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in the Trope Repair Shop.
The OwO of doom!
"And—And it was making this noise, this—this sound that bored right into your brain."
— Powell describing the Reaper horn, Mass Effect
Mass Effect
What the hell is that noise? That noise is hell.
A character within the story hears something odd. Unnatural. When they hear the sound once, it may not be that terrifying, but as time passes, they become more and more frightened. The sound gets scarier as it gains more and more relevance. Given time, the sound comes to haunt them, even away from the source. The sound has taken on a nightmarish relevance because of the setting. The sound could come from anywhere.
The trope isn't limited to a sentence, a catch phrase, or a song. The sound that terrifies the character can be made by the living, such as footsteps, a laugh, the call of a loud little animal. The sound may be made by the non-living, such as the creak of a chair, a door, a bouncing ball, the crackle of radio static, or any one of hundreds of other seemingly mundane noises. Often times it signals the coming of a yet-unseen threat, usually one you don't want to be anywhere near you, and hearing it is more than enough of a sign to tread carefully, brace yourself, or run. Better pray it doesn't mean that You Are Already Dead.
This isn't a Brown Note, a sound or image that causes involuntary action or harm. This trope is about the psychological effect of a repeated noise to the character(s) in the story. See also Hearing Voices, which can also be this depending on what kind of voices they are, and Nothing Is Scarier, which is almost the Visible Silence version of this. Sinister Scraping Sound is an intentional, psych-out type of hellish noise; if a noise foreshadowing a threat is produced by something attached to, or ingested by, that threat, it's The Croc Is Ticking.
Compare Terrible Ticking. Contrast Most Wonderful Sound, which people are happy to hear. Compare and contrast Scare Chord, where the audience learns to fear the music.
In-Universe Examples Only:
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Other examples:
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Anime and Manga
- In AKIRA: The sound the burst and sweeping cooling pipes make once Akira's chamber bursts out of the sound. The fact there is next to no other sound in the background, and the visuals and audio makes it clear it happens in the background and the sound really carries leaves the characters in awe.
- Attack on Titan:
- Every single person that hears The roars of the Female is either shocked speechless or terrified. Sasha compares it to the screams of a cornered animal, warning the others that something horrible is about to happen. She's right.
- The Rumbling, a hypothetical then not-so-hypothetical apocalyptic event involving the titans within the walls coming to life and marching across the world, gets its name from the deafening sound that comes from thousands of Colossal Titans walking in unison.
- In the anime adaptation of Durarara!!, the demonic blade Saika has its very own song and it is very creepy. Saika's voice gets into the heads of the people who are under her possession. A voice that can drive anyone insane. Anyone except for Anri Sonohara, the actual owner of the sword.
- Bleach: Konjiki Ashisogi Jizo, when first released, opens its eyes to the sound of a baby crying.
- In Dragon Ball, Videl expects to make it to her match with Gohan relatively easily, as does the in-series audience. For the next two episodes, we are treated to her opponent of her current match, Spopovitch, brutally torturing her in one of, if not the most horrifying fights in the series. Her screams... dear God, her screams.
- Hellsing's sound of Rip Van Winkle's alarm clock ringing continuously in the fourth OVA, shortly before Alucard smashes it.
- Higurashi: When They Cry: One common symptom of having fallen victim to the curse of Oyashiro is hearing a disembodied voice saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." and footsteps.
- The terrifying gambling drill from Kaiji; a device that attaches into one's ear, with a drill that advances a set number of millimeters whenever a bet is lost. It's said that the noise it makes is minimal, but because of the strategic location of the machine AND the psychological pressure put into the gambler, the sound of the drill steadily approaching to destroy one's eardrums is a soul-crushing torture on itself.
- In Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt, Federation pilot Io Fleming makes it a point to warn Zeon pilots that when you hear jazz music, that means his coming to kill you. Indeed, in the anime adaptation, his one-sided fights are usually accompanied with rampant freeform jazz.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion:
- There's an unsettling Train Crossing sound-effect that's heard during Shinji's Personal Hell Introspections (which tend to feature trains), during Asuka's Mind Rape sequence after she spots Shinji behind Kaji, as well as during the "Breakup" lines Psychological sequence in the second part of End of Evangelion.
- When a distorted, guttural, growling noise, like the synthesis of circuits and synapses, is heard during sync sequences (and behind the incoming Harpies), one knows everything is about twenty seconds away from going all to hell.
- The piercing BEEEEEEP that announces that the Eva unit has run out of internal power. Oh... shit.
- The moo-like bellow when Unit-01 goes berserk and eats an Angel was created by having Megumi Hayashibara scream as heartwrenchingly as she could, and then slowing it down and altering it. The emotion they told her to put into the scream? Not fear, not rage, not pain. Misery.
- Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon has Bewear. It looks and sounds cute...until it makes a sudden screech. When it's battling, it makes high-pitched screeches that even scare Ash out of his wits.
Comic Books
- A variation on this happens in one of the EC Comics stories, wherein a king's daughter falls to her death while he is enjoying himself at a party, and her scream keeps ringing in his ears afterwards in every sound he hears, starting with the local church bells (he has them melted down), the movements of the castle inhabitants (he has them wrap their feet in soft cloth), and even the sounds of people working in town (he has them cease working). Unfortunately his quest for absolute silence reaches a head when his ears become so sensitive that he can hear the people breathing. He orders them to stop breathing, and finally he is beset by an angry (and loud) mob. One of them, a clockmaker, sews a clock inside the king's chest that automatically wound itself up at the slightest movement and took hours to run down. The king is left lying on a bed, hardly daring to move, hardly daring to breathe, so as not to trigger the clock. Then a spider comes down on a silk line, heading for his face...
- In Supergirl storyline Bizarrogirl, Dr. Light and Gangbust are examining what appears to be a Kryptonian rocket ship when they hear a strange noise in the darkness. Alarmed, the duo become alert right before being ambushed by Bizarrogirl.
Fan Works
- Always Visible: When Galbraith arrives in London, he notes that after Portland, the streets of the capital of England are so noisy from cars that he gets the impression that turbines are buried under the asphalt.
- Children of an Elder God: In the prologue, two scientists and a team of spelunkers are exploring a network of caverns when they hear several faint, faraway screams. They freak out right away:
[There are faint screams in the distance]
Home Base (Speaker unidentified): What the hell was THAT? - From Harvest to the Ark: The skittering of the Flood becomes this for Alley. It creeps him the hell out when he first hears it on Alpha Halo and when he hears it again in Voi, knowing exactly what it represents, he FLIPS OUT to the extent that his behaviour is enough to convince his commander to retreat immediately.
- It's Always Spooky Month: Skid can apparently make a high pitched shriek, and Pump can make what sounds like lawnmower noises. The narration lampshades it.
The Monster wasn't exactly sure how he was able to make those sounds, but he wasn't one to question.
- Lessons from the Mountain has Morgoth's laughter. Over five hundred years battling monsters, and Maedhros still considers his laughter to be the most frightful sound he has ever heard.
Maedhros: I proudly told him that he may kill me or torture me, but that would never be. He laughed. I think that was the most awful sound I have ever heard, and I have heard many things that no one should hear.
- Quicken: When Emma goes nuts, she screams. Her scream sounds so scary and inhuman than her assailants step back.
A switch was suddenly flipped inside me. Something primal and inarticulate tore its way out of my throat, a sound I could have never imagined that I could make.
- SCP-682's roar.
- This Bites!: The foghorn button in the transceiver. Whoever triggers it will claim to love it, while everyone else screams at them.
Literature
- Alatriste: Recurring antagonist Gualterio Malatesta is noted to have a very particular whistle that usually comes out in his giddier moments, and often precedes him. And his presence is never a good sign, for he's usually under the antagonist's payroll, eager to do violence, and a Master Swordsman that can give even the captain a hard time all by himself.
- In Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, the "shattering pop" of the flashbulb from her neonatal memory that precedes being Blinded by the Light in the protagonist's recurring dream.
- In At the Mountains of Madness, the narrator keeps bringing up a strange musical piping sound in the air throughout the Mysterious Antarctica setting. At first he attributes it to the wind blowing through the Mountains and the Bizarrchitecture ruins of the Ancient Astronauts city, but then he hears that sinister piping when he's deep into the ruins and in the climactic ending it's revealed that it came from the Shoggoth, which are mindlessly howling the Starfish Language of their ancient masters.
- In Deltora Quest, the Wenn make a hideous racket to incapacitate anyone who enters their territory, so they can be paralyzed and eaten by the Wennbar, a monster that controls the Wenn. The Forests of Silence (ironically) are not pleasant places. Also the Four Sisters: the main characters begin to hear the first Sister to be destroyed, only to realize that they've been hearing the same sound their entire lives, and didn't even think of it as sound.
- In the Discworld book Moving Pictures there is an instrument called a resograph ("thingness-writer"), which measures disturbances in the fabric of reality. It drops a small lead ball in the direction of the disturbance, which "... in severe cases may exceed —plib— two pellets —plib— during the course —plib— of —plib— one —plib— month". Or to put it in other words...
- In the Dresden Files novel Changes, Harry fights a vampire-summoned Mayan primeval monster, a complete Implacable Man called the Ik'k'kuo. Harry notes that its heartbeat is incredibly loud... and when you are in a completely dark building, an increasingly loud thump-thump is not what you want to hear. Somewhat undercut when it makes a different sound that Dresden refers to as "that teakettle thing."
- The Famous Five: The Five (especially Anne) are often scared by mysterious noises. Notable examples are:
- In Five get into Trouble, they are startled by screech owls, on Owl's Hill. Even brave George thinks this noise is frightful.
- In Five on a Hike Together, Dick and Anne are on a deserted moor on a rainy night, and they hear a fierce clanging of bells, which are certainly not church bells. They are a warning of an escaped prisoner. This is almost a Trauma Button, as they are startled when later, they do hear church bells.
- Also in Five on a Hike Together, Dick is sleeping in a barn, and suddenly wakes to hear a scratching sound on the walls of the barn, followed by tapping on the window.
Anne: How horrid. I shouldn't have liked that at all.Dick: I didn't.
- Harry Potter
- In the spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the Augurey's cry is scary enough for wizards to think it foretold death (it actually foretells rain).
- The sound the Dementors make is described as cold enough to freeze your soul. (The kiss will devour it)
- The scream of a fully grown mandrake plant is said to be enough to kill instantly.
- The Haunting of Hill House — the noises outside disturb Eleanor.
- "The Hound (1924)": The hound's presence is first established when the protagonists enter the Holland churchyard and hear the faint baying of a hound. This baying follows them on the ship back to England and to their manor-house on the moors, being rarely traceable as coming from a specific direction. The terror brought on by the baying swells with its reoccurrences and gets worsened by the additional but less frequent sound of moving wings. In the end, when St. John is dead and the narrator digs up the Dutchman in a bid for mercy, he is left stunned when he finds the corpse in an evident state of undeadness and covered in organic material that indicates he's killed someone not too long ago. Freeze turns to flight only when the Dutchman greets him by baying.
- In John Dies at the End, the sound of Korrok's otherworldly worm minions is described as "... fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they've been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made of T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it to the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard."
- In Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, the T. rex's roar, when first heard by the characters, is described as a horrifying, unbearable scream from another world. A character wets his pants while hearing it.
- Dean Koontz's Phantoms will often include the descriptions of mundane sounds to help ratchet the tension, especially after a character has discovered a body. This culminates later on when someone picks up the phone and starts hearing various mundane animal noises, which slowly turn into the sound of thousands of people screaming in hellish agony.
- In the Ravirn novels by Kelly McCullough, Eris' laugh is frequently described by Ravirn also known as Raven as sounding like glass breaking.
- The trope is inverted in The Screwtape Letters. The letters that the demon Screwtape writes to his nephew are sent from Hell, where there is continuous noise. He tells Wormwood that in Heaven there is just silence and music. This is meant to be a terror to his nephew, as the demons want (although not necessarily like) the cacophony.
- Colin Thiele's Aftershock! has this at the start of Chapter 2, depicting the earthquake from the end of Shatterbelt:
The roar, when it came, convulsed and stunned the world. For a second or two beforehand there had been utter silence. The birds had suddenly ceased their songs, the dogs had stopped barking, the horses were standing tense and still.
It started in the hills. Nobody had ever heard a sound like that before. It began as a rumble, a deep, deep thunder, as if some great god of the earth had stirred, and groaned in agony. But it grew with fearful speed, louder and louder, like a hundred jet planes taking off together. It swept down on the foothills and the city, on the streets and houses, on the people in St. Bernard's Park. It was in the air above them and all around them, and in the ground beneath their feet. The air thundered and vibrated, the earth rocked. - The Southern Reach Trilogy: There's a loud moaning noise which comes from the reeds every evening in Area X. At first, the expedition members taunt it with howling back at it, but when it becomes louder and angrier they desist immediately.
- The heartbeat from "The Tell-Tale Heart" drives the narrator insane. Subverted in that there is no actual sound, he's just insane.
- In James Thurber's "The Whip-Poor-Will" the song of a whippoorwill which will just not shut up drives the main character insane, leading him to kill his wife, the servants and finally himself.
- The moan of an approaching zombie in World War Z. Or the nonstop moaning of an entire swarm... Of course, the characters turn to see where it’s coming from before they start running.
Live-Action TV
- Another Period: Ditzy heiress Beatrice Bellacourt is variously called upon to feign grief or sing; in both cases, the most she can muster is a bizarre squawk.
- Babylon 5: The sound of a Shadow vessel. They like to scream telepathically into the minds of their prey, to add terror to their attacks. As though their cleave beams which can split most ships in half with one shot need added terror.
- BattleBots: The sound that Minotaur's drum spinner makes as it spins up. The commentators compare it to to a jet engine, but the truly terrifying part is that it keeps getting louder... and the louder it is, the more destructive it is.
- Doctor Who has a few, especially due to the "screaming companion" effect, and Steven Moffat's philosophy of "Doctor Who takes place under your bed, in the dark.":
- Those who aren't familiar with the noises the TARDIS makes might be freaked out when they hear a ship take off with a sound like a large animal dying of respiratory failure. However, because that noise is generally synonymous with the Doctor arriving to fix things, it has become a sound associated with relief for most of the universe.
- The Cloister Bell: a low, echoing distorted bell tolling, informing the TARDIS's occupants that the ship is in some form of critical danger. It's essentially Oh, Crap! in audio form.
- "EXTERMINATE!" If you hear a Dalek say this, there's a good chance you're not going to survive. It's no wonder the Doctor was horrified when he found out that Daleks managed to survive the Time War. Used to its most terrifying effect in "The Stolen Earth", where it's broadcast by thousands of alien ships invading Earth. Anyone having any idea what the broadcast means is terrified beyond sense, with one character declaring "There's nothing we can do. I'm sorry, we are dead."
- "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances": The characters become terrified of a little boy asking, "Are you my mummy?", because very soon, they will, too!
- "The End of Time": There's a pattern of beats that creeps out even the Doctor. "dat-dat-dat—DAT". The sound of the Master. It gets really complicated, too. That sound is coming from inside the Master's head, from when he looked into the Vortex of Time-Space. That sound of knocking also heralds the death of the Tenth Doctor. Plus, the Master's drumbeat was in the theme tune from the very first episode of Doctor Who.note
- Family Matters: Parodied in "The Good, the Bad, and the Urkel". Carl punches Steve's father over a dispute about his compost heap and Steve vows revenge. Carl then slips into a Dream Sequence while watching a Western. He dreams that the dispute happens in the Old West. Inside the saloon, ominous background music continuously plays after dramatic lines, causing everyone in the saloon to look around for the source. After a final toot of the brass section when Steve challenges Carl to a duel, he says that before the duel happens, they have to form a posse to "track down that dang orchestra."
- In an episode of Frasier, Frasier makes friends with a man named Bob, who is in a wheelchair. Bob turns out to be both the most boring friend alive and a Stalker without a Crush. The wheels on his chair squeak horribly, leading Frasier to dive behind the board to hide from him.
- Friends:
- An in-universe example: Chandler flinches every time he hears "OH. MY. GOD!" and realizes that he's run into Janice again.
- Ross's "sound", his term for the discordant music he plays on his keyboard, which everybody except Phoebe hates, in "The One Where Chandler Crosses The Line":
Rachel: Oh, I can't believe I ever let him touch me with those fingers.
- Game of Thrones: In Season 3, The Boy's Cold-Blooded Torture of Theon Greyjoy includes blowing an unpleasant-sounding horn, slowly driving the victim mad.
- Kamen Rider Ryuki: Every reflective surface is a gateway to the Mirror World; an alternate dimension where bloodthirsty monsters live. Whenever such a monster preys on a human, a distinct shrill whistling sound can be heard, indicating it is about to attack. It seems only Riders are able to hear the sound.
- My Three Sons: When Katie finds herself alone in the Douglas house during a rainstorm, she hears something like a heartbeat, though she can't determine where it originates. Robbie dismisses it as maternal anxiety, and Katie initially agrees. When it happens again, Katie almost panics, until Steven Douglas points out that during heavy rain, the basement tends to flood. An automatic sump pump activates to remove the standing water, and its pumping mimics a heartbeat.
- Robot Wars:
- The contestant Hypno-Disc, one of the deadliest machines on the show, was armed with a high-speed horizontal flywheel that, once it span up to speed, produced a horrendous metal shriek like a mechanical banshee. Considering the kind of destruction it was capable of, opponents had every right to be scared upon hearing that disc rev up to speed.
- The rebooted series had Carbide, a robot armed with a vicious spinning bar that emitted what the presenters referred to as a "death hum" as it spun at full speed. And rightly so, given that it once tore an armor panel off an opponent with such force that it went flying across the arena and embedded itself in a panel of bulletproof glass and left said opponent so badly damaged that the team had to resort to duct-taping its armor back on in order to get it battle-ready for its next fight.
- The contestant Hypno-Disc, one of the deadliest machines on the show, was armed with a high-speed horizontal flywheel that, once it span up to speed, produced a horrendous metal shriek like a mechanical banshee. Considering the kind of destruction it was capable of
- Sherlock: In "The Great Game", Sherlock makes a scraping racket on his violin to get his older brother, Mycroft, out of his flat.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: One episode had dozens of whispers start up once an already disturbed cast member turned off the light to go to sleep. Hearing the voices would make her turn the lights on, and break her glass. Just ordinary whispers, very loud and very numerous, when the good doctor is supposed to be completely alone. She gets even more disturbed by finding out who's making the whispers.
- Star Trek: Voyager: In "Equinox", the (unrelated) extra-dimensional aliens have to open portals into our universe to attack. When a portal forms, the first thing they hear is a high-pitched, whining hiss. It's pretty creepy for the characters, who are asking, "WHERE IS IT? WHERE IS IT?". If they aren't fast enough, it's the last sound they'll hear.
- Star Trek: Discovery: In Season 2, the awful withered, wheezing strained breath of his future self when Captain Pike sees a vision of the future. Even through the mechanical breathing machine, it's obviously the last desperate gasps of a mind in horrible agony.
- Twin Peaks has the iconically bizarre backwards-reversed speech of the denizens of the Black Lodge. Pretty much any time they appear to the characters, something very bad is about to happen.
- The 1972 TV-movie adaptation of A Warning To The Curious makes double use of this trope, heralding the approach of William Ager's ghost with either the sound of brush being chopped (in the woods) or that of tubercular Ager's gasping breaths (in Paxton's hotel room).
- Wheel of Fortune: According to legend, when the slide-whistle sound effect was first added (whenever a contestant landed on Bankrupt) sometime in 1977, then-host Chuck Woolery acted startled and shouted out, "What was THAT?!" (To uproarious laughter, of course.)
- The X-Files: The episode "Avatar" involves an old woman spirit-thing that visits AD Skinner in his dreams. When she appears, she makes a sound made up of garbled, distorted, agonized-sounding voices and a high-pitched shriek. He is terrified.
Music
- In the song "Spooky Scary Skeletons" by Andrew Gold,note the titular skeletons, despite being "shy" and "silly", are still considered scary because they "speak with such a screech", "shriek", and "shout startling shrilly screams".
- Anaal Nathrakh invokes this in their music frequently, even by the standards of extreme metal. Have a listen.
- Every Khanate "song" is completely demoralizing, especially on their first album. The worst examples of these would be the looping riff at the beginning of Under Rotting Sky and the entirety of No Joy. This is as close to Hell as a human being will ever come to. It should come as no surprise that Khanate features Steven O'Malley of Sunn O))) fame.
- Prepare for the most spine chilling 7 minutes you will ever experience. Prepare yourself for Battle of Mice. The vocals are psychotic and distressing, but the final two minutes of this song is the horrifying cherry on top of this terrifying cake(You will be paranoid afterwards, guaranteed.)
- Blind Guardian will make you fear both the song and the mere phrase "Mr. Sandman." In addition, the eerie jingle accompanying the "bung bung bung bung" will no doubt instill some fear into your dreams.
- 22 Going On 23 by the Butthole Surfers. The song is a sloshy bass and high-pitched electric guitar broken up by a woman describing her trauma since being sexually assaulted, which may hit hard for anyone who has survived rape or any form of sexual violence.
- Anything by Blut aus Nord will automatically qualify, specifically their later output
- Krzysztof Penderecki has a freakish, atonal string piece originally called "8'37". After he heard the piece performed, however, he decided to retitle it Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. Why he did that isn't surprising once one actually hears the piece: by accident, Penderecki managed to evoke air raid and emergency sirens, bomber noises, and even screams of the burning bomb victims. The opening note alone is one extended, unidentifiable piercing screech.
- "Canticum Canticorum Salomonis" by the same composer sounds like souls crying out of the depths of hell, and Satan's wretches dragging them down again. Thrilling and terrifying.
- "Canticum Canticorum Salomonis"
- Pink Floyd's Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict. The whole song is unsettling despite the innocuous name, but toward the middle they do this whispering/heavy breathing sound and cap off the song with a long-winded and completely incomprehensible speech in a dramatic tone of voice with a thick Scottish accent that may indeed by from Hell itself. Waters revived the Pict's vocal stylings for the schoolteacher from The Wall ten years later, and that guy sounds even more deranged and hellish.
- The song is orders of magnitude worse played in reverse. Almost everything is eerier, but the long, shrill animal howl in the background sounds far more like a reedy, human voice in intense distress or pain, rising in pitch and volume instead of fading off.
- The song is orders of magnitude worse played in reverse
- Speaking of The Wall, the noises at the start of Empty Spaces, and the bridge in Hey You (with buzzing, dental-drill like noises) deserve an honourable mention, as does the absolutely batshit-insane megaphone speech at the end of "Waiting for the Worms." It's like a dramatic reading of Time Cube that deteriorates into incoherent garble.
- "Careful with That Axe, Eugene..." There's a good reason why a certain trope is named after this song.
- "A Saucerful Of Secrets" is full of this, especially the beginning of the second movement, which sounds like you're being chased through a dark castle by the legions of Hell.
- Most of metal-bashing avant-garde group Einstürzende Neubauten's early output is like this. The worst offender, however, is "Negativ Nein", which opens to a creepy beat played on PVC pipes over what sounds like a badly plugged toilet being plunged, topped by Blixa Bargeld's broken-steam-whistle scream and heavily overdubbed and echoing chanting. In German.
- Speaking of Einstürzende Neubauten...never listen to "Halber Mensch" if you still want to sleep at night. It's probably one of the scariest songs ever.
- Converge, considered a founding father of the Metalcore genre, released their 2001 album Jane Doe to critical acclaim. The album was based off of songwriter & lead singer Jacob Bannon's horrible, draining, and broken relationship with an ex-girlfriend. The tenth song, "Phoenix in Flames", is 42 seconds of Bannon screaming his lungs out over mad drumming. It has to be heard to be believed.
- Aphex Twin: "Come to Daddy" was written, in Richard D. James' own words, as "a crappy little death metal jingle" meant to spoof metal music. But for a "crappy" parody, James put quite a lot of work into making it sound scary.IIIII WANNNNT YOUR SOULLLLL! I WILL EAT YOUR SOULLLLL!
- Ozzy Osbourne's voice on the first two Black Sabbath albums, especially on the self-titled album's title track. Before he became a caricature of himself, Ozzy sounded like the lost soul he actually was at the time. This is especially notable on the pre-album demo track of "War Pigs" featured on the Ozzman Cometh collection, which is far creepier than anything Sabbath actually released.
- Just the first two? Ozzy's vocals on the third album, Master of Reality, are just as creepy, especially on "Lord of This World".
- First 30 or so seconds of Iron Man can qualify.
- "ALL ABOOOAAAAAAAAAARD, HAHAHAHA!"
- Number nine...number nine...number nine... and everything thereafter
- The chaotic orchestral buildup that's played twice in "A Day In The Life" from The Beatles Sgt. Pepper" album. You get used to it eventually, but the first time you heard it's frightening. Especially through headphones.
- On the subject of "A Day in the Life", that 15khz tone near the end of the track.
- tool loves using this, and quite a few tracks on any of their albums are comprised of dissonant noise and sound effects. Special mention would have to go to "Disgustipated" and "Faaip de Oaid" though. Both are the closing tracks from their respective albums, and both manage to be completely fucking terrifying.
- THIS. IS. NECESSARY. THIS. IS. NECESSARY. LIFE, FEEDS ON LIFE, FEEDS ON LIFE, FEEDS ON LIFE, FEEDS ON, THIS. IS. NECESSARY...
- Arguably even creepier than "Faaip de Oaid" is "Viginti Tres", the final track on 10,000 Days. Sure, it sounds kind of cool when synced with "Wings For Marie, Pt 1", but on its own, it is extremely creepy. Barely even a song, it is 5 minutes of unnerving synth noises and terrifying ethereal sounds.
- "I'll Let You Live" by Taking Back Sunday has a scream at around the 3:30 mark that needs to be heard to be believed. According to singer Adam Lazzara, he screamed so hard his eyes started bleeding and he didn't talk to anyone for a few days after.
Mythology and Religion
- The Ur-Example may very well come from Classical Mythology: the god Pan loved to scare the shit out of lonely travelers by hiding nearby and letting out a bloodcurdling scream. Ever wonder where we get the word "panic?" Now you know.
- Similar to Pan is the skinwalker of Navajo folklore. It initially freaks out its victim with two loud whistling noises that can be heard for miles. Its "speech" sounds like a distorted voice or animal call.
- Japanese Mythology: A number of youkai are know to torment travelers by making sudden and terrifying noises, like the kerakera onna (a giant, ghostly woman who haunts brothel patrons with an Evil Laugh only her victim can hear), or Hachishaku-sama (Ms. Eight-Foot-Tall), who stalks young children and can imitate the voices of their loved ones but can only make a terrifying "po-po-po" sound otherwise.
- La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) from Latin American folklore is very well known for her piercing, otherworldly screams of "¡Ay mis hijos!" ("Oh, my sons!"). To this day, many people are still very terrified of her and believe her laments are an omen for dreadful times.
Podcasts
- Kakos Industries: Episode 6 sees the Kakos Industries shareholders receiving Corin's announcements through an echo trapped in a box. The box is made of wood from Kakos Industries' GMO Echo Tree, which contains vibrations indefinitely. Corin goes on to explain, however, that the Echo Tree project is now in permanent beta after a project staff member murdered everyone else and burned all the notes. The reason he did this? He stubbed his toe walking through the Echo Tree Forest, which echoed his scream of pain for so long the sound of it it drove him mad. Between that and the sounds of being mercilessly axe murdered being added to the Forest's sounds, cleanup was handled by Kakos Industries sending in their best body-collectors-who-happen-to-be-deaf, who complained after the fact of a cold vibration inside of their bones.
- The Magnus Archives:
- The whistled tune that the narrator of "First Hunt" hears as he and his friend hunt portends something very bad. The tune is "A-hunting we shall go".
- In "Boatswain's Call" the mate on a modern ship carries the eponymous old-fashioned whistle. As the narrator finds herself in the midst of a disturbing trip in the (also strangely old-fashioned) lifeboat with the crew, the mate blows it, making a sound that is unnaturally and disturbingly shrill and piercing, yet somehow also sounds far away. Of course, this signals that things are about to go From Bad to Worse.
Puppet Shows
- Fraggle Rock: In the episode "Wembley's Wonderful Whoopee Water'', Wembley discovers that he can hear liquid inside rocks. He uses this ability to dig through one and find fizzy water that tastes like strawberries, boosts energy, and makes sleep unnecessary. The other Fraggles declare him a hero, but then Wembley hears a disturbing new sound in the rock the water is being pumped from. When he listens to the rock a while later, the noise has gotten louder and scarier than before. On top of that, the rock now has a crack in it. In the morning, the crack has gotten bigger, and the noise is even worse. A few minutes later, the rock opens a Bottomless Pit, which Gobo falls down. Wembley rescues Gobo and declares the well has to be shut down.
- A subverted example occurs in an early episode of Sesame Street. Mr. Hooper has to go to the post office first thing in the morning and asks Big Bird to open the store for him. Big Bird is already nervous about how dark the store is, and when he unlocks the door and hears a strange noise, he freaks and runs out of the store, not even bothering to turn on the lights. Fortunately for him, Mr. Hooper has just gotten back. He turns on the lights and shows Big Bird where the sound was coming from: the pay phone was off the hook.
Visual Novels
- The Fruit of Grisaia: The clicking sound of Yumiko's boxcutter is something you learn to fear in Mihama Academy, as it indicates that it's wielder is royally pissed.
- Super Danganronpa Another 2: Chapter 5 ends with a successful Frame-Up and a Total Party Kill. The sound of the "wrong verdict" alarm sums up the entire horror of the situation perfectly.
Webcomics
- Alice and the Nightmare: whenever someone's Superpowered Evil Side starts to emerge, they go hahh, hahh, hahh, with the font getting wobbly. At some point, one starts to worry what happens when they lose control.
- Awful Hospital: The bow tie delivery guy has a voice described as "as if a hundred birthday clowns got together to strangle each other to death at the same time, and every last one of them liked it." It's implied to have somehow made a living circulatory system throw up.
- Digger uses distinctive fonts for characters, resulting in a certain race speaking in “strange, scary fonts”. The creepy skin lizards are actually quite nice, but the protagonists don’t know that initially.
- In El Goonish Shive, Tedd reacts with traumatic fear to the sound of the magic detector, which is implied to be akin to a vacuum cleaner (or at least, similarly loud) yet distinctive. He was scared of it as a baby, and it stuck.
- Gunnerkrigg Court: When Annie is hospitalized and hooked to a heart monitor early in chapter 38, Kat mentions that she set the monitor to "alarm only" because she couldn't stand the constant beeping.
- Homestuck:
- The honks produced by Gamzee that go honk. HONK. honk are established as terrifying to the characters. It's worse in "[S] Equius: Seek the highb100d". After Nepeta enters the vent, it's dark and she has no idea where Gamzee is This is represented by all the music stopping save for this eerie track that has the honking.
- The honking also turns out to be the noise Lord English made to announce his birth into the universe. And his sole purpose for existing is to ensure a universe's destruction.
- The honks produced by Gamzee that go honk. HONK. honk are established as terrifying to the characters. It's worse in "[S] Equius: Seek the highb100d". After Nepeta enters the vent, it's dark and she has no idea where Gamzee is This is represented by all the music stopping save for this eerie track that has the honking
- Schlock Mercenary: A neutronium-based annie plant has a distinctive noise if containment 'fails': "SKOOOM"!! And given that it usually occurs under circumstances where the ship (or other location) usually goes up with it, it's also considered a rare sound to survive hearing.
PRANGER: Do you mean to tell me that you've been close enough to hear a neutronium pile let go, Captain?
TAGON: Twice in the last three months. Sometime I'll have to tell you about my short, furry employer.
PRANGER: I'll buy the beer, Captain. I'll buy the beer. - Sluggy Freelance: Anyone who survives the demon’s spawn (a litter of kittens) will forever jump at the sound of "mew."
