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"Real terror is not the sight of death. It is the fear of death. What is the fear of death? Terror of the unknown."
"There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of countess in that room, there is no ghost there at all; but worse, far worse."
"The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal man," said I; "and that is, in all its nakedness - Fear! Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms."
— H. G. Wells, The Red Room.
A specific kind of High Octane Nightmare Fuel and Horror movie trope, where fear is not induced by some traumatic visual element or by a physical threat, but by the sole lack of event. This is a case of rampant creepiness, associated not with what is happening, but with the general atmosphere of a sequence, where otherwise nothing significant is happening. The inflection of the trope title is " Nothing Is Scarier."
It often has to do with where the events are happening, generally because said place is just inherently scary somehow, but sometimes merely because of the way it is filmed or described.
This is all, of course, because the feeling that someone is sneaking up on you is a lot scarier than the knowledge of it.
This trope comes in two flavours:
- The classic version, where the Nothing Is Scarier moment serves to build up suspense and tension, until something scary suddenly jumps at you from nowhere. It has been done a million times, and is often poorly executed, ending up with the killer/monster/whatever apparition being less scary than the preceding sequence. Stephen King once said that the actual presence of the "big scary thing" itself tends to be the cause of the letdown — whatever they actually show is unlikely to be worse than what we were expecting. (If a door opens and there's a six-foot-tall insect behind it, we think "At least it wasn't ten feet tall"; if it's twelve feet tall, we think "Thank God, I thought it was going to be twenty feet tall" — etc. etc. etc.)
When properly done however, it can result in some of the scariest movies ever directed. When done subtly, with only muffled screams, the sounds of bodies being dragged, or other eerie sound effects - and when the character involved is sympathetic enough - a fertile imagination will reap a horrible harvest.
- The full version is when there is really nothing happening, but the result can be several orders of magnitude scarier than the classic version, because the audience is left to imagine what could have happened.
For both versions, scary music can be used to reinforce the effect, but it seems to work best when there's no music at all. The camera might slowly close in on the "nothing", either as a character musters the courage to open the door, enter the dark depths, or cowers abjectly at the impenetrable darkness.
This trope can be used in combination with many other tropes; In The Mouth Of Madness, Darkness Equals Death, Quieter Than Silence, Ultimate Evil, Leave The Camera Running, Mind Screw are just some examples, anything will do as long as the result is scary.
Compare and contrast The Unreveal, Cat Scare, Ultimate Evil.
Not to be confused with Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here or Its Quiet Too Quiet.
Classic Examples
Film
Live Action TV
- In The Avengers, there was a fairly long sequence in the middle of the episode "Don't Look Behind You" with Cathy Gale walking around in a large, spooky house in the countryside. It seems at first like no one else is present in the house, but then things in rooms begin to get changed while she is in out of the room. There is no BGM at all during this sequence, just the sound of Gale's footsteps.
- In Midnight, a Bottle Episode of Doctor Who, there is... something... that torments the Doctor and the people he's traveling with. We never find out anything about it, other than that it utterly deconstructs an ordinary Doctor Who episode and brings all of the Doctor's flaws to the forefront.
- While Buffy The Vampire Slayer is generally pretty up front with its monsters, there have been a few notable—and scary!—exceptions. Probably the most frightening is the Season 5 episode "Forever," where Dawn recruits Spike's assistance to bring Joyce back from the dead. The final scene of the episode is lifted directly from the short story "The Monkey's Paw," and is equally chilling.
Literature
- The Stephen King short story The Reaper's Image, one of his first published stories, focuses on something seemingly innocuous: a mirror with a black smudge that sometimes appears in the corner. The smudge doesn't appear for most people. But the few people who do see it, for some reason, become terrified and flee the room. Once they do— and once they are out of sight of any other human being— they are never seen again.
- The book version of The Princess Bride has a Zoo of Death instead of the Pit of Despair. It has multiple levels of basement, and as you go down the enemies get scarier. One level has absolutely nothing in it. Just a long, black tunnel with the exit door at the other end. For Inigo and Fezzik this is doggone scary. Something should be happening! This is the level of the Enemies of Fear. The idea is that you panic, run for the opposite door and let the venomous spider under the handle kill you.
- The Red Room by HG Wells.
- The Curious Sofa by Edward Gorey.
As soon as everybody had crowded into the room, Sir Egbert fastened shut the door, and started up the machinery inside the sofa. When Alice saw what was about to happen, she began to scream uncontrollably...
- This trope is pretty much the bread and butter of House Of Leaves.
- The famous short story "The Monkey's Paw" wields this trope to terrifying effect. The horror summoned by the second wish is never revealed, because the old man uses the third wish to send it back just before it opens the door.
Music
Video Games
- The whole Silent Hill series use this. All the time. Never before has radio static made your heart leap out of your mouth and go running for cover.
- Eternal Darkness is organized in chapters, during each of which the player controls a different character. Most of the characters go mad or die horribly at the end of their chapter. The story is tied together by the main character, who is reading their stories. Between each chapter she wanders around the Lovecraft Country house looking for the pages of the next chapter. Nothing happens to her until after the much later chapters, even after finding a weapon right at the beginning of the game, as well as several better weapons, and even playing a level in the same house she's wandering around. It doesn't help that there's a good chance that her Sanity Meter might be low just from reading a chapter, leading to Sanity Effects. It's almost a relief when she starts meeting things that can actually be killed...
- The developers knew what they were about. The first screen of the game, even before the Nintendo and Sillicon Knights Vanity Plates, consists of an Edger Allan Poe from The Raven *
(Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,\\ Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before\\ But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token\\ And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'\\ This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!'\\ Merely this and nothing more.) , from its beginning through "doubting..." It even trails off into an ellipsis.
- Ravenholm in Half Life 2 is like this at times. Made especially scary by the fact that fast zombies may not attack for several minutes after they scream...
- Made even more so by the fact that the standard zombies will often times lie dormant, sometimes hidden among the actual corpses, and only rise to attack after you have passed by them.
- This trope sees your Ravenholm and raises you the City 17 Underground. The battles with zombies are far more preferable to walking through almost complete darkness with the only sounds made by the player and Alyx.
- The third-party modification Dear Esther features no action, no enemies, and no weapons. The only sounds are haunting music and narrated snippits of a letter written to some woman named "Esther" that are played out as your character walks a path around a deserted island. It gets very unnerving in places.
- The game The Dark Eye, which is based on several Edgar Allan Poe, has some of the scariest moments just in roaming about the bare house where the framing story takes place. Nothing happens until you touch a single specific object to move the plot along, but it's disturbing as hell to be there alone.
- In Eversion, World X-7 replaces the stage music with a heartbeat.
- One of the randomly-selected "READY!" screens in World X-6 to X-8 is a completely blank screen.
- In World X-8, all foreground objects (except you, the enemies, and the red liquid) are black and textureless.
- Doom 3 had a level like this about halfway through the game. You finally get to the place in the complex where the monster attacks are coming from, and for the first 10 minutes of the level...nothing. You see various monsters lurking in inaccessible areas, but nothing attacks you. It ends up being one of the scariest levels of the game.
- This trope is one of the reasons why Thief 3's "Shalebridge Cradle" is one of the scariest video game levels of all time. The first part of the level has nothing in it whatsoever. It's just dark, and has freaky ambient noises. To get to the second half, you have to go down to the basement and and turn the generator on, which causes enough noise that you just KNOW will have alerted anything with a miles radius. It also turns most of the lights on, leaving little shadow to hide in.
- Some of the most chilling words ever to appear in any video game: "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."
- The first level of F.E.A.R. has exactly zero enemies, just try not firing your weapon in it. There are also lots of dark, creepy hallways in the rest of the game that would make great ambush points for enemy soldiers and psychic little girls... and most of them are completely empty and no less terrifying for it.
- Later on in the game, while moving through the ATC headquarters' research division, there's a laboratory off to the side with a scientist who has been dragged halfway up into a vent, with his legs hanging out, and his body is still twitching violently as something is tearing at his upper body. Then, the corpse goes limp, and it stays up there, stuck in place, and you have no idea what it was that killed him - which is a hell of a lot creepier than knowing what killed him.
- The Ocean House Hotel in Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines is a haunted hotel, naturally. While there are a smattering of scripted events, a great deal of it involves you just stumbling around in the dark, and only a complete nit of a gamer could ever seriously run the risk of dying within. It's still a terrifying experience.
- I don't think that any other example shows the singular power of this trope. Your character is an immortal vampire and even though you've just been turned you can still take several shots to the face from a pistol and regenerate from it in a pretty short time. You might be able to turn invisible or run faster than a car or any other weird supernatural powers. But whatever you're facing is an unknown - and that's always more powerful than anything you know.
- There is also the sequence in the abandoned hospital, you see scripted events of people being dragged around corners to their death, then the friendly quest-giver NPC at the bottom mentions this trope.
- The Nosferatu Warrens: no enemies to speak of, but still astoundingly creepy because of the fact that the place is almost deserted, and there's a mysterious whispering that follows you from the moment you enter the area. It turns out that most of the local Nosferatu have become invisible and are now stalking you, occasionally hissing in your ears, waiting patiently for you to make the wrong move. And then Gary leaps out of the darkness, yelling "BOOO!" and it's almost a relief to have a jagged-toothed sewer-dwelling monstrosity laughing at you.
- This trope is one of the reasons why System Shock 2 is consistently voted one of the scariest games of all time, even today. You've been shattering hybrid skulls with precious ammunition and fighting tooth-and-nail for survival for 5 adrenaline pumping minutes, and suddenly, silence. They're gone. You'll be wired and jumpy and you'll be seeing unmistakable twitches out of the corner of the screen, but it's nothing. It's always nothing. Just your own footsteps and the echoing whirr of the radiator, and that's when you realize there's nothing on this god-damn ship but you, a crazy AI bitch, and hordes of despairing abominations who could be RIGHT AROUND THAT CORNER.
- In Left 4 Dead, hearing a sobbing Witch and knowing she's close and you have to be careful or you'll startle her and she'll screech and try to rip you apart - and sometimes you just don't find her...
- In the Quake 3 Mod "Dark Conjunction" almost every single part of the game that isn't a battle is like this. In one scene You walk into a room with strange pillars, each pillar has a glass ball with a human head floating in it. After a while of complete silence, the eyes open up with a chilling sound and you are briefly teleported into a strange room with a great big Eldritch Abomination staring down at you. You can't leave, so you just stare at this big horrible alien demon thing for ages... But nothing happens, and eventually you are transported back as if nothing happened, and the locked door you needed to open to get through opens by itself.
- Similarly the whole series of They Hunger mods for Half Life used this well, along with every zombie trope in the Wiki.
- The game Siren is pretty bad for this. Often you'll be walking in a nearly pitch black house, village, whatever with no weapon and sight jack. You'll be able to see through the Shibito's eyes but you won't actually KNOW where they are visually until you hear them. This is bad because generally you're too afraid to go forward even though the Shibito are dumb as a pile of hammers and aren't likely to do much.
- Also, there'll be no music or any indication anything's wrong when suddenly the screen will flash red and you'll hear a Shibito yell from near you providing a wonderful "omg wtf what that?!?!?!" moment complete with running in random directions and possibly pissing yourself.
- In Diablo, the dungeon levels are large and there can be quite far between the monsters, which only adds to the suspense and scariness of the game. Even more so because there are monsters that can turn invisible and sneak up on you, and others that charge you from far off-screen with a blood-curdling roar.
- Portal: After discovering the truth behind the cake, GLaDOS continues to talk at you as you make your way through the back end of the facility. Because many of her lines are threats against the player's life, going through the facility is hell - nothing ever happens, but you're constantly fearing that something might...
- Not to mention the effect of this level on players who rely heavily on hearing as a habit. In the final level, much like the rest of the game, there is total silence, punctuated very occasional by mechanical creaks and thumps. When you're going through the level searching for ANY sign of life, alive or otherwise, and you expect every door to try to kill you anyway, these little sounds can be terrifying.
- Dead Space is a fan of this, especially in the space walk segments, where you can't hear any noises except sounds from inside your suit and coming up from the ship, meaning you'll never know the necromorph is right behind you until you see him slashing you across the back.
- Unfortunately, when inside the ship, unless you are in an area with lots of large machinery running, the Necromorphs often loudly announce their presence, which kinda kills the tension.
- Batman Arkham Asylum features a showdown in Killer Croc's lair; an abandoned sewer beneath Arkham. Croc's just a stupid brute, right? You'll just have to trick him into running headlong into something or exploit his weak point, right? Nope, he spends most of the sequence underwater, listening for you. If you move too fast, he'll figure out where you are and drag you down to your doom. So you have to move through the level gathering plot coupons at a glacial pace, with only the sound of Croc's breathing keeping you company. Unless he decides to come up and attack (and if he catches you, you're not getting away), which gets nerve wracking, really quick.
- Unfortunately, you can destroy that by just crouch-walking, which is fairly quick, and using a quick batarang throw to knock him back into the water.
- In Chrono Cross, the final battle against the game's Eldritch Abomination is the only battle in the game without any background music. It does a good job of heightening the tension.
- Ace Combat does this at least twice. In 04, the briefing for the final mission, "Megalith", features no music, though this is really because there is an unsubtitled Rousing Speech in progress in the background - it does admittedly make the mission's Ominous Latin Chanting that bit more startling, though. In 0's Mission 12, after accomplishing the first objective, the screen flashes completely white, your HUD shows a missile warning for a few seconds, your wingman starts shooting at you, and the background music suddenly stops.
- In the first Halo game, the first part of the level 343 Guilty Spark was like this. After an initial bout of Covenant enemies, you spent the rest of the first half of the level wandering around in COMPLETE SILENCE. This was not helped by the strange sounds this troper thought he heard while trying to find the objective.
- The Godfather game is grounded in semi-reality and completely devoid of traditional supernatural horror elements. However, it does have the annoying tendency to have the music cut out completely at times. It's therefore much more startling if a hostile mobster starts shooting abruptly.
- In Sly Cooper and the Thevius Racoonus there is an area with a massive gate outside it, allegedly to keep some horrible monster inside. The player wanders through the quiet, empty level for several minutes, constantly expecting the monster to appear and being severely creeped out when the reeds in the water beneath them move as if an animal is swimming right past you. After all of this excellently terrifying nothingness, the monster turns out to be a flamboyently-colored and cartoonish cobra thingy that moved so slowly you'd have to try to get caught by it.
- In Operation Flashpoint, you might be on patrol in a forest for ten minutes, encountering no enemies whatsoever and hearing nothing but the birds singing, when you walk right into an ambush and the scene explodes into a loud firefight. This being in stark contrast to a game like Callof Duty, where you're rarely not being shot at, the sudden transition is quite harrowing.
- The level Second Sun in Callof Duty Modern Warfare 2 is like this. One minute, You're fighting in a heroic last stand inside a downed helicopter the next, A nuke goes off over DC, and everything electronic shorts out. It gets really quiet for a long time, until it starts to rain heavily, and a storm starts. Suddenly, in a flash of lighting, three enemies are spotted in front of you.
Web Original
- The Slender Man Mythos, wherein we only see traces of the Slender Man. What exactly he does to his victims and how is completely up to the imagination.
- SCP Foundation. Most of the time they describe the stuff that's happening in bureaucratic language to make it even creepier, but when things get really scary, like [REDACTED] incident with SCP-███, they just [DATA EXPUNGED]
Full Examples
Anime
- Serial Experiments Lain is also fond of this, the whole show sweats with creepiness even in the most casual scenes.
- Less systematic, but still present to some extent in its spiritual successor Ghost Hound.
- Boogiepop Phantom: the Deliberately Monochrome and False Camera Effects make the entire show look like some insane nightmare.
- The Horror Manga series Fuan No Tane very rarely has anything that is overtly threatening anyone, but is nonetheless incredibly eerie. A prime example is in the 5 page segment starting here
 .
Film
- Picnic at Hanging Rock exemplifies this trope. The mystery at the crux of the film is never explained.
- Andrei Tarkovsky uses this a lot, particularly in Stalker, particularly in the insanely creepy "meat grinder" sequence.
- David Lynch brought this to a science in Eraserhead.
- Look up his short film Rabbits on You Tube, but please don't blame me for the possible mental trauma..
- Same with Darkend Room [sic]
- The first part of Lost Highway, from the same director, notably the sequence with the dark corridor that wasn't there before.
- The short film There Are Monsters gets pretty far on this trope.
- The original version of the "Stuck in the Middle with You" scene of Reservoir Dogs is much more graphic; you actually see Mr. Blonde cutting off the cop's ear, with fairly realistic prosthetics and fake blood. The version used in the movie does not include the gory visuals, but is much more horrific as you try to imagine exactly what is happening.
Literature
- H.P. Lovecraft — while he is primarily remembered for his descriptions of Alien Geometries and Cosmic Horror, his descriptions of casual landscapes or events were just as equally unsettling and creepy.
- We're talking about a man here who managed to make a description of an ordinary rental apartment in the middle of a hot summer day, with the narrator in the company of the landlady and two burly mechanics suspenseful and creepy.
- House Of Leaves was built on this. The house
(and the Minotaur) are terrifying because you can't possibly know when they'll strike. Tom nearly goes insane from this, which gets all better when he smokes a few joints. But the same sensation drives Halloway to suicide and traumatizes everyone who was in the house, including Karen who never actually went into the mysterious parts of the house and Johnny, who didn't even know whether it existed.
- It could be said they go to an even greater extreme on this, really. The climax of the book, where the house makes its most "aggressive" attempt on its inhabitants, isn't the end. Unlike the standard horror movie, where the family stands outside the smoldering ruins of the haunted house, minus one or two members, and the hero grimly says "It's over" (until the sequel), the family flees to another state and the house remains where it is. The story continues, and one of the characters returns simply because he can't stop picking at it in his mind. Even after that return, the book goes on in Truant's narrative, then terminates...several times. When it finally ends, the reader is left unsure of where they are and if the story is truly over, or even if it ended and the narrative kept going on. It's a truly labyrinthine and truly disconcerting effect.
- To clarify, in the sentence "when it finally ends, the reader is left unsure of where they are", "they" refers to the reader
- The last man on Earth sat in a room. There was a knock upon the door.
- This is known as the shortest horror story ever. However, another author was able to modify this story to make it even shorter and scarier:
The last man on Earth sat in a room. There was a lock upon the door.
- Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish that man would go away.
- The short horror story The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs. A couple wishes for their son to be resurrected after he dies in a horrible factory accident. They hear a knock at the door. The husband tries to prevent his wife from opening the door. The husband then makes one last wish, and the knocking stops. His wife opens the door, and nothing is there.
- In Patricia A Mc Killip's Riddle-Master of Hed, we hear of a king of Hed chased into his home by — something. But it didn't come through the last door. He waited, and waited, until he longed for it to break in. Then he opened the door — and found no sign of it.
- Of all the places for this trope to originate, it may have come from A Christmas Carol. After the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present give Scrooge long conversations about what's wrong with him, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come never says a thing. Adaptations with a narrator tend to emphasize this by removing or reducing the narrator's part for the length of time that the third spirit is on.
Live Action TV
- In the new Doctor Who series episode "Midnight", we're built up to believe something terrifying has happened to a woman's face, but when she finally turns around, it's completely normal, and on some level this is worse. Really, the entire episode is like that, and it's amazingly effective and unsettling. For instance, it's possibly the only time where neither the Doctor nor the audience never figures out precisely what happened.
- Played with more famously in "Blink", when every time you see the Weeping Angels, people are safe. It's between these moments that they're lethal, but the audience is most frightened when everything is, for the moment, clearly fine by the story's rules.
- This brilliantly plays on one of the old anecdote about hiding behind the sofa when a scary monster comes on the screen, because with these monsters, when you're hiding behind the sofa—when you can't see the screen, and therefore can't see the Angels—that's when they get you.
- Used to great effect in the Big Finish audio drama Scherzo, where the Eighth Doctor and Charley are trapped in a White Void Room and slowly lose all of their senses except hearing, including their sense of time. That the listener already only perceives the story through hearing punches it up to almost unbearably tense.
- Parodied in an episode of The Weird Al Show that aired shortly after The Blair Witch Project became a hit. Al announced that they would show a clip of the upcoming Blair Witch 2 (years before the film was actually made), which will be "the first film done entirely with the lens cap on." Cut to a solid black screen and a woman's voice screaming, "oh no, it's coming, it's so big and so horrible! AAAAAH!" Cut back to Al, who says "now isn't it scarier when they leave it to your imagination?"
- The red bag in Ideal, which apparently contains something terrifying enough to reduce Ax Crazy gangsters to tears. What is actually in it is never revealed.
- Similar to the Doctor Who example above - the classic Twilight Zone episode "The Eye of the Beholder." A doctor and a nurse discuss the patient of their experimental reconstructive surgery - a woman whose face is so deformed that other people have hated and reviled her all her life. And they're preparing to take off the bandages to see if the surgery has worked. The set-up to The Reveal is so effective that it strips the rest of the episode of any possible Narm-itude.
- This one's not so much scary as extremely tense, but in the final scene of the final episode of The Sopranos the family is in a diner, waiting for the daughter, Meadow, to show up. The scene is shot using slightly odd angles with slightly jumpy cuts, and the camera keeps focusing on people sitting nearby. The whole effect is rather unsettling, as though something big and terrible is about to happen, especially given that in the previous few episodes most of the show's characters have been shot dead by a rival 'family'. The tension builds as Meadow approaches the diner, then she opens the door... and the series ends.
Music
- Alien Sex Fiend's "Black Rabbit" could be the theme song for the full version of this trope. This throwaway song was the last track on the band's first album, and remains one of the most unsettling pieces of music ever recorded, even by ASF's bizarre standards. It doesn't go anywhere in terms of music, but that's what makes it spooky.
Video Games
- The first level of the original Alien TC for Doom. No enemies. None. Just fifteen minutes of slowly freaking out, searching every corner twice, thrice, four times, because for god's sakes, this is Doom! Where are they?
- The same goes for the first level of the game Aliens vs Predator 2. You make your way across a deserted planet and instilation, which are completely deserted and quiet, however, a number of strange things occur. You are constantly in anticipation of of an all-out attack, so you are completely alert. But it doesn't come until about half an hour into the game, by which time you've probably decided nothing is coming and are skipping through the empty halls, at which point the aliens appear and rip your face off.
- And also the marine's first level in the first AvP. The first time you motion sensor goes beep it's just a automatic elevator activating, but after several long minutes of increasing tension in deserted corridors, dark corners, and flickering lights you will empty the magazine in its general direction.
- AvP designers know their motion sensor, and know its use as actual sensor is virtually neglectable to it being a tension builder.
- In either version of Dead Rising after special forces have apparently taken out the zombies, those zombies all just lie on the ground. It is quite disturbing in the first play through.
- Rayman 2/Revolution/DS has the Cave of Bad Dreams, which is too over-the-top to scare anyone... except for the threat of a cyclopean demon attacking you if you take too long to complete the level.
- An after-case, if possible: if you arrive at the Romani Ranch on the third day in Majora's Mask, you'll notice that the entire field, inhabitants included, are severely quiet. Not that there's that many people living on the ranch, mind you, but the effects are still felt. The problem is that alien-ghost creatures invaded the ranch just last night, and abducted the livestock and the owner's little sister. And when you talk to the younger girl on the farm, you'll suspiciously notice what looks like a lobotomy. For experienced players who knew about this, it's just a tiny bit creepy. But for those new to the area/game, it's very, very unsettling.
- The Path has no enemies, no jump scares, nothing. It's just you, walking almost alone in the forest, listening to the calming songs and sounds of the forest, and yet you feel worked up, knowing that, since the game is a remake of the story of Little Red, there is a wolf out there, watching you...
- There is a good reason why someone put Riven (and the first Myst for that matter) in the High Octane Nightmare Fuel Page.
- Dead Space has some segments where nothing is going on, you're just walking through the ship. And it's terrifying.
- The Penumbra series makes really good use of this trope as well. The tech demo (that started it all) has only 2 encounters throughout the entire thing, yet throughout the game you're terrified in case you find something around the next corner. The trope is also present in the series proper (Overture, Black Plague and Requiem), owing to their focus on Psychological Horror - and when we say they offer this in spades, we really mean it. The whole damn series is a rich source of pure Paranoia Fuel in video game form...
- Deus Ex uses this with a little of the classic version in the underwater laboratory. Eerie music, no apparent enemies, ominous logs and corpses spread around, flat out informing you of every enemy you will face. The music and locations all build up towards something but that something never occurs.
- Resident Evil 2, safe rooms. Keep in mind that these are places explicitly named such that nothing will jump out at you, so you can save your game and stuff. Then the rooms themselves are creepy as hell and they play this. *shudder*
- Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines has had plenty of classic examples. However, a full-blown example can be found in the Skyline Apartment building: given the keening whine of the music and the subdued lighting, you'd expect that something threatening would be waiting for you. Instead, after poking around in the shadows of almost every single room in the building, you find a frightened TV host, a vaguely ominous message on an answering machine, a fresh corpse, and a dying prostitute. The place brightens up when Prince Lacroix gives you an apartment there, but considering that almost every single resident has died for one reason or another, the eeriness never quite dies away.
- Scratches also relies heavily on this for 90% of the game (the remaining 10% is High Octane Nightmare Fuel), noteworthy examples are the effect the first time you enter the basement of the mansion, the music makes you thing something is gonna jump at you from the shadows at any moment, also near the end, when you finish crafting the sacred totem and you are on your way to confront the cursed mask, creepy laughs and whispers haunt you all the time on your way to it.
- Haunting Ground, as a survival horror, makes full use of this. Creepy music is played as you walk round a castle that is yours In Name Only, where you know you are being hunted by an enemy you cannot kill, having no weapons or defense of any kind apart from that afforded by your large Belgian Shepherd (the dog). When your pursuer draws near (not that you can tell) the creepy music... stops. But then this trope is subverted - there is something scarier than no music: your dog growling at something he can smell and you can't see. Start running, and hope you pick the right direction.
- Actually, the music doesn't stop when you're being chased, it just changes. However, the chase music itself is based upon how close your pursuer is to you and it is admittedly rather faint and slow at first. Examples (both of ambient and chase music, as they're all creepy as hell): Debilitas ambient/Debilitas chase, Daniella ambient/Daniella chase, Riccardo ambient/Riccardo chase/.
- Clock Tower, the series that Haunting Ground is based on, does the opposite in the first. While Jennifer roams around the huge mansion, there is absolutely no music playing. The only sound is her walking, or opening and closing doors, or picking things up and putting them down, or the occasionally other sounds not caused by Jennifer, many of which are somewhat loud and always very sudden. If Scissorman appears, his music blares loudly and suddenly, usually accompanied by Jennifer screaming.
- Don't Cry, Jennifer, though this will often kick in immediately at around the 12 second mark or so, skipping the slow bit at the beginning. There's also this a slight variation of this called, appropriately enough, Death In The Elevator, which accompanies one of the endings (it plays while the credits role and is probably one of the scariest moments in a game full of scary moments). The second game in the series (Clock Tower, for the PS 1, not to be confused with Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within, which is actually the third game in the series) is the same way, with there being pretty much no music when you're just wandering around, and then either this or this kicking in once the chase starts.
- At one point in the first Umineko No Naku Koro Ni Visual Novel, the music abruptly switches from a fairly elaborate orchestrated piece to a much more stripped-down version of the same. Guess which one is scarier. Of course, it doesn't help that the bass line for the latter version sounds like footsteps creeping around...
- Fallout likes this as well. There are several locations, mostly abandoned military research installations or something like that where you're all alone. Which makes it really unsettling.
- Mother 3 attempts this at one point with the boss fight song, "Formidable Foes". This song has a tight, jittery, Scare Chord filled line, and the boss you fight to the same song is a giant sea serpent/snake beast that fights with tsunamis and giant fangs. The problem? Halfway through the song they apparently forget it's supposed to be creepy and go for a light, orchestral score for about two minutes... before reverting to creepy. It's so weird that it's funny as all get out and removes a lot of tension from the fight (a relief).
Western Animation
- There's a very creepy episode of Samurai Jack, called "Jack And The Zombies". No prizes for guessing his opponents in this one. However, it begins with him walking into a graveyard, and it is dead silent. Except for children's laughter. And a man's evil cackling. And scraping, rattling noises. It is very, very effective.
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