12mo ago

Did the premise of an entity approaching you only when it's not being viewed originate with Doctor Who's Weeping Angels?

The Weeping Angels apparently originated with Steven Moffat seeing a statue of a weeping angel in a structure in a cemetery and returning later to find out it was gone. At least according to this RadioTimes article. They first appeared in 2007 in the episode Blink.

I am wondering if this mechanic has been done before though?

It's become quite common in the indie horror scene.

In the 2007 video game Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis Watson would not move if in the player's view but would teleport behind the protagonist when given the opportunity. A video of it can be found here.

Considering this could be an easy place holder for developers or a way to get around programming walking animations all together I'm surprised no one took the idea and ran with it before then.

All that said it could have been used in books or movies. Maybe a twist on some other vision-centric myth like Medusa or Orpheus and Eurydice?

43 comments

Boo from Super Mario only moves when your back is turned
It originated in Super Mario Bros 3 in 1988.
- Or the game red light green light...
  Which has roots in ancient China and was originally known as “Dong macha,” meaning “Freeze move” in Chinese. It was believed to have been played as early as the Tang Dynasty.
  According to facts.com so, you know. Gotta be facts.
  
  No more dong matcha for me, thank you
- Good point. I don't know how I didn't think of that
  
  When I saw Dr. Who, I thought you were going to say this was from an episode in the 60's or something, haha

Statues (game) has been around since the eighties at least, and was one of the inspirations for the weeping angels.
Also, cats https://youtu.be/NbwpgyRUv5g
- That Wikipedia link doesn't actually go to an article
  
  It does in the web version. :/ Which client are you using?
  
  Works fine for me on Boost

Also from 2007 (before Blink aired) someone posted to 4chan a similar creepypasta that would become the first entry in the SCP Foundation.
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-173
- Funny enough, a number of years ago a giant 4chan archive surfaced which included a lot of the very first SCP posts that had been lost. It actually confirmed that 173 was posted after Blink aired, meaning it was almost certainly inspired by the episode. Not that it makes the SCP worse, but it's some interesting lore.
  
  Good to know, thanks!

Cats do it and people have been living around cats for thousands of years
- I was going to say, I think this originated with cats!
- That was adorable.
- Cats are scary as fuck.

The hedge animals from Stephen King's "The Shining", 1977, was a great part of the book that didn't make it to the movie.

There was a segment in the 2005 game "Condemned: Criminal Origins" where mannequins in a department store at night would only move (and surround you) when you weren't looking. Scared the shit of me way back then.
- Neat. I've had that on my list of games I should play for a while now

It's kind of an inversion of "don't look back", which is thousands of years old.
- “Don’t not look.”

The ghosts in Super Mario Brothers 3 (1988) would pursue Mario only when he looked away. When he faced them they would stop and hide their faces.
- SMB3 was from 1988? Lies.
  
  Released October 23, 1988... In Japan.
  Us gaijin did not get it until 1990.

this is how cats have operated since the beginning of time.

Check out They Bite by Anthony Boucher, written in 1943.
Edit: this is my favorite horror short story. Read it at night if you want to start jumping at every shadow in the corner of your eye for the next three days or something.

From what I remember they didn't intend for Watson to behave that way, they just forgot to add the animations to him.

In physics quantum particles have been proven to behave differently when they are being observed, maybe he got the idea there?
- “Observation” in quantum mechanics doesn’t mean a person looking at them, it means taking a measurement, which involves interacting with the particles somehow. It’s that interaction that causes the particles to behave differently. In other words, photons behave as a wave (moving according to a wave function) until another particle interacts with them, at which point they behave as a particle (moving in a straight line). See the various different double slit experiments for evidence of this.
  
  I thought the delayed choice quantum erasure experiment showed it wasn't the act of measurement that collapses the wave, but rather it depends on whether the information regarding its path was retrievable or not.
  Scarcelli et al. (2007) reported on a delayed-choice quantum-eraser experiment based on a two-photon imaging scheme. After detecting a photon passed through a double-slit, a random delayed choice was made to erase or not erase the which-path information by the measurement of its distant entangled twin; the particle-like and wave-like behavior of the photon were then recorded simultaneously and respectively by only one set of joint detectors