"Oh, this looks like fun!" "Wait..."
"GAH! Never mind!""That's kind of dark, isn't it? Yuri made it sound like it was going to be a nice story, so that dark turn came from nowhere."
—The Main Character of Doki Doki Literature Club! on "Portrait of Markov"
The purpose of a horror story is to scare the audience and scares rely, on some level, on the element of surprise — the more unexpected the scare, the more impact it has. But there lies a problem — an audience experiencing a horror story fully expects to be scared or exposed to horror tropes since that's what they came for. While this doesn't necessarily lessen the impact too much, as the story can still be effectively scary, an upcoming horror writer might decide they want to maximize the impact of the horror by making it as unexpected as possible.
Enter the Disguised Horror Story — a work in the horror genre that masquerades as a non-horror work. It sets up a bright, colorful, or serene tone and atmosphere to lure viewers into a false sense of security, then abruptly drops the facade for maximum impact. One such type of work is the Subverted Kids' Show, which often employs a stereotypical, Sugar Bowl-like aesthetic to make the subsequent twist even more jarring. The marketing can further enhance the effect by intentionally hiding the true nature of the work and playing up its saccharine elements — though just as many give away the story's true nature to attract horror fans who might otherwise ignore it. Either way, the twist will generally only work for so long before the work becomes known for its hidden dark nature, but one can still expect at least a few complaints from parents who thought it would be a great thing to show their kids.
While these can show up in any genre, they are most frequently independently produced Video Games and Visual Novels. Part of this is because big studios are frequently reluctant to take such a risk as deliberately misleading their audience as to the genre of work, whereas indie games are far friendlier to experimentation. The other reason is that many such games take inspiration from the massively popular Doki Doki Literature Club!, which exploded in popularity for its macabre subversion of the Dating Sim. Big studios can attempt this, however, though their execution will be different. The work will usually still be branded as what it is, (to avoid legal issues) but it will attempt to lure the viewer/player to a false sense of security before showing its true colors later on.
May involve a Cosmic Horror Reveal. Compare Surprisingly Creepy Moment, which is a horror-like moment or section of an otherwise non-horror work. Particularly common in the Digital Horror genre.
By the nature of this trope, entries below will be SPOILERS. Even just seeing a work listed, or just the fact this trope is in play to begin with is a spoiler in and of itself.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Evan begins as a lighthearted story about the titular protagonist figuring out who has been sending him messages through a library desk. Then another boy walks into the school with a gun, followed by a Once More, with Clarity montage detailing how he wasn't noticed until it was too late.
Anime & Manga
- Bokurano is an initially charming Humongous Mecha show with child protagonists. All of those kids are going down, and you'd need to use factorials to calculate how many universes get destroyed throughout the series.
- Digimon Ghost Game adheres to its Spooky Kids Media premise mixed with slice-of-life elements. The setting is a Lighter and Softer post-modern urban setting rather than the usual adventure story, and the protagonists are drawn in a more "adorable" style than those from prior seasons. It doesn't take long for the show to go straight into horror tropes such as Body Horror, Forced Transformations, Jump Scares, mass abductions, a few villains are even Serial Killers or mass-annihilators, and there is physical and mental torture in some episodes. Most episodes also feature the protagonists undergoing said body horror and mental torture.
- Happy Sugar Life seems like a fluffy, pastel-colored yuri manga with an innocent-sounding title...aside from that it's anything but. The girl-on-girl relationship is a possessive, abusive dynamic where a young girl locks a girl 7 years younger than her in her apartment and treats her like a pet instead of a person, and the setting is really not that great, with people attempting or committing rape just because they could get away with it if nobody tells the police about them.
- The initial setup for I Want to Hold Aono-kun so Badly I Could Die makes the story seem like it's going be a simple story about a girl and her ghost boyfriend. Maybe a little bittersweet, but probably very Slice of Life, right? This lasts for most of the first chapter... until Aono demands that Yuri allow him to possess her toward the end of the first chapter. It starts to become clear that not only is something very wrong with Aono now that he's become a ghost, but there are heavy hints that our protagonist has some psychological problems herself.
- Made in Abyss appears, on the surface, to be a cute manga with adorable protagonists exploring a giant cave. Then we start learning more about the Curse of the Abyss... and then the cute little protagonist gets her arm poisoned and the resulting amputation botched. Once Bondrewd and the Ibulu Village get involved, all bets are off and the story takes a nosedive into some of the most horrifying instances of Body Horror and And I Must Scream ever illustrated.
- My Dress-Up Darling has an In-Universe example with the Fictional Video Game Coffin, though it's played with in that it's introduced to Wakana (and the audience) as a straight horror game about a group of nuns in a convent being picked off one by one and trying to discover who, or what, is responsible. When Wakana starts playing it, however, he finds that it starts off as a pleasant story about the nuns' daily lives, rendered in a soft, washed-out pixel art style, causing him to question whether it really is a horror game at all. However, as the game progresses cracks appear in this cheerful façade. The characters start getting into more and more arguments with each other, the player loses the ability to use the save system, and eventually everyone besides the protagonist start turning into meals. In the end, it's revealed that these events were all the delusional fantasies of the protagonist Mira, who had killed everyone else and wanted to forget all the bad things that happened to her (including some heavily Implied Rape by her own father).
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The show initially appears to be, and was marketed as, just another cutesy Magical Girl Warrior series, to the point that the creators actively tried to hide the involvement of Gen Urobuchi (a writer famous for his grim and depressing stories) until the show's true, macabre nature became an open secret and Mr. Urobuchi becomes credited in trailers. In the series, a Ridiculously Cute Weasel Mascot or whatever offers to make a deal to grant a young girl's wish and give her powers beyond imagination in return for fighting evil entities and saving the world. But the protagonists are fighting Witches that look like Eldritch Abominations and can Mind Rape innocent people until they're Driven to Suicide. Then one of them bites the head off one of the girls on camera, traumatizing the others, and from then on the show becomes a Genre Deconstruction that displays just how psychologically damaging their job actually is. And that's even before we learn that this Weasel Mascot is keeping some horrible secrets about being a Magical Girl from the girls.
- The anime adaptation of School Days begins with the simple premise of a romantic comedy with protagonist Makoto Itou needing Sekai Saionji's help in wooing Kotonoha Katsura while Sekai is already crushing on him. While the visual novel had many good ends and only a few bad ones, the anime infamously made a series that was much more bleak and horrific than the original visual novel, depicting Makoto as The Sociopath and his love interests as two yanderes broken psychologically by his seeing them only as sex objects.
- School-Live! is an excessively saccharine Slice of Life Schoolgirl Series for almost all of the first chapter/episode. There are hints here and there that it won't stay that way, but everything still seems relatively normal... until the very end of the chapter/episode, where it's revealed that there's a Zombie Apocalypse afoot. Only then does the true nature of the series become apparent, and it doesn't get any better from there. It's disturbing not just because of what's going on, but also because of why it was so sweet and cutesy until then: one of the central protagonists lost her grip on reality and is imagining everything as it was, rather than as it is.
- Shimeji Simulation: The story follows a former recluse who makes new friends in a comedic Slice of Life. Then the series progressively dives into existentialism, introduction of supernatural entities, revelations that the people and the environment were artificially created inside a Simulated Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic Reality, and everyone getting Reality Warper powers to the point where the town gets completely unrecognizable and becomes composed of astronimically-sized pocket dimensions.
- Summer Time Rendering: The promotional materials for the anime, the cover of the first volume, and the prologue suggest a coming of age story with a hint of romance and intrigue on a sunny, rural island. While things take a sudden turn for the worse when three characters are murdered in cold blood by the end of the first chapter, the plot doesn't show its true colors as a horror thriller until the corpses pile up at the summer festival.
Comic Books
- Beautiful Darkness: In the first couple pages, Aurora is enjoying a tea party in a round pink room, only for what seems to be a cave-in forcing her out through the eye socket of a dead girl. Even as the fairies attempt to remain innocence and good-willed, it doesn't take long for selfishness and even brutality to start occurring.
Fan Works
- Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles) is going for this, but nearly everybody in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom already knows about the twist. It starts out innocently, with Pinkie Pie inviting Rainbow Dash over to bake cupcakes, but then Pinkie takes her to the basement to graphically slaughter her.
- Much like the game it's based on, FARAWAY LOGS is a case of this. The series seemingly starts as a fairly innocuous look into the lives of the characters prior to the events of the game, done via videos filmed on Basil's camcorder. However, starting from "meet my friends", the videos start getting split-second glitches and brief appearances from Something. These glitches are actually hints leading to secret, unlisted videos that prove to be far more overtly horrific, depicting the build up to and aftermath of Mari's Accidental Murder and Sunny and Basil staging her suicide.
- Geometry Dash fan levels:
- Peaceful, which provides the page image. At first, there are cute little monsters featured in the background, following your character as it moves along. However, the music will eventually corrupt, and the background will slowly transform into a fleshy landscape full of trypophobia-introducing holes. A little while latter, the background becomes cute again, and the level ends. However, one final scare appears out of nowhere. Unsurprisingly, alongside the ridiculous amounts of lag, this level was never verified. On top of that, the song that the level is set to is MopeMope, mentioned below in the Music folder.
- ExtoPlasm has too kiD frIEndly, which, in contrast, has a more "slow-burn approach". Even with a couple shifts of tone, the level remains upbeat and jokey at times. It isn't until an entire city gets nuked and you get chased by a faceless version of one of the monsters at the beginning that it would reveal its real dark side. Then, after a rainbow-filled segment in Fluffy Cloud Heaven, it shows some of the monsters dying in various ways (such as accidentally dropping a lighter and setting themself on fire, getting hit by a car, hanging themselves, stabbed in the eye by an actual monster's tongue, and have their intestines gouged out of their mouth with a meat hook). The level continues with this darkly comedic setting, all set to the beat of an epic upbeat tune.
- MindCap's COLLAB LEVEL is probably the worst. Disguising itself as a rather generic-looking collab level, this level uses many a jumpscares in it. Helps that it's also an April Fool's day joke.
- My House bills itself as a simple Doom map recreating the childhood home of the uploader's late friend, as was all the rage back in the early days of Doom mapping. The unfinished map was discovered on a floppy disk among the friend's belongings after his death and was finished by the uploader, touched up with some modern quality-of-life features that didn't exist back then, and released as a tribute. However, as the player begins to dig deeper into the house, enemies will mysteriously respawn, the music slowly becomes off-beat, starts skipping notes, and changing instruments, before outright devolving into static and synth drones, and the layout of the house becomes more and more surreal. This quickly gives way to increasingly strange set pieces that mimic a variety of liminal spaces
and can similarly bend their own rules to unnerve the player. Performing the wrong actions can additionally send players into locations such as a burned-down version of the house and The Backrooms. The Google Drive where the map is downloaded from also contains an Apocalyptic Log written by the uploader, detailing how the map began to take on a life of its own as he worked on it, with new additions he definitely didn't remember adding mysteriously appearing overnight. It also describes a series of incredibly bizarre dreams he had (which are actually hints on how to get the true ending). Oh, and the word "house" is always written in blue. Because of course it is.
- Regular Pasta seems to be more comedic despite being inserted into a creepypasta-themed contest. Mario is chilling in a pasta restaurant and decides to go find Peach, who went inside a painting to an alternate pasta dimension where all their pasta is from. At first, everything seems relatively fine. Then Mario finds Bowser's mutilated, dismembered corpse and learns that reality itself is being torn apart, and it gets darker from there culminating in a fight against the princess herself having turned into a Mechanical Abomination.
- Ribbit: Starts out as a spiritual successor to the Games Repainted mod for Deltarune, with pretty much every single sprite and line of dialog replaced with a meme. It starts to go downhill when Susie and Lancer reveal the true nature of Prince Noyno. Then Susie kills Lancer and not a moment after that is played for anything but horror.
- The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan game Story of the Blanks starts out as a nice, interesting little game starring cute little Apple Bloom finding a town full of blank flank ponies in the Everfree Forest. Then you find a skeleton in the fireplace. And that's just how the scary part STARTS.
- In a similar vein, Luna Game was initially dispersed in copies throughout the internet as a My Little Pony Fan Game platformer. Playing through it reveals it to eventually be a Screamer Prank with plot.
- Super Mario Dolor intentionally looks like a typical cheap, low-effort fan game like so many of them, with the same Excuse Plot of Mario rescuing Princess Peach from King Bowser. Then in the first stage, he reaches the exit only to abruptly run out of time and die, and when retrying the stage, it suddenly turns into a nightmarish world of blood, red textures, and eyes. The rest of the levels jump between typical Mario fare and Surreal Horror, with a subtle deeper plot in the background about Mario suffering from depression after the death of his brother Luigi.
- The SpongeBob SquarePants fan game SpongeBob Treasure Hunt starts out as a cheery looking generic 2D Platform Game featuring the titular character, mimicking the style of an official Game Boy Advance game. Upon defeating the first boss, the game suddenly shifts into a much darker tone, with SpongeBob going through dark unsettling environments with disturbing enemies, blood, and eyes, while Mr. Krabs' dialogue between stages turns into eerie unsettling descriptions of each level, cumulating in him simply telling the player to leave before the final stage. It gets even more disturbing during the final boss, where SpongeBob faces off against a strange doppelganger version of himself, followed by Squidward, transformed into an Eldritch Abomination. And then there's the endings, which either feature an unsettling picture of SpongeBob that transitions into a Jump Scare, or the staff credits featuring twisted disturbing versions of regular people's faces.
Films — Animation
- Alma has a cute art style, was directed by a former Pixar animator, and starts in a very innocent manner, before turning into a horror tale with the main character becoming trapped inside the body of a doll, alongside numerous other children who have met the same fate.
- Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island is fun and comedic as the first two acts show the Straw Hats having a fun time on a mysterious resort island. But when the Straw Hats slowly discover the island's dark secret, the tone pivots to suspense and horror, with one of the darkest atmospheres that had ever been seen in any One Piece-related media up til that point.
- Felidae looks at first glance like another animated movie about talking animals made in the 90s, with a cute art style, giving the impression it might be a kid-friendly movie. The original German trailer was even labeled as a "Youtube Kids" video. The trailer in question does not reveal at all it's actually a horror movie featuring lots of death and violence. And also cat sex.
- Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors starts out as a cutesy film with adorable animals, but once the title character shows up it turns into disturbing war propaganda.
- It's Oppo is initially depicted as a fictional Nick Jr. program, but it takes a turn for the worse after Chester Cheetah takes off his suit to reveal himself to be a man dressed up as the character for the show, which causes Oppo to unzip his own suit out of curiosity, revealing his disgustingly detailed body (with his willy being uncensored) and then it ends on a horrific note, with the narrator brutally calling Oppo out for falling out of line (swearing a few times while he does so).
Films — Live-Action
- From Dusk Till Dawn's now-famed Halfway Plot Switch plays with this trope in an interesting way. The supernatural horror elements, namely the vampires, don't show up until midway through the movie. On the other hand, many viewers find the first half—about a family held hostage by two criminals, one of whom (Richie) is a total psycho—to be the truly harrowing portion, with the Realism-Induced Horror even more disturbing than the subsequent over-the-top gore and monster effects.
- Man of the Year opens with the comedian Tom Dobbs jokingly running for the presidency. But when he actually wins, the focus shifts to Eleanor Green discovering how it happened, and everything goes to hell as her superiors at Delacroy use violent measures to keep her from telling the truth.
- Sinners pulls a similar trick to the aforementioned From Dusk Till Dawn, with the first half being a gritty period crime drama about two brothers returning home to Clarksdale, Mississippi to set up a juke joint with money and liquor they stole from the Irish and Italian mobs in Chicago. It's only at the start of the second act when the film introduces its vampire villain Remmick.
- Unedited Footage of a Bear: This short film begins with thirty seconds of footage of a brown bear before a YouTube commercial for Claridryl, an anti-allergy drug. Except that after the music for the "commercial" ends, the camera continues to follow the protagonist, Donna driving in her car. Within a few minutes, Donna is viciously attacked by a woman who looks exactly like her and runs her over with her own car. It becomes evident in hindsight that (a) Claridryl is not an anti-allergy drug but rather an over-the-counter anti-depressant booster, (b) Donna has become addicted to this drug and is suffering psychotic effects, and (c) very probably murdered her own children under its influence.
Literature
- The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle first presents itself as a whimsical story about a princess living in a marzipan castle who has lots of grand adventures with her beloved teddy bear, though a sharp-eyed reader might notice some signs that everything is not rainbows and unicorns, even before you get to the third ending (aptly named "The One With Teeth").
- I Am the Cheese might appear at first to be a carefree tale about a boy taking a bicycle trip across the New England countryside. It's more of a Psychological Thriller whose real story is about the boy's family being taken into the Witness Protection Program.
- The Last Dragon Chronicles start as a light-hearted story about clay dragons and squirrels. By the third book, the main character is speared through the heart, malevolent extra-dimensional beings with body-stealing powers are wrestling for control of the universe, and the stakes are going through the roof. This gets taken up to eleven in Dark Fire, the fifth book of the series, which includes a wildly gory sequence in which an innocent civilian has her organs pushed through her chest by dragon claws and another character is melted by a cascade of dragon urine. The sheer scale of the violence and horror compared to the innocence of the series’ start is staggering.
- Nightlanders :: A Cyberpunk Fairytale: The literal and very terrifying Evil Stepmother seems to enjoy dressing up Nightmare Fuel as a mother's tender loving care. The Moon-monster also loves to dress up horrific things (like being eaten alive by mutant worms) as 'nice' things (like tickling).
- Ringing Bell, a children's book (and movie) about a cheerful, adorable lamb with a bell around his neck frolicking in the meadows and having a very warm relationship with his mother. That is, until around the halfway point, where the Wolf mentioned earlier bursts into the barn while his flock sleeps and kills some of the sheep, one of which is his mom, resulting in a heart-wrenching scene of him sobbing hysterically over her corpse. The lamb swears revenge and eventually gets groomed into a horrifying horned beast with a thirst for blood and a strong sense of nihilism. At the end, Chirin is driven away from his farm after killing the wolf and implicitly freezes to death. Not helping is that the story is based on Takashi Yanase's experiences in World War II.
Live-Action TV
- Inside No. 9 is an anthology series of many genres, though usually dark comedy, often horror, and occasionally goes out of its way to look like something else. Notable instances include:
- "The Devil Of Christmas" is an interesting case, as the episode is presented as a so bad it's good horror movie about Krampus. Meant to look like it's from the 1970s, with director commentary and delighting in replicating the period tone. And then the real horror makes an appearance.
- "To Have And To Hold" is the story of a marriage slowly crumbling as a couple drift apart, due to the wife's past infidelity. Such quiet, personal tragedies and the grim comedy in them appears to be the episode's focus until we see what's happening in the basement...
- "Three By Three", an episode dressed up to look like a quiz show, complete with Lee Mack hosting as himself and a non-standard intro. Even if you realize it's Inside No. 9, it looks like one of their tragic stories of human failing. However, throughout the episode, subtle hints imply all is not as it seems but only the last 20 seconds is undeniably supernatural horror.
- "The Last Weekend" appears at first glance to be a poignant story about a couple spending the weekend in their rented countryside house, whilst making peace with the fact that one of them is suffering from cancer. Then we find out this relationship isn't all that it seems, and one person has a sinister plan.
- Kamen Rider tends to be a little Darker and Edgier than its contemporary kids' superhero shows, with some moral shades of gray and the occasional death. Usually, it's upfront about its stakes, but it's gotten a reputation that the series with the silliest surface theming will often have a darker story than usual:
- Kamen Rider Gaim is themed around fruit and features youth dance crews competing, but this is a smokescreen and it's actually a Cosmic Horror Story with invasive species set to overrun Earth within a decade; and Anyone Can Die as people betray one another over who gets to shape the next world. The "dance crew" plot is even explicitly resolved midway through the show, when everyone realizes that they need to focus on the truly important threats.
- Kamen Rider Ex-Aid features video games, with all the flashy graphics and sound effects that go with them; but it also takes a surprisingly serious look at comparing the extra lives and continues found in games with the permanent death of real life. It also gained notoriety when one of the heroes was brutally (if near-bloodlessly) slaughtered in the episode that aired on Christmas Day.
- Kamen Rider Gavv's theme is candy and snacks. While an evil monster candy company sounds silly on paper, the show does nothing to sugarcoat (pun not intended) the fact that using humans as an ingredient in Impossibly Delicious Food means the villains are running a drug cartel and trafficking ring. As for the protagonists, Shoma is a half-human child raised in an abusive household (and hinted to be a Child by Rape) and his full-blooded siblings are trying to kill him, Hanto was traumatized by seeing his mother taken from him as a child (abducted, but the flashbacks initially implied that he saw her eaten alive), and Rakia lost his preteen little brother to drug addiction.
- The first episode of WandaVision starts off as a simple sitcom made in the style of The Dick Van Dyke Show. The fact that Vision is suddenly alive again with no explanation after his death in Avengers: Infinity War is the first sign that nothing is as it seems. However, during a dinner with Vision's boss and wife, Mr. Hart asks where Wanda and Vision came from, beginning the unsettling, true nature of the show as Wanda hesitates to answer, Mr. Hart nearly chokes to death on his food, and his wife repeats "stop it" to both her husband and soon Wanda like a broken record. While the tonal shift was brief, it's the first sign of something dark lurking under the surface of the sitcom world.
Music
- "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" by The Beatles, a track off of Abbey Road. It starts out with Maxwell, a med student, asking science major Joan out on a date. It sounds a lot like "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" off The White Album, another cheerful McCartney ditty about young love. Then Maxwell bashes Joan's skull in with the hammer. We soon find out that he's a Serial Killer who goes on to kill one of his teachers and the judge who was attempting to sentence him for his crimes.
- "MopeMope" by LeaF and Optie starts off sounding like a cute children's jingle, before occasionally "glitching out" and turning into a hellish droning sound, before dropping the saccharine facade entirely and turning into a hardcore arrangement of itself. All while the music video features cute dancing flowers and spherical hopping creatures...that turn into horrible abominations who have creepy grins instead of faces. Not to mention the sudden rapid arpeggio that comes out of nowhere... Because of that, many music arcades that feature this song as a playable stage such as Pump It Up and maimai had to censor the aforementioned segment due to how creepy it was.
- Pretty much every song by PEPOYO could be this. Her custom Vocaloid, Poyoloid, looks like an innocent, colorful and adorable robot alien (Like this), but looking closer shows a very dark undertone, with deceptively cheery songs about suicide and character biographies with allegorical references to many dark subjects.
- "mo°lmo°l by sasakure.UK, specifically its accompanying animation. A bear-like creature travels on a flying saucer to a planet, and many love it. Soon after, it reveals its true form, brainwashes part of the population in horrifying fashion and has its brainwashed supporters hijack the media to brainwash the rest of the population. It then absorbs the population, becomes planet-sized, and eats the planet whole.
Tabletop Games
- Bunnies & Burrows is a roleplaying game where the player characters are bunnies. Cute little bunnies... living in a dangerous world where everything is larger than them and ready to eat them, and where Humans Are Cthulhu.
Visual Novels
- Although Cooking Companions is openly advertised as a Horror story, it starts off rather cutesy with its Chompette mascots and bonding with your fellow hikers before the inevitable craving for fresh meat arises...
- Doki Doki Literature Club!, ostensibly a cutesy Romance Game, starts with requiring you to accept a warning for disturbing content, but the game remains light-hearted and cheerful for most of Act 1. Things get a little darker when Sayori reveals she suffers from depression, but it's not unheard of for some romance games to have heroines with psychological issues that serve as character arcs, so it still comes as a massive shock when the player character finds Sayori's hanging corpse, and the game restarts. From that point onwards, the game starts getting very glitchy and bloody as the girls reveal their Dark And Troubled Pasts and deteriorate into Yanderes, only for it all to culminate in an elaborate use of The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You that explains the surreal plot but has seriously freaked out many people in its own right.
- On the surface, Don't Toy With Me is a cute story about two adorable Living Toys learning to befriend each other in spite of their differences. Then the owner starts playing favorites and antagonizing the other toy, and it eventually leads to one of them snapping and murdering the other, with one of the routes revealing that the owner has previously killed other toys for not getting along with Dahlia.
- From the Sun to the Moon starts out like your standard cute dating simulator, only to rapidly shift into themes of Body Horror, child abuse and cosmic horror as the plot progresses.
- Higurashi: When They Cry has an ominous intro but otherwise starts off as a brightly colored visual novel about a teenage boy who befriends several cute girls, spending their days having fun in their seemingly idyllic rural village during the early 80s. But Higurashi is not a Coming of Age Story and is especially not a Romance Game. It's a murder-mystery and Psychological/Folk/Cosmic Horror series, which becomes more obvious when Keiichi finds a newspaper talking about a murder that happened a few years ago and suddenly his friends turn Cute and Psycho, the village is said to be under a curse, and a nefarious conspiracy lurks in the background.
- How To Date A Magical Girl!, a cute game about going to a school for magical girls and looking for love until it suddenly becomes a murder mystery game.
- Penthos is an interesting example, as it doesn't attempt to pose as anything but a horror story, just a more traditional pastiche of familiar Slasher Movie tropes. It's in the game's Second Act that the story becomes more postmodern and allegorical, switching gears from a slasher to a cerebral Psychological Horror.
- YOU and ME and HER is a subverted Dating Sim years before DDLC came out. At first, it seems to be a fairly typical dating sim, just with one of the two heroines, Aoi Mukou, being self-aware. Then Aoi's route goes into Netorare territory and turns into an emotional maelstrom for everyone involved... and then, at the very end when Shinichi Sasaki has accepted Aoi for who she is, the other love interest Miyuki Sone kills her, reveals she's also become aware of the truth of their world, and traps Shinichi in a "Groundhog Day" Loop in an attempt to connect with the player behind the screen, shifting into psychological and existential horror for the final route. And if you go out of your way to make her mad, it culminates in a psychologically disturbing sex scene and Miyuki completely snapping afterwards, chasing after Shinichi with intent to kill over and over again.
Web Animation
- There is a horror adaptation of the first asdfmovie called "asdfmovie0", which starts alright despite some details being off, such as the lack of chest-bursting monster in the skit about smelling the flower. Some skits later, and characters have Nightmare Faces and scribbles over their bodies, a character's skin gets opened in half like an eggshell, and the short ends with the episode being stuck in a single frame for almost a minute. This has inspired a notable amount of similar retakes from various other creators (enough to have a playlist).
- Best Friend September initially starts out as a Flash Game before revealing it as a metaphor for a girl being groomed.
- The whole point of Happy Tree Friends is taking Ridiculously Cute Critters living their lives gaily and subjecting them to every Cruel and Unusual Death imaginable, with blood and guts galore.
- Follow the Sun!. It's all fun and games at the snack bar until the box of popcorn accidentally steps on the jelly with the trumpet and passes out. And then a blood-like liquid drips on the sun, pisses it off, and starts to set the earth on fire! Think Don't Hug Me I'm Scared meets Let's All Go to the Lobby.
- Lacey Games:
- Lacey's Wardrobe seems like a cute dress-up game at first, but then Lacey's stalker shows up...
- Lacey's Diner is a simple cooking game on the normal route, but if the player lets the timer run out, Lacey loses her customers, and then her sanity...
- Lacey's Petshop started out as typical pet care simulator, however as the game goes on her customer's request slowly getting messed up, such as stretching a hamster's neck, shoving a pair of oversized dentures in a turtle's mouth, and cutting off a rabbit's tail, legs, and ears because according to the customer they are 'too distracting'. Even the latter's request disturbs Lacey herself. The ending sequence after the player finish the game only escalates from there...
- The ARG Mr. Elephant Goes to New York involves a fictional video game about the titular flat-cap-wearing pachyderm on a two-week work placement at an office in a cartoony New York. The humor is slightly cynical and there are strange elements like a character who follows the player when prompted and only stops when they get far away enough from them, but all seems silly and innocent. Day 2, however, begins with Mr. Elephant having a nightmare about a large hand, accompanied by discordant screeching in the background. As the fortnight progresses, the nightmares continue, music stops, the scenery becomes darker and less saturated, characters either disappear or taunt the player, and even that aforementioned following character starts following the player without being prompted. All throughout the game, message appear about a character named Tomas and how he was abused by his mother.
- Rabbit Games appears cutesy and welcoming, when in actuality it is a horror series.
Web Original
- BLUE_CHANNEL: THALASIN is an Analog Horror video that, at first glance, appears to just be an old-timey commercial advertising a fantasy product dubbed Thalasin, which forces you to have certain emotions, but when the second half of the video kicks in, it advertises Thalasin Plus, which supposedly adds new emotions to your brain... but these emotions happen to distort your face into eldritch horrors, if the implications of the video are to judge by.
- Board James begins as a review series about board games the titular James played as a kid, with some friends cameoing to help the reviews along. It becomes a Surreal Horror series in which James is revealed to have been a Serial Killer who murdered Mike and Bootsy and is torturing their souls through a Recursive Reality.
- "Christmas is HELL" is like any Brandon Rogers video, being a Black Comedy short about a family with less sanity than there is water in a kiddie pool, with a strange old lady whom no one knows visiting them for no reason... and then the ending reveals the protagonist is Dead All Along, and resides in an Ironic Hell where he's forced to forever live the events that got him and his family killed. Oh, and that strange old lady? She's Old Scratch himself.
- The entirety of the Don't Hug Me I'm Scared series is the infamous Trope Codifier of the Disguised Horror Story along with Surprisingly Creepy Moment. Mostly because it starts out innocently enough, with Sesame Street style puppets discussing different themes in a really catchy song. By the end... well, let's just say things go a bit too far.
- Lesley the Pony Has an A+ Day! is pretty self-explanatory, detailing the pony happily prancing through the kingdom to see the duke. About a third of the way through, the music stops completely and the duke starts lecturing Lesley about being late. They're both portrayed through detailed illustrations with Synchro-Vox mouths and robotic voices, which is pretty eerie. But then the video spirals into horrifying as Lesley goes completely mad and self-destructive.
- Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games: Discussed and discouraged in the "Paint an Accurate Picture of Your Game" video. Sakurai argues that no matter how much you want to surprise people, it's more important to make sure people get an accurate impression of your game. He uses a horror game disguised as a cozy farm sim as an example of what not to do because it's likely to alienate players — people who appreciate horror will be turned off by the game's harmless appearance, and people who buy it expecting a fun farm sim will be upset.
Sakurai: Imagine buying a banana, only to have it taste like an apple. That's not right, now is it?
- Natsumi STEP! On the surface, it's an adorable animation about a girl who goes to a magical world full of kittens and puppies. That is until you notice some uncanny visual cues such as "Natsumi Andou, arrived at 7/20 23:36"note and a sign reading "59"note where it's all but implied that said "magical place" is the underworld. Then afterwards (originally a separate video), it shows Natsumi, our cheerful protagonist crying, and if you go back and observe the animation, as well as viewing the SWF file of that second link, you will learn the real story behind this seemingly cute film. There's no dialogue nor explicit confirmation by word, but the implication was Natsumi going to hell after killing her boyfriend and committing suicide.
- Petscop is a fictional Let's Play series wherein Paul plays what starts as a fun (albeit unfinished) game about collecting pets and finding them homes, with a colorful pastel environment called the Gift Plane, happy music, and overall looking every bit like the kid-friendly time-waster that was so common in the PS1 era. There are a few hints of something off (like the fact that the pets are scared of the Player Character), but it seems harmless. Until, that is, Paul enters a cheat code in the room of one of the pets. The music suddenly stops, and Paul ventures outside Even Care to find not the peaceful-looking Gift Plane, but a darker, mysterious new world called the Newmaker Plane. From then on, Petscop moves to a dark and twisted story involving themes of child abuse/neglect and cryptic events that Paul himself is a key figure in.
- POKOPOKOPIKOTAN by nana825763 is at first an adorable stop-motion video of two little paper girls playing in a bright little stage. Then the scene gets darker and a live-action hand starts attacking them and corrupting the stage, accompanied by imagery highly suggestive of sexual assault.
- Televoid! intially appears to be an ordinary review series by Brutalmoose but eventually reveals the host is a fictional character trapped in a void and controlled by unknown higher powers.
- The Welcome Home website introduces itself as an archive of all things related to the production of the eponymous fictional puppet show. There is an expansive selection of concept art and character blurbs on display to help viewers learn about the show and its characters... But if some viewers dig deeper, they'll find that these puppets may be living a far less ideal life than what first impressions would imply, as a misclick on Wally's house might reveal, to name one example.
- WHAT COLOR ARE YOU? starts off as a fairly normal personality quiz. Then the questions become increasingly disturbing until it eventually abandons all pretenses of being a quiz and becomes a rather disturbing rumination on free will, with frequent application of The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You.
Western Animation
- Hazbin Hotel is mostly a comedy series although it also has a sense of horror with Alastor the Radio Demon only helping the protagonist Charlie Morningstar for his own enjoyment and to be free of his Mysterious Benefactor. Another character who contributes greatly to the series’ fear factor is Valentino, one of Alastor’s fellow Overlords who abuses his employee Angel Dust sexually and financially while threatening to murder him if he doesn’t make pornographic films for him or if he just crosses him in general. Then there’s the Exorcists who kill demons because of their Fantastic Racism and the corrupt government they serve.
- Over the Garden Wall is a charming story of two brothers lost in the woods trying to get home, meeting a bunch of colorful characters while being periodically menaced by whatever creatures the forests can throw at them, but ends up being a Double Subversion. For the first half all the supposedly creepy things and people turn out to be either harmless or outright helpful, and most of the conflict comes from Wirt unintentionally making things harder for himself. Then we find out the friend they met back in the first episode has actually been guiding them to a witch that wants to brainwash them. Then an evil possessing spirit tries to eat them. Then the Beast takes center stage, and everything goes to hell very quickly.