Giant Eye of Doom - Television Tropes & Idioms

A scene in which a character has a huge eye staring at them. In many cases, the character won't notice even this - at least not until they turn around and find themselves face-to-eyeball.

Compare with Mirror Scare, Danger Takes a Backseat, and Peek-A-Boo Corpse.

Not to be confused with The Abyss Gazes Also Into You. Unless it does.

Examples

Anime and Manga

Superchunky's eye at the end of the Soul Society arc in Bleach.
The "giant eye looking through a window" variant happens completely randomly and inexplicably in Cat Soup - not that it seems out of place or anything.
The Truth (as seen through the gate) in Fullmetal Alchemist is pretty much dozens of this with Slasher Smiles in a doorway.
Neon Genesis Evangelion had this in the second episode. Shinji just witnessed Unit-01 going berserk and kill an Angel... then he notices that the reflection of its exposed eye is looking directly at him. Needless to say, it freaks him out real good.
- And later when it had gone berserk again and ate an Angel, it is wrapped in bandages with only its eye and a toothy grin being seen.
- For some reason, Angels seem to like eyes. One of them had an eye which poured acid to burn a way into the Geofront.
  - And another is just a gigantic eye that drops from space onto Tokyo 3. And by giant, I mean several kilometers long (according to NERV personnelle anyway. When you see it compared to an EVA, it looks pretty small (compared to several kms, anyway)
  - Actually, it has multiple eyes and what might be called wings...so its essentially a giant Eyes on Wings. Thing. It IS rather big in total scale actually, only being smaller then the Two Uber Angels.
Jigoku Shoujo's Ren Ichimoku has pulled his own personal giant eye of doom on Enma's victims; most notably Kuroda Aya from the first episode. "I saw you".
- Shibata Hajime has indirectly fallen here. Ren summoned his eye on Hajime's chest to scare away a shopskeeper who was about to tell him about the whereabouts of Mina.
In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, Aki's first encounter with an Earthbound God. When Misty summons her God, she looks around, confused... only to turn around and see Ccaryhua's massive eye staring at her through what's at least the twentieth story of the building's she in.

Card Games

Magic: The Gathering's Evil Eye of Orms-by-Gore and its Time Spiral shout-out, the even more obvious Evil Eye of Urborg.

Comic Books

Two Ghost Rider enemies have used the name "The Orb". One wore a helmet that looked like a giant eyeball, but the All-New Orb's head is an actual giant eyeball.
In Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, there is a giant eyeball that looms above Hell and causes paranoia and self-consciousness among the damned.

Film

Used memorably in Jurassic Park, as illustrated above.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire. "Jiminy Christmas! It's a machine!"
Enchanted has this moment:
Giselle is sitting on her windowsill with Pip. An enormous troll suddenly peeks in the window behind her.
Giselle's Woodland Friends: Eye, eye, eye, eye...
Giselle: I—I what?
Troll: I eat you now!
This happens in the American version of Godzilla. The soldiers searching New York's Absurdly Spacious Sewer for the creature come to the end of a blocked tunnel, and turn to search somewhere else. As they do so the "rubble" blocking the tunnel turns out to be Godzilla's eyelid.
Godzilla 2000.
The Lord of the Rings movies do this several times with the Great Eye of Sauron, most memorably: the first time Frodo puts on the Ring, he turns around and...
Sauron: You cannot hide. I see you.
- Bonus points for the eye being on fire.
- Parodied in the Discworld novel Going Postal. The Unseen University wizards are trying to contact another wizard with a crystal ball, but keep getting a fiery eyeball. This turns out to be the eye of that wizard, who'd developed a severe shrimp allergy. It also gave him a giant fiery nose.
Used in the "It's a Good Life" segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie.
In Shrek, the appearance of the dragon is when a gigantic eye peers at Donkey through the gap in a broken castle wall.
There is a scene in The Land Before Time where Cera finds Sharptooth lying on its back, with its eyes closed. Thinking he is dead, Cera taunts it and charges at its face. When she gets closer, Sharptooth opens its eye, staring menacingly back at her.
The Trollenberg Terror: Our heroes are trapped on a mountain by giant killer eyeballs from outer space! That look like crap!
- One re-release of the movie underlined this detail by retitling the movie as The Crawling Eye.
During the Pink Elephants sequence in Dumbo, one of the elephants turns into a camel, a snake, a harem dancer and a giant eyeball.
In The Monkees' movie Head, Davy opens a medicine cabinet and sees a giant staring eye - naturally he freaks out, and naturally it's not there when he warns the others about it.
A giant eyeball appears in the film Rango.
Happens near the end of Pinocchio when we see Jiminy Cricket run into Monstro the whale.
One of the monsters Sulley and Mike run into on their way to work at the very beginning of Monsters, Inc. is a giant eyeball peeking out of a window.

Live-Action TV

Used in the Doctor Who episode "The Eleventh Hour." turned up to Eleven by the eye belonging to an Atraxi, a species of Starship-sized eyes with a crystalline 'shell' .
- But spoofed in "Night Terrors" when Rory and Amy shriek when they open a drawer to reveal a huge eye staring out at them...only for it to turn out to be a huge but harmless Glass Eye.
The CBS Vanity Plate.
Cyclops in The Sixties British sci-fi serial A For Andromeda, a large amoeba in a tank that stares out at the scientists with a huge single eye.

Literature

Victor Hugo wrote a poem about an eye stalking Cain wherever he went. At the end, he digs a grave for himself, goes to live in it, and the eye is still there. The last line - "L'?il était dans la tombe et regardait Caïn" ("The eye was in the grave and looking at Cain") - is proverbial in French.
Happens in the Discworld, in a fashion. A character sees a giant eye in front of them, which turns out to be an Igor wearing a huge magnifying lens. When he removes it the sight is slightly less terrifying.
- There's also this Shout Out to Lord of the Rings in Going Postal: "It's not working, Mr. Stibbons! Here's that damn enormous fiery eye again!"
- Bel-Shamharoth does this to Rincewind just before It intends to eat him. This bites Bel-Shamharoth on the tentacled butt. The camera Rincewind is holding at the time takes a picture and flashes into the monster's eye. It appears that even the creature so terrifying that both Death and Time are afraid of, can't stand a bright camera flash.
The Crayak in Animorphs.
The Eye Storm in Ringworld nearly drives Speaker-To-Animals into a Heroic BSOD. Because it looks like a human eye.
In My Teacher Flunked the Planet, there's an alien that's supposed to keep an eye on the main characters in the basement. Them main characters ask if they can come in. He tells them they can't. As he explains that they literally can't come in, they open the door to find a giant eye. He takes up the entire basement.
- Of course, s/he can squirm around enough to be fed. In practical terms, this means that opening the basement door could greet you with an enormous eye or a door-sized mouth.
At the end of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell they succeed in contacting the Raven King or one of his lieutenants, who looks at them through the window in the form of a raven so large all they can see is its eye. Mr. Norrell fails to fully understand what he's seeing even when it blinks, and comments that he was very glad he hadn't realized or he would have been much afraid. Strange agrees rather shaken, as he did realize what it was.
The horror novelette Slimer by Harry A. Knight has a scene where the characters are looking through a porthole in the door at something weird, and gradually realise it's a giant eyeball pressed up against the glass, staring back at them.
This happens in a couple of Alice in Wonderland adaptations (the Disney version and the one with Fiona Fullerton) when Alice grows too large in the White Rabbit's house. The animals look at the "monster" in the house and freak.
Stephen King's It: One of Pennywise's forms in the Derry sewers is a giant eye, as seen in The Crawling Eye. Eddie drives it back by spraying it with his asthma inhaler and claiming the liquid is battery acid; a direct comparison to the medicine's taste when he uses it. In reality, his inhaler is a placebo, water with a dash of camphor, prescribed to Eddie in order to placate his mother who uses guilt and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy to keep Eddie under her thumb.

Newspaper Comics

Nature's Way (Gary Larson's comic prior to The Far Side) had a comic with a woman peering into a fishbowl and staring at a goldfish while an enormous monster is peering into her window and staring at her.
- One The Far Side comic showed a driver looking at the rear-view mirror and seeing it filled with the image of a giant eye, and underneath we see the message, "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear."
- Another The Far Side comic involved an old woman calling her neighbor on the telephone. "Hello, Mabel? It's Ethel, from up the street...fine, thanks. Say, I wonder if you could go to your front window and describe what's in my front yard." At her window is a humongous eyeball.

Tabletop Games

In Dungeons & Dragons, Beholders. Just... Beholders!
- On a related note, the discovery of a gigantic slumbering dragon (huge eye included) inside a mountain kicks off events in Dungeons & Dragons 2: Wrath of the Dragon God.
An edition or two ago, the cover of the Call of Cthulhu core rulebook showed a pair of investigators finding a giant, unmistakably alien eye taking up one whole end of a cavern.
Paranoia. As shown by the cover of the Paranoia XP◊ game, Friend Computer is often depicted as being one of these.

Video Games

Kirby has several times fought Dark Matter. In Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Kirby 64 at least, he is constantly staring at you; in the former, the final boss's final form is a Giant Eye Of Doom that shoots its blood as an attack.
The Overmind in 'StarCraft uses a gigantic lidless eyeball for his conversational avatar thingy.
Touhou has Evil Eye Sigma, who appeared as the extra boss of Story of Eastern Wonderland... and was promptly forgotten.
C'thun, Final Boss of the Ahn'Qiraj dungeon in World of Warcraft, is literally a Giant Eye of Doom in its initial stage, complete with Eye Beams. Then it turns into a giant mouth with lots of little eyeballs sticking out of the sides. And it uses eyeball-tipped Combat Tentacles to attack players. There's also a standard creature model in the Outland zones that is reminiscent of the famous D&D Beholder.
- And in the second expansion, the player is sent on a quest to destroy a gigantic, magical eye on top of a tower in the ~~Ice Mordor~~ Icecrown zone to prevent the current Big Bad from observing the good guys invading his turf. For some added hilarity, the quest is called "It's All Fun and Games".
The Legend of Zelda has Digdogger from Oracle of Ages, as well as Gohma from Ocarina of Time.
- And then there's Wart from Majora's Mask. He's a giant freaking eye covered in what look like fish eggs. And how does the fight start? You look up at him, only to suddenly have the camera zoom in so much that his eye's taking up most of the screen.
- And Bongo Bongo, a giant eye with Giant Hands of Doom.
The scene in Final Fantasy VII at the Northern Crater when the WEAPONS awaken. One of them blinks at Rufus and the others through the transparent wall.
In La-Mulana, Viy, the Guardian of the Inferno Cavern, is so huge his body doesn't fit on the screen, but the part of it you can see consists of tentacles and an eye roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle with a lid so heavy that Viy has minions whose entire purpose is to lift it.
Any Gaze attack in Saga Frontier; especially Boss X's Hypergaze (Inflicts random status abnormality) in which a HUGE eye, about half as big as the screen appears and hits every character with a gaze attack.
There's one of these in Eversion.
Corbenik's final form in .hack//quarantine is an enormous eye, with hundreds of other Giant Eyes of Doom flying about in the background. All of the other Phases in the games had eyespot markings on them somewhere, foreshadowing this. Naturally, the battle has plenty of Eye Beams going around, and when Corbenik cries his tears create an earthquake.
This happens with the player character in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story... as in, it's Bowser who's the one glaring through the window just before fighting the Fawful Express. Especially fitting after Bowser has used fire breath to practically blow up the windscreen of the train a second ago.
One of the bosses in Turok 2: Seeds of Evil on the N64 was called Golden Eye (a Take That at a certain other N64 shooter), and was just a giant eyeball (with Combat Tentacles). Turok stumbles into its lair, unaware what lurks there until pretty much the entire ceiling blinks at him.
The final part of the Final Boss from the obscure Shoot 'Em Up Steel Saviour is one of these.
In the flash game Gateway II, there's a room that looks like a normal, unassuming kitchen, until you touch something on a counter and a pair of enormous eyes open behind the windows.
Tangram from the Virtual On Series: The Giant Eye is Tangram's Wave Motion Gun
Flashbacks in Final Fantasy IX show that an enormous, smoke-shrouded malevolent eye appeared above Madain Sari instants before the entire city was annihilated. The same eye appears over the Iifa Tree as Kuja commands it to corrupt Bahamut, and again when Alexander protects its city from the maddened dragon lord. However, in this last instance, it is revealed that the eye is actually the mind-controlling, corrupting device on the bottom of the Invincible, which only looks like a giant malevolent red eye.
In Alundra 2, the mid-bosses of the underwater cave are bunch of these. And they throw bombs at you, those bastards.
Seen in the white chamber during one of the more Accidental Nightmare Fuel-erffic hallucinations.
As Matrix Online's end-of-beta events led up to a player wipe, the reddening skies filled with giant eyes, all looking down on players in random orientations.
In the Chzo Mythos games, this is basically what you see of the titular Elderitch Abomination.
The Final Boss of the NES version of Legendary Wings is a giant cybernetic eye of doom.
The cover art◊ of Shivers.
The Eye of Big Brother in I, Robot. Jumping while it is open results in death.
Eyebot in Heavy Weapon, whose design is based off a tentacled Eldritch Abomination.
MONOCULUS!
Of course, there's always the next-to-last boss fight from Mass Effect 2. It was basically a giant eye that shot lasers at you and only you.

Web Original

This is how Korrok usually appears in John Dies at the End. The entire wall between universes is the window, and you may or may not see his giant, blue, lidless eye peeking through at you at any given time. And if you accuse him of ripping off of Sauron, he'll call you a fag.
The Observer from Tribe Twelve uses a giant eyeball as a way of telling Noah I'm always watching.

Webcomics

A memorable strip of Sluggy Freelance had Reakk coming face-to-eyeball with one of the Dragons of Annoyia...and he instantly poinks it in its humongous eye. "With so much eyeball, how could I resist?" was his excuse.
The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! - Bob meets an alien Eyeball Monster. Who speaks Spanish.
Dominic Deegan's newest Big Bad is a nameless Cosmic Horror that consists of a huge eye and a lot of tentacles.
Petey's first apperance in Schlock Mercenary
Looking for Group parodies this in one strip with Richard the warlock. He rips the eye out a giant and does this to a group of minotaurs.
Richard: "What, too much?"

Western Animation

THERE! IS A GIANT EYEBALL! AND IT IS LOOKING AT US!
- I am drawn towards this giant- *boom*
Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends subverted this trope in Destination Imagination; while trying to find a way back into the imaginary toy box world, Mac turns around frightfully and sees a giant eye staring at him through the window. It turns out that it's Frankie's eye, and that he and his friends have been shrunk and put into a miniature replica of the house by the reality-changing friend that lives in the toy chest.
Used in The Simpsons episode "Barts Gets An Elephant."
The "Staring Contest" episode of The Brak Show (best lampshading of Limited Animation ever) ends with Dad being challenged by a gigantic floating eye with no eyelid.
Duck Dodgers In The Twenty Fourth And A Half Century. The original.
Buster Bunny (and, I think, Hampton) spend an entire episode trying to get rid of the giant, talking eyeball that's following them (it's only Plucky, caught in an "advanced Wild Take").
T-Bone encounters a giant eye in the "Mutation City" episode of Swat Kats.
In ThunderCats, Lion-O enters a cave where the first thing he saw is a giant eye coming at him and staring before it blinked and disappear.
In Regular Show, the group is harassed by a giant (security) eyeball.

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