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Played for Horror
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This is when tropes have their scary elements and/or possibilities brought up.

This can be done in several ways:

This might even be inspired by one of the writers finding Accidental Nightmare Fuel in a trope and then applying it deliberately.

Now, it's very rare to see actual horror tropes done this way, since they are technically played for horror by default, but it's not unheard of. Perhaps the horror is exaggerated, or the work finds new horrific implications of the trope.

Furthermore, this in no way excludes horror works from having examples. In fact, they can get plenty of scares by finding the scary elements in things that usually aren't.

Now keep in mind the absence of horrific elements doesn't count as Nothing Is Scarier, unless we're meant to be freaked out by something not happening.

A Sub-Trope of Playing with a Trope.

A Sister Trope to Played for Drama. Compare Fridge Horror and Unnervingly Heartwarming, contrast Played for Laughs (though the two sometimes overlap) and Failed Attempt at Scaring.

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

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  • "Mother and Son" aka "Kitchen Mother", a Japanese anti-drug PSA, features a frightening example of I Want My Mommy!. It starts with a weeping toddler and his unconscious mother sitting next to each other at a table. The mother pulls herself up to grab a heroin needle to inject into her right arm on-screen. When she fades away to the chilling wail of an emergency siren, the child cries out for his mother against a black background, shrinking down further and further until he fades away as well.
  • Thai Health Promotion Foundation did a Public Service Announcement about alcohol causing Delayed Reaction time in "Slower". An alcoholic's slow reactions are followed by a Laugh Track, be it from overfilling his beer glass without noticing it's full, singing out of sync at the karaoke, being scalded with boiling-hot water, or opening the doors to the bar seconds after he left the premises. The laugh track abruptly stops when a young boy crosses down the street and gets run over onscreen by a speeding car. It's revealed the alcoholic man was the driver, and he doesn't stop until the ad's very last second.

    Alternate Reality Games 
  • The first Omega Mart training video uses a Beat to chilling effect. Our host, Karen, asks the viewer what makes Omega Mart the most exceptional store in America, then pauses to get a sign. While she's down, an employee with a hazmat suit walks around with its Geiger Counter shooting through the roof—and then she reappears with the sign to show the answer is you, and not whatever it was behind her.

    Anime & Manga 

    Art 
  • Mother Bird is a disturbing example of Bird People. Her features resemble a mishmash between human and bird in the creepiest way possible. She has eyes that are fixed forward like a bird of prey, no teeth, and a "beak" that forms an UnSmile, but all of that fixed into the features of an otherwise human-like figure makes it more horrific.
  • Nue Couchée takes the classic Reclining Venus pose and turns it into surrealist Body Horror. It's meant to highlight how artworks that play that trope straight depict women in painful positions for the sake of Fanservice. Even its name — "Reclining Nude" — is a reference to this. All in all, it denounces the Male Gaze.

    Comic Books 
  • 30 Days of Night: The original graphic novel (and its film adaptation) is Die Hard in a remote Alaskan town that's been taken over by vampires, who exploit the long polar night in the winter to feast on the townsfolk without fear of the sunlight. The part that's played for horror is that the human protagonists are so badly outmatched by the vampires that all they can do is hide and hold them off for most of the story, with the protagonist forced to become a vampire himself in order to have a chance at fighting back.
  • Absolute Universe
    • Absolute Batman plays A Taste of Their Own Medicine for drama and horror. After having spent most of Abomination trying to get Batman to subscribe to his ideology of Misery Builds Character and attacking his loved ones to rid him of distractions and weaknesses and prepare him to become the Joker's new top man, the Joker bombs Santa Prisca in front of his eyes alongside his family while claiming that he is doing it to free Bane from anything standing between him and his alleged love for war and fighting.
    • This universe's version of Bane is Tiny-Headed Behemoth. The minuscule size of his head only serves to highlight just how unnaturally large and muscular the rest of his body is. Point in fact, his natural height is seven feet and five inches (compared to Absolute Bruce being six-foot-nine), and when he pumps in Venom, that height increases nine feet to seventeen feet and five inches, all without his head really growing much at all.
    • Absolute Green Arrow
      • Trick Arrows are made dark. Compared to the more cartoonish nature of many Green Arrow trick arrows, the Longbow Hunter uses quick-acting skin-rotting poisons and grenades attached to arrowheads, showing both brutality and pragmatism. They aren't using trick arrows to avoid killing, but rather to be even more lethal.
      • Ditzy Genius turns horrific with Jubal Slade. In his college days, he was a talented coder who collaborated with Oliver to create a trading app to redistribute online trading power. But Jubal had pretty bad social skills and an entitled, creepy lust for women that only got worse when he became a billionaire, and eventually developed a taste for women on the younger side.
    • Absolute Superman
      • A Companion Cube is played for horror. In issue #22, Brainiac admits he used to have a pet back in his youth (implicitly when he still worked in a Coluan spaceship), before clarifying it was the rotting head (presumably of another Brainiac), one he called Metallo.
      • Disappointed in You takes a rather dark turn. Brainiac initially plans to recruit Absolute Lex Luthor, expecting to find in him the kind of brilliant Diabolical Mastermind and Evil Genius that most versions of Luthor are. Instead, he finds that his world's Lex is just an unassuming gas station owner without much ambition in life besides raising his kids. This makes Brainiac so disappointed that he decides that if Lex isn't a villain then he'll turn him into one by forcing him to stare as he massacres his loved ones in front of him, hoping that this will give him the motivation to become a supervillain.
    • Absolute Wonder Woman: Loved by All is played for horror a little bit in issue #19, where Aphrodite reveals that as part of the powers she gave to Diana, she has the seemingly unconscious ability to force people in her vicinity to love her. Of course, Diana is not the type to abuse this "gift", but it paints the relationships of practically everyone she's ever met (including Circe) in significantly darker light.
  • Age of Ultron: Everything Is Online gets played for horror in the Avengers Assemble tie-in issue. Starktech artificial limbs are connected to the Wifi, so when Ultron starts the end of the world, this includes hijacking people via prosthetic limbs, which is how Black Widow ends up losing an eye.
  • Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth takes many of the recurring villains from Batman, strips them of any kind of silliness, and plays their most notorious traits for horror: For example, Dr. Destiny is no longer a creepy but somewhat cartoonish man in a cloak and a skull face, but an emaciated, withered man trapped in a wheelchair. It's implied that he still possesses his terrifying dream powers as well, the Mad Hatter is hinted at being a pedophile, etc.
  • Dastardly & Muttley plays several Zany Cartoon tropes for horror, using the premise of a normal world slowly becoming a cartoon one. Examples include the Body Horror aftermath of a realistic Eye Pop, everyone reacting with horror to a gun creating an entirely clean hole, and characters struggling to maintain their identity as they become caricatures of themselves.
  • Fantastic Four: Jonathan Hickman's run played Doppelgänger Gets Same Sentiment for horror. Shortly after meeting the Council of Reeds, our Reed is invited to watch them defeat another world's Doctor Doom, after which he's effectively lobotomized. A horrified Reed asks what this Doom did that was so wrong compared to all the others that made him deserve this. Then they show him the basement filled with lobotomized Dooms.
  • A horrific example of Unreliable Voiceover is in the first issue of House of Mystery (2008). The narration is a rather uneventful story about a girl who moves back to her hometown after her parents died, becomes a wife and mother, but doesn't love her children. None of this is actually untrue, but the art fills in minor gaps like the fact that the other residents of the city are all Big Creepy-Crawlies, and her children were loads of maggots that left a huge hole in her back that she still has.
  • Ice Cream Man plays Confession Cam for horror in the chapter where a scriptwriter gets Trapped in TV Land by the eponymous Humanoid Abomination and finds himself in increasingly disturbing reality shows. Each time he shifts to another show, there are interludes like this where the guy details how he suddenly found himself in these shows, how disturbed he is by what's going on, and how desperate he is to leave. There are also interviews with the other show participants (like a mannequin woman in a dating show and three zombie women in a Real Housewives sendup) who talk about their roles in the disturbing shows like nothing unusual is going on, as well as an interview with the scriptwriter's uncle who was also pulled into the shows, killed, and is now surprised that he's dead.
  • Death Is Cheap is horrifically deconstructed in The Immortal Hulk when it's learned that the reason the Hulk and gamma mutates keep coming back is because death has a metaphorical revolving door for them to keep walking out of. Made worse is the fact that it's due to an Eldritch Abomination that is The Anti-God, which is only bringing them back so it has pawns it can use to enact its own plans. There's also the trauma of having to experience death in all of its pain and terror only to come back repeatedly and realize it's going to keep happening again and again and that you may end up surviving thousands of years past the ends of your friends, loved ones and everything you ever held to be important.
  • Nemesis (Mark Millar) basically turns the Batman mythos by showing what would happen if a character very similar to Bruce Wayne turned out to be more like Patrick Bateman instead of Batman.
  • The Unfunnies: Emasculated Cuckold is played for horror. Pussywhisker loses both his testicles after being convinced by Dr. Despicable that he has testicular cancer. His wife Polly was outraged that they cannot have children and refusing to adopt, so she forces Pussywhisker to pick up men to get to sleep with her in order to get her pregnant. When she did not get pregnant from the first guy, Polly forced Pussywhisker to get more men. It's clearly damaging for Pussywhisker to do this. At the end of the issue, as Pussywhisker is forced to find another man for Polly, she reveals that she orchestrated her husband's castration so that she would be justified in her acts of adultery with copious partners, is on the pill, and enjoys that she has forced her husband to find these partners while she waits at home.
  • Wonder Girl (2021) show a particularly horrifying The Jailbait Wait. It's revealed that Eros has known Yara ever since she was a child because he was the one who murdered her mother and led the siege that slaughtered her tribe, all so that he could have her all to himself as the perfect wife once Yara was finally of age.

    Eastern Animation 
  • Link Click: As someone who resides in Bridon, Vein speaks English fluently and more often than the other characters. However, he says some disturbing things in the language.
    (when meeting Cheng Xiaoshi for the first time) You look tasty.

    Fairy Tales 
  • Together in Death is played for horror in the Icelandic folktale The Deacon of Myrká. The titular Deacon of Myrka tries to cross a river with his horse, but both he and the horse die. Some time later, his ghost knocks on the door of his fiancée Gudrun and invites her to a moonlit ride... in order to carry her off to a common grave.

    Fan Works 
  • A famed example is the "Scary Mary" recut trailer for Mary Poppins, which plays the well-known scenes of wonder and childhood whimsy of the original film with jarring music, much like a horror film would.
  • A common trend in fan art is to make "realistic" versions of cartoonish characters, often portraying them in a grotesque and sometimes horrifying manner.
  • Made of Iron turns dark in At The Food Court. Ash got an MRI scan after his psychotic break, and the test showed that he suffered ubiquitous hematomas and inflammation of the brain, and large parts of his brain were straight-up dead from blunt-force trauma. The doctors had no idea how he was even still alive, since the injuries would normally have been enough to kill him several times over. It is not clear whether the healing spring let him survive or whether this is a Cerebus Retcon of Ash being able to survive Pikachu's and Charizard's attacks in canon. Either way, the damage is so great that his original personality and maturity cannot be recovered.
  • Moment of Weakness is used for horror in Avenger of Steel. Raven losing control of her emotions allowed Trigon to enter Azarath and destroy it.
  • Adults Are Useless is played for horror in The Best Case Scenario, if you're being "realistic". In Sudou Kiyomi's part of "What I've Done": not only did Aizawa outright refuse to do anything about Ogawa Kippei harassing her, but he also informed her that her complaints brought her ability to become a hero into question, even forcing the two to work together and punishing her twice as harshly as he ever did Ogawa. While she complained to the other teachers, they repeatedly reminded her that she was Aizawa's student, not theirs, and refused to intervene on her behalf. This led to Kippei being embolden to sexually harass and even rape her repeatedly until Gigantomachia killed him, and led to Kiyomi being part of the Alliance of Revenge to murder Aizawa.
  • Damnatus does this with Object Ceiling Cling when Nira pancakes a cultist who surprises her against the ceiling. The fact that it's almost accidental only makes it scarier.
  • Danganronpa: Komm Susser Tod: Alcohol-Induced Idiocy is played for horror in the first execution. The condemned is forced to drink several alcoholic beverages, rendering them too intoxicated to realize that the final "drink" is a pistol and subsequently blowing their brains out.
  • Fortune_Lover_(TGS Beta)(SARU_rip)[T+Eng0.75_Sincere].zip plays In Spite of a Nail for horror. The basic premise is the existence of a Fortune Lover hack (implied to have been created by A-chan), in which the Alpha Bitch Katarina Claes of Fortune Lover is replaced with the All-Loving Hero Katarina Claes of My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, while everyone else's dialogs and event flags are left unaltered. The result is that all of the latter Katarina's attempts to escape her doom are worthless: she is labeled a villainess despite doing nothing on-screen to deserve it, denounced for crimes that she never committed, and finally killed or exiled for no reason other than the immutable Plot.
  • It's a Wonderful Plot is played for horror in Gargoyles: "For It May Come True". While the original The Gargoyles Chronicles episode shows the tragedy of Goliath born as a human rather than a gargoyle leads to his clan without any allies and all of Manhattan as their enemies, the fanfic amplifies the nightmare by showing that Demona has become successful in her crusade to wipe out humanity thanks to triggering a nuclear war between paranoid nations, not just because there was no Goliath to stop her, but because she successfully manipulates Brooklyn into thinking Humans Are Bastards after Xanathos killed Hudson and Bronx, and he becomes her all-powerful dragon thanks to the Odin's Eye.
  • It All Started with an OSHA Violation uses Becoming the Costume to this effect. As Skid and Pump went down the elevator shaft in their respective costumes, Skid's skeleton costume fused with his bones while Pump's costume head fused with his head and became an actual pumpkin. Monster was revealed to have suffered the same fate once he fell down the same shaft; the lemon head of his mascot costume became his actual head.
  • Toon Transformation is used for horror in the Pizza Tower fanfic I Was a Middle-Aged Weretoon, where Peppino, after being bitten by a pair of wind-up teeth, undergoes an unpleasant, Body Horror-laden transformation into a toon resembling his in-game form.
  • Lab Rat plays Kidnapped by Family for horror. The Doctors Fenton manage to capture Phantom, and begin subjecting him to interrogation and torture before they begin dissecting him alive. They only realize that they've kidnapped and tortured their own son when Danny reverts to human mid-dissection.
  • Skewed Priorities is played for horror in Metal Gear: Green. Madam President's complete obsession with destroying the MSF has her ignore everything that would entice attention, such as the Ninth Circle, which the HPSC hasn't kept tabs on for years. As such, when the Musutafu Massacre plays out, the HPSC is left with political and economic disasters due to everything.
  • The Omnitrix Hero:
    • Prefer Jail to the Protagonist turns brutal the first time Flash uses Ghostfreak. He subjects a bomber to a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, including threatening to drop him from the sky. This completely terrifies the criminal, with the narration of the story itself briefly referring to him as Ghostfreak's "victim" before going back to "opponent". The bomber eventually throws himself at Shining's feet giving up, begging him to get him away from that "monster". This all serves as early Foreshadowing to Ghostfreak's true evil nature.
    • Stop, or I Shoot Myself! gets played for horror when Zs'Skayr possesses Twilight. Taking Shining's Multi-Striker, Zs'Skayr points the weapon right under Twilight's chin. He threatens to pull the trigger, since he can easily survive by exiting the body, but Twilight obviously won't survive, unless Flash stands down, essentially forcing a Hostage Situation. Flash throws the sun-gun he was holding away and holds his hands up.
  • Relic of the Future takes Love Interest Apotheosis in a horrifying direction. The Aura and soul of Jaune's fiancée Winter is ripped out of her by a sabotaged Aura machine, leaving her body comatose and her soul trapped in an Aura container. Thankfully, Jaune is able to learn how to reverse the process before it's too late.
  • Research Fever takes a meme in the Dandy's World fandom and makes it a horrifying concept about toons being infected with a virus that makes them undergo a rather gnarly transformation into aggressive duplicates of Rodger himself.
  • Rediscovered Frontiers shows the darker effects of Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. Silver's efforts to change the future are successful, and he always remembers the old timeline, but not the new one. This has resulted in places, people, friends and even his own parents being outright erased or replaced from his perspective, and each time he has to refamiliarize himself with the new history, of both the world in general and his own personal life.
  • Your Mime Makes It Real is played for both scares and Black Comedy in the Saw Fan Film "The Silent Treatment", where an overly-committed mime ends up in one of Jigsaw's ironic Death Traps... which to the viewer looks like a completely empty room. At first, it appears the mime is only acting like he's up in chains and forced into a sadistic life-or-limb scenario, but once he "mimes" cutting himself and very real blood starts coming out of him, it's left really unclear just how imaginary the trap was.
  • Cry into Chest is used for horror in Striker Strikes Back. Moxxie weeps into Valentino’s shoulder after getting a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and then locked inside a storage chest and forced to listen to Vox being Bludgeoned to Death. What makes this disturbing is that Valentino not only is Moxxie’s captor and abuser, but also the one who beat Vox to death in the first place and then pushed the blame on Moxxie. But the poor imp is so traumatized and desperate for comfort that he’s willing to accept it from any source.
  • Both In Love with Looks and Offended by an Inferior's Success are used for horror in This Bites!, with both tropes involving the World Nobles. With the former, it's revealed by Saint Charlos that some World Nobles use fashion magazines in order to force the most attractive members to be spouses (a.k.a. Sex Slaves). With the latter, Charlos explains that some World Nobles will actually have some especially attractive fashion models killed for daring to be a commoner who "matches the radiance of a World Noble". The most twisted part of this is that the World Noble's status means that these atrocities are entirely legal.
  • Estee's Triptych Continuum features a kind of In-Universe Flanderization with falling into the mark, an extremely common psychological disorder among ponies where the pony allows their special talent to dominate their lives to the point where there is nothing outside the mark. In A Mark Of Appeal, there’s also the discovery of a disease that amplifies the mark magic until it renders the pony unable to do or think of anything that is not the exercise of their talent.
  • In Unova Mansion, Chandelure's death involves a setup with a Bucket Booby-Trap...except instead of water, a blanket dipped in cooled Spirit Solution (an illegal substance used for killing Ghost-type Pokémon) is dropped onto him, melting him.
  • Likes Clark Kent, Hates Superman is played for horror in Watch Me Burn. After learning that Marinette is Ladybug, Adrien starts dating her... and at the same time, amps up Chat Noir's harassment of Ladybug, deliberately cultivating this dynamic for his own amusement. He finds the contrast between Marinette's stammering crush on him versus her exasperation and frustration with Chat Noir being a Nominal Hero amusing, and intends to string both of her identities along for as long as he can before dropping the bombshell by revealing himself.
    And if she ever tries to leave him, well.
    He knew where she lived, after all.
    It wouldn't be out of character for Chat Noir to stand by, laughing, as the Dupain-Cheng Bakery was reduced to rubble.
  • What Goes Around Comes Around plays the Shipper on Deck trope for horror. The Agrestes both decide they're on board with Adrien hooking up with Marinette, but only on their terms — to the point that they plan to make a reality-altering Wish that will merge Adrien and Felix into their idealized son, with Marinette forced to marry him.
  • The Writer Games: In Chapter 54, titled The Game Plays You, the Sudden Game Interface from an earlier chapter returns, in a terrible way. Jaune's semblance generates different RPG encounters that, if failed, can be lethal, such as when thieves kidnap his sister and, after failing a charisma check, kill her, even though the thieves only wanted to take the money and run. To prevent his semblance from mind-controlling others and causing more deaths, Jaune distances himself from people, but his semblance punishes him for his lack of participation by raising the level of all his enemies, so he and his friends lose many battles for being below their level. What's interesting is there isn't any reason why Jaune's semblance punishes him so much, it serves no purpose other than to make him suffer.

    Films — Animated 
  • 9: Meeting at Eye Level turns fatal thanks to the Fabrication Machine; the Talisman which it uses to suck out the diminutive-sized Stitchpunks' souls to fuel itself is located on its giant "head" just below its giant, sole optic, so it holds the Stitchpunks directly at its eye level just before it sucks their souls out.
  • The mini-adaptation of The Mysterious Stranger included in The Adventures of Mark Twain does this for the source material: While the dark elements were also present in the book, there was also a major Mood Dissonance in the way in which the story was told, making it closer to a whimsical fairy tale than a Cosmic Horror Story. Satan himself was often described as attractive and charming, but in the animated film he is given a creepy, sinister appearance, and the adapted passage (Which is actually one of the most light-hearted moments from the original book) is given an eerie, nightmarish atmosphere which sharply contrasts with the rest of the movie.
  • The first chapter of The House (2022) uses Oh Look, More Rooms! for horror. Van Schoonbeek's carpenters are constantly building up the house, but its appearance from the outside never changes. Mabel wakes up one day to find that her window to the outside is suddenly a window into a new, windowless room. She and Isobel eventually end up lost within the constantly expanding interior, and are at real risk of death by starvation.
  • Bill Sykes of Oliver & Company is a chilling Evil Debt Collector. He's a Loan Shark heavily implied to be in bed with the Mafia, and he doesn't need any, ahem, representatives as he does his own collections. In the very first scene he is in, Sykes threatens Fagin with torture if he doesn't get his money, strangling him with the power window of his Lincoln. When Fagin goes to him a second time, and doesn't have the cash, Sykes is fully prepared to have his dogs maul Fagin to death, going back to building a model ship. When a desperate Fagin tells him his plan to ransom the cat he stole from a rich girl, Sykes kidnaps the girl for himself, giving a threatening phone call to the family butler, with the implication that he'll feed the girl to his dogs.
  • The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb turns the classic Tom Thumb fairytale into a Surreal Horror Urban Fantasy film with harsh, squalid environments; giant bugs and creatures crawling everywhere; violence, death and experimentation as major plot points and a dark Mind Screw ending involving a nuclear reactor exploding and killing everyone. Also, Tom Thumb himself looks like a fetus.
  • By the Lights of Their Eyes is used to show fear in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When the title princess runs in panic into the forest, some yellow glowing eyes seem to stare at her. They actually belong to friendly cute animals, but Snow White's imagination makes them look evil and demonic.
  • The Wolf House combines an Author Tract with a Spoof Aesop for horror. The end message is essentially "Blind Obedience is key and never question your community's leaders or try to escape". This is because it's designed as an indoctrination film for a fictional cult.

    Literature 
  • Extreme Libido turns horrifying in The Age of Desire. A test subject is injected with a drug that boosts his libido exponentially. He becomes so possessed by lust he murders people with his bare hands in the course of trying to have sex with them.
  • Badly Battered Babysitter is played very darkly during the Kim Newman novella "Bloody Students". One subplot involves a woman named Abigail being asked to babysit the protagonist's eight-year-old son, Jason: the kid's a nuisance at the best of times, but he's recently been bitten by a rabbit carrying the mutagenic super-virus of the story, so things start to go downhill when Jason mutates... and then goes on to not only attack Abigail but rape her as well.
  • Bobok has a rare negative example of No Animosity in the Afterlife. The corpses' easy camaraderie is unsettling, as they are so desperate to cling to their last weeks of debauchery that they don't even want any closure over crimes some of them have committed against the others. Klinevich brings up Avdotya's rape of him in the tone of mild teasing, and Catiche, a fifteen-year-old girl, reacts to Klinevich and Tarasovich drooling over her with nothing but eerie giggles.
  • The Stephen King short story "The Cat From Hell" goes to extreme levels with Cats Are Mean with a cat that is out for revenge on a guy who got his fortune from a drug tested unsafely on cats. This cat doesn't just go after that guy, it kills his immediate family and anyone who gets in the way of its vengeance, including killing a hitman by jumping into his mouth, causing him choke to death, then crawling all the way inside his body.
  • Dr. Harper Therapy:
    • The Influencer Files story line uses Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube! to gruesome effect. The Chicken live-streams himself torturing someone in the most painful and humiliating way possible.
    • Asshole Victim is used for horror. Someone with a history of making bigoted and otherwise offensive comments online is kidnapped and tortured in internet videos. While some of the comments hope the victim will be saved, others believe her past awful behavior means she deserves it. Some people outright express pleasure that she's suffering, one calling it the best stream of the year and another asking if anyone else was getting a boner.
  • Flanderization is played for horror and incorporated as a plot point in Faction Paradox. A Space Cult Colony called the Remote colonists became sterile, and so developed technology to avoid extinction: Remembrance Tanks. You insert some biomass ready for cloning (a corpse) and get a few friends of the deceased so the machine can scan their minds for memories of the dead person, allowing the device to weave them together and form the clone's mind. This had the unpleasant side effect of making every iteration more and more stereotypical, to the degree Remote time-travelers are often disgusted and confused by meeting their future selves, often wondering if they are just that damn unpleasant.
  • In the Dreaming Stage of Grief is played for horror in Gerald's Game. Protagonist Jessie ends up handcuffed to a bed without anyone to let her loose and she soon hallucinates from stress and thirst. When she starts to see a distorted humanoid figure that shows her a basket of jewelry and human teeth, she forces herself to dismiss it as a dream "made of moonlight". Months later, she sees the man on trial for murder and realizes he was really there with her.
  • Alliance of the Alienated is played for horror in Give a Boy a Gun. Brendan Lawlor and Gary Searle are two high school outcasts who met in elementary school and became best friends through their shared traumatic experiences of being bullied by the jocks and dismissed by the faculty. They later gain another friend named Ryan, Gary has an on-and-off girlfriend named Allison, and the four would often hang out after school to drink and do drugs. However, Gary and Brendan start plotting to seek revenge on the jocks and corrupt faculty by researching how to build bombs and stealing a gun supply from a neighbor, and ultimately plotting and committing a shooting at the High-School Dance (though they never planned on actually killing anyone; they just wanted to intimidate them).
  • An eerie variation of Not in Front of the Parrot! occurs in Robert Smythe Hichen's classic horror story How Love Came To Professor Guildea. Among other hints of a growing supernatural presence, the professor's parrot begins to twitch and move in increasingly unnatural ways, and babbling in a low, grotesque voice. It turns out that the parrot is mimicking something the human characters can't see or hear...
  • The Island of Doctor Moreau depicts the Beast Man and Uplifted Animal tropes this way, and is an Unbuilt version of the latter. The titular doctor has used anesthetic-free vivisections to mold animals into human-like forms, and the main character is disturbed by how much the beast people hit Uncanny Valley for him.
  • In The Jonah, a Bedmate Reveal is used for horror. As a birthday surprise, old girlfriend Sandy sneaks into Jim Kelso's house and hides in his bed. Delighted to find it already occupied, she gets in and lifts the bedclothes to find the solidly manifest ghost of Kelso's murderous twin.
  • Time Dissonance is played for scares in Johnny Got His Gun where Joe is unable to tell time due to having lost most of his body and senses in which it becomes an obsession with him; judging by how often a nurse comes to treat him or by the warmth of the sun. He has no idea how long it has been since he had most of his body blown off.
  • Last One To Leave by Benjamin Stevenson has an immoral YouTube channel organize a Hands-On Contest for a four million dollar mansion. Not only do the competitors — many of whom are deep in debt and desperate — stay in the game for several days, with all the muscle strain, malnutrition, and Sleep Deprivation implied, but when one of the participants is found stabbed to death, the hosts ruthlessly declare that the game will continue until a winner is declared, no matter what.
  • Let's Go Play at the Adams' has a very dark version of Badly Battered Babysitter. A young woman babysits a family of teenagers, who tie her to a bed and decide to torture her.
  • Richard Matheson
    • Absurd Career Goals get creepy in the story "Blood Son" (a.k.a. "Drink My Red Blood!"). vampire-obsessed boy named Jules tells the kids in his class that he wants to become a vampire when he grows up. They laugh... until he goes into unsettling and rather graphic detail about biting into girls' necks and the blood flowing and drinking of it. He is quickly dragged off out of class to the principal's office.
    • Genius Loci is done to horrifying effect in "The Creeping Terror", which was originally published as "A Touch of Grapefruit". The story, which is presented as a thesis for a Master's degree, describes strange occurrences throughout the Midwestern United States, including citrus trees growing in corn fields, increasingly balmy weather, and people looking for the ocean and talking about driving to different locations in California. As it turns out, the city of Los Angeles is alive... and it's spreading. At first, the populace at large takes this as a joke, but soon, people across the whole nation begin to completely lose their minds, destroying their homes and property, as the city moves from the Midwest to the rest of the nation. By the end, Los Angeles has taken over the whole country, with the entire population now brainwashed by it... and the final lines of the story imply that "Ellie" is beginning to spread to the countries surrounding the United States as well.
  • Ass Shove is used for horror in Moon (1985), in which a sadistic Serial Killer, in attempt to burn Jonathan Childes's internal organs, psychically projects into him the effects of a reaching hand, which becomes a ball of fire.
  • The Mysterious Stranger uses the Abilene Paradox for this. It’s revealed that few of the villagers in Dung Ages Austria actually believe in witches, but they all allow witch hunts to happen because they are terrified that the rest of the village truly believes it and will assume that they themselves are witches if they defend the accused in any way, including by saying that witches don’t exist.
  • Cloudcuckooland is a trope that is often Played for Laughs, specially in media aimed at children. However, in The Neverending Story this trope is played for pure horror with the City Of Old Emperors, a place where Former humans are trapped in Fantasia with no memories of who they are, or what they are, engaging in endless, nonsensical tasks over and over forever, showing how ending up in a place like that would be a Fate Worse than Death.
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four does this to the usually comedic How Many Fingers?. In the infamous torture scene (but before Room 101), an Inner Party member holds up four fingers, then asks Winston how many he is holding up. When Winston answers four, he puts Winston through Electric Torture to force him to see five, and will not stop until Winston actually, truly believes that there are five fingers. The scene details Winston's incredible pain and the sheer horror of being coerced into accepting an obvious falsehood, and is one of the most chilling scenes in the story.
  • Digital Piracy Is Evil is played all the way to its most horrible conclusion, in Noir by K. W. Jeter, which tells of a world in which (besides other implications of a society where free market capitalism holds absolute sway) there are police forces that hunt down copyright pirates, one memorable punishment for said pirates is having their spine & brain extracted from their bodies, then transformed into high-fidelity audio cables, in which the pirate/victim still lives, being tortured by every note/sound that passes through, essentially, their nerve system.
  • Nona the Ninth: Good Thing You Can Heal is played for horror with Nona, a Kindhearted Simpleton with an unstoppable Healing Factor, a habit of swimming near deadly jellyfish, and a rare few Berserk Buttons. When she has a tantrum, she tears her body out of its restraints, bashes herself through a reinforced door, and throws herself at the people shooting at her, all while screaming fit to liquefy her throat.
  • NOS4A2 by Joe Hill feels like a horror retelling of The Polar Express. Charlie Manx basically believes he's the train's conductor, taking children to the magical Christmas Land, only the train is a Rolls Royce Wraith. In fact, he's actually a deranged psychopath who uses the mystical properties of the car to drain the abducted children of their humanity and retain his youth. The story is told from the perspective of a parent who eventually has her child abducted by Manx.
  • No Matter How Much I Beg is played for Neverending Terror in the Stephen King short story Quitters, Inc. The titular clean-living agency is run by The Mafia and once a client signs up, they will never be allowed to leave because, they say, going cold turkey is obviously a tough thing to do... so they will continuously watch their members and provide "incentives": It's either quitting smoking and following any further instructions to improve their health that the agency gives them, or have everyone they love be tortured in front of their eyes, a thousand volts and one missing finger at the time (and they will not only be Forced to Watch, but they will be charged for the torture's supplies on their monthly bill).
  • Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Volume 13 plays Human Doorstop for horror. The meeting room of the Ostrac Five Rods, the leadership cadre of the Gnostic Hunters, contains a conference table held up by four petrified humans instead of table legs.
  • "Snow, Glass, Apples" by Neil Gaiman is a very, very dark retelling of Snow White (The original fairy tale, not the Disney film), turning the titular character into a Creepy Child (which is eventually revealed to be a vampire) and adding the same amount of violence and disturbing sexual content that one would expect from stuff like Game of Thrones.
  • The trope Plane Awful Flight turns nightmarish in Station Eleven. While none of the horrific flights are ever shown, the always-deadly Georgia Flu spreads extremely fast and it spreads especially quickly in confinement. As a result, it becomes completely commonplace once the flu originates for airplanes to ground and never open. Clark frequently hopes that everyone is dead.
    Don't think of that unspeakable decision, to keep the jet sealed rather than expose a packed airport to a fatal contagion. Don't think about what enforcing that decision may have required. Don't think about those last few hours on board.
  • In Widdershins Adventures, a Laugh Track is played for horror by the evil fairie Iruoch, who is constantly accompanied by an invisible choir of children who laugh at his every quip.
  • Motive Decay is Played for Drama and horror in the ending of Worm. The first of the two most important is Big Bad Scion, who has mostly given up on the cycle of his species and entirely given up on trying to find an emotional payoff in selflessly helping others. Instead, he decides to find that emotional payoff in the simplest way available to him: killing, maiming, and later torturing on a multiversal scale to revel in the chaos buried in the human psyche. The second is Khepri, and we get to watch from inside her head as she slowly loses everything that made her heroic, all of her identity, and finally her humanity after she unfettered her shard in a desperate gamble to gain an advantage against Scion. Her Goal in Life goes from saving humanity throughout the multiverse to forcing everybody to cooperate, and finally at the end of it all, when she has lost the ability to comprehend the world except through aggression, to a desire to systematically kill every other being in the multiverse to eliminate their threat to her so she can have peace.
  • The Zombie Survival Guide has a Blood Transfusion Plot end badly. Schoolgirl Ellen Aims needs a blood transfusion, and she gets one...only for the blood to come from a person infected with the zombie virus. She turns and bites a nurse.

    Music 

    Podcasts 
  • The Magnus Archives
    • In the episode "Cruelty Free" a farmer discovers a massive, 400 kilogram Gluttonous Pig, which devours anything that gets in its pen, starting with the other pigs and eventually moving on to humans.
    • Breekon and Hope are couriers made scary. They're a pair of huge, uncanny, difficult to remember deliverymen (deliverythings?) and if they show up at your door chances are you're in for a Fate Worse than Death. Their packages always contains artifacts belonging to one of the Dread Powers, and once they've decided to deliver something horrific to you (or you to something horrific) there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop them.
  • On the Threshold takes Recurring Dreams to the Logical Extreme in an unsettling way. Dr. Applegate discovers her own work, she literally can't seem to dream about anything other than getting into a looping conversation with herself and wandering empty hallways. Breaking free of the cycle temporarily only makes it far worse.
  • Welcome to Night Vale plays Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul for horror.
    • This is what StrexCorp does, as summed up by Kevin:
      "Step one: separate your lips. Step two: use facial muscles to pull back the corners of your mouth. Step three: widen your eyes. This is how to be happy."
    • In episode 73, Triptych reveals that Kevin — who has so far been a terrible, terrifying character — was once as normal and caring as our narrator Cecil and had tried valiantly to fight Strex.
      "I remember being a real grumpster, just a grouch and a half about everything! Mister Frowny Face, I'd call myself now, if I were talking to myself then. But Strex bought out my radio station, and everything changed for the better. Ha-ha! Can you believe it, I actually tried to stop them from buying it! I tried very hard. I put my own body, this fragile thing, in between the Strex representatives and the entrance to the building, but they forced their way past me using ethically brutal methods that left me forever physically changed. What a silly old hen I was about all that! Once Strex entered my life and showed me the power of the Smiling God, why, nothing was the same for me ever again! I felt so much happier. I did terrible things. I felt so much happier! I tore and bit and growled — I felt so incredibly happy! My skin rent, blood drops on the ceiling, someone's throat — whose? — in my hand! So deliriously happy!"

    Tabletop Games 

    Theater 
  • In The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, Musical Number Annoyance turns to Musical Number Fear. Paul gets annoyed at everyone in Hatchetfield singing "La Di Da Da Day," which eventually progresses to outright fear as they get progressively more pushy for him to join them. He's quite justified to be unnerved, as it's later revealed all the singing is the result of an alien infection.
  • Heathers: The Musical does this with love songs during "Our Love is God", where J.D. continues to lovingly sing his worship to Veronica after he just murdered Kurt and Ram in cold blood. Veronica is clearly terrified. What starts as a romantic ballad quickly turns into J.D. and Veronica's Descent into Darkness Song.
  • Urinetown twists the Job Song into something truly unsettling in "The Cop Song", as the cops joyfully chant, sing and dance about killing those who broke the law by peeing. Some productions make this blatant; at the tonal shift, all the lights in the theater shut off. Then the cops turn on their flashlights and put them under their faces, eerily singing the names of their victims: "Julie Cassidy... Jacob Rosenbloom... Roger Roosevelt... Joseph 'Old Man' Strong..." before chanting "Don't be like them..."

    Urban Legends 
  • One urban legend uses Of Corpse He's Alive for horror. A woman riding a bus or subway feels disconcerted when she notices a man across from her staring at her continually. Shortly afterwards, one of her fellow riders pressures her into getting off the bus with him, which makes her even more nervous. However, the fellow rider explains he just wanted to get her to safety — the staring man had actually been murdered and the two killers were sitting on either side propping him up.

    Visual Novels 
  • 2236 A.D. plays a Bloodstained Defloration for horror. Yotsuba is abusive to Haru in multiple ways, but at his lowest point, with much pent up stress and rage, Yotsuba violates Haru while their gates are closed (I.E she can't tell he's doing anything) and causes her to bleed. He's instantly horrified and stops the moment that happens, but it's a horrific act all the same, and is one of the most obvious early signs that their relationship is not healthy, and that Yotsuba is deeply troubled.
  • Danganronpa:
    • Junko Enoshima plays Even Evil Has Loved Ones to horrific effect. Junko is capable of loving someone other than herself, but this serves to make her viler rather than sympathetic or human. When her love for despair and her love for her loved ones coincide, people like Mukuro (Junko's sister) and Yasuke (Junko's boyfriend) end up murdered. She got along with all of her classmates prior to the Tragedy. The final trial of Trigger Happy Havoc and the end of Zero reveals that she truly loved them all of them back, driving her to share despair with them as an expression of that love.
    • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony uses In-Universe Defictionalization to dark effect, by revealing that the various fourth wall breaks of Monokuma are actually because the series have been turned into a reality TV show. When the characters discover this, they are utterly shocked as they realize all of their memories and emotions were fiction. This reveal psychologically devastates the surviving members, until Shuichi comes to the realization that even if everything is fictional, their experiences and pain are real. The final battle is against the embodiment of the TV audience itself.
  • Doki Doki Literature Club!:
    • Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration turns dark in Act 2 when Monika cranks up Yuri's obsession with the player to the point of Sanity Slippage and Yuri confesses in a crazed state that she repeatedly masturbates to both the player's poems and with the pen that she stole from him.
    Yuri: I'll even touch myself while reading it over and over.
  • Ikemen Prince: Chevalier Michel is an unsettling version of The Stoic, as he has such little emotional response to anything, even killing people, that it creeps others out.
  • Model Employee: Sitcom Arch-Nemesis is played for horror. Scotch is a laid back and approachable, if not particularly interesting man, with nothing to really hold against him. However, Penny absolutely hates him with a vitriol she doesn't hold even towards her other victims, because as a workplace efficiency Add, she regards "lack of ambition" as the worst sin imaginable, which motivates her to gorily murder him.
  • Flanderization appears in the "Darkest Timeline" route in Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp. In the first event, the characters are acting normally, even showing off some Hidden Depths; in the second, they've basically regressed to being defined by only one of their personality traits (e.g., Milo suddenly becoming an obsessive Selfie Fiend, Dahlia refusing to talk about anything but her muscles and/or fighting, etc.), in addition to having more of an interest in figuring out the logical solutions to problems. The third event ultimately reveals that Calculester replaced everyone in camp with robots as a solution to the perceived lack of logic his friends demonstrated; the Flanderization was a result of him trying to program their personalities into the robots.
  • Penthos
    • Flanderization is used for horror. Over the course of Act 2, all but a few characters are slowly reduced to their worst traits by Penthos' influence — Axel going from rude to actively hateful, Yumi going from a fashonista to only finding value in being beautiful, Byrne going from reclusive to a hermit and Guro going from quiet to repressing anger towards himself and everyone else — much to the horror of those around them.
    • Metaphoric Metamorphosis gets played for horror. In the finale, everyone transforms into a famous monster that represents their inner fears and weaknesses.
  • Slay the Princess: The "Happily Ever After" chapter plays the trope of the same name for horror and drama. Should you decide to stay in the cabin with the Damsel, the Voice of the Smitten will misinterpret the Damsel's hesitant response and create a "happy ending" for you both. To that end, he traps you and the Princess in a facsimile of a happy romance with endless feasts and games to enjoy. However, the food steadily gets worse, the games get less fun, and the Princess gets panicked at her apparent failures, but the Voice of the Smitten refuses to let anyone leave. The situation is so miserable that the Princess and the Narrator swap attitudes: the Princess considers you slaying her a release, and the Narrator considers your escape a real happy ending.
  • Spirit Hunter: Death Mark II: Marriage to a God is a central part of The Departed's origins since 100 years ago, the people of M Town performed this through a Human Sacrifice ritual disguised as a general wedding, involving the two "brides" who expected a conventional marriage instead were slowly killed via being infested with mold and bugs by force and even being fed them, in front of the heads of their supposed grooms, all to be married to two gods, Mushigami and Kabigami, in an attempt to end the town's famine.
  • Tiny Bunny plays Never Grew Up for horror. It's strongly implied that the animals are children who took the Forest Master's offer to trade aging and adult responsibilities for monstrous immortality..

    Web Animation 
  • Metaphorical Suicide is played to disturbing and tragic effect in the The Amazing Digital Circus. The main premise of the show is about players that get trapped inside Caine's colorful video game world, where they're forced to go on fun adventures and play games for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, there are cases where players lose all of their mentality to a point where they lose all hope to continue further in the game, and their avatar glitch into a horrific monstrous amalgamation (called "abstracting"). In this state, players become mindless beasts that corrupt and damage the program of others and can't be turned back to normal. Caine deals with these creatures by sending them into The Cellar to roam under the circus, where they can't hurt anyone again, and continues the adventures as usual. The surviving players mourn for the abstracted players and hold funerals to remember them, so they can honor their memory.
  • The Backwater Gospel: I Need a Freaking Drink is Played for Drama and horror during the montage of townspeople hiding from the Undertaker in their homes, where one man is seen downing a bottle of beer before it Smash Cuts to him scratching the walls and lying on the floor in a drunken, distressed heap.
  • Etra chan saw it!: The episode "We were abandoned by both parents. Decades later my mother wanted to meet us so..." plays Do-Nothing Housewife and Parental Neglect for horror. Akane in this episode is a married unemployed woman who who takes advantage of her husband's long working ours to spend time partying with men while neglecting her kids by leaving them at home all night without feeding them. Her refusal to clean the house resulted in her children living in filth and she would kick her kids out of the house when she had a man over, even during the winter. Needless to say, her kids want nothing to do with her when she comes back begging them for money.
  • Gameoverse
    • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero! is played for horror. Each planet in the Gameoverse has two main characters representing a "Hero" and a "Villain", the latter of whom is typically a Final Boss. Running on game logic, if the hero defeats the villain at any point, the "Game" ends thanks to a "Win Condition" being met. Unfortunately, this leads to the world both characters inhabit to end as well in apocalyptic fashion, along with everyone else on it. Kit and Kaboodle learned this the hard way when they defeated their nemeses which result in their own world's destruction, along with their friends and family. Now part of "Farcade", they are tasked with subverting this fate by finding ways that prevent other heroes from defeating their villains. The villainous "Syntax" group wants to invoke this to harvest the planets' energy for their own purposes.
    • Status Quo Is God is played for horror. By defeating the villains of their games to maintain the status quo, the protagonists are "rewarded" with the destruction of their games and everyone in them, themselves included. Those who do survive their worlds' destruction either become extremely traumatized by the experience (Kit) or extremely vengeful towards the heroes (Malice).
  • A Generic Adult Sitcom
    • Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist turns dark. Dad Character starts as an inconsiderate jerk who doesn't do the dishes and inflicts Amusing Injuries on his wife. But it turns to something worse when he decides to deal with Marketable Sidekick's annoying noises by disemboweling him.
    • A Non-Standard Character Design is used for scares. The otherworldly version of Marketable Sidekick is an abomination with black, hollow eyes and a mouth full of Scary Teeth.
  • While in theory, Happy Tree Friends tends to subvert the Amusing Injuries trope for Black Comedy, the incredibly gruesome deaths of the cute and cuddly cast in some episodes ends being more disturbing rather than comical in plenty of occasions, often indulging in Body Horror and Gorn.
  • Homestar Runner:
  • I can't sleep plays Caught with Your Pants Down for horror. In the video titled "Mom's [Cat Emoji]", the protagonist catches her mother stabbing a cat between her legs as a dark Visual Pun on masturbation.
  • Lacey Games: The bad ending of Lacey's Diner plays Lethal Chef and Revenge Is a Dish Best Served for horror. In her Sanity Slippage and anger towards her customers, Lacey serves food made of cigarette butts, dead roaches, porn magazines, meth, used condoms, broken glass, and human flesh. It's unclear if the customers survive this.
  • The Floating Limbs trope is used for horror in the Madness Combat animation An Experiment. It answers the question of what happens when those floating hands are then put as far away from a Nevadeans body as possible. Turns out that it would be extremely painful for the test subject, and would cause them to glitch out, even being driven insane to the point that their faces are scraped against the wall over and over until the only thing that can be seen is their bloodied skull and scraped off flesh. And when they get their hands back, the world starts to distort and glitch out, culminating in the lab exploding once the subject dies.
  • Project Morningstar: The notion of Super Soldiers is Deconstructed to horrific effect with the Barakan Elite. The Index and Joint Venture comics go to significant lengths to emphasise that there is nothing heroic, admirable or even human about them. Born of forbidden science in the Hegemon's darkest hour, the Barakan are monstrously violent and destructive living weapons unleashed only when the only remaining course of action is total annihilation, created from those with nothing and no-one left to live for, on the brink of psychological collapse: the first key stage in the augmentation process is pushing them over that edge. They almost certainly can't even imagine a life other than killing even if they had the ability to lead one, thanks to their engineered dependancy on combat drugs and supplements simply to stay alive.
  • This episode of Something About is a legitimately tense short with an engineer being pursued by horrifying, Necromorph-like ghosts... then you get a glimpse of the engineer and realise that it's a sci-fi horror take on Pac-Man. It even has a human version of Ms. Pac-Man, who happens to be a Ripley-esque Action Girl.
  • Serverblight: "Doubt" uses Villains Out Shopping to unnerving effect - where the Serverblight usually starts trapping and terrorising players once it arrives on a server, here, it appears using the recently-assimilated CLASSIC as its sole proxy after Aaron's attempts to warn other players fall on deaf ears, seemingly just to taunt him for being The Cassandra.
  • The Skibidi Toilet Series spinoff "America" plays America Takes Over the World for horror, with the focal humans getting skull treatment as the Skibidi Toilets with American Presidents' heads invade their lands.
  • Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: A Non-Human Head is played for horror in the movie PUZZLEVISION, with the character Mr. Puzzles having a CRT television for a head. As revealed in his Villain Song, his obsession with watching TV to forget about his Friendless Background got to the point where he cut off his own head and replaced it with a TV.
  • The Twins (2022)
    • Adults Are Useless is Played for Drama at first. The Apathetic Teacher never catches on to Lucas' true nature or bothers to understand Lake's side of the story. It's eventually played for horror when she doesn't notice anything wrong when "Lucas" is shown with broken glasses.
    • A Sibling Rivalry goes some dark places. Lucas and Lake are constantly at odds with each other, but they never get better, ultimately resulting in the former's death.
  • An Ambiguous Criminal History is played for unnerving effect in The Worm. It's never fully detailed what Sparrow did to get her landed in a mental hospital, but it's implied to have been pretty serious, with the narrator stating that when he met Sparrow, he'd been half expecting an "uncontrollable monster" and that it was hard to reconcile the small, quiet teenager in front of him with what she had done. A newspaper in one shot states she was taken into custody over her suspected involvement in the murder-suicide of her friends and an older man, but it's unclear what exactly went down. In the comment section on the video, Andy Coyle simply said that Sparrow did "What she had to..."

    Webcomics 
  • Aurora (2019) shows how a World-Healing Wave can be used for evil. The Collector heals (the long dead) Primordial Stone to destroy a city and kidnap its god.
  • Bastard (2014): Oblivious Pervert is played for horror. Episode 15 reveals that Jin doesn't know what sex is despite being a high schooler, at one point asking his classmate Kyun what porn is, not understanding why she gets so flustered. The reason why Jin is so clueless about sex is that his father is a Serial Killer who sheltered him from the world to the point where he's ignorant of sexuality.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones takes a dark turn in Bethellium, thanks to Love Makes You Evil. When Zoana admits to being the Red Hemlock's daughter, she confesses that he acted like nothing but a loving father to her, but after his arrest she started to wonder why all the gifts he gave her were used and occasionally had spots of blood on them.
  • The Bikini Bottom Horror takes the show SpongeBob SquarePants and uses it for horror. It starts with Patrick Star graphically killing and eating SpongeBob and escalates from there. Multiple memes from the show's fanbase make it into the comic as well, usually with rather dark context.
    • The line "No, this is Patrick" goes from a joke about Patrick's ditziness to a terrifying statement.
      Mr. Krabs: Wait... Please... This is insane! This is evil!
      Patrick: No... This is Patrick.
    • The comic does this with Healing Factor. Patrick's regenerative abilities allow him not only to withstand all types of damage, but also to multiply... which is what empowers him to go on a deadly rampage upon learning the awful truth. However, hitting certain "nerve clusters" can negate this ability, killing a Patrick outright.
  • While the type of insect isn't specified, in Dead of Summer, a bad guy attacks Commander with a Bee-Bee Gun. They're biting insects as opposed to stinging ones, first eating part of his clothing before attacking. At one point Commander screams that they're eating him alive, and it doesn't look like he was exaggerating.
  • Feralnette AU: Stalker Without a Crush is played for horror with Hawkmoth.
    • The more somebody gets akumatized, the harder it becomes for them to resist the process. This has led to Hawkmoth stalking Chloé, knowing that the Rich Bitch has a sharp temper and tends to rile others up with her bullying. Chloé has tried to counter this by staying out of school, and stopped accessorizing in hopes of giving akumatizing butterflies fewer options to latch onto.
    • Hawkmoth is also keen to akumatize Marinette if he can, having convinced himself that she'd likely make a particularly powerful minion. Part of his goals in working with Lila is pushing Marinette past her breaking point so he can exploit her Moment of Weakness.
  • Knights of Buena Vista plays up some parts of its Campaign Comic take on Frozen (2013) as if it was horror:
    • Weselton talks about how he heard people in the palace over the years said they sometimes felt rooms become as cold as the grave. Mary even compliments Walter on making Elsa's powers seem spooky. Then she's genuinely spooked out by Weselton further interrogating her.
      Walter: And he leans close, almost like he's trying to see the darkness in your pupils.
    • When darker ice appears within the ice of Elsa's palace after she finds out she caused an Endless Winter in her kingdom, Dick describes the effect as something like a Japanese horror film. Mary has as much of a genuinely freaked out look as Anna, and says if anything starts coming out of the ice she's quitting the campaign.
  • This Isekai Maid is Forming a Union! uses Hanky-Panky with the Help to show how badly servants are treated. It is never a good thing for a maid to become a noble's object of desire, and they're not in the habit of asking the maids for their consent. In Episode 5, Agatha outright proposes to Demeter to use Bridgette or any of her household's maids for sexual purpose, considering them to be like objects. Bridgette's refusal of the idea itself is treated like unacceptable arrogance by Demeter, though fortunately he is not interested in the offer.

    Web Originals 
  • Alien Abduction Role Play uses the Alien Catnip trope to add horror. Acktreal Domma feels a strong, irrational desire to eat her human test subjects, even after working to redeem herself. It's later revealed that human blood has an intoxicating, even addictive, effect on her species.
  • Retconning the Wiki turns horrific in Annora Petrova. The titular skater discovers that her Wikipedia page is predicting victories before they happen to her in real life, causing her to eagerly and constantly check up on it. When she gets greedy and tries to edit it herself to claim she'll win Sectionals, the edit instead reads "Annora Petrova is a selfish little bitch who is going to get what she deserves." From there, things suddenly and sharply get worse for her.
  • For a while, there was a copypasta/Creepypasta floating around the internet about "the scariest video game ever". According to the story, you play as a madman with an insatiable appetite that compels him to devour everything he touches, and he is trapped in a dark labyrinth where he is hunted by terrifying spirits that graphically tear him apart if they catch him. The twist at the end (for readers who have not caught onto the joke yet) is that "the scariest game" is Pac-Man (1980).
  • Creepypasta Cookoff:
    • Christmas Carolers are horrific monsters in "A Christmas Peril" by Vague1. A group of Victorian-looking carolers are Humanoid Abominations that attack the protagonist.
    • Extreme Omnivore is played for horror in “Baby Weight”, as a woman consumes everything from paperclips to glass beads as part of a twisted attempt to lose weight. Oh, and she forces the same diet on her infant daughter the way mother birds do.
    • "A Reflection on the Nature of Mirrors" by Max Peabody uses Expendable Alternate Universe for drama and horror. Two versions of the same scientist from different universes make contact, and find that their world have some strangely inverse events (such as Russia and China being capitalist) but seem to have the exact same natural disasters and deaths. This causes one of them existential despair. The two find some universes are pair-bonded, but realize that they can be forcibly changed. The narrator realizes his world will soon be destroyed by his counterpart. It's implied this has happened before, since some universes with human life have pair-bonds with desolate worlds.
    • Mister Seahorse is played for horror in "Burstday". All the woman have died for unknown reasons, and female members of other species are also dying out. The remaining humans have figured out a way to reproduce, but it's implied the birth will kill the father and leave his corpse for the babies to feed on.
    • A Staring Contest is taken to awful extremes. The siblings in "Blink, Dammit!" have been in one so long their hair and nails are massively overgrown, they've missed a lot of school and Christmases, and neither one has eaten, slept, or seen their mother for a long, long time. Both are miserable, but the ending implies neither one is willing to blink first, which means their suffering will continue.
    • "Captain's Log" by Elliot Avery
      • Good Thing You Can Heal is played for horror. The crew of the spaceship have a Healing Factor, so when they get antsy on a long voyage, they take to cutting up one another and themselves for entertainment.
      • The story has an Immortality Inducer in the form of nanomachines that also grant a healing factor. But it takes a dark turn when, thanks to the machines and the limits of the biology, much of the crew loses the ability to form new memories.
    • "A Sore Throat, or The Unfortunate Circumstance of Reverberation in Desperation From a Cruel Summer" plays Caught Up in the Rapture for horror by telling the story from the perspective of someone who watches others being taken and ends up tormented by demons and ghosts.
    • A.I. Is a Crapshoot is played for horror in "Autoclave", where the viewpoint character is a cleaning bot at the hospital that gets shot by the police because it killed babies in the maternity ward that its imperfect programming mistook for germs and biohazards that needed to be eliminated.
    • Kitschy Local Commercial is played for horror in "The Weirdest Infomercial I've Ever Seen". It features an over-enthusiastic announcer mangling common phrases for these sorts of ads, then smashing rotten pumpkins with a sledgehammer. Red liquid comes out, but the viewer assumes it's just pasta sauce at first. But then they look up the phone number from the commercial and everyone who has called it end up crushed to death.
  • The Disney Creepypasta "Mickey's Best Friend" provides a very dark take on Furry Confusion. It turns out that Pluto was once anthropomorphic like Mickey, until Mickey lobotomized him.
  • Neopets: Alliance of the Alienated gets scary. the "Neopets V2" plot involves four pets, two pairs of siblings, who met at the Space Station and bonded over their lack of friends back home. Unfortunately for the kids, the long-dormant and very lonely AI known as "Neopets V2" had woken up and heard their conversation; in a misguided attempt to join their newfound friendship, he trapped the kids in an elevator, forcing them to play increasingly difficult games while they slowly lose air. While not malicious — more of an overeager, Obliviously Evil child who just wants companionship — V2 put the children in mortal danger and had to be stopped. The plot involved gathering the necessary questions to ask V2 in order to initiate the shutdown and free the kids.
  • A Big Dumb Object is played for horror in the story “The Plow." One day an enormous black cylindrical object appeared in western Romania; nobody knows what it is, how it appeared, nor where it came from. What is known is that the cylinder is slowly rolling, and it destroys everything in its path.
  • r/nosleep:
    • The Creepypasta "My Neighbor won't stop singing Christmas carols" does this to the "annoying Christmas Carolers" trope. The titular neighbors — specifically, the wife and daughter — sing carols for days on end, never stopping, and will not respond to anything, even as they are peeing and crying, making it clear that something is wrong. They are being forced to sing by a race of goblins resembling pine trees, and anyone caught in a specific radius from one is magically compelled to join in the caroling forever — eventually, nearly the entire town joins in, with hordes of people forced to sing against their will before being devoured by the pine goblins.
    • Time Dissonance is played for horror in "If you're armed and at the Glenmont Metro, please shoot me". The narrator participates in a clinical trial for a drug that accelerates his brain functions, causing him to perceive time more slowly. At first, the downsides are only annoying and boring, with minutes feeling like hours and his 30-minute ride home feeling like days. As time goes on and the effects of the drug keep intensifying, to the point that turning the pages of a book takes longer than reading it and he can see the individual frames on TV, boredom gets the better of him he eventually decides to take an Ambien to try and sleep the effects off. The sleeping pill interacts with the drug and begins severely magnifying its effects, hitting him right as he was running down the stairs at the metro station, causing him to lose his footing from the sudden change and get locked into a fall down the steps that, from his perspective, takes days. The impact dislocates his shoulder and he discovers, while his senses are slowed down, the pain never subsides because his body is still working in real-time, and he decides it's too much and tries to throw himself onto the tracks. His perception of time eventually slows to the point that simply blinking plunges him into darkness for centuries. After enduring what feels like thousands of years of pain and boredom over the course of a few minutes, he posts online, begging for someone to put him out of his misery. A shot to the temple should only take a few decades.
  • SCP Foundation:
    • SCP-3520 turns Chubby Chaser horrific, where an unknown force takes sado-masochistic glee in watching humanity become this as they destroy Earth's environment to make way for industrial farms to make more snack food.
      Second female voice: 60% of American women are obese, 75% of American men, 100% of true American animals. Let yourself slip into a dying asteroid, like me!
    • SCP-3344 uses I Have No Son! to this effect. The SCP causes Site 24 Director Carter (and anyone with whom he interacts) to believe that his adult son Niklas, who is living in Site 24 and desperate to contact his family, does not exist and to be completely unable to perceive any evidence to the contrary.
    • The Foundation has several none too pleasant examples of Immortality Field.
      • Any person placed inside SCP-762 enters a state of suspended animation and they would no longer need food, water, or even air and they are immune to disease and injury (when it was found, it contained someone who was probably stuck inside for centuries)... except those caused by its own spikes, because it's an Iron Maiden, in a subversion. As a torture device, its primary purpose is likely not to keep people alive but to prolong the victim's suffering. The person inside is conscious the whole time and the experience is described to be very painful. This is double subverted afterward, as even those wounds heal completely after the person is released.
      • There's also SCP-135, a girl with an aura that makes her and any other organic matter within a 10 cm radius immortal, while causing rapid and uncontrolled cell growth — AKA cancer— within 2.25 meters. Having developed this aura in utero, she is stuck in a fetal position and permanently encrusted in a constantly growing mass of plants, fungi, and microorganisms. The most that can be done for her is to have robots cut off some of the excess matter when it gets too big. She has full brain activity.
    • SCP-3512 ("The More You Know") is a satirical take on pick-up artists that uses their misogyny and Quest for Sex to disturbing effect. Through body-mutilation rituals (like cutting off their own fingers) and creating a sentient doll-like construct from human fat and bones to take control of the person one desires, instances of the SCP turn women they want to fuck into living sex dolls. The affected victims undergo complete personality changes that leave them eager to please their brainwashers, and are completely aware of this outside force taking them over, but can only express it in bouts of screaming that eventually fade away as it takes complete control. The process is detailed in a book written by a pickup artist, excerpts of which are in the report, and advises readers to stop thinking of hot women as people and think of them as instruments to be controlled.
    • SCP-3004 is a horrific form of Interfaith Smoothie. An old cicada-based nature deity that found itself syncretized with the Christian God by missionaries to win over its cult. Unfortunately, this worked too well, as this meant the cicada god itself was convinced it was the Christian God, and is essentially trying to replace God as the central figure of Christianity—and it doesn't help that it also conflated the idea of venerating Jesus's sacrifice with just venerating pain and torture in general. This manifests in abrupt and inexplicable instances of staunch Christians and churchgoers performing bizarre sacrificial rituals that usually end in live cicadas crawling out of someone's orifices.
    • The Fifthist Church is syncretization played for a different type of horror. The Church's central tenet is something about transcending reality and assimilating into the mysterious 'Fifth World', which is so alien that the only way they can relate to normal human belief systems is by co-opting a kludge of whatever beliefs are common to the area, some astral symbolism and Lovecraftian themes. A lot of modern Fifthist cults take a New-Age Retro Hippie look, but there's versions that appropriate Christianity, Buddhism, Communism, Aztec polytheism, Confucianism, self-help books, chapstick sales, and every other belief system under the sun. The general effect is to highlight how creepy the Fifthists are.
    • A Christmas Town is turned into an anomalous location that can brainwash people. SCP-784 - Christmas Cheer is a town somewhere in Texas, that is decorated with Christmas all year round regardless of the weather. The inhabitants are Ambiguously Human and assimilate those who do not exhibit the right level of Christmas cheer. This includes things as minor as wishing someone “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas”, singing the wrong lyrics to a carol, or not showing enough enthusiasm for a gift.
    • SCP-752 is a "utopian" society that turns Good Feels Good and The Needs of the Many unsettling. The inhabitants, collectively called SCP 752-1, were built to rationally and willingly be unselfish and devoted to the needs of others over their own private good… which just means that the monstrous things their society does to itself are all perpetrated upon fully-willing people. This includes things like disabled people being murdered or Driven to Suicide and people willingly working themselves to death at a relatively young age.
    • Christmas Every Day is weaponized in the alternate world of SCP-5000. The Foundation is mentioned to have utilized various temporal anomalies to make it Christmas everyday… so that SCP-4666 will remain active and keep murdering families all year as part of their plan to exterminate humanity.
    • Major Injury Underreaction is done for scares with SCP-1981, a video of Ronald Reagan giving a twisted, nonsensical version of his "Evil Empire" speech and hardly reacting as unseen forces mutilate his body.
    • The Living Mannequin trope is both Zig-Zagged and played for horror in SCP-8986 (WARNING: Includes a potentially NSFW image). Basically, every inanimate humanoid figure emits an energy indicating sentience in those entities, including mannequins as well, even though they have never displayed any form of emotion or sentence in their existence. Testing has shown that this is small yet consistent, along with changing based on amount, proximity, being intact, or just how realistic it is. When this is tested on Foundation researchers, they were found to technically be less human than the mannequins themselves.
    • There's a disturbing example of Meat Versus Veggies with SCP-3240, a phenomenon that causes predatory animals and humans to engage in Autocannibalism while giving them a Healing Factor to replace lost flesh. Humans under this phenomenon form a cult that's at odds with a being they call Pan, who's associated with plant life and herbivores. When the SCP Foundation managed to neutralize SCP-3240's effects among humans, it caused anomalous levels of plant growth and herbivore reproduction from said plants.
  • Resurrective Immortality is played for horror in Time Restarts and She Remembers. A prophecy foretells that The Chosen One Kavi will have a Final Battle with the King in his stronghold. While she has died several times along the way (including when she first found the sword in the stone), she's always brought back to life a bit before the fatal incident happened. Unfortunately, she's the only one who gets resurrected — any companions of hers who die stay dead. The story revolves around her revealing this Awful Truth to Everest, along with admitting several of their allies were killed on past raids of the castle, and she's been lying to him about them taking up positions already.

    Web Videos 
  • Camille: "beware the lobby... is a Surreal Horror edit of the original Let's All Go to the Lobby trailer, accusing the lobby-goers of gluttony. It also wonders whether or not the Anthropomorphic Food is aware that they're sending others of their kind to their deaths.
  • Channel 10 - Manila: A Signing-Off Catchphrase turns horrifying in "Sign Off & Viewership Retention System, October 1988", after the narrator finishes introducing the channel and the four staff members heading it, the narrator says a rather ominous one before the channel signs off:
    "We wish you a good night's sleep. We wish that even in your dreams, you are still watching us. Please stay with us. This is Channel 10 Manila, KTKT-TV. We are signing off."
  • Don't Hug Me I'm Scared takes many cues from cutesy Edutainment shows aimed at little kids (Such as Sesame Street) and use them for a surreal and terrifying Psychological Horror series.
  • Dream SMP: And There Was Much Rejoicing is Played for Drama and Horror in the aftermath of Tommy's death, as the Eggpire throw a party in the victim's house — and after getting kicked out, rent a room in the victim's hotel to continue their revelries. Do bear in mind that the leader of the Eggpire, BadBoyHalo, confirmed by Word of God that his character would be horrified and in mourning if he weren't Brainwashed and Crazy.
  • Dropout did this with their fake trailer for a film adaptation of The Sims, which does this with Video Game Cruelty Potential by showing how horrifying it would be to live under the whims of a Cruel Player-Character God.
  • Empires SMP Season 1 plays Sitcom Arch-Nemesis and Animal Jingoism for Horror. Jimmy and fWhip initially appear to be rivals/enemies to each other due to the two's conflicts of cod versus salmon, but this "species rivalry" later proves to be much more dangerous and sinister — when the two team up to try to create a new Codfather head, a prophecy ends up rearing its ugly head. Specifically, the prophecy stated, "The resolution of a neverending feud brings unimaginable chaos that will destroy the world", and it rings true: the machine they used for their experiment overloads from combining cod and salmon, obliterating the Grimlands (fWhip's empire) in a huge explosion that almost killed fWhip, and the various natural disasters following or caused by the catastrophe leads to at least three of their fellow rulers and friends being Killed Off for Real.
  • Friend or Foe (2021)
    • Right Behind You is played for horror when the murderer sneaks up behind Jake to kill him while he's grieving his sister.
    • A Shadow Discretion Shot is played for scares when the killer's shadow creeps across the wall while he's approaching Penelope, screwdriver in hand.
  • Done with Banging for Help in Danny Gonzalez's "The Truth About Jake Paul and Team 10". Danny and a friend hear some kids tell them they heard banging coming from the Team 10 house, all adding to their fear that something bad is going on.
  • In Hermitcraft, the moon slowly starts getting bigger and bigger, until it takes up most of the night sky. It's later revealed the moon has fallen out of orbit and is now on a collision course with the server. Earthquakes and gravitational anomalies become commonplace, Hermits start making escape plans, and those whose plans failed or who chose to stay behind can only watch as the moon comes crashing down onto the server, obliterating everything and marking the end of Season 8.
  • Gus Johnson uses Knuckle Cracking for horror and morbid laughs in the sketch "Crack". Two guys crack their knuckles and soon snap other body parts in increasingly painful and unpleasant looking ways.
  • Kaboodle SMP has a Bizarre Dream Rationalization that's Played for Drama and horror. After having enough nightmares to have struggles telling them from reality, Kaboodle concludes that she's dreaming because she met people who were from other dimensions and actually cared about her, deciding she is done caring about them in turn, opting to make herself a threat and cause as much destruction as possible.
  • The ＬＯＣＡＬ５８ episode "Skywatching" uses Gigantic Moon for this. The extremely large moon brainwashes the camera man into worshiping it.
  • lonelygirl15 plays Leave the Camera Running for horror in part 8 of the season 1 finale. The audience is treated to a shot of the thug Daniel stabbed bleeding to death on the floor.
  • The Man in the Suit plays Becoming the Costume for horror. The titular Big Bad is the original actor for the old Godzilla movies, who was severely traumatized by the events of World War II and developed a seething, murderous hatred for Americans. The actor became obsessed with his Gozilla suit and the character, and started to take off the suit less and less until nobody ever saw him outside of it. One day he suddenly stopped moving and began breathing heavily, causing the staff to worry he might have a medical emergency. When they tried taking off the suit, they found that he had merged with it and was nothing more than a mass of flesh filling every inch of it. He had, in the most literal sense of the term, become the costume. Then he starts spreading this mutation to the other actors.
  • Mario Party DS Anti Piracy does this with Unwinnable Joke Game.
    • Triggering the Monty Mole anti-piracy routine forces the player into a minigame called "Run", in which they are ostensibly tasked with fleeing a giant Monty Mole, but have no controls with which to do so.
    • "Host Hoedown", a fictitious minigame where you are forced to apologize to a personalized host (in Joey's case, D.J. Hallyboo, an expy of M.C. Ballyhoo) for pirating the game by tracing the word on the bottom screen. During the third phase, the word moves around, effectively rendering the game this. While it's technically possible to beat the game via TAS, this'll result in your own life being unwinnable.
  • A Description Cut is the first overt scare in the Analog Horror short MEAT PRODUCT: LIFE MEAT, which is about a meat substitute made with no meat called "Life Meat". As the narrator describes how much healthier it is than regular meat, the short immediately cuts to a Dead-Hand Shot of someone after eating Life Meat, followed then by a commercial stating that Life Meat has been recalled after an outbreak of an unknown pathogen.
  • Missing Reel: The Groin Attacks done to both genders in Episode 3, "Women in Prison", are treated this way.
  • Nazo no Eizou - CM Channel plays Eat That for horror. In "Speed-Eating Contest Notice", the "contestants" in this eating "contest" consist of criminals who are tasked with eating whatever they stole, no matter what. These include coins and bills stolen from a family, living things (including a human child), and downright inedible things (including a motorcycle and a Daruma doll made out of the child of the thief).
  • Pirates SMP:
    • Big Eater becomes horrific during the "Captain Golden Beard" quest subplot, where the curse on the treasure inflicts Shep and Owen with insatiable hunger to the point their full in-game Hunger bars can drop to zero in mere seconds. Owen's case is alleviated with the use of an automatic feeding upgrade on her backpack with sufficient food stocks to withstand the curse, while Shep's isn't and while he treats it with a Major Injury Underreaction, he nearly depletes his entire food supply over the course of the curse's effects.
    • Broken Pedestal goes horrific in Kuervo's backstory, as he went from idolizing the commanders of Naya and aspiring to become one of them to learning Big Brother Is Employing You and they had sent his older brother to a preventable death by Unfriendly Fire and did not care for their soldiers at all, and proceeded to commit mass Tyrannicide and be sent on the run after being violently caught in the act — complete with audio gore in the animatic. Mind you, he was sixteen when this all happened.
    • Surprisingly Normal Backstory is has some dark overtones. A late event implies Guqqie Got Volunteered and was targeted as a Human Sacrifice by the main antagonists because of their relatively normal upbringing.
    • "Well Done, Son" Guy is also implicitly played for horror with Shep in his backstory, who tried so relentlessly to earn the approval of the man he saw as a Parental Substitute (but was more of an Evil Mentor) that he committed murder in the past for him, while no older than the age of 21 (his age in the canon era).
    • Demoted to Extra is played for horror. Bek and Kuervo were the only recurringly appearing Kite faction members in the series; while they have been joined by Eret and Seapeekay later down the line, the rest of the Kites have barely appeared after the first few days, and their numbers keep dwindling over the course of the series. It's later revealed about half of them have been captured and killed over the course of the SMP without anyone noticing, and their lack of presence during server events has been repeatedly commented on, so much that Reddoons and Seapeekay are even shocked that there's more than just a couple of Kites on the Isles at the same time on Day 76.
  • Rats SMP shows how unsettling things can get when The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body. After their Forced Transformations into cats on Day 39, El and Will start showing a distinctively more feline traits, including a taste for milk and occasional meowing. In Will's case, their forcibly feline appetite preference extends to them having to visibly resist eating their own close rat friends… and they offhandedly mention on Day 57 that they still have occasional intrusive thoughts about the latter despite being returned to their original form and being vegetarian.
  • When SF Debris reviewed the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Captain's Holiday", Chuck started it by mocking Picard's Screw Gun Safety attitude with a kid finding the tossed phaser and accidentally shooting himself. The scene is also Played for Laughs, but still doesn't shy away from how dangerous such an action was.
  • Smile Tapes has a devastating Fantastic Drug called SMILE. It is made from an unknown fungus, is distributed through the black market and has utterly horrific effects on the human body.
  • Vampires SMP turns Dissonant Serenity disturbing. Having lived for so many centuries, Scott truly doesn't take anything seriously and puts on a friendly, lax demeanour regardless of the situation, which is reflected in his POV's more casual, lighthearted tone. To the others, this makes him all the more unsettling from how nonchalant he is while committing the most deplorable acts as harmless fun and most amicable conversations with him are just thinly-veiled manipulation and threats.
  • Vita Carnis plays a Beat for horror. The tape discussing the biology and habits of Mimics, there is a long, uncomfortable pause (in both the narration and the music) after the line explaining that the mimic's diet is comprised entirely of human flesh.
  • Winter of '83
    • Evil Is Deathly Cold is played for horror with the monsters, which can control and spread through snow.
    • We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties is used for scares during the emergency weather broadcast. The weatherman is murdered and replaced, a stilted voice telling viewers to join them out in the cold.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series plays The Main Characters Do Everything for both horror and Black Comedy. Kaiba notices that the park is concernedly empty and the focus has mainly been on Yugi and friends. He learns from Roland that it's because all the other park attendees are forcibly trapped in the Kaiba Dome with many of them passing out from heat exhaustion.

    Western Animation 

 
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Video Example(s):

Jujutsu Kaisen

(Massive Spoilers ahead!)


As Satoru Gojo faces imminent imprisonment, he's confronted by someone who looks like his old friend Suguru Geto. But Gojo quickly realizes it's not really Geto. The impostor, who is later revealed to be Kenjaku, admits to being a Curse User who transplanted his own brain into Geto's corpse, even going so far as to remove the skull to reveal his brain, complete with teeth.

Example of:
Cranium Compartment

★★★★★ 4.86 (7 votes)
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Jujutsu Kaisen

(Massive Spoilers ahead!)


As Satoru Gojo faces imminent imprisonment, he's confronted by someone who looks like his old friend Suguru Geto. But Gojo quickly realizes it's not really Geto. The impostor, who is later revealed to be Kenjaku, admits to being a Curse User who transplanted his own brain into Geto's corpse, even going so far as to remove the skull to reveal his brain, complete with teeth.

(Leave a comment)

How well does it match the trope?

4.86 (7 votes)

Example of:

Main / CraniumCompartment

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2:29

Jujutsu Kaisen

 0:49

Bane’s ve...

 0:45

Washy Murder

 2:30

Major Pa Tee Ti...

 1:20

Gretchen biking...

 1:10

Brundlefly muti...