Regularly Scheduled Evil

"Every 23rd Spring for 23 days it gets to... eat..."

— Jezelle Gay Hartman, Jeepers Creepers

A killer is on the loose. Sometimes the killer is a person, but more often it's some sort of supernatural monster. Many people — dozens sometimes, and sometimes even hundreds of people — have fallen to this fiend. No one's noticed because the killer only comes out to play every few years, or every few decades, or even every few centuries. Regardless of the time involved, no one has connected this long string of victims.

At least, no one has put two-and-two together until now. Our intrepid hero is the only one clever or lucky enough to connect the dots. Now if he can only convince someone that the same killer who murdered those prostitutes a hundred years ago is the same killer murdering prostitutes today without being accused of being the killer and left unprotected in a jail cell.

A specific type of Vicious Cycle. May overlap with Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday, or Theme Serial Killer. If the killer is a supernatural being, it is often a case of As Long as There Is Evil.

If this happens monthly, it may be Menstrual Menace or Lunacy, with werewolves especially prone to the latter. A particularly regular Comet of Doom could also count. Ancient Evil is particularly fond of this trope, yet often contracts Genre Blindness from being outdated. Compare Eternal Recurrence.

And this is a Death Trope, so expect UNMARKED SPOILERS!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Early in Death Note, it's explained that Light had set aside specific time slots in which to kill criminals with the Death Note, in order to provide himself with a healthy balance of sleep, homework, and death.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Hohenheim and Dante kill people every so often to use as surrogate bodies for their souls. Dante is attempting to start a new and more destructive cycle by devastating countries with knowledge of Philosopher's Stones so they will create one she can steal.

Comic Books

• In NiGHTS into Dreams…, the divide between the dream world and waking world weakens every 100 years, and only two dreamers a century produce red Ideyas, allowing Wizeman to schedule his takeover attempts around that.
• The monster from Psychonaut wakes every 400 years to feed on the planet Xenos.

Fan Works

• In the Better Bones AU, One-eye reappears every few generations in a new form to terrorize the Tribe, and the Tribe has to kill him again every time.
• The Bridge (MLP): Giranbo is a monster who abducts and consumes children every Halloween, Nightmare Night, or similar holiday.
• In the Pony POV Series, Grogar escapes from his prison every 500 years unless stopped somehow. In the Dark World timeline's Sequel Series (by a different author) Dark World Drabbles, he's ultimately killed by the combined Rainbows of Light and Darkness.

Film — Live-Action

• Dragonslayer: Every six months, a dragon attacks the village of Urand, forcing them to sacrifice a virgin girl for it to devour so that it spares the rest of the community.
• The Creeper in Jeepers Creepers emerges from hibernation every 23 years and feeds for 23 days.
• Lifeforce (1985): The space vampires attack the Earth to consume souls when their spaceship departs from Halley's Comet every 76 years when it's in close enough proximity to Earth.
• The Night Strangler: Once every 21 years for the last century, alchemist Richard Malcolm strangles several women and extracts their blood to use in an elixir of immortality. Doing this and keeping himself in isolation for the waiting period have trapped him in an endless cycle and driven him completely insane.
• The Kaiju in Pacific Rim are attacking on a schedule so regular that the defense force has a countdown clock accurate to the second. The intervals are getting smaller, though, and the movie starts with a prediction that they'll soon be sending more than one at a time. Which is, of course, proven true.
• Sint deals with the regularly scheduled attack of the ghost of a Sinister Minister (which is the origin of the Sintkerlaas/Santa Claus myth) and his flesh-eating, naked barbarian "elves" every 25 years on Christmas. At the end of the movie, we find out that the police and government are aware of these attacks and seriously think there is nothing that can be done other than keep things under wraps and pray for the best, even letting one of the heroes (a Cowboy Cop who hates Christmas due to being a survivor of a previous attack) take the posthumous fall for the movie's events.
• Split Second (1992): The alien monster kills its victims based on the lunar cycle, and only during high tides in the partially submerged city of London.

Literature

• In American Gods, Shadow discovers that the disappearance of teenagers over the course of several years in a small town are actually sacrifices to an ancient tribal god that resides in the town. Not even the people in the town know about the dark secret.
• The Avatar Series: The Overgod Ao exists to preserve the balance only, not to take sides against good and evil. Thus, he chooses an insane human to be the god of various evil things and a good mage to be the goddess of magic. That bites him in the ass in the end, because magic is meant to be part of the balance, and therefore neutral for everyone, so the goddess is forced to change. The insane god of murder eventually gets his comeuppance too. He murders so many gods that even the Overgod can't say he's 'just doing his job' anymore. He upset the balance so badly that the only solution was imprisonment in his own pocket plane for one thousand years. Being alone with his own mind for one thousand years does not help his sanity.
• The vampires in Blindsight were like this, sleeping for long periods so their prey could repopulate, until humans invented architecture, which largely drove them away from civilization because of their innate phobia of right angles. This ability of theirs is exploited after the species is resurrected, as being able to hibernate for years is a great aid in space travel.
• This appears in a fairly benign fashion in Carpe Jugulum. Every few years, the old Count de Magpyr would arise from the grave, probably kidnap some young woman who looked good in a nightdress, then be killed. (It's implied that "kidnap" may have been a bit of face saving on the part of the "kidnapee". The Old Count was, by most accounts, rather charming when he wanted to be.) This went on for long enough and was generally harmless enough that no one really minded. The less benign version also appears, albeit much more briefly — the current Count has an... arrangement with a charming little town near the castle. The town's inhabitants are less than pleased about it, but their opinion doesn't matter to de Magpyr...
• In Dragonlance, the gods agree that there must always be a balance between good and evil, and therefore Takhisis must be released at some point in history to allow the balance to reassert itself or there could be another cataclysm like the Kingpriest of Istar brought about.
• Empire from the Ashes: Every 50-100,000-odd years, a huge fleet sweeps the galaxy, exterminating every sapient species it finds. The last interstellar human empire, of which the population of Earth is an offshoot, was aware of this fact, and built an enormous fleet to stop them. Unfortunately for Earth, we're on the closest edge of human space to the fleet, they're coming again, and the Imperium is nowhere to be seen.
• A mouse genocide occurs in The Heroic Adventures of Hercules Amsterdam every seven years. Unfortunately, the mice don't live seven years, and none of them can count higher than four anyway.
• IT: Pennywise awakens from hibernation once roughly every 27 years for 12–16 months at a time, feeding on children before going into slumber again. According to Mike, It's cycles usually end in the winter months of the year, but the Losers injured It so badly during the summer of 1958 that that particular cycle ended prematurely.
• In Log Horizon, the "Return of the Goblin King" was a bi-annual event in the game Elder Tale where the various Goblin tribes would unite under a King. The players knew in advance when this would happen, so they would coordinate and plan for it, easily finishing the event when it rolled around. But when Elder Tale became reality, the players were so focused on adjusting to living in the new world that they forget about the event, and when the Goblin King is crowned, a massive invasion by Goblin armies results... an invasion that could have real, lethal consequences since it is no longer a game.
• In The Wheel of Time, Ishamael briefly escapes his prison once every thousand years. The first time resulted in the Trolloc Wars, and the second time resulted in the collapse of Artur Hawkwing's empire. On an even grander scale, the ends of the two Ages we're privy to involved a climactic showdown with the local Satanic Archetype; presumably the ends of the other five Ages are similarly dramatic.
• In When Demons Walk, a murderer kills every seven days or so, which is one of the things that help the protagonists figure out it is indeed a demon doing the murdering.

Live-Action TV

• Angel:
  • Penn, the serial-killing Puritan vampire sired by Angel, went on murder sprees every ten years or so.
  • The Mayincatec demon from "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco" returns to eat the heart of heroes every fifty years.
  • Angel himself did this when he was evil. While Angelus cheerfully tortured and killed people all year round, he apparently thought Valentine's Day was special, and every February 14th, he made sure he did something really evil and petty to mark the occasion.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Gingerbread", Hansel and Gretel are really a demon that appears every so often as a pair of murdered children to provoke witch hunts.
• Charmed (1998):
  • Hecate comes to earth every generation or so to marry and be impregnated by a human male, allowing her Half-Human Hybrid spawn to appear human and live unnoticed in the mortal realm.
  • Barabus, demon of fear, is originally stated to come to earth on Friday the 13th every 1300 years. His second appearance Hand Waves his early return. Subsequent episodes don't even bother.
• In the Criminal Minds episode "Bloodline", a family (which later turns out to only be one branch of a whole network of families) follows a tradition of selecting a random family that has a daughter. Then they break into the selected family's house, kill the parents and abduct the girl, in order to raise her as a wife for their son. By traveling all over the country and presumably only killing once per family per generation, they've managed to remain undetected for at least a hundred years.
• The CSI episode "Sweet Jane" has a Serial Killer who started killing when he was in his late teens, and only gets "the urge" every ten years or so. He doesn't get caught until he's in his seventies. The length of time between murders is one reason why it takes so long for the police to catch him.
• In Dexter, Special Agent Lundy becomes convinced that a pattern of murders repeated across the country is caused by one person whom he has dubbed "The Trinity Killer", since they always kill three victims. He's wrong; it's actually four. This has been happening every few months for over 30 years. The entire fourth season is centered around this mystery.
• Stargate Atlantis: The vampiric Wraith harvest human worlds in the Pegasus Galaxy at regular intervals and hibernate in between the cullings of their prey to allow the human population to recover. The Pegasus humans figured out the Wraith's schedule at some point, and the more advanced societies made preparations to prepare for their arrival. When the Atlantis expedition inadvertently awakens the majority of the Wraith, the schedule is bumped up considerably — to the point that the abundant Wraith suffer food shortages and later start to feed on each other.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Wolf in the Fold", an alien energy being called "Redjac" frames Scotty for murder. Turns out the immortal killer has been going from planet to planet, killing people, for centuries. At one point it was Jack the Ripper.
• Supernatural has this happen whenever the boys investigate a murder, to the point that it's standard operating procedure for the Winchesters to look for such patterns.
• The Torchwood episode "Countrycide" has a group of villagers deliberately kidnap the sort of people who would go missing in the countryside every ten years for a harvest.
• Eugene Victor Tooms from The X-Files episodes "Squeeze" and "Tooms" comes out of hibernation every 30 years to feed on human livers, a process which has made him functionally immortal.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons gives us the Tarrasque, an immense, nigh-unstoppable force of destruction. Flavor text in the Monster Manual entry says that it awakens every so often, wreaks havoc and eats everything in sight, and then goes back into hibernation for a few thousand more years. Since it cannot be killed, this happens whether or not the players defeat it; at best they can send it back into hibernation before it does too much damage.
• Magic: The Gathering: From the original Mirrodin Block, Memnarch's "Levelers," designed to keep the plane's civilizations from growing too powerful by leveling them every century.
• In Ravenloft, committing six murders over six days with the fang of the nosferatu grants the wielder Nigh-Invulnerability and no aging for thirteen years. The darklord of Zherisia has been using it regularly for over a century as of the adventure Hour of the Knife.
• Some Necron tombs in Warhammer 40,000 send out forces to attack the local population on a regular schedule.

Video Games

• Body Harvest: When the aliens harvested humanity in the 20th century, they returned once every 25 years when their Comet homeworld is close enough.
• Castlevania:
  • Dracula naturally returns every 100 years, As Long as There Is Evil in the hearts of man. This assumes no one tries to resurrect him in an evil ritual, or there isn't a massive surge of evil at the time (and someone to do the proper actions for the deed).
  • The "hundred-year cycle" is broken by the time of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, instead replaced with a cycle of solar eclipses.
• In Final Fantasy X, the giant monster Sin always returns to wreak destruction on the planet Spira a few years after it's 'destroyed'. But in this case, the people of the world know of it (a giant killer space whale is sorta hard to miss, after all), and its cycle of rebirth is well known. What they don't know is that the very act of 'killing' it is what causes it to be reborn, as whichever Final Aeon is used becomes Sin in its place.
• Taken to ridiculous extremes in Half-Minute Hero. Each mission of the main story involves an evil lord who casts a spell that will destroy the world in 30 seconds. In the endgame content the villain returns like clockwork every 100 years, each time giving the main character 30 seconds to save the world.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Every 10,000 years, the monstrous Calamity Ganon returns to lay waste to Hyrule and must be defeated by a hero with a legendary evil-destroying sword and sealed away by a princess of the royal line wielding the hereditary holy magic. A century before the game begins, the King of Hyrule began preparations for Calamity Ganon's reemergence by excavating the ancient Magitek arsenal used to fight him in the previous cycle; unfortunately, Ganon was too smart to be beaten the same way twice, and a Near-Villain Victory occurred.
• The Sinistrals in the Lufia games revive every 100 years. Erim's always a little early... Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals refers to it as the "Legend of the Apocalypse", the cycle of the Sinistrals appearing either to destroy human civilization or be defeated by a Legendary Hero.
• Mass Effect:
  • The Reapers return roughly every 50,000 years or so to wipe out all advanced life in the galaxy before returning to dark space as they have for at least 37 million years. Nobody puts two and two together because they go out of their way to make sure no definitive proof of their existence is left after their centuries-long genocides. Luckily for the galaxy, the last guys to get the treatment left a little something special for the future civilizations...
  • The Reapers are also shown to shape the galaxy to fit this method. For instance, they seeded the galaxy with enough technology to accelerate the development of space-faring civilizations, but not enough that the civilizations can begin to develop weapons or defenses that might stand up to a Reaper.
  • Most importantly, they created the mass relay network, and due to its extent and ease of use, it inevitably becomes the main faster-than-light method of travel for evolving civilizations. This ensures that the colonies will all be within reach of the Reapers when it's time to destroy them.
• The Leveler from Myth is essentially the Dark Lord of the universe, reincarnating into whoever last defeated him every one thousand years or so. Every time, he brings a new dark age, followed by an age of light, with him getting stronger each time. At the end of Myth 2: Soulblighter, the cycle may have been disrupted; with Soulblighter's death a mere sixty years after Balor's head was cast into the Great Devoid, he may have made a grave mistake in trying to defeat the light before the Leveler's return. On the other hand, as it wasn't the light's turn to win, the dark may be returning even worse than before.
• In Ōkami, the dread serpent Orochi demands a human sacrifice (Virgin Sacrifice is implied but not stated) every year at Kamiki Village's Full Moon Festival. Unlike other examples, everyone knows exactly when it will happen and where the poor maidens go to be killed, but no one dares stand up to Orochi.
• Dark Force of the Phantasy Star franchise returns every 1000 years; this is possible in III and IV, as they occur concurrently.
• In Star Control 3, it is revealed that the Orz are scouts for a being/race from another dimension that comes to devour all sentient life in our galaxy every time it reaches critical mass. Naturally the most intelligent guys from the last cycle left clues (then devolved themselves just below sentience).

Visual Novels

• In Higurashi: When They Cry, the curse of Oyashiro-sama kills two people every year. It's always right around the town's big cotton-drifting festival, and only one body is found, and it's always someone related to the dam project. It's considered to be the work of the village's demon god but is actually a human Milkman Conspiracy.
• Every ten years in Spirit Hunter: NG, the evil spirit Kakuya appears and forces people to play games against her that they can never win — for if they do win, then Kakuya just plays with them again until they lose, and thus meet a tragic fate. Also every ten years, a preteen girl is kidnapped by children's author Yakumo Miroku, who mutilates her into a doll to appease Kakuya for another ten years.
• In Wake the Dead, the biggest surge of zombies occurs every seven years during the Summer Solstice. The story starts 28 days before the solstice comes... and that year happens to be the seventh since the last great surge.

Webcomics

• The Witch's Throne: A random girl awakens as a Witch every ten years, during a random month and day.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender
  • If you're not from the Fire Nation, Sozin's Comet counts. It comes approximately every 100 years and magnifies Firebenders' power to absurd degrees. It was used to commit genocide on the Air Nomads a hundred years before the show's time, and the same fate almost befalls the Earth Kingdom in the finale.
  • If you are from the Fire Nation, there's the Day of Black Sun, a solar eclipse that strips Firebenders of their powers and makes the Fire Nation vulnerable to attack.
  • Villainous Waterbenders have it too good. Every full moon strengthens waterbending, thereby enabling bloodbending. The Legend of Korra introduces a family of supremely powerful Waterbenders who can bloodbend even without the full moon, though.
• In Hercules: The Animated Series, a group of centaurs would attack a nearby village every Sunday. The villagers got used to the raids to the point of treating them as an Unusually Uninteresting Sight. Then the centaurs' leadership was taken over by a warlord who suggested that they break out of the pattern.
• The Owl House: Grometheus the Fear Bringer is a mind-reading shapeshifter that's contained beneath Hexside. It breaks free on the same day every year, which Principal Bump has turned into an event called Grom Night where the school's best student is pitted against the creature.
• Pinky and the Brain has a daily (well, nightly) version: "Gee, Brain, what do you wanna do tonight?" "Why, the same thing we do every night, Pinky — try to Take Over the World!"

Real Life

• Not evil as such, but some locusts and other species of insects do this, remaining dormant for a regularly scheduled period of years (always a prime number) and then emerging in huge numbers to mate, lay eggs, and die. If you're really unlucky, they'll be eating while they do this.
  • According to The Other Wiki, the Rocky Mountain locust caused terrible devastation to farming efforts in the American Midwest in the later half of the 19th century, until the species mysteriously went extinct. It is theorized that humans broke the cycle by inadvertently destroying all the locusts' eggs during one of their dormant periods by plowing up the ground where the locusts nested in order to plant crops.
  • If you happen to be part of a culture that eats locusts, their emergence is a blessing.
• El Niño, a regular reversal of weather patterns, which can lead to crop failures and famines in certain parts of the world. Dynastic changes and rebellions in China have a tendency to happen during El Niño years.
• People today may not view it this way but at certain latitudes, winter used to be a once a year time of crisis and only if the right preparations were taken the community (or family) would make it through it. In the days of imported bananas year-round, this is of course much less of a problem. There is a reason autumn was the traditional hunting and butchering season: Every animal product that could be preserved through the winter (e.g. as bacon, jerky or sausages) and that would not be as much a drain on food reserves as a living animal was a plus in getting through the cold, dark days.

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