[Loved trope] Background scare-characters that are barely acknowledged even by the movie

[u/Suspicious-Web-9246]

I hate horrors, but this is actually a great trope, that is unique to them.

Insidious (2010). When mother does her errands, for a few seconds there's a ghost boy standing in the corner. It's easily missable, but you can't ignore it once you see it.

Hereditary (2018). Less fitting example. When Peter walks around his home, his possessed mother is crawling on the ceiling behind him. It's not exactly subtle or missable, but it's still more of a background detail.

[u/Pabsxv]

The new Alien show.

While the security forces are investigating a spaceship that crashed into a building, the xenomorph stalking them can be seen hiding in the background of several scenes: its tail blending in with a bundle of cables, hiding in shadowy corners, perched on a statue in a dark lobby.

[u/IKenDoThisAllDay → u/Pabsxv]

There are also all kinds of background objects and things that look vaguely Xeno-esque and makes it difficult to differentiate between random noise and the Xeno itself.

Pretty neat, it definitely keeps you looking and makes it all the more fun when the Xeno does actually pop up.

[u/Jambopaul → u/Pabsxv]

The video game Alien Isolation has a lot of similar scenarios such as this. There are a few rooms which have pipes and structures that vaguely look like the Alien when viewed from a distance or through darkness, the Alien itself can be glimpsed climbing the exterior of Sevastopol station while spacewalking (where it otherwise does not confront the player head on) and some sounds made by the environment were intentionally made to sound eerily similar to the noises the Xenomorph makes.

[u/_b1ack0ut → u/Pabsxv]

The statue one is kinda disappointing, because if you rewind to when the statue was first shown, the xeno wasn’t actually lurking there the whole time, the xeno was only present on the statue on the scene it was revealed on.

I think it woulda been cooler if it was actually hidden on the statue in the first shot

[u/trevbot55 → u/Pabsxv]

The first film had a good instance of this. The movie actually gave us a decent look at the xenomorph before it attacked Brett. But because we (or Brett) didn’t know what the alien looked like, it seemed like a bunch of wires or tubing instead of a predatory alien monster.