Unnecessarily Creepy Robot

"SLEEP LITTLE DUMPLING. I HAVE REPLACED YOUR MOTHER."

The Unnecessarily Creepy Robot is deliberately designed to be scary, with little to no regard to its intended purpose. Sure, the characters may say it's only a simple maintenance robot, but does it have to look like a giant mechanical spider? Sure, it's just a mining droid, but does it have to have sinister glowing red eyes? And who gave it a laser, anyway? Why even design a robot that looks like that?

Drama.

Robots tap into our primal fear of automation. The fear of being replaced and/or destroyed by a machine. And it's all the more dramatic when a robot is scary looking. When your robot snaps and turns on you, it's all the more frightening to be chased by that giant spider, to be stared down by those red eyes, to be zapped by that laser.

The Unnecessarily Creepy Robot can take many forms. It may tap into the Uncanny Valley, being too human-like for comfort. Or it may be vaguely humanoid, but with some addition or subtraction that makes it unsettling. It may also resemble an animal that humans have an instinctive revulsion to, like a insect or a reptile. Or it may have a design so far removed from anything recognizably organic that it makes you wonder how anyone could come up with it.

Whatever the form it takes, the Unnecessarily Creepy Robot has this as its constant: the creepy design is, at best, only vaguely related to its intended function. Given what characters in-universe say it was designed to do, it doesn't have to look like it does. It was meant to be creepy first, efficient second. Because a robot will always run amok, and when it does, it will be all the more terrifying to have it chasing you.

The most extreme types may approach becoming Mechanical Abominations. See Cute Machines for the opposite of this Trope. Super trope of SkeleBot 9000.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Every robot in Blame!. Also every silicon creature. Actually just everything in the manga, period — except Iko, a cute ghost-hologram-like girl thingy.
• In one episode of Tamagotchi! Yume Kira Dream, Mametchi invents a Robot Me of Papapianitchi for Cafe Mama's birthday (Papapianitchi being Cafe Mama's husband). Unfortunately, Mametchi not only gets the look of his face off-model, but the robot itself thrusts flowers in the faces of nearby girls and proclaims its love for them. Mametchi's friends are unnerved by the machine.

Comic Books

• Most of Brother EYE's creations in The New 52: Futures End and Batman Beyond seem to focus on the edginess of sewing superheroes together into faux-phyrexian creations rather than actual practical use. Probably the crowning example is attaching Barbara Gordon's torso to the Bat Signal, rendering both essentially less efficient than before.

Fan Works

• Nicely Done: Lisa upgrades Lily's Jack-in-the-box with a peek-a-boo animatronic, which is described as a wired, robotic clown with bright red eyes that drones "Peek-a-boo" over and over. Naturally, Lily's reaction to this is to cry over how creepy it is.
• Rocketship Voyager: After Voyager is abducted by aliens, Captain Janeway wakes up naked, floating in mid-air surrounded by members of her crew impaled on tubes and needles, while a giant metal spider with eight red eyes scuttles across the ceiling towards her. Janeway's only reaction is a petulant demand to be released from Sickbay, as it's just the ship's Auto-Doc.
• Invoked In-Universe in Something Always Remains. Mike Schmidt comes to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza as an adult, and wonders how he ever got close to the animatronics as a kid, as they freak him out long before they start to roam the place.

Films — Live-Action

• Colossus Of New York tells the story of a brain surgeon whose humanitarian son gets into a fatal accident, so he transfers his son's brain into a robot body. The robot looks like this.◊ Unsurprisingly, he goes on a rampage.
• I, Robot edges into this territory. Normally the robots are non-threatening, if a bit coldly impersonal — a shining example of Everything Is an iPod in the Future. When dialing home for a software update, however, they stand in a corner, stare at their owners, and glow a baleful red.
• M3GAN: The titular robot is basically a life-sized porcelain doll with a rubber face. Her voice and expressions come off as robotic and generally have an intentional uncanny valley vibe to them.
• In The Matrix, Sentinels are alien, organic-looking robots with multiple eyes and metallic tentacles, that almost resemble deep-sea creatures. There isn't really a reason they need to look this way, other than to be truly menacing when they swarm on the Nebuchadnezzar. Indeed, most of the Machine tech is characterized by being unnecessarily creepy. The "human farms" in particular look like something out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting. Later works in the franchise imply that this was a conscious choice on the part of the Machines. "The Second Renaissance" shows that the first Machines were simple humanoid androids. As relations between Human and Machine soured, the Machines became more and more alien, developing into creepy insectoid things. And it was most likely deliberate: both to distinguish themselves as apart from both humanity and humanity's control, and as a means to intimidate the Humans.
• The Phantom Creeps: in this classic 1939 Film Serial, Mad Scientist Doctor Zorka has a giant robot with sharp claws, glaring eyes, and a monstrous, fang-filled mouth. The robot doesn't actually do anything significant over the course of the serial: it opens the door to Zorka's secret lair, stands guard, and occasionally moves heavy objects around the lab. There's really no reason for it to look that scary, except to establish that its creator is villainous.
• Saturn 3: Hector is perhaps the quintessential example of an Unnecessarily Creepy Robot. Hector is seven feet tall and humanoid in form, although instead of a recognizable head it has a telescoping metal tentacle with a pair of eye stalks on it. Its body is a network of metal tubes and plates that resemble human musculature, giving it the overall appearance of a skinned, decapitated corpse. Its CPU is a mass of culture-grown human brain tissue. Hector's intended purpose? To replace one of the human workers on a farming colony.
• Star Wars:
  • The universe has an interesting example. On many backwater outposts like Mos Eisley, droids are often put together or repaired with parts salvaged from other droids. This not only results in droids that sometimes look rather unsettling, but also causes many of them to develop bizarre personalities and mental defects.
  • The Star Wars Legends continuity had the C2-R4 Multipurpose Unit (a hideous thing resembling an R2 unit designed by a Mad Max villain), which was built from scrap by overenthusiastic aliens and flopped horribly, and the J9 Worker Drone, whose insectoid looks and misleading name meant that it didn't sell well and the people who did buy it ignored its protocol training and sentenced it to move boxes forever.
• The Terminator universe has the T-600's, the models preceding the iconic T-800. The metallic skeleton design has a purpose, since it's supposed to be intimidating for humans, but the 600s were the first attempts at creating Terminators capable of blending in with the resistance. Unfortunately, this was before Skynet had created realistic synthetic skin, so the 600s ended up looking like freakish, murderous mannequins that would pass only a very cursory inspection.
• In the film Transcendence, the helpful singularity known as Will Caster attempts to help disabled people by using nanotechnology to restore their limbs, eyes, and other deficiencies. He also, for some reason, felt the need to add brain implants to all of his patients that could turn them into creepy borg-like drones which he could take control of and speak through. The only thing this accomplishes is freaking people out and causes the authorities to turn against him.
• Mechagodzilla from Godzilla vs. Kong is easily the most disturbing-looking version of Mechagodzilla to date, with a skull-like face, glowing red eyes, square-shaped dorsal spines and gangly, skeletal-looking arms ending in pincer-like claws. Despite being created to supplant Godzilla and restore mankind to its former glory, it's designed in such a horrifying way that it's almost like its creators wanted it to turn evil. And it does, after its controlling system is possessed by the still-living consciousness of the severed head of Godzilla's long-defeated ancient nemesis—King Ghidorah.

Literature

• The robots of Isaac Asimov's works are an interesting subversion: the Robot designers are aware of this trope, and go out of their way to make their robots as non-creepy as possible. The Robots are described as basically humanoid in form, but quite obviously mechanical. Some stories indicate that the technology does exist to make them look more organic, but the designers don't do it to avoid the Uncanny Valley. They genuinely don't want to creep out the humans who are going to buy the robots and work closely with them on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, sometimes it just can't be helped - and unfortunately many of the film adaptations missed the point.
• Depending on how you define "robot" (ie - artificial life form, construct, etc.), the Frankenstein's Monster. The Monster is a grotesque abomination with a humanoid form, a crude imitation of human life whose creator abandoned him almost immediately after his "birth". The story unfolds as it does for this very reason: the Monster's initial kindness giving way to violent misanthropy stems from his hideousness causing everyone he interacts with to reject him. The book does note that the creepiness only starts after bringing Adam to life, and Frankenstein was aiming for beauty.
• Heart of Steel offers up a robot that Julia dubs Stickman, who resembles a cross between a stick insect and a coatrack, sounds like someone taught an electric shaver how to talk, and acts like a nominally-helpful Cylon.
• The Murderbot Diaries. Even the title character is startled when a ten-meter-tall robot with long spiderly legs and a head covered in spikes bursts from the bushes in front of Murderbot, who takes a moment to ponder how agricultural robots are the least likely to be involved in industrial accidents yet look the most terrifying.
  It's weird how something designed to take care of delicate lifeforms looks the most like it wants to tear you apart and eat your humans.

Live-Action TV

• The Doctor Who serial "Robot" introduces the K1, a robot designed to do dangerous work in place of humans, like mining and handling radioactive materials. Considering that its purpose is for heavy labor, it being big and bulky is understandable, and even the pincer hands could be a practical choice. But why the eyeless face that's always glaring,◊ and the voice that can only speak in an aggressive bellow?
  • "Keblam!" has the Kerblam! Delivery Robots, who have puppet-like faces with glowing, unblinking eyes and rictus grins on their faces. While they are perfectly nice and friendly, the Doctor's companions are creeped out by them. She just accuses them of being robophobic.
• Eureka features "Tiny", an experimental extra-terrestrial explorer robot. It's built like a giant wolf and has the obligatory glowing red eyes and laser cannons. Carter even calls it out as an "unnecessarily creepy design".
• The Watchbird drones from the Masters of Science Fiction episode "Watchbird" were originally designed for military use in the Middle East, and like any other military drone, move too fast and too high up for the target to be able to see them clearly for them to have any psychological effect. Despite this, they're designed to look like creepy metallic eagles.
• In Other Space, Kent designs a body for AI Natasha so that she can operate outside the ship. It's a mechanical spider.
  Natasha: Kent designed it to be very fast.
  Kent: And eerily quiet, while it's not quite as venomous as I want it to be.
• The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" features androids that are superficially identical to humans... and then there's Ruk, the monstrous giant android portrayed by Ted "Lurch" Cassidy. He's an older "model" android, and so perhaps not as elegantly designed as newer ones, but still, he's much more intimidating than he needs to be.
• That Mitchell and Webb Look has a scientist who refuses to create anything that could potentially endanger mankind, and who created a robot to help in stores with claws to stack shelves. It's shaped like a giant scorpion. It doesn't help that his name is Professor Death, leading to things like the Mind-Controlling Death Ants.
• In the Red Dwarf episode "Give and Take", we have Asclepius, which features: a single massive eye that is Sickly Green Glowing, a mouth-grill that looks like an impossibly massive set of fangs curled into a permanent Slasher Smile, a body designed like a stereotypical Mad Scientist labcoat, one hand that's a rotating array of blades and pincers, and another hand that's basically a cannon. Its designated function? Medical diagnosis and surgery.
• Loki (2021): The TVA's "Nudifier" robot is designed to get prisoners changed out of the clothes they came in with and into their jumpsuits. For God knows what reason, the machine built for this simple task is a hulking, four-armed monstrosity that protrudes from the wall and has a constantly twitching smiley icon on a TV monitor for a face. It is also totally unwilling to take "no" for an answer, has No Sense of Personal Space, and seems to enjoy stripping prisoners way too much; poor Loki practically looks like he's been sexually assaulted after it burns off all his clothes with a Disintegrator Ray.

Tabletop Games

• In Magic: The Gathering the Phyrexians are a race of evil, magical, assimilatory undead cyborgs that seek perfection in horrific blends of metal and flesh. While they supposedly prioritize efficiency over all else, most if not all of their designs seem to focused in being as horrific as possible rather than efficient.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Necron, an Omnicidal Maniac race of robots (a humanoid race whose mind imprints were put in machines after their masters ate their souls). They all look like mechanical skeletons, fight in utter silence and use energy guns that disintegrate their targets bit by bit with rays of green light. They are nearly impossible to kill and if their nanomachines can't cope with the damage, they teleport away, disappearing without a trace. It is all done entirely on purpose. The C'tan want their enemies to know death is coming for them.
  • Robots built from Necron tech that are not full Necrons are also designed to be creepy, with most designs being based around arthropods — Tomb Spyders and Scarabs being the most notorious. This overrides function. For example, a Tomb Spyder is a floating machine designed to look after Necron tombs, and Necron tech is some of the most reliable stuff ever, meaning it's not entirely clear why it had to have so many legs when it only rarely touches the ground.
  • Also applies to Imperial Servitors. Due to the Adeptus Mechanicus fear of true AIs, all robots are actually either clones or convicts that are lobotomized and strapped with huge amounts of cybernetics, which results in extremely disturbing cyber-zombies doing much of the Techpriests' menial labour.
  • And don't forget the servo-skulls, actual human skulls stuffed with cybernetics and given an anti-gravity drive. Nothing creepy about a skull hovering in a corner with various dangly manipulators or weapons just waiting for orders...
  • There're also Cherubs — baby-shaped servitors whose small frames and angelic wings fit oh so perfectly with crude cybernetics.
• Rifts:
  • The Coalitions' armies of skele-bots are built specifically to intimidate, as they remind one of dead people's skeletons rising up from the ground to attack you. The Coalition are willing to use this psychological weapon along with the robot's physical threat, even though they are dead against magic, and such a thing would not happen by their hand; however at least the 'bots look like human skeletons. Coalition War Machine introduces a whole bunch of new 'bots, with a similar issue, but it appears the Hellion and Centaur are a step too far for the Emperor and the Coalition High Command; only ten of each have been manufactured. They resemble a four-armed, horned demon skeleton with a long tail, and a centaur skeleton, respectively. This is apparently too creepy as they don't look like human skeletons.

Video Games

• The Deimos of 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, despite being aggressive kaiju, are actually construction equipment, but look like mechanical monsters, especially given their color scheme and glowing red eyes.
• Alien: Isolation gives us the Working Joes. The androids of Weyland Yutani, as seen starting with Alien are extremely humanlike, except when cut and bleeding milky white fluid. The Working Joe androids of Seegson, on the other hand side, start in the Uncanny Valley and are programmed to dig it into an Uncanny Mariana Trench with their waxy appearance and bad AI that can barely deviate from its standard functions (but will still merrily try to strangle you while asking you to remain calm). It's fully acknowledged in-universe: The Seegson marketing department tries to spin their faults as features, claiming no-one would want an android that you can't tell from a human. Considering that, for quite some time, the Working Joe was the face of the Alien: Isolation Nightmare Fuel page rather than the titular creature, it may come as little surprise that Seegson is in the process of going belly-up.
• Many of the robots from the Descent series of games fall into this category. They hit all of the tropes - glowing eyes, sharp, deadly claws, scary humanoid faces, spider-like limbs, ridiculously freaky sounds... many a kid in the 90s had nightmares after playing these games.
• The Fallout setting in general has the Mr Handy robots, which resemble three-legged octopi moving about by means of an exposed jet engine; each leg is topped with a modular tool, with a flamethrower and a circular saw being standards. It's designed to do general household tasks, not be an ambulatory safety hazard.
• Fallout 76 gives us MODUS, the Enclave supercomputer, who, due to some damage to its systems has all the personality of a sociopath incapable of reading social cues. Even when trying to be helpful it comes across as Faux Affably Evil at the best of times. The digital avatar on its screen looks like a younger Hugo Strange and even when trying to smile looks like he's seconds away from trying to skin you.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • The franchise takes place in a Suck E. Cheese's where the animatronics are not only really creepy-looking, but roam around the restaurant at night — and, due to shoddy programming, see anybody they find as a robot out of costume and try to jam them into a suit filled with wires and electronics. The managers are evidently too cheap to get any of these things fixed. The truth is even more disturbing: the animatronics are Haunted Technology possessed by the vengeful ghosts of murdered children.
  • In the sequel Five Nights at Freddy's 2, the new animatronics are supposed to be cuter and more kid-friendly, but some still have baffling design decisions, like Mangle's sharp teeth (and that's before it was turned into a mess of parts). The Puppet outright owns this trope; it's a unnaturally skinny thing with a terribly creepy clown mask. The old animatronics look even worse due to disrepair, although in this case they aren't meant to be entertaining, or even moving around.
  • Toy Chica invokes this during the second game: when she begins to roam the halls, she ditches her beak and eyes, turning an already creepy robot into something of nightmares.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 3 only has one animatronic: Springtrap, which is a decrepit version of Bonnie, which was found in a sealed-off room. Of course, Fazbear's Fright is supposed to be a haunted house. It also has the corpse of a child Serial Killer trapped inside it.
  • The Nightmare Animatronics in Five Nights at Freddy's 4 are massive monstrosities with exposed wiring and More Teeth than the Osmond Family. Of course, they are the literal nightmares of the protagonist, who's already scared of the normal animatronics.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location has all the animatronics being able to separate their faces, revealing their robotic parts underneath, and that's aside from being robot clowns. Really, what was William Afton thinking?
  • The Salvage Animatronics from Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator really make you wonder why your boss thinks they can be used for entertainment. Molten Freddy is a tangle of metal cables with a battered Freddy mask ( being what remains of Ennard from the last game), Scraptrap is Springtrap in even worse disrepair, Scrap Baby has what looks like a saw of some sort for a hand, and Lefty- the best-looking one of the bunch- is still missing his left eye. Of course, your boss isn't planning to use them for the pizzeria; he's using the pizzeria to trap them in one location so he can destroy them all in one fell swoop.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach: One animatronic has a sun/moon theme, a creepy voice, and a Slasher Smile. Lights-on, it acts like an overbearing nanny with No Sense of Personal Space, and lights-off it acts like a goddamn creep with an obsession with punishing naughty children. Its role in the Pizzaplex, believe it or not, is to work in the daycare. One message on the Fazwatch reveals that at least one child refuses to sleep with the lights off after spending a day in there with it, and wets the bed even when the lights are on.
• The Faro robots from Horizon Zero Dawn were designed for warfare, and the Deathbringer/Khopesh very much looks the part, being a blocky tank-like walker brimming with guns. The Corrupter/Scarab is slightly creepier, but could be justified as a scout unit that needs to clamber over difficult terrain. The Metal Devil/Horus units however, defy all reason and sanity. Yes, it's a mobile production plant for the others, so it would need to be large, but who on earth thought it would be a good idea to make them into gigantic metal squids with mile-long tentacles?!
• illWill (2023) has the Spider enemies, gigantic robotic eyeballs on mechanical spider-legs that chases after you relentlessly. Their King Mook counterpart, King Spider, takes it up a notch being a building-sized robotic eye that stares into your soul.
• The Landfall Archives mini-game, "Creepy Robots", naturally have these, depicted as red-eyed Cyber Cyclops with spindly limbs and repeatedly chases after you with a Marionette Motion.
• Lies of P: The Scrapped Watchman was designed as a police mascot, yet it is extremely large, has Creepily Long Arms, huge clawed fingers, a very unsettling face, and a battery so overpowered it can discharge lightning. Despite this, the children of the city adored the thing.
• Metroid Dread: Despite being explicitly designed as research and surveillance drones, the E.M.M.I. have a rather intimidating appearance with their towering and skeletal build that can shift to an animalistic stance, clawed hands and feet, and their giant glowing eye. Not to mention the equally giant sample-taking needle that extends from the eye. Which makes it all the more inconvenient (if aesthetically appropriate) when they go rogue.
• Overload, a spiritual successor to Descent, overdoes it by making basically all robots look borderline excessively creepy.
• In Stellaris you can give your machine empire robots the "Uncanny" trait, impacting your diplomatic prowess negatively even if you play as a relatively benevolent robot empire, simply because your robots are that creepy.
  These monstrous machines were created in the image of one of the most horrific species in the universe, and the resemblance is uncanny.
• Chortlebot in Wario Land: Shake It! Seriously, it was presumably designed to be some sort of entertainment robot, like an automated clown for a circus. What they actually came up with was a Monster Clown flying head that looks like it came from the ninth circle of hell, complete with Evil Laugh, built in flamethrower and a nose that acts like a circular saw. There's pretty much no role on the planet that this thing could do that wouldn't have anyone in the nearby vicinity running for an exit.

Web Animation

• In Bravest Warriors, there is an episode where Danny builds a robot version of Chris in order to make him jealous. While everyone else is understandably freaked out (Robo-Chris is just a skull with arms, legs, and glowing red eyes) Chris himself is thrilled that Danny built him and doesn't find him creepy at all. At least until Danny turns up Robo-Chris's friendship drive and said robot starts getting clingy...
• Lampshaded in Foxy Gets Hooked. When Bonnie and Foxy stop in front of the "Kid's Corner" bulletin board, some of the drawings on the board ask "What is with the eyes?" referring to the animatronics' strangely Creepy Shadowed Undereyes in the original game. One of the drawings even suggests that the animatronics are high.
• Helluva Boss: the Robot Fizzarolli model is a terrifying Monster Clown with Monochromatic Eyes and a tendency to break down and spark everywhere. One is used to entertain children at the theme park Loo Loo Land in the Greed Ring of Hell, and is so terrifying it makes demon babies cry. The other purpose "Robo Fizz" is primarily marketed for is as a Sex Bot. When we meet the flesh Fizzarolli they're based on, yeah, he's a demon, but he's positively cute, which somehow makes the robots even worse.

Webcomics

• Girl Genius: Pretty much all Heterodyne creations have way too many teeth paired with a violent sense of humor, but special mention goes to the Monster Clown clank they used to watch over their children.
  Gil: So this was the nursery?
  Tarvek: It explains... so much...
• The artificial Treasure Monster from The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! looks like a hideous jewel-encrusted Oni mask mounted on semi-amorphous clawed body made of black slime. It really just wants to be helpful and eventually gets a job as a waiter.
• Questionable Content has Gordon a friendly robot who helps with the questionnaires that pair humans with companion androids. He's also designed like a dog-sized purple spider who sits on people's heads to collect biometric readings, and doesn't have a clue why Marten's heart rate is so high in his presence.
  Chassis colors designed to appear candylike and nonthreatening, ignoring the fact he is A THREE FOOT TALL ROBOT SPIDER.

Web Original

• Cracked has posted several articles on this subject.
  • See "The 7 Creepiest Robots to See in Action," and "The 7 Creepiest Real-Life Robots."
  • There's also "A Series of Emails from Cyberdyne's New Tech Guy," about the Fridge Logic that should have averted a certain Robot War. "I'm not a design guy or anything, but I can't see any either performance or aesthetic benefits in designing the robots with cold skeleton heads, piercing red eyes, or giant metal teeth." (However, the article seems to believe it was Cyberdyne that built the Terminators, which it did not.)

Western Animation

• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: Ultron looks pretty creepy, even before his inevitable Face–Heel Turn. His designer Hank Pym (Ant-Man) even gets called on it, but he doesn't see it.
  Hank: It's not a toy and it's not creepy-looking. It's designed to look like an Ant head.
• Futurama has quite a collection, played largely for laughs:
  • Robot Santa Claus. Sure, he's evil now, but as originally designed, he shouldn't be that scary. Granted, he didn't start that way exactly. He has a "nice" look (eyes curves side down, tilted outward, no teeth, no spikes on the hat, seen when he first appears and when he gives Zoidberg his pogo stick) and a "naughty" look (seen every other time he's on screen). The "naughty" look is very over-the-top however^note having him look slightly annoyed by naughty children, sure, but downright evil?, and the massive size seems rather unnecessary.
  • The current page image is that of a robot nanny who not only looks frightening, but speaks in a loud, angry voice and claims to have replaced the baby's mother before feeding it with a bottle from its toothy maw. Leela thinks it's cute. Notably, the baby doesn't seem to mind either.
• Gravity Falls: In "Soos and the Real Girl", Stan shows off Goldie, a nickel-operated animatronic gold prospector that's supposed to give a "gold nugget" to customers. It was already creepy, but its age and poor maintenance causes it to leak oil (especially from its mouth and eyes), fall apart, and shriek when used.
  Wendy: No offense, Mr. Pines, but it's time to throw that thing out. Its face reminds people of the inevitability of death!
• Steven Universe: Holo-Pearl is a Hard Light projection of Pearl meant to be a simple sparring partner, but very conspicuous shortcuts in its appearance make it creepy, having a one track mind focused on fighting, talking like a robot, and, while in "wait mode", just staring off into nothing. Also, every time it furrows its brow, its blue eyes turn red, which is probably supposed to be scary.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Rising Malevolence", the battle droids systematically and efficiently hunt down and crack open the life-support pods holding the survivors from the earlier battle. Through this process, they maintain the same high-pitched voices, bumbling demeanor and goofy personalities they always have, cheerfully humming tunes and joking among each other while casually talking about hunting down their victims.

Real Life

• Real Life military tech averts this trope for the most part, with an emphasis on functionality rather than intimidation. Drones like the Predator are basically small unmanned planes, and there's actually a kind of beauty to their simple aerodynamic design.
• One of the recent trends in robotics is a move toward designs based on insects. Focus is shifting away from complex machines capable of complex tasks, and more toward smaller, simpler units programmed with a simple set of commands. The insectoid design definitely is more efficient for certain tasks, like moving over uncertain terrain, and some have theorized that future space exploration will be done by means of insect-like autonomous drones. So they are, in a sense, Necessarily Creepy Robots...
• There are many creators of animatronic robots that invoke this trope.
• Some high-end hunting decoys resemble real deer or bears closely enough to hit the Uncanny Valley when their animatronic heads turn to "look around".
• Inverted in the case of the "Cloaca Machines", a series of works designed by Belgian industrial artist Wim Delvoye. They aren't all that creepy to look at, actually. As to what they do, however... ^{What's a "cloaca"?}A cavity similar to the anus for the release of excretion and genital products.
• The Telenoid R1 is a telepresence bot intended to allow people communicating to see each other's facial expressions. Unfortunately, it looks disturbingly like a deformed, limbless fetus.
• Robotics developers Boston Dynamics have been half-jokingly accused of deliberately leaning into this trope. Many of their designs are meant to be proofs of concepts, testing things like object detection and avoidance, and reaction to changing terrains or conditions. As such, they look conspicuously "incomplete" as they are tested in the lab and the outside world, moving in disturbingly-naturalistic ways while clearly missing parts that would make organic beings more at ease. A few standout models include "Spot," which can climb stairs, open doors, and run up to 45 mph; "Big Dog", which is basically a headless hydraulic mule; and their first humanoid model, which they rather ominously chose to name "Atlas".

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