Mook Horror Show

He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are brought to justice.

"Are you feeling the pressure? You're alone in a room, your friends have been picked off one by one... now it's just you and him!"

— The Joker to an unlucky henchman, Batman: Arkham Asylum

The Mook Horror Show is a scene that plays out like a horror/slasher film, but casts the hero as the monster. Depending on the hero, it could involve Let's Split Up, Gang! and slinking through shadows, a Five Rounds Rapid followed by a frantic retreat, or any other situation that attempts to show how cool the hero is by emphasizing the terror of his foes.

Unless it's a darker Anti-Hero involved, the mooks probably aren't being slaughtered in horrifying ways, unless they happen to be intelligent robots, aliens, or monsters. If the minions are human, that sort of conduct would probably be bad for the hero's publicity (if the public ever has a chance to find out). However, war stories may relax this rule — killing enemies in wartime is more often seen as justified.

This trope is a frequent component of the Roaring Rampage of Revenge or One-Man Army, may involve a Foe-Tossing Charge and often overlaps with Villainous Valour, with the Big Bad — or The Dragon, if the Big Bad isn't present — cast as the Final Girl. Sometimes used to demonstrate that Dark Is Not Evil. It's often a key component of the Terror Hero's act. May also be invoked by a hero to Pay Evil unto Evil to a villain who enjoys subjecting others to this type of thing to give them a taste of their own medicine. They may also play it up for various reasons. Among others, they're probably going to not fight you at 100% if they're too busy screaming in blind terror of you. Contrast with Sparing the Final Mook, where after fighting off many mooks, the hero allows a last one to flee or otherwise surrender.

It's important to be cautious with the Mook Horror Show trope. A hero who brutally slaughters mooks in a particularly horrifying way may not seem very "heroic" in the eyes of the audience. Such reactions can lead to a hero becoming a Designated Hero or a case of He Who Fights Monsters. Of course, this all depends on the nature of the mooks in question, as (obviously) security guards and construction workers who are just doing their jobs and supporting their families are easier to sympathize with than mindless monsters like demons and zombies.

Not to be confused with a show in which the mooks look like creatures from horror films; that's Red Right Hand. Also doesn't overlap at all with A Clockwork Orange — even though it did have mooks as main characters, and they did find many things "real 'orrorshow." See also The Joys of Torturing Mooks.

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Examples:

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Anime & Manga

• In Aruosumente, Dante single-handedly killing 300 enemy soldiers when he was a child does not make for a pretty scene.
• Attack on Titan:
  • Chapter 64 clearly shows how utterly powerful the Survey Corps has become. A well-trained, fully equipped squad of 35 black-ops commandos in their element is decimated, outmaneuvered, and outwitted by seven teenagers with obsolete combat gear. The derailing train of thought from the squad leader's point of view says it all.
  • Chapter 81 has one when Levi shreds Zeke out of his Titan form. Zeke goes from being a Smug Super to actually being freaked out. Taken to another level in 83 when Levi arrives again, having ripped through a small army of Titans singlehandedly to try and stop Zeke from escaping. Zeke's reaction is to call him a monster and withdraw on the spot.
• In Baccano!, Claire Stanfield versus the Lemures and Ladd Russo.
  • One flashback scene shows Jacuzzi being threatened by Russo's thugs, and true to his Cowardly Lion nature, Jacuzzi ends up pleading with them to leave him alone so his friends won't kill them/pleading with his friends to show some mercy. The thugs, believing Jacuzzi is alone, don't take the hint and are taken out by Jacuzzi's gang, who all sport Glowing Eyes of Doom.
• In Berserk, this befalls Mooks trying to arrest or kill Guts. Even Apostles aren't immune sometimes — as the Black Swordsman, Guts can be easily seen as even worse than the beings he's going after.
• The gunfight between Revy and the Neo Nazis on board their ship in the Black Lagoon anime episode "Moonlight Hunting Grounds" quickly turns into this, with her cold-out murdering nearly everyone in her path while in the grip of full-on dead-eyed Whitman Fever. It's even more so in the manga, where Revy goes so far as to kill the main deck crew, who weren't even Neo Nazis, and were only doing it for the money.
  • In a later arc, Revy and her fellow badass Ginji start hunting mooks throughout a bowling alley. Revy herself lampshades this. "Better run or the bogeyman is going to get you!"
• Bofuri: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense.:
  • Most New World Online players are absolutely shocked and terrified when facing Maple. In the first event, a large number of players team up to take her down like she's a multiplayer raid boss and fail horribly. Her ridiculous defense prevents anyone from dealing damage even if they manage to hit her, her Devour skill is a one-hit kill against anyone within arm's reach, and her Hydra skill deals massive poison damage even from a distance. The fight was so one-sided that the game developers soon patched the game specifically to nerf Maple and make it harder for other players to become like her.
  • Sally gains a reputation in chatroom rumors during the second event when she solos some in PVP. The shadows of the forests under the light of a red full moon gives a horror game vibe to her swift killing of loads of players.
• Casshern Sins: present in almost every fight scene and is a major plot point.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Whatever you do, do not seriously piss off Accelerator. He's a fairly laid back guy most of the time, but if you try and harm Last Order, this trope comes into effect in a BIG way. Hound Dog had the misfortune of kidnapping her and then trying to kill him: the result was absolutely horrifying.
  • Some of Touma Kamijou's fights are shown from his opponents' point of view. Many incredibly powerful beings become terrified of the boy with the unheard of ability to negate any ability or break any enchantment, punch hard enough to shatter concrete, and shrug off incredible punishment.
• In Claymore when a high ranking warrior is sent against anything that is not an Awakened being (and sometimes even then) this trope is extremely likely to occur, there are however a couple of moments worth of a special mention.
  • Teresa of the Faint Smile does this to a group of human bandits who previously had done nothing but harass her, when the bandits cross the line and hurt the child Teresa cared about. Teresa annihilates them even as they try to escape.
  • Much later another powerful Claymore, Miata, does this to a horde of Yoma who assaulted her after she ended up being disarmed. Miata merely tore the monsters apart with her bare hands and similarly to Teresa she cut her targets down even as they were running for their lives.
• The first two chapters of Dance in the Vampire Bund featured a couple of these. A squad of fully equipped (although clueless) mercenaries end up fleeing a trio of maids shrugging off machine-gun fire and tearing them bodily apart only to run into a contingent of Mina Tepes' personal werewolf guard. Meanwhile the assassins that were loaded for vampire and using the mercs as a distraction corner a seemingly preteen girl and her personal servant (who proves useless beyond giving a warning)... it doesn't matter.
• The hero of Darker than Black has a rather serious case of this. In his first appearance, we have a Cat Scare, Offscreen Teleportation, a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique, and leaving a guy dead (with the police baffled as to the methods) just because he pissed him off. What with the scary mask and scarier name (It's pretty safe to say that you don't want anything to do with someone called "The Black Reaper"), you could very conceivably construe him as the villain until the end of the second episode.
• Dragon Ball:
  • In the original Dragon Ball, Goku got in on the action, and he did as early as his childhood adventures. Just watch him plowing though the Red Ribbon Headquarters to get the Dragon Balls as proof. He dodged a projectile fired from a rocket launcher literally meters across, then slammed the soldiers into a wall; shrugged off a sniper shot as if it was a pellet from a BB gun, terrifying the sniper; then he kept punching through the ceiling to reach the leader's floor.
  • Dragon Ball Z:
    • Vegeta gets a scene when he stalks a completely outmatched Jeice throughout Frieza's ship horror movie style, including many instances of Offscreen Teleportation, before finally killing him as he vainly attempts to fly away. Neither of them are good guys at this point — Vegeta's in the middle of an Enemy Mine with the heroes, but doesn't let this stop him from being as sadistic as possible.
    • Vegeta is like this to many of Frieza's other Mooks. In particular Cui, Dodoria, and Appule, who was watching him heal in Frieza's ship.
    • And the only reason Trunks didn't achieve this with Frieza's henchmen was because it took him about 3 seconds to kill about 20 of them.
    • After undergoing rigorous training to try to take on Perfect Cell, Trunks invokes this when he returns to the future and takes on the evil Androids and Cell, intentionally making them know just how screwed and helpless they are against him, because this was exactly what they'd done to their victims.
    • Goku's arrival on Namek sees him mowing down the members of the Ginyu Force, leaving both Recoome and Burter down and Jeice visibly freaking out and forced to retreat.
    • Super Saiyan 2 Gohan, especially in the anime, where he takes his time killing the Cell Jrs. messing with his friends and family while they're shaking in fear. To drive the point home, the screen turns creepy blue whenever a mook dies.
• Elfen Lied starts out with half an episode of this trope courtesy of Lucy, who escapes from her cell, strips naked (except for her creepy helmet), and cuts a bloody swath of destruction through the facility. She encounters dozens of heavily-armed guards and kills them messily with what seems like very little effort. She also decapitates a bystander who had no idea what was going on and wouldn't have been an obstacle, just to make sure the audience finds it impossible to sympathize with Lucy... until her we learn of her backstory.
• Fist of the North Star has this every single time Ken faces common Mooks due his ability to make them explode with a single touch.
  • The greatest example of this is when Ken, madder than hell at Jackal and his gang for what they did to Taki and Toyo, utterly annihilates them, putting everyone involved through a showcase of just how horrifying Hokuto Shinken, an art explicitly designed for assassination, can actually be. The chapters in question bear names like "Rage! To the Depths of Hell!", "Death to Mad Dogs!", and "A Challenge to the Devils!", though the TV series episode featuring Kenshiro's Roaring Rampage of Revenge is a lot more fitting — "I am Death Itself! I'll Chase You to the Ends of Hell!"
• There's several instances of this in Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Lan Fan has a She's Back moment in which she shows that she's recovered from the loss of her arm by rescuing Ed and his group from Gluttony by cutting Gluttony to ribbons with the blade attached to her automail. It's an awesome scene, but it's initially shown from the perspective of Gluttony, an Obliviously Evil Psychopathic Manchild who is overwhelmed with pain and fear.
  • Toward the end of the series, Mustang goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Envy, and despite Envy being one of the most sadistically cruel characters in the series, you actually feel kind of bad for it.
  • "Greedling" helps the rebel forces hold back the soldiers loyal to Central Command. This entails a Terminator-inspired scene where Greedling is in his Ultimate Shield form and smashes tanks like toys while the enemy soldiers futilely try to shoot him. Someone on the heroes' side even comments "Good thing he's on our side."
  • Badass Teacher Izumi has a couple of scenes where she takes out soldiers while sporting Glowing Eyes of Doom, and it's shown from their perspective.
  • In a humorous example, at one point, Ed is being hunted by soldiers from Central Command after going rogue. In a scene shown from their perspective, an unseen Ed calmly takes out the group looking for him, finishing up with the unfortunate soldier who, when describing Ed, just had to note his short stature.

• Gintama:
  • Sougo facing off against Itou's traitors in the Shinsengumi Crisis arc definitely counts. As it sinks in just who it is that they are about to fight, the traitors collectively start sweating. To Sougo's credit, at least he has the decency of granting them quick deaths: by ordering them to charge him all at once. In a matter of seconds, the traitors' corpses lie scattered across the train wagon, their blood splattered and their swords littered, while Sougo, who has nary a scratch upon him, licks off a little blood from his face.
  • Gintoki and Jirocho singlehandedly slaughtering Kada's Shinra bodyguards in the Four Devas arc becomes this for her, outright calling them monsters as the Shinra corpses begin to pile up. As the fight progresses, she becomes increasingly unnerved, and by the end of it Kada is utterly terrified, even though Gintoki and Jirocho are clearly on their last legs, and in complete disbelief that her strongest bodyguards were butchered by just two "base monkeys".
• Goblin Slayer is this in spades.
  • The goblins in the setting are the mookiest of monsters, considered rookie fodder but, at the same time, so dangerous and depraved that their numbers have exploded... or would have, if not for Goblin Slayer nearly single-handedly butchering every goblin he comes across. In fact, his introduction shot is shown from the perspective of a goblin, showing Goblin Slayer as this silent, imposing, unflinching monster... after which said goblin doesn't last 30 seconds before being crushed against a wall with a targe before having a flaming torch shoved through his face.
  • The Goblin Champion in Water Town's sewers gets hit with the full brunt of this trope when Goblin Slayer forces himself back to his feet from the brink of death and furiously strangles it with hair collected from a nearby skeleton, akin to using a garrote. Unable to shake off the damn thing that's killing it, the Champion can only see Goblin Slayer as a nightmarish, formless shadow, which then proceeds to punch one of its eyes off. Terrified and roaring in abject pain, the Champion decides to cut its losses and get the hell out of there. The rest of the goblins in the room become just as terrified from seeing the whole thing, and become even more terrified when a half-dead Goblin Slayer dares them to keep fighting, upon which they promptly follow the Champion's example and run for their lives.
    Goblin Slayer: Who's next? (throws the Champion's eye at the goblins) Is it you? Or you?!
• Happens not-infrequently in Gundam, particularly the series with more powerful Gundams, like Gundam Wing and Gundam 00.
  • This cutscene from SD Gundam G Generation Neo depicts a team of Hizacks being slaughtered one by one by an invisible assailant, which is revealed at the very end to be the Gundam Deathscythe. In many ways the video feels like an Homage to Predator, thanks to the jungle backdrop and infrared Impending Doom P.O.V..
  • Often, the scene will include a Mook screaming some variation of "It's a GUNDAM!" Memetic Mutation happened, and fans decided that saying this phrase means you are very quickly going to be killed by a Gundam.
  • The original series did it very well, by giving us Char 'Red Comet' Aznable, so feared that his entering the battle provoked an Oh, Crap! moment (and would continue doing so for the entire series), attacking the Gundam with everything he had and realizing he was Shooting Superman. Later Zeon mechas had weapons that could theorically destroy the Gundam, but by that point Amuro's body count justified his nickname of White Devil, and in one occasion we were treated to a Zeon force that outnumbered the heroes four to one and outgunned them by six to one being effortlessly destroyed by the Gundam, with the viewers' point of view being the one of the Zeon's commander having an Oh, Crap! moment.
  • MS IGLOO gives a nice example in the third episode, which takes place just a bit after the Gundam makes its debut on the battlefield. We see a three-second video of the Gundam chopping up a Zaku... from the Zaku's perspective. What with the Gundam's pitiless face, glowing yellow eyes, and the sheer terror in the pilot's voice, it's very obvious why Zeon decided to call it the "White Devil".
  • Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt plays a similar clip, with a Zaku being mercilessly torn apart by a Gundam far more powerful than it is. In this case the Gundam pilot was deliberately toying with the Zaku to maximize the pilot's fear before killing him.
  • Gundam Build Fighters Try plays it for laughs in Episode 8, where the Cold Opening shows the Try Fighters facing Team Angelfish, who only use amphibious mecha. However, the randomized battlefield they get is a tundra, so all the water is frozen over and far too thick to break. As the horror sets in in, Team Angelfish looks up and sees the silhouettes of the Try Fighters' Gundams through the snow and mist, walking slowly towards them with their eyes glowing...
• In Hellsing, this is usually how battles between Alucard and the mooks go. Indeed, Alucard seems to do this on purpose because he thinks it's funny.
  • Case in point: Walking very slowly down a corridor towards an elevator full of mooks despite having Super Speed, or allowing enemies to shoot him up a bit, just to make sure they know they have zero chance of survival when they realize their weapons barely inconvenience him.
  • When Seras drinks Pip's blood and becomes a full vampire, her transformation is enough to terrify every Nazi vampire in the vicinity, to the point of them being frozen stiff.
  • Two words: Level Zero. Both the catholic paladins and the nazi vampires immediately realize that, if they can't kill Alucard then and there, they are all going to die.
• High School D×D has a few examples. In particular, Issei is often portrayed from the enemies perspective as a terrifying, inhuman monster who can rip through everything they throw at him with nothing but his fists.
• In Higurashi: When They Cry, Mamoru Akasaka to the Mountain Hounds. While the battle is pretty cool in the anime, it's in the visual novel that it truly is a Horror Show to the Mountain Hounds, as the "fight" is told from Tetsuro Okonogi's point of view and describes how one-sided the whole thing is for the group and the narration describes him as a monster more than once during the whole thing.
• The Irregular at Magic High School: Shiba Tatsuya, in his position as a special lieutenant of the JSDF, is known as "Maheshvara" (another name for Shiva, a Hindu deity) to the Chinese forces who tried to invade Japan in Okinawa and Yokohama. At the tender age of 13 he nearly single-handedly stopped the invasion of Okinawa, using his unique decomposition magic to quite literally erase the enemy soldiers from existence with his right hand, while resurrecting his allies with his left hand. This freaked the enemy out so much, they decided that the only way to salvage the situation would be to bring in the cruisers and bombard the beaches from afar. It didn't help them much. The higher ups even forbid the utterance of that name among the soldiers. Three years later China attacked again in Yokohama on 31 of October 2095, only to be repelled once more, this time also losing almost all of their land forces involved in the attack, a third of their entire fleet and an important naval base at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. Along with a chunk of land which was obliterated in an event that was later called "The Scorched Halloween".
• Katanagatari: Episode 4 segues away from the main duo to focus on the Maniwa Insect Squad attempting to abduct Shichika's sister Nanami, to use her as a hostage. The episode takes the viewpoint of the Insect Squad, who are all fairly decent people for assassins. They all somewhat like each other, and one of them is even getting married after this mission. And then Nanami turns out to be an unstoppable, gifted, Cute and Psycho Instant Expert who just happens to look like a little ill girl. She tortures one for information, and then murders them all by mastering and then using their own ninjutsu against them.
  "There's no point in trying to commit suicide. I removed your poison molar while you were sleeping. ...I'm afraid I'm going to have to torture you now."
• In Log Horizon Shiroe realizes that to Kinjo and the rest of the Kunie clan the raid on their base of operations must have been horrifying: Two dozen warriors with inhuman abilities appear and start wiping out their defenses, and even if they die they'll get back up and keep fighting like zombies.
• During a flashback in Lycoris Recoil, the attack on the old radio tower is finally shown. At first, Majima's terrorists are actually winning against the Lycoris deployed to supress them due to his Super Hearing letting him pinpoint their locations and give orders to counter them. And then Chisato shows up, effortlessly incapacitating every one of Majima's men while he is helpless to do anything about it, even dodging when he shoots her from near point-blank range. When his blindfold comes off, the first thing he sees is her red eyes seeming like they're glowing as they reflect the light. The real kicker is that Chisato was seven years old at the time.
• An interesting example on Metal Fight Beyblade. Reiji loves to torment and scare his enemies into broken wrecks during his battle. Gingka turns the tables on him during their fight by exploiting Reiji's own fear of his enemies not being afraid of him, sending him into a fear-induced Villainous Breakdown.
• Naruto of all people manages this during his fight with Pain, where he appears as a pair of glowing eyes in the darkness (Gamabunta's mouth) before killing one of Pain's bodies.
• Sayo being hunted as a dangerous ghost in Negima! Magister Negi Magi plays this up, giving a terrifying insight into how Setsuna and Mana handle their "work".
• No Game No Life introduces the two Badass Bookworm protagonists by witnessing their victory from a game master's point of view, along with multiple accounts of how this group of people is unbeatable and has set multiple world records, crushing lifelong professional players after studying / playing their game for less than 72 hours. Then we find out that said protagonists are two NEETS whose weakness is the real world.
• This usually happens in One Piece when a notable character launches a one-man charge on his enemies. A more literal example would be during a flashback on Thriller Bark, at the time of Brook's rampage as the Humming Swordsman five years prior to the story. Hilariously enough, the one doing the scaring is also scared (Having an admitted fear of ghosts) and is only moving with the speed and lightness of a skeleton so he won't have to look at the zombies.
  • Perhaps one of the biggest examples is Luffy charging into Enies Lobby and spending many chapters just running around and annihilating everything in his path while the Marines panic.
  • Heck, one of the best examples in the series has got to be the Straw Hats vs. the Franky Family, well, it can potentially be called a fight. Early in the Water 7 arc, the Franky family steals a sizable amount of money Usopp had been guarding, and proceed to beat him up and mock him when he shows up at their hideout to try and get it back. When Luffy, Zoro, Sanji, and Chopper learn of this, they immediately head off to said hideout themselves, and kick off their entrance by punching out a Giant Mook unlucky enough to have been leaving for an errand right when they get to the front door. After that, the four proceed to blow though the Franky Family's best defenses like they weren't even there, swatted aside their best attacks effortlessly, and then systematically block off every one of their escape routes, all the while beating the everliving crap out of them one by one. When one tries to point out that the stolen money isn't with them and beating them up won't solve anything, Luffy simply punches him out and informs the remaining members that he couldn't give a rat's ass; all he's interested in is revenge for Usopp. This sequence definitively shows that, as goofy as the Straw Hats are, it is a terrible, terrible idea to make enemies out of them.
  • A more recent anime example in the Punk Hazard arc. Luffy, Zoro, Robin, and Usopp are leaving the "fire" portion of a Hailfire Peaks-style island, and are crossing a freezing cold, shark infested lake to get to the "hail" side. On the way, Brownbeard and several Mooks manage to capsize their boat, sending them into the water. After Brook manages to distract the group at a critical moment, they then find that Zoro had easily cut apart all of the sharks that were after them, and all four are on a plateau above. They're all half-frozen over and look like death, but they still manage prominent Slasher Smiles at the group as they each calmly point out which Mook they're going to steal a set of winter clothes from, freaking said Mooks out to no end. Finally, Brownbeard recognizes Luffy, which is enough to convince everyone to just get the hell out of there, though too late to prevent the winter clothes from getting stolen anyway.
  • How Usopp beats most of his enemies (the most well known example being Perona).
  • Most of the time the Straw Hat Pirates have been in Totto Land has involved Big Mom and her family and crew relentlessly sending combatants, and waves of ordinary goons, at Luffy and his crewmates — whatever she sends out never seems to be enough, and as she and her personal army pursue them out to sea, they only become greater in number and raw strength...and Luffy and the others still pummel them all. You even get the occasional short scene of the Big Mom Pirates' rank-and-file, and citizens of Totto Land, asking just how scared the family must be of the Straw Hats as they see large crowds of Big Mom's fighters mobilize where they anticipate Luffy will go.
  • During her fight with Black Maria, Nico Robin utilizes a new technique called "Demonio Fleur" where she creates a gigantic and demonic-looking copy of her torso, complete with bat wings, horns and fangs. She then proceeds to wail on the Tobiroppo with total impunity culminating with her using "Grand Jacuzzi Clutch" to break Black Maria's back, to the sheer horror of all the mooks who witnesses that, truly living up to her epithet as the "Devil Child".
• One-Punch Man goes in to a mook's (Ground Dragon) point of view as he tries to escape Saitama by digging through the ground. In the anime, the viewer sees Saitama's face suddenly pop in to view, and in both the anime and manga he's deliberately drawn in an uncanny way. From Saitama's perspective, these were just some animal-beings that annoyed him by attacking him at his place and wrecking his apartment. From Ground Dragon's perspective, he's running for dear life from an unstoppable force of power, and suddenly found the guy staring right at him in a dark tunnel.
• Overlord (2012):
  • Ainz Ooal Gown is a level 100 MMORPG character Trapped in Another World where even something around level 60 would be considered godly, and most of his direct subordinates are either as powerful or really close. As such, any fight they get into usually devolves into either Ainz or one of his minions horrifically massacring everyone in their way as onlookers watch in terror, or their opponents exhausting every attack at their disposal only to find that they haven't put a single scratch on any of them.
  • Ainz spends most of his fight against the Sunlight Scripture effortlessly tanking everything they can throw at him. The one attack that manages to damage him? It elicits laughter. Nigun's reaction is that of sheer horror, since the Dominion Authority he summoned to attack Ainz was believed to be an invincible trump card by New World standards.
    Ainz: So this is what it feels like to take damage!
  • Sebas pays a visit to an Eight Fingers building where he believes Tuare has been taken. He's greeted by four of the Six Arms, the Eight Fingers security division and some of the strongest fighters in the Re-Estize Kingdom. Sebas doesn't give them the time to process their horror.
  • Sebas's fight against Zero, the last of the Six Arms, starts with Zero charging up and unleashing his strongest attack, which does precisely dick, and ends with Sebas lightly tapping Zero in the head with his foot. Zero can only weakly mutter "What the Hell Are You?" as he dies.
  • Volume 7 is an exercise in Mook Horror Show, the problem being that very few of the mooks are Asshole Victims. Even worse, Ainz had to set them up so they'd actually go to the tomb (he'd ordered it hidden away previously) to see how it'd perform against intruders, but the difference in power is still such that he barely learned anything past "we're much stronger than these guys".
    • One team runs into a swarm of zombies, and only gets past them with a barrage of spells. This triggers a trap where they're about to be crushed by exploding zombies, from which they barely escape. And then they run into an elder lich, an undead powerful enough to commands the vast swarms of zombies they fought. Seeing as it isn't attacking, they try to negotiate with it, addressing it as the tomb's master... only to see six more coming up behind them. The team breaks and runs, only to fall into a teleport trap and end up in a room full of cockroaches. The cockroach king is kind enough to tell them that they made it as far as the second floor before sending his minions to eat them alive.
    • One team consists of a Smug Snake and his team of mentally-broken elf slaves. He is effortlessly beaten by a giant hamster, and when he loses his arms, they make no effort to heal him, even kicking his corpse for good measure.
    • The last team faces off against Ainz himself. Not only does he fight them to a standstill, he then reveals he's not a warrior but a caster, and takes off the ring that was hiding his Power Level. The team's caster immediately vomits on realizing just how badly screwed they are. Oh, and then he shows that he can cast Time Stop...
  • Volume 9 provides, for everyone who isn't Ainz or one of his subordinates, the Battle of Katze Plains. Good lord, the Battle of Katze Plains...
    • For a little context, Emperor Jircniv of the Baharuth Empire formed an alliance with Ainz and roped him into participating in one of his annual wars with the Re-Estize Kingdom in order to show his power to the world and unite all of humanity against him. To say that it worked too well would be an understatement: because Jircniv asked Ainz to start the battle using his strongest spell, Ainz goes and casts a Super Tier spell that instantly kills 70,000 soldiers from the Kingdom. Both the remaining Kingdom brass and soldiers, along with the onlooking Imperial Knights, become absolutely horrified. Nimble, one of Jircniv's elite guards, tries to mask his fear by commenting to Ainz that it was a magnificent spell. When Ainz starts laughing at this, Nimble becomes terrified that he may have offended Ainz somehow, but Ainz gives him an answer that makes him realize this was just the tip of the iceberg:
      Ainz: You said that was a magnificent spell, just now? There's no need for you to be so wary, but... My spell is not over yet, you know?
    • While Ainz's spell did kill 70,000 soldiers, their deaths were just fuel to summon five Dark Young: gigantic goat-like monstrosities filled with mouths and tentacles that proceed to trample the Kingdom's army underhoof while their bleating and the sound of the soldiers being crushed try to drown one another. After-battle reports would indicate that the Dark Young went on to crush over 100,000 soldiers, with the total killcount adding up to around 180,000. Some of the survivors of the battle would end up suffering PTSD attacks at the sound of a goat's bleating, and a seer from the Slane Theocracy, who bore witness to the battle, would end up locking herself in her room, becoming too traumatized to ever dare leave.
    • If you think the Empire suffered no casualties, then clearly you haven't been paying attention: one of the Dark Young heads towards their camp in order to collect Ainz so that he may clean up the battlefield personally. The sight of the damn thing walking towards them makes the knights break formation and run for their lives; at least 100 knights were trampled to death by their comrades, who were too desperate to get away to notice or care.
    • And just in case it wasn't clear enough what kind of horror Ainz unleashed upon the battlefield... The name of the spell he used? "Iä! Shub-Niggurath!". As in, the Mother of a Thousand Young herself. Ainz describes the Dark Young as her "adorable little babies", and becomes elated at being able to summon five, calling it a new record. And it wasn't even his strongest spell!
    • Jircniv comes dangerously close to losing his sanity upon hearing the battle reports, and the anime portrays him Laughing Mad at how badly he screwed up.
• At one point in the anime of Phantom ~ Requiem for the Phantom, Zwei is chasing after Scythe Master completely from Scythe's perspective, with Zwei laughing creepily and flashing a deranged Slasher Smile the entire scene.
• Pumpkin Scissors: Randel Oland is very much a Gentle Giant... until he opens his blue lantern, a literal Berserk Button that sends him into a hypnotic trance in which he becomes an unstoppable killing machine who knows no pain or fear of death. As he slowly advances toward his targets, expect a lot of loss of confidence, quite a bit of pants-wetting, and screams to "Kill him! For the love of god, KILL HIM!"
• s-CRY-ed: Kazuma has been pictured like this on at least one occasion — during his Unstoppable Rage following Kimishima's death, when he tears into a squad of ordinary HOLD troops. We get to see his approach from Scheris's viewpoint — an unstoppable monster stalking out of the flames, spreading death and destruction in his wake...
• Both seasons of the anime Sekirei begin with one of these, as human soldiers come face-to-face with super-powered aliens. The second season, in particular, is noteworthy since the same incident is shown from the point of view of the Sekirei a few episodes later. This incident is the reason the Single Numbers inspire so much fear among the younger Sekirei. The first five wiped out a multi-national invasion force in a matter of minutes, with barely any effort. Witnessing the destructive power of their subjects filled Takehito with horror, triggering a My God, What Have I Done? moment. Big Bad Minaka, on the other hand, is inspired to begin the Sekirei Plan with the intention of forging a "New Age of the Gods".
• Tenchi Muyo: War on Geminar has Kenshi scaring the crap out of his enemies in Episodes 8 and 11. Episode 8 even shows closeups of two random Mooks crying and shivering in pure terror as Kenshi rips through them like tissue paper; he also does a convincing imitation of the tactics of the creature from Alien to take down a squad of mecha trying to hunt him down. (It's mentioned survivors of his attack quit even though their side actually won at the end of the episode.) In Episode 11, he goes berserk in response to a particularly dirty tactic and actually kills the guy who came up with that plan in the first place.
• Tokyo Ghoul features multiple examples reminding the audience just how scary Ghouls really are, when viewed through the eyes of CCG mooks.
  • Kaneki disarms several soldiers and then looms over them, drawn as a black figure with one glowing eye and a Slasher Smile. One mook promptly starts weeping and loses control over his bladder.
  • Whenever Yoshimura comes out of retirement to fight, the focus shifts to the Investigators facing him. It is a healthy reminder that even though he is a Vegetarian Vampire, Yoshimura is also considered to be one of the most dangerous Ghouls in Tokyo. Several mooks are seen weeping in terror, and more than one starts urinating when faced with the full horror of the elder of the two Owls.
• In Trigun, Vash the Stampede sometimes plays up the horror factor that his reputation gives him, since it gets him out of fights and he actually has a strict moral code against killing. He's done the sneak-around-and-pick-your-dudes-off thing and the Implacable Man advance-while-singing-a-terrifying-ditty-about-genocide song: "Total Slaughter, Total Slaughter, I won't leave a single man alive. Ladi-Ladi-Die, Genocide. Ladi-Ladi-dud, an Ocean of Blood. Let's begin the killing time." It didn't work, though kicking a rocket fired from an RPG by the terrified mook, AFTER singing that, into the ceiling DID work.
  • This is most explicitly shown in one episode, where Monev the Gale found out the hard way how scary a genuinely angry Vash can be when Monev gunned down a bunch of innocent civilians. He compared Vash's Glowing Eyes of Doom to the eyes of the devil himself.
• The Vision of Escaflowne has a scene in which Van goes completely apeshit and effortlessly slaughters all of Dilandau's Dragonslayers. Most of the action isn't shown — there is only the sound of the unfortunate soldiers' screams over Dilandau's intercom. Hint: when your heroic protagonist can make the villain (who's been established as a complete and utter lunatic) freak out, it's a sign that things have gone very, very wrong.
• It happens twice Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, with Yuya being the monster. The first time had him first go into Awakening, where he brushes off the Obelisk Force's attacks with an inhuman indifference. At first unnerved by this, the Obelisk Force keep attacking. But when Yuya unleashes his Odd-Eyes Rebellion Dragon, they're all wiped out at once.
  • The second time had Serena and Ruri duel against Yuya, who was entering his Awakened state after a villain threatened Yuzu. Serena and Ruri's monsters actually back away and whimper in fear of Yuya. Yuya unleashes Odd-Eyes Raging Dragon, who viciously destroys every other card on the field and attacks the girls with an inferno.

Comic Books

• The 2000 AD series Jaegir is set in the universe of Rogue Trooper. Jaegir was once a soldier stationed on Nu Earth, and she remembers Rogue as, in her own words, a "blue demon" who tore through her comrades, ripping their throats out, while his allies' ghosts laughed and joked.
• Animal Man: After Lennox murders Buddy's family on orders from some corrupt executives, Animal Man snaps and hunts them all down for revenge. It's played like a horror movie, with him using his powers to brutally murder each of them one by one — pulling one off his boat and drowning him, burying another alive, using his super strength to punch the elevator yet another one is riding in clear out the building, and then finally killing Lennox himself by viciously electrocuting and mauling him. Nothing they do or say can stop him.
• Astro City:
  • A small-time crook sees the superhero Jack-in-the-Box change into his civilian clothes. At first, he thinks that he's struck gold by discovering this potentially valuable information, but then starts to imagine all the ways in which selling the info could go wrong, including nightmares of being pursued by Jack (a light-hearted-yet-potentially-scary Spider-Man Expy). He eventually gets so stressed out he leaves town without revealing the secret to anyone.
  • This effect is also used by the Confessor, a Batman Expy who relies on the fear he gets from mooks — especially for the first Confessor, who was actually a vampire with all of the associated powers.
• Atomic Robo does this with vampires from another dimension. Robo seals off the lab as Jenkins re-enacts just about every classic horror scene upon the vamps.
  New Guy: We're trapped in here with them?
  Robo: Oh, no. We're not trapped in here with them. They're trapped in here with Jenkins.
• Batman:
  • Striking fear into criminals is kind of Batman's whole shtick, to the point that a yellow ring tried to conscript him into the Sinestro Corps, which is powered by fear. In other words, the ring decided that Batman was the scariest thing in the entire space sector. And the only reason it didn't take was because it detected Batman is equal parts fear and sheer force of will, a green ring alignment. Later, during Blackest Night, a Sinestro Corps ring decided to settle for Scarecrow. Granted, Batman was going on his exodus through time during that event, so the ring wasn't able to try for the Caped Crusader again.
  • In the Season 11 Smallville comics, something similar happened, with Parallax controlling Yellow Rings into taking hosts on Earth, even pre-existing Green Lanterns. Except that this time, when the Yellow Ring started its usual spiel about how he can inspire great fear, Batman interrupted it with a Death Glare and the words, "take a deeper look. Let it linger." The Yellow Lantern paused, did so, then immediately went quiet. That's right: Batman scared a weapon powered by fear, controlled by the embodiment of fear, into submission.
• The Crow: The goons Eric slaughters believe him until the very end to be simply a maniac who is Not Afraid to Die, so they just keep coming at him, figuring that he'll eventually go down if they hit him enough times.
  Final Boy: [shooting Eric point-blank in the head, splattering blood all over him] Walk away from that, mother—
  Eric: [covered with blood yet completely unharmed] Scared?
  Final Boy: No.
  Eric: You should be. [shoves the mook's head into a wall with so much force that it immediately explodes in blood]
• Whenever any Ghost Rider loses control on his Spirit of Vengeance, expect this trope to be played in full force. Johnny and Danny have theirs on tighter leashes, so it's rarer for them. Robbie has less control and so far all we see of him as All-New Ghost Rider feels like watching a Slasher Movie except every victim is a criminal.
• Immortal Hulk:
  • The first issue has the Hulk ripping through a biker gang. We don't see what he does to them, but we do get to hear it. Hulk himself doesn't even appear on-page until he gets to his target, the last person left in the building.
  • Much later on, Betty Ross (as Red Harpy) tears through several of Fortean's hired goons, while a terrified Jackie McGee watches.
• Scrooge in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is often quite good in scaring the shit out of his enemies. The most egregious examples come from the ending chapter and a side story: in the ending chapter the Beagle Boys, numbering eight with Granpa Beagle, are running from the Money Bin with some stolen money, only to discover that they're being chased by Scrooge, causing Granpa Beagle (then the only one to have met him before) to faint in terror before Scrooge effortlessly knocks them out while complaining of old age; in a side story set in Klondike a group of mooks who had already faced him once learns they can steal Scrooge's mining claim if they prevent him from talking with Goldie, decides to beat him up and give him to the Mounties (It Makes Sense in Context), but upon learning there's only two dozen of them they try and search for some other people.
• Marvelman is an early example of this being done intentionally. When the title character is invading a secret government base, we're treated to mooks describing him as some sort of monster.
• In newuniversal, John Tensen — now empowered as Justice — hunts down the gang who shot him and finds them in a darkened warehouse. First there's a voice from the dark, then he dismembers them with the Laser Blade that his new powers project.
• Paperinik New Adventures:
  • Xadhoom is one of the very few people in a Disney comic allowed to break the Thou Shalt Not Kill rule... And boy does she take advantage of it every time she meets the Evronians. The series' protagonist Paperinik is no slouch himself. Usually it's masked by the Amusing Injuries of the Mooks, but those who escaped have nightmares about him. Even the emotionally-crippled Evronians (upon seeing him on their freakin' mobile homeworld, one of them who had a previous run-in with Paperinik started trying to convince himself it was another nightmare). And then, in the reboot series, we once enjoyed Paperinik getting really pissed, and it was downright scary. Oh, did we mention that Paperinik is the Anti-Hero identity assumed in some Italian stories by Donald Duck?
  • In 'classic' Paperinik stories, this seems subverted, as Paperinik and most crooks have an amiable chat when the latter are caught in the act before the criminals go to give themselves up to the police, but whenever the Beagle Boys or someone new commit a crime the Double Subversion becomes clear: Paperinik will defeat them anyway (and in a few occasions has beaten up and caught hundreds of criminals at once) and isn't shy to repeat the performance with criminals from out of town or the Beagle Boys (who are simply too stubborn to know when to quit), so the other criminals choose a way that allows them to dodge at least the beating.
  • Paperinik is also prone to do this literally. As in going at the homes of criminals from out of town who plan to come in his city, show them a video of what he did to criminals stupid enough to commit crimes in Duckburg, and ask them if they really want to come to Duckburg. The fact a sadistic superhero just proved he knows where they live only amps up the terror factor.
  • In comic books Donald can do it even without dressing as Paperinik, as shown in "Donald and Reginella's Wedding". Just the sight early in the story of Donald starting loading plenty of salt shells for his shotgun should be enough to warn the reader shit would go down, let alone him furiously shouting threats at the Big Bad while wielding it (and after having shot him in the ass twice)... And indeed, the first encounter was so bad that the villains then come at him with an entire army. It wasn't enough, and afterward Donald can dictate rather harsh terms on pain of him finishing the job — without killing them.
• Rob Liefeld's Prophet character did this a couple times. Once to be like Batman and once to be like Rambo.
• Planet Hulk: Korg was one of the Kronan Invaders who served as the antagonists in Thor's debut issue. Many years later, after befriending the Hulk, he developed into a somewhat more heroic character, but he was still terrified of the thunder god, and, in a flashback from his point of view, we saw the Kronans' battle with Thor depicted as one of these.
• The Punisher:
  • An annual issue of The Punisher MAX shows the story from the POV of an arsonist, being pursued by the Punisher through Manhattan. It never once gave the Punisher's perspective; he was presented as simply an unstoppable force that the criminal just couldn't get away from. Earlier in the same issue, the CIA was treated to a very literal horror show when they witnessed Frank massacre dozens of mobsters via satellite. Even Frank's old buddy Microchip is shaken up by what he sees.
  • Also from The Punisher MAX, "The Cell" has Frank get arrested and sent to Ryker's Island. From there he instigates a massive riot to cause his real targets (the mobsters indirectly responsible for his family's deaths) to panic and run for an exit... except that at every exit is a sobbing convict telling them to turn back before getting headshotted by Frank. The mobsters flee back to their original cell, wonder why Frank has it in for them personally and are about to turn on each other when Frank comes in.
  • Arguably, Punisher is on the receiving end of this when he goes up against Daken in Dark Reign. He survives the battle for several hours only because Daken finds Punisher's efforts at stopping him with mere bullets to be entertaining. Daken slowly dismantles Punisher over that time, then gets sick of it and reduces him to a pile of severed body parts tumbling down into the sewer with a few quick blows.
  • Later on, in an act of poetic justice, it is now Daken himself who is on the receiving end of this, courtesy of a newly revived, Bloodstone-powered, and very pissed off Punisher (now going by the moniker Franken-Castle).
  • The Punisher: The End has a very short implied one: Sometime after a global nuclear war is about to start, the guards at Sing-Sing are ordered to execute the prisoners, saving the Punisher for last. As they're about to enter Frank's cell, the bombs hit, and the lights go out. Then one of the guards yells at his squadmate to let go of his rifle...
• In Runaways, you wouldn't think that a sweet little girl who talks to plants could be all that terrifying, but Klara once accidentally tore apart a squad of paramilitary goons and managed to catch the son of Wolverine unawares. A mock psych-profile released in advance of the team's guest appearance in Avengers Academy suggested that the Marvel Universe at large sees her as a Creepy Child and prefers to give her a wide berth.
• Sin City loves this trope. Wallace, Miho, and Marv have all inspired a great deal of dread in their enemies.
  • When Marv killed the police death-squad goons at the Farm after they had just blown away his parole officer Lucille, he faced the last one and said "That there is one damn fine coat you're wearing." The next page showed him chasing the guy down with a hatchet while cackling like a lunatic.
  • Miho has an entire mob family quaking in fear throughout Family Values. She even intimidates one mook into killing his own brother.
  • Wallace had a guild of assassins running scared to the point where the mob boss running the organization decided just to leave him alone and not try to get revenge.
• The Spectre does this as his shtick in most incarnations. Unlike many comic book supers, he is perfectly willing to kill and often does, and usually has the reality warping powers to make the event horrific and terrifying for the evildoers.
• It's easy to forget because of his family-friendly portrayals, but Spider-Man sometimes comes across this way, especially when he intervenes in muggings. Just imagine how you'd react to a gruesomely contorting silhouette with wide, staring eyes scuttling down the wall at you...
  • In one particular Spider-Man instance, he was fighting a costumed mercenary in a secure medical facility. The mercenary didn't realize that he was out-matched, until Spidey tore a reinforced steel fire door from the wall and threw it at him. Effortlessly. After that, the mercenary was fleeing in terror. Ordinary opponents generally don't realize what the "friendly neighborhood" Spider-Man is capable of.
  • There's another bit where one of his enemies has hired a professional merc team to take Spider-Man out. They "chase" him into Central Park and, while the leader is giving a rousing speech about how Spider-Man's rep had to be overblown and that he was just an amateur, Spider-Man is taking out each of the other mercs behind the leader one at a time, while they're traveling in a tight formation and looking just about every direction except the one that matters (up). The leader ends his speech to turn around and gauge its impact on his men only to find them all gone... and then he goes berserk. Spider-Man ends up leaving the unconscious mercs webbed up around the house of the enemy who'd hired them.
  • Titania was on the receiving end of one of these during the Secret Wars (1984). Coming fresh off of a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown of She-Hulk, Titania was feeling pretty smug and superior... and then Spider-Man showed her just what smug and superior really meant by using his agility to dodge all of her attacks, slugging her hard enough for her to feel it with absolute impunity, and tearing into all the psychological fault lines papered over with her newfound power mere weeks ago. It culminated in Spidey tossing her through a wall and over a cliff casually, and Titania having a phobia about facing the web-slinger that lasted for years.
  • In his Anti-Hero days, Venom has this trope even more strongly. He even threatens to eat your brains! Backfired once, though. Rescuing an innocent girl from perceived danger? Okay, cool. Being a giant slime monster with foot long teeth gave the girl horrible nightmares.
  • Scarlet Spider: Kaine is a living demonstration of what a Spider-Man who doesn't play nice looks like. During The Clone Saga, he terrifies pretty much everyone he comes across, leaving a trail of bodies killed by his signature move, 'The Mark of Kaine', which essentially uses his enhanced wall-crawling powers to burn handprints in people's faces. On his return in Spider-Island, he's arguably even scarier, since he looks and dresses enough like Spidey that everyone mistakes him for the web-slinger (much to his irritation), has stingers that emerge from beneath his wrists and controls spiders. Add all that to the terror that Spidey sometimes inspires, the fact he can transform into The Other following his second resurrection, that he's prone to Unstoppable Rage, has no problem with killing or torture and he's noticeably faster and stronger than Spider-Man and you get a Terror Hero that has drug cartels wetting themselves, the 'Superior' Spider-Man engaging in a massive freak-out and is capable of tearing through the X-Men and (briefly) killing Wolverine.
• The Strange Talent of Luther Strode is the purposeful embodiment of this trope, being the result of the thought "What if Peter Parker never had Uncle Ben in his life but still got superpowers?" Luther shows very little restraint when his or others lives are in danger after attempting to be a nonlethal vigilante , and with notable super strength he's able to gib/blow to pieces the average human torso with a glancing blow. This isn't helped by the fact his powers have made him a near 7 foot wall of muscle, meaning when he appears, he's towering above most enemies he faces. The trope is especially played up in the first two volumes where several average criminals and police are left with him or another super powered character.
• Superman:
  • Once done when an enemy had made him very sick. He reminds the villains that he now cannot control the force of his blows.
  • What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way? has Superman doing this to the Elite to show them why a superhero shouldn't kill people. The result is downright terrifying.
    Superman: He went into orbit at Mach 7. If you had Super Hearing, any second you will hear the... [Beat] Pop!^note Thankfully, he's lying.
  • Happened off-panel, but one issue of Batman had a thug explaining why he moved back to Gotham from Metropolis: one second, he was in the middle of a job, the next he was two miles up in the air, with a calm, gentle voice in his ear telling him to reexamine his life choices. Even facing the goddamned Batman would be better than to risk testing the patience of a guy who could do that, he decided.
  • In Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Krem ambushes Ruthye and Supergirl and shoots one arrow at the latter. Then he watches how she calmly gets up and walks towards him, ignoring several more arrows becoming embedded in her bust. Krem's crony swings his sword at her, but the woman nonchalantly catches the blade. Then her eyes glow red, and she states she could not care less for their weapons before delivering a beatdown.
  • The Strange Revenge of Lena Luthor: Supergirl tracking down the members of the criminal gang who tried to gaslight her friend Lena into madness is depicted, from their viewpoint, as being hunted by a relentless invulnerable monster who will find them anywhere and cannot be outraced, fooled, stopped or hurt. Kara is even depicted in one panel as one would expect from a vampire or movie monster: she is swooping down from high, at night, with her arms outstretched and her hands curled into a claw-like position as she lunges towards her runaway frightened prey.
  • In Way of the World, Dolok time-travels once and again to escape from Supergirl; however, every time he believes he is finally safe, she shows up out of nowhere and starts hitting him with gusto.
  • The Supergirl from Krypton (2004): When the Earth's heroes invade Apokolips, a legion of parademons turn themselves into suicide bombers in a futile effort to stop Superman. Their comrades can do nothing but watch how dozens of parademons detonate upon impact against Superman's body while the Kryptonian hero relentlessly strides forward, unharmed and unhindered.
  • Day of the Dollmaker: The titular villain is visibly terrified when Supergirl crashes into his lair, trashes his army of murderous toys and approaches him slowly and calmly, her glowing eyes blasting every weapon he tries to fetch.
  • The Death of Luthor: The titular villain's mooks are not overly concerned about the police car chasing after them, but they become frightened out of their witts when they notice Supergirl flying towards them.
  • Played with in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, a Perspective Flip of the DC Universe from the perspective of Superman's arch-nemesis Lex Luthor. As seen in the page image, there are several scenes where Superman is depicted as a terrifying, alien and unstoppable menace to the world and the humans around him... but then, those words 'Perspective Flip' are relevant here. We're seeing him from the skewed and twisted perspective of Lex Luthor, who is of course going to be distorting him.
• A comedic variant occurs in one issue of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl in which a base full of A.I.M. agents go into a panic when they hear that Squirrel Girl has just shown up.
• In Watchmen, the scene in Rorschach's backstory in which the kidnapper comes home plays out something like this.
  • Dr. Manhattan does this in the Vietnam War where he effortlessly vaporizes Vietcong as he rolls.
  • Rorschach actually outdoes Dr. Manhattan in this during the riots. Where as the rioters argued with Dr. Manhattan, the people left immediately when Rorschach just made his presences known to them.
• X-Men:
  • Wolverine has a few of these under his own belt. One of the most notorious events happened during the Hellfire Club's abduction of Jean Grey/Phoenix in The Dark Phoenix Saga. All the other X-Men were either captured or incapacitated; Wolvie's sent down a storm drain in a flood. He washes up in the basement, and proceeds to stealthily go up level by level, since even HE can't fight the whole club at once. "Stealthy", in this case, meaning "gut everyone in the room before they can make noise." He grabs one poor schlub to interrogate him, starts off by giving him an utterly terrifying description of what he and his claws can do, and mentally notes to himself that he's toned down since joining the X-Men, since he actually let this one live long enough to even answer his questions. AFTER, it must be reminded, he just eviscerated a few dozen other guards on the way up. This scene also shows up in the animated series — the series obviously cut out the slaughter but still had Wolverine telling the mook that his adamantium claws could cut through the mook's armor like a hot knife through butter and implying that they could do worse to flesh.
  • Super Soldier Tyke-Bomb X-23 inflicts more than a few of these. Wiry teenage girl (or worse, skinny pre-teen) she may be, but a trained assassin with a fearsome Healing Factor and implanted Absurdly Sharp Blades is what nightmares are made of... assuming that you live. And that is when she is not hopped up on the Trigger Scent. Probably the most epic example comes from X-Force: After having been recaptured by Kimura and tortured, Laura makes her escape by flooding the entire base with the trigger scent via the sprinkler system. Even Kimura, who Laura can't even harm to begin with, responded with an Oh, Crap!. We should probably also mention that Laura only has one arm at the time thanks to Kimura doing some work on her with a chainsaw before she got loose.

Comic Strips

• Sometimes used with The Phantom. Even more than Batman, he is a Bad Ass Normal who depends on the mooks thinking him a supernatural menace, so it fits.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Three of these are inflicted on Alan Jonah's goons by Monster X.
• Chapter 8 of Ace Combat: Wings of Unity treats us to an entire Exile army group being all but exterminated by the combined magic of none other than Princesses Celestia and Luna. The narration (thankfully) doesn't go into excessive detail...but we're still treated to a scene where all but four pegasi are either vaporized as they scream in agony, or slammed against a mountain when they try to retreat. All of this is seen from the Exile's perspective, only shifting back to the heroes once the magical onslaught ends. And those four survivors? They're later ambushed and brutally killed by an as-yet-unnamed pegasus, with the last one begging for his life before being killed via Neck Snap.
• Boldores And Boomsticks: Chapter 42 has Team RWBY raid Team Skull's base after Team Skull steals Nebby. The chapter is mostly from Team Skull's point of view and has them be utterly demolished by the huntresses in training.
• All the rescue teams and the Draconian Empire dish this out to the Monkey King's entire army once Latias brings their shield down and continue to do so after they have managed to break into their base in Brave New World.
• In The Butcher Bird, this is typically the result whenever the Nightmare Pirates fight the Marines or other pirate crews. The most standout examples being the man-eating ghouls, the hallucinogen-slinging armorer, and, later on, the absolutely massive Ghost Ship.
• The Cheating Death: Those That Lived saw, during the 40th Games, the careers dying of brutal death from Lammy Phyronix's traps.
• In Child of the Storm, Warren is a somewhat mopey teenager and the protégé of Sean Cassidy. After about 25 chapters of hints, suggestions and one partial demonstration (zombie dragons were involved) of exactly how dangerous Warren is, chapter 70 really puts it on show with a section from the point of view of a nameless HYDRA paratrooper. Him and about twenty of his colleagues are wearing derivatives of the Falcon suit. All he sees is a flicker of silver as Warren first slices their Quinjet in half, with a number of paratroopers being sucked into the engines, then the rest are picked off one by one, with little to no use of the Gory Discretion Shot, before the half mad Agent finally gets a look at Warren, who then removes his wings, letting him fall to his death. The description is like a horror movie based on the Old Testament.
• The Heroes Association is on the receiving end in Enemy Number One due to believing Saitama is a villain and him showing up at their headquarters to tell them to leave him alone. From his perspective, a bunch of annoying freaks keep attacking him all the time. From theirs, an unstoppable enemy is ruthlessly tearing through even S-Rank heroes in an effort to destroy the Association.
• A Familiar Void: Chapters 43-44 show the perspective of Reconquista soldiers and mages invading the Insect kingdom with genocidal intent, only to be torn apart by various insect soldiers, Goams, and Hornet herself.
• The Firefly fic Forward has a scene showing the mooks' perspective when River is carving through them. She isn't shown as cute or adorable; she's portrayed as insane and terrifying.
• Guardians, Wizards, and Kung-Fu Fighters has a scene in Chapter 7 when a group of Phobos' soldiers are being hunted through the woods by wolf Jade.
• In Kim Possible fanfic His Honor, The Mayor, Drew Lipsky this turns out to be the cause of Kim's Sanity Slippage, Global Justice has been Screening the Call to keep her away from missions that might be too traumatic for her but due to a mixup she and and some Ax-Crazy Cowboy Cop got sent to a low level minion lair and saw the Cowboy Cop executing several Mooks. Kim was so traumatized she tried to sneak up and kill the guy in retaliation before seeing a friend of hers who happened to be close by injured and going to save her instead. She later blacked the whole thing out but she's been suffering mental problems ever since.
• Happens in The Legend of Spyro: A New Dawn when Cynder cleaves her way through a Gargoyle outpost in her Superpowered Evil Side. It was written this way to show how destructive and sadistic Cynder's Dark Form was.
• In Mass Effect: Human Revolution chapter 17, a Blacklight squad on the hunt discover that their prey is being protected by Adam Jensen. We see through the squad leader's perspective as it ends poorly for them, to say the least.
• In Mythos Effect, this is the reaction Turian soldiers tend to have when fighting New Earth Federation ground forces. But, given that the NEF fights almost exclusively with Eldritch Abominations, that's understandable.
• Happens a lot in The Night Unfurls. Considering how the protagonist is a Terror Hero, has a demented fusion between saw and cleaver as his weapon of choice, and is always covered in the gore of his foes whenever he is active, this is understandable. It is exaggerated in Chapter 8 of the original story, where Beasley and the Mortadella brothers, the Arc Villains of the Feoh/Ur Arc, are the ones being terrorised.
• Oogway's Little Owl: Taylor's first fight against a group of croc bandits is this from the crocs' perective, due to a combination of luck, misunderstanding, and a conveniently timed rain storm making them think they were fighting some kind of demon owl, instead of a terrified, half-trained initiate.
• Likewise, in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Power Girl fanfic Origin Story, fugitive Kryptonian Alex Harris's fight against the Thunderbolts acts as one between Venom struggling to contain her and Moonstone's panicked thoughts of how Alex is going to kill them all.
• In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, Ash submits Hunter J's minions to this when he gets captured aboard her airship. Unfortunately, when he confronts J herself, she turns out to be nowhere near as easy.
• In Pony POV Series, the Mane Six (particularly Rarity) pull this on General Lone Ranger, which the author admitted was a Shout-Out to Superman vs. the Elite, including a scene where Rarity demonstrates how utterly outmatched Lone Ranger is by pretending to mortally wound him.
• Xander in The Pride of Sunnydale is treated like a combination of the Terminator and Jason Voorhees by vampires, including silently killing them while others have their back turned.
• The Red Dragon's Saber: Artoria's beatdown of the Fallen Angels is partially shown from Raynare's point of view. It shows her growing frustration over getting her butt kicked and then her terror when Artoria chops off their wings.
• "The Fire", one of the companion one-shots from The Rending Trilogy, does a lot to show just what kind of Nightmare Fuel Yang Xiao Long could be if you finally did something to really make her snap. In this case, that something would be killing Ruby. It takes place from the villain's perspective as it describes a horrible red-eyed flaming beast (they explicitly never refer to Yang as a woman, but "it", a thing) and how she effortlessly shrugs off and ignores everything they try to throw at her while brutally killing them one-by-one before finally incinerating Cinder and then declaring her intention to hunt down Torchwick and do the same to him.
• In the Transformers fanfiction Snap, Crackle, Pop, it used this trope when Sunstreaker, believing that the Decepticons had captured his brother, assaulted the Decepticon base by himself and brutally murdered many, many mooks in a way that impressed many of the 'Cons watching security footage of the attack in progress. As one Decepticon put it, "Why isn't this guy a Decepticon? Seriously, why did we never recruit him?"
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Smallville fic Stakes and Fenceposts, Clark Kent is portrayed this way to the Buffy-verse villains and heroes. It gets to the point where The First Evil stacks the odds overwhelmingly in Caleb's favor: surrounding the city in a forcefield so Clark can't leave and the sun is blocked out so he can't recharge, triggering an earthquake and other disasters so Clark has to rescue the citizens and tire himself out, mutating Caleb into an Eldritch Abomination with incredible strength, speed, durability, and magically toxic Sinister Scythe Combat Tentacles, magically making Caleb untouchable to Clark's blows and immune to his heat vision, and backing him up with an army of vampires all armed with kryptonite swords and machine guns loaded with kryptonite bullets. Despite this incredible advantage, Clark annihilates the vampires before they have a chance to come near him, and takes down Caleb with a combination of his powers and wits. Caleb gets an inner monologue where he expresses how utterly outclassed and terrified he is, and without the advantages he would have died in a instant, considering Clark the real monster. Buffy and the others, watching from a safe distance, are terrified as well. The First also made one huge mistake: It didn't know Clark can fly.
• Sword Art Online Abridged:
  • Episode 4 leans into this when Rosalia and her minions try to mug Kirito and Silica. Rosalia delivers a Breaking Speech that reduces Kirito to a Laughing Mad mess bearing an Evil Grin as he makes The Slow Walk towards her Mooks, and when he explains they can't deal enough damage to overcome his passive health regeneration, they're reduced to Tears of Fear.
  • In the second season, Asuna repeatedly subjects Sugou's minions to this. When she breaks out of her cage in Episode 14 they can only shriek "IT'S LOOSE!!" before she tears into them, and when she escapes again in Episode 15, the result looks like something from the Alien franchise, with a dropped walkie-talkie lying in a dark hallway beneath a flickering light fixture. Furthering the comparisons, Episode 16 reveals that Asuna was eating employees to scare them away from Sugou's mind control research.
    Voice on Radio: Bravo, come in! Do you have visual on the prisoner?! I repeat, do you... Oh, lord... IT'S IN THE VENTS!!
    (inhuman snarls and sounds of carnage)
• In A Thing of Vikings, the Battle of the Sound of Berk at the end of Book I is told mostly from the perspective of the combined Anglo-Danish fleet trying to reach Berk in order to attack it. Unfortunately, since they backed Hiccup into a corner, he doesn't hold back in defending his home and his people, and the shattered (and much reduced) fleet ends up running for its life, thoroughly traumatized.
• In This Bites!, four of the weaker Straw Hats (Nami, Chopper, Cross, and Soundbite) instill such terror into the Marines they fight at Enies Lobby that the one calling for reinforcements is reduced to simply repeating "Oh god" over and over and calls them "demons", inspiring Cross to give his friends the collective moniker of "the Demon Trio".
• Tiberium Wars:
  • The introductions of the Nod and GDI commandos are both cases of this. The Nod commando's initial appearance is as an untrackable, cloaked, and impossibly precise killing machine gunning down whole GDI squads by herself. The GDI commando, meanwhile, is an unkillable juggernaut with superhuman strength and a railgun capable of blowing soldiers to ribbons, but is still a surprisingly clever tactician who outwits and outguns his opponents.
  • The Mammoth Tank's introduction includes Nod Militants in literal pants crapping fear, when they realize that what those "Moving houses" actually are.
• The Totally Amazing Spider-Man: The spies find themselves on this end of the trope. After being ordered by Jerry to bring Spider-Man in for questioning, the spies attempt to lure him in by staging a mugging, but quickly find themselves out of their element. Clover screams for her life and ends up in Spidey's web, to her disgust, and Alex runs for her life when she sees Spider-Man approach. Afterwards, Clover is far more cautious in trying to capture Spider-Man.
• One story in Vow of Nudity begins with the protagonist's raid on a cruel marquis' chateau, where the vast majority of it involves her (a naked level 7 monk) silently plowing through countless CR½ guards, most of whom are understandably freaking out as she's defeating 2-4 of them every single turn. One of them (the team marksman) even abandons the fight entirely after she catches his crossbolt and sends it flying right back into his chest!
• In Dragon Ball fanfiction The Warrior's Daughter, the Frieza Force, who had spent decades spreading fear through the universe, land on Earth but are intercepted by an unknown female. Said female proceeds to transform into the same kind of warrior who destroyed their supremely powerful boss, and starts killing them one after another, shrugghing off every attack directed against her, as berating them for being a pitiful "challenge".
• Chapter 10 We Can Be Heroes! (Steven Universe) has Lapis finally go all out with her hydrokinesis against the Kazkani 500, an alien mafia syndicate that has kidnapped and beaten her friend Hurley into a bloody pulp with the intention of executing him. Kicking things off by punching their loudmouth leader through a wall, the rest of the Kazkanis become scared out of their minds when she weaponizes the water flowing through their hideout's pipes as well as the pouring rains outside, and unleashes a chaotic maelstrom in the form of water tentacles, water pillars, and even armies of sea creatures made of water. And when their leader fights back, she conjures up a giant watery clone of herself that demolishes his hideout and scares him so bad that he passes out from sheer fright alone.
• Happens in Weight of the World when Penny 2.0 activates and sees soldiers menacing America. She utterly decimates them, slaughtering all of them in brutal ways with a serene expression on her face. A few of the deaths include: a slit throat, impalement, getting dragged screaming across the floor and stabbed, sliced to bits with wires and a snapped neck. There's a reason she's a Sociopathic Hero.
• In A World of Bloody Evolution, Yang gets temporarily corrupted by Khorne following her best friend's abduction by Dark Eldar. Cue cultists pissing themselves. It's really downplayed by the fact it's from her point of view, but it's incredibly easy to feel the mooks' fear as what they were worshipping five seconds ago comes back and tears them apart. A little bit of contrast to the above example because, instead of a vengeful big sister she's gone completely Ax-Crazy]]:
  Yang: Hey there Buddy!
  Lead Cultist: Open up, I beg of you!
  Yang: Shh... shh... now, what do we say?
  Lead Cultist: S-s-say?
  Yang: What do you say to your pathetic masters, who you failed so miserably?
  Lead Cultist: I-I-I-I-
  Yang: You say you're sorry!
  Lead Cultist: I'm sorry!
  Yang: What do you say?
  Lead Cultist: I'M SORRY!
  Yang: LOUDER, YOU FUCKING WORM!
• In XCOM: Second Contact, the initial (hostile) contact between Turians and Humans abruptly switches to the Turian perspective at several points. The Turians against a human XCOM squad that breaches the bridge of one of their ships find themselves fighting against plasma weaponry and psychic powers. It doesn't go well for the Turians.
• This video by Super Smash Bros MALR shows Batman through the eyes of inexperienced thugs, much like many of the other examples on this page.

Films — Animation

• Parodied in Incredibles 2, when Jack-Jack, a baby, subjects a raccoon to a Mook Horror Show. The fact that he’s a baby who won the Super Power Lottery helps.
• In Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, special forces wearing iconic armor are unstoppable against the rebels and the Public Security agents.
• In Lilo & Stitch, Stitch's escape scene in the first looks like this way apart from the fact that he's arguably a villain at this point.
• Monsters vs. Aliens has the scene where Gallaxhar tries to capture Susan. He underestimates just how strong she is, and ends up fleeing for his life in terror as she tears his ship appart trying to squash him like a bug. He only regains his composure when he manages to capture Susan again and extract the Quantonium from her body.

Films — Live-Action

• Pretty much any Steven Seagal film. Case in point, Hard to Kill. Yeah, the bad guys killed his wife and put him in a seven-year coma, but the way Mason Storm stalks and kills them one by one, taunting them the whole time, you can't help but pity them. Especially the one he runs down and publicly executes with a neck-snap in front of all of Chinatown and his own son.
• 28 Days Later, once the character snaps, plays very much like this trope — up to him doing Offscreen Teleportation.
• In Act of Valor, all of the major gunfights the SEALs get in invoke this on the part of the terrorists/cartel soldiers. The parts shown from their perspective as they (try to) fight the SEALs shows them facing deadly squads of elite soldiers who are slipping among their positions in total silence, snipers picking off their men as they try to flee, and deadly-coordinated SEALs cutting down their troops with precise shots.
• A scene in Air Force One stages a shootout in the baggage hold of the eponymous plane; it's entirely from the perspective of the Russian baddies, while the hero, the President, is seen only as a vague silhouette delivering death to the terrified mooks.
• At the end of the remake of Bangkok Dangerous Joo stalks and efficiently kills many gangsters as they grow increasingly jumpy and frantic.
• The opening scene of Tim Burton's Batman (1989) qualifies — but then the trope is inverted in the movie's cathedral climax, with The Joker inviting Batman ("Shall we dance?") to tangle with his stealthy, gongfu-trained assassins. What makes the scenario especially ironic is that Batman has just survived being blown up and is already bleeding and at least partially physically weakened; he does manage to dispatch all three of the mooks — indeed, even killing one of them! — but it isn't easy.
• In Batman Begins, some of Batman's first attacks on criminals are filmed this way. Not to mention their POV of him gliding over the city while they are under the effects of the Fear Toxin. Plus the scene of him interrogating Jonathan Crane, a.k.a. Scarecrow, who at the moment was being Hoist by His Own Petard. This is exemplified by Bruce's statement of intent when he enters the League's headquarters:
  Bruce: I seek the means to fight injustice, to turn fear against those who prey on the fearful.
• In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Batman's first appearance plays out like this, except the POV characters are two Gotham cops rather than Mooks. First, they find the slaves who Batman saved from a human trafficker, refusing to leave their cell because the thing that saved them is still in the building. Then the cops hear the sounds of a fight and the human trafficker's terrified scream. The rookie cop, Officer Rucka, finds the human trafficker handcuffed to a radiator, badly beaten and branded with a Bat symbol. Rucka, already freaking out, suddenly realises that Batman is right behind him, causing him to panic and fire wildly at the Bat while Batman quickly crawls across the ceiling in a very creepy way and disappears.
  • Whilst his later rescue of Martha Kent in the warehouse is more action heavy, it still manages to weave in this aspect. The mercenaries prepare for Batman, guns trained squarely on the door where they think he'll make his entrance, only for Batman to explode up from underneath the floor, pulling at least one guy down through it and start swiftly killing them off one by one. Anatoli, secure in the room holding Martha, quite visibly begins freaking out at hearing the gunfire and screams coming from outside, realising that his men (whom number close to two dozen) are not stopping Batman.
• Bloodshot (2020): Ray confronts Martin Axe in a tunnel by turning out the lights and deliberately crashing a truck containing flour to block off the road. This plays out as the target's bodyguards getting stalked by a Super Strong, super-Healing Implacable Man through a dark area badly lit by flares and the red glow of his nanites, escaped flour in the air and on the ground like snow.
• Commando, especially the toolshed scene.
• A drawn out example in the second "Crocodile" Dundee movie. Once the bad guys follow Mick to Australia, he uses his knowledge of the terrain and the wildlife to take them out one at a time over the course of the second half of the movie.
• The Crow had a much more elaborate re-creation of the shootout on the street from the comic, set this time up in Top Dollar's penthouse suite above the nightclub he owns. Unlike in the comic, here Eric doesn't actually want to kill anyone except for Skank, one of his fiancée's rapists (all of whom were acting on Top Dollar's orders, but Eric doesn't know this yet) — and was willing to let everyone else live, including Top Dollar and his half-sister, if they would just hand Skank over to him. But Top Dollar's extreme arrogance drives him to immediately order Eric's execution — and the inevitable result is what looks like two dozen henchmen being slaughtered either by gunfire, Top Dollar's stash of antique weapons, or simply being thrown out the window. Ridiculously, they all keep coming at Eric even when it should be clear that they are absolutely no match for him even when all together, yet alone as one or two stubbornly persistent men.
• Dead Man's Shoes follows the victims whenever the main character confronts them.
• In Desperado, the opening scene has El Mariachi's character reintroduced this way as Buscemi narrates over one of these.
• Die Hard: Invoked. After John McClane accidentally kills one mook with a Neck Snap, he takes the opportunity to send the body down in the elevator, delivering a threatening message to Hans and the other terrorists written on the dead man's shirt in red marker: "NOW I HAVE A MACHINE GUN, HO HO HO". While the terrorists panic, John watches and takes notes on the perps from the ceiling above.
• Dredd is basically an extended Mook Horror Show. Dredd and Anderson respond to a murder investigation, bust the perp and it escalates from there. Ma-Ma sends Mooks to kill the two judges. It's not enough. She busts out three massive gatling guns to wipe out an entire floor. All this succeeds in doing is pissing Dredd off. She sends her top enforcer after him. He unceremoniously throws him off a balcony. When Anderson is kidnapped, Dredd lures more Mooks to a convenient spot and literally rains fire on them. Ma-Ma even tries bringing in Dirty Judges and this, thanks to Anderson's escape, only slows Dredd down for approximately two minutes with the net result of supplying him with more ammo. Her last resort of threatening to blow up Peach Trees itself ends in abject failure when Dredd simply shoots her and throws her off the 200th floor. The manner in which many Mooks die is quite brutal. Headshots. Fire headshots. Hi-Ex headshots. Kay puts it best.
  Kay: How the fuck are we gonna stop this guy?
• The retired government assassin turned protection for hire protagonist in The Equalizer films is a master at this. He stalks the Mooks, sets deadly traps often using normal household objects, along with deadly hand combat and weapons skills. Many Mooks and even the Big Bad start panicking once the bodies pile up. Not to mention he often shows up out of nowhere and gives them a chance to do the right thing before he goes Jason on them. He's so good at scaring them that the number one question a Mook ask before he kills them is: 'Who the hell are you?'
• Groupie: The plot involves a young woman ingratiating herself into the lives of a rock band whom she holds responsible for her brother's death. Once she's accepted in as a groupie, she kills each member off until there's one left to face her at the end.
• Hancock:
  • The opening sequence where Hancock breaks into the back of an SUV at the head of a high-speed chase, sits there arguing with the robbers inside for a minute, then when they break his sunglasses, stops the car dead by slamming his feet through the floor into the roadway, then lifting it off and flying it onto the top of a building where he skewers it on a spire and leaves the robbers there.
  • Also, the scene where he intervenes in the Hostage Situation inside a bank. We're shown the events from the bank robbers' POV, with Hancock just flying through the lobby and carrying off the mooks one at a time and the leader of the gang screaming, "What is happening???"
• Ip Man doled out a serious No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to ten black belts. While normally very a very calm, and patient man, the pain Ip Man had inflicted upon the black belts in his Tranquil Fury include:
  • A stomp to the face
  • Punching a man several times in the face before dislocating his arm
  • Dislocating a leg at the hip
  • Beating down two men separately with Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs
  • Flinging a man around
  • Stomping, kneeing, and elbowing a man in his back
  • Various pressure point attacks, at one point while fighting four black belts at once
  • The most notable one however was when he held the survivor's head between his knees and slugged him presumably in the nose repeatedly
• The James Bond films rarely go here due to the necessity of keeping Bond a positive character. There have been exceptions:
  • After Bond sends a mook on skis careening over a cliff in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the camera stays on the mook as he takes his long, final, fall to his death.
  • The death scream uttered by the unnamed villain whose parachute Bond steals at the start of Moonraker is one of the most disturbing sounds ever heard in cinema.
  • The way Bond kills the bald man (i.e. the expy Blofeld) at the start of For Your Eyes Only could trigger this trope in anyone with claustrophobia (or acrophobia).
  • The worst offender may be GoldenEye in which Bond mows down a dozen Russian soldiers who just happened to be on duty at the wrong place and time. And then he gets a tank…
  • Dr. Kaufman, in Tomorrow Never Dies, is one of the only characters in the Bond film canon to be heard begging for his life before 007 kills him anyway.
  • A very subtle one occurs in Casino Royale (2006). When Bond shoots the corrupt section chief in his office, for a split second a close-up of a photograph on the man's desk is shown — an image showing him with his family.
• John Wick. Bob Chipman described the series as an inverted Slasher Movie franchise where the killer is the hero (even moreso than usual), and throughout the films, John is presented as a dreaded figure in the criminal underworld who we see absolutely earned his terrifying reputation. The young dumbass who convinces him to come out of retirement gets a massive "The Reason You Suck" Speech from his own father, a crime boss who knows how screwed he now is.
• Kick-Ass:
  • Hit-Girl, particularly during her night-vision FPS shootout scene where she's shooting gangsters left and right as they're unable to see her under cover of darkness. Done again in Frank D'Amico's penthouse when she prepares to shoot a cowering mook on the floor, runs out of bullets and runs to the kitchen. The mook stands some distance away and unloads automatic fire on the spot she's hiding in, lowers his gun and looks away in assumed success, and gets a pair of flying kitchen knives in the chest.
  • Big Daddy's more literal "show", the warehouse massacre, witnessed by Chris via a hidden cam is unsurprisingly terrifying from his point of view. Whilst more subdued in his reaction, his father is still clearly shaken by what he sees.
    Frank D'Amico: Who the hell is this guy?!
• Kill Bill: The Bride's battle against the Crazy 88, in which she utterly spanks them (literally, in one case). It's nearly 20 minutes long!
• In The Long Kiss Goodnight, Charlie's rampage through the farmhouse is not seen, only heard, from Mitch's perspective as he's locked in the basement.
• Looper: When Old Joe gets loose in Abe’s hideout, the results play out like a horror movie; he shows Abe’s crew just what a Looper with decades of experience can be like by methodically slaughtering his way through the building, with all of the mooks utterly helpless to stop him.
• Many of these occur in The Lord of the Rings. Several involve Legolas; for example:

  • When he rides down the stairs at Helm's Deep shooting Uruk-hai all over the place
  • When he kills the oliphaunt but must first take out the Haradrim riders controlling it

  • Others include:
    • Aragorn and Gimli driving off the Uruk-Hai from the gate at Helm's Deep. It almost seems as if some of the Uruk-Hai simply fall off the high bridge in terror.
    • The Rohirrim cavalry when they finally arrive at the battle of Minas Tirith; as they come close to the orc army, we see the orcs' expressions go from fierce determination to sheer terror, down to even the uber-tough, cocky general Gothmog. The orcs in front are swept down and trampled instantly in the charge, and from there the Rohirrim just keep charging through, knocking down, slashing and trampling orcs by hundreds and thousands until finally the ones farther back start to flee, only to be also caught in the path of the horses and trampled.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man, Tony's escape from the cave in a huge, unstoppable suit of powered armor is played out a bit like a monster movie, especially the armor's debut; the lights go out, and a nightmarish, hulking metal thing looms behind one of the terrorists. He does it again when he goes back to Afghanistan and kills all the terrorists with his new upgraded armor.
  • The first appearance of the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk is deliberately done in this way.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron opens with soldiers rushing about because they're under attack... by the Avengers.
    Henchman: Herr Strucker, it's the Avengers!
    Strucker: Can we hold them?!
    Henchman: They're the Avengers...
  • Black Panther: The African slavers attacked by Black Panther in the middle of the night. First their vehicles inexplicably stall all at once, then they spot a dog barking at... something in a tree, and one of them is sent flying into a car, hard enough to bend metal. Follow a brutal take-down by a mysterious, black-clad figure with an animalistic look that just shrugs off their bullets and kills them one by one with claws.
  • Avengers: Infinity War: Thor becomes this to the Outriders, Thanos' Elite Mooks invading Wakanda. He unleashes such phenomenal devastation upon them with his axe Stormbreaker that they begin to flee in terror. Given that Thanos is a Bad Boss who would kill them for failure and cowardice, they fear the God of Thunder more than they fear their own master.
  • Captain Marvel:
    • A short one plays out as Fury and Maria are pursued by enemies and Maria runs out of ammo. As the Starforce soldiers close in on them, Goose sprouts a bunch of giant tentacles from her mouth and grabs all the Kree. Cut to a shot from an adjacent hallway, where the waving tentacles pull them out of sight, and screaming and slurping are heard as they get eaten.
    • Once Carol taps into her powers' full potential, she curbstomps an Accuser armada threatening the Earth, tearing through each ship like it's nothing. Not helped by the fact that the fight is partially viewed by the last Accuser standing, Ronan, who wisely turns the remaining Kree around.
  • Avengers: Endgame:
    • Thoroughly broken after losing his wife and children, Clint Barton has a violent fall from grace. When we see him again after the Time Skip, he's abandoned his Hawkeye identity to become the vicious vigilante Ronin, Walking the Earth to tear apart the Earth's surviving criminal population.
    • Spider-Man finally decides to activate the Instant-Kill Mode of his Iron Spider armor, skewering Thanos' monsters left, right and center.
    • Tony Stark swipes the Infinity Stones from Thanos and places them in a Gauntlet of his own. He snaps his fingers just as Thanos had done to wipe out half the universe in ''Infinity War'', and suddenly every opponent on the battlefield, Thanos included, disintegrates into piles of ash in what proves to be Tony's Crowning (and Dying) Moment of Awesome.
• The intro of Ninja Assassin is a textbook example. Except it's not the hero who's acting the part of the monster.
• The opening hit scene of The Professional. Leon knocks off the Fatman's henchmen one by one — point blank headshot, garrote from the ceiling panel, pulled over the stairwell by a necktie, numerous shootings behind sun shades — without anyone (the guards or viewer) ever laying eyes on him. "Those fuckers blocked both the exits," mutters the Fatman, when seeing Tonto hanging by the neck on CCTV. Finally, the Fatman ends up with a knife to his throat, produced by Leon's disembodied arm out of the shadow. Leon then reveals himself and makes the Fatman call the number of the man who's hired Leon to intimidate him into leaving town.
• There is always at lease one scene in every Rambo movies.
  • In the First Blood, the corrupt Sheriff's squad gets mangled one by one though non lethally and when the leader is the last one left, Rambo holds a knife to his throat while saying that he could have killed them all if he wanted to, before warning him not to push it and to let it go, or he will "give him a war he won't believe".
  • In Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo stalks a Russian hit squad looking for him. In this scene we are often seeing through the mooks' eyes and, Rambo is depicted as a fearsome invisible stalker like the Predator.
  • In Rambo III, a group of Russian special forces chased Rambo into a cave. Likewise, we are often treated with the mooks' view as Rambo kills them one by one in the dark. It ends with the helicopter pilot giving out an Oh, Crap! just before Rambo destroys his helicopter with an explosive arrow.
  • In Rambo: Last Blood, Rambo lures Hugo and his men into the tunnels of his ranch, which results in every single mook falling victim to Rambo himself and his booby traps, except for Hugo, who Rambo later kills by ripping his heart out.
• The assassination attempt on Moses in the beginning of Red (2010). A CIA hit squad goes to eliminate a single retiree. They don't catch on to just how dangerous their target actually is until he's killed two of them and they haven't even seen him yet.
• In Resident Evil: Apocalypse the S.T.A.R.S. squad who are targeted by Nemesis who massacres all of them, except for the taxi driver who is spared.
• The second act of Riddick is focused on the mercenaries trying to capture Riddick, with Riddick essentially taking the role of the murderer in a horror film.
  • Also the opening scene of the previous film in the series The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) has the mercenary crew hunting down Riddick. After they chase him into an ice canyon the scene plays out mostly from their perspective, panicking as crew mates disappear one by one, until only the last one is left, and he finds that Riddick has disarmed him already.
• Road House (1989) has Dalton attacking Wesley's mansion, picking off his mooks one by one before battling Wesley himself.
• RoboCop has shades of this. He is effectively bulletproof, slow but nigh-unstoppable, more machine than man, and has perfect aim. Most bad guys try to run while RoboCop walks after them like a typical horror movie villain. His early arrests of Emil and Clarence in RoboCop both emphasize their utter helplessness when face-to-face with him.
• Joey's actions in Rolling Vengeance tends to play out this way. We hardly get any shots of him inside the truck, while his victims flee desperately in terror from him. The truck itself is demonic-looking, completely with flames spewing out its exhaust pipes and a giant drill on the front. This could just have easily been a horror movie if the monster truck was driven by a villain instead.
• In The Rookie, Charlie Sheen's character instantly switches from coward to badass when his partner (Clint Eastwood) is kidnapped. The trope kicks in when he enters a bar in which he previously had the shit beaten out of him. First he breathes fire on the bartender, beats up half the patrons and fires off several rounds from his gun — at this point, the patrons are standing in stunned silence. Then he trashes the place and sets fire to it, at which point they all flee in terror.
• In The Scorpion King, the hero uses a sandstorm to force a bunch of Mooks into a cave, where he kills them one by one.
• Serenity: River's rampage in the Maidenhead bar is definitely one of these.
• Early in The Shadow, some mooks have fitted an old man with cement shoes and are about to drop him into a river when the title character shows up and picks them off unseen, taunting them with wisecracks and his signature laugh as he goes.
• The ending of Shooter. Swagger has escaped the Government Conspiracy framing him and succeeded in clearing his good name, but the conspiracy's masterminds have seemingly gotten off scot-free as well, and are meeting up at a secluded hunting lodge to plot the whole thing all over again. Suddenly, one of their mooks drops dead in the middle of the meeting. Then The Dragon catches a bullet to the throat. Then the lights go out, and Swagger really gets to work.
• Spider-Man of all people briefly causes this for the man who is believed to be Uncle Ben's killer, sneaking through the shadows in the background before attacking from behind.
• Star Wars:
  • Episode I — The Phantom Menace shows the Trade Federation leaders panicking as the implacable Jedi make their way to the bridge, mowing down any droids they send against them.
  • Episode III — Revenge of the Sith shows dozens of clone troopers experiencing this when Yoda and Obi Wan re-enter the Jedi Temple. The Jedi hardly break stride as they slaughter them all without a scratch.

• Episode VI — Return of the Jedi: The moment Luke Skywalker and his lightsaber are reunited at the Pit of Carkoon, everything goes downhill fast for Jabba the Hutt's assorted gangsters as they are blasted, sliced, sent flying headlong into the Sarlaac's gaping maw, or all three. Jabba himself is strangled to death in the dark by Princess Leia.
  • It doesn't go much better for the Imperial stormtroopers on Endor's moon once the Ewoks get into the fight as they go from having the "Rebel scum" dead to rights to being massacred by a swarm of waist-high teddy bears and their booby traps.
  • There's also the crew of the Executor after a kamikaze Rebel fighter crashes into their bridge and sends them plummeting into the Death Star II.

• Sucker Punch:
  • When Babydoll kills two of the demon samurai, the third is shown hesitating and trembling. When he finally draws his katana and charges, she kills him in a Single-Stroke Battle.
  • In the WWI sequence, two German soldiers spot Babydoll walking toward them and try desperately to set up and load a massive lewis gun, but fail and are cut down. After he crashes, the German courier tries to ward off Babydoll with his gun, and is shocked when she deflects his bullets while marching toward him.
• Part and parcel of the Taken series. Best example (or worst, for the mook in question) would be the scene in the first film where Mills tortures a guy with electricity, leaving it turned on as he departs.
• Pops up near the end of Waterworld, when the Mariner boards the Smoker vessel. After murdering one of them, a group of Smokers start hunting him throughout the ship. He slowly picks them off in a segment interspersed with scenes of the Morality Pet bragging about how the Mariner will kill them all.
• We Are the Night: The vampires kill a group of Russian gangsters with ease, and the sole survivor later is a paranoid wreck after seeing it.
• Dale from Wrong Turn 2: Dead End seems to have been lifted right from an action movie and put into this horror movie. After escaping capture by the mutant family that has been killing and eating anyone who goes into the woods, he starts killing them off one by one (mostly using explosives). It took getting shot with multiple arrows (which only pissed him off) and having razorwire thrown around his neck to bring him down. The surviving mutants are absolutely horrified to find the splattered remains of their family.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men: First Class: The Soviet soldiers who are suddenly attacked by barbed wire when Erik Lehnsherr (who hadn't turned villain yet) decides to invade the general's residence.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: Wolverine's run through Stryker's goons in lake Alkali. They grow more and more terrified as he continues to butcher his way through them.
  • Two of them in Logan:
    • The first is at Laura's hands. After the fight breaks out at Logan's hideaway, she retreats back into the cover of the building that serves as Logan's house, but she's not running away. As several of Pierce's men pursue her, she works her way through the shadows, picking them off one-by-one in a way that makes it clear that she's not trying to run. She's hunting them.
    • Logan gets in on the act when Xavier has a seizure at the casino. Pierce's Reavers have located the room they're staying in, but are frozen in place when Xavier loses control of his power. Logan arrives, and though in great pain remains mobile. The hapless Reavers can only watch helplessly as he stalks towards them one-by-one, slaughtering them while unable to defend themselves.
• You're Next: The Final Girl Erin is the daughter of a Crazy Survivalist who learned a lot of his survival skills growing up in the Outback. About halfway into the film, she proceeds to turn the tables on the crew of killers attacking the house and start slaughtering them from the shadows one by one.

Literature

• Aeon 14: The entirety of the primary narrative of the fan-written Short Story "Know Thy Enemy" takes place during the Battle of Five Fleets in Destiny Lost, retold from the perspective of one of the antagonist factions. Among other things, we get to see a man be disassembled by Grey Goo in first-person.
• All of the Animorphs to some extent, especially Rachel. They're (as far as the Yeerks know) a group of Andalite bandits who can sneak into any top-security facility as insects, then demorph and remorph as deadly megafauna, then escape as birds or insects once they've destroyed everything. In the last book, Jake flushes tens of thousands of helpless Yeerks (essentially prisoners of war) into space, killing them instantly.
• Anita Blake:
  • Anita is this to vampires as told by Jean-Claude, who is the Master Vampire of St. Louis. "To us, you are the boogeyman who snatches young foolish vampires." Or something like that. And when she executed a were serial killer in the middle of a mall in front of small children who looked horrified that she was going to kill him after she strolled up to him in the food court. Then she snaps at a werewolf who annoyed her on the phone, who breaks down in tears and blubbers for her not to kill her. It helps she's a licensed Executioner who can kill vampires and weres legally. Oh, and one of the most powerful necromancers in the United States.
  • It's even worse with Edward, the Badass Normal vampire hunter that Anita occasionally works with. Vampires call her The Executioner since she's killed so many of their kind, but they just call him Death.
• The BattleTech short story Almost Sounds Like the Guns Themselves takes place shortly after the Aurigan Civil War and a large part of it consists of a Shell-Shocked Veteran's flashbacks to his entire squad being massacred, with his best friend dying in a particularly nasty fashion at the hands of an enemy mechwarrior heavily implied to be the player character from the game.
• In the Dale Brown novels, this generally occurs when Tin Men or CIDs are around and there're no anti-tank weapons in the enemy's reach.
• Cassandra Kresnov, of Joel Shepherd's Cassandra Kresnov series, instigates this whenever she's locked in close quarters with a bunch of human soldiers. It's mentioned that the hallmark of an attack by a higher end combat GI is when your friends are all shooting and the next moment they're all dead. The greatest example of this is probably in book five, Operation Shield. Cassandra had befriended a trio of war orphans in the previous novel, and the League government decided that kidnapping the two oldest ones would be a great way to blackmail her. She had a reputation as a cool thinker, so they expected that she'd easily cave to their demands to keep the kids safe. They weren't expecting her to discover her maternal instincts. And go into a Roaring Rampage of Rescue with a mission plan consisting of "everything between me and the kids dies." By the time they realized just what they'd unleashed, it was far too late. To really drive it home, the scene is done from the perspective of the League commander as she shouts orders over her radio to her squads, only to have them killed off one by one. And Cassandra deliberately leaves a single witness alive, to make sure that everyone gets the message: don't ever threaten her kids.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): When Crinis gets going with her dozens of razor-barbed tentacles vibrating like a chainsaw, Anthony frequently regrets having panoramic vision and no eyelids, as monsters are flayed, dismembered, and tossed into her fanged mouth, sometimes not completely dead yet. Then she obtains "soul seeker cilia" that she can drive into monsters' brains to push them over the brink of insanity. It's not a pretty sight — for normal people, anyway. Crinis' reaction? "[Hee, hee, hee, hee!]"
• Cradle Series: The main point of view is Lindon, a young man who spent most of his life being told he was worthless, and was weaker than most children when he was sixteen. Some lucky breaks allow him to get stronger, but he keeps facing people far stronger than him, so he spends most of his fights terrified and scrambling to survive. Rare chapters from the views of other people, however, show how much of an absolute monster he has turned into. In addition to incredible raw strength, he has burning red eyes, multiple different powers that he shouldn't be able to mix, and a ruthless approach to combat. Though he usually offers his enemies a chance to surrender first, he has a Face of a Thug so they assume he's just mocking them. This all comes to a head in Wintersteel, when he works through the revelation he needs to advance to Overlord, which is mostly about how other people see him. He is such a perfect void, a consuming force, that he is able to manifest the Icon of Void and become a Sage younger than anyone else on the planet has ever managed. And then he curb-stomps Sophara, one of the most powerful entities in the world.
  She looked into his eyes, which had transformed into blue crystal. He was the end of her every technique, and as she stared into that merciless gaze, she realized he was her end.
• At the end of The Demon Breed by James H. Schmitz, the story is retold from the aliens' point of view, and we see just how badly the Action Girl protagonist ended up scaring them.
  There seemed to be nothing they could do to check her. She came and went as she chose, whether in the sea or in the dense floating forests, and was traceless as a ghost. Moreover, those who had the misfortune of encountering her did not report the fact. They simply disappeared.
• Discworld:
  • Rincewind uses The Luggage to terrorize his foes. Or rather, he hides while the Luggage... entertains itself.
  • In Thud!, there is a brief section about some dwarfs in a cave, when suddenly, a pale, bloody human with a sword and axe stands on a rise above them... And it says, Is that my cow?
  • In Jingo!, Reg Shoe's attack on some enemy soldiers is narrated this way.
  • In Night Watch, you see Reg's transformation into a zombie... he refuses to die after being shot (with arrows) seven or eight times in the chest at point blank range. The archers don't take it well.
  • Likewise for criminals with the bad fortune to cross paths with Angua.
• The title character of the Stephen King novel Dolan's Cadillac seeks revenge against the title character, who ordered a hit on his wife. To this end he quits his job as a teacher and becomes a road worker in order to set a trap for Dolan when he passes by in his you know what. He digs a large hole and covers it with a weak stretch of road so that the Cadillac plunges into it. He then taunts Dolan for a while before filling up the hole.
• The Dresden Files:
  • The title character starts as a rather pitiable wizard trying to work his way out of professional disgrace. Several books and a pile of supernatural bodies later, he suddenly finds his opponents backing down or outright fleeing rather than face him, and is several times rather abruptly reminded of what he looks like from his enemies' point of view. The books are narrated in the first person so we never get to see it, but it's discussed several times.
  • He lampshades this himself in Turn Coat. He is facing no less than five Wardens and three members of the Senior Council, and they are afraid to fight him. Then he remembers something... "They were dealing with something far more dangerous than me, Harry Dresden, whose battered old Volkswagen was currently in the city impound. They were dealing with the potential demonic dark lord nightmare warlock they'd been busy fearing since I turned sixteen. They were dealing with the wizard who had faced the Heirs of Kemmler riding a zombie dinosaur, and emerged victorious from a fight that had flattened Morgan and Captain Luccio before they had even reached it. They were dealing with the man who had dropped a challenge to the entire Senior Council, and who had then actually showed, apparently willing to fight-on the shores of an entirely too creepy island in the middle of a freshwater sea."
  • This trope is at its most direct in Changes, where a Red Court vampire assassin, upon seeing Harry, screams and runs away.
  • In the novella "Aftermath", which takes place hours after the events of Changes, Karrin Murphy thinks a bit about Harry and how he's a nice guy, weird and goofy and eccentric, but his magical knowledge can sometimes seem like Sherlock Scans, and when he needs to deal with something that can survive being thrown through a city block, he can do the throwing.
    Murphy: Watching Dresden operate was usually one of two things: mildly amusing or positively terrifying. On a scene, his whole personal manner always made me think of autistic kids. He never met anyone's eyes for more than a flickering second. He moved with the sort of exaggerated caution of someone who was several sizes larger than normal, keeping his hands and arms in close to his body. He spoke a little bit softly, as if apologizing for the resonant baritone of his voice.
    But when something caught his attention, he changed. His dark, intelligent eyes would glitter, and his gaze became something so intense it could start a fire. During the situations that changed from investigation to desperate struggle, his whole being shifted in the same way. His stance widened, becoming more aggressive and confident, and his voice rose up to become a ringing trumpet that could have been clearly heard from opposite ends of a football stadium.
    Quirky nerd, gone. Terrifying icon, present.
    Not many "vanillas", as he called nominally normal humans, had seen Dresden standing his ground in the fullness of his power. If we had, more of us would have taken him seriously — but I had decided that for his sake, if nothing else, it was a good thing that his full capabilities went unrecognized. Dresden's power would have scared the hell out of most people, just like it had scared me.
    It wasn't the kind of fear that makes you scream and run. That's fairly mild, as fear goes. That's Scooby-Doo fear. No. Seeing Dresden in action filled you with the fear that you had just become a casualty of evolution — that you were watching something far larger and infinitely more dangerous than yourself, and that your only chance of survival was to kill it, immediately, before you were crushed beneath a power greater than you would ever know.
  • In Ghost Story we get this from Molly's perspective:
    Molly: You don't know, Harry. What you did for this town.
    Harry: What do you mean?
    Molly: You don't know how many things just didn't come here before, because they were afraid.
    Harry: Afraid of what?
    Molly: Of you, Harry. You could find anything in this town, but you never even noticed the shadow you cast. [...] Every time you defied someone, every time you came out on top against things you couldn't possibly have beaten, your name grew. And they feared that name. There were other cities to prey on — cities that didn't have the mad wizard Dresden defending them. They feared you.
  • Lampshaded in Skin Game: Michael points out that the last time someone threatened Harry's daughter, Harry killed the entirety of the Red Court, one of the three major powers in the world, akin to killing everyone in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Even monsters would have to think twice about making that threat again.
• Happens quite often in The Executioner series with villains invoking the terror of the black-clad One-Man Army with icy blue eyes, striding untouched through their ranks, dealing death.
• David Gemmell characters tend to get at least one chapter narrating their pursuit or onslaught from the perspective of minor villains, bandits or so on. The gold standard would be the opening of Hero in the Shadows, which details a band of raiders meeting their ends at the hands of an ageing Waylander.
• The final chapter of John Gardner's novel Grendel is more of a Boss Horror Show, with Beowulf coming off as cruel and sadistic as he mortally wounds the main character by ripping off his arm.
• Several Honor Harrington books have the thoughts of various Peep or Solarian officers about to be on the receiving end of a Manticore Missile Massacre, usually because their CO is too dumb, arrogant, or incredulous to realize that they're about to be ripped apart by said Massacre. And, of course, vice versa.
  • One scene in Crown of Slaves sees a bunch of Mesan operatives in their hotel suite trying to deal with the unfolding Gambit Pileup, only for a team of ex-Scrags and Audubon Ballroom gunmen to storm their suite. The ex-Scrags are bad enough, but the Mesans are scared shitless of the Ballroom.
• In The Hunter's Blades Trilogy, which is part of The Legend of Drizzt, the titular hero uses his skills as a ranger as well as his Master Swordsman status to inflict devastating losses on the orcs coming to join a local warlord. It's his hope he can ebb the recruitment of King Obould's army through sheer terror. It works.
• This is where I Am Legend gets its title from. It turns out that some of the vampires that Robert Neville was hunting have managed to rebuild civilization, and devoted considerable resources to capturing him because, to them, he was the monster of their legends.
• The short story The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm by Daryl Gregory, showing the POV of those who happen to be living in a country ruled by a supervillain when it's 'invaded' for the umpteenth time by American superheroes... What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?.
• The Jungle Book: When Baloo and Bagheera want to save Mowgli from the sinister Bandar Log monkeys they enlist the help of one of the most feared predators in the jungle, Kaa the python. He is still terrifying from the perspective of his enemies, especially the Bandar Log who panick and become his prey in no time.
• Nadreck of Palain VII from the Lensman series. Made possibly even worse because the mooks never even realize he's at work until they all suddenly go mad and kill each other... and depopulate their entire planet except for 3 leaders.
• The climax of Oathblood has an encampment of child-kidnapping soldiers getting its guards picked off in the night by the teachers of those children. A slightly older non-kidnapped student sneaks inexpertly through the camp letting people assume she's an escapee and following her, only to be led either to the teacher who'll knock them out or the one who'll run them through with a furious possessed sword. At the very end, when the leader of the band is gloating menacingly at a twelve year old and telling her she doesn't have the guts to spill his blood, Kethry interrupts him mid sentence by running him through from behind.
• The Odyssey presents a particularly horrifying example when Ulysses, his son and two servants, being the only ones armed in the premises, proceed to slaughter Penelope's would-be suitors without allowing them to escape nor arm themselves. Considering that Ulysses' son Telemachus had counted 108 suitors, this had to take some time to complete. To top it off, he then orders the horrified maidservants who had slept with the suitors to dispose of the corpses, and after they finish has them executed by his son. Who promptly decides stabbing is too good for them and has them hanged instead, making a point that he wants a painful death for them.
• Only You Can Save Mankind, in the chapters from the perspective of the ScreeWee, shows what it's like to be a video game "baddie" spacefleet, under relentless assault from an enemy that never runs out of fuel or ammo, can take out each of your ships with a single shot while you need multiple shots to retaliate, and even once you've done so, won't stay dead.
• This happens at least once a book in The Oregon Files, whenever the bad guys realize that the titular ship isn't a dilapidated tramp steamer full of grungy sailors, but a highly advanced, heavily armed warship crewed by special forces-trained mercenaries.
• Paradise Lost uniquely describes God, specifically God the Son, as a monster of "terrour" and "night" during His battle with the rebellious angels. The whole sequence depicts how horrifying an all-powerful enforcer of justice would be to those as unjust as the founders of Hell.
• The scene that brings Tobimar and Poplock together in Phoenix Rising, as Tobimar is rescued from attacking mazakh by a mysterious force that seems to attack out of nowhere and then disappear. The mazakh who aren't killed outright flee in terror, and even Tobimar is distinctly unsettled.
• The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist in Another World: A team of demon mooks finds themselves thoroughly outclassed by Seika Lamprogue. All, except, two, being defeated with monstrously powerful variants of their own powers, with the others being killed by simple hexes.
• The Reynard Cycle: In The Baron of Maleperduys, a particularly likable Calvarian foot soldier wakes up after a battle, only to discover that he and many of his fellow mooks have been taken prisoner by Reynard, who is going to hang the majority of them, and then feed their corpses to Tiecelin's Shrikes.
• One of the viewpoint characters of fantasy novel Ruin is Macquin, aka "Old Wolf", a warrior turned slave turned gladiator. When he escapes his captors send seven men after him. He eventually kills them all in a dark forest at night, and you really get a sense of just how terrified they are of him.
• There's one scene that plays like this in book seven of Safehold series when Merlin/Dialydd attacks barge full of Inquisitors who killed his friend. The entire scene is narrated from perspective of one of the Inquisitors and it shows the reader just how scary Merlin can be if he turns off his internal limits.
• The Norwegian novel The Son by Jo Nesbø is basically an entire book of this trope. Sonny Lofthus is a professional scapegoat for the Norwegian mob who has escaped to get his revenge, but the book is never actually told from his perspective, only the people who interact with him. That means that every scene that involves him taking his violent, sadistic, and often creative revenge (of which there are many) is told from the perspective of Sonny's victims.
• Pulp Magazine heroes The Shadow and The Spider lived for this. It's not surprising that these two were the primary inspiration for the Batman.
• Space Marine Battles is usually narrated by the eponymous Super Soldiers, but Wrath of Iron opens with a brief Perspective Flip, showing just how terrifying things can get when those Implacable Men get to you.
• In the Spiral Arm series, during the infiltration of the Gayshot Bo in On The Razor's Edge, the narrative briefly switches to the perspective of the enemy Magpies getting picked off one by one by the heroes.
  Magpie Seven Bhatvik had thought himself third from the rear, but when he glanced over his shoulder on the stairwell he saw no one behind him. This was not a good thing to see, and he shivered a bit with unreasoning fear. He climbed a few more steps, then quickly looked back. He still saw nothing. Which was too bad.
• In The Stormlight Archive, the luckiest highborn Alethi warriors fight with magical BFSes and Powered Armor, including two of the viewpoint characters. One chapter from the point of view of a lowborn soldier describes his total horror at seeing one such warrior in battle: effortlessly massacring his comrades with the oversized Soul-Cutting Blade, shearing through the weapons and armor of the people futilely trying to slow him down, leaving a swath of corpses with burnt-out eye sockets in his wake.
• Tarzan of the Apes is a master at creating mook horror shows, especially in the first novel or two before he became more "civilized". There are several sequences where he is following a caravan of enemies — usually nasty natives or Arab slave-traders — and picks them off one by one, terrifying the rest into near-insanity as he does. He clearly enjoys it rather more than one would expect a hero to.
• Jack Fleming from The Vampire Files has employed this trope occasionally, using his vampiric powers to feign a haunting in an early novel and to completely scare the crap out of gangsters in his later, grimmer adventures.
• Victoria has a tense scene where one of the goddesses of Cascadia is hunted down by the Resistance. They are out in the wild forest, and the unseen resistance commandos kill her attendants quietly and one by one, until she is left alone.
• The Wardstone Chronicles: In Book 6, the protagonists are forced into an Enemy Mine situation with the Witches. As they are travelling to Greece, their ship is attacked by pirates. The heroes react by unleashing the army of Ax-Crazy, blood-thirsty witches on them, and a hilariously one-sided fight ensues.
• In the penultimate book of the Witcher Saga, Ciri mows down a squad of bad guys after luring them onto a frozen lake. In thick fog. She has skates, while they can't even see her coming until she's right next to them and dashes back into the fog, leaving a dead body behind each time. Ultimately the sole sound of her skates scrapping over ice is enough to cause panic — and then even that stops.
  • During the final battle of the last book, Geralt's ally Regis, an extremly powerful vampire, finally throws off his refusal to touch blood and lets loose on a bunch of the Big Bad's minions trying to pin Ciri down for her to be raped and impregnated against her will as part of an Evil Plan to acquire the powers she carries in her bloodline. By the time Regis is done, there's blood all over the walls, severed limbs everywhere and he's got his fangs buried in the neck of the last surviving mook. Oh, and the best part? He looks like a total pushover herbalist, so when he enters the room unarmed, the mooks just laugh.
• In Worm, When Skitter utterly ANNIHILATES the 28 merchants who attack her territory. They didn't take her power to control bugs seriously and made jokes as they threatened her people. They laugh at a figure made of bugs until it dogpiles one of them and he starts screaming. Then they realize that they are surrounded by creepy, humanoid figures made of bugs, that are immune to their weapons. Skitter could have taken them out in an instant, but takes her time to freak them out to show what happens to anyone stupid enough to attack her territory. It also shows the readers just how freaking scary she can be when she doesn't hold back.
  • Highlights including letting one of them "escape" before cornering him and slowly advancing her bugs on him. He lets out a primal scream just as they attack.
  • Another involves a merchant that intended to use gasoline to burn the buildings of her people, she scares her into spilling it on herself and uses a slow moving army of beetles carrying lit matches toward her as she desperately tries to get away.
  • Later in the story we see a video of her attack on PRT HQ, calmly walking past screaming people she attacked with stinging insects. She's mostly visible as a pair of glowing eyes in the midst of her swarm. Even her movements are eerie; how she moves without looking at people, and how every bug in the room moves in synch with her. Her agent remarks that she looks like she could be a member of the Slaughterhouse 9.
  • In the sequel Ward, the protagonist pulls this off on a couple of occasions. The main character Victoria Dallon, formerly known as Glory Girl and now known as Antares, can fly 80+ mph, bench press 14 tons, has an invincible and invisible forcefield with a dozens of extra limbs, and an aura that can induce heart-stopping terror in anyone nearby. At one point she goes after The Pharmacist and manages to close with and capture her by the expedient of smashing through walls to grab her from an unexpected angle.

Live-Action TV

• In the final season of 24, Jack Bauer's Roaring Rampage of Revenge where he stops traffic in an underground carpark and proceeds to tear his way through a small army of mooks while wearing head-to-toe body armour and a big black goalie mask. Another moment comes from the end of the same episode which shows the aftermath of a roomful of mooks (and The Dragon) that Jack has massacred in horrific ways, with only one survivor left.
• The fourth episode of Agent Carter starts off in the POV of the Mooks who have Howard Stark held captive. One of their fellow Mooks is knocked out by some killer in the shadows, and when they try and find out who did this to him, they only end up being knocked out by the same killer, who, of course, is none other than Peggy. The scene is complete with spooky background music, too!
• An early episode of Angel opens with a demon fleeing from a "rogue demon hunter" on a motorcycle. In a comedic twist, it turns out it's Wesley.
  • Angel fights a blind but extremely skilled and deadly assassin. Since Angel is a vampire who lacks a pulse, breath, or body heat, she can't sense him unless he's moving. He takes advantage of this fact to defeat her. She is shown terrified out of her wits before Angel kills her.
• The Boys (2019): In the first season finale, Homelander commandeers a mission to storm an ISIS drug warehouse from a U.S. Special Forces unit, he then enters the building, and calmly greets the terrorists. They open fire, and as hundreds of rounds bounce harmlessly off of him, Homelander uses his Eyebeams to behead, dismember, and disembowel them. The last guman, Homelander burns his legs off, and puts his boot on his head. When he comes out, Homelander gives the special forces unit the all clear, right before spotting a guman fleeing the massacre, and using his eye beams to stop him.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In the Dracula episode, we see a vampire running madly through a graveyard... and then we realize he's running from Buffy.
  • Another example is in "Pangs" which opens with a handsome fresh-faced youth with Victim of the Week written all over him creeping through the forest, then starting in fear as he comes face-to-face with the Big Bad Buffy. Buffy punches him, whereupon he vamps into Game Face.
  • "This Year's Girl". While in a coma Faith has nightmares that resemble a Slasher Movie, in which she's an innocent girl being stalked by Buffy, portrayed as a cold-blooded, implacable Psycho Knife Nut. This does not improve Faith's disposition when she wakes up from said coma.
• Burn Notice: "He's Michael Westen! There are only four of us!" Said by a Russian Spetznaz operator.
• An episode of Charmed opens with a young boy walking to an ice cream van in a dark alley. Later, we learn that the ice cream van is a trap set against prepubescent demons.
  Ice cream man: Would you like some ice cream, little one?
  Young boy: Yeah.
  Ice cream man: You didn't say "please".
  Young boy: {screams before opening credits]
• Daredevil:
  • In the fourth episode of Season 1, the Ranskahovs kidnap Claire Temple and start beating her to get information on the "Masked Man" who's been troubling their business interests. Suddenly the lights all go out, and then, one by one, Matt picks them off one at a time, with them unable to see him.
  • The second episode of Season 3 sees Matt kill the lights before entering a basement where the gangbangers who carried out an attempted kidnapping for Wilson Fisk are holed up. Things play out exactly as one might expect.
  • The third episode of Season 3 sees Matt interrogate Fisk's crooked lawyer by garroting him from behind in his car, then fight off a team of FBI agents that show up to rescue Donovan. It's clear that these FBI agents probably aren't ones actively doing dirty work for Fisk and are just protecting Donovan from an assailant, especially with the way one yells "They have families, asshole!" when he gets a chance to draw down on Matt.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Dalek POV shots in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" — when the Doctor is just about to get the upper hand over the Daleks, we're suddenly in a Dalek's head for the scene as the First Doctor stares it with a Psychotic Smirk and we know he's done something very clever.
  • In "The Pandorica Opens", the Doctor translates a local legend:
    The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a... trickster. Or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or... reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world. (It's him.)
  • The opening of "A Good Man Goes to War" invokes this on behalf of the villains, as they prepare for an imminent attack by the Doctor. One scene has the Cybermen deal with an off-screen attack destroying parts of their base. "Intruder level 11! Seal off levels 12, 13, and 14! Intruder level 15!" Although it turns out the attacker is not The Doctor, but, in fact, "The Last Centurion" Rory Williams.
    Rory: Where. Is. My. Wife?
  • Lampshaded later when River Song calls out the Doctor on this ("You make them so afraid.") as a violation of the ideals he set out with.
  • A more subtle version is invoked by the Eleventh Doctor in "The Wedding of River Song".
    The Doctor: Imagine you were dying. Imagine you were afraid and a long way from home and in terrible pain. And just when you thought it couldn't get worse, you looked up and saw the face of the devil himself.
  • We then see that the entire scene has been shown from the point of view of a damaged Dalek, who starts screaming "EMER-GEN-CY! EMER-GEN-CY!"
• In Game of Thrones Season 7, Daenerys Targaryen rides one of her dragons into battle and uses it to devastate the Lannister army. The difference here from the other times she used her dragon to destroy her enemies is that we see the deaths up close from the Lannister perspective shaking in fear and their deaths are treated in a somber light instead of being considered a moment of triumph for Daenerys.
• In an episode of the 2010 series Human Target, a plan to infiltrate the well-guarded mansion of a tycoon with Ilsa's help goes awry, and Ilsa is captured. Chance, thanks to his Unresolved Sexual Tension with her, single-handedly goes to rescue her, mowing down the tycoon's mercenary army. All this is shown from the viewpoint of the tycoon and his Dragon, whose faces get more horrified at the closing sounds of gunshots, screams, and shouts of "he's unstoppable". Chance then bursts into the room and guns down the rest of the Mooks. All with a pistol. Chance is not unique in this regard, although he is the best. Guerrero's name is enough to scare the wits out of any criminal or even a mob boss, and the guy himself looks like a nerd. Baptiste is also just as badass, which makes sense, since all of them went through the same school.
• * Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Parado kept goading Emu to fight him and pulled all sorts of sick tricks to get his attention because Emu has always prioritized saving people over antagonizing him. When Emu finally ran out of time, options and patience, Parado got more than he could handle as his every move proved entirely futile. Even worse, Emu exploited his fragile mental state to wreck him on the inside too by mocking and twisting his own words. By the end of the fight Parado is reduced to a sobbing mess begging for mercy. Kuroto, the absolutely bonkers bioterrorist with a god complex, who would regularly mock Emu's kindhearted nature, is disturbed by watching the fight.
• The Mandalorian:
  • The titular character is betrayed by his comrades while on a prison ship. He proceeds to escape from the prison cell they locked him in, sabotaging the cameras and doors to herd his traitorous team like rats in a maze and stalk them before coming after them one by one.
  • Chapter 13 opens with a particularly savage one, as a group of hired guns are slaughtered, one by one, by Ahsoka Tano. She attacks from the mist, which renders her invisible except when she ignites her lightsabers — and she ignites them only in the seconds before she kills.
  • The season 2 finale has the main protagonists cornered by Moff Gideon's Dark Troopers, and all hope seems lost... but then a mysterious, hooded warrior shows up and begins effortlessly carving a path through Gideon's forces, sending the once Smug Snake into a full-on Villainous Breakdown. Who is this enigma? Why, none other than Luke Skywalker, the original Star Wars hero.
• Moon Knight (2022) makes it very clear that Moon Knight is a terror to his enemies — and also to his alternate personality, the mild-mannered Steven Grant, who has no memory of his actions as Marc Spector/Moon Knight, but can snap between the two personas in emergencies. The first episode is seen entirely from Grant's point of view (until the end), and at one point, he is surrounded by four hostile mooks; then he blanks out for a few seconds and recovers to find four dead mooks and other people fleeing from him in terror. Then, at the end of the episode, Grant is running from a monster and trapped in a room, and Spector speaks to him, begging to take control. The monster breaks in — and a moment later, it is trying to flee in terror, before the unleashed Moon Knight beats it to death with his bare hands.
• The Punisher (2017) does this more than once:
  • Frank meets up with his army buddy Gunner in the woods on the latter's family land, when they're attacked by a kill team sent by Rawlins. They proceed to turn the hunters into the hunted, picking off the assassins one by one, while Rawlins watches on from his men's body cams.
  • Russo sends another team to Frank and David's hideout once he and Rawlins discover its location. Little do they know, Frank was anticipating their arrival and has spent the whole day preparing his defenses. He tears through the whole team solo, and brutally interrogates the last one before executing him.
• In an episode of Sherlock, the bad guys have kidnapped John, thinking he's the famous detective, until Sherlock himself arrives in the tunnel where they're keeping him. Sherlock taunts the bad guys from the darkness, extinguishing lights and striking from the shadows in a manner reminiscent of the other world's greatest detective.
• The series finale of Spartacus: Blood and Sand opens with Gannicus and an offscreen accompaniment of warriors slaughtering a hapless bunch of Romans, leaving one alive to tell the tale.
• In the Season 6 episode of Stargate SG-1 "The Other Guys", when SG-1 is attacking the Jaffa guarding the Stargate, O'Neill, Carter and Jonas use the standard "shoot them with zats" approach, but Teal'c instead waits for a Jaffa to run past him and erupts out of a lake and drags the Jaffa down into the water.
• Stargate Atlantis in an early episode has the titular Atlantis base taken over by soldiers of the Genii, a planet of humans native to the Pegasus Galaxy. After they fake executing the base commander, the military commander Major Shepard proceeds to annihilate the entire enemy force by methods that include climbing onto the roof of a room to execute a group of soldiers who can't see because of smoke bombs. He later gets into the control room to turn on the Stargate force field as Genii reinforcements are coming through, which wipes out all but 5 of the entire platoon of them with a Portal Slam.
• A second season episode of Supernatural opens with a terrified woman being stalked by a dark presence in a forest. She hides desperately behind a tree, relaxing in relief when her pursuer goes past, apparently not noticing her. Moments later, her head is chopped off. Sometime later, we find out she was a vampire. However, in a twist, she belonged to a coven that was feeding off of cattle to avoid killing humans, and the hunter who killed her turns out to be Ax-Crazy.
• In The X-Files, one episode opens with a teenage boy fleeing some off-camera pursuer, frantically yelling for help. It's to no avail, as his pursuer catches up and kills him... with a stake to the chest. It's Mulder, and he was vampire hunting.

Music

• The Megas seem to like this one.
  • "The Quick and the Blue" has Quickman becoming increasingly aware of how boned he is, but won't back down. To wit: He sees Megaman as nothing less than the unstoppable avatar of death itself.
    Is what they say true? Does death wear blue? Can he fall?
  • Flashman believes that fighting Megaman would be futile.
    Megaman is so powerful
    I fear my end is near
  • GeminEye is about Geminiman trying to bodyguard himself from Megaman, whom he sees as a hired gun out to kill him for reasons he doesn't know.
• Disturbed's song Indestructible is all about this. The narrator describes himself as a "terror to behold".
  From the other side a terror to behold
  Annihilation will be unavoidable.
  Every broken enemy will know
  That their opponent had to be invincible

Myths & Religion

• The Bible mentions how terrified the pagan nations were of the Israelites after their god laid waste to Egypt and then went around destroying everyone who attacked them in the desert. See, for example, the Moabites in Numbers 22 (the beginning of a Villain Episode) or the people of Jericho in Joshua 2.
  • Notably, this is not limited to villainous characters. Several of the prayers of King David — a relatively heroic guy by the standards of the time — go, "I know I don't deserve it, but please don't kill me!"
• The Ramayana character Vibheeshana sees Parvati — the real Parvati, not the human woman she currently looks like 0 — and almost goes crazy with fear. Imagine seeing Someone who is truly, inhumanly pure, before whom you feel just how venal and mortal you are. Someone so holy that they could incinerate you with a touch, and the only reason they don't is they know Fate has decreed a more humiliating death for you in the future. And all the while your rakshasa buddies are laughing, totally unaware that they are krill in the shadow of a whale. So, Vibheeshana defects. They call him a coward. Vibheeshana replies (paraphrased): "Yes, I am afraid, and if you could see what I see, you would be too!" Vibheeshana is the only soldier who survives the oncoming divine wrath — solely because he had the sense to flee.

Pro Wrestling

• Wrestlers like The Undertaker and Sting during face runs will often have segments or promos that count as this, with the various mind games and scare tactics they use to scare the living hell out of their heel adversaries.
• A picture perfect version of this was in TNA, when Sting, Fortune and Kurt Angle teamed up to do this to Immortal on the July 14th episode. The former had the other five dress up as Monster Clowns and pick off Immortal one by one. Gunner even attempted to invoke Final Boy in the end, but it didn't work. During Sting's title match with Mr. Anderson, Bully Ray showed up to try and help Anderson win, but then Angle, still in clown gear, appears and takes him out. The lights go out and Anderson finds him alone in the ring, Kurt standing on the entrance ramp, leaving Anderson in a panic that lets Sting win.

Radio

• "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" Listen to the opening here

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • For any party that reaches the mid levels. At that point, anything that isn't an exotic monster with special abilities, or a creature with character levels, tends to get taken down frighteningly easy by the party. Adventuring parties that tend to solve their problems with maximum application of violence tend to get slapped with derogatory term of "murder hobos" or "Munchkin" by DMs or roleplay-focused players. A good explanation.
  • Some particularly creative and/or vindictive DMs have exploited this trope by turning campaigns into a twisted version of Hired to Hunt Yourself. The party begins picking up rumors of a frighteningly vicious band of ne'er-do-wells, but always seem to be one step behind the bad guys... only for it to ultimately be revealed that the rumors are about them.
• This is Exalted, from the right (wrong) perspective. Normal people are called "Extras" for a reason, and playing a campaign as Heroic Mortals is more a question of "what kills you and how" than anything else. To normal people, the lowest forms of supernatural beings — Hungry Ghosts, Commoner Fae, First Circle Demons, Lesser Gods and Elemental Spirits, Enlightened Mortals — are nigh-unstoppable monsters. Terrestrial Exalted are elemental super-soldiers designed to brutally slaughter the aforementioned "monsters" in droves — and said super-soldiers are in turn little more than mooks to experienced Celestial Exalts.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Are you human? Are you currently being given a standard issue Lasgun, Flak Jacket, Infantry kit, and a copy of the Imperial Guardsman's Uplifting Primer? Start praying to the Emperor that your assignment is primarily fighting rebellions of planets who failed to pay their taxes or traitors. Otherwise, enjoy being part of Squad number 529 being sent to replace the most recent losses. Oh, and don't think of running away from the big scary monster charging at you from the front. Headquarters has seen fit to stop that by placing something even scarier at the back of your squad. It's called a Commissar, and his job is to provide "encouragement" to any who might consider retreating. Said encouragement often involves impromptu execution for cowardice via .75 caliber explosive shell firing Bolt Pistols. Planetary Defense Forces have it even worse. At least the Imperial Guard often defeats the enemy, even though the first deployed usually don't get to see it. The PDF, on the other hand, can merely slow them down until the Guard arrives...
  • The Deathleaper is a Tyranid Lictor that singlehandedly destroyed an Imperial world's morale in the face of a Tyranid invasion. Knowing that merely killing the Cardinal would make him a martyr and stiffen the populace's resolve, it instead started murdering the Cardinal's bodyguards right in front of him but leaving him untouched before vanishing, repeating the process every day. In less than two weeks the Cardinal went mad, demoralizing and disorganizing the planet's defense forces and allowing the hive fleet to overcome the planet with ease.
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: The sourcebooks occasionally remind players that some supernatural powers, like sprouting wings or breathing fire, will cause uninformed onlookers to mistake the character for a monster born of Chaos and react accordingly.
• Werewolf: The Forsaken: the Forsaken Werewolf tribe fittingly known as the Hunters in Darkness has this as their modus operandi; when hunting, they typically stalk their prey from a distance, using Homefield Advantage to isolate and lure them where they want while picking them off one by one. The corebook explicitly compares this to a Slasher Movie.

Video Games

• When there is a hacker in a multiplayer game, the other team will experience this trope, as they swiftly get cut down left and right by an unstoppable killer.
• Ace Combat has this as a staple of the series once the player has progressed enough. What makes it interesting is that the enemy never know your callsign, only your insignia, leading to a variety of nicknames:
  • Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies: After the furball over the Comona Islands, in which Möbius One can land a hit on the Yellow Squadron and force them to withdraw, the Eruseans start looking out for the "Blue Ribbon". This culminates over Megalith, their last holdout, when they see the entire squadron bearing ribbon insignias and freak out.
  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War has this as a stronger focus, helped by an in-universe fairy tale about a demon rising from the North Sea:
    • After the sinking of the Hrimfaxi at the North Sea, the Yuktobanians begin calling the squadron the Demons of Razgriz. It's not a nickname either - the bad guys seemingly believe the squadron to be real demons. It gets to the point that merely mentioning the squadron among Yuke ranks is enough to cripple the morale of entire battalions. President Harling decides to play on this after they rescue him by officially designating then Razgriz Squadron with a new all-black paintjob.
      Yuke Soldier: HELP US! IT'S THE RAZGRIZ!
    • A specific example is after the death of Chopper, as the player's squadron fight all the more fiercely and the Enemy Chatter becomes panicked.
    • The game also features the mission "Powder Keg", wherein the player's squadron is sent to take out an enemy weapon supply base out in the jungle. They start off rather confident that they can drive you off, but as you continue destroying the entrances to the base, they start getting more desperate and afraid as fires and explosions rock the base, destroy their supplies, and kill many of their men. By the end they're in a complete panic just before your last bomb completely destroys the entire facility.
  • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown has this happen around the time the first Arsenal Bird is destroyed. By this time Trigger has a new emblem featuring three clawmarks across his old one, so he's dubbed "Three Strikes"
    Osean Ground: If you see Three Strikes in the sky, count to three and the enemy's gone!
• Occasionally, That One Player becomes this to their gaming community. For instance, Dslyecxi, founder of Arma clan Shack Tactical, is treated as a terrifying specter of a man who can approach, make a kill, and escape without warning. Name-dropping him in a match is a great way to suddenly cause the other side to start making mistakes out of fear of him and his reputation. There's also been a few cases where he panicked the other team so badly just by his presence that they started killing each other by mistake trying to kill him. Please note that in at least one such instance, he had been confirmed down and out in the game for several minutes and his opponents were still causing friendly fire casualties because they were that worked up and paranoid after Dslyecxi had spent the prior 10 minutes or so picking them off one or two at a time.
• Assassin's Creed II has two separate instances where Ezio's main targets, Templars, are heard talking about Ezio Auditore da Firenze. The first man is completely paranoid, trying to talk himself into calming down ("He'll... he'll leave. He'll get bored, I'm sure...") and surrounding himself with guards. The second has a near-panic attack when he finds out that Ezio is simply in the same city that he is.
  • While Ezio had yet to establish his reputation as a supernatural combatant, both targets had actually been in Ezio's presence — the first had been one of the would-be killers of the Medici brothers, the second when Ezio trailed a conspirator to a secret meeting only to be revealed and escape — so they knew already how close he had come to them before; in the time between the targets he'd also developed a reputation as the Assassin.
  • In both the first game and the second, guards will throw down their weapons and flee in absolute terror after watching Altaïr or Ezio tear apart their comrades without so much as being scratched in return.
  • In the case of the second target, it is all the more satisfying, considering you're sitting on the ledge right above him.
  • Or, in the case of the first, the game encourages you to hide inside the well he's currently pacing around.
  • A commonly heard reaction to seeing Connor in the third game is "Oh, Hell. We're gonna' need some help!" Said Redcoats could end up torn to pieces in seconds. It is also entirely possible to leave a few bodies hanging from the branches of trees in your wake, or thin their numbers by luring a bear to them.
• In Asura's Wrath, the soldiers that witness Wrath Asura destroy their armies are absolutely terrified of him, and can only watch in horror as he rips through everything in his way.
• This is a staple of the Batman: Arkham Series' "Invisible Predator" sections, where Batman takes on groups of armed enemies by stealthily picking them off one by one. As the fights wear on, the mooks get more and more terrified (you can even check their elevated heart rates via Detective Vision) and start behaving more erratically. And to make matters worse, their boss is often there to berate them via loudspeaker for their failure (Joker being the worst of the lot since, as seen by the page quote, he actually seems to enjoy pointing out to his men how utterly screwed they are).
  • Joker has been usurped as the worst person to ever be on Mook Mission Control duty by Scarecrow in Arkham Knight. He doesn't angrily berate his men for their incompetence. He doesn't gleefully taunt them about how screwed they are. Instead, he gives them a very detailed and "educational" lecture about the exact psychological nature of the fear they are currently experiencing, and how it will haunt them for years to come and perhaps the rest of their lives. No wonder he was only allowed to do this once in the entire game. All other times you are in a Predator section against militamen, it's the Arkham Knight himself on the radio. Or Deathstroke, after the Knight is defeated.
• A video game mechanic in the Batman Begins games has you messing with the enemies' environment (using batarangs to break the lights, opening steam valves, activating heavy machinery, or simply performing stealth takedowns on their fellow mooks when they're not looking). When you max out their fear meter, Batman automatically steps out into the open as you see, from the mook's POV, a terrifying glowy-eyed demonic Bat Man.
• In Bionic Commando, Area 12's baddies go into a panic when they spot SuperJoe.
• The preview trailers for Krieg the Psycho, the sixth confirmed playable character in Borderlands 2, show bandits being obliterated by his hulking silhouette in a dark crimson area, particularly as part of experiments being used on him.
• At the beginning of Breath of Fire III, a baby dragon wakes up deep inside a mine, and then, under the player's control, proceeds to wreak havoc, slaughtering most of the miners it comes across and others who try to stop it. It is eventually captured, but when it escapes captivity it transforms into the main character, Ryu. Later, it's revealed that the mine incident was a nightmare for those that barely survived the ordeal.
• Ryu awakening the Kaiser Dragon for the very first time in Breath of Fire IV. It was a Roaring Rampage of Revenge as a result of Sociopathic Soldier Rasso taunting him the deaths of innocent women and children Rasso tortured. Rasso eventually reaped what he sowed, and the rest of the Imperial troops couldn't do a thing before the Kaiser slaughters them all. The only survivor was Captain Ursula (who, while on the same side as Rasso, abhorred his actions), and only because Nina gave Ryu a Cooldown Hug to finally calm him down.
• Brutal Doom: Lower-tier demons like the zombies or imps have expressions of fear, pain and anguish as your character rips through them.
• A simple but nonetheless notable game feature in City of Heroes. Sometimes an assassin's strike from a stalker will terrify enemies nearby, stopping them from fleeing.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: The Imperial campaign gives you not one but two levels where you get utterly curbstomp an entire map with a ridiculously overpowered unit, rewarding you with the fearful screams of your enemies. The Shogun Executioner is a building-sized Humongous Mecha with three torsos and three giant swords that can step on any enemy, slice any building dead in one or two hits, and doesn't need an Anti-Air attack because it just needs to walk into air units to kill them. Enemies can only really deal Scratch Damage to it, but it does accumulate... good thing Tesla weaponry heals the monster.
• If you go for the "Don't Fear The Reaper" ending in Cyberpunk 2077 then V is this due to cutting down Arasaka's best left and right with no help, and some of the last defenders are so afraid that they try to run away, surrender or reluctantly engage in combat with V whilst pathetically begging "I Don't Want to Die." If you're sufficiently leveled and geared then it's likely you'll be killing almost everything in one or two hits while they'll barely scratch you. The entire sequence is similar to Johnny Silverhand's flashback sequence from the beginning of Act 2 but with a much better outcome if you succeed.
• While his status as a hero is questionable at best, it's practically a given that Jackie Estacado from The Darkness rips apart his opponents with complete animal brutality. By the end of the first game, all the mooks beg desperately for Jackie to spare their lives. This is even more noticeable in the sequel, which has you performing deeper levels of brutality. Lampshaded in-game, when Jackie recounts what using the Darkness does to a person.
  Jackie: Once the Darkness gets ahold of you, you start to lose control. You start to wonder what the fuck you're doin'. Time slips away from you. And then, all of a sudden, its like you're sitting in a theater, watching a movie of your own life. You're up there, on the big screen, big as life. You're a fuckin' movie star. And you're killin' all the bad guys — tearing them limb from limb. And you feel good. You look good. Fuck, you ARE good. And then you realize somethin'. Everyone else in the theater — they're screamin', 'cuz they're watchin a horror movie. And you're not the hero. You're the monster.
• In Dead Space 3, after Isaac Clarke's love interest, Ellie, is apparently killed the scared man who had until that point just been desperately trying to survive goes away for awhile, as Isaac begins relentlessly slaughtering his way through Necromorph and Unitologist alike. The Unitologist radio chatter reveals their panic, because no matter what they throw at Clarke, he won't stop coming.
• Destiny 2 brings back Saint-14, a Boisterous Bruiser known as one of the Last City's greatest heroes for his one-man crusade against the rapacious Fallen who want humanity exterminated. Then comes Season of the Splicer, in which the spotlight shines on the House of Light, a breakaway Fallen faction that wants peace with humanity and has been granted refuge in the City. But Saint-14 only knows the Fallen as blood-soaked monsters, and is willing to say as much to the face of Mithrax, the leader of the House. Mithrax responds by telling Saint-14 the legend of a monster of their own, a thing that hunted his people and slaughtered them relentlessly, who could be killed but never for long, and whose shadow the House of Light now lives beneath every single day... a monster called "the Saint." This shakes Saint-14, who's uncomfortable with being feared, and is the beginning of a chain of events that ends with him becoming Bash Brothers with Mithrax.
• In the Deus Ex: Human Revolution DLC "The Missing Link," the Belltower soldiers will become gradually more and more terrified of Jensen as he pushes through the ship and Rifleman Bank Station, cutting down and shooting and blowing them up as he goes, and they know they can't stop him. Notably, they're just as terrified when he's getting around totally unseen. It's made very clear that it's still an example to them, because Adam is a heavily-augmented super-soldier who, upon being forcibly woken from cryo-sleep, managed to kill five armed soldiers single-handedly after being surrounded and it still took eight more soldiers to bring him down. Now he's loose in the complex, he has all his gear back, and they don't know where he is. Hell, even if you keep a low body count, the soldiers will remark that that just means Jensen is "more resourceful and more dangerous".
• An interesting point to Devil May Cry 4 switching away from Dante's perspective from the first half lets the player see the beloved hero as presumably everyone else does; a cocky, stylish, unstoppable killing machine that does not consider you a threat in any way and is wholly justified in doing so. Dante proving That One Boss, far and away more dangerous than anything else Nero goes up against, lets the player see what it's like being on the receiving end of Dante's Showy Invincible Hero shenanigans.
  • The opening cutscene really serves to sell this. A mysterious man in a red coat smashes through the ceiling, murders your leader, and then assaults an army of trained swordsmen and slaughters the lot of them. He barely speaks, and when he does, it's only to mock you. When you shoot at him, he shoots your bullets out of the air. And this is the guy you played as in the last few games.
• Diablo III has a scene where the men in Maghda's Coven are hinted to see your character fighting them as this when you go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against them following Deckard Cain's death:
  Coven Member: He's/She's unstoppable! No mortal could slaughter our brethren with such ease!
  • A journal you find in Act II called "The Feared Hero" confirms that the remnants of Maghda's coven are scared shitless of you:
    Dark Cultist: We camp, lying in wait for a hero of incredible prowess. My gut churns with the suspicion that we are simply fodder. I have heard tales of this hero wading through our ranks, slaughtering us as if we were children. I will not sleep again tonight, I fear.
• Corvo from Dishonored. Using the Flash Step power to get behind an enemy makes them wonder "where'd he go?", and then you can strangle them unconscious, slit their throat, shoot them in the back, or feed them to a swarm of rats, and if you're good enough at sneaking about, you can do all that without them seeing much more than your terrifying visage and their life flashing before their eyes. That skull mask he's wearing is enough to reduce most bystanders to tears. And that's not even mentioning that you can use severed body parts as thrown weapons.
  • The idle chatter that the assassins have make it absolutely clear they're scared by how skillful Corvo is. God only knows what the ordinary mooks think of him, seeing as they don't have access to supernatural powers.
• Doom:
  • In DOOM (2016), several chronicles located in Hell detail how the player character, dubbed "the Doom Slayer," was considered the most terrifying thing in all of Hell because of his tendency to rip and tear through absolutely everything he came across. It's eventually revealed that they only stopped him by dropping an entire temple on his head. And even that only lasted so long.
  • Its sequel DOOM Eternal shows that the demons are still pissing terrified of the Doom Slayer. As well they should be. Just use your Super Shotgun's Meathook to pull yourself towards one of the Imps and watch it throw up its arms in cowering terror as it realizes it's about to get a brief and horrifying demonstration of proper chainsaw technique. As shown in this trailer, even the humans he's trying to save are terrified of him: both ARC and UAC staff show obvious distress as the Doom Slayer walks through their facilities, treating him with instant unquestioning respect and a considerable degree of abject fear, basically permitting him to do what he wishes. Even the armed guards stop short when they realize what's happening. He is never once treated as anything other than something to be feared. As described in an off-the-cuff observation by Ben Croshaw:
    "It was like the start of Halo 2, but if Master Chief was a bear."
• In Dragon Age: Inquisition, as you progress through the zones you pick up letters written by your enemies in camps you overrun. You get to read the terrified reports of enemy lieutenants who've seen you in action, and the slowly degrading sanity of enemy commanders whose entire operation is being razed by your implacable advance.
• In Drakengard 3, this is how most human soldiers react to Zero effortlessly slaughtering their friends left and right.
• While most of the enemies you fight in the original Drakengard are too Brainwashed and Crazy to be frightened, the game makes no bones about Caim being a bloodthirsty psychopath who's only slightly better than the enemies he kills, and on the occasion he does fight a non-brainwashed enemy (for example, child conscripts that Caim coldly slaughters just like any other enemy before him) they react with a more-than-appropriate amount of pants-wetting terror.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim casts you as a mook horror show. Sure, normal bandits and enemy soldiers will charge you at any time, but they don't matter. No, the Dragonborn scares the Dragons. When you fight and kill your first Dragon, as the beast dies you'll hear this:
  Mirmulnir: Dovahkiin?! No!!
• Enemy Mind is a side-schooling Shoot 'Em Up where the player controls a mysterious entity that has to proceed through the level by possessing the pilots of enemy ships and turning them against their allies. In-between waves, the player can hear radio chatter of the other pilots freaking out over this weird...thing that keeps turning their allies against them.
• In the game The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay there are a few instances in the course of the game which turn the situation into this for the guards in the prison. But none so much as the moment when Riddick gets into a fully kitted out battle armour with chainguns, rockets...
• By the middle stages of Fable, anybody who witnesses the level of damage the Hero of Oakvale can deal is vocally terrified, even if the Hero is halo-and-butterflies Good and beloved by all the townspeople. Non-hostile bandits tend to beg for their lives when he looks at them.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, according to Boxcars, the Powder Gangers view The Courier as an equivalent to The Grim Reaper when they are vilified by them for slaughtering their attack on Goodsprings.
  • Joshua Graham has this effect on both Caesar's legion (for the mere thought he might still be alive) and the White Legs (he is the reason they haven't overrun Zion). This was a hold over from his "Malpais Legate" days as he destroyed anyone that stood in the way of Ceaser's Legion.
  • You can invoke this if you have the Terrifying Presence perk.
  • Any post-Old World Blues random encounters double as this and Robotic Reveal. Imagine that you're one of the Legion, tasked with bringing down a profligate who, after going off the grid for weeks, has finally turned up somewhere southwest of Vegas. Your team tracks him through the wilderness, noting that his footprints are heavier than normal and that he must be carrying an extra load. You find him wandering through the desert at midday, seemingly unburdened by either the extra load or the sun, and scope him down with the anti-material rifle (why they sent this with you for one man, Caesar only knows). His head finally centered in the crosshairs, you pull the trigger, expecting a grisly red mist and the muted thump of a fresh corpse on the sand. Instead, you’re treated to the metallic WHANG of a ricochet and the cold gaze of a newly-forged demigod. As he closes the distance to your contubernium with inhuman speed, you have just enough time to doubt the anti-material rifle was enough.
• In Fallout 4, you can become this to members of Sinjin's gang by leaving calling cards on their corpses, wearing the Silver Shroud costume, and speaking in-character as the Shroud. If you speak as the Shroud in the final confrontation, all of Sinjin's mooks run in terror.
  • Played with during the mission Hunter/Hunted. You get treated to watching the Gunners losing handily to an assault from a Courser, who you are in turn pursuing. You hear the commander getting more and more desperate as the Courser rips through their defenses.
• Far Cry 2 turns into this once you get a decent reputation. Just listen to the Enemy Chatter.
  "Oh God, it's HIM! What do we do!?"
  • Even more in Far Cry 3, since the protagonist is a drug- and/or magic-powered killing machine who has escaped sure death numerous times and tears through swathes of both pirates and later better-equipped privateers with little difficulty, sometimes without any of them even being aware of what's going on until his machete is being stabbed through their chest; little would one suspect the name "Snow White" to inspire sheer unadulterated terror among that sort of crowd. Even if your reputation is low, foes tend to panic if they find a body and fail to find the killer.
  • And in Far Cry 4, the only thing more terrifying than the Son of Mohan is the two-ton bullet-proof walking tank of death that he brought to play. You can make the elephant grab the nearest soldier with their trunk and slam his body into the ground. Or ram the elephant into a car with enough force to kill everyone inside.
    • Also, multiplayer Hunters have the power to turn invisible, use elemental powers, and can summon eagles / bears / elephants. If you're currently playing a golden path mook and your enemy isn't a noob, you may beg for mercy now.
      Narrator: Fun Fact: Elephants love the taste of blood.
• Once Cloud mounts the iconic Hardy Daytona in Final Fantasy VII Remake, we see a small scene from the perspective of a Security Officer and how he feels about the skinny, glaring guy with Occult Blue Eyes who just hurled a six-foot sword directly at him.
• This is a major theme and gameplay mechanic in Ghost of Tsushima, tied in with the game's Karma Meter. If you play as the honorable Samurai you were trained as, enemies will face you head on and in numbers, obviously making battles more difficult. But if you play as the Ghost, enemies will be subjected to the mother of all Mook Horror Shows as you stealthily sweep through their camps, quietly murdering them in cold blood or using theatrics to terrorize them to the point of madness, with the result that many enemies will just straight up run for their lives if they see you. Its easier and arguably more effective at driving the Mongols out of Japan... but is that really how a samurai should be acting, even in such trying times?
• Lampshaded by Zoe in Ghostrunner when she comments how ridiculously outmatched and underequipped the Keys really are to deal with Jack. You can have a lot of fun just deflecting all of their projectiles and jumping around them while they stand helpless.
• In God of War III, you get to witness (and control via Quick Time Event) Kratos brutally killing Poseidon from the latter's POV. It's every bit as disturbing as it sounds.
• Granblue Fantasy:
  • In episode 13 of the anime, the Empire's soldiers get stomped by Djeeta's crew off screen. Instead, several character's have a horrified look on their face, and Katalina covers Lyria's eyes so as not to see the carnage the rest of Djeeta's crew is causing to the soldiers. They then run out of the cave with their tails tucked between their legs.
  • Also occurs in the Shadowverse collab events when the imperial soldiers have the misfortune of trying to take down Mordecai, a powerful undying warrior.
• In Grand Theft Auto V, Trevor's introductory mission has him fighting a whole platoon of Lost gang members. Once you've killed certain number of them, the remainder will immediately drop their guns and run for their lives.
• Gundam:
  • The intro to an SD Gundam G-Generation game featured a bunch of Zakus getting hunted and killed, Predator-style, by the Gundam Deathscythe.
  • Journey to Jaburo's intro had the original Gundam do much the same, though it starts partly Predator-style (shooting one Zaku through a high-rise, ambushing the second with the Hammer) and ends partly Superman-style (charging the third Zaku with beam saber in hand as it futilely fires its machine gun).
• In Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the G-Man coldly and bluntly tells you that the Vortigaunts (aliens from the first game that were aggressive toward you, but are now your friends in the sequels) barely had any experience with humanity, with their first experience being "a crowbar coming at them from a steel corridor".

• In Halo games, the Grunts will say things like "He's everywhere!" and run away when you kill a lot of them at once. The books also go into their point of view every so often, and they tend to be exactly that scared (if not more so). Additionally, Covenant troops often are heard referring to the Master Chief and his fellow Spartans as "demons", both in and out of the games.
• In The Horde, some of the cutscenes show that unlikely hero Chauncey has a reputation as a ruthless and terrifying warrior among some of the Hordelings.
• Hotline Miami is literally nothing but this taken to the extreme. Gameplay consists almost entirely of killing faceless goons by the buildingful. An expert player can beat a level in under a minute.
• If you take the violent route in Iji (straining poor Iji's already fragile sanity), you can read the logs the enemies leave behind. They vary between fear of the grunts, astonishment, and anger of the officers struggling to maintain the discipline.
  • Even in a Pacifist Run you'll find logs freaking out over this human anomaly just waltzing through the aliens' defenses without even killing anything (plus the fact that Iji is likely holding onto enough weapons and ammo to supply a small army.)
• In the promotional materials for Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, it tells of a previous mission to Tatooine where Kyle Katarn left a single survivor. The author of the message, a New Republic intelligence agent, expresses anger that said sole survivor was too traumatized to offer an vital information.
• Pretty much the only purpose of Waddle Dee is to be cannon fodder for Kirby's latest destructive ability. Except for those armed with spears or parasols, their only way of hurting Kirby is to bump into him. And they often panic and try to escape, given the chance.
  • In Revenge of Meta Knight from Kirby Super Star; while Kirby infiltrates Meta Knight's battleship and destroys it from the inside, his henchmen progress from calm self-assurance to complete havoc. (Except for Sailor Waddle Dee, who's panicking from the start.)
• In The Last of Us, Joel and Ellie, as they trek across America, begin to get a reputation as the "crazy old man and girl" who are unstoppable killing machines. In fact, in a sequence near the end of the game, when Joel is noticed, the human enemies start running away rather than rush in and attempt to gang up like they have done up to that point. And the best part? Joel was impaled only a short while ago and is severely weakened. The guy can barely walk on two feet and still sends people running for the hills.
• LISA: At the end, Brad Armstrong literally becomes one, tearing through 4 waves of an army plus their big boss whilst transforming into a Joy Mutant.
• The introductory cinematic for the Raptor in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Console) consists of a terrified hunter running for his life while being pursued by a pack of raptors, an Aliens-style motion detector/radar screen indicating just how screwed he is.
• In Mark of the Ninja, this actually works as a gameplay mechanic. Usually, when a guard comes across a dead body, or sees you attack one of his fellows, he sounds the alarm. However, certain particularly brutal kills (such as hanging guards with the chain you use as a Grappling-Hook Pistol, hitting them with a portable spike trap or feeding them to flesh-eating bugs) causes an enemy to enter a terrified state where they can't sound the alert, just scream helplessly and fire blindly, often mowing down other enemies. If you're feeling particularly cruel, you can also accomplish this by dropping a corpse in front of a guard below, who will get scared absolutely shitless by the sight of his dead buddy plummeting on the floor in front of his very eyes. More generally, you are a blade-wielding Stealth Expert sneaking about casually dismembering the mooks in horrible fashion, and the target you spend the first half of the game hunting down is eventually reduced to cowering in a heavily secured panic room and pleading for his life as you cut down his guards and disable his automated defenses.. Really, it's Mook Horror Show: The Game.
• In the Mass Effect 2 DLC "Arrival", the Project guards pretty much start panicking the second Shepard wakes up and then starts slaughtering his/her way through the entire complex by him/herself.
  Scientist: Readings indicate that Shepard is resisting the sedatives. Must be a glitch in the system...Oh shit! It's not a glitch. SECURITY!
  • Even before that, during the Korlus mission, you tap into the Blue Suns' radio early on, letting you listen to their increasing panic as you slaughter your way through their base.
  • Any mission that involves the Eclipse or Blue Suns mercs tends to have com chatter from their bosses getting more and more freaked out as Shepard and co. effortlessly end everyone in their way. The Blood Pack on the other hand...
  • There's also strong indication that this is how the Omega mercenaries viewed Archangel. Of the three gang leaders, only Garm (the Blood Knight Krogan in charge of the Blood Pack) isn't freaked out by how close Archangel has come to killing him. The other two are really pissed and afraid by his attempts on their lives, not to mention desperate enough to team up.
  • Also during Arrival, during the fight for Object Rho, particularly notable if you're going for the "Last Stand" achievement.
    Random Guard Chatter: Shepard won't go down!
• The tradition is continued in the Mass Effect 3 DLC "Citadel" as you slaughter your way through the Mysterious Figure's army of mercenaries.
  Random Merc Chatter: Guys, I think we chose the wrong Shepard!
  • This time it's also extended to Shepard's crew. Note, in this DLC, the entire ME3 squad + Wrex and Cortez are participating in the slaughter — subverting Arbitrary Headcount Limit (although Shepard him/herself only brings two squadmates as usual) — which consist of some of the most badass people in the galaxy.
    Random Merc Chatter: But they've got a krogan! Why don't we have a krogan?
    Wrex: Wouldn't want to be you, princesses! HAHAHA!
    Random Merc Chatter: I think that turian with him/her is Archangel! How the hell are we supposed to kill him?!
    Garrus: [Boom, Headshot!] You're not.
    Random Merc Chatter: Shit! That's a Prothean over there!
    Javik: And that's a future corpse over there!
  • Additionally in the combat mission on Mars, Cerberus mooks (humans enhanced with Reaper augmentations) will exclaim "Holy shit! It's Shepard!" when Shepard attacks.
    • The revelation that the mooks have been indoctrinated and can no longer fear for themselves implies that their Reaper masters are as scared of Shepard. This is pretty much confirmed in the Leviathan DLC.
  • In the Multiplayer, the Cerberus troops start off professional, but as you kill more and more of them they get decidedly less so. For instance, earlier on, they'll say "Taking casualties" in a calm, professional manner. As you slaughter more of them, they'll scream that same line in panicked terror.
• Max Payne:
  • The first Max Payne gets like this by the end. There's nothing like tearing through a building of guards and hearing their boss respond to their messages over the PA, "What do you mean, 'he's unstoppable'?"
  • This happens in parts of Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne with Mona as the killer.
  • At one point in Max Payne 3 at the tail end of tearing through a base full of Elite Mooks, one of them drops his gun, drops to his knees and begs for mercy. There's also a minor mook-on-mook variation when Max lets Serrano loose on the doctor.
• In the very first Medal of Honor game, if you blew your cover in the U-Boat mission, Kriegsmarine officers would yell, "It's Jimmy Patterson!" and attempt to mow you down in a panic.
• The scene where Gray Fox slaughters the guards in Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. It makes a point of zooming in on one mook's face as he fires blindly at the invisible thing slaughtering his comrades so the player can see the absolute fear in his eyes, before said invisible thing runs him through and leaves him bleeding to death on the floor.
• Enemies in Metal Slug often scream and run away when they see you coming. They do this automatically if you use a continue.
  • The first game pulls this off on the player in the ending: A surviving enemy tosses a paper airplane, and the view follows it as it flies through the game's stages... littered with the bodies of the scores of soldiers you've slaughtered over the course of the game.
• Artyom's efficacy at combat or stealth in Metro Exodus is remarked upon by NPCs on multiple occasions. If he manages to sneak past most of the Children of the Forest camps without raising an alert in the Taiga level, then NPCs at one of the last camps will comment on how impressed they are by his slipperiness. On a related note, if Artyom manages to eliminate almost an entire outpost of bandits or oilmen on his own, then the last survivors of his assault will lay down arms and attempt to surrender.
• Metroid:
  • The Metroid Prime Trilogy, particularly the first game, highlights it if you read some of the Space Pirate's mission logs, increasingly desperate recordings of how "the Hunter" is tearing through their forces.^note This includes, appropriately, the encryption on the logs themselves, which the player might not even have realized were encrypted. This monster is of course Samus Aran, the player character.
  • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes's recordings are even more tragilarious because the pirates on Aether are already under attack by a "Dark Hunter," and then... "Another Hunter, this wearing the traditional colors of Samus Aran, made planetfall today. Horrific as it may sound, there are TWO of them now."
• The developers of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel Shadow Of War cite the Batman Arkham series as a shining example of good combat and purposefully invokes this trope.
  • While chopping Orcs to bits is enough, Talion can use the surrounding environment to terrorize them. Like unleashing Morgai flies or Caragors on them. Getting your Hitstreak/Might meter enables more direct terror methods like setting Orcs on fire, freezing-shattering them, setting yourself on fire, slowly hacking them to pieces, start teleporting, or raising up undead Orcs. Enough brutality thins the frequent huge militias the player fights to fair numbers. Without Meter you can come out of stealth and brutally stab an unlucky Orc causing witnesses to run and gives you a Meter bonus, allowing you to follow up with another vicious execution.
  • Orc and Olog Captains are randomly generated and have brilliant AI, meaning they can develop exploitable fears based on their interactions with you; Like being set on fire, seeing mind-controlled Orcs betray his group, a Caragor, a rival Orc, watching their comrades being brutalized or mind raped— Oh yeah! Did we forget to mention you can destroy an Orc's psyche in the middle of combat?
• NieR has The entire second playthrough. Just entire cutscenes with shades talking about how "that man" is going to come and none of them will be left.
• NieR: Automata: The enemy robot mooks will occasionally chatter with either vengeful rage for what you've done to the rest of them, or about as much terror as a monotone robot voice can express due to what you've done to the rest of them. This apparent display of emotion by the robots rattles 2B quite a bit.
• No More Heroes has the Dark Side mode: the screen turns black-and-white (except for red for Travis's katana and the inevitable bloodshed) and all mooks in the area start cowering away from Travis as he walks menacingly towards them and systematically murders them for the duration of the mode.
• No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: Travis' new Dark Side move allows him to transform into a tiger. While you're in this form, Mooks go from trying to beat ten shades of shit out of you to tripping over themselves in their efforts to get the hell away.
• The waterwraith in Pikmin 2 is a rare example of a boss horror show. Throughout the dungeon, the waterwraith has been terrorizing you with its relentless chase. It's completely invincible, and will kill any pikmin on contact, all while making an unholy gargling noise. Most players consider it the scariest thing in a game with no shortage of horror (seriously, look how long its page is. What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?) But on the final floor, where you have to face it as a boss, you have purple pikmin with you now. It is terrified of that "thud" sound that they make when thrown. Once you get it into its second phase, it is completely incapable of harming you. Its only movements are to either run the hell away, or to cower in fear of that noise.
• Piratez: An indirect case with the 'The Attack Of Violent Flare Females' article in the Solar Courier, which covers a typical raid mission observed from the enemy perspective. It focuses on how scary and overwhelming the pirates are, but also lampshades the typical player behavior of throwing light sources at random all over the place, which makes sense from the tactical perspective but probably looks puzzling in-universe.
• In Project Sylpheed, Katana becomes this for the ADAN forces. He begins the game as a rookie who is barely able to take out a small enemy cruiser. After a few weapon upgrades and some player experience, he can (and if you want all the achievements, will) be the most effective weapon on his side, tearing through enemy fleets and having entire fighter squadrons directed his way, with most of the enemy ace squadrons either dead or resigned to not being able to touch him.
• [PROTOTYPE] has its main character Alex Mercer pull more than a few horror-movie tricks in cutscenes, just in case his powers weren't already scary enough in-game. They include Offscreen Teleportation, shrugging off being riddled with lead, leaving fingerprints and footprints in his targets' blood after he's done with them, popping back up after being "killed", mimicking people without inducing suspicion until he feels like it, and being oddly nonchalant about an enormous bullet hole in his face.
  • Hell, the intro features him tearing apart an entire Blackwatch squad, rather easily.
  • Moreover, the fact that you can later have people gunned down by accusing them of being you demonstrates the panic and paranoia you sow among the mooks even outside of your murderous rampages.
  • And if you sneak into an army base, you can orchestrate it yourself, silently consuming and taking their places one by one, until there are none left.
    • Oh, as if watching your buddy get lassoed from across the room, yo-yo'd to death, and his liquefied remains getting slurped up through a proboscis sticking from a hoodie-wearing nobody's stomach wasn't worrisome enough. The fact that said nobody's Immune to Bullets is just gravy.
  • And then the sequel swaps out the From Nobody to Nightmare protagonist for a Scary Black Man Papa Wolf whose raw, vengeance-driven fury looks like something Kratos might invoke. Now give him an even better ability to disguise himself, new powers that include turning mooks into living hand grenades, the ability to rip vehicle-mounted weapons from their mounts and use them against his enemies and a tendril power that strings their mutilated bodies up to walls and buildings and...Oh, boy.
• In Resident Evil 4, Leon comes across an Apocalyptic Log written by the murderous, parasite-controlled villagers that have been hounding him. It frames him as an unstoppable killing machine that is going to slaughter every single soul in their village before he's done. They're not....entirely wrong about that.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours sometimes requires this if the player wants 100% Completion. Shoot ten out of twelve gang members who hang out at the gas station? The last two frantically run away. Many times Tony ends up mowing them down as they are trying to hijack a car and flee.
• Shadow Complex, definitely. You are just this one random guy who is going through the base and slowly taking it out. Many of the guards at first are like "it's just one guy" but later on they realize how much damage he's doing. And then there's the ways to kill enemies — normally, sneak fisticuffs, headshots, grenades, missiles, ground pounds, environmental factors... all while you slowly advance from civilian to a Powered Armor badass.
• The opening of Shadow Hearts: Covenant involves a unit of German soldiers invading the French village of Domremy. They enter the church, only to hear something taking out the rest of the unit outside. Then a massive, winged demon smashes through the window and proceeds to mop the floor with them. The last thing you see is the demon casually strolling away, and transforming back into beloved protagonist, Yuri.
• In Sleeping Dogs, Wei Shen can cause any enemies around him in a fist fight to flinch by grabbing one of their friends and breaking their leg with a stomp to the side of the knee. He can also use the environment to do things like set mooks on fire, impale them on hooks or electrocute them. Typically, the drug bust side missions involve beating down a certain number of guards to hack surveillance devices and end when any remaining guards run for their lives.
• This can be initiated in Sly 2: Band Of Thieves and Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves with Murray's Guttural Roar, which makes all enemies run away from him in fear for 6 seconds.
• This is done in Spec Ops: The Line, only there is no Hero. First, there are the scared cries of enemy combatants during battle. Later, in one scene, a character is shown dying of terrible burns to the airway from a white phosphorous attack you dropped on him. With eyes wide with terror, he just gargles out, "Why?" Near the end game, there is a whole memorial to all the men who've been killed. It's covered in dog tags and American flags. The pictures of the Player Character and the support NPC are found on it. The grief and hate is nearly palpable.
• Splinter Cell:
  • Sam Fisher gets this sometimes. Especially prominent in Conviction, in which the enemies are occasionally people Sam likely trained and know exactly what he's capable of. Even the less professional mercenaries can be heard loudly challenging Fisher in order to psych themselves up. Too bad it also gives away their positions, and is just irritating enough for the player to want to kill them to shut them up.
  • In Chaos Theory, doing things around mooks like whistling in the dark, destroying lights, knocking their comrades out/killing them and leaving the bodies for them to find and throwing cans and bottles around gradually builds the enemy's fear to the point where they fire blindly at where they last heard the noise or run away screaming. The interrogations also generally have Sam using threats of bodily harm to scare mooks into giving up information.
    Sam: [after being asked if he is a spy] Yeah, the real kind, not the tuxedo kind. I'm the kind that makes you bleed all over your Andretti unless you give me information!
    Mook: Oh, God!
    [...]
    Sam: [being refused information] Are you crazy? We're on the sixtieth floor.
    Mook: Wha— What do you mean??
    Sam: You know, it's not true that you go unconscious before you hit the ground. You see it coming the whole way.
    Mook: You— You wouldn't!
    Sam: You wanna convince me not to?
• Happens in StarCraft when fighting the Zerg. The cinematic The Amerigo makes especially heavy use of this, and in the tie-in comic books, Marines often panic when fighting them.
  • StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, especially, takes the trope to a whole new level, thanks to Kerrigan becoming a Game-Breaker / Humanoid Abomination / One-Woman Army in addition to still leading the Swarm. Not to mention that, while no longer as villainous as before, she is still remembered by her enemies as one of the biggest mass-murderers in the Starcraft universe...
    • One mission actually has Kerrigan teaming up with Raynor's Raiders to free Jim Raynor from a high security prison spaceship. Horner suggests sending Ghost Agents (or Tosh and a spec-ops squad) for stealth, but Kerrigan tells him not to bother. She then proceeds to gracefully waltz in through the front door, wave of Zerg following her. Nightmares ensue for the Dominion forces keeping the spaceship. And probably some of the Raiders, too.
    • There's also the final unit upgrade mission, starring Ultralisks. You get to roll through a city with the biggest, meanest combat monsters the Zerg have to offer, and they will not stop, even as Mengsk launches warhead after warhead into your forces, panicking and screaming to his men to fight for their lives.
• Star Fox 64 has the Area 6 mission, a difficult but target-rich stage in which the four Arwings and support ship of the StarFox team blasts their way through Venom's fleet and orbital defenses. The whole time you're listening to Enemy Chatter, which becomes increasingly desperate as they throw everything they've got your way and nothing stops you.
  Caiman: They're through the second line!
  Commander: Fire! FIRE! Don't let them through!
• One of the trailers for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II shows the chained-up Starkiller about to be executed by Imperial stormtroopers. He uses the Force to free himself and knock out the lights. The guards start looking around, shooting at any shadow in near-total darkness, while Starkiller picks them off one-by-one. The last guard starts backing off towards the door, his every shot deflected, until Starkiller impales him with his lightsabers.
  • In both installments of this series, it probably isn't a fun prospect being a Stormtrooper ordered to take out a renegade Sith.
• Star Wars: Battlefront typically has players in the role of a common stormtrooper, clonetrooper, battle droid, Rebel soldier, etc. However, it's possible to bring important named characters from the story to the field, such as Jedi Knights, Sith Lords, bounty hunters, and Rebel heroes. This is what it looks like when the average trooper encounters a named character.
  • Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) has a battle mode called Ewok Hunt, in which the Stormtrooper team must survive a night in Endor. The Ewoks can see in the dark, whereas the Stormtroopers cannot. And each time a Stormtrooper is killed, that player joins the Ewok side. The Ewoks are finally vindicated: instead of cute teddy bears, they are a terrifying and formidable presence striking from the darkness.
• Team Fortress 2: Most of the "Meet the Team" promotional videos are interview-style showcases of the RED team members doing what they do best against the BLU team. "Meet the Spy", by contrast, is a more conventional short shot from the BLU's perspective as they try to figure out which one of them is the RED Spy while the Spy picks them off one by one.
  • And in "Meet the Sandvich", a BLU Soldier and Scout are beaten to death (offscreen) by a RED Heavy.
  • "Meet the Pyro" does this as well, somehow made more disturbing by glimpses of how the Pyro apparently sees the carnage he creates.
    • The Pyro ups the ante even further; even his allies, including the mentioned RED Spy, are terrified of him (or her).
• The extensive Enemy Chatter in Titanfall make it clear that this is in full effect for the hapless Grunts. The mix of shock and terror in the grunt's voice after his squad gets wiped out can catch you off guard, and if you corner them with your Titan, they sometimes drop their weapons or go into the fetal position. If you kill a grunt dragging his injured comrade to cover, the other freaks out.
• Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (2013), having spent the better part of the game scared out of her mind and trying to survive a bunch of crazed cultist maniacs out to murder her and her entire expedition, begins turning the tables on her tormentors, to the point that by about the midpoint of the game the mooks give a collective Oh, Crap! when they see her coming and refer to her as "The Outsider". Especially when she picks up the grenade launcher, and beginning with her assault on the Solarii compound to rescue Sam, Alex and the others Lara begins actively hunting them down, making it abundantly clear that she is all out of fucks to give.
• Some trailers for Total War: Warhammer and its sequel have featured this:
  • For the first game, we have the Warriors of Chaos and Vampire Counts trailers.
    • The first is shown from the perspective of an Empire soldier who's the Sole Survivor of a battle with Chaos as he haplessly struggles to get away from an offscreen enemy while flashing back to the horrifying warriors charging into battle and chopping up his allies. Then at its apex, the trailer closes on him about to be hammered into the ground by Kholek Suneater.
    • The second shows a Witch Hunter and his underlings being ambushed by the Undead, lead by Mannfred von Carstein. While haunting music swells, the scenes of Vampire armies besieging human and Dwarf cities is intercut with the Witch Hunter fighting for his life while Mannfred slowly advances on him, cutting down soldiers right and left without even looking at them. Finally, it's just him and the undead, and the Vampire appears behind him out of nowhere, then the Witch Hunter is Forced to Watch while Mannfred raises his men as Zombies to fight in his army.
  • The Dark Elves trailer for the second game features a near-direct homage to Vader's scene in Rogue One with Malekith confronting and cutting down some steadily panicking High Elven red shirts using his sword and magic powers in similar fashion.
• Transformers: Fall of Cybertron features Grimlock's levels, which feel very much like playing as the horror movie monster. His alternate mode is a robotic fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus rex, gigantic even by Transformer standards and completely unlike anything ever seen or conceived of on Cybertron. He's also got a reputation planet-wide as an anger-fueled berserker, and nearly impossible to control even for the long-suffering Optimus Prime. Battle-hardened Decepticons collectively go into blabbering panic at the sight of him, and even rocket launchers and laser cannons hardly faze him. His finishing moves include ramming a twenty-foot-long sword (larger than his enemies are tall!) through their chests or heads, crushing them underfoot, biting them in half, melting them to slag with his fire breath, or just beating on Decepticons with other Decepticons.
• Valkyria Chronicles' Chapter 4 battle has as its victory cutscene the heroes raising a drawbridge underneath an Imperial armor company. There's shots of the enemy tanks scrabbling to stay on the bridge and an infantryman hanging onto the bridge for dear life before the slope becomes too steep and they fall off.
• The Tenno are this to both the Grineer and the Corpus in Warframe. Oh, sure, enemies might start to charge at you when a mission starts, but watch closely and you'll notice that the longer a mission runs, the more enemy soldiers flee at your mere presence, firing over their shoulder in their retreat. In fairness, a single Tenno can effortlessly infiltrate and slaughter an outpost or ship with over 150 personnel, performing feats such as aerial acrobatics, turning invisible, elemental summoning, resurrecting the dead, or defying death itself. On top of that, most Warframes have access to some kind of ability that allows them to simply destroy all opposition in a radius of up to 20 meters. Now consider that most Tenno operate in teams of four. No wonder Grineer and Corpus troops start panicking and fleeing at the sight of one. Notably, this fear response does not appear in robots or infested enemies, but it does show up in the Corrupted, implying that even total brainwashing wasn't enough to keep these soldiers from realizing they should be shitting themselves in fear and running at the sight of a Tenno.
• It's entirely possible to pull this off in Watch_Dogs, particularly during gang hideout missions where lots of armed enemies are around, but so are lots of cameras and items that you can hack, including the mooks' own explosives! In some cases, it's possible to take down all or almost all of the enemies without even setting foot in the main part of the area: just follow the cameras and take out every last one of them by detonating the grenades strapped to their belts, or causing fuse boxes to explode as they walk by them, or dropping shipping crates on their heads. If you want to go for the more traditional route, start the mission at night and cause a blackout, then run in take them down with your billy club or shoot them in the head with a silenced pistol or machine gun, then set down explosives near the bodies so that you can blow up any remaining patrols when they come to investigate, all without ever being seen. Nobody is safe from the Vigilante...
• William J. "B.J." Blazkowicz gets this treatment in Wolfenstein: The New Order, but taken further in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, when his ability to come back from any injury earns him the moniker "Terror Billy".

Web Animation

• The Warhammer 40,000 fan film Astartes shows a squad of Retributor Astartes boarding a rebel spacecraft and methodically eliminating all opposition from the rebel guardsmen. Only Part Four, which has a couple of psykers opposing them, has the Retributors face any sort of meaningful resistance — everyone else is just a trigger pull from losing chunks of their bodies. This is further compounded by the rebels performing a variety of legitimate tactics against the Retributors which nonetheless does nothing more than dent up their Powered Armor.
• In Max Gilardi's Fazbear and Friends, Freddy and the gang are portrayed as kind and likeable characters who simply have no idea that they are animatronics. At least till the ending, anyway.
• Helluva Boss: In "Truth Seekers" a quartet of demons escape from a government facility and hack, slash, blast, and maul their way through dozens of agents. After two agents manage to crawl their way past their coworkers pools of blood and severed body parts they manage to lock it down, only for the lights to flicker, computers start taunting them, dead agents rise as zombies, topped off by one of the surviving agents vomiting up a Prince of Hell. The demons are the protagonists.
• Pootis Engage is mostly shown from the POV of the area 51 mercs, and thus we get to watch their horror as they are destroyed in incredibly well animated ways by the Heavy duo.
• Played for laughs in RWBY. Yang evidently made quite an impact on Junior's goons in her Curb Stomping of them in the Yellow trailer. When she goes back to his bar in "Painting the Town", they're frantically trying to hold the door shut to stop her from coming in. When she blasts the door down with Ember Celica and struts in with a playful "Guess who's baaaack!" and a wide smile, every single goon immediately points a gun in her face. The only exception is the DJ, who is sitting cowering behind his mixing desk.
• Guardian. During the Changeling invasion of Canterlot, a detachment of Changelings has cornered two unicorns. Enter a certain cross-eyed pegasus with a family resemblance, ready to kill or die in order to protect said unicorns.

Webcomics

• Dan, of Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, does this to Regina, starting about here, for the next four pages.
• Girl Genius:
  • The flashback of Zeetha wiping out the inhabitants of an entire pirate fortress sure looks like this in a couple panels.
  • As does the scene where Agatha's circus buddies battle Wulfenbach troopers in Sturmhalten. At least on a few pages.
  • The best example, however, would be the sequence where the Castle Heterodyne reactivates to kill off invading forces. Some invaders are swallowed by the ground, others crushed by spiky walls, gigantic Clank-monsters surprise them from behind or below, and of course there's the death sentence that is hearing a flying Clank break through your window shouting "THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING IN MECHANICSBURG!"
• Lackadaisy: The pig farmers' assault on the protagonists' speakeasy turns horribly against them once Freckle gets hold of a Tommy Gun and starts cackling maniacally while shooting from the rafters.
• Mushroom Go, being about a group of pirates in the Mushroom Kingdom, treats Mario this way. His only appearance to date was in a flashback told by Captain Martello. He crippled her Hammer Brother father for life and incinerated his partner. The way she describes him makes him seem like a terrifying, one-man-army, monster, which to the Koopa Troop, he kinda is.
• Schlock Mercenary: Schlock, being bulletproof, super-strong, fond of heavy ordnance, habitually eating his enemies and not at all humanoid, naturally gets this treatment sometimes. Nowhere more so than in Schlocktoberfest 2001. It starts as a horror movie cliche when Diamond Bugs easily tear through armor, and then reverses when they face the "regenerating zombie cannibal!" Compounded by the fact that the enemies are depicted as children and he has at least quadrupled his size and strength by consuming his fallen comrades' bodies, and preserving their heads in jars.
• In Skin Deep, seriously ticking off a bugbear can create this trope very quickly.
• xkcd has a comic from the point-of-view of viruses facing human ingeniosity.
• Zomgan: After Craven orders his Zomgan goons to charge towards Mirae On to avenge Jeff, Mirae doesn't go merciful on them. He punches the ground, summoning bones and uses one of them to slaughter his way through the Zomgan. It ranges from beheading one, slashing another in half, and using his own organs and bones to murder the remaining Mooks.

Web Original

• In The Deathworlders Chapter 32 we're treated to a Celzi general's perspective on a SOR assault on his compound. It's not pretty.
  There were nine humans loose in his compound, and they were death.
• Though on paper Dream is at a disadvantage as the target of Manhunts, as many comments like to point out, in practice, the Hunters are more scared of Dream than he is of them, and for most of the Manhunts that fear proves to be fully justified as he picks the Hunters apart. This is especially the case when watching the earliest 1 Hunter videos from George's perspective, showing exactly how terrifying it is to go up against Dream. Most of the time, he'll be hunting you.
• The video The Flying Man has a superpowered human-shaped thing that seemingly exists solely to kill criminals. It doesn't interact with the press or anyone else on-screen, so we see it through the eyes of a hapless criminal that attracts its attention. The video has been called "Lovecraft with superheroes."
• Hank from Madness Combat tends to invoke this a fair bit. The fact that he's basically killed everyone he's seen in the series at least once doesn't hurt a bit.
• In The Salvation War, Satan attempts to conquer Earth in 2008 at the invitation of God, only to find he has disastrously underestimated how tough humanity has gotten in war. The resulting slaughter of demonic mooks who are consistently outmaneuvered, outwitted and sheer overwhelmed by Humanity's ruthless military might soon becomes an almost pitiful massacre.
• Something Awful once featured a story from the point of view of two video game mooks, who were portrayed sympathetically and after some nervous waiting had to face the terrible killing machine that had been tearing through the ranks of their fellow soldiers. One of them actually managed to kill him. But then somehow everything was suddenly as if that whole encounter hadn't happened, and he was coming again...
• Mr. Welch:
  672: The forehead is not an appropriate place for a kill-count holotatoo.
• The Whateley Universe story "The OP" stars the Grunts, a school team training for a future career in the military. Between their training and their own fairly respectable mutant powers, one wouldn't precisely consider them mook material...yet Carmilla in full Eldritch Abomination mode picks them off one by one easily and graphically enough in true horror movie fashion. Good thing for them it's only a training simulation.
  • The segment during "Revenge of the Alphas" that pits Bloodwolf, Killstench, and Maggot against Jade. 3 of the most dangerous students on campus against a little girl. They end up utterly terrified of her, none more so than Bloodwolf, who decides that she has to be some kind of demon.
  • Jade goes one better in "Christmas Elves", using her fast regeneration and a handful of parlor tricks to convince a whole Syndicate facility that they were under attack by an Undead army.

Western Animation

• The very first episode of Ćon Flux casts the title character in this light, slaughtering masked mooks left and right to levels reaching almost parody. And then the masks come off, the families come to collect the bodies... One of the early shorts (before the series was made) begins with Aeon moving down dozens of enemy, and then the narrative abandons her to focus on one soldier's painful dying moments after being shot down.
• In the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "The Avatar State", Aang has a nightmare where he sees himself in the Avatar state, and realizes just how terrifying an opponent he is to his enemies when he unloads the whup-ass.
• In The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Hank Pym's introductory scene and Establishing Character Moment as a nice guy unless you push him too far shows him conducting an experiment which is interrupted by a team of badass mercenaries. He shrinks himself and shows how dangerous that power can be by taking out the group one by one, essentially invisible, causing all of them to totally lose their composure and freak out. The whole thing is inspired by a scene in Predator (with Hank standing in for the Predator).
• Ben 10:
  • In the episode "Last Laugh", the main villain, Zombozo, has one of the most ironic examples of this trope: after tormenting Ben the entire episode through Mind Rape, he finally pushes Ben too far by threatening his cousin, causing Ben to become Ghostfreak and invoke this trope to literally scare Zombozo to death.
    Ben/Ghostfreak: What's the matter, Zombozo, you're afraid of good old Ghostfreak?
  • Happens to the same villain again at the hands of Gwen in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien when he tries to kill her aunt right in front of her. Gwen replies by going One-Winged Angel and terrifying the living heck out of him.
  • Ben actually has multiple scenes in all series where he displays this trope: in one episode of the original series, he attacked two mooks in his Ripjaw mode in a typical Jawesque fashion; Alien Force and Ultimate Alien have scenes such as when he threaten people as Rath (though Rath's behaviour make it more comical), and the list goes on.
  • Though it didn't involve a villain, Ben 10: Alien Force also had a full episode with Ben doing this to his own allies as part of a test to see how good they had become. For the whole episode, they were trapped on a space station with Ben doing several times Offscreen Teleportation and beating them up in various form while mocking them with a Psychotic Smirk. It was creepy as hell.
• Being a pastiche of Batman and The Shadow, Darkwing Duck tries very hard to pull this trope off. He usually fails, but on occasions, he does succeed quite well.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • Batman: The Animated Series:
    • The opening sequence follows in the same vein as other Batman media.
    • The best in-episode example is in "The Trial". Batman is loose and the villains are in a dark room lit only by Two-Face's lighter. Batman, in the exact environment where he is next to invincible, circles around the edges of the room, outside the lighter's glow, and grabs the villains one by one. The Joker finally says it's time to panic when he sees Harley suspended from the ceiling and bound with the straitjacket Batman had just escaped from. To make things worse, Harley had been holding onto Batman's utility belt...
    • Another good example is at the climax of "The Forgotten", which has Batman taking down some evil gold miners who have been enslaving homeless people. In a startling aversion of Hollywood Darkness, the Big Bad has the miners switch off all the lights in the mine and turn on their head-lamps as the only source of illumination, not realizing that Batman loves the dark. The miners are like fish in a barrel as Batman incapacitates them — and all of this offscreen, as all we get are screams, sounds of struggle and the remaining miners slowly coming unglued, until their leader actually tries to flee from Batman rather than attempting to kill him.
    • "The Man Who Killed Batman" plays some variants when humble mook Sid the Squid gains the Red Baron title ''The Man Who Killed Batman'' more or less by accident. First, False Friend mook Eddie G. arranges for Sid to play the bait while Eddie gets away, so Sid is chased by a Terror Hero. Sid is saved by his own luck and stupidity, apparently killing Batman in the process. He's taken to a Bad-Guy Bar to celebrate, only to have some Bit Part Bad Guys Gangbangers challenge him for the title of "the toughest guy in Gotham." Cue a Bar Brawl. In quick succession, Sid is "saved" by the arrival of the police, only to be menaced by Harvey Bullock with a little Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique; "saved" by a lawyer, who turns out to be Harley Quinn and leads Sid to the Joker, who puts Sid in a Death Trap; escapes by a Deus ex Machina and seeks protection from The Don Rupert Thorne, who suspects Sid is trying to pull a Scheherezade Gambit and decides Sid has outlived his usefulness; and finally truly saved by Batman, who plays this trope straight on Thorne's gang, and sends Sid to jail... where he is held in high regard for almost killing Batman.
  • If you make Superman angry enough, he may do this. Hawkgirl and Aquaman, on the other hand, skip directly to this.
• Given the Urpneys' immense Sympathetic P.O.V. (and how cowardly they were on top of it), slapstick variations were fairly common in The Dreamstone. They even tried to make the cutesy heroes look as menacing as possible in many cases. "The Dream Beam Invasion" is a rare case of using the trope and then reversing it back onto the heroes straight afterwards. Apparently when the Urpneys stopped being afraid of them and actually threatened to fight back, the heroes were kind of out of strategies.
• In Gargoyles, the Manhattan Clan often invokes this trope.
• Marvel's Spider-Man features the iconic scene of Spider-Man going after Uncle Ben's killer as this; the buglar is initially puzzled to see this man in strange costume show up, only to soon be terrorized as Peter throws him around, stick him to the wall with webs and yells at him about how all he wants to hear from him is scream. When he finally gets let go due to Spidey's My God, What Have I Done? moment, his first move is to hand himself over to the police and beg them to arrest him, just to get away from the crazy man in spider suit.
• In an episode of Megas XLR, "Coop D'Etat", an army of giant robots follow Megas into a large cloud and are picked off one by one. One of the robots even trembles in fear.
• Several Samurai Jack episodes were told through the eyes of sympathetic characters attempting to kill Jack. Jack is just as unstoppable in those episodes as any others.
  • At the end of the Three Episode Pilot, Jack has single-handedly decimated a horde of insectoid Mecha-Mooks, ending with one of the robots surrounding him taking a single step away from the samurai covered in the Symbolic Blood of his enemies. "No. There is no escape." Violent action ensues.
  • Gets played for laughs in Season Five. Aku has spent the past fifty years throwing everything he has at Jack and watching everything he has fail miserably, and plus Jack has stopped aging so he can't even just hide and wait for Jack to naturally die. The possibility of Jack eventually finding and killing him has been hanging over his head all this time, and it's driven him to become a Nervous Wreck. Little does he know, Jack has lost his sword and so can't kill him.
• In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Spider-Man becomes this when wearing the black suit. Despite how hilariously hammy his dialogue is, you can still see the fear in Shocker's eyes as Spidey is literally hunting him down with the intention of killing him.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Though decidedly Played for Laughs, the scene where SpongeBob chases down the Strangler is definitely portrayed as this while mostly being an homage to Droopy cartoons.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Maul's rampage on the Venator. After he's set free by Ahsoka, he massacres his way through the Clones trying to enact Order 66 with nothing but his telekinesis and a shocking amount of Family-Unfriendly Violence.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
  • Used in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) with Splinter. His appearance in Shredder's chamber is heralded by a panicked-looking Foot Mook falling into the room and being dragged back into darkness and a pair of Glowing Eyes of Doom.
  • Shades of this in the portrayal of "The Night Watcher", Raphael's vigilante persona in TMNT.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • Raven once invokes this trope on Dr. Light by accident, because her self-control is slipping and her dark/angry half-demon side gets out of control. Given a funny Continuity Nod later in the series, when a gleefully-gloating Dr. Light suddenly finds himself facing Raven again, and immediately surrenders and asks to be taken to jail.
  • In the two-parter "Aftershock", the Titans as a whole, having to deal with their Sixth Ranger Traitor Terra, first approach by going easy on her, giving her chances to come back to her senses and return to them. She brutally rejects every single time, viciously taking them down one by one all while mocking some of them for added measure. Comes the second part, the Titans stop holding their punches against her... and proceed to tear through her as she runs away in terror.
• Transformers:
  • Bulkhead pulls this in Transformers: Prime with MECH Mooks.
  • Predaking, having learned that the 'Cons engineered the destruction of his brethren, goes on a rampage inside the warship. The Vehicons try their best, but they're little more than an annoyance.
  • In Beast Wars Optimus Primal, of all bots, pulls this in "Gorilla Warfare", when he's hit by a virus that was supposed to turn him into a coward. Instead, it made him a devoid-of-fear berserker who rampaged through the Predacon base, subjecting Taratulas and Waspinator to this trope.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • The very first non-pilot episode, Dia de los Dangerous, features Brock Samson methodically killing as many of the Monarch's henchmen as he can using his car, lighting-up and enjoying a smoke as he does. It's horrific.
  • ¡Viva los Muertos! started out this way by showing what Brock Sampson in action looks like through the eyes of a rookie henchman. After the rookie's corpse is used as a test subject in Dr. Venture's reanimation experiments, Brock must deal with the guilt of accepting that the disposable mooks he's been killing are generally decent people.

Real Life

• A soldier is shot in his bulletproof vest, falls and gets back up. The reaction from the insurgents is priceless.
• Just imagine being an average, forcefully drafted soldier in any war through history. You either are the horror monster or you're dead.

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