Nothing Is Scarier / Web Original

Examples of Nothing Is Scarier in Web Originals

Wait for it...

• SCP Foundation. Most of the time they describe the stuff that's happening in bureaucratic language to make it even creepier, but when things get really scary, like [REDACTED] incident with SCP-███, they just [DATA EXPUNGED].
  • SCP-055 is a self-keeping secret, or "anti-meme." While many logs, videos, notes, experiments, etc. about it are on file and readily accessible, no information about it can be retained, instead just leaking out of the mind of anyone who learns about it shortly thereafter. It has a cell and its own set of containment procedures, but nobody knows what it is, how it got there, or why its containment is as it is. It could very well have killed hundreds or thousands of people and nobody would have any way of knowing. It is, however, possible to remember what it isn't.
  • A previous interpretation of SCP-087 was the prime example of this trope taken to the extreme. While not exactly a game, SCP-087 serves as a "simulator" of sorts. This "simulator" involves the player simply going down stairs in the dark with nothing but small light sources at each platform which leads to the next flight of stairs. The paranoia level is BEYOND eleven and the tension is so thick you can't even cut it with a chainsaw. The only thing that causes the tension? Nothing. The only thing that happens is you go down countless flights of stairs and occasionally see a shadow pass by you, which can be classified as a Cat Scare, since it does nothing other than scare the living s**t out of you for a second followed by an awkward laugh or sigh of relief. The simulator only gets scarier from here, since you now hear the sounds of scary breathing echoing through the flights of stairs. The breathing gets louder and louder until you get to the last platform, where you are surprised by a strange figure while cardboard cut-out hands extend their reach towards your face before the simulator intentionally crashes. While the initial scare is expected, the hands reaching out towards your face can generate mild yelps from the easily terrified.
  • This gets even worse when you see SCP-835's incredibly squicky uncensored articles and realize that there is a very good reason for that.
  • SCP-231. You never know what they're actually doing to the pregnant girl, though it's kinda obvious with how any Class-D personnel conducting Procedure 110-Montauk will be terminated if they even try to prolong it. (The author has claimed it's actually not the obvious answer, but refuses to elaborate on what it actually is, beyond "worse", as in, "If I ever described it, then the Internet would come up with something worse, and that would ruin my impact".) The worst part about it? She HAS to be alive, awake, and aware for the procedure to work.
  • SCP-579 is described simply as [DATA EXPUNGED]. However, it's kept in an alternate universe created by another SCP. Procedure if that doesn't work? Destroy that alternate universe. Procedure if that doesn't work? "In the event of an unsuccessful Action 10-Israfil-B, no further action will be necessary." In fact, this trope is why the containment procedures always come before the description. Unless you cheat and skip ahead, you start out knowing nothing about the thing but the increasingly Long List of just what it takes to make sure the thing never sees the light of day, and if it's done right, you're scared before the section after that, which tells what it is, and the section after that, that tells what it did last time it was in the general population.
  • There's one artifact (SCP-902) that actually, in-universe, is basically this trope in a box. What's done to contain it is epic, more so than some artifacts known to be capable of ending the world. Then you find out what it is: it's a box that makes a ticking sound, like a clock. What is it counting down to? How much time is left? Being near it makes you incredibly paranoid about that, but that is all it does. Maybe. Perhaps the real danger is that the object's memetic paranoia will cause widespread panic if too many people realize its existence.
  • SCP-823, while already being one of the most terrifying articles on the site, has containment procedures that are never actually explained. There are two "zones" surrounding the theme park, a yellow zone and a red zone. The yellow zone is bad enough but whatever is in the red zone is so heinous and dreadful that anyone who enters it is to be killed on sight. The only thing we know about it? Sometimes piping or music comes from the red zone and if that's the case, personnel need to get out of there immediately.
  • SCP-1562 is a slide that, if you go down it on your stomach with your arms at your sides, it sends you a dark, cramped tunnel with just barely enough room to move forward or backward. Out of two D-Classes who were sent in, the first found a child's shoe and heard a young boy talking, but not talking to him, before he was abruptly cut off. The second D-Class found the first, but he wasn't moving and began repeating the conversation he'd had with the doctor on the radio word-for-word (implying the tunnel's location is a specific point in time as well as space). Once that was over, contact with the second D-Class was lost as well. Attempts at study or even recovering anyone sent to the tunnel are impossible, and there's no way of knowing if the people sent there actually die.
  • SCP 2317 is probably the clearest 'wait for it...' example in the Foundation. The article has 6 iterations, each at a different security clearance level, each one giving out a little bit more information about the anomalous door, the pocket dimension behind it, and the containment procedure used. The last level pulls the rug out from under all of it by revealing that the procedure is a placebo, the Foundation cannot contain the world-destroyer inside, and it's about to break its last seal.
  • SCP-2935 is a cave that leads into a universe exactly like ours, with one exception: Everything in it died at 3:13 on 2016 April 20. As the expedition sent into the dead universe trying to gain an understanding of what has happened, the possibilities decrease as they keep looking. Let us reiterate that: They start out with nothing, and then get fewer possibilities from that point onward. It's not a disease because everything in this universe died at the exact same moment, including molecular life, meaning the corpses do not even decompose. It's not some SCP that's gone on a rampage because all of the SCPs died, too. Organic SCPs have all died — including 682, the completely unkillable omnicidal lizard. Inorganic SCPs have become inactive, with some of them even having started to corrode. And something happened to a certain ethereal Ghost Girl SCP which caused her to violently explode, painting the walls of her containment cell with ectoplasmic remains. (Speculated by the expedition to have been caused by her "dying twice".) Literally nothing that could be deemed in any at all way "alive" or "sentient" by any definition of the words was spared this event save for one thing: The dead universe's iteration of Agent Keller, one of the expedition members, who Ate His Gun and is the only thing in this world that's actually decomposing... Finally the expedition send a drone over to our side with some material but they are all killed when a nuke at the site they're exploring goes off shortly thereafter... Then we learn, through the last recorded words of the dead universe's Agent Keller, the truth, which is no less terrifying and does nothing to dispel this trope: Alternate Keller of the dead universe was sent into his world's iteration of SCP-2935, only to find a dead universe on the other side — same as the main expedition — and the very moment he returned to his own universe, everyone in his universe died as well.
    "Maybe I was the reason. Maybe I... am Death. If it was in there and I brought it back, then I am Death."
    "You know, it occurs to me... if you're listening to this... you're Death, too."
  • An almost literal case of "Nothing at all" comes in the form of SCP-3200, aka, the %C3%B6tes_Void'>Boötes Void. The Foundation isn't sure what it is, but one of their theories is that it's a huge tear in space-time through which you can encounter other parts of reality. What's more is that it's expanding, fast, and it threatens to consume the entire Universe eventually. So, the Foundation devises the Peregrine Expedition, which involves utilising temporal sinks to speed up the flow of time for a spaceship so it can make the journey within the lifetime of its crew. The mission is successful, and the three men arrive inside the anomaly. Out there, everything outside the spacecraft is a completely empty black void. Imagine, if you will, the idea that you are in an impossibly vast void of purest nothing, with no one but the other two men accompanying you in the endless silence. Then they realise that reality is possibly in constant flux inside the anomaly, screwing with their Kant Counters so they can't find accurate Hume levels. After a while they start finding the boxes. Boxes that contain mission logs for the Peregrine Expedition. At first they only receive capsules full of mission logs, but then they find lookalike bodies, and scraps of destroyed spacecraft. Eventually, the lead astronaut goes outside the spacecraft and returns two days later with this message:
    Captain Kuznetsov: We were fools. The void isn't a region where spacetime is ruined; it's the source of the tear itself. Spacetime itself is rending itself apart and we're seeing echoes of every timeline in the past and future. Time is an ouroboros, devouring itself again and again, only to be reborn. I saw all of it. All of the times we tried to stop it in the past. All the times that I tried to stop it in the past. And the future. This happens again and again, until we get it right. Over and over again, we try and try to fix it. All times blend together until we reach singularity and all is lost. The tear opens more holes everywhere in reality, and the anomalies appear faster and faster, but containment is only delaying the inevitable. The inevitable cleansing of the slate. I saw all the timelines. And we haven't stopped it in any of them. Bogoroditsa. We have seen into the abyss, and by God, it hates us.
• The Slender Man Mythos, wherein we only see traces of the Slender Man. What exactly he does to his victims and how is completely up to the imagination.
  • The series based around Slendy, Marble Hornets. Think Blair Witch Project to the 10th power.
  • It says something about the series that one of the scariest clips shown is a bald man in a business suit walking into a dark bedroom. Bald all over.
  • Tribe Twelve, starting with Night Recording.
  • This trope also contributes to why some find Slender Man to be Nightmare Retardant, due to the belief that he might not do anything to his victims beyond staring at them.
  • Everyman HYBRID, in I'm Okay. It starts out rather quiet, before suddenly springing incredibly loud distortion on you. Expect to have full britches afterwards.
• The short film There Are Monsters gets pretty far on this trope. It's never explained what exactly the monsters are doing to their victims, which naturally means your imagination will fill it with the worst things possible.
• The Haunted Majora's Mask ARG has several, especially in the first arc. The most unnerving, though, is in the first video of the Ryukaki arc, Sounds.wmv, where Kayd is going through his house while weird things are happening, happens to turn right, and then the Elegy statue from MM's EYES are staring back at you. It's even worse if you read the video's description where Ryukaki says that he didn't see them until he actually watched the video.
• This variation on an already creepy ytmnd meme puts this trope to, um, extremely good use.
• Rose Codreanu's death in Survival of the Fittest V4. She goes to sleep in a danger zone during the announcements but before it's announced as one, and has a calm, happy, introspective dream... with a constant beeping increasing in frequency throughout. Then, in the middle of a sentence, it cuts off with the notice that she's deceased. Very much a break from the usual Gorn deaths.
• The first minute and a half of this video is conventional, if effective, horror. The rest of it is equally terrifying to watch, running purely on this trope, even though nothing happens.
• Episode 12 of Satellite City pulls this off to excellent effect to introduce Jones. The closest we get to exposition is Quinn telling the others "it got out", before Ludwig, who can rarely be bothered to provide an emotional response to anything, immediately freaks out, breaks Sullivan's phone and orders him not to attempt any form of communication with the outside world, before we even have any idea what he's talking about. If that wasn't enough to set you on edge, the next scene is a chilling, horror movie-level sequence of some poor bastard being stalked through the streets of London at night by a twelve-foot-tall, Slender Man-esque vaguely human silhouette. All we see is the hideous black shape lurching down the street after the man before lunging at the camera...and there the video ends.
• A brief example appears when it came to the release of System Shock 2 on digital distribution website GOG.com. Entering the homepage briefly showed a closeup of SHODAN which opened her eyes, and then the rest of the homepage finally appeared. A perfectly chilling way to commemorate one of the most-often requested games appearing on the site.
• The Wyoming Incident, a simulation of a TV broadcast hijacking courtesy of Something Awful, uses this trope very well. The entire scene is made up of only black and white, and in a low resolution. The ominous noises, unsettling font, and abstract messages^note "WHAT HIDES IN YOUR MIND?"/"WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN IT"; "WE STAND AT THE DOOR"; "YOU ARE ILL"/"WE JUST WANT TO FIX YOU" magnify the apprehension of the viewer, building up to the surreal and VERY creepy use of 3D model faces, in between a pattern of long pauses and sudden transitions. The little static hisses on the soundtrack during those pauses ramps up the tension even further if you can use them to mark time before the faces and music kick in.
• It begins as an Affectionate Parody of Silent Hill, so You Awaken in Razor Hill makes use of this trope regularly. As the protagonist discovers more and more of what is out there (and could be approaching or hidden in the shadows), the periods of no activity get far more (scrape) tense.
• At the end of The Nostalgia Critic's already-dark review of James and the Giant Peach, the screen goes dark and there's a mess of noisy shots. Nasty, but not particularly scary. But then there's two seconds worth of complete silence, and one last bullet rings out. It's bloody creepy. Critic apparently picked up some tricks from all that written abuse, as one of the scariest moments in "The Review Must Go On" is when Doug sees a shadow of Critic just beyond the corner of his wall, and he runs away when Doug notices.
• In To Boldly Flee, 8-Bit Mickey goes berserk after Prick pushes his Berserk Button (his height). We have absolutely no idea what happened, only that afterwards, Mickey's shirt was covered in blood (including "help me"), it severed a hand, and while Prick is dead for all interacting with the rest of the world purposes, he's still technically alive.
• In Worm, Lung believes in an inversion of this: the fear of the unknown is a weak fear, he says, that is broken the moment the actual threat hidden within the unknown is revealed. He believes that a far greater fear is knowing exactly what the threat is, and knowing that you are utterly helpless against said threat.
• The Immagetchu from Doraleous & Associates is only seen on camera briefly, and is largely depicted as a squeaky voice in the distance saying "I'mma get you!" and a hand from Behind the Black performing a Vertical Kidnapping. It manages to be creepy once we see it, too.
• The main idea behind Max Gilardi's The Northern Incident. The video starts off with a fisherman and his dog staying in a shack up in the Yukon Territories for a few days, only for their truck to be stolen by an unseen stranger. As weeks go by, the fisherman gets cut off from the rest of the world, and whenever he hears knocking on the door, no one will be outside. It's a very unsettling video for a Take That! towards Furries.
• While Shitbrix are usually type 3, some Shitbrix pictures are actually animated, culminating in a Jump Scare. Be careful while looking at Shitbrix pictures...
• Nikolay Yeriomin's trilogy of web-released short films named Trilogy of Senseless basically illustrates varying degrees of this trope. While first short, Rpik has nearly nothing occurring, it generally gives viewers slightly unpleasant feeling. Book of the Senseless on the other hand unleashes on the unsuspecting viewer massive amount of this mixed with incoherent and quite unnerving barely explained events happening in someone's basement. If you look closely at the post-credits scene of the Book, you may notice what is essentially a link to a third installement, which was specifically made as a second for the purpose of this trick...
• The first episode of ORIGIN ZERO has a human squad wiped out by aliens. Aside from one shadow, we never see a single attacker.
• Unwanted Houseguest: Episode 29 of "TRUE Scary Stories" walks a line between this and "Nothing at All." Most of the story is just a retelling of a High School bus trip, but at the very end the narrator sees a clown riding a bike, in the middle of nowhere, late at night. Whether or not this is sinister, or the narrator was just being paranoid, is left to the reader.

Nothing at all

• The Crawlspace is all the more terrifying for what's left unexplained. We never find out what exactly the creature is, where it comes from, how it (supposedly) ended up sealed in the crawlspace, and what might have happened to previous inhabitants of the apartment that led to the landlord offering such a low rent. Nor do we find out what happened to the narrator's roommates, who simply disappeared (although the narrator is pretty certain they're all dead and it's heavily implied the creature was involved).
• Don't Walk Home Alone After Dark:
  • We never find out what happens to the people the Pine Creepers take, including the narrator’s friend Jordy, who simply vanishes with no trace of what might’ve happened to him.
  • The Worm: We never find out what the Worm really is or where it came from; it's implied it might be impossible for humans to fully comprehend it.
• The blog Internet History, which is devoted to collecting and posting pictures from defunct image-hosting sites, features a surprising amount of this. While most of the pictures featured on the blog are of rather mundane things, there's something quietly unsettling about a lot of them, much of which can be chalked up to the fact that every image is posted completely devoid of context, and some of them are apparently very personal in nature. Often overlaps with Uncanny Valley as well, especially with some of the more bizarre, macabre, and depressing photos.
• 50 second mark of this YouTube Poop: "Hi, I'm Captain Qwark! And believe me, there is nothing worse than nothing! (he he he)"
• How to Survive Camping: It's never stated exactly what the man with a skull cup does to those who refuse his drink, but the description was enough to bring Kate to tears whenever she thought about it during the following days.
• Liminal Spaces. These are basically pictures of empty rooms, offices, playgrounds, malls, etc. The main difference between these pics and a typical "When you see it" pic is that there is no hidden scare; the images just look...off. Some have claimed its because of a lack of people in settings you would normally associate with crowds. Some claim it's because the photos invoke nostalgia of a time the viewer can't recall, due to dated decor or equipment in the pictures, or the cheap, dated camera used in some pictures along with unbalanced lighting. Others claim it's both. A great chunk of these photos can be found here.
• Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv is a Creepypasta about a YouTube video of a mustached man staring. The video has no audio and he smiles at the end.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-303 is a Humanoid Abomination that evokes a paralyzing Primal Fear response in humans, teleporting behind closed doors and menacing those on the other side. However it never harms people directly, and if anyone ends up in a position that makes it fully visible it immediately teleports away while disabling recording equipment, making it impossible to observe or interact with. The only death attributed to it was a researcher who it trapped in a storage room for five days, and it's been known to steal random objects such as lab equipment, cadavers, and coffee creamer for no discernable reason. Despite this, everyone who encounters it is absolutely convinced they'll suffer a Fate Worse than Death at its hands thanks to Genetic Memory.
  • SCP- 055 is an 'anti-meme' that cannot be described or remembered; the closest anyone can get is describing what it is not.
  • A lot of SCPs work on the principle of either redacting or nobody having any clue what some central element of the story is.
    • What is Procedure-110-Montauk? All we know is that it's extremely distressing to observe (all staff assigned to that SCP get monthly memory wipes), must be carried out by registered sex offenders to reduce chances of it being botched, the emotional distress it causes to the subject is essential to its effectiveness, and it's not the thing you're thinking of. It's worse.
    • The tale Fear Alone provides an interesting exploration of the trope in regards to 231-7. Here, Procedure 110-Montauk isactually nothing. They just read the girl a bedtime story. All the ominous implications that it involved crossing a Moral Event Horizon are because the procedure does rely on causing a certain amount of fear and distress... that is achieved with the Foundation's own fear about what 110-Montauk could be.
  • What caused the alternate universe's death in SCP- 2935? We know how it's triggered (a sapient being moving through the portal, then coming back), but not what is responsible.
• This tweet by ASmallFiction is about a canary brought into a mine revealing the presence of something that speaks through it. The nature of it is left to the imagination — the ones carrying the canary don't stick around long enough to find out.
• WE'LL BE RIGHT BACK.: Most of the anomalies involve the absence of text, key visuals, dialogue, and even music, creating an eerie silence building up to a scare that, in some cases, never comes.

The incident involving the little girl watching Disney Channel in "Evidence Capture (2003)" is only described in vague detail over the phone by Gabriel. Whatever happened, it involved a monster she'd been seeing in her nightmares, and it caused her to have a seizure despite having no history of epilepsy.

There all along!

• Most photos from The Slender Man Mythos. You'll see, say, a creepy, foggy forest. You'll stare at it for a while, trying to see what all the "OH SHIT" comments are about. Then you'll notice that that one tree off to the side and way in the back isn't a tree.
• The Mind of the Nightmare pulls this off when Devin realizes that, despite his compulsive locking of doors since he was a child, the Rake has somehow managed to sneak in and out of his room while he was asleep for who knows how long, just to sit at the foot of his bed and stare at him. Just think about it. Some creature with razor sharp claws and an unknown agenda could have sneaked its way into your room last night some time after you fell asleep, leaving you completely at its mercy.
• This is the entire point of those infamous "shitbrix" pictures; they show what looks to be a normal picture, with the caption "when you see it, you'll shit bricks". You look and look and after a while you'll give up and think there's nothing there... but when "it" appears, it jumps out at you, and you wonder how you didn't notice it almost immediately. A◊ few◊ examples◊.
• The previous image for this page◊. At first, it appears to be only a black screen staring at you; look at the screen from an angle (and by that we mean, from above) and you'll discover that there's something else in that image...It's a cat's eye.
• The famous Creepypasta "Masterpiece" uses this to great effect. A teenager hears noises in the middle of the night, goes to the bathroom before investigating, and sees blood all over the carpet near their parent's room. The teen runs back to their bed and hides under the sheets, pretending to be asleep, then sees a strange monster (the lack of description/awareness of what the damn thing is makes it another example of this trope) drag the corpses of their parents into the room. The creature uses blood to draw a pentagram on the wall, writes a message in the middle, then hides under the bed, waiting. The teen lies awake for hours, knowing that death is imminent. As their eyes finally adjust to the light, they are able to make out the words on the wall — "I KNOW YOU'RE AWAKE." Brrrr.
• Survival of the Fittest: Quinn Abert enters a thread with a blank post. Verbatim:
  • Quinn Abert continued from One Final Embrace.

---