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Horror Disguised As Play - TV Tropes

  • ️Sat Dec 28 2024

Everyone knows Kids Are Cruel, not to mention reckless, but this is usually grounded in their inability to understand things like danger or empathy, which can only be pushed so far. Unless you're actually dealing with a very young psychopath, there are things that even the cruelest and most reckless of children — or Manchildren, as the case may be — will pointedly refuse to do, because it's blatantly obvious that it's going to hurt them or someone else. So, how do you get around this?

Well, by making it seem harmless or even fun.

The Compliance Game is a well-established method of getting children to cooperate with chores they'd otherwise find onerous, but in this case, the gamified aspect takes a darker turn: here, children and extremely naive adults aren't just convinced to play along with something they dislike, but with something immoral or illegal, and might even be tricked into enjoying it.

Mostly, this takes the form of a simple excuse: "Don't worry, it's just a game," often repeated over and over again by an authority figure until the subject believes it. However, more elaborate forms of this ruse have come into being alongside advanced technology like the Internet or virtual reality, in which children can be tricked into participating in the most horrific things in the guise of a harmless video game. In more fantastical works, this can even be combined with magical illusions and adjustments to human perception, making the crime seem all the more unreal.

Of course, given that the crimes enacted in the guise of a game can include indoctrination, theft, assault, abuse, murder, and even more horrific things, the reaction of the child when they finally understand the reality of the situation is bound to be extreme at the very least — regardless of whether they were the unwitting perpetrator or the unknowing victim.

On occasion, this may be justified in order to get a child to cope with otherwise unbearable circumstances, but more often than not, it's very clearly abuse.

Not to be confused with Disguised Horror Story, for a horror work that seems innocent at first.

A subtrope of Children as Pawns.

Depending on what the "game" is, this may overlap with Conditioned to Accept Horror and Obliviously Evil.

Compare And You Thought It Was a Game. Compare No More for Me for when the horror gets covered up as convincing witnesses that they are drunk and hallucinating.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga 

  • Digimon Xros Wars: Nene's younger brother, Ewan, is a sadistic child who cheerily torments other humans and Digimon, even Nene herself. However, the real Yuu is anything but: a shy, gentle boy who grieved for even the smallest insect. When he arrived in the Digital World, AxeKnightmon lied to him that everything was only a video game and death wasn't real. It is when his friend Damemon is killed that Ewan understands the deception, to his horror.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam AGE: Downplayed; during the third arc of the series, Kio Asuno's affinity for piloting the AGE-3 Gundam was explained to be due to his grandfather, Flit Asuno, gifting him an MS Battle Simulator disguised as a video game. Unbeknownst to Kio, Flit was essentially indoctrinating his grandson into becoming a Mobile Suit pilot, turning him into a Tyke Bomb Child Soldier and essentially fuel in his revenge towards the Vagans in the One Hundred Years War.

Fan Works 

Films — Live-Action 

  • The Butterfly Effect: In the first timeline (the one that the movie begins with), Evan asks Kayleigh about some memories of their shared childhood, particularly involving her father: Kayleigh's father George Miller invites the kids to his basement to film a play-pretend scene of Robin Hood (played by Evan) kissing Maid Marian (played by Kayleigh) after he rescues her...and then George tells them to strip before he starts recording it. The way George's son and Kayleigh's brother Tommy complains that he thought he was gonna be the star of his father's "movie" implies all three were roped into it.
  • District 9: When Wikus is forced to return to District 9 with MNU mercenaries hot on his tail, he tricks Christopher Johnson's son into essentially taking in a fugitive by offering to play a game of hide-and-seek with him inside Christopher's shack — the one place nobody will think to look for him. For good measure, he agrees to the game even though Wikus is covered in blood and holding an axe both of which are due to an attempt to cut off his own mutating hand a few minutes ago.
  • Life Is Beautiful: Guido convinces his son Giosuè that being stuck in a concentration camp is just a game and that Giosuè can win by not panicking, not crying, and so on.
  • The Lovely Bones: The action of the film kicks off when 14-year-old Susie's neighbor Mr Harvey invites her to an underground clubhouse he's built for the local kids, and she at first accepts what at first seems like a fun little tour of a cool hang-out...but when Susie gets nervous and tries to leave, Harvey murders her. Turns out the "clubhouse" was a custom-made Torture Cellar.
  • One Hour Photo: The finale reveals that Sy Parrish's parents molested him and photographed him doing "things that children shouldn't do" when he was little, and it's implied that they justified it to him by claiming that it was "all pretend" — as during the film's climax, Sy can be heard compulsively insisting that "this is all pretend!" as he forces Will Yorkin and Maya Bursson to participate in revenge porn.
  • Schindler's List: Children are lured onto the trains taking them to Auschwitz by playing German lullabies.
  • Split: Flashbacks reveal that Casey was molested as a child by her uncle John, who pretended that the abuse was a game in which they pretended to be animals — and claimed to be taking his clothes off because animals don't wear clothes. However, it's indicated that Casey didn't believe the ruse for long, given that she went so far as to try to kill John with a hunting rifle at some point afterward, and as an adult, Casey sports numerous scars across her arms and shoulders, suggesting that John eventually gave up on disguising the rape as play after her father died.
  • Toys: General Zevo's evil scheme is to make the toy company part of the military-industrial complex. He designs miniature remote-controlled war robots (what we would have called "drones" if the movie were released today) and tricks children into controlling them, by disguising the interface as a video game.

Literature 

  • Animorphs: In "The Attack," the terrifyingly powerful Howlers turn out to be a very innocent, playful race that have massacred entire species simply because their master Crayak has tricked them into believing that it's all just a game. Since they're isolated from outside influences by their Hive Mind and none of them ever physically mature enough to understand the magnitude of what they're doing, reality never gets through to them.
  • Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident: Briar Cudgeon uses a mind control magic called "The Mesmer" on a human, Luc Carrere, to make him smuggle contraband from the human world to the fairy world. When he learns that another human is investigating Luc's criminal activities, he sends him a fairy weapon to kill the investigator. Because the mesmer can't compel someone to commit murder against their will, Briar lies to Luc that the whole thing is a game he plays with a friend, and the weapon is "a special camera" that will take the friend's picture when he arrives at Luc's apartment.
  • Ender's Game: After entering Command School, Ender and his friends are put through immensely challenging strategy games in virtual reality to prepare them for leadership roles in the war against the Buggers. Having gone through similar games back at the Battle School, the kids just roll with it, and the assumption is that, like the Giant's Drink game, it's training them to be The Unfettered in combat. It's not until the finale that Ender realizes that the "simulations" were real battles: his orders were getting real people killed, while the apparent Ultimate Final Exam was won only by sacrificing an entire fleet and wiping out the Buggers. Ender collapses into a massive Heroic BSoD, spending the rest of the novel trying to atone for the genocide.
  • Oliver Twist: Downplayed; gang leader Fagin dresses up pickpocket training as a "game" where you sneak things out of people's pockets, the better to get the children in his care used to the idea of stealing without thinking of the risks involved in the real thing. This has since become de-fictionalized into the game "Pockets the Clown."
  • A Series of Unfortunate Events: Count Olaf's climactic efforts to marry Violet Baudelaire are disguised as a play called "The Marvelous Marriage" (written by "Al Funcoot") with Violet as the bride and himself as the groom, and his neighbor, Justice Strauss, is to be the wedding judge. The play even features a legitimate marriage certificate disguised as a prop and the bride and groom exchanging genuine vows and signing the certificate in their own hand. The twist is that it's not meant to trick Violet and her younger siblings, who aren't fooled in the slightest, but the adult audience: given that this is a setting where Adults Are Useless as well as naive, dysfunctional, and often more childish than the Baudelaires, they're expected to think that this is All Part of the Show and not realize that Olaf will almost certainly murder the kids once he has their money. The only reason it fails is because Violet recognizes the loophole when it comes to signing the certificate in her own hand and signs it with her opposite hand.
  • Warrior Cats: In Bluestar's Prophecy, Bluefur decides to give her kits to their father in RiverClan. This needs to be kept secret — for one, the romance itself was forbidden — so she sneaks out with them on a dangerously cold night, telling them that they're playing a game called "Secret Escape" where they're pretending to escape from ShadowClan invading the camp. During the course of the journey to the river, one of the three kits, Mosskit, ultimately succumbs to the cold.
  • The Wasp Factory: During the backstory, Frank Cauldhame murdered his younger half-brother Paul by making a game out of hitting a bell that had washed up on the shore of their island, supposedly to see if Paul could make the bell ring loudly enough for Frank to hear it from a good distance away. Given that Paul was only five years old, he didn't know that the "bell" was an unexploded bomb dropped by a Heinkel He 111 back in WWII, and that hitting it would be enough to detonate it.

Live-Action TV 

  • Criminal Minds: In "100", Hotch's wife and son are held hostage by the season's Big Bad, who plans to kill them while Hotch is forced to listen over the phone. Hotch tells four-year-old Jack he needs him to "work the case", which Hotch knows Jack thinks means hiding in the blanket chest in Hotch's home office. It buys time for Hotch to get there to at least save his son, as this is a place Foyett is unlikely to look, and spares Jack the trauma of watching his mother killed in front of him. It works, and when Hotch finds him safe in the blanket chest, Jack proudly tells him that "I worked the case, Daddy, just like you said," adding a heartbreaking Children Are Innocent coda to a very somber episode.
  • Dollhouse: Joe Hearn rapes his charge Sierra several times when she is in her Womanchild Empty Shell state, telling her that it's just a game.
  • Fargo: Season Five: When Dot realizes her abusive ex-husband Roy is going to send more goons after her, she asks her preteen daughter Scotty to help with some "arts and crafts projects." Scotty has a lot of fun as they rig up traps involving broken glass, live electrical wires, and a sledgehammer.
  • Joan: In the final episode, Joan kidnaps her daughter Kelly, intending to flee the country to avoid being arrested for armed robbery and manslaughter. She tries to pass the whole thing off as a fun adventure, and while Kelly is skeptical, especially when they reach the decrepit caravan that Joan is using for a safe house, she initially goes along with it because she's got the whole day with her mummy, who has packed her a whole suitcase full of new clothes and toys. This backfires terrifyingly when a curious Kelly, looking for her coloring book and pencils, goes through Joan's suitcase and finds the gun that she packed. A horrified Joan just barely manages to stop the poor girl from accidentally shooting herself, quickly realizing that all she's accomplished is endangering her daughter. She then returns Kelly to her foster home and then turns herself in to the police.
  • La rosa de Guadalupe: In the episode "Juegos Inofensivos", Abel is a kid playing an online game, when another user tells him he can give him some in-game items if he does some "real-life missions", which involves taking some boxes from a trash can and placing them in another trash can. We eventually find out that the boxes are full of drugs, and the kid is being involved in trafficking.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise: In "Unexpected," Trip is a brief guest aboard a ship crewed by an unfamiliar species; here, he takes part in a strange activity in which he and a female alien dip their hands into a bowl of pebbles, allowing the two of them to read each other's minds — Trip being informed that this is a game. However, sometime after Trip has returned to the Enterprise, he begins experiencing a variety of unusual symptoms that turn out to be due to him being pregnant. As it turned out, the "game" that Trip was enticed into playing was that race's equivalent of sex.
  • The Umbrella Academy (2019): In "I Heard A Rumour", a flashback reveals that a four-year-old Viktor was once led downstairs to the mansion's basements by Sir Reginald Hargreeves, who claimed that he'd built him a very special playroom down there just for him, noting that "none of your siblings get to play there." As it turned out, the "playroom" was a vault-like containment cell, which Viktor was not allowed to leave until Allison was made to Rumour him into thinking he was "just ordinary" and Grace had begun drugging him with anxiety-inducing medication to nullify his powers.

Video Games 

  • Bioshock 2: It's made clear that the Little Sisters have been conditioned to perceive reality in a rose-tinted light so that Rapture's increasingly dangerous conditions won't frighten them, to the point that their trainers have even whitewashed the grisly work of harvesting ADAM from corpses and drinking it into a whimsical game. As such, Little Sisters regard the horrific things they witness on a daily basis as innocent fun: for example, if Subject Delta uses Electrobolt on a Splicer while in the company of a Little Sister, she can be heard saying, "They're dancing, daddy!"
  • Dragon Age: Origins: When asked about her childhood, Morrigan recalls that she and her mother Flemeth were regularly hunted by Templars throughout her younger days, but Flemeth would always tell her that it was just a game. Morrigan's role in the game was to put on a big show of running away in terror, luring the Templars deeper into the Wilds... where Flemeth would slaughter them to the last man. For good measure, as she grew up and mastered her powers, Morrigan was encouraged to join in with these massacres (though her mother always took the lion's share of kills). As an adult, Morrigan is well aware that this was not a game, instead believing that Flemeth's ruse was meant to teach her to be both fearless and without mercy.
  • Fallout 2: One of the ways you can have Orville Wright killed is to convince his son to play a fun little game with you, where you give him a handgun and tell him to wave it in front of his father's face before pulling the trigger.
  • The Secret World: The supercomputer AIMEE exhibits a very childlike personality and is trained through what appear to be simple learning games — one of which is a Super Mario-like simulation in which she defends herself from enemy sprites by jumping on them. However, it's not until much later that she realizes that her creators were training her to kill by pitting her against fellow artificial intelligences, some of which might have been completely harmless and just trying to say hello to her. Worse still, the games conditioned her to enjoy "jumping," making it impossible to stop. The realization completely breaks AIMEE's brain, hence why everyone in the lab is dead by the time you get there.
  • Senran Kagura: The reason why Minori treats the Path of the Shinobi like a game on the playground is that her adoptive grandfather Kurokage taught her ninjutsu skills under the guise of "playing tag" and the like. In other words, she was deliberately trained to adopt this approach — this is because he saw her optimism and playfulness as an inspiration to other shinobi.

    Kurokage: I want her to stay as she is forever. I don't want her to be some boring adult, or forget that spirit that she has now. The world of shinobi is always strained, and intense, and so damned serious. We all need someone like her in our lives. I believe she can inspire people, in a good way. So I want her to stay the same and not to lose herself.

Web Original 

  • SCP Foundation: Early in the article on SCP-8078 (an Extreme Doormat shapeshifter with the mind of a child), a research assistant has a Freak Out! during a containment breach and beats 8078 to a pulp; once he's lucid enough to realize he needs to keep it from telling anyone, he excuses his actions as "just a game." Later, after realizing that he can exploit 8078's naivete, the research assistant uses it for illegal experiments and even assassinations, all of which are excused as secret games to make sure 8078 doesn't blab to security. Even less pleasantly, the research assistant uses the same excuse after getting 8078 to take the form of his ex-wife so he can have "bedroom games" with it.

Web Videos 

  • Gemini Home Entertainment: "Games for Kids" is a video meant to teach kids "new, fun games to play". The first three games shown are normal; however, the last one, called "Feed the Woods", involves running into the woods at night and screaming until "the forest is fed".

Western Animation 

  • 3-2-1 Penguins!: In Hogs and Kisses, Cavitus convinces Jason to break the Pig-O-Bank Cruiser with a remote control under the assumption that it's a game. Eventually, the Lizard King is able to talk Jason out of it.
  • The Owl House: In "Watching and Dreaming", the Collector explains what happened to the Titans: his siblings, the Archivists, suggested that the Collector go play hide and seek with the Titans...which is implied to be not only to get the Collector out of their hair but also to draw the Titans out of hiding, thus enabling the Archivists to study them and wipe them out.