The Blank

"Do I have something on my face?"

Honestly i kind of just want to see his skull like is it, solid where there would be eyes and a nose.

— gameranx

The human brain is hardwired to recognize faces. Humans will even see faces where there are none, such as The Man in the Moon. So there is something very disturbing about a person without a face. Meet The Blank.

The Blank is a humanoid character with no face. Perhaps it is a disguise to unsettle opponents. Perhaps they were a victim of some entity that steals faces, a common form of Transformation Horror. Or perhaps they're just that good at poker. How the character is able to see, breathe and talk without eyes, a nose or a mouth is not likely to be resolved — although robots, aliens and monsters might have an easier time justifying this.

While The Noseless or No Mouth characters often have part-time facial features with Sudden Anatomy, this seems to happen less often with The Blank. Presumably, The Blank is generally done for dramatic impact, while those others are sometimes simply for creator convenience. It might also be a consequence of running into a Face Stealer.

Not to be confused with The Faceless, which is where a character's face is hidden from view rather than nonexistent. Compare Faceless Eye and Eyeless Face. The Nondescript might as well not have a face, given how tough theirs is to recall. See also Malevolent Masked Men and its extra-blank subtrope White Mask of Doom.

Has nothing to do with Story of the Blanks, or with Warhammer 40,000 Anti-Magic.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A PR campaign for a new car from Lotus had faceless people turning up at public events in the UK.
• Pepsiman, Pepsi's mascot (Japan only).
• This anti mobile theft ad from Protect Your Data.

Anime & Manga

• The Pict in Hetalia: Axis Powers are an entire species of faceless aliens.
• A one-shot character's face was not drawn for most of the chapter in Chibisan Date.
• Doraemon had a gadget who erases faces used in one episode, where the faces are then redrawn with a special gadget pen. Nobita tried using this gadget to make himself more "handsome" to impress Shizuka (getting an artist friend of his to sketch his new face) but inevitably Gian and Suneo found out about it. Eventually, the three of them decide, screw that, they'll have the artist redraw from scratch… but alas, said artist broke his drawing arm in an accident, which Nobita and gang doesn't find out until after erasing all their faces.
• Canti from FLCL has a TV for a head. However, he expresses emotions well enough with gestures.
• Truth from Fullmetal Alchemist is blank all over, save when his face is contorting into a sadistic grin, or when some poor idiot is about to lose a chunk of himself to it.
• Inuyasha:
  • One of Naraku's incarnations starts off this way, until he starts stealing people's faces (leaving them faceless and dead).
  • There is also the Un-Mother in the episode when Sesshomaru first appears, a faceless woman who impersonates Inuyasha's mother in an attempt to steal his soul.
• Symbolic example in Magi: Labyrinth of Magic: when Alibaba meets his father, the King of Balbadd, his face (and hands) are shown as blank darkness. Later, on his deathbed, Alibaba finally asks the King if he ever really loved Alibaba's mother; when he confirms that he did, his face is suddenly revealed.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, practically every OZ Mobile Suit has a face dominated by a flat, square camera sensor. This takes on another dimension later in the series, when the Mobile Dolls are introduced.
• In The Promised Neverland, Queen Legravalima's final form has a head with no discernable face. In addition to it being incredibly creepy, especially coupled with her incredibly calm and relaxed posture and way of speaking, this form gives her a very rapid Healing Factor that covers her entire body—the only surefire way to kill a demon is to Go for the Eye—meaning she has no weaknesses.
• Rurouni Kenshin: Like Decoy Octopus, one Shinomori Aoshi's Ninja Elite Mook named Hanya more or less destroyed his own face so that he can be a Master of Disguise.
• Queen Millennia: A Millennial Thief who kidnaps Hajime has a solid round black head which turns out to be a mask Selene wears. In later appearances the face at least has a shape.
• In Sailor Moon, one makeup-themed Monster of the Week accidentally erased her own face. She was trying to draw it back with eyebrow pencil on when Sailor Moon zapped her.
• In the first season OP of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, female students are shown with facial features blanked out and various kanji written on them.
• School Rumble: "WHEN DID THIS FACELESS MOB OF EXTRAS START CHASING ME!?"
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: One of the defining traits of the ganmen robots is that they have large faces. Thus, when the enemy Anti-Spiral robots show up, the Gurren Brigade are visibly disturbed that they don't have faces.
• In I Think Our Son Is Gay, this trope is used twice to indicate a hypothetical person as Tomoko thinks about something. In Chapter 18, it's Daigo's hypothetical girlfriend when the potential of Incompatible Orientation is discussed, and the second time is in Chapter 40, when Tomoko admits she considered what is a "happy family" for her children at one point, this appears as Hiroki's hypothetical wife.

Arts

• Giorgio de Chirico made spooky use of featureless mannequins in several of his paintings, including "The Disquieting Muses."
• Several sculptures by Kevin Francis Gray are of metallic human figures with their faces hidden by waves of what might be cloth, or might simply not have faces at all. In particular, "Face Off", "Pearly Girl & Pearly Boy", and "Hold Tight" give off this impression.
• René Magritte used faceless, suited figures in many of his paintings as well. However, "Son of Man" is not an example, as though the subject may appear, at first glance, to be faceless, if you look closely you can see a single eyebrow and part of an eye.
• The Scream: The central character has no hair, nose, eyebrows, or ears, further accentuating the eerie sensation of its excruciating and distorted expression. The two figures in the background also don't have distinguishable features.
• Venus of Willendorf has no visible face. While her breasts and her vagina is quite detailed, her head is covered in small bumps that can be seen as hair hanging in her face or as artistic license.

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • A very early story (Detective Comics #34, 1939) features a man whose face has been erased by the villain. Weirdly he could still speak and there is no indication in the story that the condition is reversible. Hilariously, he hardly even seems to care. He scares Bruce Wayne in the first few panels, but both men shrug it off like he just stepped on his foot or something.
  • Another one-shot Batman villain is Dr. No-Face. No prizes for guessing what his gimmick is.
  • Particularly disturbing is another No-Face (no relation to the guy above) appearing in Battle for the Cowl: Arkham Asylum, where he tops off an already creepy comic by painting his face to look like the Joker. Why he has no face is even more disturbing; he glued a ceremonial mask on (long story) and his father tore it off when he saw him wearing it. (It later turns out, however, that he doesn't exist, and Jeremiah Arkham has been hallucinating all of his "special" patients. Whether that makes him more or less disturbing is another question...)
• Chick Tracts: The series portray God as this.
• Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Anti-Monitor briefly causes the Psycho-Pirate to lose his face in order to bring him to submission.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: There was a group of faceless people inhabiting a jungle valley in Carl Barks's Uncle Scrooge story named The Many Faces of Magica de Spell.
• Doctor Who Magazine: One strip gives us Shayde, whose head is a featureless black sphere.
  • And the faceless children from "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night".
  • A Doctor Whoa strip speculated that the reason for the Tenth Doctor's regeneration would be having his face worn away from too much kissing.
• Doom Patrol: During Grant Morrison's run, Flex Mentallo describes a number of his former teammates in one issue. Among them is the Fact, whose appearance and name are a clear homage to/parody of The Question. The Fact goes on to feature (sort of) in Flex's own miniseries.
• Fantastic Four: The Awesome Android is an artificial person with a blank grey cube for a head. He can't talk, and when he appears working in a law firm in the pages of She-Hulk, he uses a chalkboard to communicate. He later upgrades to a modern tablet device that connects to his CPU via Wi-Fi; one wonders why he continued to communicate via text at that point, rather than acquiring a text-to-voice application.
• The Heckler: John Doe, the Generic Man, is not just blank-faced, his body is an outline with a plain white interior. His face sometimes has a description of his emotions where the mouth should be. He can turn anything he touches equally featureless (but labeled).
• Justice Society of America: Johnny Sorrow has no human face... but pull aside his mask and you die.
• Lori Lovecraft: The demon Trifoms in Lori Lovecraft: The Big Comeback has no features on his head (just some vague protuberances), but eyes and a Belly Mouth on his torso.
• New Mutants: The android Zero.
• Nova: Megaman.
• O.M.A.C.: The Global Peace Agents use masks to make themselves appear blank-faced. In Final Crisis, the new Question, Renee Montoya, appears to become the first Global Peace Agent. The implication is that the blank-face masks worn by all Peace Agents in O.M.A.C.'s future are based on the Question's mask (and probably use a "later generation" of the same technology).
• The Outsiders: In the original Batman and the Outsiders, one storyline had Halo having a recurring nightmare where her face was pulled off like a mask, revealing her to be faceless underneath.
• The Question: The Question could be considered the Trope Codifier. It's usually a mask, but he likes giving people absurd explanations when they ask about it.
• The Defenders: Ruby Thursday of the Headmen is a sexy Mad Scientist with a shape-shifting blob of red plastic for a head; its resting state is a featureless sphere. The closest she ever gets to having a face is a pair of glowing "eye" dots that only appear when she needs to indicate which direction she's looking.
• Scooby-Doo: A Marvel-published issue dealt with a faceless phantom trying to scare an inventor into giving up his plans for a teleportation device. Turns out the phantom, when unmasked, was a schmuck who feared teleportation devices would render airlines obsolete and he wouldn't be able to see the stewardesses. And the clincher was the inventor's teleportation device was phony. Shaggy puts on the featureless mask and cracks an obvious joke:
  Shaggy: That man tricked us. I have lost face.
  Scooby: Ouch!
• Spider-Man: The Chameleon has no face of his own when not impersonating someone.
• Strikeforce: Morituri: One alien scheme involved an alien "healer" plant, which killed people by making their skin overgrow their mouth and nostrils, leaving the faces of their corpses covered only with skin.
• The Tomb of Dracula:
  • The Faceless Fiend can transfer features or body parts from others onto his featureless form, leaving blank flesh on his victim in its place. This also somehow kills his victims.
  • The Dimensional Man, a minor villain in the Marvel Universe created by Steve Ditko, who also created The Question.
• Transformers: While most of them have some kind of recognizable humanoid features, a fair few Transformers essentially have no facial features beyond a single glowing eye, such as Whirl (who at least benefits from an Expressive Mask) and Shockwave; the IDW comics explained this as being a form of deliberate mutilation used as punishment. Somehow, a more traditionally Blank Transformer face can become profoundly disturbing.
  • Other characters have a visor-and-faceplate arrangement, such as Chromedome, Tailgate and Rewind, which gives the general outline of eyes but no other details (although Expressive Mask is sometimes in place, and Tailgate starts venting energy while under stress that gives the impression of tears). It's confirmed that this usually means a lack of a traditional mouth, since the lack of lips means that Chromedome has been trying and failing to make a dismissive "pfft" noise for four million years.
• Watchmen: Rorschach, the Captain Ersatz of The Question, a particularly weird example because of the shifting patterns of his mask. It seems like you should be able to project facial expressions onto it, but you can't.
• West Coast Avengers: The original miniseries features a villain who calls himself "The Blank" (picking it up from a bystander in the bank he's robbing at the time), a petty thief with nothing but a pistol and a stolen force field belt that makes him bulletproof, hard to grab, and makes his entire body look like a light gray silhouette when active. After escaping the newly-formed team in their first encounter, he entirely sensibly decides that he is badly outclassed against "real" superheroes and should leave town ASAP — unfortunately for him, other events prevent him from doing so, leading to his eventual apparent Disney Villain Death.
• W.I.T.C.H.: In one of the early issues, Will dreams that she's woken and looked in the mirror to find that she has no face! Then she tries to draw one on with a black marker before being woken up.
• Wonder Woman Vol. 5: When Deimos and Phobos steal the soul of Veronica Cale's daughter, she's left with no facial features. Luckily, she doesn't need to eat or breathe in this state, but she's left entirely unresponsive, including not aging alongside the other kids her age.
• X-Statix: The villain Mr. Code has a Question-style featureless mask with a barcode printed on it.
• Yor, the Faceless Hunter from Saturn, an obscure DC Comics space villain best known for his appearance on Batman: The Brave and the Bold. His people have evolved all their facial features away; their ears expanded and took in visual information, they smelled with their skin and also photosynthesized through it while developing telepathy for communication.

Comic Strips

• Dick Tracy: The Blank, a.k.a. Frankie "Faceless" Redrum, considered to be the first true supervillain that Dick Tracy fought, was a disfigured criminal who hid his hog-like face behind a featureless, flesh-colored cloth mask attached to his face. In the Dick Tracy live-action film, in which the character is downgraded/retrofitted as a generic vigilante alter ego of Femme Fatale Breathless Mahoney (conceived mainly to eliminate Big Boy Caprice's gang so that she can have Dick Tracy), the mask is changed to a generic stocking mask and Mahoney simply talking in a husky voice.
  • Interestingly, even though Redrum hardly appeared in the strip at all, the Blank became one of Tracy's most intriguing and iconic foes — so much so that, when plans were first made in the 1980s to do a movie version, the Blank was the very first villain that the screenwriters thought to include.

Fan Works

• In the Avatar: The Last Airbender fic The Avatar's Love by Rain And Roses, Aang has his face stolen by Koh. Katara then has several nightmares throughout the story, most of which end with her uncovering Aang's face only to reveal that it's completely blank.
• Slender Man fic By the Fire's Light features the tall, dark, and faceless Slender Man as the antagonist.
• In Child of the Storm, The Slender Men have blank white mask like faces. Somehow, they can still shriek. And yes, men. There are thousands of them and for added Nightmare Fuel, they can shapeshift, they can fly, they travel by shadows, they're mercenaries from the Winter Court and implied to be the children of something even worse.
• The Face is a comic book parody character used in short stories of comic book fan fiction by Ben del Mundo. He was created on November 20, 2004, and was inspired by the DC Comics character, the Question. His attire consists of a costume of gray, complete with trenchcoat, fedora, pants, and gloves. In addition he wears a faceless mask in order "to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies" and uses his journalistic investigative skills to solve crimes.
• In Five Minutes to Save the World Hermione used human experimentation to create supposed super-soldiers known as the Faceless. As a punishment by magic for going against the natural order of things, every one of them is literally faceless.
• From The Fog: One of the alternate skins that Herobrine may use is the default skin completely devoid of facial features.
• In The Loud House fanfic The Nightmare House, Lola's nightmare involves parts of her face falling off until she has no face.
• One of the dominant villains of The Otherworld Anthology is The Hatter, an evil version of the Alice in Wonderland character with no face save for a pair of bulging eyes.
• In the long Final Fantasy VII fic Sink to the Bottom With You, our heroes face up against faceless soldiers, among other similar horrors cooked up by Hojo and hiding out in the Midgar Sewers.
• Sword Art Online Abridged has a temporary example in Episode 15, when Leafa refuses to believe that Kirito's mission to rescue Asuna isn't some sort of prank at her expense, and Yui demonstrates just what she can do with her admin privileges - giving Leafa several seconds to try to scream when her eyes, nose and mouth are deleted from her avatar.

Films — Animation

• Radio from The Brave Little Toaster, who for some reason, unlike all of the other appliance characters in the film, actually lacked a face.
• The LEGO Movie: President Business rubs off Good Cop's face so Bad Cop won't be hindered by his morality. Luckily, Bad Cop later crudely restores it with a marker upon his Heel–Face Turn.
• Just pick any of The Mind's Eye series, and you're guaranteed to find at least one humanoid figure lacking a face and, much more frequently, anatomy. One submission in the first in the series even goes as far as to lack the blank itself, reducing the character's head to a thin ring.
• The Princesses Rhyme and Reason in the Chuck Jones animated version of The Phantom Tollbooth, as well as the Terrible Trivium, as in the literature version mentioned below.

Films — Live-Action

• Antichrist: The epilogue features Willem Dafoe's character being surrounded by a large group of faceless female spirits who walk through the forest, ignoring him.
• The mysterious navigator androids aboard the Cygnus in The Black Hole.
• In Blood and Black Lace, the killer wears a featureless white mask, as part of his Coat, Hat, Mask ensemble.
• The killer in The Boogeyman (1980) is described as this, though he's really just a guy with stocking over his head.
• In The Brothers Grimm, Sasha loses her face due some cursed mud splashed by a crow sent by the Mirror Queen and becomes one for a bit before getting transformed into a Gingerbread Man.
• This trope forms the entire premise of Bruiser. A man wakes up one day to find that his face has taken on the appearance of a smooth, featureless mask; no eyes, nose, mouth or facial hair.
• Ugg and Lee's default forms in the Critters series are white faces that lack features.
• Dick Tracy featured "The Blank", a faceless gangster super-villain alter-ego who acts as The Chessmaster of the film.
• Toward the end of Dolores Claiborne, Selena sees the back of her own head while facing a mirror. When she tries to turn around, she has no face. This happens just before her bad memories come back.
• In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, when Joel escapes with the memory of his ex-girlfriend into an already-erased memory, the characters he sees are distorted and have no faces. In another scene, he confronts the memory of his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend (who, coincidentally, is erasing his memories) he forcibly turns him around, but since he's only ever seen him from behind all he gets is the back of his head again.
• Faust: Love of the Damned: Jade has childhood nightmares about a faceless man who raped her that she called "Smooth Man".
• The Intruders has a nasty one named Hollow Face, a sort of storybook monster who steals children's faces.
• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): The Angel Killer wears a blank white mask reminiscent of the Slender Man.
• The trope was subverted in the film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun; makers of the film included extensive dream/fantasy sequences with actor Timothy Bottoms to get around the fact that his character spends the entire novel with a blank, box-shaped mask over his completely destroyed face.
• The faceless dancer from Legend (1985).
• Xayide in The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter starts out this way. Then she puts her face on. Watch it here.
• Will Turner finds a faceless corpse in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The man had his face sucked off by the tentacles of the Kraken, an event Gibbs mentioned earlier in the film. (Just in case you needed reminding, this is from the same director as The Ring...)
• Revenge of the Sith: A rare good example are the Kallidahin, who harbor Obi-Wan, Bail Organa, and Yoda after the two Jedi return from their duels, as well as trying to save Padme.
• A soldier in Saving Private Ryan gets his face blown off during Omaha Beach, though that's actually quite distinctive: people would readily be able to recognise that.
• A particularly screwed up◊ instance in the slasher film Smiley.
• The reflective robots guarding the bomb on the train in Sucker Punch.
• Pictures from the movie Surrogates (Second Life in Real Life via sexy androids) show the two leads inspecting android soldiers: their faces consist of two tiny camera lenses for eyes and vague brow/nose ridges.
• Toxie uses video erasing equipment to erase the face of a henchman in The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie.

Gamebooks

• The Gamebook series The Fabled Lands features a country whose leader is the person out of every generation born without a face. He does wear a mask over it, but it is featureless too.
• In the Give Yourself Goosebumps book Welcome to the Wicked Wax Museum, one of the possible endings was that your face gets stolen, and the front of your head only has smooth, blank wax where it used to be.

Literature

• In Alien in a Small Town, Indira has felt self-conscious and "stared at" all her life. She finds it enormously comforting that her alien friend is a good listener and literally does not have a face.
• In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Sandgorgons have no facial features.
• The protagonist of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man is haunted in his nightmares by The Man With No Face (Looming. Silent.) Diagnosed as his subconscious denial of his business rival as his father.
• The SF novel Eudeamon by Erika Moak uses this trope. An earlier version of it can be found online here. Suffice it to say, much of this story qualifies as horror, even though technically it is a love story.
• In Author Mary SanGiovanni's books Found You and The Hollower the big bad is a faceless creature in a fedora hat and trench coat who uses bogyman tactics to break you so he can feast on your fear and despair.
• In Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart (which would become Hellraiser), the Engineer (a fifth cenobite known by reputation by Frank at the story's beginning), doesn't show up until the end. This may be a questionable example if he was only given human shape by virtue of occupying Julia's wedding dress.
• Zig-zagged with The Big Bad of James Stoddard's fantasy novel, The High House. His head just appears as a white roundish mass with no features. However, occasionally, either his Slasher Smile mouth or his eyes will be visible on it. When the hero kills him at the end, all his features become visible and he looks just like an ordinary human being.
• In one of The Indian in the Cupboard books, Omri's father is accidentally sent back in time to inhabit a faceless Iroquois Indian corn doll. He becomes a miniature of his human self, with a flesh-and-bone face, but no features. Doubles as And I Must Scream.
• Johnny Got His Gun could be said to be a pioneer of this trope going into full-blown horror territory, with the novel's main character (who lost his arms, legs, and face in an explosion during World War I) spending the entire novel with a featureless box-shaped mask covering up the face portion of his caved-in skull. It also gets points for coming up with a way for someone without a face to communicate in a realistic fashion (he uses Morse Code).
• From The King in Yellow, the Stranger in Pallid Mask aka the Phantom of Truth, whose equivalent haunts the protagonists in one of the short stories. He is a living corpse whose face is white smooth like a mask. The Stranger might also be Hastur "the King in Yellow" of the Cthulhu Mythos.
  "I wear no mask."
• In The King of the Swords by Michael Moorcock, Corum, an incarnation of the Eternal Champion has to face god of Chaos "Mabelode the Faceless" (or perhaps "Mabelrode").
• H. P. Lovecraft's nightgaunts.
• Indirectly used in Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms, when Carrot offers to reveal the face of a killer to a clown. Surrounded by painted eggs which document the make-up worn by professional clowns, he shows the witness an unpainted egg. As the Fools' Guild indoctrinates clowns to think of their make-up as their real face, the clown retreats in horror from the "faceless" egg. In truth, Carrot has deduced that the murderer isn't a clown at all.
• One of the titular Midnight's Children has this power. Downplayed in that he does still have eyes (of a sort) and a mouth-like hole.
• Simon R. Green's Nightside series has the Harrowing, unstoppable constructs with no faces, who are a constant source of terror to John Taylor throughout the series.
• In Paradox Bound, the Faceless Men have been around since the founding of the US, tasked with protecting American history from accidental or intentional changes by people “skidding” across history. They also protect the Dream, an extremely powerful artifact that can be used to remake the country to a single person's desires. When people are recruited by the Faceless Men, they undergo surgery that removes their facial features and grafts the feeling of certainty into them, as well as the ability to move through history at will. Certainty allows them to know exactly what is around them up to a certain range, which is how they are perfectly fine without eyes. It also makes them very hard to kill, as they can calculate the precise way to position themselves to make bullets bounce off their bones harmlessly at just the right angle.
• The Terrible Trivium◊ in The Phantom Tollbooth.
• In Tanya Huff's The Silvered, the protagonist tries to practice healing magic on an injured rabbit. To her horror, when she tries to close up the holes in its skin, she closes up everything—mouth, ears, and nose. This winds up being how she kills the Big Bad, who has protections from everything except healing magic.
• Slimer. Mark is trying to find a woman in a lab coat he saw on the security monitors. He finally locates her again, walking towards the camera instead of away from it, and faints when she's revealed to have Fish Eyes with the rest of her face a complete blank. Unfortunately Mark is a junkie, so he assumes he was hallucinating when he meets the woman shortly afterwards and she now has a completely normal face.
• In The Stand, people see Randall Flagg in their dreams with a black hole for a face, and many assume that's what he'll look like in person. Thus, one of his many nicknames is The Man with No Face. When they do meet him, he appears normal enough... usually... but since he's a Humanoid Abomination, it's hard to say what he truly looks like.
• The E.F. Benson story The Step features this.
• The Tales to Give You Goosebumps short story "Broken Dolls" features a creepy old woman who crafts dolls, but doesn't include facial features on her creations. It is later revealed that she uses a type of magical gel (referred to as "dolly jelly" by the protagonist's younger brother) which not only robs the unfortunate victims of their faces, which then end up on the specific doll, but their souls apparently become trapped in the dolls, too.
• In Those That Wake, the man in the suit is described as being hard to describe, with a lack of facial or clothing features but definite familiarity.
• Till We Have Faces: Orual's favorite In-Universe bit of Wild Mass Guessing about her veil is that she wears it to hide a vast emptiness where her face would be. This theory in particular helps her intimidate wily politicians and brave soldiers into ceding to her demands.
• In the third Warrior Cats book, Fireheart has a nightmare of a faceless queen losing her kits.
• In Who? by Algis Budrys, a scientist kidnapped by the Soviets is returned to the West as a cyborg after suffering severe injuries during his kidnapping. His face is just a blank metal mask, one arm is mechanical and the other might be a transplant, so how do the authorities know if he really is the scientist or a well-briefed spy impersonating him?
• Vorkosigan Saga: Elli Quinn becomes this in The Warrior's Apprentice when she takes a plasma burn to the face. Fortunately, plastic surgery does wonders in the future.

Live-Action TV

• Parodied somewhat on 30 Rock. On a show within a show episode, we see a manager whose face appeared to be blurred for the camera, but we learn he has "Blurry Face Syndrome".
• Tom has a vision of Maia sans face in The 4400. The combination of The Blank and a Creepy Child pushed this scene into fearsome overdrive. Also, he can't see her face is because she's just been the subject of a Ret-Gone via Time Travel, making the whole thing that much worse.
• In an episode of Akumuchan, Ayami has a dream where one of her students is completely face-less. To remedy this, one of the other students attempts to draw a face on him so that he can be "normal".
• The true forms of the aliens in the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode "The Tale of the Thirteenth Floor"; in fact, the protagonist turns out to be one too at the end.
  • The people who had their faces stolen in "The Tale of Many Faces". She couldn't take away their personalities, though. Not true blankness, actually.
• The Avengers (1960s): In "Death's Door", Lord Melford has a nightmare about attending a peace conference where he is greeted at the door by a faceless man. Steed and Emma later discover he had been drugged and the nightmare staged. During the final fight against the bad guys, Emma shows up wearing the costume and mask used to create the faceless man.
• The Batman parody Bat Thumb had the Villain No-Face, who had no face, and whose evil plot was to disperse the same chemical which caused him to lose his face throughout the city.
• Black Mirror: In "USS Callister", Daly does this to Nanette, and can do much worse at any time. This is a reference to "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and a possible Shout-Out to both movie version of "It's a Good Life" and the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Charlie X", where a woman's face is also removed by a misanthropic Manchild with godlike powers.
• The Bringers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer are sort of this, given that they seem expressionless, emotionless and have skin growing over where their eyeballs should be. The show's creators specifically commented that making them look like deformed humans was creepier than most of the other demons they used.
• The Human Being mascot of Greendale on Community, consists of a faceless white nylon bodysuit.
• CSI: Cyber: In "Click Your Poison", the bad guy is laundering money by playing against himself in an on-line poker site. This is represented on-screen by the identical faceless figures sitting around a poker table.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Masque of Mandragora", Count Federico does a Dramatic Unmask of the astrologer Hieronymous, who is dressed in the mask and robes of his cult, only to get a nasty shock when he finds his face is just a glowing light after absorbing the Mandragora Helix.
    The Doctor: Let's say Hieronymous gave him a blank look.
  • All the humans who have their faces stolen by aliens in "The Faceless Ones".
  • The Raston Warrior Robot from "The Five Doctors".
  • The Cybermen's killer androids from "Earthshock".
  • In "The Caves of Androzani", Sharaz Jek uses faceless warrior androids as grunts.
  • The Wire's victims from "The Idiot's Lantern". The police are under pressure to keep things quiet with the coronation happening, so they're just bagging the victims up and locking them in a Black Site.
  • The Silence (or Silents) could partially qualify; as they lack most facial features, save for two bulbous eyes, and a slit for a nose.
  • The Handbots in "The Girl Who Waited", which is commented on by the Doctor, and later lampshaded when Old Amy disarms one of them and keeps it as a pet, she draws a face on it and names it Rory.
  • "The Name of the Doctor": The Whisper Men, who are minions of the Great Intelligence, could also qualify as such. Aside from a freakish looking mouth, they otherwise completely lack facial features.
• In Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights all the actors in the "Untitled Street" sketch are given blank faces so they can be as neutral as possible.
• Blank-ness turns lethal on Fringe, when a string of victims' facial features start rapidly growing over, causing death by suffocation. Even a tracheotomy can't save them, as the growing tissue quickly seals any such airholes as fast as they are made.
• The Haunting Hour: In "Scary Mary", chanting Mary's name three times in front of a mirror will summon the Mirror Monster Scary Mary, who will send her three faceless servants through the mirror to drag the summoner back so Mary can steal their face.
• The Green Man from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia wears a faceless spandex bodysuit.
• In Kamen Rider Double, the True Final Boss Utopia Dopant does this to all of Shotaro and Phillip's friends in the penultimate episode, since Phillip's emotional turmoil will accelerate his evil plan. Too bad for him all he really did was trigger one of Shotaro's finest Moments of Awesome.
• Leverage: In "The White Rabbit Job", the team disguise themselves as crash test dummies of the target's employees (It Makes Sense in Context) with blank faces.
• Look Around You contains a couple examples of this:
  • In the pilot episode, it is explained that the "queen" of a calcium molecule escaping makes the entire molecule unstable and can lead to the dreaded "Helvetica Scenario". What exactly happens is unclear, but the end result is the victim losing their face. Clip
  • In the last episode of Series 2, Prince Charles ends up looking faceless after Leonard Hatred sprays him with his "Psilence" liquid skin. (It's not explained how His Royal Highness is able to breathe after this happens, but he seems to manage.)
• Parodied in The Mighty Boosh - Vince describes Howard as "generic-looking" and when he paints his portrait, paints his face as a big pink circle, like a balloon. Howard's uninterested Love Interest Mrs Gideon agrees that it looks just like him, and later on Dixon Bainbridge draws a sketch of Howard the same way.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers had The Face Stealer in one episode, who could steal faces even through the Rangers' helmets, leaving them mindless zombies.
• The eponymous villain of the Monster Squad episode "No Face" lived up to his name, as he had no face of his own when not using makeup to impersonate Chief Runny Nose and the mayor.
• Sapphire and Steel encountered one of these in Assignment 4 (named Mr. Shape in the credits); aside from being faceless, most of the time he could use two actual faces (both of them pretty nondescript).
• Spitting Image featured a number of literally faceless bureaucrats.
• When we finally see Anubis' face on Stargate SG-1, it's just a dark swirly energy-thing.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Charlie X", Charlie turns a laughing crewwoman into a faceless freak.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "The Fight", Chakotay fights a being from a region of chaotic space; the being is wearing a boxing hoodie that hides his face, and when the alien is finally revealed, he has no face, only a starfield.
• Star Trek: Picard: In "The Impossible Box", Soji's father appears in her memories this way, which is a clue that they were faked.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "A Matter of Minutes", every minute is built by faceless blue construction workers who are seemingly incapable of speech.
• Ultra Series:
  • Zetton from Ultraman has a glowing orange patch that shoots fireballs in place of a face.
  • Satanbizor and Bizorm from Ultraman Gaia, as a homage to Zetton.
  • Greeza from Ultraman X has a featureless orange dome for a head with glowing, pulsating lights within.
• Wednesday has faceless students as background characters at the academy for supernatural creatures Wednesday Addams is forced to attend.
• The renegade aliens in The X-Files have no faces as a result of having sealed every orifice on their body to prevent infection by the black oil.

Music

• The cover of the Boards of Canada album Music Has the Right to Children shows a faceless family.
• Stephen Jones' album cover Beautiful features Stephen Jones himself with women with no faces.
• One of The Monkees' albums, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., uses this trope in its cover art.
• The interior art of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here (1975) depicted a faceless man in the desert dressed in business attire and hawking Pink Floyd records. He probably falls somewhere between The Blank and Invisibility because while he definitely seems to have a head, his limbs are clearly invisible, which ties in with the album's theme of absence.
• "The Actress" by Joe Iconis is about a struggling actress who literally belts her face off during an audition. This actually works in her favor, as her lack of unique features means people only care about her impressive voice. Unfortunately, it also means nobody cares about anything else about her, and they don't notice when she dies because all she already does is scream. It appears to be a metaphor about how the industry shuns uniqueness.

Music Videos

• Probably one of the least strange things to appear in the Deranged Animation that is the music video for "I Miss You" by Björk.
• The surreal music video for the Manic Street Preachers' "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next" features a faceless family — they have noses although no nostrils but their eyes and mouths are simply papered over with blank flesh. Combined with the song itself, it's very disturbing.

Myths & Religion

• The noppera-bō of Japanese myth like to do this as a way to scare people: They're shapeshifters, and once they've finished playing with their latest victim, they wipe away their current face before vanishing.
  • From the same mythos, mujina sometimes scare people by posing as noppera-bō (when mujina are their own sort of creature rather than another name for tanuki, anyways.) Westerners primarily know of both from Lafcadio Hearn's short story "Mujina", which has led to noppera-bō being identified as mujina in works such as Dungeons & Dragons.
• It's unclear whether or not a mythological character with no facial features actually exists in Chinese Mythology, but one parable told by Daoist philosopher Chuang Zu tells the story of The Blank "Hun Dun": the other gods took pity on him and tried to give him regular facial features like everyone else, but the process ends up killing him.
• The Grey Man of Pawleys Island, South Carolina has a reputation as a benevolent version of The Blank. A faceless man in a dapper grey suit and hat, he strolls down the beach whenever a hurricane is due to hit the island, allowing just enough time for residents to escape to the mainland. While no one knows exactly who he is the ghost of, the Grey Man is credited with saving thousands of lives over the past century and a half.
• The udug/uttuku demons of Mesopotamian Mythology were nameless and formless beings most frequently described as a dark shadow or an absence of light.

Podcasts

• The Silent One, a recurring enemy in Dark Dice is described as having no facial features except for three empty eye sockets.
• One of the recurring characters in Welcome to Night Vale is the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home. Despite her lack of facial features she can see and speak, and would like to know your wifi password.

Tabletop Games

• In Deadlands: Hell on Earth, the abominations known as the Nowhere Men appear as man-shaped humanoids; their build and rough features matching men's exactly, but they are devoid of facial features. Their eyes and mouths are sealed up and their noses and ears merge seamlessly into their skulls.
• Dungeons & Dragons: The Basic D&D Known World and AD&D Mystara settings feature a monster called the mujina, which is based off of a misidentification of the Japanese noppera-bō. Angels are also faceless in 4th edition. According to the Word of God, this is a change made specifically to evoke this trope.
• Legend of the Five Rings: The Lying Darkness can give incredible stealth and mimicry skills to ninja — the only cost is a literal and figurative loss of identity. Their faces become smooth as eggshells when they're not imitating someone — when they revert to their shadowy selves, they can cause their features to melt off, revealing this blank slate and seriously freaking out whoever sees the effect.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • This overlaps with White Mask of Doom in the Phyrexian Machine Orthodoxy (the Porcelain Legion to be more precise) and their Grand Cenobite Elesh Norn. The "porcelain" plates they wear on their faces look like masks, but actually grow as a part of the body of native Phyrexians and are grafted organically into the bodies of new, usually involuntary converts. Elesh Norn herself is only a partial example — contrarily to the majority of her legion, the lower part of her face is still visible under her extravagant plate.
  • The elemental spirit Muldrotha doesn't have a face, as such — her head is a featureless orb of swamp water, with no features save for a pair of horns a glowing light at its center.
• Pathfinder: Whisperers, fey described in the Bestiary 6, have a pale light that shines where their face should be.
• Scarred Lands: In Swords and Sorcery Creature Collection, Face Stealers in their natural form look like tall, slightly distorted lanky humanoids covered in shaggy hair, with unnaturally long arms and a horned ferret-like head that seems too small for its body. However, a face stealer is seldom encountered in its natural form as it can magically peel away the faces of their victims, leaving the unfortunate souls with no facial features, just raw flesh covering their heads and two nostril holes where the nose should be.
• Vampire: The Masquerade: The story of Jaggedy Andy, one particularly nasty case of Body Horror courtesy of Sascha Vykos. Long story short, Andy pissed off Vykos enough that Vykos used Vicissitude to flatten his entire face. While Andy was dying from suffocation, Vykos had one of their Sabbat goons Embrace him. Now Andy is forever doomed to unlive with a face without orifices. He can subvert this by chiseling his face to reopen his eyes and mouth, but being a Vampire means all damage will be healed when he goes to sleep. And the worst part? Andy noted that this isn't the worst Vykos can do.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Eldar Harlequins provide a straight example from the same universe. Being Monster Clowns, they wear elaborate Harlequin costumes which can cause various hallucinations or delusions to afflict enemy troops. The models often often depict them with a mask that is half The Blank and half face.
  • Dark Eldar Mandrakes sometimes have completely featureless faces (though some only lack eyes, and some only lack mouths).
  • Some Chaos Champions in Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 are without facial features as a gift from their fickle divine patrons. Usually with no loss of sensory ability. One classic Chaos Champion of Tzeentch model from the late 80s was sculpted to represent this mutation.
  • The helmets of the Tau evoke this and Cyber Cyclops, by contrast with the usual Rage Helm style.
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: One of the Mutations that can be inflicted by Chaos exposure causes the person's facial features to crawl away, leaving them completely blank. They somehow retain their senses of sight, hearing, and smell, and lose the need to eat and drink, but are forever hungry and thirsty.

Theatre

• The Bat: The Bat wears a featureless mask (although up close it can be seen that it has eyeholes). This causes witnesses to describe him as being without a face.

Theme Parks

• At Disney's Hollywood Studios, the walkaround characters include the green army men from the Toy Story films...who have green mesh over their face, probably not scaring any children at all.

Toys

• LEGO:
  • Quite a few minifigs that have helmets covering their heads don't sport faces underneath. This is especially true for older figs. Oddly, the title character of The Mandalorian continued to receive this treatment in sets inspired by Season 2, even though Seasons 1 and 2 each have at least one chapter exposing his face to the viewers; one of these even inspired a set from the August 2021 wave.
  • BIONICLE has the Toa Inika, who have this piece◊ as their true head. In-story, it's explained that their faces give off an intense glow, so you couldn't see them anyway.
    • Poor Matoran Kazi has a multi-function socket piece (AKA "hand") for a head. Essentially, it's just a connector for supporting his mask, while the other Matoran all have regular head pieces. Maybe that explains his perpetual bad mood.
• Whatsherface dolls. Similar to Blanca, you can make them 'un-blank' but still...◊
• The Gotchi King from Tamagotchi is a giant limbless golden egg who has no face, but can eat and communicate with other Tamagotchis with no problems.

Video Games

• Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere does something like this with COFFIN-equipped planes that have no outwardly visible cockpit; it's not as disturbing as a faceless human being would be, but it's still jarring the first time you really notice it.
• Blanca, the cat with no face from Animal Crossing. Because this is a game where An Interior Designer Is You, you get to give her a face! Using a magic marker!
  • In Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Blanca takes a different role, more akin to the mythical Noppera-Bo (See mythology for more). Instead of letting the player draw on her face, she becomes the April Fools event character, shapeshifting into villagers and letting the player decide who is the real villager and who is Blanca.
• In Balatro, the Faceless Joker gives $5 if three or more face cards are discarded at the same time.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine's Sammy Lawrence never had his face shown during the first four chapters. In Chapter 5, when Henry finally sees his face, there isn't one - just a head made of ink. This was later debunked in the credits of Chapter 5 but it's presumably his face is covered in ink.
• The Binding of Isaac: Angels are generally depicted this way, with the exception of the Angel Baby enemies and some angel familiar items. Statues in angel rooms lack faces, as do Uriel and Gabriel. Afterbirth adds a Seraphim transformation that turns Isaac himself in to an angel, which also gives him a blank face.
• Noroko from The Black Heart normally has no face. Until she begins screaming.
• Hakumen from the BlazBlue series always has his face covered by a featureless white mask. His name means white face or blank face.
• In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, Anonymous is completely lacking facial features. It’s an especially notable example since he’s one of the lead main characters, who isn’t meant to be scary at all. Interestingly, his blankness only gets brought up in conversation once, in an optional scene at that, when Til struggles to guess whether or not he’s “smiling.”
• The Elementalists in Braveland Wizard are the only unit with no facial features whatsoever.
• In the Flash game But That Was Yesterday, all of the characters have no facial features except for a nose.
• Ethan, Synaptic and C6 robot from Call Of Duty Infinite Warfare have this, since they're robots and have no facial features.
• The Tall Man from the Chzo Mythos and Trilby at the beginning of the first game and in The Art of Theft.
• The undead German soldiers you fight in the Otherworld level of The Darkness.
• Aside from the giants, none of the stick figures in Defend Your Castle have faces.
• In Devil Survivor 2, generic JP's members are drawn without a face for a literal version of Faceless Goons. However, they have a face in universe.
• At the end of D'LIRIUM, the protagonist, Ada encounters her friends, apparently alive despite their deaths inaugurating the start of the game, but completely faceless and in a state of torment. Whether the player decides to kill them or not triggers the Multiple Endings.
• In Doki Doki Literature Club!, A Glitch in the Matrix makes Natsuki's face disappear at a moment when she's being mind-controlled.
• EverQuest has a faceless god in Cazic-Thule, the god of fear. It's worth noting that the rest of his body is heavily muscled and brutal-looking, and he has four arms. And no face. So how do you tell whom he's most likely to put those arms to use on?
• True Assassin from Fate/stay night turns out to have had no face after Dark Sakura kills him and removes his mask.
• Nobody in the game Feel the Magic: XY/XX or its sequel have any kind of distinguishing facial characteristics, aside from one instance, each, of a beard and a mustache.
• Faceless Squall from Final Fantasy VIII. It's so creepy, it's even the game's Nightmare Fuel page image!
  • The Final Boss has no face either.
• The Ghostrunner has no face, only a visored head. This helps the player project themselves onto him.
• None of the characters in The Granstream Saga have any faces (observe), a stylistic choice which some people found disturbing. The only exception is that characters with moustaches still have them drawn on in the right place.
• The Flash game Gretel and Hansel 2 introduces creepy squiggly things that steal faces from other people. Their victims are turned into Blanks and lose all motivation and drive along with their faces - they can't even move. This even applies to their ghosts.
• Several Grow games have humanoid creatures named Onkies (singular is "onky") who have no face but they still manage to look cute with their interactions and how they seems to be made of wax or modeling clay.
• In Heart of the Woods, Madison spots Tara outside in a snowstorm, and only realizes "Tara" is an illusion when she sees that "Tara" doesn't have a face.
• Apparently, Xion from Kingdom Hearts was faceless at one point or another, or rather she has a face, but what people see in her depends on who they have connections to or what they expect to see in her. The implication is that anyone who has no connection to either Sora or Ven will see Xion this way.
• In Krunker, due to (intentional) graphical limitations and stylistic choice, all of the boxy characters have no faces.
• Dark Link from the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In most games he doesn't even have eyes.
• The homunculi in the last few levels of Mage Gauntlet have no faces, and many appear to be decaying or covered in tumors. They appear again in Wayward Souls as the Faceless. Justified - they're Whitebeard's failed alchemical clones.
• The Cyborgs (the enemies with treads for legs, not the Mjolnir Mark IVs) in the Marathon series.
• While he's not entirely faceless, Decoy Octopus from Metal Gear Solid cut off his nose and ears in order to make his disguises more convincing.
• The shareware Mike's Cards does this with the default court cards◊ as of version 1.8 (August 2001).
• Guardians from Nuclear Throne have vaguely humanoid or animal shapes, but all of them have a tiny active portal where their face would be.
• The Queen Eloah Vader from OFF has no face.
• The many Toads held captive in the Temple of Shrooms in Paper Mario: The Origami King have no faces, walk around like zombies, and are functionally lobotomized. They actually do have faces; it's just that Hole Punch, the boss of the temple, punched them out and stored them away. Destroy Hole Punch and the Toads get their faces back.
• Ideal Maki/Mary of Persona becomes this way in the Lost Forest when she figures out she is not the real Maki.
  • In Persona 2: Innocent Sin, Shadow Maya still has a face in her character portrait, but her character sprite has no eyes (the only facial feature visible on the sprites) to make her effectively faceless when she shows up. It's the first of several (obvious) signs that something is very wrong with her, though it's surprisingly easy to miss at first but for a subtle feeling of wrongness about her appearance.
• In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice, Inga suffers from prosopagnosia, so he remembers everyone this way. When a Divination Seance is held after Inga is murdered, showing what he saw in his final moments, his killer has no face, and his true killer exploits this to try to frame someone for the crime.
• In Pokémon Sun and Moon, UB-01, UB-03 and UB Burst aka Nihilego, Xurkitree and Blacephalon respectively have nothing resembling a face, likely to highlight their alien nature. Blacephalon still remains ambiguous with the yellow dots on the floral objects decorating the sides of its head appear to be eyes (since it can blink).
  • Staryu and Starmie are more ambiguous due their cores.
  • Zygarde is similarly ambiguous; it has geometric patterns on its face that could be interpreted as eyes, but it's hard to tell.
  • Roggenrola just has a hole where it's face should logically be. It's evolutions have similar holes in places where eyes would normally be implying Roggenrola's face might actually be a single giant eye.
    • The truth is worse. The Pokedex explains that hole is an EAR.
• Tipp in Ring Fit Adventure is rendered in a superflat style that simply doesn't show his face.
• A boxing game based on the Rocky movies for the Colecovision features fighters without any facial details.
• Johnson from Schwarzerblitz: his face keeps on oscillating between all possible features, resulting in a blurred image (portrayed in-game as a featureless black face with white eyes).
• The bubble-head nurses from Silent Hill. A lot of the more humanoid monsters in the series tend to lack faces too, or have Eyeless Faces. Although, you're lucky if that's the only thing wrong with them.
  • Even Pyramid Head is this. In fact, Pyramid Head was designed visually to be this taken to the extreme: not only is he missing a face but his head isn't even vaguely shaped like a human head; this was to make him come off as completely emotionless; his aura of sheer purpose and oppression marred only by faint traces of physical pain.
• Sunless Sea: The Delightful Adventuress has a sidekick called Barnabas, who is an Unfinished Clay Man created with no face. He normally wears a mask to cover this up and the Player Character only learns he's Unfinished after you're done transporting them. After the Adventuress backstabs both of you and bury you alive in the Tomb of the First Emperor, the narration mentions that Barnabas, despite having no face, is very expressive about how he feels about the betrayal.
• Generic nameless soldiers in Super Robot Wars tend to be this, both good and bad. It's not too noticeable if they're wearing space suits, but some of them look rather creepy.
• In Tales of Symphonia, There is a Rare faceless enemy called the Gentleman, wearing a suit and tie. Wait a second...
• The Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows has the staff of the orphanage-turned-asylum, shadowy silhouettes created from the memory of the Cradle, representing the faceless adults keeping order between the children. They're really really scary.
• The title character in Tiny Thief has a nose but no other visible facial features.
• Transistor: The Breach() Function's source, unlike all other Functions' sources, doesn't have a Subject picture, instead being a faceless humanoid silhouette with a blue light coming from its chest, due to data corruption.
• Warframe:
  • Citrine, the geode warframe, has had her face removed by the Orokin in order to make space for the powerful crystals corrupting her body that grant her exceptional defensive powers.
  • Dagath, a take on the Headless Horseman trope, with a twist. Once a Dax cavalrywoman, she was involved in a three-way tryst with an Orokin couple who later had her converted into a Warframe out of jealousy over her fondness for her warhorse. But since Warframes have no emotion, they tired of her and decided to destroy her by having her face vaporized with a laser (the same kind that show up in Orokin tower traps). The couple thought this had killed her. They would eventually find out they were very wrong, the hard way. Dagath now survives as a creature of revenge, with a hollow hoop for a head where her face used to be.
• The "Nopperabu" effect in Yume Nikki, which is a reference to the noppera-bo, spirits from Japanese folklore that appear to be ordinary humans, but have no faces.

Visual Novels

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice:
  • The Holy Mother, the founder of the Khura'inese belief system and first ruler of the Kingdom of Khura'in, is traditionally depicted with a blank face on murals or artifacts, with a depiction of her face being considered to be blasphemy. The only artifact that shows her face is a small statue of her inside the Founder's orb, which is normally filled with opaque wax to hide said statue.
  • Late in the game, Inga Karkhuul Khura'in, the prince consort of Queen Ga'ran Sigatar Khura'in, is revealed to suffer from prosopagnosia, which makes him see everyone as being this.

Web Animation

• None of the humans in An Adventure of Sheep and Chicken have faces.
• ASDF Movie 4: "Well, I stole your face!"
• Pumkin of Baman Piderman. And, technically, Squib and the Tubas.
• All humans in the Madness Combat universe lack a face. People only begin getting individualized features when they become important story-wise, but in most cases they will still lack a mouth and eyes. Sanford, Jebediah, and the Auditor take special note for having a mouth, facial hair, and eyes respectively.
• The premise of Blank: A Vinylmation Love Story involves a pair of unpainted Vinylmation figures. In fact, a fair amount of the cast is faceless.
• The claymotion serie Klay World features clay figures without any face.

Webcomics

• The Figure from The Artist is Dead!! is a living, unfinished figure sketch. In an ugly raincoat.
• Ghoul runs into one of these in Autumn Bay.
• A few characters in Cat Legend, notably Mindy, have had their faces erased after they told a secret they were to have never known.
• In Champions of Far'aus, the goddess Sarlise wears a mask because she doesn't want to disturb people with the fact she doesn't have a face.
• This is what happens to people whose faces are stolen in City of Blank. What's worse, their faces can never be given back, and the victims usually die from suffocation.
• Coga Nito: The lifeless robot shell Eric builds, as well as the black duplicate BB later inhabits both sport blank glass domes for faces.
• Ma'am, Madam, Lady, etc., and Qstickman from Educomix.
• Jerry from Ennui GO! is a homeless man whom Izzy meets early in the comic. He initially has no facial features, so Izzy (and on one occasion, Renee) try to draw some onto him, but they don't stick.
• Erma: Aunt Mayumi is a noppera-bō from a family of Youkai and therefore has no facial features other than a slight protrusion where her nose would be. She's somehow able to eat with the area where her mouth would be, though it's not shown how. She's never shown speaking, though it's unclear whether she can.
• In Chapter 18 of Gunnerkrigg Court, Robot S1 fights a large, bull-like robot whose head is just a square slab of metal. Zimmy and Antimony run into "Nobodies" in Chapter 19, who have nothing but black smudges where their faces should be. Apparently, this is also how real people sometimes look to Zimmy.
  • Chapter 25 introduces a subversion in Kingbot. He's introduced with a face that's a featureless slab (aside from two small eyes), but he found a way to give himself facial features.
• Mr. Three from Hero Oh Hero, who is a Humanoid Abomination and speaks entirely in unintelligible TV static. He seems friendly though.
• Homestuck:
  • Three of the guardians (John's dad, Rose's mom, and Dave's bro) all only have one notable facial feature (Dad's nose, Mom's mouth, Bro's glasses). Bec, Jade's guardian (and pet dog) lacks any features whatsoever. The facelessness is either an art style or a representation of how the four kids see their guardians.
  • Doc Scratch has no facial features whatsoever, what with his head being a gigantic cueball.
  • In Act 6, the facelessness of the Guardians continues with Alpha!Dave, Alpha!Rose, and God Cat.
• The faceless villain from The Incredible and Awe-Inspiring Serial Adventures of the Amazing Plasma-Man is named, appropriately enough, Blank. Though he does wear goggles.
• The true forms of angels in Kill Six Billion Demons can evolve with their personality. In "Wielder of Names", White Chain is criticised for having developed a very human (and female) looking form, naturally including a face. When she's finally had enough and decides to side with some extremist angels, she tears off her own face, leaving only a hole all the way through the back of her head.
• Lovely Lovecraft: Night Gaunts lack faces in their true Dreamlands forms, but they gain faces in their Earthly forms. Their Dreamlands appearance is consistent with the real H. P. Lovecraft's tales, although he makes no mention of them appearing differently in the waking world.
• All of the characters from Nebula are faceless, since they are personifications of The Solar System, and are represented with the planets/celestial bodies for heads
• In Mias World, we are introduced to King, who has no face. Not to mention not having any sort of distinctive details save for the small, fake crown hovering above his head.
• In the Oglaf strip "Fairest" (NSFW), the subject of the storyteller's tale is a woman with a cube-shaped head and no face.
• In Parallel Dementia while Visage has a White Mask of Doom and actually does have a face underneath, albeit an undead one, his undead minions are all faceless horrors.
• Three from A Path to Greater Good has just a white, plain expanse for a face under that mop of black hair.
• T.O.E. in Rice Boy and Order of Tales is a machine man with a small circular screen for a head.
• A very major antagonist in Sam & Fuzzy is even CALLED 'Mr. Blank.' That's his name. He drinks tea through his mask. He belongs to a sect within the ninja mafia called the 'blankfaces'; elite operatives trained from childhood, who all use masks like this (different colours are apparently used to tell them apart; the only other blankface shown is called Mr. Black and wears the exact same outfit, only, you know, black.)
  • Mr. Blank's face is eventually revealed retroactively when it is revealed he had infiltrated the supporting cast before the start of the current arc in a clever disguise — namely, by taking his mask off. Mr. Black's face is revealed in a Flashback.
  • There's also a somewhat different sect that uses the stitching on their masks to make letters. There's a plot focusing around Mr. X and Mr. Y, though Mr. X seems to prefer leaving his mouth exposed.
• In YU+ME: dream , Faceless Man is an example of this trope, though he does eventually grow a mouth of sharp teeth.

Web Original

• Generic "anonymous" characters are often represented in Internet art as having blank green or grey faces (mouth optional).
• In some images, Anonymous. This has even been cosplayed using a green spandex mask.
• In The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, the Wraiths employed as security in the Interdimensional Black Market are the enslaved remnants of people who ran afoul of the Market's boss, and lost their face along with their personhood.
• This DeviantArt GIF
• Three from Land Games.
• In Mortasheen, Goza start out like this, but have a biologically programmed urge to make their own faces through self-mutilation.
• The original faeries on Neopets were faceless.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-600 has the faceless version visible on camera, but otherwise takes on appearance based on direct human observers.
  • SCP-2135-C, the people inhabiting a world based on Manhattan as it appeared on February 1st, 1959, lack eyes, noses, and mouths, although they're apparently still capable of sight and scent.
  • SCP-3008-2, the "staff" of the infinite IKEA, are faceless humanoid figures with inconsistent proportions who try to kill people trapped inside after closing time.
• The "blank slate" Presidential candidate depicted by Tom Tomorrow here.
• The Swackett weather application uses this for its "peeps".
• The facelings from The Backrooms are human-like entities without faces who roam the backrooms, and are some of the most common entities found. There are multiple types, but the two most common are "Child" and "Adult" types. Adult Facelings are friendly and are not hostile unless provoked. Child Facelings, on the other hand, are mischievous and hostile. Some will try to murder survivors, others are simply pranksters.
• A lot of videos in WE'LL BE RIGHT BACK. involve characters' faces becoming completely blank. Examples include PBS Kids mascots Dot and Dash in both "PBS Kids System Cues Workprint (1999)" and "Disney Channel Broadcast Anomaly (2004)", Patrick Star and a background fish in "July 25th Anomaly (2005)", and various Nicktoons characters in both "Red Mist Anomaly (2008)" and "Abstract Idents (2003)".

Web Videos

• In Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel), there's the ghost of a monk haunting the Stocksbridge Bypass. Many who have encountered him up close were shocked to find out that underneath his robe's hood was nothing at all, despite having felt that they were being watched by him the entire time.
• The British Railway Stories: For some reason, most of the diesel engines in the series didn't have faces. The sole exceptions were Gronk, and one minor diesel seen early in episode 6.
• In The Cat with Hands, the cat who wants to be human takes a boy's face and leaves him without one.
• The protagonist of the short film Face starts out this way, with a smooth white head with no facial features.
• They took my FACE! JUSTIN!
• Slendy of The Slender Man Mythos, would definitely take the prize for Trope Codifier along with his various victims (see what I did there). Amongst his original list of attributes was that his face was supposed to look different to every viewer, implying his facelessness in photographs was some kind of Glamour Failure, but everybody stuck with it until the popular perception of him drifted into actual facelessness.
• Todd in the Shadows' title cards depict him like that.
• Super Mario 64: CLASSIFIED: The Automatic Enhancer's personification of itself, Stanley, appears as a textureless Mario model, and he's not happy about it.
  I'M NOT HAVING FUN
• In the Encanto YouTube Poop "Enchanto", Alejandra shouts to Alma and Dolores that Mirabel was about to tell them about her "super awesome face". Dolores responds that Mirabel didn't get one, and there is a brief shot of a faceless Mirabel.

Western Animation

• In the American Dad! episode "Enter Stanman", one of the caricatures of Stan in Francine's subconscious is just him with no face. Stan gets confused about what he represents and guesses that it's him as Slender Man, but is informed that it symbolizes her perception of his emotional openness.
• Koh the Face Stealer from Avatar: The Last Airbender can turn people into this. Aang sees a monkey on his way to visit Koh that has been turned faceless.
• The Batman Beyond villains the Royal Flush Gang are a criminal family that dress like playing cards. One member of the group is Ace, a nigh invulnerabile robot that has no face.
• The heads of the Global Peace Agency in the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "When OMAC Attacks!"
• In the Bump in the Night episode "Loss of Face", Squishington accidentally scrubs his face off and ends up losing the washcloth he used, requiring Mr. Bumpy's help to get his face back.
• One of the ghosts in Danny Phantom is a shapeshifter whose default form is faceless.
• Peter's "poker face" on Family Guy is this.
• The E.V.O. No-Face in several episodes of Generator Rex.
• Cobra Commander from G.I. Joe, and every Cobra Viper level henchman, who are always portrayed in faceless masks. Also the episode "Glamor Girls", which was one huge horror episode involving a face erasing machine.
• The Herculoids. The title opponents in the episode "Attack of the Faceless People".
• Mastermind from the Josie and the Pussycats episode "Never Mind a Master Mind". (Mastermind may have been patterned after the Dick Tracy villain the Blank, as the Dick Tracy characters were appearing in Archie Comics at the time.)
• There's Justice League Unlimited's Question. As in the comics, his seemingly blank, featureless face is just a mask, which he affixes to (or releases from) his face with the help of an aerosol sprayed on his face. The spray also changes his hair's color, from its true red shade to the brunette tint he's normally seen in as the Question.
• The Warlords of King Arthur & the Knights of Justice are soldiers made from stone. They have the same bodily movement potential as humans, except for the face. Their heads evoke helmets and as such, they don't have mouths and don't do expressions.
• Let's Go Luna!: The Magic Globe can talk, but does not have a face.
• Tweety erases Sylvester's face in the Looney Tunes short "Trip for Tat", and Sylvester is forced to have a new one tattooed on the blank space.
• An episode of Martin Mystery involved a face-stealing doppelganger.
• In Momma Named Me Sheriff, being born without a face is apparently a medical condition in-universe. Sheriff unknowingly burns the money donated to get some faceless kids new faces but makes up for it in the end by giving them the faces of some recently-killed forest animals.
• Hexadecimal of ReBoot has a series of masks that she quickly swaps out behind her hand to change expressions. Her real face isn't shown until halfway through the second season, when Bob removes it and reveals that there's absolutely nothing beneath. After a few seasons, she gets a serious character revamp, including a face. Said face is still a mask, only animated. It later goes back to static, leading the viewer to assume there's still nothing behind it.
• There was a 1976 episode of Scooby-Doo where the villain was a faceless robot zombie, "The No-Face Zombie Chase Case". Yes, that's the actual title.
• Scream Street: Sir Otto's manservant Nameless is a hulking faceless humanoid construct.
• Probably not the same thing, but in an episode of The Simpsons, Homer goes on an impromptu vision quest, and at the end sees what appears to be his wife. When he goes around her to look at her face, it's just her backside all the way around.
  • In another episode, the family watches the Guinness World Records. One is "A man who holds the current record for least amount of faces, with none!" ["Help me!"].
• In an episode of South Park, during woodworking class, Clyde informs Mr. Adler that Tommy got his face stuck to a belt-sander, and Tommy shows up without any facial features.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Dirty Bubble Returns", a teacher becomes this after Dirty Bubble wipes away her face. He also does this to Perch Perkins briefly until putting his face back on upside-down.
• An episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! featured a parody of Indiana Jones named "Indiana Joe", who had NO FACE for no explicable reason. He could talk just fine - if he hadn't been drawn with no face, it would be impossible to tell because the plot and the characters react to him as if he did have a face. The script described him as a caricature of Harrison Ford, but DiC Entertainment was afraid of legal repercussions from Ford and George Lucas.
• Henrietta (Toby's passenger coach) from Thomas & Friends was, for a long time, one of only a few mechanical characters in the show not to have a face. She did, however, gain a face in one of the storybooks, and it carried over after the show went fully CGI.
  • One episode of Thomas the Tank Engine featured a real-life locomotive known as the City of Truro visiting Sodor. However, unlike all the other locomotives in the show, the Truro actually does not have a face. The producers felt it wasn't necessary to put a face on such a famous engine, especially when that engine only appeared briefly.
• Transformers:
  • Omega Supreme's original toy has a head, but only a blank screen where a face would be, having a similar appearance to the all-concealing visors on astronaut helmets.
  • The Transformers: Prime version of Soundwave. His faceplate occasionally shows data he's browsing but never betrays himself. Add on the fact he's The Voiceless, speaking only once in the entire series before attempting suicide and it's quite disturbing.
  • The protoforms in Beast Wars and Transformers: Animated are completely featureless from head-to-toe.
• In the last episode of the short-lived series The Wrong Coast, co-host Debbie-Sue begs the director Mack to show his face on TV, only he really has no face.
• Young Justice (2010): In "The Fix", Miss Martian and Artemis make a Journey to the Center of the Mind in an attempt to repair Aqualad's shattered psyche. There they are confronted by a version of Aqualad that has no face.
• Futurama's The Twilight Zone (1959) parody The Scary Door brings up the trope as part of one of its opening narrations, invoking what sounds like a stereotypical Twilight Zone-style twist in a hypothetical scenario. From the way the narrator says it, it sounds like any other twist reveal would do.
  "You're on a scenic route through a state recreation area known as the human mind. You ask a passerby for directions only to find he has no face or something. Suddenly, up ahead, a door in the road. You swerve, narrowly avoiding... The Scary Door."

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