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You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall." — Stephen King, Danse Macabre
A villain-specific type of He Who Must Not Be Seen, Ultimate Evil is evil so horrifying it cannot be shown on screen. Used when nothing the art department could come up with could possibly be horrifying enough. Or because you have no budget for effects, and need an easy out (see Raimi Vision).
In some cases the Ultimate Evil is eventually shown on screen, perhaps because the heroes are finally at the end of the Sorting Algorithm Of Evil and need something tangible to oppose. These cases usually end in disappointment, and prove the original decision not to show anything correct. If said disappointment is intentional on the authors' part, then the villain is just The Man Behind The Curtain.
Compare Satan. And, for that matter, God, who often gets portrayed this way for entirely different reasons ( we hope). May also show up in a Cosmic Horror Story.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- The Boss, or "Ano Kata" in Detective Conan; it's never been revealed who it is. Maybe it's one of the original characters...
- Mahou Sensei Negima eventually gave a glimpse of the final Big Bad, titled "Life Maker" or "Mage of the Beginning". Naturally, his face was never seen behind his Black Cloak.
- Mao-chan parodied the trope with an alien that was too cute to be shown, as it caused all who gazed at it to swoon with heart shapes in place of their eyes. While the program never reveals the alien to the audience as per the trope, the shadow of the creature suggests an amoeba-like form with eye-stalks and possibly small tentacles as well.
- Berserk The true Big Bad of the manga appears only in a Missing Episode that was never issued out of concern of revealing too much. We only catch a brief, unclear glimpse of the Idea of Evil, the entity responsible for Midland's World Half Empty that only the Godhands have met.
Gamebooks
Films
- A magnificent example of Ultimate Evil is The Last Wave, which is all about the end of the world and about doom. There isn't a single effects shot.
- Ultimate Evil is the entire premise of The Blair Witch Project.
- This is because the makers couldn't afford a really scary monster effect or suit. It ended up working better than if they had.
- Many of the tenets of this trope evolved from the 1942 horror classic Cat People. In that case, the film's budget was very low and the only special effects the production could afford was tatty off-the-rack "man in a cat suit" suits; the director thought it would be much scarier to not show the creatures at all but merely use cinematographic tricks and the actors' performances to suggest them. The effect worked, and has been endlessly copied ever since.
- The origin of this particular usage was dramatized in the fictional film The Bad and the Beautiful, in which Kirk Douglas (playing a composite character based partly on Cat People producer Val Lewton) and Barry Sullivan spend a scene or two working on a B-movie called Cat Men.
- Similarly, Jaws also used this trope as a loophole to film a movie about a shark attack virtually without a shark, due to the ceaseless problems with their mechanical substitute. Given how bad the props are in the sequels, the wisdom of this move is all the more apparent.
- Robot Chicken, in a parody of the reediting of the original Star Wars trilogy, had a sketch where Steven Spielberg announces his decision to redo the special effects in Jaws. The results are not pretty, to say the least.
- "You missed me, you dried-up douchebag!"
- Alien pulled the same trick; the director realized that while Giger's design was awesome and the creature did look scary in glimpses in the dark, it ran the risk of looking fake if it was too visible. When the special effects caught up with the design, we got Aliens.
- But not really. The design of the suits in Aliens were actually simplified, not just to cut costs (because they needed a lot more suits), but to allow the actors a greater range of motion. In a well lit room the original would look far better, but because Cammeron kept them either in the shadows or moving too fast to clearly see, he gets away with it beautifully.
- Bubba Ho-Tep of the eponymous Bubba Ho-Tep was shown in shadows for the majority of the film; it was handwaved that he's so powerful that he sucks the energy out of light bulbs, so whenever he's walking down a hallway the lights in front of him will suddenly flicker out, etc.
- Throughout most of the original Star Wars trilogy, Darth Vader's mask symbolized not only his evil, but the notion that his face must be so horrifying concealing it could not make it worse. The fannish disappointment was rife when the mask was finally removed, and revealed what one fan called "Uncle Fester with blue sparkles".
- Possibly an intentional subversion. Or one would like to think so, anyway.
- More than possible. The notion that Vader underneath the frightening armor was intentionally made to be a broken and pathetic individual has been noted in numerous interviews. In Lucas's own words, Vader is less a monster and more "a sad man who made a deal with the Devil...and lost".
- Ultimate Evil was the villain in Time Bandits, as played by David Warner.
- Galactus in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is only shown as a massive cloud of smoke. This is likely because his common depiction in the comics is, frankly, rather silly looking.
- And a cloud of smoke wasn't silly looking? Besides, it's quite possible to do classic Galactus well
 ◊.
- This Troper has always interpreted Galactus as having no true form. He is, for all intents and purposes, a god (being Older Than The Universe). His true form is incomprehensible to lesser beings. The "silly-looking" humanoid in the purple & blue armor is done for our benefit. For The Movie, the massive storm cloud is his most basic form. The director (Tim Story) realized that having the comic book Galactus appear on-screen for only two minutes would be anti-climactic, to say the least. However, being a fan of the comic books, he included references that only people who have actually read the comics would understand: when The Cloud passes by Saturn, it casts a shadow in the shape of his helmet; when The Surfer confronts him in the eye of the storm, the flames form an outline of his head.
- SKYNET, the Big Bad from the Terminator franchise, has never been depicted on-screen (except for in various non-canonical video games and the Universal Studios Terminator ride). Justified in T3 when it turns out that SKYNET is, in fact, the Internet. SKYNET actually appears as a character in Terminator Salvation, where it's played by Helena Bonham Carter.
- In Children of the Corn, He Who Walks Behind The Rows is never openly shown on screen. Presumably, the kids' murderous fanaticism was sufficiently horrifying that seeing the god/demon/spirit/whatever which they followed wasn't deemed necessary.
- In Disney's Bambi, the Ultimate Evil known as "Man" is never shown on screen.
Literature
- The stories of HP Lovecraft used Ultimate Evil quite a bit; sadly, movies and TV shows based on said stories don't use it nearly enough.
- The Crimson King, Big Bad of Stephen King's meta-continuity among his novels, possessing various incarnations across dimensions, such as The Man Behind The Big Bad of The Stand, is constantly said to be the horrific source of all evil. However, behind-the-scenes Villain Decay sets in, and by the time he's revealed, he's a gibbering old man in a red cloak, who attacks the hero with weaponized Harry Potter toys while continually screeching "Eeeee!" and is then erased by Patrick. Given the absolute terror he inspires in his subordinates (some of it due to firsthand experience), there has been elaborate Fanon created to explain this inconsistency.
- The degeneration of the main villain fits in with the overall theme of The Dark Tower, where eveything is breaking down. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...
- Just look at the Gunslinger Born Prequel comics—the Crimson Kind is this scary spider-demon-thing that is eating a person.
- Chronicles of Prydain Big Bad Arawn was never seen (or even described) in his true form.
- Wrong. Well, mostly wrong. After he took the form of a snake and had his head cut off he returned to his true form: a man in a black cloak. However, his head fell face down and so his face was never seen.
- The Lord Of The Rings, where the titular villain Sauron is mentioned often but never actually appears. He is, however, given some description in supplemental material. In the film adaptation, Sauron was given a full costume for the prologue, and was even intended to appear in the climax and duel Aragorn, before filmmakers realized how goofy that would be and digitally replaced him with a big troll.
- The Silmarillion makes it clear that he was unable to take a physical form, at least without The Ring's power.
- It's debatable. He lost his ability to assume a 'fair form' after dying in the sinking of Numenor (Atlantis). He lost his physical shape again at the end of the Second Age, though IIRC, the Ring was cut from his hand after he was dead. He refomed a physical body during the Third Age, first becoming known as the Necromancer of Dol Guldur, then openly declaring himself when he returned to Mordor. He lost his ability to assume a physical shape at all only after the Ring was destroyed. See Gollum's statement to Frodo: "There are only four fingers on the Black Hand, but they are enough."
- That line could be interpreted either literally or metaphorically.
- The ring was cut from his hand at the culmination of the siege of Barad-Dur, while he was most certainly still corporeal. The movie portrayal of the severance with the broken Narsil is exactly as it is written.
- In the film he was never seen during the Third Age, although the giant fiery eyeball was mistakenly identified as his physical form by some viewers, including the 'Sauron blogger' who stated "I am not an evil lighthouse."
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The Minotaur in House Of Leaves. In reality, the Minotaur isn't so much a character as it is a concept invented by characters journeying through the house to explain the uneasy feeling that they're being watched, followed, and hunted down by some horrific creature. Tom Navidson even calls it "Mr. Monster" at one point. It is only called the Minotaur by Zampanò, who later struck through every passage containing that title.
- The strike-throughs are actually provided by Truant, who reconstructed the passages after Zampanò attempted to destroy them. On at several occasions, he succeeds, most notably on pages 372-373, the former of which contains the phrase [2 pages missing] and the latter of which is a series of XXXXXXXX interrupted only by one word and one partial word, though the footnotes survived.
- A series of short stories by Robert W. Chambers leave us (and a young fan named HP Lovecraft) wondering, "Just what the hell is the The King in Yellow?
- Just after the stoic Doc Savage escapes through the entrance of a strange underground cavern he looks back to see somethingor SOMEONE reaching out to him and screams for the first time in his life.
- In Beyond the Deepwoods, the first book of The Edge Chronicles, the Gloamglozer is handled this way... but according to its descriptions, seems to be a fairly underwhelming bogeyman not much worse than some of the threats you actually do see. In an inversion of how this usually works, when it actually shows up toward the end of the book, it turns out to be something far, far worse; A grotesque and malevolent trickster with more than a little in common with Satan.
- Ultimate Evil is the subject of Arthur Machen's short story ''The White People'', with elements of The Fair Folk . As written by Lovecraft:
“In Machen, the subtlest story—The White People—is undoubtedly the greatest, even though it hasn’t the tangible, visible terrors of The Great God Pan or The White Powder.” (to Robert E. Howard, 4 October 1930)
- Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth universe features a classic Eldritch Abomination as its Ultimate Evil — a galaxy-sized region of space in which no matter or radiation exists. Moreover, it is sentient and mobile, traveling across the universe in search of new galaxies to devour. It has been discovered by several species at various points in galactic history, even the most advanced of which could barely do more than find a way to flee. Naturally, Flinx, the protagonist of the series, is the Chosen One who is said to be the key to its destruction.
- Unless you count the stuff written after his death (which you shouldn't), the Honored Matres in the later books of Frank Herbert's Dune series are running back from the Scattering on account of some terrible, nameless evil.
Live Action TV
- The First Evil in Buffy The Vampire Slayer was a type of Ultimate Evil, as it was shown briefly onscreen three times, but for the rest of the time, we never got to see it directly.
- And was very disappointing when it was finally seen, thus proving the point of this trope.
- It was never seen. It sent scary visions to Buffy a few times, but It itself was never seen because there is nothing to see.
- The Wolf, Ram, and the Hart, aka the Senior Partners of Wolfram&Hart from Angel are a great example of Ultimate Evil. A powerful and ancient cabal of demons that are the true power behind the series main antagonist Wolfram&Hart, they are never seen or even heard once. The demon that appears for the Review was just possessed by one of them. Yet the series makes their influence an undeniable and terrible thing. By the end of the series, they ultimately prove to be an unstoppable force of Evil that Angel and company can only fight, but never defeat.
- The Source on Charmed. A good example of what's problematic with showing the Ultimate Evil, as well — after several seasons of only being mentioned in passing he's finally revealed as a mysterious cloaked figure. With each sucessive appearance, the Source gets more stupid looking and more like a traditional Big Bad, until finally he's killed off and replaced with new Big Bads.
- Similarly, the aliens in The X Files were, for the entirety of the first season, represented by slo-mo and flashlights.
- The Family Channel had a short-lived series called Scariest Places on Earth which would use a night vision camera to capture the horrified expressions of those visiting the titular places and seeing the titular scary stuff, but that was it. Short-lived because nobody who watched the show once was stupid enough to want to watch it twice.
- Anubis from Stargate SG-1 possibly fits this trope. Actually he is seen, but it is only a black shade inside his dark hood. In fact, he has no body but is an energy being that uses the mantle combined with a force field to keep his form intact. In the episode of his "death" we get to see his real body.
- The new series of Doctor Who season 4 episode "Midnight" has a chillingly effective Ultimate Evil. Unlike all of the Doctor's other adversaries, it has no shape or form and is only known by its influence on others. The Doctor proves to be utterly mystified and helpless against it, and were it not for a Heroic Sacrifice by the tour guide, it would have succeeded in killing the Doctor. In its one appearance, it evokes the same fear from the Doctor that the Doctor usually inspires in other alien menaces, such as the Daleks.
Tabletop Games
- Pale Night, a demon lord from Dungeons and Dragons fits this trope. She appears as a ghostly woman wearing a shroud. Her true form is so horrifying, though, that reality itself rejects it; the shroud is not hers, apparently, but something the multiverse forces on her. (This is implied to be because Obyrith demons themselves are chaotic beings of entropy and madness; the reason for their hideous forms is because the, for lack of a better term, intelligence of the Abyss is forced to adhere to the rules of a lawful universe to bring its servitors into being. Pale Night's true form, though, managed to break those rules.
- Her deadliest attack is the ability to suppress her shroud for an instant. Unlike almost every other example in the game, if you succeed on the Will save against this ability, your character is considered to have NOT comprehended what he saw, and blocked it out. Whereas if you fail they understand what they see and die instantly.
- It's probably a portal they look through and realize they're a fictional creation being used by an overweight, unhygienic basement dweller whose fingers are crusted with cheese dust-I kid, I kid.
- Warhammer 40000. The four Chaos Gods and the Emperor of Mankind all get this treatment to varying degrees. The Cosmic Horror-flavored C'tan, sadly, do not.
- Not on the table, where they've basically been torn out of space and rammed into an airtight liquid metal skin. In their natural form they operate on a scale so large they were surprised when they found out that planets exist, let alone the little noisy things on them.
Video Games
- An example in Fate/stay night; he heroes eventually find out that the Mac Guffin they are fighting for was actually corrupted some time in the past and has become the home of Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian devil. He is a being that is 60 billion curses personified and the antithesis of human goodness. And he hates back. The only thing we get to see is basically pure evil that is leaking from it, and it is implied that it has no 'real' shape. Except in the Heaven's Feel route, where it finally manages to manifest itself as a vaguely humanoid tangle of limbs and eyes. Luckily, it does not succeed in being properly born before it is obliterated.
- King Stan in Okage: Shadow King is trapped in the form of a shadow for 95% of the game, citing that the entire world will shake in terror once he regains his True Form. It turns out to be less than impressive (although that chin is pretty scary).
- Demonica of Stretch Panic is a monster so horrifying that merely seeing her causes Linda to die of fright. You must prevent her from entering the shack you are inside by following her shadow in the windows and attacking through the entrances she tries to use.
- Giygas, the Big Bad of Earthbound, is an Ultimate Evil in similar ways to Cthulhu, for example, all of his battle messages read "You cannot grasp the true nature of Giygas's attack!" While he is shown as a whirly red ghost thing, it's implied that this is not his true form, but the only form he can manifest of Earth.
- In Mother, the first game of the Mother series does have a physical form: the form of his attacks is still "inexplicable", but the above "implications" are merely the result of uninformed speculation. It doesn't change the fact that this must have been quite a shock for Japanese players who were expecting to see the original Gyiyg only to be treated to a swirling, nightmarish background-from-hell.
- Parodied in Star Control II: The cowardly Spathi live in perpetual fear an entity they actually call the ULTIMATE EVIL!!! They know absolutely nothing about it, and have never even seen it, because (they claim) it always lurks just outside the range of their most advanced sensors. This is, of course, further proof of its nefarious intent.
- Hilariously, they have no clue that their next-door neighbors are the physical manifestations of a real Ultimate Evil from beyond.
- The Watchers in Drakengard are made out to be ineffable and all-powerful by their servant, solidifying their position as the Ultimate Evil in the game. Except when they appear near the game's finale, they take a form that is indeed horrifying and morbid. Part of it probably comes from this editor's expectation of the writers playing this trope straight, and the other part comes from the symbolism latent in their appearance.
- During the course of Jade Empire, what has been done to the Water Dragon is described as pretty much the Ultimate Sin.
- Subverted in Darkened Skye, where the Big Bad, known as "He whose face must not be glimpsed" and universally feared by all, is ultimately revealed to literally be a tiny maggot. As the heroine puts it "He Whose Face Must Not Be Glimpsed? That's because he's too small to see!".
- Deliberately or not, this might be a Shout Out to Captain Marvel's enemy, Mister Mind. When he first appeared in the 1940's, it was over a year of comics before he appeared as anything but a voice over a radio, sending his Monster Society of Evil to wreak havoc. When he was finally revealed, his true form was... a superintelligent alien caterpillar about 4 inches long, wearing glasses.
- The Dark Master of The Legend of Spyro series has yet to be properly seen (Except in anmated cut-scenes which are probably not very representive of his real appearance) or heard, though he will appear in Dawn of the Dragon, fufilling the trope completely, but look at the evidence, and you'll discover that he is one of the most powerful video game villains of all time. Not surprising, considering he happens to be a purple dragon like Spyro.
- The eponymous Siren. You hear its cry — something like a distorted, unearthly air raid siren, in a play on the dual meaning of the word — but you never actually get to see it. The Sorting Algorithm Of Evil skips right over it, taking you straight from the shibito to Datatsushi, The God That Fell, the creator of the siren, the shibito, and the red water.
- Word Of God is that the siren is just the sound of Datatsushi, but this contradicts the game itself; a secret cutscene shows the fall of Datatushi and the first appearance of the siren, and there, the cry of the siren and the cry of Datatsushi are clearly two entirely different sounds, the siren responding to Datatsushi's scream.
- In KotOR II, you never actually see Darth Nihilus's face. The only scene where his mask is removed is done by a different character and his corpse is destroyed before you can look yourself. According to other sources, Nihilus is actually dead, and just takes the form of a mask and cloak through the force.
- Inverted in Riddle of the Sphinx: when you finally look inside the Ark of the Covenant, all you see of the Ultimate Good is blinding white light.
- "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."
- The Vasari from Sins Of A Solar Empire are running away from a terrible, nameless evil that destroyed all of the inner colonies of their once-great empire. We never learn much more about it, because in their eagerness to get the game out, the developers forgot to include a campaign mode, and as a result the plot ends at the beginning of the game and (until the expansion) the lore serves only as an explanation for why the sides' units look and act the way they do.
Webcomics
- In Kaspall, a box shaped robe with one arm and a cane becomes Nightmare Fuel this way. Of course, knowing the things that it DID to its victims helps.
- The Monster in the Darkness of Order Of The Stick qualifies as this; so far, he has only been shown in complete darkness.
- Subverted in that Monster-san isn't actually Evil, just easily manipulated by Evil.
Western Animation
- Dr Claw, the villain from Inspector Gadget was never shown on the original animated series. For the first movie, he was played by Rupert Everett, but was clearly meant to be a completely different villain. An action figure of Dr Claw was made, when it was revealed that he disappointingly looked like your stereotypical "Mad Scientist".
- Gormiti The Lords Of Nature Return gives us Obscurio, the supremely powerful leader of the Darkness Gormiti. While the toyline does feature a figure of him, he has not been seen in the series proper, only appearing as a spiritual entity which hides in a specially-forged crown that possesses Toby in Episode 6.
- He Man and She-Ra gave us Horde Prime, the man behind both Skeletor and Hordak. All we ever saw of him was a greenish glow and a huge mechanical fist.
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