He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are brought to justice.
"Are you feeling the pressure? You're alone in a room, your friends have been picked off one by one... now it's just you and him!"
— The Joker, talking about Batman to an unlucky henchman, Batman: Arkham Asylum
The Mook Horror Show is a scene that plays out like a horror/slasher film, but casts the hero as the monster. Depending on the hero, it could involve Let's Split Up, Gang! and slinking through shadows, a Five Rounds Rapid followed by a frantic retreat, or any other situation that attempts to show how cool the hero is by emphasizing the terror of his foes.
Unless it's a darker Anti-Hero involved, the mooks probably aren't being slaughtered in horrifying ways, unless they happen to be intelligent robots, aliens, or monsters. If the minions are human, that sort of conduct would probably be bad for the hero's publicity (if the public ever has a chance to find out). However, war stories may relax this rule — killing enemies in wartime is more often seen as justified.
This trope is a frequent component of the Roaring Rampage of Revenge or One-Man Army, may involve a Foe-Tossing Charge and often overlaps with Villainous Valour, with the Big Bad — or The Dragon, if the Big Bad isn't present — cast as the Final Girl. Sometimes used to demonstrate that Dark Is Not Evil. It's often a key component of the Terror Hero's act. May also be invoked by a hero to Pay Evil unto Evil to a villain who enjoys subjecting others to this type of thing to give them a taste of their own medicine. They may also play it up for various reasons. Among others, they're probably going to not fight you at 100% if they're too busy screaming in blind terror of you. Contrast with Sparing the Final Mook, where after fighting off many mooks, the hero allows a last one to flee or otherwise surrender.
It's important to be cautious with the Mook Horror Show trope. A hero who brutally slaughters mooks in a particularly horrifying way may not seem very "heroic" in the eyes of the audience. Such reactions can lead to a hero becoming a Designated Hero or a case of He Who Fights Monsters. Of course, this all depends on the nature of the mooks in question, as (obviously) security guards and construction workers who are just doing their jobs and supporting their families are easier to sympathize with than mindless monsters like demons and zombies.
Not to be confused with a show in which the mooks look like creatures from horror films; that's Red Right Hand. Also doesn't overlap at all with A Clockwork Orange — even though it did have mooks as main characters, and they did find many things "real 'orrorshow." See also The Joys of Torturing Mooks.
Sub-pages
Other examples
open/close all folders
Advertising
- This creative new advert for Stand Up to Cancer.
It depicts a researcher dripping an experimental medicine onto a sample of HeLa to the Star of Wormwood bringing an apocalyptic plague unto the cities of... erm... cancer, actually.
Comic Strips
- Sometimes used with The Phantom. Even more than Batman, he is a Bad Ass Normal who depends on the mooks thinking him a supernatural menace, so it fits.
Fan Works
- Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Three of these are inflicted on Alan Jonah's goons by Monster X.
- Chapter 8 of Ace Combat: Wings of Unity treats us to an entire Exile army group being all but exterminated by the combined magic of none other than Princesses Celestia and Luna. The narration (thankfully) doesn't go into excessive detail...but we're still treated to a scene where all but four pegasi are either vaporized as they scream in agony, or slammed against a mountain when they try to retreat. All of this is seen from the Exile's perspective, only shifting back to the heroes once the magical onslaught ends. And those four survivors? They're later ambushed and brutally killed by an as-yet-unnamed pegasus, with the last one begging for his life before being killed via Neck Snap.
- Austraeoh has elements of this in Eljunbyro. After being brought back from dying and partially turning into a chaos beast, Rainbow Dash is utterly unhinged and proceeds to slaughter her way through legions of Ledomaritan guards. The scene is shown not from the guards' perspective, but from her fellow prisoners that she's leading to safety - and who are not sure if they're more scared of the guards or their savior.
- Boldores And Boomsticks: Chapter 42 has Team RWBY raid Team Skull's base after Team Skull steals Nebby. The chapter is mostly from Team Skull's point of view and has them be utterly demolished by the huntresses in training.
- All the rescue teams and the Draconian Empire dish this out to the Monkey King's entire army once Latias brings their shield down and continue to do so after they have managed to break into their base in Brave New World.
- In The Butcher Bird, this is typically the result whenever the Nightmare Pirates fight the Marines or other pirate crews. The most standout examples being the man-eating ghouls, the hallucinogen-slinging armorer, and, later on, the absolutely massive Ghost Ship.
- The Cheating Death: Those That Lived saw, during the 40th Games, the careers dying of brutal death from Lammy Phyronix's traps.
- In Child of the Storm, Warren is a somewhat mopey teenager and the protégé of Sean Cassidy. After about 25 chapters of hints, suggestions and one partial demonstration (zombie dragons were involved) of exactly how dangerous Warren is, chapter 70 really puts it on show with a section from the point of view of a nameless HYDRA paratrooper. Him and about twenty of his colleagues are wearing derivatives of the Falcon suit. All he sees is a flicker of silver as Warren first slices their Quinjet in half, with a number of paratroopers being sucked into the engines, then the rest are picked off one by one, with little to no use of the Gory Discretion Shot, before the half mad Agent finally gets a look at Warren, who then removes his wings, letting him fall to his death. The description is like a horror movie based on the Old Testament.
- The Heroes Association is on the receiving end in Enemy Number One due to believing Saitama is a villain and him showing up at their headquarters to tell them to leave him alone. From his perspective, a bunch of annoying freaks keep attacking him all the time. From theirs, an unstoppable enemy is ruthlessly tearing through even S-Rank heroes in an effort to destroy the Association.
- A Familiar Void: Chapters 43-44 show the perspective of Reconquista soldiers and mages invading the Insect kingdom with genocidal intent, only to be torn apart by various insect soldiers, Goams, and Hornet herself.
- The Firefly fic Forward has a scene showing the mooks' perspective when River is carving through them. She isn't shown as cute or adorable; she's portrayed as insane and terrifying.
- Guardians, Wizards, and Kung-Fu Fighters has a scene in Chapter 7 when a group of Phobos' soldiers are being hunted through the woods by wolf Jade.
- Heroes of the New World; after defeating the main body of the Finalem Pirates, Izuku and Yamato go to the Marine base and town the pirates captured prior to their arrival and proceed to pick off the skeleton crew left to guard their hostages- Izuku uses Black Whip to yank the mooks out of sight, while Yamato dons her hannya mask and ambushes whoever's left from the shadows.
- In Kim Possible fanfic His Honor, The Mayor, Drew Lipsky this turns out to be the cause of Kim's Sanity Slippage, Global Justice has been Screening the Call to keep her away from missions that might be too traumatic for her but due to a mixup she and and some Ax-Crazy Cowboy Cop got sent to a low level minion lair and saw the Cowboy Cop executing several Mooks. Kim was so traumatized she tried to sneak up and kill the guy in retaliation before seeing a friend of hers who happened to be close by injured and going to save her instead. She later blacked the whole thing out but she's been suffering mental problems ever since.
- Happens in The Legend of Spyro: A New Dawn when Cynder cleaves her way through a Gargoyle outpost in her Superpowered Evil Side. It was written this way to show how destructive and sadistic Cynder's Dark Form was.
- In Mass Effect: Human Revolution chapter 17, a Blacklight squad on the hunt discover that their prey is being protected by Adam Jensen. We see through the squad leader's perspective as it ends poorly for them, to say the least.
- In Mischief (MHA): The Brotherhood mercenaries find themselves going through this during the I-Island arc, courtesy of Fumikage and Dark Shadow, the newest Moon Knight. The young hero mows down all mercenaries on his way, most of which can only scream in horror, saying a demon is picking them apart, and given the fact Dark Shadow definitely benefitted from this power-up, they are absolutely correct. He may not kill them, but they are left pretty damn close to it.
- In My Hero Academia: Unchained Predator, the Steel Sabers find themselves going through this during I-Island, when up against the Doom Slayer. Unlike the heroes who would rather bring them to justice, the Slayer has no intention of letting the Sabers live.
- In Mythos Effect, this is the reaction Turian soldiers tend to have when fighting New Earth Federation ground forces. But, given that the NEF fights almost exclusively with Eldritch Abominations, that's understandable.
- Happens a lot in The Night Unfurls. Considering how the protagonist is a Terror Hero, has a demented fusion between saw and cleaver as his weapon of choice, and is always covered in the gore of his foes whenever he is active, this is understandable. It is exaggerated in Chapter 8 of the original story, where Beasley and the Mortadella brothers, the Arc Villains of the Feoh/Ur Arc, are the ones being terrorised.
- Oogway's Little Owl: Taylor's first fight against a group of croc bandits is this from the crocs' perective, due to a combination of luck, misunderstanding, and a conveniently timed rain storm making them think they were fighting some kind of demon owl, instead of a terrified, half-trained initiate.
- Origin Story: Fugitive Kryptonian Alex Harris's fight against the Thunderbolts acts as one between Venom struggling to contain her and Moonstone's panicked thoughts of how Alex is going to kill them all.
- In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, Ash submits Hunter J's minions to this when he gets captured aboard her airship. Unfortunately, when he confronts J herself, she turns out to be nowhere near as easy.
- In Pony POV Series, the Mane Six (particularly Rarity) pull this on General Lone Ranger, which the author admitted was a Shout-Out to Superman vs. the Elite, including a scene where Rarity demonstrates how utterly outmatched Lone Ranger is by pretending to mortally wound him.
- Xander in The Pride of Sunnydale is treated like a combination of the Terminator and Jason Voorhees by vampires, including silently killing them while others have their back turned.
- The Red Dragon's Saber: Artoria's beatdown of the Fallen Angels is partially shown from Raynare's point of view. It shows her growing frustration over getting her butt kicked and then her terror when Artoria chops off their wings.
- "The Fire", one of the companion one-shots from The Rending Trilogy, does a lot to show just what kind of Nightmare Fuel Yang Xiao Long could be if you finally did something to really make her snap. In this case, that something would be killing Ruby. It takes place from the villain's perspective as it describes a horrible red-eyed flaming beast (they explicitly never refer to Yang as a woman, but "it", a thing) and how she effortlessly shrugs off and ignores everything they try to throw at her while brutally killing them one-by-one before finally incinerating Cinder and then declaring her intention to hunt down Torchwick and do the same to him.
- In the Transformers fanfiction Snap, Crackle, Pop, it used this trope when Sunstreaker, believing that the Decepticons had captured his brother, assaulted the Decepticon base by himself and brutally murdered many, many mooks in a way that impressed many of the 'Cons watching security footage of the attack in progress. As one Decepticon put it, "Why isn't this guy a Decepticon? Seriously, why did we never recruit him?"
- In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Smallville fic Stakes and Fenceposts, Clark Kent is portrayed this way to the Buffy-verse villains and heroes. It gets to the point where The First Evil stacks the odds overwhelmingly in Caleb's favor: surrounding the city in a forcefield so Clark can't leave and the sun is blocked out so he can't recharge, triggering an earthquake and other disasters so Clark has to rescue the citizens and tire himself out, mutating Caleb into an Eldritch Abomination with incredible strength, speed, durability, and magically toxic Sinister Scythe Combat Tentacles, magically making Caleb untouchable to Clark's blows and immune to his heat vision, and backing him up with an army of vampires all armed with kryptonite swords and machine guns loaded with kryptonite bullets. Despite this incredible advantage, Clark annihilates the vampires before they have a chance to come near him, and takes down Caleb with a combination of his powers and wits. Caleb gets an inner monologue where he expresses how utterly outclassed and terrified he is, and without the advantages he would have died in a instant, considering Clark the real monster. Buffy and the others, watching from a safe distance, are terrified as well. The First also made one huge mistake: It didn't know Clark can fly.
- Sword Art Online Abridged:
- Episode 4 leans into this when Rosalia and her minions try to mug Kirito and Silica. Rosalia delivers a Breaking Speech that reduces Kirito to a Laughing Mad mess bearing an Evil Grin as he makes The Slow Walk towards her Mooks, and when he explains they can't deal enough damage to overcome his passive health regeneration, they're reduced to Tears of Fear.
- In the second season, Asuna repeatedly subjects Sugou's minions to this. When she breaks out of her cage in Episode 14 they can only shriek "IT'S LOOSE!!" before she tears into them, and when she escapes again in Episode 15, the result looks like something from the Alien franchise, with a dropped walkie-talkie lying in a dark hallway beneath a flickering light fixture. Furthering the comparisons, Episode 16 reveals that Asuna was eating employees to scare them away from Sugou's mind control research.
Voice on Radio: Bravo, come in! Do you have visual on the prisoner?! I repeat, do you... Oh, lord... IT'S IN THE VENTS!!
(inhuman snarls and sounds of carnage)
- In A Thing of Vikings, the Battle of the Sound of Berk at the end of Book I is told mostly from the perspective of the combined Anglo-Danish fleet trying to reach Berk in order to attack it. Unfortunately, since they backed Hiccup into a corner, he doesn't hold back in defending his home and his people, and the shattered (and much reduced) fleet ends up running for its life, thoroughly traumatized.
- In This Bites!, four of the weaker Straw Hats (Nami, Chopper, Cross, and Soundbite) instill such terror into the Marines they fight at Enies Lobby that the one calling for reinforcements is reduced to simply repeating "Oh god" over and over and calls them "demons", inspiring Cross to give his friends the collective moniker of "the Demon Trio".
- Tiberium Wars:
- The introductions of the Nod and GDI commandos are both cases of this. The Nod commando's initial appearance is as an untrackable, cloaked, and impossibly precise killing machine gunning down whole GDI squads by herself. The GDI commando, meanwhile, is an unkillable juggernaut with superhuman strength and a railgun capable of blowing soldiers to ribbons, but is still a surprisingly clever tactician who outwits and outguns his opponents.
- The Mammoth Tank's introduction includes Nod Militants in literal pants crapping fear, when they realize that what those "Moving houses" actually are.
- The Totally Amazing Spider-Man: The spies find themselves on this end of the trope. After being ordered by Jerry to bring Spider-Man in for questioning, the spies attempt to lure him in by staging a mugging, but quickly find themselves out of their element. Clover screams for her life and ends up in Spidey's web, to her disgust, and Alex runs for her life when she sees Spider-Man approach. Afterwards, Clover is far more cautious in trying to capture Spider-Man.
- One story in Vow of Nudity begins with the protagonist's raid on a cruel marquis' chateau, where the vast majority of it involves her (a naked level 7 monk) silently plowing through countless CR½ guards, most of whom are understandably freaking out as she's defeating 2-4 of them every single turn. One of them (the team marksman) even abandons the fight entirely after she catches his crossbolt and sends it flying right back into his chest!
- In Dragon Ball fanfiction The Warrior's Daughter, the Frieza Force, who had spent decades spreading fear through the universe, land on Earth but are intercepted by an unknown female. Said female proceeds to transform into the same kind of warrior who destroyed their supremely powerful boss, and starts killing them one after another, shrugghing off every attack directed against her, as berating them for being a pitiful "challenge".
- The Weaving Force: Taylor, already a Terror Hero in canon, is shown in action from the perspective of a hapless mook. Deconstructed - confronting her memories of Khepri sends her into a Heroic BSoD.
- Chapter 10 We Can Be Heroes! (Steven Universe) has Lapis finally go all out with her hydrokinesis against the Kazkani 500, an alien mafia syndicate that has kidnapped and beaten her friend Hurley into a bloody pulp with the intention of executing him. Kicking things off by punching their loudmouth leader through a wall, the rest of the Kazkanis become scared out of their minds when she weaponizes the water flowing through their hideout's pipes as well as the pouring rains outside, and unleashes a chaotic maelstrom in the form of water tentacles, water pillars, and even armies of sea creatures made of water. And when their leader fights back, she conjures up a giant watery clone of herself that demolishes his hideout and scares him so bad that he passes out from sheer fright alone.
- Happens in Weight of the World when Penny 2.0 activates and sees soldiers menacing America. She utterly decimates them, slaughtering all of them in brutal ways with a serene expression on her face. A few of the deaths include: a slit throat, impalement, getting dragged screaming across the floor and stabbed, sliced to bits with wires and a snapped neck. There's a reason she's a Sociopathic Hero.
- In A World of Bloody Evolution, Yang gets temporarily corrupted by Khorne following her best friend's abduction by Dark Eldar. Cue cultists pissing themselves. It's really downplayed by the fact it's from her point of view, but it's incredibly easy to feel the mooks' fear as what they were worshipping five seconds ago comes back and tears them apart. A little bit of contrast to the above example because, instead of a vengeful big sister she's gone completely Ax-Crazy]]:
Yang: Hey there Buddy!
Lead Cultist: Open up, I beg of you!
Yang: Shh... shh... now, what do we say?
Lead Cultist: S-s-say?
Yang: What do you say to your pathetic masters, who you failed so miserably?
Lead Cultist: I-I-I-I-
Yang: You say you're sorry!
Lead Cultist: I'm sorry!
Yang: What do you say?
Lead Cultist: I'M SORRY!
Yang: LOUDER, YOU FUCKING WORM! - In XCOM: Second Contact, the initial (hostile) contact between Turians and Humans abruptly switches to the Turian perspective at several points. The Turians against a human XCOM squad that breaches the bridge of one of their ships find themselves fighting against plasma weaponry and psychic powers. It doesn't go well for the Turians.
- This video by Super Smash Bros MALR shows Batman through the eyes of inexperienced thugs.
Films — Animation
- Parodied in Incredibles 2, when Jack-Jack, a baby, subjects a raccoon to a Mook Horror Show. The fact that he’s a baby who won the Super Power Lottery helps.
- In Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, special forces wearing iconic armor are unstoppable against the rebels and the Public Security agents.
- In Lilo & Stitch, Stitch's escape scene has many hallmarks of this trope, apart from the fact that he's arguably a villain at this point.
- Monsters vs. Aliens has the scene where Gallaxhar tries to capture Susan. He underestimates just how strong she is, and ends up fleeing for his life in terror as she tears his ship apart trying to squash him like a bug. He only regains his composure when he manages to capture Susan again and extract the Quantonium from her body.
Literature
- Aeon 14: The entirety of the primary narrative of the fan-written Short Story "Know Thy Enemy" takes place during the Battle of Five Fleets in Destiny Lost, retold from the perspective of one of the antagonist factions. Among other things, we get to see a man be disassembled by Grey Goo in first-person.
- All of the Animorphs to some extent, especially Rachel. They're (as far as the Yeerks know) a group of Andalite bandits who can sneak into any top-security facility as insects, then demorph and remorph as deadly megafauna, then escape as birds or insects once they've destroyed everything. In the last book, Jake flushes tens of thousands of helpless Yeerks (essentially prisoners of war) into space, killing them instantly.
- Anita Blake:
- Anita is this to vampires as told by Jean-Claude, who is the Master Vampire of St. Louis. "To us, you are the boogeyman who snatches young foolish vampires." Or something like that. And when she executed a were serial killer in the middle of a mall in front of small children who looked horrified that she was going to kill him after she strolled up to him in the food court. Then she snaps at a werewolf who annoyed her on the phone, who breaks down in tears and blubbers for her not to kill her. It helps she's a licensed Executioner who can kill vampires and weres legally. Oh, and one of the most powerful necromancers in the United States.
- It's even worse with Edward, the Badass Normal vampire hunter that Anita occasionally works with. Vampires call her The Executioner since she's killed so many of their kind, but they just call him Death.
- The BattleTech short story Almost Sounds Like the Guns Themselves takes place shortly after the Aurigan Civil War and a large part of it consists of a Shell-Shocked Veteran's flashbacks to his entire squad being massacred, with his best friend dying in a particularly nasty fashion at the hands of an enemy mechwarrior heavily implied to be the player character from the game.
- In the Dale Brown novels, this generally occurs when Tin Men or CIDs are around and there're no anti-tank weapons in the enemy's reach.
- Cassandra Kresnov, of Joel Shepherd's Cassandra Kresnov series, instigates this whenever she's locked in close quarters with a bunch of human soldiers. It's mentioned that the hallmark of an attack by a higher end combat GI is when your friends are all shooting and the next moment they're all dead. The greatest example of this is probably in book five, Operation Shield. Cassandra had befriended a trio of war orphans in the previous novel, and the League government decided that kidnapping the two oldest ones would be a great way to blackmail her. She had a reputation as a cool thinker, so they expected that she'd easily cave to their demands to keep the kids safe. They weren't expecting her to discover her maternal instincts. And go into a Roaring Rampage of Rescue with a mission plan consisting of "everything between me and the kids dies." By the time they realized just what they'd unleashed, it was far too late. To really drive it home, the scene is done from the perspective of the League commander as she shouts orders over her radio to her squads, only to have them killed off one by one. And Cassandra deliberately leaves a single witness alive, to make sure that everyone gets the message: don't ever threaten her kids.
- Chrysalis (RinoZ): When Crinis gets going with her dozens of razor-barbed tentacles vibrating like a chainsaw, Anthony frequently regrets having panoramic vision and no eyelids, as monsters are flayed, dismembered, and tossed into her fanged mouth, sometimes not completely dead yet. Then she obtains "soul seeker cilia" that she can drive into monsters' brains to push them over the brink of insanity. It's not a pretty sight — for normal people, anyway. Crinis' reaction? "[Hee, hee, hee, hee!]"
- Cradle Series: The main point of view is Lindon, a young man who spent most of his life being told he was worthless, and was weaker than most children when he was sixteen. Some lucky breaks allow him to get stronger, but he keeps facing people far stronger than him, so he spends most of his fights terrified and scrambling to survive. Rare chapters from the views of other people, however, show how much of an absolute monster he has turned into. In addition to incredible raw strength, he has burning red eyes, multiple different powers that he shouldn't be able to mix, and a ruthless approach to combat. Though he usually offers his enemies a chance to surrender first, he has a Face of a Thug so they assume he's just mocking them. This all comes to a head in Wintersteel, when he works through the revelation he needs to advance to Overlord, which is mostly about how other people see him. He is such a perfect void, a consuming force, that he is able to manifest the Icon of Void and become a Sage younger than anyone else on the planet has ever managed. And then he curb-stomps Sophara, one of the most powerful entities in the world.
She looked into his eyes, which had transformed into blue crystal. He was the end of her every technique, and as she stared into that merciless gaze, she realized he was her end.
- At the end of The Demon Breed by James H. Schmitz, the story is retold from the aliens' point of view, and we see just how badly the Action Girl protagonist ended up scaring them.
There seemed to be nothing they could do to check her. She came and went as she chose, whether in the sea or in the dense floating forests, and was traceless as a ghost. Moreover, those who had the misfortune of encountering her did not report the fact. They simply disappeared.
- Discworld:
- Rincewind uses The Luggage to terrorize his foes. Or rather, he hides while the Luggage... entertains itself.
- In Thud!, there is a brief section about some dwarfs in a cave, when suddenly, a pale, bloody human with a sword and axe stands on a rise above them... And it says, Is that my cow?
- In Jingo!, Reg Shoe's attack on some enemy soldiers is narrated this way.
- In Night Watch, you see Reg's transformation into a zombie... he refuses to die after being shot (with arrows) seven or eight times in the chest at point blank range. The archers don't take it well.
- Likewise for criminals with the bad fortune to cross paths with Angua.
- The main character of the Stephen King novel Dolan's Cadillac seeks revenge against the title character, who ordered a hit on his wife. To this end he quits his job as a teacher and becomes a road worker in order to set a trap for Dolan when he passes by in his you know what. He digs a large hole and covers it with a weak stretch of road so that the Cadillac plunges into it. He then taunts Dolan for a while before filling up the hole.
- The Dresden Files:
- The title character starts as a rather pitiable wizard trying to work his way out of professional disgrace. Several books and a pile of supernatural bodies later, he suddenly finds his opponents backing down or outright fleeing rather than face him, and is several times rather abruptly reminded of what he looks like from his enemies' point of view. The books are narrated in the first person so we never get to see it, but it's discussed several times.
- He lampshades this himself in Turn Coat. He is facing no less than five Wardens and three members of the Senior Council, and they are afraid to fight him. Then he remembers something... "They were dealing with something far more dangerous than me, Harry Dresden, whose battered old Volkswagen was currently in the city impound. They were dealing with the potential demonic dark lord nightmare warlock they'd been busy fearing since I turned sixteen. They were dealing with the wizard who had faced the Heirs of Kemmler riding a zombie dinosaur, and emerged victorious from a fight that had flattened Morgan and Captain Luccio before they had even reached it. They were dealing with the man who had dropped a challenge to the entire Senior Council, and who had then actually showed, apparently willing to fight-on the shores of an entirely too creepy island in the middle of a freshwater sea."
- This trope is at its most direct in Changes, where a Red Court vampire assassin, upon seeing Harry, screams and runs away.
- In the novella "Aftermath", which takes place hours after the events of Changes, Karrin Murphy thinks a bit about Harry and how he's a nice guy, weird and goofy and eccentric, but his magical knowledge can sometimes seem like Sherlock Scans, and when he needs to deal with something that can survive being thrown through a city block, he can do the throwing.
Murphy: Watching Dresden operate was usually one of two things: mildly amusing or positively terrifying. On a scene, his whole personal manner always made me think of autistic kids. He never met anyone's eyes for more than a flickering second. He moved with the sort of exaggerated caution of someone who was several sizes larger than normal, keeping his hands and arms in close to his body. He spoke a little bit softly, as if apologizing for the resonant baritone of his voice.
But when something caught his attention, he changed. His dark, intelligent eyes would glitter, and his gaze became something so intense it could start a fire. During the situations that changed from investigation to desperate struggle, his whole being shifted in the same way. His stance widened, becoming more aggressive and confident, and his voice rose up to become a ringing trumpet that could have been clearly heard from opposite ends of a football stadium.
Quirky nerd, gone. Terrifying icon, present.
Not many "vanillas", as he called nominally normal humans, had seen Dresden standing his ground in the fullness of his power. If we had, more of us would have taken him seriously — but I had decided that for his sake, if nothing else, it was a good thing that his full capabilities went unrecognized. Dresden's power would have scared the hell out of most people, just like it had scared me.
It wasn't the kind of fear that makes you scream and run. That's fairly mild, as fear goes. That's Scooby-Doo fear. No. Seeing Dresden in action filled you with the fear that you had just become a casualty of evolution — that you were watching something far larger and infinitely more dangerous than yourself, and that your only chance of survival was to kill it, immediately, before you were crushed beneath a power greater than you would ever know. - In Ghost Story we get this from Molly's perspective:
Molly: You don't know, Harry. What you did for this town.
Harry: What do you mean?
Molly: You don't know how many things just didn't come here before, because they were afraid.
Harry: Afraid of what?
Molly: Of you, Harry. You could find anything in this town, but you never even noticed the shadow you cast. [...] Every time you defied someone, every time you came out on top against things you couldn't possibly have beaten, your name grew. And they feared that name. There were other cities to prey on — cities that didn't have the mad wizard Dresden defending them. They feared you. - Lampshaded in Skin Game: Michael points out that the last time someone threatened Harry's daughter, Harry killed the entirety of the Red Court, one of the three major powers in the world, akin to killing everyone in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Even monsters would have to think twice about making that threat again.
- Happens quite often in The Executioner series with villains invoking the terror of the black-clad One-Man Army with icy blue eyes, striding untouched through their ranks, dealing death.
- David Gemmell characters tend to get at least one chapter narrating their pursuit or onslaught from the perspective of minor villains, bandits or so on. The gold standard would be the opening of Hero in the Shadows, which details a band of raiders meeting their ends at the hands of an ageing Waylander.
- The final chapter of John Gardner's novel Grendel is more of a Boss Horror Show, with Beowulf coming off as cruel and sadistic as he mortally wounds the main character by ripping off his arm.
- Several Honor Harrington books have the thoughts of various Peep or Solarian officers about to be on the receiving end of a Manticore Missile Massacre, usually because their CO is too dumb, arrogant, or incredulous to realize that they're about to be ripped apart by said Massacre. And, of course, vice versa.
- One scene in Crown of Slaves sees a bunch of Mesan operatives in their hotel suite trying to deal with the unfolding Gambit Pileup, only for a team of ex-Scrags and Audubon Ballroom gunmen to storm their suite. The ex-Scrags are bad enough, but the Mesans are scared shitless of the Ballroom.
- In The Hunter's Blades Trilogy, which is part of The Legend of Drizzt, the titular hero uses his skills as a ranger as well as his Master Swordsman status to inflict devastating losses on the orcs coming to join a local warlord. It's his hope he can ebb the recruitment of King Obould's army through sheer terror. It works.
- This is where I Am Legend gets its title from. It turns out that some of the vampires that Robert Neville was hunting have managed to rebuild civilization, and devoted considerable resources to capturing him because, to them, he was the monster of their legends.
- The short story The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm by Daryl Gregory, showing the POV of those who happen to be living in a country ruled by a supervillain when it's 'invaded' for the umpteenth time by American superheroes... What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?.
- The Jungle Book: When Baloo and Bagheera want to save Mowgli from the sinister Bandar Log monkeys they enlist the help of one of the most feared predators in the jungle, Kaa the python. He is still terrifying from the perspective of his enemies, especially the Bandar Log who panick and become his prey in no time.
- Nadreck of Palain VII from the Lensman series. Made possibly even worse because the mooks never even realize he's at work until they all suddenly go mad and kill each other... and depopulate their entire planet except for 3 leaders.
- The climax of Oathblood has an encampment of child-kidnapping soldiers getting its guards picked off in the night by the teachers of those children. A slightly older non-kidnapped student sneaks inexpertly through the camp letting people assume she's an escapee and following her, only to be led either to the teacher who'll knock them out or the one who'll run them through with a furious possessed sword. At the very end, when the leader of the band is gloating menacingly at a twelve year old and telling her she doesn't have the guts to spill his blood, Kethry interrupts him mid sentence by running him through from behind.
- The Odyssey presents a particularly horrifying example when Ulysses, his son and two servants, being the only ones armed in the premises, proceed to slaughter Penelope's would-be suitors without allowing them to escape nor arm themselves. Considering that Ulysses' son Telemachus had counted 108 suitors, this had to take some time to complete. To top it off, he then orders the horrified maidservants who had slept with the suitors to dispose of the corpses, and after they finish has them executed by his son. Who promptly decides stabbing is too good for them and has them hanged instead, making a point that he wants a painful death for them.
- Only You Can Save Mankind, in the chapters from the perspective of the ScreeWee, shows what it's like to be a video game "baddie" spacefleet, under relentless assault from an enemy that never runs out of fuel or ammo, can take out each of your ships with a single shot while you need multiple shots to retaliate, and even once you've done so, won't stay dead.
- This happens at least once a book in The Oregon Files, whenever the bad guys realize that the titular ship isn't a dilapidated tramp steamer full of grungy sailors, but a highly advanced, heavily armed warship crewed by special forces-trained mercenaries.
- Paradise Lost uniquely describes God, specifically God the Son, as a monster of "terrour" and "night" during His battle with the rebellious angels. The whole sequence depicts how horrifying an all-powerful enforcer of justice would be to those as unjust as the founders of Hell.
- The scene that brings Tobimar and Poplock together in Phoenix Rising, as Tobimar is rescued from attacking mazakh by a mysterious force that seems to attack out of nowhere and then disappear. The mazakh who aren't killed outright flee in terror, and even Tobimar is distinctly unsettled.
- The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist in Another World: A team of demon mooks finds themselves thoroughly outclassed by Seika Lamprogue. All, except, two, being defeated with monstrously powerful variants of their own powers, with the others being killed by simple hexes.
- The Reynard Cycle: In The Baron of Maleperduys, a particularly likable Calvarian foot soldier wakes up after a battle, only to discover that he and many of his fellow mooks have been taken prisoner by Reynard, who is going to hang the majority of them, and then feed their corpses to Tiecelin's Shrikes.
- One of the viewpoint characters of fantasy novel Ruin is Macquin, aka "Old Wolf", a warrior turned slave turned gladiator. When he escapes his captors send seven men after him. He eventually kills them all in a dark forest at night, and you really get a sense of just how terrified they are of him.
- There's one scene that plays like this in book seven of Safehold series when Merlin/Dialydd attacks barge full of Inquisitors who killed his friend. The entire scene is narrated from perspective of one of the Inquisitors and it shows the reader just how scary Merlin can be if he turns off his internal limits.
- The Norwegian novel The Son by Jo Nesbø is basically an entire book of this trope. Sonny Lofthus is a professional scapegoat for the Norwegian mob who has escaped to get his revenge, but the book is never actually told from his perspective, only the people who interact with him. That means that every scene that involves him taking his violent, sadistic, and often creative revenge (of which there are many) is told from the perspective of Sonny's victims.
- Pulp Magazine heroes The Shadow and The Spider lived for this. It's not surprising that these two were the primary inspiration for the Batman.
- Space Marine Battles is usually narrated by the eponymous Super Soldiers, but Wrath of Iron opens with a brief Perspective Flip, showing just how terrifying things can get when those Implacable Men get to you.
- In the Spiral Arm series, during the infiltration of the Gayshot Bo in On The Razor's Edge, the narrative briefly switches to the perspective of the enemy Magpies getting picked off one by one by the heroes.
Magpie Seven Bhatvik had thought himself third from the rear, but when he glanced over his shoulder on the stairwell he saw no one behind him. This was not a good thing to see, and he shivered a bit with unreasoning fear. He climbed a few more steps, then quickly looked back. He still saw nothing. Which was too bad.
- In The Stormlight Archive, the luckiest highborn Alethi warriors fight with magical BFSes and Powered Armor, including two of the viewpoint characters. One chapter from the point of view of a lowborn soldier describes his total horror at seeing one such warrior in battle: effortlessly massacring his comrades with the oversized Soul-Cutting Blade, shearing through the weapons and armor of the people futilely trying to slow him down, leaving a swath of corpses with burnt-out eye sockets in his wake.
- Tarzan of the Apes is a master at creating mook horror shows, especially in the first novel or two before he became more "civilized". There are several sequences where he is following a caravan of enemies — usually nasty natives or Arab slave-traders — and picks them off one by one, terrifying the rest into near-insanity as he does. He clearly enjoys it rather more than one would expect a hero to.
- Jack Fleming from The Vampire Files has employed this trope occasionally, using his vampiric powers to feign a haunting in an early novel and to completely scare the crap out of gangsters in his later, grimmer adventures.
- Victoria has a tense scene where one of the goddesses of Cascadia is hunted down by the Resistance. They are out in the wild forest, and the unseen resistance commandos kill her attendants quietly and one by one, until she is left alone.
- The Wardstone Chronicles: In Book 6, the protagonists are forced into an Enemy Mine situation with the Witches. As they are travelling to Greece, their ship is attacked by pirates. The heroes react by unleashing the army of Ax-Crazy, blood-thirsty witches on them, and a hilariously one-sided fight ensues.
- In the penultimate book of the Witcher Saga, Ciri mows down a squad of bad guys after luring them onto a frozen lake. In thick fog. She has skates, while they can't even see her coming until she's right next to them and dashes back into the fog, leaving a dead body behind each time. Ultimately the sole sound of her skates scrapping over ice is enough to cause panic — and then even that stops.
- During the final battle of the last book, Geralt's ally Regis, an extremly powerful vampire, finally throws off his refusal to touch blood and lets loose on a bunch of the Big Bad's minions trying to pin Ciri down for her to be raped and impregnated against her will as part of an Evil Plan to acquire the powers she carries in her bloodline. By the time Regis is done, there's blood all over the walls, severed limbs everywhere and he's got his fangs buried in the neck of the last surviving mook. Oh, and the best part? He looks like a total pushover herbalist, so when he enters the room unarmed, the mooks just laugh.
- In Worm, When Skitter utterly ANNIHILATES the 28 merchants who attack her territory. They didn't take her power to control bugs seriously and made jokes as they threatened her people. They laugh at a figure made of bugs until it dogpiles one of them and he starts screaming. Then they realize that they are surrounded by creepy, humanoid figures made of bugs, that are immune to their weapons. Skitter could have taken them out in an instant, but takes her time to freak them out to show what happens to anyone stupid enough to attack her territory. It also shows the readers just how freaking scary she can be when she doesn't hold back.
- Highlights including letting one of them "escape" before cornering him and slowly advancing her bugs on him. He lets out a primal scream just as they attack.
- Another involves a merchant that intended to use gasoline to burn the buildings of her people, she scares her into spilling it on herself and uses a slow moving army of beetles carrying lit matches toward her as she desperately tries to get away.
- Later in the story we see a video of her attack on PRT HQ, calmly walking past screaming people she attacked with stinging insects. She's mostly visible as a pair of glowing eyes in the midst of her swarm. Even her movements are eerie; how she moves without looking at people, and how every bug in the room moves in synch with her. Her agent remarks that she looks like she could be a member of the Slaughterhouse 9.
- In the sequel Ward, the protagonist pulls this off on a couple of occasions. The main character Victoria Dallon, formerly known as Glory Girl and now known as Antares, can fly 80+ mph, bench press 14 tons, has an invincible and invisible forcefield with a dozens of extra limbs, and an aura that can induce heart-stopping terror in anyone nearby. At one point she goes after The Pharmacist and manages to close with and capture her by the expedient of smashing through walls to grab her from an unexpected angle.
Live-Action TV
- In the final season of 24, Jack Bauer's Roaring Rampage of Revenge where he stops traffic in an underground carpark and proceeds to tear his way through a small army of mooks while wearing head-to-toe body armour and a big black goalie mask. Another moment comes from the end of the same episode which shows the aftermath of a roomful of mooks (and The Dragon) that Jack has massacred in horrific ways, with only one survivor left.
- The fourth episode of Agent Carter starts off in the POV of the Mooks who have Howard Stark held captive. One of their fellow Mooks is knocked out by some killer in the shadows, and when they try and find out who did this to him, they only end up being knocked out by the same killer, who, of course, is none other than Peggy. The scene is complete with spooky background music, too!
- Angel:
- One episode opens with a demon fleeing from a "rogue demon hunter" on a motorcycle. In a comedic twist, it turns out it's Wesley.
- Angel fights a blind but extremely skilled and deadly assassin. Since Angel is a vampire who lacks a pulse, breath, or body heat, she can't sense him unless he's moving. He takes advantage of this fact to defeat her. She is shown terrified out of her wits before Angel kills her.
- The Season 5 episode Harm's Way shows that Angel is quite scary to some of the people at Wolfram & Hart. He's portrayed as an unfeeling, uncaring boss who's just waiting for an excuse to decapitate someone with zero warning. When someone tries to frame Harmony for murder, she has to prove her innocence before anyone even accuses her, as she fears Angel won't listen to her side of the story.
- The Book of Boba Fett: During his and his allies' final battle with the Pykes and the other Mos Espa crime families, Boba sends his right hand woman Fennec Shand off to take care of something. When the Pykes realize they lost and try to flee, it's revealed what this mission was-Fennec effortlessly slaughters every single one of them, all without being seen, in a cramped building, while the Pyke leader gets more and more terrified as he realized that not only can he not see her, she's killing all of his allies before he can even blink.
- The Boys (2019): In the first season finale, Homelander commandeers a mission to storm an ISIS drug warehouse from a U.S. Special Forces unit, he then enters the building, and calmly greets the terrorists. They open fire, and as hundreds of rounds bounce harmlessly off of him, Homelander uses his Eyebeams to behead, dismember, and disembowel them. The last guman, Homelander burns his legs off, and puts his boot on his head. When he comes out, Homelander gives the special forces unit the all clear, right before spotting a guman fleeing the massacre, and using his eye beams to stop him.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- In the Dracula episode, we see a vampire running madly through a graveyard... and then we realize he's running from Buffy.
- Another example is in "Pangs" which opens with a handsome fresh-faced youth with Victim of the Week written all over him creeping through the forest, then starting in fear as he comes face-to-face with the Big Bad Buffy. Buffy punches him, whereupon he vamps into Game Face.
- "This Year's Girl". While in a coma Faith has nightmares that resemble a Slasher Movie, in which she's an innocent girl being stalked by Buffy, portrayed as a cold-blooded, implacable Psycho Knife Nut. This does not improve Faith's disposition when she wakes up from said coma.
- Burn Notice: "He's Michael Westen! There are only four of us!" Said by a Russian Spetznaz operator.
- An episode of Charmed opens with a young boy walking to an ice cream van in a dark alley. Later, we learn that the ice cream van is a trap set against prepubescent demons.
Ice cream man: Would you like some ice cream, little one?
Young boy: Yeah.
Ice cream man: You didn't say "please".
Young boy: {screams before opening credits] - Daredevil:
- In the fourth episode of Season 1, the Ranskahovs kidnap Claire Temple and start beating her to get information on the "Masked Man" who's been troubling their business interests. Suddenly the lights all go out, and then Matt picks them off one at a time, with them unable to see him.
- The second episode of Season 3 sees Matt kill the lights before entering a basement where the gangbangers who carried out an attempted kidnapping for Wilson Fisk are holed up. Things play out exactly as one might expect.
- The third episode of Season 3 sees Matt interrogate Fisk's crooked lawyer by garroting him from behind in his car, then fight off a team of FBI agents that show up to rescue Donovan. It's clear that these FBI agents probably aren't ones actively doing dirty work for Fisk and are just protecting Donovan from an assailant, especially with the way one yells "They have families, asshole!" when he gets a chance to draw down on Matt.
- Doctor Who:
- The Dalek POV shots in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" — when the Doctor is just about to get the upper hand over the Daleks, we're suddenly in a Dalek's head for the scene as the First Doctor stares it with a Psychotic Smirk and we know he's done something very clever.
- In "The Pandorica Opens", the Doctor translates a local legend:
The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a... trickster. Or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or... reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world. (It's him.)
- The opening of "A Good Man Goes to War" invokes this on behalf of the villains, as they prepare for an imminent attack by the Doctor. One scene has the Cybermen deal with an off-screen attack destroying parts of their base. "Intruder level 11! Seal off levels 12, 13, and 14! Intruder level 15!" Although it turns out the attacker is not The Doctor, but, in fact, "The Last Centurion" Rory Williams.
Rory: Where. Is. My. Wife?
- Lampshaded later when River Song calls out the Doctor on this ("You make them so afraid.") as a violation of the ideals he set out with.
- A more subtle version is invoked by the Eleventh Doctor in "The Wedding of River Song".
The Doctor: Imagine you were dying. Imagine you were afraid and a long way from home and in terrible pain. And just when you thought it couldn't get worse, you looked up and saw the face of the devil himself.
- We then see that the entire scene has been shown from the point of view of a damaged Dalek, who starts screaming "EMER-GEN-CY! EMER-GEN-CY!"
- In Game of Thrones Season 7, Daenerys Targaryen rides one of her dragons into battle and uses it to devastate the Lannister army. The difference here from the other times she used her dragon to destroy her enemies is that we see the deaths up close from the Lannister perspective shaking in fear and their deaths are treated in a somber light instead of being considered a moment of triumph for Daenerys.
- In an episode of the 2010 series Human Target, a plan to infiltrate the well-guarded mansion of a tycoon with Ilsa's help goes awry, and Ilsa is captured. Chance, thanks to his Unresolved Sexual Tension with her, single-handedly goes to rescue her, mowing down the tycoon's mercenary army. All this is shown from the viewpoint of the tycoon and his Dragon, whose faces get more horrified at the closing sounds of gunshots, screams, and shouts of "he's unstoppable". Chance then bursts into the room and guns down the rest of the Mooks. All with a pistol. Chance is not unique in this regard, although he is the best. Guerrero's name is enough to scare the wits out of any criminal or even a mob boss, and the guy himself looks like a nerd. Baptiste is also just as badass, which makes sense, since all of them went through the same school.
- Kamen Rider:
- Kamen Rider Drive: After being reduced to only a belt after his defeat to his son, Banno is reduced to a whimpering wreck just as Go is about to prepare the Shingou Axe's finishing move on him. Banno pleads to Go to not kill him because doing so will rob the world of his glorious knowledge. Only for his pleas to fall on deaf ears as he screams in horror before the axe gets dropped on him.
- Kamen Rider Outsiders: Banno would once again be at the short end of the stick when Kamen Rider Zein beats him within an inch of his life, he attempts to appeal to Zein to spare him by swearing allegiance to the authoritarian AI, only for Zein to immediately execute him anyway. But not before Banno hopelessly trying to escape Zein's wrath while being skewered from top to bottom. Even the Foundation X agent observing Zein's first fight also shared the same fear and dread as Banno's.
- Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Parado kept goading Emu to fight him and pulled all sorts of sick tricks to get his attention because Emu has always prioritized saving people over antagonizing him. When Emu finally ran out of time, options and patience, Parado got more than he could handle as his every move proved entirely futile. Even worse, Emu exploited his fragile mental state to wreck him on the inside too by mocking and twisting his own words. By the end of the fight Parado is reduced to a sobbing mess begging for mercy. Kuroto, the absolutely bonkers bioterrorist with a god complex, who would regularly mock Emu's kindhearted nature, is disturbed by watching the fight.
- Kamen Rider Drive: After being reduced to only a belt after his defeat to his son, Banno is reduced to a whimpering wreck just as Go is about to prepare the Shingou Axe's finishing move on him. Banno pleads to Go to not kill him because doing so will rob the world of his glorious knowledge. Only for his pleas to fall on deaf ears as he screams in horror before the axe gets dropped on him.
- The Mandalorian:
- The titular character is betrayed by his comrades while on a prison ship. He proceeds to escape from the prison cell they locked him in, sabotaging the cameras and doors to herd his traitorous team like rats in a maze and stalk them before coming after them one by one.
- Chapter 13 opens with a particularly savage one, as a group of hired guns are slaughtered, one by one, by Ahsoka Tano. She attacks from the mist, which renders her invisible except when she ignites her lightsabers — and she ignites them only in the seconds before she kills.
- The season 2 finale has the main protagonists cornered by Moff Gideon's Dark Troopers, and all hope seems lost... but then a mysterious, hooded warrior shows up and begins effortlessly carving a path through Gideon's forces, sending the once Smug Snake into a full-on Villainous Breakdown. Who is this enigma? Why, none other than Luke Skywalker, the original Star Wars hero.
- Moon Knight (2022) makes it very clear that Moon Knight is a terror to his enemies — and also to his alternate personality, the mild-mannered Steven Grant, who has no memory of his actions as Marc Spector/Moon Knight, but can snap between the two personas in emergencies. The first episode is seen entirely from Grant's point of view (until the end), and at one point, he is surrounded by four hostile mooks; then he blanks out for a few seconds and recovers to find four dead mooks and other people fleeing from him in terror. Then, at the end of the episode, Grant is running from a monster and trapped in a room, and Spector speaks to him, begging to take control. The monster breaks in — and a moment later, it is trying to flee in terror, before the unleashed Moon Knight beats it to death with his bare hands.
- The Punisher (2017) does this more than once:
- Frank meets up with his army buddy Gunner in the woods on the latter's family land, when they're attacked by a kill team sent by Rawlins. They proceed to turn the hunters into the hunted, picking off the assassins one by one, while Rawlins watches on from his men's body cams.
- Russo sends another team to Frank and David's hideout once he and Rawlins discover its location. Little do they know, Frank was anticipating their arrival and has spent the whole day preparing his defenses. He tears through the whole team solo, and brutally interrogates the last one before executing him.
- In an episode of Sherlock, the bad guys have kidnapped John, thinking he's the famous detective, until Sherlock himself arrives in the tunnel where they're keeping him. Sherlock taunts the bad guys from the darkness, extinguishing lights and striking from the shadows in a manner reminiscent of the other world's greatest detective.
- The series finale of Spartacus: Blood and Sand opens with Gannicus and an offscreen accompaniment of warriors slaughtering a hapless bunch of Romans, leaving one alive to tell the tale.
- In the Season 6 episode of Stargate SG-1 "The Other Guys", when SG-1 is attacking the Jaffa guarding the Stargate, O'Neill, Carter and Jonas use the standard "shoot them with zats" approach, but Teal'c instead waits for a Jaffa to run past him and erupts out of a lake and drags the Jaffa down into the water.
- Stargate Atlantis in an early episode has the titular Atlantis base taken over by soldiers of the Genii, a planet of humans native to the Pegasus Galaxy. After they fake executing the base commander, the military commander Major Shepard proceeds to annihilate the entire enemy force by methods that include climbing onto the roof of a room to execute a group of soldiers who can't see because of smoke bombs. He later gets into the control room to turn on the Stargate force field as Genii reinforcements are coming through, which wipes out all but 5 of the entire platoon of them with a Portal Slam.
- A second season episode of Supernatural opens with a terrified woman being stalked by a dark presence in a forest. She hides desperately behind a tree, relaxing in relief when her pursuer goes past, apparently not noticing her. Moments later, her head is chopped off. Sometime later, we find out she was a vampire. However, in a twist, she belonged to a coven that was feeding off of cattle to avoid killing humans, and the hunter who killed her turns out to be Ax-Crazy.
- In The X-Files, one episode opens with a teenage boy fleeing some off-camera pursuer, frantically yelling for help. It's to no avail, as his pursuer catches up and kills him... with a stake to the chest. It's Mulder, and he was vampire hunting.
Music
- The Megas seem to like this one.
- "The Quick and the Blue" has Quickman becoming increasingly aware of how boned he is, but won't back down. To wit: He sees Megaman as nothing less than the unstoppable avatar of death itself.
Is what they say true? Does death wear blue? Can he fall?
- Flashman believes that fighting Megaman would be futile.
Megaman is so powerful
I fear my end is near - GeminEye is about Geminiman trying to bodyguard himself from Megaman, whom he sees as a hired gun out to kill him for reasons he doesn't know.
- "The Quick and the Blue" has Quickman becoming increasingly aware of how boned he is, but won't back down. To wit: He sees Megaman as nothing less than the unstoppable avatar of death itself.
- Disturbed's song Indestructible is all about this. The narrator describes himself as a "terror to behold".
From the other side a terror to behold
Annihilation will be unavoidable.
Every broken enemy will know
That their opponent had to be invincible
Myths & Religion
- The Bible:
- It is mentioned how terrified the pagan nations were of the Israelites after their god laid waste to Egypt and then went around destroying everyone who attacked them in the desert. See, for example, the Moabites in Numbers 22 (the beginning of a Villain Episode) or the people of Jericho in Joshua 2.
- Notably, this is not limited to villainous characters. Several of the prayers of King David — a relatively heroic guy by the standards of the time — go, "I know I don't deserve it, but please don't kill me!"
- The Ramayana character Vibheeshana sees Parvati — the real Parvati, not the human woman she currently looks like— and almost goes crazy with fear. Imagine seeing Someone who is truly, inhumanly pure, before whom you feel just how venal and mortal you are. Someone so holy that they could incinerate you with a touch, and the only reason they don't is they know Fate has decreed a more humiliating death for you in the future. And all the while your rakshasa buddies are laughing, totally unaware that they are krill in the shadow of a whale. So, Vibheeshana defects. They call him a coward. Vibheeshana replies (paraphrased): "Yes, I am afraid, and if you could see what I see, you would be too!" Vibheeshana is the only soldier who survives the oncoming divine wrath — solely because he had the sense to flee.
Pro Wrestling
- Wrestlers like The Undertaker and Sting during face runs will often have segments or promos that count as this, with the various mind games and scare tactics they use to scare the living hell out of their heel adversaries.
- A picture perfect version of this was in TNA, when Sting, Fortune and Kurt Angle teamed up to do this to Immortal on the July 14th episode. The former had the other five dress up as Monster Clowns and pick off Immortal one by one. Gunner even attempted to invoke Final Boy in the end, but it didn't work. During Sting's title match with Mr. Anderson, Bully Ray showed up to try and help Anderson win, but then Angle, still in clown gear, appears and takes him out. The lights go out and Anderson finds him alone in the ring, Kurt standing on the entrance ramp, leaving Anderson in a panic that lets Sting win.
Radio
- "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" Listen to the opening here
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- For any party that reaches the mid levels. At that point, anything that isn't an exotic monster with special abilities, or a creature with character levels, tends to get taken down frighteningly easy by the party. Adventuring parties that tend to solve their problems with maximum application of violence tend to get slapped with derogatory term of "murder hobos" or "Munchkin" by DMs or roleplay-focused players. A good explanation.
- Some particularly creative and/or vindictive DMs have exploited this trope by turning campaigns into a twisted version of Hired to Hunt Yourself. The party begins picking up rumors of a frighteningly vicious band of ne'er-do-wells, but always seem to be one step behind the bad guys... only for it to ultimately be revealed that the rumors are about them.
- For any party that reaches the mid levels. At that point, anything that isn't an exotic monster with special abilities, or a creature with character levels, tends to get taken down frighteningly easy by the party. Adventuring parties that tend to solve their problems with maximum application of violence tend to get slapped with derogatory term of "murder hobos" or "Munchkin" by DMs or roleplay-focused players. A good explanation.
- This is Exalted, from the right (wrong) perspective. Normal people are called "Extras" for a reason, and playing a campaign as Heroic Mortals is more a question of "what kills you and how" than anything else. To normal people, the lowest forms of supernatural beings — Hungry Ghosts, Commoner Fae, First Circle Demons, Lesser Gods and Elemental Spirits, Enlightened Mortals — are nigh-unstoppable monsters. Terrestrial Exalted are elemental super-soldiers designed to brutally slaughter the aforementioned "monsters" in droves — and said super-soldiers are in turn little more than mooks to experienced Celestial Exalts.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- Are you human? Are you currently being given a standard issue Lasgun, Flak Jacket, Infantry kit, and a copy of the Imperial Guardsman's Uplifting Primer? Start praying to the Emperor that your assignment is primarily fighting rebellions of planets who failed to pay their taxes or traitors. Otherwise, enjoy being part of Squad number 529 being sent to replace the most recent losses. Oh, and don't think of running away from the big scary monster charging at you from the front. Headquarters has seen fit to stop that by placing something even scarier at the back of your squad. It's called a Commissar, and his job is to provide "encouragement" to any who might consider retreating. Said encouragement often involves impromptu execution for cowardice via .75 caliber explosive shell firing Bolt Pistols. Planetary Defense Forces have it even worse. At least the Imperial Guard often defeats the enemy, even though the first deployed usually don't get to see it. The PDF, on the other hand, can merely slow them down until the Guard arrives...
- On the flip side, Imperial Guard tanks and artillery are an entirely different animal. Puny Earthlings don't seem so weak when tossing high explosive death left and right.
- Chaos Cultists and Traitor Guardsmen have it even worse than the Planetary Defense Forces. The Guard might get a good commander but the Renegades and Heretics are treated like garbage by dint of existence.
- The Deathleaper is a Tyranid Lictor that singlehandedly destroyed an Imperial world's morale in the face of a Tyranid invasion. Knowing that merely killing the Cardinal would make him a martyr and stiffen the populace's resolve, it instead started murdering the Cardinal's bodyguards right in front of him but leaving him untouched before vanishing, repeating the process every day. In less than two weeks the Cardinal went mad, demoralizing and disorganizing the planet's defense forces and allowing the hive fleet to overcome the planet with ease.
- Are you human? Are you currently being given a standard issue Lasgun, Flak Jacket, Infantry kit, and a copy of the Imperial Guardsman's Uplifting Primer? Start praying to the Emperor that your assignment is primarily fighting rebellions of planets who failed to pay their taxes or traitors. Otherwise, enjoy being part of Squad number 529 being sent to replace the most recent losses. Oh, and don't think of running away from the big scary monster charging at you from the front. Headquarters has seen fit to stop that by placing something even scarier at the back of your squad. It's called a Commissar, and his job is to provide "encouragement" to any who might consider retreating. Said encouragement often involves impromptu execution for cowardice via .75 caliber explosive shell firing Bolt Pistols. Planetary Defense Forces have it even worse. At least the Imperial Guard often defeats the enemy, even though the first deployed usually don't get to see it. The PDF, on the other hand, can merely slow them down until the Guard arrives...
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: The sourcebooks occasionally remind players that some supernatural powers, like sprouting wings or breathing fire, will cause uninformed onlookers to mistake the character for a monster born of Chaos and react accordingly.
- Werewolf: The Forsaken: the Forsaken Werewolf tribe fittingly known as the Hunters in Darkness has this as their modus operandi; when hunting, they typically stalk their prey from a distance, using Homefield Advantage to isolate and lure them where they want while picking them off one by one. The corebook explicitly compares this to a Slasher Movie.
Web Animation
- The Warhammer 40,000 fan film Astartes shows a squad of Retributor Astartes boarding a rebel spacecraft and methodically eliminating all opposition from the rebel guardsmen. Only Part Four, which has a couple of psykers opposing them, has the Retributors face any sort of meaningful resistance — everyone else is just a trigger pull from losing chunks of their bodies. This is further compounded by the rebels performing a variety of legitimate tactics against the Retributors which nonetheless does nothing more than dent up their Powered Armor.
- In Max Gilardi's Fazbear and Friends, Freddy and the gang are portrayed as kind and likeable characters who simply have no idea that they are animatronics. At least till the ending, anyway.
- Helluva Boss: In "Truth Seekers" a quartet of demons escape from a government facility and hack, slash, blast, and maul their way through dozens of agents. After two agents manage to crawl their way past their coworkers pools of blood and severed body parts they manage to lock it down, only for the lights to flicker, computers start taunting them, dead agents rise as zombies, topped off by one of the surviving agents vomiting up a Prince of Hell. The demons are the protagonists.
- Pootis Engage is mostly shown from the POV of the area 51 mercs, and thus we get to watch their horror as they are destroyed in incredibly well animated ways by the Heavy duo.
- Played for laughs in RWBY. Yang evidently made quite an impact on Junior's goons in her Curb Stomping of them in the Yellow trailer. When she goes back to his bar in "Painting the Town", they're frantically trying to hold the door shut to stop her from coming in. When she blasts the door down with Ember Celica and struts in with a playful "Guess who's baaaack!" and a wide smile, every single goon immediately points a gun in her face. The only exception is the DJ, who is sitting cowering behind his mixing desk.
- Guardian. During the Changeling invasion of Canterlot, a detachment of Changelings has cornered two unicorns. Enter a certain cross-eyed pegasus with a family resemblance, ready to kill or die in order to protect said unicorns.
Webcomics
- Dan, of Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, does this to Regina, starting about here, for the next four pages.
- Girl Genius:
- The flashback of Zeetha wiping out the inhabitants of an entire pirate fortress sure looks like this in a couple panels.
- As does the scene where Agatha's circus buddies battle Wulfenbach troopers in Sturmhalten. At least on a few pages.
- The best example, however, would be the sequence where the Castle Heterodyne reactivates to kill off invading forces. Some invaders are swallowed by the ground, others crushed by spiky walls, gigantic Clank-monsters surprise them from behind or below, and of course there's the death sentence that is hearing a flying Clank break through your window shouting "THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING IN MECHANICSBURG!"
- The flashback of Zeetha wiping out the inhabitants of an entire pirate fortress sure looks like this in a couple panels
- Lackadaisy: The pig farmers' assault on the protagonists' speakeasy turns horribly against them once Freckle gets hold of a Tommy Gun and starts cackling maniacally while shooting from the rafters.
- Mushroom Go, being about a group of pirates in the Mushroom Kingdom, treats Mario this way. His only appearance to date was in a flashback told by Captain Martello. He crippled her Hammer Brother father for life and incinerated his partner. The way she describes him makes him seem like a terrifying, one-man-army, monster, which to the Koopa Troop, he kinda is.
- Schlock Mercenary: Schlock, being bulletproof, super-strong, fond of heavy ordnance, habitually eating his enemies and not at all humanoid, naturally gets this treatment sometimes. Nowhere more so than in Schlocktoberfest 2001. It starts as a horror movie cliche when Diamond Bugs easily tear through armor, and then reverses when they face the "regenerating zombie cannibal!" Compounded by the fact that the enemies are depicted as children and he has at least quadrupled his size and strength by consuming his fallen comrades' bodies, and preserving their heads in jars.
- In Skin Deep, seriously ticking off a bugbear can create this trope very quickly.
- xkcd has a comic from the point-of-view of viruses facing human ingeniosity.
- Zomgan: After Craven orders his Zomgan goons to charge towards Mirae On to avenge Jeff, Mirae doesn't go merciful on them. He punches the ground, summoning bones and uses one of them to slaughter his way through the Zomgan. It ranges from beheading one, slashing another in half, and using his own organs and bones to murder the remaining Mooks.
Web Original
- In The Deathworlders Chapter 32 we're treated to a Celzi general's perspective on a SOR assault on his compound. It's not pretty.
There were nine humans loose in his compound, and they were death.
- Though on paper, Dream is at a disadvantage as the target of Manhunts, as many comments like to point out, in practice, the Hunters are more scared of Dream than he is of them, and for most of the Manhunts that fear proves to be fully justified as he picks the Hunters apart. This is especially the case when watching the earliest 1 Hunter videos from George's perspective, showing exactly how terrifying it is to go up against Dream. Most of the time, he'll be hunting you.
- The video The Flying Man has a superpowered human-shaped thing that seemingly exists solely to kill criminals. It doesn't interact with the press or anyone else on-screen, so we see it through the eyes of a hapless criminal that attracts its attention. The video has been called "Lovecraft with superheroes."
- Hank from Madness Combat tends to invoke this a fair bit. The fact that he's basically killed everyone he's seen in the series at least once doesn't hurt a bit.
- In The Salvation War, Satan attempts to conquer Earth in 2008 at the invitation of God, only to find he has disastrously underestimated how tough humanity has gotten in war. The resulting slaughter of demonic mooks who are consistently outmaneuvered, outwitted and sheer overwhelmed by Humanity's ruthless military might soon becomes an almost pitiful massacre.
- Something Awful once featured a story from the point of view of two video game mooks, who were portrayed sympathetically and after some nervous waiting had to face the terrible killing machine that had been tearing through the ranks of their fellow soldiers. One of them actually managed to kill him. But then somehow everything was suddenly as if that whole encounter hadn't happened, and he was coming again...
- Mr. Welch:
672: The forehead is not an appropriate place for a kill-count holotatoo.
- The Whateley Universe story "The OP" stars the Grunts, a school team training for a future career in the military. Between their training and their own fairly respectable mutant powers, one wouldn't precisely consider them mook material...yet Carmilla in full Eldritch Abomination mode picks them off one by one easily and graphically enough in true horror movie fashion. Good thing for them it's only a training simulation.
- The segment during "Revenge of the Alphas" that pits Bloodwolf, Killstench, and Maggot against Jade. 3 of the most dangerous students on campus against a little girl. They end up utterly terrified of her, none more so than Bloodwolf, who decides that she has to be some kind of demon.
- Jade goes one better in "Christmas Elves", using her fast regeneration and a handful of parlor tricks to convince a whole Syndicate facility that they were under attack by an Undead army.
Western Animation
- The very first episode of Æon Flux casts the title character in this light, slaughtering masked mooks left and right to levels reaching almost parody. And then the masks come off, the families come to collect the bodies... One of the early shorts (before the series was made) begins with Aeon moving down dozens of enemy, and then the narrative abandons her to focus on one soldier's painful dying moments after being shot down.
- In the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "The Avatar State", Aang has a nightmare where he sees himself in the Avatar state, and realizes just how terrifying an opponent he is to his enemies when he unloads the whup-ass.
- In The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Hank Pym's introductory scene and Establishing Character Moment as a nice guy unless you push him too far shows him conducting an experiment which is interrupted by a team of badass mercenaries. He shrinks himself and shows how dangerous that power can be by taking out the group one by one, essentially invisible, causing all of them to totally lose their composure and freak out. The whole thing is inspired by a scene in Predator (with Hank standing in for the Predator).
- Ben 10:
- In the episode "Last Laugh", the main villain, Zombozo, has one of the most ironic examples of this trope: after tormenting Ben the entire episode through Mind Rape, he finally pushes Ben too far by threatening his cousin, causing Ben to become Ghostfreak and invoke this trope to literally scare Zombozo to death.
- Happens to the same villain again at the hands of Gwen in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien when he tries to kill her aunt right in front of her. Gwen replies by going One-Winged Angel and terrifying the living heck out of him.
- Ben actually has multiple scenes in all series where he displays this trope: in one episode of the original series, he attacked two mooks in his Ripjaw mode in a typical Jawesque fashion; Alien Force and Ultimate Alien have scenes such as when he threaten people as Rath (though Rath's behaviour make it more comical), and the list goes on.
- Though it didn't involve a villain, Ben 10: Alien Force also had a full episode with Ben doing this to his own allies as part of a test to see how good they had become. For the whole episode, they were trapped on a space station with Ben doing several times Offscreen Teleportation and beating them up in various forms while mocking them with a Psychotic Smirk. It was creepy as hell.
- During Kevin's brief return to insanity and thus villainy in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien we have Ben pursuing any lead on his whereabouts via his villains. He does this by tracking them down and beating any information out of them, with one notable example of him grabbing a bunch of Forever Knights as Lodestar and slamming them into walls and each other until they talk. The first thing we see of this are the knights running away and one of them being 'dragged' back to Ben via magnetism.
- Being a pastiche of Batman and The Shadow, Darkwing Duck tries very hard to pull this trope off. He usually fails, but on occasions, he does succeed quite well.
- DC Animated Universe:
- Batman: The Animated Series:
- The opening sequence follows in the same vein as other Batman media.
- The best in-episode example is in "The Trial". Batman is loose and the villains are in a dark room lit only by Two-Face's lighter. Batman, in the exact environment where he is next to invincible, circles around the edges of the room, outside the lighter's glow, and grabs the villains one by one. The Joker finally says it's time to panic when he sees Harley suspended from the ceiling and bound with the straitjacket Batman had just escaped from. To make things worse, Harley had been holding onto Batman's utility belt...
- Another good example is at the climax of "The Forgotten", which has Batman taking down some evil gold miners who have been enslaving homeless people. In a startling aversion of Hollywood Darkness, the Big Bad has the miners switch off all the lights in the mine and turn on their head-lamps as the only source of illumination, not realizing that Batman loves the dark. The miners are like fish in a barrel as Batman incapacitates them — and all of this offscreen, as all we get are screams, sounds of struggle and the remaining miners slowly coming unglued, until their leader actually tries to flee from Batman rather than attempting to kill him.
- "The Man Who Killed Batman" plays some variants when humble mook Sid the Squid gains the Red Baron title ''The Man Who Killed Batman'' more or less by accident. First, False Friend mook Eddie G. arranges for Sid to play the bait while Eddie gets away, so Sid is chased by a Terror Hero. Sid is saved by his own luck and stupidity, apparently killing Batman in the process. He's taken to a Bad Guy Bar to celebrate, only to have some Bit Part Bad Guys Gangbangers challenge him for the title of "the toughest guy in Gotham." Cue a Bar Brawl. In quick succession, Sid is "saved" by the arrival of the police, only to be menaced by Harvey Bullock with a little Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique; "saved" by a lawyer, who turns out to be Harley Quinn and leads Sid to the Joker, who puts Sid in a Death Trap; escapes by a Deus ex Machina and seeks protection from The Don Rupert Thorne, who suspects Sid is trying to pull a Scheherezade Gambit and decides Sid has outlived his usefulness; and finally truly saved by Batman, who plays this trope straight on Thorne's gang, and sends Sid to jail... where he is held in high regard for almost killing Batman.
- If you make Superman angry enough, he may do this. Hawkgirl and Aquaman, on the other hand, skip directly to this.
- Batman: The Animated Series:
- Given the Urpneys' immense Sympathetic P.O.V. (and how cowardly they were on top of it), slapstick variations were fairly common in The Dreamstone. They even tried to make the cutesy heroes look as menacing as possible in many cases. "The Dream Beam Invasion" is a rare case of using the trope and then reversing it back onto the heroes straight afterwards. Apparently when the Urpneys stopped being afraid of them and actually threatened to fight back, the heroes were kind of out of strategies.
- In Gargoyles, the Manhattan Clan often invokes this trope.
- Marvel's Spider-Man features the iconic scene of Spider-Man going after Uncle Ben's killer as this; the buglar is initially puzzled to see this man in strange costume show up, only to soon be terrorized as Peter throws him around, stick him to the wall with webs and yells at him about how all he wants to hear from him is scream. When he finally gets let go due to Spidey's My God, What Have I Done? moment, his first move is to hand himself over to the police and beg them to arrest him, just to get away from the crazy man in spider suit.
- In an episode of Megas XLR, "Coop D'Etat", an army of giant robots follow Megas into a large cloud and are picked off one by one. One of the robots even trembles in fear.
- Several Samurai Jack episodes were told through the eyes of sympathetic characters attempting to kill Jack. Jack is just as unstoppable in those episodes as any others.
- At the end of the Three Episode Pilot, Jack has single-handedly decimated a horde of insectoid Mecha-Mooks, ending with one of the robots surrounding him taking a single step away from the samurai covered in the Symbolic Blood of his enemies. "No. There is no escape." Violent action ensues.
- Gets played for laughs in Season Five. Aku has spent the past fifty years throwing everything he has at Jack and watching everything he has fail miserably, and plus Jack has stopped aging so he can't even just hide and wait for Jack to naturally die. The possibility of Jack eventually finding and killing him has been hanging over his head all this time, and it's driven him to become a Nervous Wreck. Little does he know, Jack has lost his sword and so can't kill him.
- In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Spider-Man becomes this when wearing the black suit. Despite how hilariously hammy his dialogue is, you can still see the fear in Shocker's eyes as Spidey is literally hunting him down with the intention of killing him.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: Though decidedly Played for Laughs, the scene where SpongeBob chases down the Strangler is definitely portrayed as this while mostly being an homage to Droopy cartoons.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Maul's rampage on the Venator. After he's set free by Ahsoka, he massacres his way through the Clones trying to enact Order 66 with nothing but his telekinesis and a shocking amount of Family-Unfriendly Violence.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
- Used in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) with Splinter. His appearance in Shredder's chamber is heralded by a panicked-looking Foot Mook falling into the room and being dragged back into darkness and a pair of Glowing Eyes of Doom.
- Shades of this in the portrayal of "The Night Watcher", Raphael's vigilante persona in TMNT.
- Teen Titans (2003):
- Raven once invokes this trope on Dr. Light by accident, because her self-control is slipping and her dark/angry half-demon side gets out of control. Given a funny Continuity Nod later in the series, when a gleefully-gloating Dr. Light suddenly finds himself facing Raven again, and immediately surrenders and asks to be taken to jail.
- In the two-parter "Aftershock", the Titans as a whole, having to deal with their Sixth Ranger Traitor Terra, first approach by going easy on her, giving her chances to come back to her senses and return to them. She brutally rejects every single time, viciously taking them down one by one all while mocking some of them for added measure. Comes the second part, the Titans stop holding their punches against her... and proceed to tear through her as she runs away in terror.
- Transformers:
- Bulkhead pulls this in Transformers: Prime with MECH Mooks.
- Predaking, having learned that the 'Cons engineered the destruction of his brethren, goes on a rampage inside the warship. The Vehicons try their best, but they're little more than an annoyance.
- In Beast Wars Optimus Primal, of all bots, pulls this in "Gorilla Warfare", when he's hit by a virus that was supposed to turn him into a coward. Instead, it made him a devoid-of-fear berserker who rampaged through the Predacon base, subjecting Taratulas and Waspinator to this trope.
- The Venture Bros.:
- The very first non-pilot episode, Dia de los Dangerous, features Brock Samson methodically killing as many of the Monarch's henchmen as he can using his car, lighting-up and enjoying a smoke as he does. It's horrific.
- ¡Viva los Muertos! started out this way by showing what Brock Sampson in action looks like through the eyes of a rookie henchman. After the rookie's corpse is used as a test subject in Dr. Venture's reanimation experiments, Brock must deal with the guilt of accepting that the disposable mooks he's been killing are generally decent people.
Real Life
- A soldier is shot in his bulletproof vest, falls and gets back up. The reaction from the insurgents is priceless.
- Just imagine being an average, forcefully drafted soldier in any war through history. You either are the horror monster or you're dead.
