Spooky Photographs

The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, the Trope Codifier for the phantom caught on film.

Hey, my holiday snaps^note or vacation pictures for non-British people are back! Let's see… old castles, museums, and statues, old castles, museums, and more statues, and then old museums about statues of castles…

Hold on, what's the funny blur on that photo? A double exposure? A moth? A smudge? Or could it be something more? Could it be a ghost lurking just outside normal human perception, or an ominous warning of disaster to come? Or just something essentially inexplicable, random and Fortean?

Spooky photographs come in three main types:

1. Spectral Snaps: Overlapping with See-Thru Specs, Spectral Snaps reveal objects normally invisible to humans—ghosts and UFOs are common ones. Detail ranges from blurry blurred blur to crystal clear figure.
2. Foreboding Photos: The picture somehow reveals the future. Whether it blurs out the faces of those not long for this world, or depicts a brand new car as a smash-out wreck, the photographs contain depictions of future events—and they are never good.
3. Negative Negatives: One step beyond Foreboding, these photos actively curse the victim, causing unfortunate, often ironic, events to befall the subject. Sometimes overlaps with Brown Note.

If it falls into either of the first two, it will probably be a Convenient Photograph.

May come from a Magical Camera. Also see Spooky Painting.

Examples:

Spectral Snaps:

Anime & Manga

• In Azumanga Daioh, the girls are weirded out when they spot what appears to be a ghost in one of their summer vacation photos. They're further weirded out when Osaka remarks that it looks kinda like someone she used to know back in Osaka.
• Referenced in Dr. STONE: After Senku invents the daguerreotype, Minami sets about photographing as much as she can to preserve a record of humanity's progress. However, when she tries to get action shots of the people relaxing (swimming in Summer and snowboarding in Winter), Action Girl Kohaku is moving so quickly that she leaves a high-speed blur on the camera, causing Gen to snark that people who look back on the photos are going to mistake her for a ghost.
• Great Teacher Onizuka: When Onizuka temporarily takes a job picking up the remains of people who jumped in front of trains, Kikuchi takes a photo of him that shows him surrounded by ghosts.
• Kirby: Right Back at Ya!: Preceeding several paranormal events, Escargoon takes an instant photo of Dedede, only to discover to his horror that there's a ghost in the background. Subverted later when it turns out that Escargoon was behind the paranormal goings-on as part of a revenge prank against Dedede, and superimposed the ghost in the camera's film ahead of time.
• Played with in Lucky Star: when Soujirou reminisces with his daughter Konata about his dead wife Kanata, Kanata's ghost drops by to see how her family is doing. After a heartwarming (and heartwarmingly funny) sequence, Soujirou insists on testing his new digital camera by taking a picture with his daughter, and Kanata joins in. The resultant photograph has a "spooky shadow", and Soujirou and Konata panic over whether to delete the photograph, or print it out and burn it (or in the english dub, burning the entire camera), much to poor Kanata's distress.
• In Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok, Loki has a Shikigami (Paper-spirit) familiar named Ecchan (who also happens to be a Ridiculously Cute Critter) which is Invisible to Normals. Sadly, Mayura the Occult Freak is considered 'normal' in this sense - but in at least one episode, it's shown that a 'group photo' of Loki and Co. shows Ecchan as well (crystal-clear, even) causing it to be one of Mayura's most treasured possessions.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi played with this one. Sayo shows up in both a photograph and Nodoka's mind reading book, unintentionally looking really scary, even though she just wants to talk to someone. So the class exorcists show up and try to get rid of her. Sayo is saved when Asakura accidentally takes a picture of her in which she isn't scary-looking.
• In Re-Kan!, the use of a (cell phone) camera is the only reliable way for Hibiki's friends, who lack her sixth sense, to see the many ghosts she interacts with.
• In one chapter of Sgt. Frog, Fuyuki finds himself appraising some "ghost photographs" taken by the Keronians. Keroro's is the result of an optical illusion, Tamama's is the result of a failed Tamama Impact, and Giroro's is the result of a childhood prank. Then the Cute Ghost Girl who lives in Keroro's room shows a photograph she took of herself with a mysterious figure standing behind her, and Fuyuki manages to explain the "mystery figure" as another optical illusion, completely ignorning the fact he has a photograph of a REAL ghost on his hands.
• Skyhigh Karma manages to combine this trope with Radiograph of Doom in the first chapter. When Mai hits her head during a minor car accident, she's taken to the hospital for x-rays. The x-rays reveal a spectral hand gripping her skull — the first concrete evidence of the ghost that's haunting her.
• There's a Ghost Behind That Gal: In one chapter, Yuina and Hikari have a Photo-Booth Montage with Reiko at a purikura booth ("print club", a kind of booth that lets users use simple editing software on their pictures before printing them). Unfortunately, not only does Reiko not show up in the photos, but all the pictures come out spooky and distorted.
• One of the Tomie stories has a member of the photography club take photos of Tomie, but all of them come out showing her as a hideously deformed monster. Thereafter, Tomie tries to avoid having her picture taken, but the same thing happens whenever someone manages to get a snapshot.
  • In The Seashore, also by Junji Ito, holiday snapshots show the ghosts of children who had drowned in the sea.
• In Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase, this is the result of every photo Kouhei takes.

Comedy

• Canada's Just For Laughs group: unsuspecting customers in a minimart are 'unwittingly' given a look at one of the CCTVs, which through a simple split-screen gimmick, makes it look like there's a Grim Reaper standing in the shot - or is it?

Fan Works

• Parodied in the Were Phoenix skit of the fourth Touhou Project M-1 Grand Prix fanvid, where Keine teaches Mokou how to act in a funeral parlor. Mokou suddenly decides to take a picture of the recently deceased, but when she looks at the photo she took, she sees a picture of the original Cute Ghost Girl of the Touhou series, Mima!

Film — Live-Action

• In Beetlejuice, Lydia takes photos of Adam and Barbara wearing bedsheets, thinking they're her parents - she identifies them as ghosts when they're not visible under the sheets.
• Discussed in Crimson Peak, when Charlie Hunnam's character describes his fascination with "ghost photography" and shows a few pictures like this. They don't directly tie into the plot, though.
• In Les Diaboliques, the school headmaster's face appears in a window in a class photo taken after his wife and mistress have supposedly drowned him in a bathtub. Of course, this is all just part of a plot by the headmaster and mistress to literally scare the wife to death.
• This is where the eerie premonitions come from in Final Destination 3.
• There's a darkroom scene in Ghostbusters II where Ray and Egon develop photos of the haunted painting of Vigo that were taken with special, ghost-sensitive film. The photos they see are double-exposed with the image of the river of evil slime flowing under the city. As the two Ghostbusters examine this, the developed photos catch fire and the door locks, and they're only saved by Winston breaking the door down.
• Grave Encounters showcases these from the realistic (orbs) to full human shapes screaming outside the window.
• Insidious and its sequel have a lot of these as a plot point, mostly of young Josh being threatened by the Old Woman. The first film also has Tucker being startled by a pair of ghosts as he inspects the home with See-Thru Specs.
• The Others (2001), when Grace finds the death portraits of the servants.
• The Pact: A ghostly hand can only be seen in photos (printed copies, or through the viewfinder of a digital camera). Subverted when the viewfinder shows a gaunt male figure walking through the living room. We're led to believe this means the figure is a ghost. It's actually a trick of perspective: we would have been able to see the figure even without the camera, because he was a living human.
• In the film Shutter, a professional photographer's photos show him and his friends being stalked by otherwise invisible ghosts.
• In The Sixth Sense, every picture of Cole has an orb of light in it.
• MST3K-featured film Tormented (1960) does this. Except only one guy can see the ghost in the photo, and he's the only guy who can see the ghost outside of the photo, so it's quite pointless.
• The Whisperer in Darkness. The protagonist is unimpressed when a man turns up with a photograph of a creature his father supposedly shot, yet there's nothing to be seen because they're allegedly made up of 'a different kind of matter'. Until one of the scientists uses a parallax viewer, revealing the creepy sight of a Starfish Alien Mi-Go.

Literature

• In IT, several photographs physically move when they're looked at, and one of them actually cuts a character's hand. They also bleed.
• Not really photographs per-se, but Shallan's renderings of the symbol-head things (Later revealed to be Cryptics, the spren of the Lightweavers) in The Stormlight Archive certainly qualifies.
• Ransom Riggs created the story of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children around eerie old photographs from ten different collections, including his own, deciding to create his own context for them as their original contexts were long forgotten. The photographs are included as actual items within the story, and provide a very rare case of an author showing exactly how certain characters look. The film adaptation recreates many of the photos and uses the general content as something of an aesthetic inspiration for its original content, like the immortality machine's resemblance to many real historical photos of creepy war technology.
• Stitches:
  • The strangely quiet woman who dances with several of the men in "Folk Dance" doesn't show up in any of the photographs taken by the main character, with the men appearing to be dancing with nobody.
  • At the end of "The Kimono", the ghost of the main character's sister appears in the photograph of her and her daughter taken at the daughter's Shichi-Go-San ceremony, wearing the same kimono as her daughter.
• In The Truth, Otto Chriek's "dark light" iconograph combines Spectral Snaps with a bit of Foreboding Photos. A picture of William de Worde shows him with a spectral version of his father looking over his shoulder, while a photo of career killer Mr. Pin shows him with a large cloud of sinister, shadowy figures behind him. The latter picture also predicts a fire that breaks out near the end of the book.
• Tanith Lee's story "Yellow and Red": the protagonist spills alcohol on photographs of his recently-deceased tomb-raiding uncle and his family (all of whom were plagued by ill-health) to reveal a malignant shape - yellow, with red dots for eyes - that seems to have stalked them. He becomes phobic about having his own photo taken, but someone does, and he cannot resist pouring whisky onto it...

Live-Action TV

• One episode of Asias Got Talent has a creepy magician girl taking a Polaroid of one of the judges which after development shows herself standing behind the judge.
• After being brought Back from the Dead, Buffy looks at a photo montage of the Scoobies on her bedroom wall and sees their faces as skulls. These and other hallucinations indicate that something else came back with her...
• Ghosts (UK): Fanny can be seen on camera, leading to ghost hunters calling her "The Grey Lady."
• Kamen Rider Decade has a variation on this: Protagonist Tsukasa's photographs are always blurry and overexposed which he explains by saying he's not from that world. When he takes pictures of people from the other Kamen Rider universes, they have ghost images that show the true nature of things; for example, a picture of a girl and her grandmother shows the girl's brother^note Who isn't around because he's stuck in Super-Speed watching over her.
• Mystery Hunters: Christina explores a cave allegedly full of ghosts where photographers have taken photos that seem to show ghosts when they are otherwise invisible. Downplayed though as Doubting Dave points out the equipment the photographers had with them may have been what was responsible for the ghost like imagery.
• In one episode of Supernatural, the ghosts in a film studio can only be seen through a camera phone.
• In an episode of Surviving Death a researcher claims most ghost photographs are not really ghosts but some are unexplained. The episode also interviews a man who claims to have made contact with a spirit through his polaroid camera.
• The X-Files: In "The Calusari", a photograph taken just moments before the death of a two-year-old boy, thought to be an accident, yields evidence of paranormal intervention. It was an evil spirit of the boy's dead brother who led him on the spot.

Print Media

• This is an area that's been of interest ever since the first primitive cameras emerged in the 1840's. Fortean Times, which discusses, catalogues and as often as not debunks this sort of thing, keeps a keen interest and its archives have got loads of examples.

Tabletop Games

• The World of Darkness: if someone in your photograph appears to just inexplicably be a blur, it's advised you steer clear of that person - because they're a vampire.

Theme Parks

• The 2008 Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Florida featured their own take on Bloody Mary, in this case a phobia therapist who attempted to cure her patients of their fears by exposing them to the extremes of their fears (usually accidentally driving them insane). The website featured a long backstory and buildup to the event, showing her various cases. Her first patient to die was a photographer who saw frightening images in his photographs; she locked him in a glass coffin with a limited oxygen supply and flashbulbs going off all around him, giving him the choice of leaving the coffin to face his fear or suffocating. He chose the latter. As each case was tied into a haunted maze, the photographer's case became Dead Exposure, which was supposed to be traveling through a zombie apocalypse through photographs. The house was completely black and key props, scenery, and costumes were painted with blacklight-sensitive paint and blacklight strobes flashed simultaneously with the sound effect of a camera snapping, giving the impression of being caught in a series of photographic negatives.

Video Games

• The gameplay for Fatal Frame is all about using a camera to detect and banish ghosts.
• A friendly example occurs in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. After Link helps a ghost come to peace and return to its gravestone, he can visit the gravestone later and have his picture taken next to it. The same ghost will photobomb the photo by appearing next to him happy.
• In the ghost-hunting video game The Lost Crown, finding haunted locations and taking photographs can often reveal clues that can't be seen with ordinary vision.
• In Metal Gear Solid, ghosts will appear in your photographs if you take pictures in certain areas. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has a hidden ghost image as well.
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has several ghost cutscenes.
• Pokémon Snap actually has this as a game mechanic. In at least one level, taking photos of a strange blur will have them develop as a Ghost Pokemon. And then in a later level there's a strange set of shiny things...It's one of the Pokemon Signs — a constellation of Mewtwo!
• Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People gives you a camera feature in all episodes that you can use to take screenshots of the game. In the final episode, "8-Bit Is Enough", after completing the "Spirits of '76" event, you'll hear a spooky noise in certain areas. Pull out the camera and take a picture, and a ghost from "Spirits of '76" will be in the shot, along with a box that wasn't visible before the picture was taken. Afterward, the ghost still won't be visible, but the box it appeared alongside will actually be there to provide you with a bonus collectible.
• Twilight Syndrome's fourth episode, "The Last Train", gives the option to take a picture of the platform at a haunted train station following the appearance of a mysterious train in the middle of the night. Seeing the developed picture afterwards will reveal a group of disembodied spirits boarding the train.
• In an Easter Egg in Yakuza 6, taking pictures in certain areas around Kamurocho will get you a ghostly photobomb from deceased characters from past games, such as Akira Nishikiyama, Shintaro Kazama, Sohei Dojima, Yoshitaka Mine, or Yoshinobu Tokugawa.

Visual Novels

• In The Letter, one of the photos that Zach takes of Hannah ends up eerily distorted due to the ghost's presence. Trying to make another copy of it doesn't help.
• At the end of the fourth case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Lotta does a group photo of everybody. She later says that she caught a ghost in the photograph, which makes her want to go back to paranormal photography. When we later see the photo, it shows Mia Fey standing beside the rest of the group.

Webcomics

• In Achewood, the Mexican magical realism camera takes pictures of people's souls rather than their bodies, showing how they feel.
• Parodied in this Buttersafe strip.

Web Original

• Homestar Runner: Played for laughs in the Halloween Episode "Haunted Photo Booth", where the photo booth at Marzipan's party causes a mysterious face to randomly appear in people's pictures. Much to the disappointment of Strong Bad, who was hoping to get "demonic barf powers", the ghost refuses to show up in any of the pictures he takes. Then it turns out the "face" was caused by the glint off The Cheat's gold tooth, which had come out earlier in the night thanks to him eating too many "loose tooth remover" taffies.
• Apparently the New York Post has one of those.
• Pretending to Be People features a camera which, at specific times, can take photos of a realm outside of our own.
• The Slender Man Mythos began as an unsettling background detail in a photo, and this trope remains a big part of the mythos. There's some perfectly normal picture... and then somewhere in the background, this tall, thin, black figure is watching. The best ones are really easy to miss unless you're paying close attention.
• Parodied in the Something Awful thread from which Slender Man originates ("make normal images paranormal") with a ghostly, blurred figure who shows up in the background of a painting.

Real Life

• Early photographers sometimes got a bit creeped out by their own photos, despite understanding the technology behind them. Anecdotes recount how one early image of a Victorian-era city street disturbed its maker (who'd been used to painting urban scenes), because it'd perfectly captured a small street sign which the artist himself hadn't even noticed was present.

Foreboding Photos:

Anime & Manga

• Inverted in one story in ×××HOLiC when a desperately distressed woman comes to see Yuuko with a photo that doesn't seem spooky at all — another pretty young woman standing on the edge of a cliff with her back to the camera. Yuuko agrees to deal with the photo and puts it in a silver frame to try and seal its power, but the frame starts to melt and the woman (very, very slowly) begins to turn around to face the camera. After the frame completely melts away, the woman finishes turning and the first woman who brought the photo to Yuuko's store steps into the picture, holding the camera which took the photo, and shoves her off the cliff to her death. The photo was a living record of her crime which she couldn't hide.

Film — Live-Action

• A non-horror example in Back to the Future, where Marty travels back in time to 1955 with a photo of himself and his siblings. As his actions unintentionally prevent his parents from getting together - and thus, his conception - he notices that he and his siblings seem to be gradually vanishing from the photo. Once everything is set right at the end and his parents get together after all, the photograph is restored.
• In Final Destination 3, photos taken on the night of the roller-coaster crash that depict the people on Death's hit-list contain clues to what sort of improbable demise they'll suffer when their belated turn comes up.
• In Ju On: The Grudge, Izumi and her friends appear in photographs which have their eyes covered by mysterious black smears.
• In The Omen (1976), every single photo Jennings takes has some clue on how the pictured person is going to die... by Satan's influence. These are the omens of the title.
• A bizarre, never-quite explained version appears at the end of The Shining. After Jack Torrance freezes to death in the hedge maze while his wife and son escape the Overlook Hotel, the camera pans along a series of photographs hanging on a wall in the building. The central picture, dated July 4, 1921, features a happy crowd of individuals at a party... with Jack standing front and center, smiling for the camera. Stanley Kubrick, known for messing with his audience, has offered no official explanation for this, and even when he does talk about it in interviews, his fans are cautious about believing him. The most commonly accepted idea (and one that Kubrick himself suggested) is that the Overlook "infects" anyone who fills a particular role in the hotel with an evil spirit; the photograph is simply a manifestation of that spirit, which has infected every caretaker the hotel has ever had.

Literature

• In The Girl from the Well, Kagura sends Tark a photo before heading to Aitou village in The Suffering. When Tark gets the photo, Kagura's face is distorted and her companions are headless.
• The Goosebumps books Say Cheese and Die! and Say Cheese and Die — Again! both have an evil Polaroid camera whose photographs foretell imminent disaster for those in its lens.
• Anyone who has seen the video in The Ring and will die in seven days will have their faces blurred when their picture is taken.

Live-Action TV

• Played for laughs in an episode of Community. After wandering into a theater, Chang is told by a janitor that the theater had burned down years ago. Chang returns to the theater and confronts the audience, who tell him that the janitor died years ago. Chang's sanity begins to erode and he wonders if he himself is really alive or not. The end of the episode features a slow, Shining-esque pan into a black and white photograph of people in 19th century clothing, including Chang... and then with a Scare Chord, we see "Old Timey Photo Club, 2014."
• Kamen Rider Double has something between Spectral Snaps and Foreboding Photos - a photo of the Sonozaki family reveals all of them in their Dopant forms, including two that haven't debuted at the time.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "A Most Unusual Camera", three small-time hoods unwittingly steal an instant camera which takes pictures of a given scene, five minutes into the future.
• The X-Files:
  • In "Unruhe", Gerry Schnauz takes photographs of the future victims. The pictures capture their and his mind; there are pictures of them being dragged away by screaming demons. The photos are a proof that the victims suffer and need his help: a lobotomy. As it's the maniac's subconscious that was in fact distorting the photographs, some little clues about his identity were left in every single one of them.
  • "Tithonus" features a photographer who can detect people who are about to die and uses it in an attempt to photograph Death.

Video Games

• In Undertale, a special ending that replaces the Golden Ending if you've finished a genocide run beforehand contains a photo depicting the friendly NPC cast members with red X's over their faces, and the main character replaced with the Fallen Child. Given context, it's strongly suggested that the Fallen Child is either planning to steal Frisk's body and kill them all, or already has.

Visual Novels

• At the start of Spirit Hunter: NG, Ami and Akira come across a photo booth in the underpass that they don't remember being there before. Ami begs him to take pictures with her, and he obliges. All of the photos turn out great, except for one where Ami's face is a horrific mish-mash of eyes. They nervously put it down to a malfunction, when in reality it's a precursor to their first spiritual encounter.

Web Original

• The Creepypasta "Minor Corrections" by Slimebeast is about a mail-in photo development lab that will attempt to "fix" any photo they think seems "incorrect", meaning anyone in the photograph who had died between the time the photo was taken and the time the lab received the film will be shown in their deceased state, with all the Body Horror that entails. They can also predict imminent future deaths, unfortunately the narrator was too late to stop his father from hanging himself.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-978's photographs depict the subject's suppressed desires.

Negative Negatives:

Films — Live-Action

• In Amityville 3-D, one of the main characters takes some pictures seemingly predicting the death of the evil house's real estate agent. Later, after finding a demonic face in one of the photos, she rushes to tell her friend about it, only to crash her car. Right after the crash the pictures randomly burst into flames, burning the girl down to a skeleton before causing her car to blow up.
• The Devil's Messenger: In "The Photograph", Donald takes a photograph of the beautiful young woman he later rapes and murders. When he develops the photograph, he sees he her standing on the path in front of the house. However, anyone else who looks at it sees only the old farmhouse. Each time Donald studies the photo, the woman has moved further along the path towards, until her face fills the entire photo. He rips up the print, and the woman's body appears in his studio; lying in the same position that she was when he killed her. He examines the body, and it reaches out and strangles him. His agent finds Donald's body lying alone in the studio. When he examines the ripped up print, it contains nothing but an old farmhouse.
• Ghostbusters II had the negatives of Vigo's Spooky Painting catch on fire by themselves in an attempt to burn down the Firehouse.

Literature

• The Four Past Midnight novella "The Sun Dog" features a very... special Polaroid camera (the 1980s Sun model). Pictures taken with it don't show what it's pointed at, but have a large black dog in the background that gradually comes into focus, getting closer and closer, and looking more and more menacing. Despite this, a character keeps taking pictures with the camera (it's established that doing so is not entirely voluntary). Eventually, it escapes from the photograph itself, but is immediately re-captured when the protagonist takes its photo.

Live-Action TV

• In the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode "The Tale of the Curious Camera", a gremlin haunts a camera and destroys everything it shoots, depicting just how in the photographs. The Hero tries to get rid of the camera, only to discover it's also a Clingy MacGuffin. The Hero manages to destroy the camera, but the gremlin just transfers itself to a videocamera, which destroys everything it points at. When that gets destroyed, the ending shows that the gremlin jumped into a computer.

Radio

• One episode of the Canadian horror anthology radio drama Nightfall featured a cursed camera. In this case, anyone who had their picture taken would die under mysterious circumstances within twenty-four hours. And when the photos were developed...the victims looked like they were already dead.

Video Games

• Twilight Syndrome's second episode, "Ghost Photo Park", revolves around a Paranormal Investigation that was initiated by seeing a photograph that turns out to be this: Any photos of people taken in front of a Torii gate within the titular park will show a strange glitch once developed that shows the people in question's heads sectioned off from their bodies by a horizontal offset; this represents the curse originated by the spirits that haunt the park, who were victims of beheading executions carried out on the site in centuries past, and whose severed skulls now litter the bed of the park's lake. Anyone that has a picture taken in this fashion essentially has a target painted on his or her back, particularly if that person continues to hang around the park afterwards, as exemplified by Yukari, who has such a picture of herself taken by Mika, and is subsequently thrown into a jumble of disconcerting and threatening situations, including being in the path of a truck which veers off a nearby road and falls into the park (which is all but stated to be a result of the vengeful spirits' influence); in the chapter's worst ending, Yukari fails to dodge the truck and ends up in hospital, where her health falls into a steady decline.

Web Original

• One creepypasta involves a second-hand copy of Super Mario 64 that does this. A photo of the player's family appears in the game, and decays more and more every time he loses a life. Seeing as this is also a Darker and Edgier Nintendo Hard version of the game...
• Yet another creepypasta features a particularly creepy photo of a dog. There is also a mysterious hand and the fact the room is lit by the camera flash only, but mostly it's the dog. Which happens to have human teeth and stalk people in their dreams demanding they spread the image.

Real Life

• People from societies where knowledge of photography was not widespread often believed that photographs of themselves could be used by enemies to curse them.
• Even people from technologically developed cultures who believe in curses often think that a photograph can be used in a manner similar to a Voodoo Doll.
• Though not exactly featuring ghosts, most photographs by Diane Arbus are pretty scary.

Multiple:

Films — Live-Action

• In The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow, Johnny Hollow's photo of four figures and a baby at a campsite, all involved in a Mystery Cult, becomes progressively spookier, and manifests several different types of creepiness, first showing a body that should be invisible to the viewer, then combining this with subtly changing expressions and limb position so that time seems to be passing in the photo, until explicitly paranormal elements are introduced, culminating with a demonic presence seemingly moving directly towards the viewer, possibly to exit the photo and kill its observer now that they've realized the fates of certain parties in the photo.

Other:

Western Animation

• There's a special variant of this in Rocko's Modern Life, in that it's not the pictures themselves which are frightening but the circumstances behind them. In the Halloween Episode "Sugar Frosted Frights", Rocko, Heffer, and Filburt end up being chased after by the Hopping Hessian (a one-legged parody of the Headless Horseman). The following year, Filburt's shocked when he goes to Rocko's house and finds Rocko, Heffer, and the Hessian laughing at photos of themselves taken during last Halloween. Just as everyone's about to leave, Filburt stops them all asking an important question that leaves everyone, including the Hessian, completely horrified.
  Filburt: Who took those pictures?!

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