Mama Tattletail (provider of this page's image) is basically a less passive, female version of Slender Man. You have to look at her to keep her in place, and the only way to see her is her flashing, red eyes...
And during the 'party' on Christmas Eve as the ritual restarts the VHS starts 'rewinding', playing the Talking Tattletail advert sounds in reverse as Mama starts spouting off phrases all over the place. Also, the VHS begins to glow and then starts floating. You have to wonder if it's not just the Tattletails that are seemingly 'possessed'.
Mama Tattletail's jumpscare also catches many players off guard. It doesn't help when her dissonant voice, before attacking you, says a variety of phrases, one of them being "Mama's looking after you!". Although while you could heighten your guard when your flashlight goes out, you will get caught off guard if you run into her without that happening.
Mama Tattletail's introduction is also very creepy. On Night 3, you have to put in her cassette tape. What she says starts out tame enough... And then the tape's sounds distort and grow lower-pitched. What Mama says becomes less of a simple story and more of a thinly-veiled threat.
The trailer video is quite creepy, especially the 90's style commercial that takes up the first half. At first, it just seems like a cheesy advert ... until you start taking a closer look at backgrounds and realize there are dead bodies laying on the floor. Even creepier is that you can watch the trailer and not even notice the corpses until someone points them out to you. If you can't find them, look just to the left of the couch all the Tattletails are hanging out on, and then behind the spinning Tattletail box at the end of the commercial.
The VHS Tapes you can find are quite disturbing. So, you know about the commercial for the Tattletails, right? As mentioned before, there is a dead guy hidden in said videos. But here's the creepy part- One of the clips labeled "Storage", shows a man (the dead one shown in the commercials) suffocating. And just a second later, you see Mama Tattletail in front of him... Really goes to show how disturbing of a villain she is.
The game's "cover art" (the image on the main page) is just a cropped version of this◊ image. Pretty harmless, just Tattletail fresh out of his box and having laid some eggs, right? Take a look behind the couch.
People have actually discovered that there are hidden 'cameras' in the VHS tape you watch at the end of Night 4 by inputting sequences of numbers taken from the Good Ending's product tag. One of those cameras shows a room of Mama Tattletails... and one's still moving.
All of this is ignoring the fact that it's implied that ALL Tattletails are sentient. And that they move around on their own. And that Mama can teleport from one part of the house to another.
Mama can also disable lights somehow, which includes your only source of light at night. Just by looking at her.
The Kaleidoscope update adds a new story mode, and it manages to be extremely creepy... it turns out that someone is tampering with your memory to try and get you to keep a boring, broken Tattletail for reasons unknown. To fix things, you enter "The Kaleidoscope", an Eldritch Location that consists of a twisted version of the house you've been playing in, all set to eerie music. The entire time, Mama Tattletail isn't a threat right up until the end, when she suddenly wakes up and begins chasing you through the twisted house.
Tattletail:Let's tell a joke! Knock Knock? Orange! >Orange who? Momma Tattletail:ORANGE YOU FORGETTING SOMEONE?!
The introduction can be even more distressing, as it hammers home the memory alterations by having you re-live the ending segment of the base game's Christmas day... but Tattletail is nowhere near as emotive. Instead of nagging you for food and brushings, it just flatly states "Please feed Tattletail". Seeing the annoying and cheerful Tattetail become this hollow toy is unnerving or saddening, although that depends on which side of the coin you are on.
The chase music. It's a particularly creepy and unnerving number mixed with the tempo rising when Mama is close to you... and the beat? It sounds like a fucking HEARTBEAT, which could match how the main character is feeling when they're right under the sinister toy's toes, in fear.
, which basically tells you, "Get ready to run." And it sounds similar to the also-unsettling "Flight of the Zinger" from Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, which certainly doesn't help.
