NEW INFO! (from Notch's blog)
I put some stuff into the spoiler, but the full is
here
Last weekend, I started working on a new mob because I was frustrated with the slow progress on some town code I was writing, and for some reason I decided to make yet another creepy one. It’s dark, it has long and narrow limbs, moves very slowly, and will pick up blocks and move them around... when I playtested it, it mostly felt like a regular zombie. There’s was a distinct mismatch between looking creepy and not actually playing creepy. When I made it move faster towards the player when attacking, and deal more damage, it got more difficult and I started respecting it, but it never felt creepy or scary.
So I thought some about what “creepy” actually is
So I made it passive until you looked straight at it.
Still, that was more scary than creepy. It’s like a jump scare in a movie...I wanted something a bit more psychological. So to really drive home the point of looking at them being bad, I made the Endermen freeze and turn towards you when you look at them. As long as you look straight at them, they stand perfectly still and look straight at you. As soon as you look away, they will run (very fast) towards you.
And they teleport.
When they attack, you know it’s your fault. When you happen to look at one, you can keep looking at it to figure out how to deal with it, but you know it WILL reach you very fast once you stop looking at it.
And that, my friends, is creepy. Possibly too creepy.