"I meant what I said. These things, these forces, they are our fear. Deep fears. Primordial. Always looking for ways to grow and spread."
— Gerard Keay, The Magnus Archives, "Family Business"
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, right? Well, you'd better hope it's not this fear.
Simply put, these are beings that are brought into existence by the fear of others. Perhaps it's the fear of many people, even everyone in the world, or perhaps just the fear of one thoroughly unlucky person. While many of them are simply born from general terror and aren't picky about what kind, a fairly common spin on this trope is multiple such beings, each one representing a fear of something different.
The mechanism by which they're created varies greatly. They could simply be a quirk of the magic system, or an easily frightened Reality Warper could create them reflexively. A Living Dream could even qualify — well, a Living Nightmare, as it were. If the antagonist is a Nightmare Weaver, these might be their Mooks.
Needless to say, these are pretty much always villains. In the majority of cases, they'll need more fear to stay alive, and have no qualms about sowing it themselves. (Although, conversely, fear may still sustain them even after they die.) The whole "made of fear" thing can also contribute some helpful, equally evil secondary powers, such as discerning the fears of others or just skipping to the logical endpoint and forcing them to be afraid. A common method of weakening or defeating them is to make sure they know I'm Not Afraid of You. Interestingly, Admitting to Fear sometimes works as well — can't fight what you won't acknowledge.
Note that this trope is about beings that are created from the fear of a specific person or group of people, and not simply an Anthropomorphic Personification; for instance, an eternal god of fear that represents the concept of fear would not count.
Subtrope of Emotion Personification, Tulpa, and The Heartless. Compare The Dreaded and Made of Evil.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Chainsaw Man: The Devils are formed from the collective fear that all of humanity holds for a particular concept, and become proportionally more powerful based on how much they're feared. A hyperspecific fear produces a pathetic weakling like the Tomato Devil, while more prevalent fears create terrifying monstrosities like the Gun Devil. Devil's incarnating more abstract, primal fears such darkness are unassailable eldritch horrors.
- In Jujutsu Kaisen, cursed spirits are spiritual entities born from the collective accumulation of negative emotions, primarily fear of specific things such as natural disasters, insect plagues, etc... and its power is proportional to the number of people who fear that specific fear.
- Paranoia Agent: In the final episode, the public's collective use of Lil' Slugger as a scapegoat for avoiding taking responsibility for their own personal problems escalates their fears and manifests a giant black blob that engulfs much of Tokyo. It's only after Sukiko faces her fears and owns up to her being responsible for creating Lil' Slugger in the first place that the calamity ends and the people are able to start rebuilding.
Comic Books
- Green Lantern: The Emotional Spectrum have entities who embody a certain emotion. The most infamous of them is Parallax, the Entity of Fear created eons in the past when the first sentient being felt fear, who possessed Hal Jordan and turned him into a Omnicidal Maniac. His presence is still felt within the Green Lantern Corps as new recruits now must understand and overcome fear to be able to use the full power of the Green Lantern Ring.
Films — Animation
- Rise of the Guardians: One of Pitch Black's methods of cowing people is to extract their nightmares, which become intimidating and unruly black horses (night mares). These mares can be rendered harmless if that person grows a spine and faces their fears.
Films — Live-Action
- Ultraman Ginga S The Movie: Showdown! The 10 Ultra Warriors!: Etelgar can summon Eteldummies, physical manifestations of a person's worst fears, from his fortress lair as means to impede intruders. Arisa, Gouki and Sakuya who attempts an entry to free the imprisoned Ultramen were confronted by their greatest nightmares coming to life (respectively Chinese Vampires, giant beetles and... sentient bouncing tomatoes). Towards the climax, after the Ultramen are released, Etelgar uses residual trauma extracted from the citizens towards previous villain Dark Lugiel (from the recent events of Ultraman Ginga) to summon a mountain-sized copy of Lugiel to attack the city; when the Ultramen defeat Lugiel and prepares to storm Etelgar's fortress, it turns out Etelgar's spell of fear works even on Ultramen, creating physical copies of each Ultra's worst fears for them to battle in the climax (in short order... Five King for Tiga, Dyna and Gaia, Dark Mephisto for Nexus, Alien Sran for Max, Dark Empera for Mebius and Ultraman Belial for Zero — Ginga-Victory and Cosmos who learnt to suppress their emotions during the show managed to avoid fighting their fear manifestations).
Literature
- Blood Wine Sequence: Charlotte realizes at the end of A Taste of Blood Wine that vampires are incarnations of humanity's fear of death, and consequently will be immortal as long as humans fear dying.
- From a Whisper to a Scream: The antagonist turns out to be a ghost formed from the fear of a girl's abusive (emotionally, physically, and sexually) father. He's invincible as long as she's afraid of him, but once she realizes that he's nothing but a figment of her subconscious he loses all his power and is easily vanquished.
- Hogfather: The first boogeyman was created by humanity's fear of the dark and the unknown. As humanity advanced, mastered fire, and learned to face that fear, it lost power. In contrast to most portrayals (and following Terry Pratchett's penchant to examine the unexpected sides of regular tropes), it's not entirely villainous. Fear of the Dark is what led humans out of caves, to discover fire, and create civilization. However, much like how Death became a fan of mortals, the First Boogeyman became fond of children, and decided to protect them by collecting their teeth (which could be used as a magical link to influence them). Thus the Boogeyman became the Tooth Fairy.
- Renegades Trilogy: The hero Sketch has Art Initiates Life abilities tied to his emotions. When he was young and couldn't control his powers yet, he drew a figure in a dark cloak wielding a scythe, which used his fear to come to life. Unlike his other drawings, however, it was tied to a deep-seated, continuous emotion, and couldn't be unsummoned. It escaped and took on a life of its own as the supervillain Phobia, sustained by Sketch's fear.
Live-Action TV
- Kamen Rider Zeztz: Nightmares, the Monster of the Week, are living forms of various phobias. They are born within the dreams of different people and escape into the Dream World, manifesting various phenomena in the real world. Once they've spread the fear they're associated with, they can take over the body of the dreamer who created them and spread to new people.
- Star Trek: Voyager: In "The Thaw", the Voyager crew meets three aliens who were frozen in stasis, and enter a simulation of a circus, created by their brains. One of the clowns is a Monster Clown, who was created from their combined fears and thus makes a living out of trying to scare people.
- Ultraman Tiga: In the episode "Dream," the main antagonist is Bakugon, a Kaiju created from the nightmares of a stressed-out salaryman when cosmic radiation washed over his house.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons: The Death Kiss is a variant of the Beholder that represents an individual Beholder's fear of extreme blood loss. Physically, they resemble standard beholders but without the central mouth or eye stalks. Instead, they have ten long tentacles that each end in a tooth-lined orifice that they use to grab onto victims and drain blood from them, which they do obsessively as Death Kiss Beholders are themselves paranoid about starving from not getting enough blood. Unusually, despite being a physical manifestation of a Beholder's fear, the Death Kiss is weaker than a normal Beholder and is therefore always subservient to any true Beholders it encounters.
- Magic: The Gathering:
- The planeswalker Ashiok views nightmares as an art form, and many of their cards are able to physically manifest nightmares. One of their creations, Cacophony
, is created from the collective nightmares of the entire city of Meletis, and powerful enough to be typed as a Nightmare God.
- The plane of Duskmourn is ruled by the fear-eating archdemon Valgavoth, and his influence turns the world ever more horrifying to further increase his power. One manifestation of Valgavoth's power is the nightmares, amorphous embodiments of individual fears. They hunt down those whose fear gives them form and pull the unlucky victim into their body, where they are forced to live through that fear forever.
- The planeswalker Ashiok views nightmares as an art form, and many of their cards are able to physically manifest nightmares. One of their creations, Cacophony
Video Games
- Deltarune: Ralsei describes the Titans as the resultant embodiment of the fear of the dark.
"When the Fountain's power becomes too strong... When the flow of darkness roars wild... It makes... that. A Titan. It's the fear-of-dark. It's the bump-in-the-night. It's the shadow of the backside of your mind. It has no consciousness. It only exists to destroy."
- Dragon Age: Inquisition: The aptly named Nightmare is an ancient demon who embodies and feeds on the fears of mortals. It may have begun as a more benign spirit who comforted people by removing their trauma so they could live more peaceful lives, but at some point, it became corrupted and sought to create more fears so that it could gorge itself. Its Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder, and both it and the smaller fearlings who serve it appear as something that the observer is frightened of. The Inquisitor and Hawke see Nightmare as a monstrous spider because of their arachnophobia.
- In Final Fantasy XIV, most primals are Tulpa formed from the image of a hero, god, or other legendary figure whose name and story are remembered by a large group of people. The primal Necron is specifically made of Alexandria's fear of death, which its summoner, Calyx purposefully stoked in its thralls to make it more powerful. The nature of this primal's creation means that it will resummon itself even stronger than before whenever it's destroyed because of its own fear of death, making it theoretically unkillable so long as it has a source of aether. It's only defeated when Sphene manages to weaken the fear of death its thralls are experiencing with a Rousing Speech as Alexandria's queen, nullifying the primal's Resurrective Immortality.
- League of Legends: Nocturne is a being of pure darkness and terror spawned from the collective nightmares of all sentient minds. He is usually trapped in the Spirit Realm, where his Omnicidal Maniac tendencies have ensured he is the only being left, but he can hitch a ride on the dreaming minds that visit the Spirit Realm and use their fear to physically manifest himself in the waking world.
- The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night: The final test that Spyro faces before meeting the Chronicler is a battle against the thing that he fears the most. In his case, this takes the form of a battle against a dragon spirit resembling Cynder's evil adult form, as he was afraid of her heading back into darkness.
- Luigi's Mansion: Bogmire is a ghost who's a product of the mansion's fear and despair.
- OMORI: Sunny, Basil (and potentially everyone else) is haunted by Something, a spectral hallucination manifested out of Sunny's worst fears. While not directly malicious, Something haunts Sunny, manifesting during various panic attacks and nightmares he has both inside and outside of Headspace. In reality, Something is a manifestation of Sunny's grief and guilt over killing Mari, taking the form of her hanged corpse. The game's best ending concludes with both Sunny and Basil casting away their inner demons.
- Ruphand: An Apothecary's Adventure: Craven Fiends, which eat cowardice caused by fear of something and can weaponize fears:
Craven Fiend Bestiary entry: They reflect the fears behind the craven acts that feed them [...] used Phasmophobia, the fear of ghosts and the undead, to summon hordes of Phantasms.
- Silent Hill: Monsters are created from a psyche's conscious, subconscious, or repressed thoughts manifested by the mysterious supernatural power of the town-Silent Hill. Sometimes, someone only needs to have a psyche powered by strong enough emotions or memories, such as trauma or fear, to manifest these monsters.
- World of Warcraft: The continent of Pandaria is alive to the emotions of its inhabitants — the arrival of the warring Alliance and Horde unleashes the sha, shadowy beings representing negative emotions. There are sha of fear, along with sha of hate, pride and so on. Numerous quests have the player defeat the sha by ridding places or people of their fears.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The world of Aionios is a simulation in a multiversal computer called Origin, which was created to reset two universes after they collided. The collective fear of change coming from everyone whose souls were contained in Origin coalesced into Z, the first Moebius. Unusually for this trope, Z believes his purpose is to protect humanity from the future they fear, and when he casts Aionios into a Forever War, he does it so that he can keep it in eternal stasis.
Web Originals
- In Aurora (2019), the storm god Tynan originated as a mundane storm. The fears of the people caught in the storm gave it life and, quickly, motivation: he developed a taste for their fear, and began to draw strength from mortals' fear of storms.
- The Magnus Archives: The Dread Powers are fourteen godlike psychic beings that exist in a space "adjacent to our universe". Spawned one by one over the course of evolution and human history as new fears arise, each of them embodies a specific domain of fears; for instance, the Flesh embodies the fear animals have of being butchered, but also the human fear of blood and gore, and even body dysmorphia. They can influence events in our universe, but mainly do so to try and spread the fears they're associated with.
Western Animation
- Teen Titans (2003): In "Fear Itself", the Titans are left terrified after watching a horror movie—except for Raven, who claims nothing scares her. Shortly after, the Tower suffers a blackout, where the movie's monsters suddenly appear and pick off the team one-by-one until Raven's left. Once Raven accepts she's afraid, she's able to defeat the monsters. As it turns out, it was Raven herself who caused the ordeal because the movie did scare her, but since her powers act on emotion, her fear manifested as horrors due to her denying her fear.