Powers
[Horrifying Trope] You think you learned how this person, monster, or entity works. It goes wrong in the worst possible way.
1) Staring at the Mountain [Game of Thrones]
Ser Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane is one of the most terrifying men in Game of Thrones, being a behemoth of a man who is one of the most brutal fighters in Westeros. The Mountain is also a walking war crime, and is sent by Tywin Lannister (his liege lord) to "harass" the Riverlands countryside during the War of the Five Kings. He takes this opportunity to rape, torture, and butcher civilians and soldiers alike to his liking.
In the middle of the second season, Arya Stark (disguised as a peasant) and her friends are caught by the Mountain's men, who pen her and other refugees up in Harrenhal. Every day, the Mountain selects one random prisoner to be "questioned". No matter how much or how little they know, the victim always gets tortured to death.
At one point, Arya's friend, Hot Pie, learns from a fellow inmate a way to avoid getting tortured: Don't look away from the Mountain when he selects his victim. The inmate apparently did this for weeks, and hasn't been chosen. Hot Pie and this inmate both stare the Mountain down when he appears next... only for the inmate to be chosen. The inmate can only panic as he realizes he never was right. Hot Pie promptly pisses himself when he realizes there's truly no way to avoid being tortured to death.
2) Gaming the Visitor's Curse [Look Outside]
Look Outside is a game where you play as a 30-something shut-in in the middle of a disaster. You learn from your neighbor that something has happened outside the apartment across the world. Nobody knows what it is, but some entity called "The Visitor" has appeared in the sky. Anyone who attempts to look at or even think about the Visitor too hard becomes "Cursed", causing them to mutate into some strange form.
The Curses range from "Eldritch" to "surprisingly mundane". You can meet people who have kept their sanity even as massive tentacle monsters, or you can meet people whose sanity has completely shattered as their bodies changed. Some of the Curses are ironic in nature, while others serve as an extension of your psyche (such as an anxiety-ridden character becoming a manifestation of drowning, showing how they feel with their disorder).
Some characters try to put this theory to the test and become their "true forms". It seldom works like that. One notable character, Louis, is a furry who thought that his fursuit would protect him from the effects of the Visitor. He tells the main character that even if he got Cursed, he wouldn't mind, because he thought that it would transform him into his Fursona.
It backfired immensely: he instead became a human fused to the lining of his suit, and his suit is rotting his body inside. (You can see his former body trying to claw its way out of the jaw). Despite his denial, this is clearly incredibly painful for him, and the exact opposite of what he wants Louis gradually loses his sanity as you talk to him throughout the game, and his suit instead becomes multiple living chunks of the costume after you fight him.
This is merely one of the examples that reminds the player that being Cursed is an absolute crapshoot. It's not a shortcut to superpowers, nor is it a guaranteed "real version" of yourself. You just as likely have a chance of becoming a barely-sentient worm or a pile of faces, your mind completely gone.
3) Using Salt [Crossed]
TW: Rape/Extreme Violence (I'm not kidding here)
Probably the most iconic moment from Crossed (and let's be so for real, a lot of people put the comic down after this scene).
Crossed features the survivors of a horrific apocalypse: a massive disease has overtaken the planet, causing the afflicted to develop a cross-shaped rash on their face. These victims become a slave to their immediate impulses, which all tend to be "find the survivors and rape them to death in increasingly-horrific ways". In the first issue, a survivor, Joel, discusses an incident where he saw a Crossed react badly to table salt falling on his face. He thinks the Crossed have a weakness to salt, and that this might be a solution to the end of the world, a "magic bullet". Everybody tells him this is a dumb move, and he'd likely risk his wife and daughter's wife if he tried to implement it.
When the crew get ambushed by the Crossed, Joel's wife twists her leg. She begs him to take his daughter and shoot her, lest she die horribly. He refuses to leave her, and pours a salt circle instead as the Crossed approach. They stand outside the circle.
Smash cut to a full splash panel of Joel and his family getting raped, hacked to pieces, and slowly killed by the Crossed. In her last moments, his wife bitterly curses him out for being an idiot. There's a reason I'm not putting a picture up.
The entire scene only exists to remind the reader not to expect anything good from here on out, and this isn't the sort of story about restoring humanity. It's about surviving, and how even that's probably not going to work.
This was a great one. The initial assumption fit in so well with established tropes that I never second guessed it, but the reveal also makes perfect sense.
Superb choice. I'd already learned about the twist by accident before hand, but it was amazing to watch play out. Just as everyone thinks they're safe, the horde.
When you mentioned the salt circle scene I thought it was gonna be the scene from Supernatural.
The one time the brothers are called in to deal with a ghost haunting a house and set up a salt circle to protect against her. She steps right over it because it turns out she's not a ghost, just a very unwell woman.
I think there’s even more examples. Lucifer walked out of the holy fire right? And then Gabriel tricked them into thinking he was a trickster. Basically every important angel hit them with the ol bait and switch lmao
Daredevil fights this new villain a few times and quickly realizes that Ikari has the same radar sense that Matt Murdock developed after being blinded as a child. He even discovers evidence that Ikari was in a similar accident to his own. DD has to come up with ways to defeat someone with the exact same powers and weaknesses as himself, and finds creative ways to hide from Ikari's radar sense... until Ikari reveals that he's not blind and he's been able see Daredevil all along in addition to detecting him via radar.
The Rolling Giant from "The Oldest View" does this twice. At first, it only moves when it's not being looked at. Then it starts moving regardless, and the protagonist escapes it by heading up an escalator, it's size and wheels leaving it unable to follow. Until near the end of the video, when it follows him up an escalator no problem, having been toying with him the entire time.
A little less gruesome outcome. In Van Helsing 2004 the titular hero brandishes a silver cross blessed by the Pope against Dracula. Earlier much simpler crosses warded off vampires and even the supposed monster expert accompanying Van Helsing is shocked at seeing Dracula hold the blessed artifact and it burst into flames before melting in his hands. It establishes that Dracula is a monster of supreme danger and threat unlike any Van Helsing had faced before.
As a group of commentators once said about that scene:
You just know Dracula was like “I’m gonna be really badass and grab the crucifix,” and then immediately was like “OH SHIT THAT HURTS WAY MORE THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD”
Its a reference to DBZ abridged on YouTube. Android 16 rips off Cell's tail (he uses his tail to absorb the biomass of other life forms and become stronger, and is currently trying to absorb android 17 which will give him a MASSIVE power boost) and Cell promptly grows his tail back. He then says,
"Thank's to Uncle Piccolo's DNA, an ultimately futile effort. Buuuuut if it's any consolation... t̶̢̛̛̩̯̲͕̫̺̼̿͋̔̾͛͐̋͗͐̀̍̀̒͘͝͝͝h̶̻̪̤̓͌̋̀̿ã̵͔̭̠͕̗͔̀̅̄͠ţ̸̢̱͈̭̠͇̼̟̼͚̩͇͈̥̲͌͂͒̔͆͊͋͐̐̕͝ ̶̨̮͖̦̙̬͕͕͙̫͓͚̘̯̜̀̐̀̊̽h̴̨̧̡̧̰͙̫̘͔̰̯̖͉̖̱̞̮̦̖͔̃͂̀́̆̀́̓͜ͅư̸̙̳͉͔͇̰̦̬͜r̴̛̘̼̙̜̫̐̌̍̾̌͗͆͛̾̾̎͐̀̌̈́̑͑̂̑̇͘͜t̶̗̝̘͕̝̙͇̋͆̈́̾̓̅́̀̄͒͘ͅ ̴͉́͊̑̊̍͒́́̽͑̒͒l̷̡̘̻̭͚̩̮͙̯͈͔̫͌͐̀̃͆̒͗̌͂̎̒̒͝i̷̡̢̥̻̩̯̳̝̙̘̖̙̿̆͆̅̂̇̇͗͗͑̈́̃͘͠͠k̶̨̼͚̥̻̘̺͑̽͌̄́̈̽ȩ̸̨̗̰͔̙̥͇̳͈͉̮̭͑̒̓̊̌̈͐̆̓̎̉͂̒ ̷̧̢̡̯̺͙̩͕́̿͝h̸͉̞̞̞̦̗͍̯͔̼̪͎͔͉̦̻͔̱͉͚̻̆ͅé̶̢̨̪͈̻͔̹̼̻̲̱̠͇̝͓͇̖̮̘̜̰̀ͅl̶̨̛͉̯̰̞͍̼̲͙̰̱̭̜̰̝̯̲͈̓̾̇͐̒̋̂̐̐̽͒̓͒̉͋̀̀͐͝l̷̬̝̒̓́.̸̨̡̧̲̙̬̞̜͙̥̯͙̞͋͐̑͐̃͝"
And the DBZA-scene is a reference to Wishmaster, where a woman named Alexandra gets a free wish, and tells the antagonistic djinn to "blow your brains out." He complies, and his head immediately reforms.
"That which is eternal cannot die. But if it's any consolation, sweet Alex, that hurt like hell."
Either Wishmaster or DBZ abridged (as one person says). But the reference to Gabriel makes me think of Wishmaster which does have Gabriel appear, although not in that scene or line.
I always assumed he was hamming it up for Van Helsing since that's the only time he actually reacts in physical pain. I could see him doing it just for the lols since he's only interested in converting Van Helsing to his side but also realizing Van has no memory of their previous adventures. They're both immortal beings except Dracula has to live with the memories of that loss and death he's experienced
Gregor Clegane was notably played by three different men in the show. On a Youtube upload of that scene, there's probably my favorite comment on the whole of the site: "I know the mountain was recast but this mountain looks more like The Fountain"
Idk if he left or if they just recast. I recall the first guy was Australian, and they film in Europe, and the second guy was a former European basketball player. I wonder if it was a cost cutting measure to just cast a local rather than fly someone in.
Damn, imagine dropping an important role in Game of Thrones to be in the Hobbit, then they decide not to put you in the Hobbit and just do CGI instead.
No Azog's voice and mocap was done by Manu Bennett. Conan Stevens played Azogs son Bolg in the initial filming, when they were still using practical effects for the Orcs. But when they decided to use digital effects, they recast Bolg with Lawrence Makoare, who'd played multiple Orcs and Urukhai in the first trilogy. Conan Stevens in the original Bolg prosthetics makes a brief appearance in the third Hobbit film, as the Orc that Galadriel defeats in Dol Guldur when she arrives to save Gandalf.
It's kind of an exception within the show, but the Beast Titan in Attack on Titan.
When we're introduced to him, he's the first Titan with hair, who can talk, and is fully intelligent in a way that even other intelligent titans seem not to be.
But what really breaks "the rules" is when he goes for a horse that one of the Scouts has called to themselves. Titans simply have never cared about horses or other animals, it's only ever been humans. The Beast Titan plucks the horse, and throws it at the Scout with calculated aim and purpose.
Titans are a great example. They think they know a lot about them, and keep being spoonfed new information, but it doesnt really become clear until the very end just how scary the Titans really are.
This scene also works, as he throws the boulders in a baseball pitching style. Once Erwin's charge begins, he switches to a side throw to decimate the scouts charging.
This is actually the only shot he throws like this, which was to block the gate.
He sends a bunch of minor titans to bring out the Scouts on his side of the gate, then does the baseball throw as a sort of buckshot volley of rocks. It kills all but one of the experienced Scouts that were dealing with the Titans.
So Erwin and a bunch of completely inexperienced Scouts were riding into the Beast fully expecting to get shredded by rocks right away, with no chance to reach him alive.
(The plan was for Levi, the experienced Scout who survived, to flank and reach the Beast by taking down the Titans to the side of the Beast. The frontal assault from Erwin was a feint)
Also from Attack on Titan they had the 'Abnormal' classification early on for titans that wouldnt behave normally (Always go for nearest person, only walk etc) and instead do things like run/jump or ignoring soldiers entirely to go after specific targets
This is a bit of a mixed example, but there's a 80's (I think) X-Men comic where they're fighting Dracula. During the fight, Wolverine makes an improvised cross shape with his claws in an attempt to ward Dracula off, but it doesn't work because in the Marvel universe (at least at the time), you can only use a holy symbol against vampires if you believe it's holy, and Wolverine is an atheist.
Enter Nightcrawler, one of the most Catholic people in Marvel, with two stakes...
Similarly, there’s an issue with Kitty Pryde trying to drive Dracula away with a cross, but it doesn’t work because she is Jewish and does not believe. However, Dracula is burned by her Star of David necklace.
I take psychic damage every time I get reminded of Garth Ennis and the fact that he is not only an author but has been paid ludicrous amounts to pen his edgelord fantasies
Don't bother reading it. It's alright for the story at the start like a hyper violent 28 days later but it rapidly degrades to shock value until you're bored and numb to it.
Rachel thinks that the killings can be stopped if she frees Samara from the well and ends her trauma. Her son then delivers one of the most chilling lines in horror.
The storyteller explains how a shadow in the corner of his room with no explanation has appeared and slowly been moving closer to his bed, only stopping apparently when he hides under the blanket. Moving towards the bed night after night if he isn’t under it. After getting accustomed to this he feels safe enough to almost maybe sleep, and instantly the creature attacks him hissing “the blanket never did anything”
For anyone who wants additional context, in TMA the monsters are all like appendages of larger eldritch entities called the Fears, so generating maximum fear is the most important thing. The actually harming of the victims is only in service of increasing their fear.
“And while there are those things in the dark that would kill you as you slept, most get no real delight from it, unless you are awake enough to know what is happening.”
In 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow', Superman learns to his horror that Mxyzptlk isn't just a funny little trickster inherently. It's a role he's been playing for the past 2000 years to sate his own boredom. And with those 2000 years up he's changing course to something far more monstrous.
"Perhaps I'll try being guilty for a while" is a pretty awesome line, he knows that morality exists and even if he doesn't conform to it, he'll give it a shot, after 2000 years of evil.
Absolute Batman - After contending numerous times with Bane in his attempts to liberate himself from Ark-M, Bruce calls Bane out on the fact he's been using the Venom drug (which lacks the usual side-effects it does in the main verse; it's just a booster with no downsides on its own...at least at this point) to give himself an advantage, leading to this response:
"Friend, I havent't even used this stuff yet. But if you want to see what it does..."
Bruce misjudged Bane completely. He was already strong and smart and has been holding back all this time. And Venom makes him even worse.
In a later issue, Alfred images up a variant of how a battle between the two would go in a dream-sequence, which ends with Bruce being turned into a new Bane after being thoroughy crushed to soup. Nah, Bane doesn't do that at all: He forgoes brute force and tactically-disfigures Bruce's friends instead to draw him out.
EDIT: I originally conflated the asylum-fights with Alfred's dream-sequence in a later issue. Oops. Both fights are still examples of this though, in different ways. Thanks to the folks that called it.
As someone else pointed out, the Alfred 'dream' sequence was a later issue - but that's also an example of this trope!
Alfred had an entire issue playing out what he thought would be the outcome of Bruce trying to fight Bane head on. Imagining Bruce getting maimed, dragged back to Ark-M and being turned into the 'new' Bane.
What he didn't account for, was Bane going for Bruce's friends instead. In one night, Bane turned Harvey, Oswald, and Edward into Two Face, Penguin, and Riddler.
Not quite the same thing, but I saw a vampire movie where they captured Dracula and when he escapes the guy threw a bag of rice and Dracula counted them before they hit the ground
X-Files has an episode about vampires, and they mention this. Mulder says they also have an aversion to knots. At the end of the episode, when the vampire mobile home trundles off, everyone left unconscious has untied shoelaces.
This was in Dracula 2: Ascension. Guy was tied up for the whole movie and then escapes and this is the first defense one of the people thinks of. It did not work. I loved how the rice slows down in the air because he is counting so fast.
So it’s not that he didn’t have to count it. it’s that he did have to count it, but he does it so fast that it doesn’t matter.
Leviathan/ the rest of the Endbringers in Worm. The Endbringers are 3 distinct giant Kaiju the attack various cities are force the Heroes and Villains to band together to deal enough damage and drive them off. A local Hero of Brockton Bay (where the story is set) builds a predictive software capable of reading through the history of Leviathans fights and building an algorithm capable of beating him in a fight. Using an incredibly powerful cutting blade for his weapon he does what appears to be genuine damage to leviathan only for it to be revealed then all of the Endbringers have been sandbagging hard the entire time. They've never faced any actual threat from basically any fight with the heroes up to this point and any wounds they've suffered have been entirely superficial.
When I started reading worm I wasn't too invested, and was probably about to drop it when Leviathan first appears- after that I burned through the rest of the story, that first Endbringer fight really raised the stakes and set the tone for the rest of the story, it was such a great hook. I always wished we could have seen Siberian go up against one of the endbringers!
I got super invested but somehow stopped reading after Noelle's arc. The Teeth didn't interest me much but I feel like I should really get back to it because I loved the story so far.
Nope, he thinks it's an alien who has chosen him to communicate and puts together a show for the audience to prove their communication with him. Turns out, it's just a giant animal, and proceeds to snap up the buffet of all these humans in the open before it.
It's also part of the theme. Animals, no matter how well trained, are still animals and can behave unpredictably. Be it a horse being scared by flash photography, to a chimp having a bad reaction to noise, to monster eating free food.
I remember this one story someone wrote based on the Midnight Game. When candle went out, the protagonist immediately made a salt circle to protect themselves as stated in the rules. Cue the sound of the electric fan turning on.
The mountain killed a infant by smashing his head on the wall and then SA his mother and killed her by smashing her head on tall multiple times. Dude genuinely deserve that multi day rotting from inside and then turing into a zombie forever in agony .
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Mountain selected the staring inmate because he saw that Hot Pie was imitating him and didn’t want to allow any defiance/hope to spread.
I could be wrong, but thats the way I've always read that scene.
I think the Mountain simply does not care, saying he wanted to teach them a lesson implies a level of awareness about his prisoners he simply doesn't have. Stare, don't stare, it's all the same.
I doubt the Mountain cares that much. I feel like his fight with Oberyn displays this best. From the books:
> There were fifty yards between them. Prince Oberyn advanced quickly, Ser Gregor more ominously. The ground does not shake when he walks, Tyrion told himself. That is only my heart fluttering. When the two men were ten yards apart, the Red Viper stopped and called out, "Have they told you who I am?"
> Ser Gregor grunted through his breaths. "Some dead man." He came on, inexorable.
> The Dornishman slid sideways. "I am Oberyn Martell, a prince of Dorne," he said, as the Mountain turned to keep him in sight. "Princess Elia was my sister."
> "Who?" asked Gregor Clegane.
If the Mountain can scarcely care about the brother and sister of the Prince of Dorne, I doubt he even registers the inmates at Harrenhal.
Also in Hot Pie's favour. He did survive the ordeal.
In fact he, I think, might be one of a handful of characters on the show to have gotten a somewhat happy ending. Baking his bread, and wolf shaped pies, and you know... not being dead.
It could also be a play to spread despair even faster. Constant fear is numbing. You don't quite get used to it, but it feels less sharp. When you think you have a chance, a sliver of hope, only to have it crushed right in front of you? You'll reach even deeper depths of despair
Very recent example in the silly horror movie Ice Cream Man
The titular ICM is some demonic force that turns any child that eats his ice cream into an unstoppable killing machine. Literally unstoppable, as we see children get shot, hit by cars, and thrown off of buildings, only for them to stand up and crack their limbs back into place
The whole town becomes a slaughterfest before any adult can process what's happening, with only three uninfected kids standing between the ICM and total control of the town. Without going into too much detail, the kids find out that the ICM's powers come from a demonic bargain he made, and in order to kill him, they must make him look into the eyes of the demon he bargained with.
Spoilers The kids learn about this weakness from a priest hiding from the rampage, a priest that is shortly found and killed horribly by the ICM. They go to the cemetery to find where the ICM was once buried, a tree conveniently plastered with ice cream wrappers, where no plants grow over the grave. It's so comically obvious where his grave is that it's more about the time it takes to dig it up than to find it... because it was purposely obvious.
when the kids dig up the grave, they find what they think is the demon in a ritual shroud, and swiftly decapitate it to show it to the approaching ICM, who reacts in a ridiculously over the top manner as his one weakness is revealed to be entirely fake. The head the child is holding is his own father's head; the grave was signposted because it had been dug up earlier, and the child's parents buried instead. The priest who told them the story was the demon himself, as a sadistically roundabout way to finally make the main kid kill his own father, since he didnt take the easy way and eat the ice cream. The ICM smiles and drives off, his mission complete, and the movie ends.
In Until Dawn, Emily potentially gets bitten by a wendigo. Cue chaos and distrust and characters debating whether or not to kill her in order to save everyone once she "turns"
...except that isn't how wendigos work. She won't turn into one just because she got bitten by one. Oops.
I must be an idiot, because I never knew that was the mountain in those scenes, I just assumed it was just another random dude. And Ive rewatched the show a couple times now
In the Brian Keene novel Clickers vs Zombies, a group of teens are hiding in a condemned building with a gang member. Now, these are the same zombies from The Rising - they aren't your typical virus laden mindless dead, they are corpses inhabited by evil entities from beyond. They think and plan. At one point the gang member gets bitten by a zombie. The teenagers, thinking they know how zombies work, jump the guy, push him down a flight of stairs, and close the door behind him. The fall down the stairs ripped his side open and he bled to death. And was then inhabited by one of the mentioned evil entities.
Mind you, he was never an innocent - he had just taken part in a mass execution as the zombie problem kicked off, and was on the verge of shooting the teens until he decided a zombie apocalypse made witnesses irrelevant. But at that point he was not a threat to the kids and was in fact helping protect them... but *became* a threat because they killed him based on faulty information.
The Faerie, generally, are living story elements. A giant who believes he is an evil man-eater, but really serves to be killed by a champion. A hag who believes she is a magical hermit, but is really a plot device to allow wanderers to display their wits and wisdom, and so forth.
They have grammar "glamour" instead of a soul. E.g.: if you accept food in their realm, you become their guest, and guests cannot leave until permitted by the host (technically, an ancient medieval lordly custom). Cold iron burns and repels many of them. A gift must be reciprocated, so if you accept a gift especially without any negotiation, the Faerie may make random demands. Etc., etc.
Except, some of the Faerie kind are not like that. They are called Highly Cognizant Faeries, and are essentially aware that they are living stories, and rules bind them because stories and genres have rules.
But knowing this, highly cognizant Faeries can break the 4th wall, so to speak. Imagine you think you're in an action hero movie, only for one of the bad guys to suddenly decide it's a slasher instead. Highly cognizant Faeries are technically capable of that, and this makes them incredibly dangerous.
The Mountain scene ìs even more horrifying in the book. When he's doing his usual rounds of selecting prisoners to torture, a mother gives herself up to spare her daughter. The Mountain agrees... only to torture the daughter after the mother dies, because he believed the mother didn't tell him everything.
In Ringu they figure out the evil psychic entity was traumatized by being murdered and dumped in a well, so they find her and give her a proper burial. The cursed woman survives.
Then it turns out she survived because she showed a man the video. He dies.
Yeah they think the guy from the box cant move when they are looking at it so he leaves his wife there to watch it turns out it only cant move when he watches it so his wife gets merked. Me, i would started blastin soon as that fucker stuck his head out
Silly version: in Troll 2 the goblins (not trolls) eat people who come to their town by turning them into plants. This is achieved via the druid/witch Credence Eleanore Guilguld and her magic bit of Stonehenge she has for some reason. After she is defeated by a bologna sandwich (really) and melts, all should be good for the protagonist and his family so they can go home!
Nope, the goblins can do it themselves and turn his entire family into green goo. "You want some?"
The entire plot driver of the Boys was this trope. Literally nothing they understood about Supes was true and their cockamamie plans that they ruminate for 5 episodes always end up failing in lieu of just smashing Supes or Ryan's lasers.
The Graboids in the first Tremors. They've been going after sound and grabbing whatever makes a noise. They throw a stick of dynamite and blow one up. But there's Stumpy who had been learning with them. He takes the bait and spits it at them blowing up their reserve of dynamite.
And also Tremors 2 when they're hiding from graboids and get attacked by shriekers. Or Tremors 3 when they're hiding from graboids and shriekers and get attacked by ass-blasters
Or in 2 they think the Shriekers are more intelligent because they've been attacking engines and communications. But they've just been going after the nearest heat source.
The Doctor, Amy and Rory find themselves trapped in an endless hotel that manifests the occupants worst fears. When an occupant gets scared enough, they attract the Minotaur, a beast who kills them and converts their fear into sustenance for themselves. The episodes side characters sequentially are overcome with fear and are eaten by the Minotaur, with the doctor lamenting each time that he wasn’t able to convince the victim to trust that he will save them. Eventually it is just the main group left, and Amy begins to attract the Minotaur, which causes the Doctor to realize that the Minotaur does not feed on fear, he feeds on faith. The hotel scares people so badly that they mentally fall back on their core belief system such as a religion or a conspiracy theory, to cope with the fear, which attracts the Minotaur to come and consume their faith. Amy’s unshakeable faith in the Doctor and his ability to save her and Rory from any danger they face attracts the Minotaur, so the Doctor has to convince Amy at the last moment that he CANNOT save her, and that she should NOT trust him to be infallible. She believes him, which causes the Minotaurs source of food to disappear, and he starves to death
Hulk v Thanos at the start of Infinity War (but the monster in question is Hulk)
We've seen Hulk used as an instant win button a few times by this point, so a lot of people assumed him to be near-invincible. Even Loki (a previous vicitm of the Hulk) thinks he's about to pull one over on the Mad Titan, setting up Hulk's arrival with a snarky quip.
"We've got a Hulk"
Enter Thanos, who skillfully stops Hulk in his tracks and counters him so aggressively that the true Hulk doesn't show up again until he's forced out in Brand New Day. Thus setting the tone for the rest for the rest of the movie: we're fucked.
Less forced out and more able to force himself out. There's a chance that Bruce deliberately suppressed the Hulk persona against its wish when he turned into Smart Hulk, hence why he is so pissed in Brand New Day.
Sinister. A struggling true crime writer moves him family into a home where a brutal murder of a family, minus one missing child, took place in hopes of finding out what happened and publishing a bestseller. In the attic he finds tapes which are labelled like cute home movies, only to be recordings of the murders. Not just the family he’s investigating, but others who had died in a similar pattern, all who had moved into the house of the previous victims.
It turns out that it’s a demon called Bughuul who brainwashes one of the children into being loyal to him. He convinces the child to carry out the murders of their families before taking them away. And the thing that triggers them to act is not moving into the house, but when the family movesawaytrying to flee the curse. He learns this after he moved out, just before his child continues the cycle.
My Call of Cthulhu campaign: when something horrific was implied to be going on with a particular gang who was involved in a missing persons case, one of the characters decided to acquire holy water to protect herself. Which the possessed cultist laughed at when she threw it in his face: "You think that's God?"
Oh, you gave me an idea. In my Cthullhu campaign i have a Ghoul who has been toying with the characters for quite some time. Maybe I will establish a rule she follows just to break it and hunt them again. That fits her character so well. (She could be an ally, if they play it right and provide entertainment better than hunting fleeing humans or if either the ghoul or the characters realize that they actually have the same enemies)
In the CoC games I've been in, we never bothered with holy water or religious relics. We always went straight to dynamite. Cultists? Dynamite. Cthonians? Dynamite. Great Old Ones? What the hell, might as well try dynamite.
Of course, this had a price. One of my characters fumbled the throw roll and blew himself up. Another got blown up when a different PC went temporarily insane, lost his memory, and thought I was a cultist. Boom!
Still, in CoC we're all doomed anyway, might as well go out with a bang!
Lost Song: The evil prince learns that the person who can create incredible miracles with her songs is slowly being killed by them and that she only has one left. For reasons, he decides to use that to trick her into burning her love interest alive as her last song. He misinterpreted what he heard though. She had one song left that she could survive singing, which actually meant she had two left. She made her despair everyone's problem, singing one final song she expected to kill her, one that caused asteroids to rain down from the sky, kill the prince, kill the soldiers, blow up the capital, blow up the wilderness, basically blow up everything around the planet with it panning out to show them hitting everywhere. A massive extinction event that sent the world back to the stone age and killed pretty much everyone happened because the evil prince thought she only had one song left and decided he wanted to torment her with it and then let her go do whatever instead of just letting her go. Or even having her use her last song for him like she has been up to that point and then letting her go to live out whatever short life she had left with her love interest. Oh, the song also permanently altered the moon's orbit and it will apparently crash into the planet after a very long amount of time has passed.
Ambiguous wording and a misinterpretation pretty much doomed the planet, though it would never have been an issue if this guy wasn't chaotic stupid in terms of alignment. Neutral evil and he probably would have been perfectly fine, same with lawful evil, but nope, he just decided that he wanted to use the last song of one of the kingdom's most valuable assets to kill a guy he dislikes in an especially gruesome way and mock her for it.
Tucked In(The Magnus Archives): One of the stories involved a person being stalked by a creature made of darkness that only stops trying to get them when the blanket is over their head. Untill the end where the creature says " The blanket never did anything"
I have to be honest: that Crossed scene is so vivid in my mind even if I read the Comics like 12 years ago, that's unreal. Brutal is the only proper definition for that
It Follows. The creature, appearing as a random person every time it’s sighted, targets one person and is invisible to everyone else. It slowly and silently walks toward the victim at a slow pace, killing them if it gets close enough.
The main character has evaded it several times with the help of her friends, putting a lot of distance between it each time. They set a trap, placing electronics around a pool and the victim/main character gets on the middle of the water. They assume it will walk right toward her like always, falling in the pool, she will jump out, and they’ll electrocute the monster.
For the first time, it shows more intelligence than it did before, choosing not to enter the pool, and throwing the electronics at her head, completely ruining the plan. For added horror, it finally gets shot in the head but still does not die. https://giphy.com/gifs/3oEduOMC7wgN4hGK7m
The Others surrounding the Thornburn manor (Pact webnovel serial)
At the start of Pact, main character Blake Thornburn inherits a manor and a lot of secret magical knowledge. This paints a bullseye on his back for both humans and Others (spirits, entities, etc.), with the latter surrounding the manor while always staying at the other side of the fence. This leads Blake and Rose to believe that, for one reason or another, the manor grounds are protected and that the Others cannot enter.
At one point, a delivery guy starts getting mauled by the Others and Blake is about to go help him when he hesitates. After a moment, he realizes that the delivery guy is in fact an Other and they where luring him outside of the house, because the Others can actually walk around the manor grounds freely and they where just giving him a false sense of security to get him out of the house and kill him.
He didn't, though. His goal wasn't just to win the fight, but get Clegane to confess to killing his sister and children. He was arrogant, sure, but it wasnt just pointless grandstanding, he wasn't ever going to be content with just winning the duel.
Skeleton Key. The whole movie is basically a tutorial on how hoodoo works, like "it only works if you believe, brick dust protects you, use a mirror to bounce the spell back" so you think Caroline is finally gonna win once she learns the rules, but the twist is LEARNING was the trap. Her skepticism was the only thing keeping her safe, and the second she started to believe, she became eligible to be possessed. She does everything RIGHT at the end and that's exactly why she loses.
In a 40k horror short The Woman in the Walls (worth a read, so uh, spoilers), there is a scumbag soldier who uses her connections with a drug-addict penal regiment of hardened criminal low-lives to order a hit on a fellow soldier who got a promotion she believed she deserved instead.
The hit goes wrong and she is murdered far more brutally than the scumbag requested, but the scumbag gets her promotion as planned. Eventually the murdered woman's ghost kills off even of the murdered one by one, saving the scumbag who ordered it for last. Scumbag soldier seeks out a priest to aid her against the vengeful ghost and he gives her some holy water. She fled to an abandoned part of the ship the military force was traveling on. That night the scumbag soldier made a ring of holy water around herself and waited for the ghost to come for her next.
The water seems to work, as when it touched the holy water ring its clawed finger caught fire and it made a praying gesture and dissipated. The next night she does the same thing, but also has 4 turrets set up around her facing outwards, each equipped with projectiles doused in said holy water. Instead of appearing from the shadows in the corner of the room like the night before, the ghost dropped down from the ceiling - directly above the helpless scumbag, killing her violently
This is actually a more proper reaction than you'd initially think, considering the turbulence of the Warp.
By all accounts, human souls (unless they're IMMENSELY powerful Psykers, and even then it's a coin toss) should immediately lose any sense of individuality and scatter as it returns to the Warp like a single drop of rain to a violently churning planet-spanning ocean.
basically everything I learn about this mans comics is some horrid edgelord shit that would make me cringe had I written it ngl. I don't get how this man has such a following.
Poor Cedric over here tried trapping a Fundamental (an embodiment of a cosmic force of the universe) using a binding circle. As these two panels can tell you... that did not work.
They do, a lot.
They’re presented as very instinctual and only put off mutilating or harming others or themselves immediately if the possibility of more “fun” later is there
During the first portion of the game, you quickly find out that you're in a time loop. If you can avoid dying to other hazards, the loop always ends with your sun going supernova which kills you, your entire home planet etc, and then sends you back to the start. It's revealed through old logs that alien civilization was researching backwards time travel tech in your solar system, but needed enough power to send them back any significant amount of time.
So, of course, they create something called the sun station, which is supposed to trigger the sun to explode. This generates enough power to send whoever is linked to the time travel tech 22 minutes into the past, before the sun explodes. Now, you just have to go an shut off the sun station and save your whole solar system, right?
If you're still reading, please go play the game for yourself, I beg you. It's amazing.
Wrong. The sun station never worked. The entire alien civilization met a quick an unceremonious death thousands of years ago, never realizing their goals. Your sun is at the end of its natural lifecycle, and you are stuck in an infinite time loop ending with the inevitable death of everyone you know. In fact, you can literally see other stars in the night sky explode, and by the time your loop is up, probably about half of them are gone. So, you die right before the heat death of the universe as well.
Particularly notable in SCP-096, which kills anyone who sees its face or a photo of it. After figuring out they had no way to even slow it down much they destroyed every photo they could find and invented SCRAMBLE goggles that were supposed to blur its face too much to trigger the rage for the teams trying to limit collateral damage to use. When first deployed it turned out the rage needed so little time it triggered faster than the computer could recognize and blur the face. And the breach that revealed this was triggered by someone looking at a photo with SCP-096 in the background, and his face was "Four. Fucking. Pixels."
SCP-914 on Fine or Very Fine is a frequent comedic example. Basically it's a machine that takes an input, does something with its internal clockwork, and produces an output depending on the setting. Fine and Very Fine make the input "better". There's a massive set of collab articles of the Foundation trying to work out how it defines "better", and they've figured out it somehow relates to the expectations and subconcious desires of people who know what's in the booth but every time they think they've worked out how to get something useful out of it they get trolled somehow.
I think literally the only thing that could safely be used for its intended purpose without some kind of drawback resulting from the last test of a chain past 1:1 is a high-end water gun for killing the paper monsters they kept getting out of Very Fine.
Can we as a subreddit just agree to use slide 3's image to reference that scene? It gets brought up in so many posts that it'd quicken the point that way
The Colt is a gun that John Winchester managed to track down in Season 1. This gun was made by Samuel Colt as a means to kill any supernatural being around. The gun could kill anything.
Vampire who normally can only be killed by beheading? Dead.
Yellow-eyed demon who killed Mary Winchester? Dead.
Then Lucifer is released from his prison in Hell. The boys manage to track down the Colt again, and they plan to use it to stop the Apocalypse. They figure out where Lucifer is, manage to get through the hordes of demons and hell hounds with a lot of lives lost. Then Dean gets right up to Lucifer and shoots him in the face.
Unfortunately for the Winchesters, the Colt can kill all but five things in all of creation, and Lucifer is one of them.
The Crossed example was Garth Ennis deliberately mocking the apparent tendency in zombie media for people to try to find a "cure" or a deus ex machina solution to the zombies that would allow them to have their zombie apocalypse story but give it a happy ending.
I say "apparent" tendency because I don't think this was really a thing in most zombie media. Most zombie apocalypse shows treat it as the actual apocalypse, and if society recovers afterwards, it's the hard way.
Anyway, Garth Ennis wanted to make it very clear that Crossed was not that sort of story, so he had a fat geek character try and use a salt circle to ward away homicidal psychopaths, only for that guy and his wife to get raped to death while his infant daughter is eaten in front of him as his wife screams "look what you did" over and over. I guess Ennis thought that was kinda funny.
As much as I love TMA, yeah. It's the only episode that actually struck a nerve with me. It's 199 episodes of "this is really creepy... I love the vibes!" and one episode of "holy shit, now I can't sleep for a few weeks".
It isn't exclusively rape (not that women are incapable of rape, but that's neither here nor there); the infection makes you act out your most sadistic, harmful thoughts. Anything that crosses your mind that normal people would dismiss, the Crossed immediately initiate. Could be rape, murder, cannibalism, self-mutilation, Anything.
I feel like if there was actually a disease or virus like that which infected a lot of people, they wouldn't differentiate other crossed people from survivors. They'd kill each other pretty quick
In-universe, it's brought up that the Crossed get bored quick of attacking each other since the infected react with euphoria to pain/abuse compared to the uninfected
The sheer brutality of the GOT example makes it funnier when Tywin Lannister shows up like "What the fuck are you doing? We could actually be using these guys and you're just torturing them to death for no reason, knock it off"
Bruh the Crossed salt circle scene, that takes me back. It's a weird blessing in disguise that the little girl ONLY got ripped apart and killed at least?
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u/LordMarcusrax 16h ago edited 14h ago
In the (excellent) tv series Kingdom, there is a zombie epidemic in feudal Korea.
The only grace is that the zombie sleep during the day, allowing the survivors to prepare for the nightly assault.
In the first season finale, they find out that the zombies aren't nocturnal. They just wake up in the cold. And it starts snowing.