Coffee Breakfast

Remember when your parents wanted to keep the floors in the house looking nice and clean so they'd remind you to wipe your shoes off before you came in? In this instance however, the focus is more on who or what made these footprints rather than why the floors are dirty. Because, lets face it, when a series of footprints suddenly appear in the form of the deep red color of blood or some other watery/dirty/mucky substance...it is...rather unsettling...to say the least... Especially when you can hear the accompanied sound of the footsteps ringing throughout the area, but you can't exactly make out who or what is lurking nearby until you turn around and come face to face with it... If the person making the footprints is evil or something similar, the muck that is covering their legs and feet will make them look even more out of place and therefore creepier. This trope is typically used to increase suspense. Therefore it happens in horror or drama themed works. If the footprints appear to have been made by a werewolf or some other sort of beast then it's Human To Werewolf Footprints.

Examples:

• A version happens in the first movie with a puppy dog that walks by the main character tracking blood. We then see the body of someone who just jumped off a building and the resulting pool of blood.
• In the opening sequence of, Rena walks barefoot on some broken glass and drips blood onto the floor.
• : Lucy in the beginning of the first episode where she's naked and walks through the pools of blood of the people she slaughtered and in the second episode when she's fighting Bandou. In the tenth episode after she kills Kouta's father and sister, she's seen standing in a pool of their blood.
• This also occurs in, when Howl turns into his true form and leaves wet footprints across the floor, waking up Sophie.

• Done subtly on the first page of when the red-head prophet-of-doom walks casually across the puddle of the Comedian's blood, trailing bloody footprints.
• Played for Laughs in . After falling in the river, Asterix and Obelisk hide from the Romans in a hotel owned by a sympathiser, but unfortunately end up tracking muddy footprints all over the place. The obsessively neat Swiss isn't happy about the prints, especially when he has to muck up the place even more by walking around in their muddy shoes to convince a Roman search party that he left the footprints himself after going for a stroll.

Film

• did this with Samara after she came out of the television, in the form of water from an old well.
• Played entirely straight in, when Tom Cruise walks in the Japanese house with his boots on, and he realizes when he sees his host cleaning the muddy footprints behind him that this just isn't done.
• In, when Faux Satan appears in a fairly well-dressed manner, but his feet are bare and covered in muck.
• Played for laughs in . The characters find a trail of bright red footprints leading down the hallway, prompting one of the male characters to comment "Ew! Someone's on the rag!"
• This happens in the Fathers Day segment of .
• In the 1942 film, there is a trail of muddy animal prints that turn into a human shoe prints.

Literature