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Lily's Poke-Madhouse / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Don't worry! It's just a dream! ||For now...||While primarily a slice-of-life comic focusing on interpersonal relationships, Lily isn't afraid to dip her toes into darker themes every now and again.
- A lot of the behind-the-scenes lore deals with some pretty gruesome subject matter, including exotic meat trading, Wife Husbandry, eugenics, mass-murder and Pokemon being maimed in battle.
- Pokemon Abuse, the central issue the comic deals with, is set up as an extremely insidious mesh of grooming, power dynamics, and normalized behavior that results in an issue so rampant and ignored by the general public that the League has a hard time keeping it in check.
- Pokemon Abuse also mirrors several real-world examples of sexual exploitation, with Teacher/Student Romance and ParentChild Incest being directly referenced to describe the power dynamics between a trainer and Pokemon.
- Pokemon Abuse is cited as the reason Gardevoir are going extinct, as the bonds they rely on for healthy neurological development are frequently weaponized to groom Ralts from a young age. The fact that the Pokemon has developed a memetic reputation for it in-universe implies that the public does not take this issue seriously at all.
- G's entire character arc involves the sheer abject terror she experiences when the reality that she's ||fallen in love with Lily|| finally sinks in. The amount of trust she has to put on Lily to not take advantage of the situation, regardless of whether G wants her to or not, has resulted in her being very insecure about how their friendship is interpreted and very concerned about the way Lily seems unbothered by what people say about them.
- It's been implied by Orchard on numerous occasions that while Lily was an enforcer, she arrested someone for trying to feed her Gardevoir meat.
- It was briefly hinted at that the League has been using someone Lily arrested as a vector to study mating bonds between Gardevoir and Humans. It is unknown what this research involves, but the Gardevoir involved was recently revealed to have suicidal depression, and the human in this couple was dubbed
*Subject One*.
- All of this becomes more chilling when you remember that until very recently, ||Lily's wiki page listed one of her nicknames being
*Subject Three*.||
- The reason G was banned from competitive battling was that she went into
*Surrender to Madness* and the resulting Berserk Mode ended with her cutting off a Blaziken's leg.
-
*Surrender to Madness* itself. It's described as G surrendering to all of her baser instincts and letting her ||mating bond with Lily|| loose at it's full strength. This turns her into an extremely powerful fighter, but also makes her so possessive of Lily in this form that she is driven to violence if anyone comes within five feet of her. *Surrender to Madness* ultimately represents the very kind of person G has been trying so hard to avoid becoming, and is said to require a great deal of trust in Lily to even use as she is completely at Lily's mercy in this form.
- After Bonnie is accidentally created during the cloning experiment, the doctor with the ponytail orders for Bonnie to be
*terminated*. When Lily points out that doing this would be tantamount to killing a newborn infant, Dr. Ponytail callously points out that she's about the same level of maturity as a toddler, and that because Bonnie is "company property", they have every right to kill her. Luckily G gives Lily a way to save Bonnie, but think about it. If it weren't for Lily's immediate love for Bonnie and G's quick thinking, Dr. Ponytail would have *killed a child*.
- Universe 2-82 is an Alternate Universe in which G and Lily are not only in a romantic relationship, but married. Ignoring all the horrifying implications, this relationship has not only lead to them both becoming unstable Stepford Smilers it also effectively brought out the worst in each of them. G of the 2-82 universe is a manipulative sleazebag, who actively encourages mainverse's G to
*gaslight mainverse's Lily into a relationship* in the *Honesty* Arc, implying that she did the very same thing to her Lily, while Lily of the 2-82 universe is an arrogant Jerkass who seemingly forsook all her morals concerning pokemon abuse, downright brags about her and 2-82's G's relationship and ridicules mainverse's Lily's much healthier relationship with Mikaila, while Mikaila is sitting right next to them and listening. It's basically all the reasons why Lilyvoir should *never* happen rolled into one extremely cursed AU.
- The Violate arc can be seen as a metaphor for rape whether the author's intent was there or not (also doesn't help that despite them being joke posts there are side stories with similar themes).
- In regards to the mating bond, there is a scene where Mikaila berates Lily for almost severing the bond (thus ending G's life) comparing her to a previous abusive partner.
- G is canonically an adult when it occurs as 15 is the end lifespan in this universe for the Gardevoir line, Lily is 15 as well.
- G attempts to murder an infant Ralts named Cala for bonding with Lily
- G uses Surrender to Madness on a couple of kids bullying a kid, they're never seen again. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LilysPokeMadhouse |
Lawrence of Arabia / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
The scene where the Turkish soldiers capture Lawrence. First it seems like they'll figure out who he really is, then the creepy Turkish Bey starts hitting on him, strips him and feels him up. When Lawrence tries to fight back he's beaten, and it's heavily implied that he's gang raped. Made especially gut-wrenching by the fact that poor Ali is outside and can hear what's going on but is powerless to help him.
The strong implication that the Bey's been doing this for years, and that not all of his victims were as lucky as Lawrence, is pretty unsettling as well. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LawrenceOfArabia |
Lily C.A.T. / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
# Unmarked spoilers are ahead, per Spoilers Off rule.
- Some of the more grotesque deaths, especially the real Lily cat, who is graphically torn apart and crushed by the alien bacterium.
- When Hiro and Nancy escape the Saldes the physical body of the bacterium grabs hold of their shuttle. As it tries to breach the hull, it forms the faces of their dead friends at the windows and screams for help
*using their voices*. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LilyCAT |
Life on Mars (2006) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- In many ways, it is all about Nightmare Fuel coming to life for Sam. I found the Test Card Girl bloody terrifying even
*before* this show aired...
- Even scarier: Series 2, episode 1. That bloody whistling.
- Whether you take it as Sam being in a coma or go with the
*Ashes to Ashes (2008)* explanation, all the good he does to affect the future from 1973 is completely meaningless. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LifeOnMars2006 |
Life SMP / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
The series' very premise is a Deadly Game with only one survivor... at most. Is it surprising that there are plenty of
*terrifying* moments throughout it all?
## General
- The concept of the Red Lives is unnerving by itself. At any time,
*anyone* can drop to their final life, and go from a peaceful player to a cold-blooded killer whose only goal is to murder everyone on the entire server. Hope you were on good terms with them before they turned...
- Season 2 turns this up to eleven. If you're a Red Life, all prior alliances and agreements are void, any friendships you may have had are dissolved, and your only goal is murder, by any means possible.
- Season 2 also introduces the concept of the Boogeyman. At the start of every session, a number of players (usually one but it can be multiple) are selected to become the Boogeyman, and their one goal for that session is to kill someone. If they don't kill someone before the session is over, at the start of the next session they will
*instantly turn Red* (in Last Life) or lose up to eight hours of their lives (in Limited Life). Oh, and the same rules that apply for Red Lives also apply to the Boogeyman, meaning they can kill anyone, regardless of affiliation. And it could be *anyone*.
## Season 1: 3rd Life
- The Desert (Grian and Scar) are a terrifying duo when they want to be. Especially after Scar turns Red, Grian takes it as an opportunity to go ham on everyone else, and with permission from Scar, lays a TNT trap that winds up killing
*three* people. Not only that, after seeing that two more people have turned Red, Grian proposes inviting them to the faction, renaming it "the Red Desert", and changing its goal to *taking out the entire server*. And all this was before Grian even loses his first life (which took until Day 7), meaning the single deadliest event on the server was caused not by a Red player as everyone feared, but a then-unassuming Green player. Grian just goes to show that you don't need to be a Red Name to be a threat.
- The Battle of the Red Desert in the first part of Day 7 is surprisingly disturbing to watch.
- Just before the battle, Dogwarts discuss who they want to target in the fight. What makes this disturbing is how
*casually* they talk about this, like they're discussing weekend plans over lunch. note : Their target was Scott, by the way. Him being the first to go down was not unintentional.
- The bulk of the battle begins with the two sides firing on each other. While the Red Desert and the Flower Forest originally intend to lure Dogwarts forces into multiple traps, they wind up activating the traps too late, resulting in a Curb-Stomp Battle in Dogwarts' favour where 3/4 of the two factions' alliance dead in the battle, one of them taken out of the fight permanently.
- Jimmy's perspective is... harsh to watch in-character. Being on the Red Life half of the dual factions and stuck in the bunker, the poor man watches his husband get shot to death in front of him, hears his other ally die, it's him and Scar left to defend everything as everything goes haywire, then he gets shot and dies trying to get down the escape ladder. And this time, unlike the other times, he can't even come back anymore.
- After Scar escapes the bunker as the Sole Survivor, the Crastle forces arrive... then Dogwarts proceeds to curb-stomp
*them* too, even though two among them (Martyn and Skizz) weren't even fighting, instead chasing down Scar for the Red banner he stole episodes ago.
- After winning the Battle of the Red Desert, Dogwarts still barely gets a moment to breathe. After Martyn dies trying to retrieve the Red banner they've been after this entire time, everyone manages to regroup, Martyn and Impulse manage to get rid of a TNT minecart trap and patch up the Dogwarts base a little... then the Red Desert drops in from the ceiling and murders Impulse right then and there.
## Season 2: Last Life
-
*The Boogeyman.* Every session, one or more players are secretly selected as the Boogeyman, with as their only goal to kill another player. The concept alone is enough to make every player on the server mistrustful of even their closest allies, and the ways the various Boogeymen have operated are equally horrific.
- On Day 1, Bdubs and Etho spent an hour together, both having
*many* chances to kill one another, so both were convinced the other wasn't the Boogeyman. They then met up with Grian, and the three of them started enchanting together... And then, mid-enchanting session, Bdubs suddenly attacked and killed Grian. This was terrifying from both Grian *and* Etho's point of view, from Grian's because getting jumped was so sudden he barely had time to react, and from Etho's because he suddenly realized *he'd been hanging out with the Boogeyman all session*.
- On Day 2, Joel offered to let the Southlands use the stolen enchantment table, for a small price. The cave Joel led them down was trapped, which Grian immediately spotted. Joel then started furiously attacking the Southlands (including Mumbo, who'd died in lava earlier and had no armor), forcing them to flee the cave in a mad panic. Mumbo managed to kill Joel before he got any kills in... but then immediately got murdered from behind by Scar, that day's
*second* Boogeyman.
- On Day 3, Lizzie offered Scott and Pearl an alliance; if they helped her dig out a slime chunk, all three of them could make unlimited use of the slime farm. Scott and Pearl agreed, and they followed her down a ladder... only for Lizzie to suddenly step off the ladder into a small side-hallway, and take away the water at the bottom, revealing a pitfall trap. Pearl spotted the trap and followed her into the side-hallway, but before she could process what that meant, Lizzie was already attacking her. Pearl was murdered in a cramped little hallway, with no way out, while Scott watched from half-way up the ladder, unable to help in any way.
- The way the Reds behave is...
*unnerving*, to say the least.
- The mysterious voice accosting Martyn throughout the series has always been unnerving, but his perspective of Day 8
*really* cranks the terrifyingness up a notch. Martyn initially hallucinates the other Southlands members being with him to make fun of Mumbo's intro, but after he snaps out of it and realizes he's completely alone, the voice returns... and it's *not* happy. What follows is a tense scene of Martyn running away in a blind panic while the voice *screams* at him in his head, blaming him for the deaths of the other Southlanders. **||The Watcher||:** They're all gone! **Martyn:** *(running, hyperventilating)* No, NO, *NO!* **||The Watcher||:** It's *your* fault! **Martyn:** You said only [Grian] had to die! **||The Watcher||:** And you FAILED!
## Season 3: Double Life
## Season 4: Limited Life
- In the previous three seasons, only Red Lives can kill, though this rule is loosely enforced at best. In
*this* season, however, while Red Lives can obviously still kill Yellows and Greens, *Yellow Lives* are legally allowed to kill Green Lives, which adds another layer of paranoia to the players.
- The Bread Bridge trap on Day 2. While it appears to be just another one of the Bad Boys' silly antics (with their history), and their encroachment on Entertainment Mountain territory is simply an annoyance, it becomes much more terrifying when it's revealed to be a calculated Boogeyman kill courtesy of Joel, with his non-Boogey allies in on the scheme.
- Scar doesn't even
*see* it coming, being located right under the bridge when it happens. Even though he predicted it to be a trap the moment he saw it, not even this knowledge could save him from having two hours of his life-time deducted.
- While it can be seen out of a corner of Cleo's eye, by the time she's realized, it's already too late for her to move out of the way.
- By the start of Day 4, the number of players who
*haven't* dropped to Yellow can be counted on one hand, with a few phasing between colours due to various kills. Since non-Boogeyman players can only gain life-time by punching up the colour levels, it's safe to say that the last Green Names did *not* enjoy being hunted for their life-time during the first hour of Day 4. The Yellow Names also start displaying... unnervingly bloodthirsty behaviour that one would normally expect from in Red Names.
- At the very end of the series, Martyn's betrayal can be quite horrifying to watch, especially from Impulse's perspective. Here they are, having agreed to have a fair, honourable, three-way Duel to the Death, having even
*died* to make sure everyone's on a similar life-time... then Martyn pulls out a sword, hacks his Day 1 ally to death on the spot, and the only thing he can do is run and unsuccessfully put a lava bucket down before being cut down himself mere seconds later. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LifeSMP |
Limbus Company / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Welcome back to the City, where every single bad thing about Cyberpunk is taken to its logical extreme. And instead of playing as a bigshot with all the well-meaning and well-done people going against you, you now take control of "Sinners" that are near the bottom of the foodchain with incredibly insane and sadistic people that are the face of the city rather than the exceptions, around the corner waiting to make your Sinners prey.
Unlike in Library of Ruina where the Fixer and Syndicate communities are in the forefront, this time, the Wings are in the forefront, and in several imstances, even their executives are visible and upfront. Therefore, expect every one out of three person you meet to be some heinously awful and/or insane lunatic who has no qualms and no remorse committing all sorts of horrible atrocities for every reason you can imagine, be it pragmatism, practical usage or simply for no reason bar being pure evil for the sake of. It's such a horrible setting that it would make the Corpos in Cyberpunk look like amateurs.
Abnormalities and E.G.O.
The very concept of E.G.O Corrosion. Whereas its introduction in Wonder Lab was very minor and only noted it to be dangerous in the long run, we get to see its full extent in this game. An E.G.O. Corrosion is effectively the Abnormality itself as long as it exists. The Gameplay and Story Integration also counts, since an E.G.O. Corrosion can only happen ingame when you activate an E.G.O. while the Sinner has low sanity (that, by the way, is reached by letting them see their allies die one by one), which means that their psyche has to become unstable enough. They'll have a Sanity Slippage and become Ax-Crazy, and thus, E.G.O. Corrosion can be considered a catharsis of all the built-up despair, from being overwhelmed by it all. Letting a sinner Corrode their E.G.O. is essentially torture in itself.
Whereas standard E.G.O. use outfits the Sinner in an outfit that draws inspiration from the Abnormality it comes from, Corrosions warp the user's entire body. In Fae Lantern's corruption, Gregor becomes part of the tree; in Pursuance's corrosion, Meursalt changes his face to only have many eyes on it, becoming an Angelic Abomination; and in Fourth Match Flame's corruption, Yi Sang becomes a walking, charred corpse. Anyone corroded by the Telepole E.G.O. takes the form of the wolf it comes from — but not just the wolf; their face and body replaces the charred corpse on the wolf's back.
Though not as outwardly Body Horror as some of the others, the attack animation for Faust's Hex Nail ends with a cereal box falling out of the gaping hole in its front in a pool of blood, giving it imagery disturbingly close to a miscarriage.
My Form Empties is a pretty unnerving Abnormality by itself, being a strange, bleeding Buddhist statue who can brainwash people, but its unique battle theme is even more unnerving: unlike the more rock-heavy and fast themes of fights, My Form Empties' theme is eerily quiet, with only ominous sounds like the wind blowing, a bell ringing or monastic hymns breaking the silence.
Dongrang proves definitively that gaining an E.G.O isn't a sign of moral character or heroism, it's simply pure determination and the acceptance of the self as you are - even if that self is remorseless and unempathetic. Awakening an E.G.O makes Dongrang worse, since it effectively solidifies his will and removes even the facade of friendliness he put on.
Mirror Dungeon Events
One event features the Sinners coming across a horribly mutated creature wandering around, with the description noting that it was a passenger twisted and lost between dimensions, with no one even knowing they disappeared... and then confirms what the player may be thinking and clarifying that the transport company would know and pretend the passenger never existed. That's right; W Corp's WARP Trains not only have the horrific experiences like Love Town happen regularly, but sometimes the results of said experiences manage to escape the Trains. Leaving the poor bastard trapped in that state, wandering between dimensions forever.
Successfully giving the passenger directions make the situation even worse; they drop a Wing-branded lighter, with the game confirming that they weren't a passenger; they were one of the WARP Cleanup Crew. Not even W Corp's own employees are safe from being victims of the WARP Trains.
What's worse, the E.G.O stemming from it gives the user bullfighter attire - bullfighting is notoriously torturous for the involved animals.
Chapter 1
One of the first things we learn is how Mephistopheles gets fuel: by being fed live people into a meat grinder, as some unfortunate Backstreet thugs found out.
G Corp is now known as Gravity Corp, but it used to be a much more macabre Gene Corp that fused humans with insect DNA to create human-insect hybrids for war. And as Gregor can testify, its executives were anything but nice people.
Through Gregor's memories, we get another view of the dreaded Smoke War, this time on the side of the old Gene Corp soldier fighting for the old L Corp before Lobotomy Corporation took its place as a Wing. And oh boy, it's just as horrifying as it was described by Roland and Salvador during Library of Ruina.
Not only do we get to see thousands of soldiers of Gene Corp facing Fixers in a battlefield of massive proportion, but we also see why Gregor is considered the poster boy of Gene Corp. Unlike him who's procedure was perfect, soldiers of Gene corps are shown mutating during the war. Some are growing wings during the fight, other have their arms and legs completely changing into insect appendages like scythes and claws. The worst are the ones like Tomah who have antennae or weird worm-like appendages coming out of their mouths and eyes. YUCK!
The culmination of Gregor's walk down nightmare lane in his flashbacks to the Smoke War ends with tons of giant hands materializing from the sky and slamming down to crush the G Corp soldiers in the flashback as if they really were nothing but bugs. Especially horrific once one learns that the hands are meant to represent Hermann, the scientist who performed his procedure and the one he calls "mother".
Even worse? After spending so much time trying to flee from the hands and avoid getting crushed, Gregor realizes that the only way to end it all is to give up and allow the hands to catch him. Ultimately, he feels that the truth is he really can't run away from his past, or her.
In a flashback to his time after the war, we're treated to a scene where after a good samaritan tries to check on Gregor when she notice something is wrong, his arm goes wild without his meaning to and nearly impales the poor woman. He's audibly terrified and desperate, begging the guards on the train to cut off his arm to keep him from hurting anyone. Being betrayed by his own body to the point the only way to keep others safe is to mutilate himself to even temporarily cease being a danger.
Though it's used as a throwaway line, Gregor mentions that even though he doesn't mind dancing to placate the Mariachi Syndicate, he thinks he ought not to because the stimulation of something as simple as dancing might cause him to go out of control and cause his arm to attack the audience.
Kill the loved ones or comrades of a Middle Finger, and on the next day they'll slaughter the entire neighborhood you're in. Rodion learnt this the hard way when she killed a tax collector that happens to be the mother of a Middle goon.
This is essentially the same problem as the Thumb; the Fingers all have traits and culture that would otherwise be admirable virtues, but since they twist it to the most logical conclusion, they instead define them as the horrific organizations they are.
Chapter 3
Everything about Nagel und Hammer. A brutal, extremist organization that's effectively a natural body supremacist cult, they're introduced wanting to kill Dante for the simple crime of having a prosthetic head and only get worse from there. It's revealed they murdered effectively an entire innocent village just because of their craft of making prosthetic bodies, and did so via one of the worst ways to die historically; Impalement, with a notice that most of the victims are still barely clinging to life and can take days to finally die from their mortal injuries. And these victims are scattered throughout the entire chapter, numbering in the hundreds in all likeliness.
At one point, the Sinners stumble across a pair of Inquisitors torturing one of their victims in the Chapter's dungeon. Said victim, due to their prosthetics, is still alive even as the Inquisitors effectively disembowel them, begging them to stop only for the Inquisitors to cruelly taunt them by asking if they can still cry with their prosthetics, only to dismiss it as "fake" when they actually do.
The worst part of the Inquisition? They're not just a brutal syndicate or a lone schmo; they're corporate backed by N Corp, and its members are all N Corp employees. The massacre happens inside K Corp's nest but because they're members of a Wing, not a single security force is raised to stop them.
This seems like a one-off case of random lunacy, but in The Distortion Detective (likely way before the company started to turn a bunch of its employees into lunatic inquisitors), N Corp did attempt to kill Moses's crew because YuRiA filmed a bunch of Sweepers in the Night of the Backstreets, which is otherwise unaccountable. In Leviathan, Vergillus's squad was slaughtered for the same reason right before he was forced to join Limbus Company alongside Charon. That's right. On top of Fantastic Racism against prosthetics, they have a whole set of 14 infractions that are grounds for slaughter, and it's not the first time they kill people over bizarre reasons. N Corp is infamous for things like this.
The implications on why the N Corp. employees are even allowed in to smash high-end prosthetic plants and kill people inside K Corp's turf with little resistance whatsoever. When Don is beating Sinclair, he tells her that back in the day, groups like that didn't even exist in Nest K, but one day they "just happened" to show up. Given that those are actual Wing employees and not a Syndicate, it suggests that this happens because both Wings had a fairly lucrative business deal going on. As for the deal itself? K Corp. is a Wing that focuses on medicine and bio-augmentation, so a prosthetic plant in their turf obviously isn't a welcome addition. The rest speak for themselves; said plant is hurting their economic baseline or ideals, so they're hiring N Corp to clean it up. The Inquisitors aren't even invaders looking for trouble, they are legitimate employees deployed through legitimate procedures doing throughly sanctioned business. It says a lot about how grim the situation is for the people living in Sinclair's town when the more well-going Wings are willing to let the actually insane ones they are doing business with do whatever they want over a neat business deal.
Meursault (a former employee of N Corp.)'s reaction to all of this. While it's the first time he saw the employees working for Nagel und Hammer raze entire cities, he's not surprised that something like this would happen, telling the group that they are the Wing who believes it "acts in the interest of humanity" and even implies to Heathcliff that he once considered joining the group but turned down the offer. The implication being he always knew them as violent, order-obsessed ilk and it's not just several nutcases with a severe case of Fantastic Racism.
Kromer is another very disturbing and irredeemably evil character like Elena before her. She acts like a very disturbing Yandere to Sinclair and is deployed by N Corp to devastate his hometown under her superior's orders to obtain the Golden Bough in the L Corp branch under it. She also purposefully desecrates his family's grave (of which she previously killed) to spite Sinclair. She enjoys every bit of sadism she throws out as much as Elena shamelessly enjoys killing her four thousand or so people. Oh, and this is an official N Corp employee out for a slaughter (that is very likely also sanctioned by the Wing's higher-ups, considering they did nothing over it) and not a random Syndicate leader or a lone wolf threat.
To add onto her possessiveness of Sinclair, Kromer believes wholeheartedly in some destined partnership between herself and Sinclair because she saw a vision of an alternate timeline where Sinclair actually joined her in Nagel Und Hammer's zealotry. And even in the game's timeline where she doesn't have that reality, she does everything in her power to get him to obsess over her, even if that obsessiveness is nothing but hatred. She takes just as much glee in the idea of him horrifically brutalizing her as she does in the partnership she desires from him. Yikes.
The battlefield she fought, manifested by the Golden Bough's power, is a Corpse Land that symbolizes her fanaticism of destroying all prosthetic users.
Kromer's One-Winged Angel form is very disturbing. Her lower-body turns a pile of flesh with centipede-like legs with an iron maiden-like jaw on her chest.
The aftermath of Kromer's fight. Sinclair is barely struggling, the rest are wiped out and even Dante realizes the risk of danger. The whole group of Sinners might had been dead on-spot if not for Demian's intervention. What makes this even worse is the Nagel und Hammer front itself is implied to be still intact despite their leader's death, and can regroup to wreck more havoc at the borders if N Corp itself likes to.
This whole thing paints N Corp as a very disturbing Wing. While most Wings are described to be insane corporate overlords with little or no common sense, just like W Corp before them with their WARP Trains, N Corp takes it to a whole, new level. Contrasting the few Wing Employees we do see, including the Head, who are Punch Clock Villains or Affably Evil madmen, every other major N Corp employee we see bar Vespa Carabro are either Mad Scientists or insane lunatics of the highest caliber. As Vespa and Kromer suggests, whatever they sent in will be hell even for high rank Fixers, and they will gleefully deploy them on random people for bizarre reasons such as filming in the Backstreets or using prosthetic arms. One only wonders do they still have people like Hermann or Kromer ready to launch at the next group of unfortunate Fixers who just happened to accidentally break a Taboo or offended them.
Even worse is that according to Mersault in Chapter 3 and in Dante's Notes, the Nagel und Hammer Inquisitor subsidiary is not supposed to operate on such a gigantic scale, and used to be a small-scale movement when he was working in N Corp. One only wonders is there a massive Singularity experiment within N Corp. that uses its own employees as test subjects.
They have access to a type of tech known as "Canned Experience" which allows anyone who consumes them to experience something without actually going through it. According to Leviathan, they have a vending machine that sells canisters that cause anyone who consumes them to experience suicide. It gets worse from here — N Corp. Heathcliff and Mersault's entries imply that most, if not all Nagel und Hammer inquisitors are Wing employees brainwashed through this Canned Experience tech, turning them into the Ax-Crazy inquisitor cultists with an insane hatred against prosthetics we do see. Oh and that's not all — Mersault suggests that the Inquisitors were a fringe group back in the days, rather than the massive organization of Knight Templar crazies they are now. One only wonders if there is a singularity experiment that uses its own employees as test subjects. Whatever this is, like with W Corp's Love Town trains, it makes little to no sense and nobody knows what the higher-ups are thinking with this absolutely wicked idea.
From Sinclair's perspective, and depending on how you personally view the process, his quiet observation as his family undergoes a full body prosthetic replacement procedure one by one is a silent sort of horror. One by one, the familiar faces of his family are replaced by metal heads completely void of any human features. Until he's the only one left at the family breakfast table who can actually eat anything anymore. Combined with the knowledge that, one day, no matter his personal reservations or arguments, the same thing is going to happen to him whether he likes it or not. The window in his base E.G.O art has the table set at christmas, but there's not just the three mechanical humans resembling his family - there's four. As much as he would bear a hatred over Kromer for killing his parents, Sinclair is noticably disgusted and terrified by this. There's no wonder why there are actual timelines where not only he didn't end up being an Arch-Enemy of Kromer (or a variant based on Faust), he became cohorts with her to purge all prostethic-modified humans.
There's also the implication that the Sinclair family may have also had a pet dog that they also made undergo the process, with all the unsettling implications of choosing to give an animal that can't understand the changes a mechanical body would bring. Though it's left a bit more ambiguous as to whether the robotic dog Sinclair mentions in his flashbacks was ever originally a living animal or was simply a robot that looks like a pet, the plausibility on its own is a bit chilling.
Chapter 4
Right off the bat, we get an Abnormality rampaging in the middle of K Corps Nest. Previous games have shown that the Nests of non-fallen Wings are thought to be safe havens where you don't have to worry about something big and nasty tearing them apart, and thus if said something does get though, it's treated very seriously and becomes more than a commotion amongst the Wing's management and the Fixer community alike. They still are... unless the Wing itself decides to have some fun with it. While the Abnormality was dealt with before it could cause too much damage, at least a city block was destroyed and countless people were killed. It doesn't help that K Corp wasn't trying very hard to contain it and was actively suppressing evidence that something was going horribly wrong, and after the Sinners deal with the Abnormality and had a chat with some K Corp employees, we know why. The Abnormality was deliberately let out to test Limbus Company, something that the Sinners merrily let slide unlike Kromer's Inquisition. There's something very wrong when one of the more well-to-go Wings set up a catastrophe with hundreds dead just to draw the attention of our heroes, who also couldn't care less.
The seemingly benign K Corp has a rather...odd dark secret. It's not something overtly destructive as W Corp's "Love Town" Trains or N Corp's taboos or brainwashed Inquisitors, but an ethically distasteful one. Remember how Lobotomy Corporation's text suggests the City has infinite, cheap food supplies? Well, turns out K Corp manufactures genetically modified chickens that have their body parts routinely cut off for quality meat and regenerated with HP bullets. Truly an animal rights group's worst nightmare.
When the Hell's Chicken event was running, the prize screen had a note stating that the food products of Bodhisattava Chicken was not produced by K Corps Singularity. Which means that said 'dark secret' may not be so secret after all...
The Shi Association's assassination of Shrenne. One moment she's alive and speaking, then you hear and see a slash down the middle of her body as she falls silent... And a thin red line appears down the middle of her whole body before she falls over, dead and split in half with a sickening squelching noise as the narration discusses the splashing fluids from her sliced brain hemispheres. And nobody in the room even realizes what's happening except Ryoshu, who tells everyone to shut up, stay still and not even breathe. Then the wall gives way as the assassins make their getaway, revealing that the assassin sliced through a wall and still cleanly killed off Shrenne in a single blow. Ishmael then reveals that it had to have been the Shi Association's doing, and that the assassin couldn't have been a low-ranking member from Sections 5 or 6, meaning that this was the doing of someone who was from Section 4 at minimum. It's a reminder that the Section 2 Shi Association Fixers we fight in Library of Ruina are beaten fairly quickly as jobbers only because of the Library's inherent magic and they're heavily weakened before they're thrown into the Library — they're apex predators to the typical cityfolk who don't even have the resources the Library has.
The truth behind K Corp's HP bullets and healing serum. They're not nanomachines as Dongrang initially claimed, but the tears of a captured entity that K Corp forces to watch recorded videos of human suffering, before collecting the tears that it sheds after. All of this sheds light on some of K Corp's prior actions: the recording of dying civilians seemingly for media purposes, the lack of response to the Brass Bull's rampage, and even the sanctioning of Nagel und Hammer to terrorize their own territory - all of it which were seemingly also mutual-benefit business deals that also get more recorded agony to fuel the entity's suffering. There's no wonder they're so laid back and well done when they themselves don't even need to get their hands dirty for the sake of energy gain.
The entity itself is also plenty grotesque, being an enormous mass of flesh and wires with a single bloodshot eye that is being pried open by K Corp's machines. When being shown footage, it is shown visibly suffering and panicking as its pupils dart around.
The tears are also not "healing" in the normal sense: they merely revert the target to its original form. Unfortunately, the serum doesn't know what an original form is, which is where the refining process comes in. Restoring the human body is one thing, but it can also be used to forcibly mutate or regress individuals, such as how test subjects who were forced to believe they were insects through mental suggestion were literally regressed into insectoid monsters. If the tears have no refining, then anyone that touches them will be reverted back to the "original form of humanity", instantly killing them without any trace left behind.
Even worse, this is not how the Singularity used to run — the previous Manager of K Corp made it cry by telling it sad stories. Unfortunately, said CEO died of old age, and another more ruthless CEO got in and declared that the previous one is too ineffective. Dongrang then sold her the mirrors and used it to broadcast atrocities across the City for the eye, causing it to cry more. The new management successfully industrialized their Singularity in an astonishingly constructive way, but by this point, all scientific morals might as well as be flushed down the drain. Given that K Corp still manage to do more good than harm with their Singularity and they're very good at Obfuscating Insanity to the point that a run-of-the-mill Cityfolk won't even notice it unlike other Wings, but at what price?
If you're the type who does things and hobbies for the sake of satisfying intellectual curiosity, then the story of how the League of Nine Litterateurs eventually met their end is definitely a huge nightmare fuel. It is a slow, gradual sort of horror, but nevertheless, there is the reason why people tend to keep their funky tech in their own little Syndicates — the Wings will go out of their way to grab them for their own use in ways that would make Nineteen Eighty-Four look like child's play. To put in some detail when many parties began to caught wind of the technologies invented by the Nine Litterateurs, they eventually caught attention of T Corp's tech agency due to their inventions being "unregistered". While at first they only received the notice that the technology needs to be registered to the agency, what followed afterwards basically amounted to witch hunt to the point its members eventually disappeared one by one after several visits from them. T Corp simply read their past, present and future and landed exactly in their direction to capture and vanish them, and the only members who survived are the ones who sold themselves to other Wings like K Corp and N Corp. They also didn't immediately arrest the targeted members, but instead decided to work in such way that utterly crushed the hopes and spirit of the target. It is both nightmarish and depressing to think that the thing they initially built as nothing but pure expression towards their love for technology ultimately became the Litterateurs' downfall.
At the end of Yi Sang's flashback, we learn Hermann's goal: the complete obliteration of all Mirror Worlds, leaving the canon version of the City as the only timeline in existence. The Mirror Worlds are not actual alternate universes but possible futures diverged from the canon timeline, but it becomes even worse once you remember that in Leviathan, we're shown that one such world is our own universe.
T Corp itself is very disturbing and is easily some of the most batshit insane Wings ever seen. Not because it represents some dystopian future society, but represents a time that very much existed in the 1800s, when living standards were ironically at their lowest for the working class despite the industrial revolution, cities were bleak and miserable for all but the high class, factory slaves and child labour was common and legal. Even the T Corp collectors are essentially Steampunk Pinkertons. There's truly a price of silence — the Wing essentially sacrificed every single thing inside their quarters for the sake of every one else, given how they do make full, constructive use of their Singularity. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LimbusCompany |
Liminal Land / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
It's okay, she's just giggling!
Liminal Land is shaping up to be a very creepy Analog Horror about an amusement park with a dark secret.
- Every single Nightmare Face. There's barely any photographed face that isn't blurred, horribly stretched, or otherwise warped to the point it just looks
*wrong*. It's one thing for a picture to have strong motion blur, but it's another thing for everyone to look like their faces are caving in.
- HOME. It was meant to be an underground suburbia so visitors would stay onsite for as long as possible. People loved it so much, they wanted to live there permanently. The washed-out colors, harsh artificial lighting, compact spacing, and lack of windows make it feel more claustrophobic than comfortable. Not to mention that at least one employee has heard something he thought was a child screaming and [REDACTED] in the hallways.
- It doesn't help that the entire thing is one giant repurposed nuclear power plant. The former plant's main energy sector, "The Hub", housed reactions so powerful that simply entering it meant death within an hour. To put that in perspective, the Soviet workers who looked directly into the freshly exposed reactor core during the Chernobyl disaster suffered for weeks from acute radiation before they died. Whatever was going on in "The Hub" would kill you
*in an hour*.
- This area was retrofitted into the lowest zone of the Subliminal Land Water Park. That's right, families, the elderly, children, and infants can go swimming in a pool of extremely powerful radiation! What could possibly go wrong?
- The science behind the
*Laugh Track* ride involves "cortical activation" and "compression-induced laughter". As in, you wear a mount that will forcibly crush your chest and suffocate you to deprive oxygen to your brain. Out of the 25 university students who volunteered for early trials, all of them came out with severe stomach pain and brain fog, and three of them had *damaged or ruptured diaphragms.*
- In the Training Tape, lots more Nightmare Faces, and also an odd bit of wording:
*"THIS IS THE PERSON."* Combined with the fact that some of the photos have only one person, you start to wonder... is the viewer learning to recognize dissatisfied customers, or just to recognize humans *at all?*
-
*Investigation Tape* covers a series of cases involving "The Liminal Land Anomaly", in which certain parkgoers were attracted to one of the rides, disappeared, and were found dead later. We dont see the corpses themselves, but we do see sketches of what their recovered bodies looked like, and they are horrific: their facial structures are distorted and stretched into grotesque mimicries of smiles with beady black eyes, barely resembling their former selves.
- The way each victim found themselves on the Anomaly is eerie as well. Grown, otherwise able-minded adults suddenly sneak away from their family or class of first graders for hours on end, only to be found later in such a mutilated state.
- The last case study bears mentioning on its own. A woman managed to access the ride controls despite the attraction being
*closed for repairs due a faulty failsafe*, in view of the employees (who did nothing), then rode the anomaly non-stop for 26 minutes. For reference, the average roller coaster ride lasts a little under *two minutes*. When they finally got the ride under control again? To say that she was "unrecognizable" would be an understatement.
-
*Found Footage-Welcome H.O.M.E* all but confirms that HOME is an Eldritch Location purposely designed so that no one can leave
even if you wanted to. Even its very name is a lie: the true meaning of its acronym is not Holistic & Opportune Mutual Experience, but Hide, Obscure, Maintain, Evict.
- The opening of Nexpo's video
*Fear of the Deep*. We're treated to a phone message that was recovered on May 25, 1989 from the answering machine of a man named Frank, who we can assume is Frank Strother, one of the missing persons listed in the *LVVT Channel 5 Sign-Off (1988)* video. On the other end is a woman (presumably a family member or friend) who has been desperately trying to reach him for the last 5 days, as he had apparently taken her children to the park, but never came back. Considering how many people have up and vanished at that park, or worse, one can only begin to guess what happened to them.
"Hi, this is [UNINTELLIGABLE]. Please leave a message at the tone. Thanks for calling."
*[beep]*
"Where are you? I've been trying to reach you for
*five days*
. Five fucking days and
*nothing*
! Where are my kids, Frank? Where are my
*fucking kids*ing kidsing kidsing kids
"
*[tape ends]* | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiminalLand |
Linked Universe / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Nine Link's together with The creator going on record saying they they love angst? Doesn't look good for our heroes.
- The mere fact that the threat is so large,
**9 Links** have to be brought together to stop it.
- Unlike the games, Wild's scars shown in full, and they are horrific. Not only do they litter his entire body (except for most of his face), at one point Hyrule and Wild discuss them and Wild mentions that, although the Shrine of Resurrection healed it, his
*ear* was very likely shot off by a Guardian. Sky is cringing and begging them to change the subject internally, and safe to say the audience is probably agreeing with him.
- The Shadow's original appearance is... yuck. See for yourself here.
- Wind mentioning his sister seemed to have an effect on Wild. The mere concept of Wild having a sister who he very likely lost in the Great Calamity is equal parts nightmarish and tragic—and even if it was scrapped in Zelda canon, there's nothing saying it's non-canon here.
- Time mentions in "scars" that he has a lot of emotional baggage. Jojo has confirmed that he was alluding to his time in Termina.
- The Yiga are still active. And they're out for more than just Wild—by now, they'll attack
*any* Link they see. Case in point, their debut comic sees them attack and try to kill Warriors. And unlike Wild, none of the other Links know what to expect from a traveler until they're about to be jumped.
- The Q and A has confirmed that Jojo had intentions of bringing everyone to Wild and Hyrule's versions of Hyrule. However, they also mentioned that seeing such destroyed worlds wouldn't mesh well with the Hero's spirit... Sky already has mountains of guilt from starting the cycle, but there are also the others who feel compelled to help anyone—only they're used to the friendlier worlds they come from, not the apocalyptic worlds that Wild and Hyrule come from.
- Time is still holding onto the Fierce Deity mask, despite knowing how powerful it is. The fact that Time believes there's something so powerful he needs the mask as a last resort is telling.
- The infection causes monster's blood to become black. It's a bit disturbing to look at and not to mention how the monsters look when they initially get infected...
- Add to that the strong possibility that the infection has mind altering properties and it gets even creepier.
- Dink's blade
*stops fairies from healing wounds* | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LinkedUniverse |
Linkin Park / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
This nu-metal band has some pretty creepy songs too.
- "The Requiem" has part of the lyrics of "The Catalyst" (which are already very dark), but instead autotuned for extra creepiness. The lyrics are also delivered in a really low-key and subdued way, which makes it even creepier.
- "The Radiance". The "lyrics"
*are the Real Life words of J. Robert Oppenheimer*:
- "Wisdom, Justice, and Love" takes soundbites from one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches about how The Vietnam War is hell, and makes it even scarier by distorting him into a Voice of the Legion. It even repeats the last line two more times in utter silence for extra creepiness. Less a Madness Mantra than one of rare clarity.
- Counting the videos, the one for "Final Masquerade" had so much cryptic symbollisms that it's both confusing and disturbing at the same time.
- The video for "Waiting For The End" is driven by lots of visual effects. A lot of the effects are quite...unsettling.
- The cover of the Xero demo tape◊ features what can only be described as a Fetus Terrible with green skin and Black Eyes of Evil.
- The highly creepy, Mood Whiplash music of "Nobody's Listening" from Meteora. It's not surprising that it was added to the album at the last minute.
- The untitled hidden track on the
*Hybrid Theory* EP would be unsettling even if it wasn't preceded by six minutes of static after "Part of Me".
- It was belived to have been reworked into "Session" for
*Meteora* (although Mike Shinoda denied it when asked on Twitch); the stuttering percussion and eerie piano backing give it an overall bleak feel, compounded by the noise at the end that sounds like a *death rattle.*
- Also from the EP is "Carousel", which also combines this with Tear Jerker, due to sparse, creepy instrumentation and backing vocals that slowly begin to grow in aggression.
- If we're going to be completely honest, the video for "One Step Closer" counts too.
- The bridge to the song itself. Chester screaming, "Shut up when I'm talking to you!" could easily call to mind an abusive spouse or parent.
- Pretty much the entirety of the song and accompanying music video for 'Papercut' qualifies. From the maggot riddled corpse occupying one of the rooms next to the group, to the dark figure that runs past them and is spazzing out in the next room, to the moving painting of the Fetus Terrible from the Xero demo tape, to the facial distortions near the end of the video, to those goddamn flannel pants Chester is wearing, it'll leave you with your skin...crawling for a while.
- The music video for Breaking The Habit, entirely done in a rough anime style, features horrific imagery sure to trigger viewers who have gone through depression and suicidal thoughts, such as a woman cutting herself with a piece of glass and smearing her blood on a piece of paper where she wrote Im nothing, and the reveal that Chester threw himself off the very tall building the band is playing on and smashed into a parked car below
Harsher in Hindsight considering his 2017 suicide, even though it wasnt in the same way.
- "Until It's Gone" wasn't exactly the most scariest of the band's songs.... but the album version's outro can be a bit nightmarish.
- The music video, however, features quite a few disturbing imagery. One of them is a lovely shot of a man bleeding from his nose. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LinkinPark |
LISA: The Hopeful / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
"Sooomebodyyy... A-a-anybodyyy... Love... meee..."
Being a faithful fangame to the LISA series, LISA: The Hopeful has more than its fair share of scares.
- Lanks getting violently raped. It's not explicitly shown what happens, but Craig Fuchs's lecherous behavior towards Beltboy combined with the scream that Lanks lets out while he's offscreen doesn't leave much to the imagination. We discover as the game progresses that the head wound he received was the
*least* of the trauma he got from the ordeal.
- The subsequent sequence where Beltboy narrowly avoids going through he same experience is just as unsettling. He's completely unarmed and cornered in the back of a trailer by a creepy man soaked in what is presumably Lanks' blood. All of Craig's attacks are uncomfortably sexual in nature, usually manifesting in him groping and trying to lick Beltboy as he struggles to break free. Save for Craig's line of dialogue upon being defeated, it's a serious and disturbing depiction of sexual violence. "Blood for Sex" plays over the scene and it perfectly compliments the claustrophobic atmosphere.
- Walking through the swamp while high is mostly a fun and goofy experience until Beltboy's childhood friend randomly shows up and attacks him. Since the crew is high, she hits hard; and then about halfway through the battle Beltboy shakes off the high and realizes that it's actually a Joy Mutant, Pinhead, that looks like a huge, fleshy, triangle-shaped head.
- When you think about it, Sportsball is just glorified, brutal fights to the death, which are then recorded as entertainment for everyone in the surrounding area. It seems like the mortality rate for fighting in the arena is quite high, given that Beltboy and co. cut through twenty-one other competitors in their competition alone. Considering all the blood and viscera smeared across the floor in the mutant pens, it seems like the Sports King has lots of corpses to use as food... unless he's not just siccing the mutants on still-living human beings (as he does with Beltboy after he wins the tournament).
- Gars' cryptic reference to sending people beneath the waves becomes much creepier when we consider all the skulls and bones lying around the cave. It can reasonably be inferred that his friends and him have been luring hapless surface-dwellers down into the cave and then drowning them. If we're to go with the assumption that Gar and his fishmen are the kids from the orphanage, it would mean they've been paying tribute to their Gods for a
*long* time.
- Hopeful's Joy Lab is arguably as unnerving, if not worse, than the one from Painful. It's practically empty, aside from some cryptic notes about various test subjects' gradually worsening conditions and a few patrolling Creeps. In the basement awaits Amy, an absolutely terrifying mutant, and a Pain Mode-exclusive optional room just before the exit has a floor made entirely of blood. The background is the red Joy intestine/flesh screen, adding another layer of strange unreality. But the worst part is probably the hallucinations that Beltboy sees of Rodriguez's severed head and his childhood friend, which randomly pop out throughout the lab.
- Even worse, Amy uses Familiar Cry, which is only otherwise used by the mutated forms of Beltboy, Lanks and Cyclops, and if you are on the Beltboy route specifically and escape the battle, she'll scream at him and push him back, something that only mutants who recognize the party like mutated Reginald do when you escape their battles. The implication of this is she is the mutated form of Beltboy's childhood friend.
- The fights with the Lovelies on the eastern mountain start out normally, but once you kill them, they mutate
*instantly*, with horrific shrieking sound effects and the battle music changing to "Love Me".
- The complete and utterly shocking Mood Whiplash of the final battle with The Lovelies. At first, the fight starts off as normal. Once only Hart is alive, though, the other Lovelies mutate into especially creepy joy mutants. After that, the entire atmosphere of the fight changes! Once he almost died, Hart does as well. His final words, however, are utterly horrific.
I need it... I need it so bad...
Please, I can't die without it, let me have it...
I want to see her face.. and... hold her...
Grip her throat...
F-ff...fucking... kill heeer...
- Hart's Joy Mutant form. His body contorts into a vaguely heart-esque form, and his mouth begins to tear itself open into a screaming position. He looks like he's in extreme suffering and is literally screaming for help; to make things worse, he's visibly crying. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LisatheHopeful |
LISA: The Pointless - Scholar of the Wilbur Sin / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
By exploring the caves of Garbage Island, you'll find a few piles of maggots. If you crush them all, you'll be attacked by Mother Maggot, a writhing pile of corpses and trash, filled to the brim with maggots.
When you enter the mines, you'll eventually be attacked by a salt creature, which seems to be one of the miners that worked on the salt caves. While it can deal some pretty devastating blows, most of it's turns are spent screaming in agony.
Once you get the school key, you'll meet Wilbur Sin again, tending to a mysterious machine that seems to be producing the infinity jerseys and the green miasma you encounter around Downtown Olathe. His first phase plays out like his original fight, but once his health gets low enough, he'll produce 4 copies of himself, beginning one of the game's most difficult fights.
If you revisit the playground after defeating two of the major bosses in the mountains, you'll be able to fight Shammi, one of the most horrifying mutants in the Lisa franchise. It has an eye gouged out, most of the skin on the middle of its torso torn away, and the bones of all of his fingers except its thumb exposed. Apparently his frail body couldn't handle the transformation...
After spending some time on Downtown Olathe, you may try to head back to the desert, either out of curiosity, or to visit the Twilight Plaza again. Surprisingly, it is possible, but things aren't exactly the same. The once vibrant village is nothing but rubble and ruins, and the inhabitants are either long dead (reduced to skeletons) or so old and senile they can't recognize you (or even acknowledge you at all). The only sane person left tells you that it has been DECADES since you've visited their village, and they've been waiting for the Marauders for that whole time. It was already implied that time itself stopped working normally after the Flash, but seeing the small, friendly village reduced to nothing due to that is chilling. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LISAThePointlessScholarOfTheWilburSin |
LISA: The Pointless / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
After enemies are defeated in battle, their corpses appear in the overworld. Besides being a nice addition to the visuals, it's a stark reminder of your actions and their consequences. Alex and Joel aren't just defeating RPG opponents for experience points, they're killing other human beings with their own personalities and thoughts in a grim struggle for survival. It feels much more dramatic knowing that each battle irrevocably reduces the number of people left in Olathe (and presumably on the entire planet) by another increment.
The boss fight against Roland is similarly disturbing once you get to his third phase. He's been knocked to the ground, he's visibly bloodied, and he starts wasting turns to cry and cough up blood. Roland's an antagonistic jerkass, but it still feels weird watching Alex and Georgy mercilessly wail on him even when he's already clearly down for the count. Roland's death ends up being very prolonged and painful, with him slowly getting brutalized until he slumps to the ground and dies.
While resting at House Dust after getting to the mainland, Alex and Joel awaken to discover that Chaz, the joy addict, has mutated and violently killed all of the inn residents. Upon leaving the inn, the area outside of it is completely deserted, with all of the NPC's having vanished (save for the one who said he hated everybody). It's discomforting, especially right after Alex and Joel's moment of bonding.
A troubling detail in the village reveals what happened to it and provides a little foreshadowing. Some of the skeletons are wearing the infinity jerseys.
At House Dust, a man dug up a bunch of Infinity Jerseys. Then when everyone leaves for Garbage Island, the box is empty, implying that they took them with. Given what's known aboutthe Infinity Jerseys, Garbage Island may soon become an even less hospitable place to live...
At one point while crossing the desert, Alex enter a cave, where only his silhouette is visible. While resting, he awakens to some kind of quadrupedal creature quietly standing over them, making a horrible moaning noise. You're given the choice to either offer it some jerky or remain still. Although the creature ends up just walking away in either case, it's a very tense moment because you can't tell what it is or what it wants.
Later while exploring Downtown Olathe, you encounter the creature again, whereupon it's revealed to be an especially nightmarish-looking joy mutant named Twisty (pictured). While most of the mutants from the original game have clearly human characteristics, Twisty looks more like a deer or an equine. However, closer analysis reveals that his mouth is actually his head, which has been twisted around and split wide open to accommodate his coiled tongue. It's distressing to dwell on how a normal person was contorted into this horrible new shape.
Downtown Olathe. While the rest of Olathe has its share of violence, the upgraded art is full of Scenery Gorn and all the gangs there are engaged in "the game," a perpetual turf war with no foreseeable end. And that's before the Infinity Franchise really starts upsetting the power dynamic of the area.
The Infinity Franchise embodies the nihilistic ethos of Olathe and have taken it to a logical extreme. They're not unlike the pro-mutant cult that's briefly featured in The Joyful, but are far more disturbing and fleshed-out. They endlessly kill and pillage for no apparent reason other than enjoying the thrill of violence, invading new areas so they can kill and pillage some more. It's implied that the franchise are overrunning all of Olathe, their numbers sustained by a steady flow of new recruits (who may or may not be under the influence of sinister supernatural forces). They really seem to be dead-set on continuing their rampage until all of humanity has been wiped out. Even if Alex and Joel kill go out of their way to kill every single franchiser in downtown Olathe, it's shown that more men will just take their place, making the fight against them feel completely fruitless.
As you progress further and further through Downtown Infinity, black/green tinged silhouettes called "The Infinite Masses" start appearing. They look like negative space holes in the world, only marked by the ever-present red 88. Some of them resemble people you've killed, but a lot of them don't...
An especially unsettling area in downtown Olathe are the fields where Jessie Mack can be found. The whole landscape, like the rest of downtown Olathe, is layered thick with blood and human flesh from the victims of the franchise's rampage. Far worse than that is Jessie Mack's farmstead, where it's implied that after being sucked into the franchise, he killed many of his own children, family members, and friends, grinding their bodies down into meat to share with the franchise. "The Void," a jangly and atonal tune, plays in the background and lends the area an atmosphere of unease.
There are a few franchisers here that aren't hostile to Alex, but are extremely creepy regardless. They're all to busy muttering to themselves or writhing around in piles of human viscera to notice Alex. There's one franchiser who does talk to Alex though: an obese, blank-eyed man who's unusually calm in spite of the blood pouring from the stump where his right arm was. He turns to face Alex as he walks along and tells him ominous, cryptic things about the nature of the infinity franchise.
"You resist the jersey, but HE will transform you."
Many of the peaceful characters found at the beginning of Downtown Olathe suddenly become violent Franchisers as you progress, which makes you question whether people use the Franchise as an excuse to act violent or if the jerseys themselves are changing them.
Right after talking to Yado during the flashback sequence, Alex enters a bus, which rides through a neighborhood. At first, everything seems normal, but then piles of flesh start appearing on the scenery, all over, even filling up an entire house. The music grows more tense as the scene gains a shade of red, the bus meeting a dead end where... something rises, screeching. Alex wakes up immediately after that, and we've yet to discover what the hell that thing was. All we know is that it's called "Principium Vitae", it's somehow "the origin of all things", and Alex isn't the only one who can see it: an NPC on Garbage Island makes a passing reference to seeing an "ugly red thing".
Hugo, the gloved man that continually shows up in the background. Besides looking creepy, he's always silently observing Alex for no readily apparent reason. The fact that the areas he shows up in lack music makes his presence feel even more disconcerting.
Him showing up and murdering all of the resting travelers before slicing up Alex is pretty stomach-churning to watch. Hugo forces Jason Pike, a recently-met NPC, to make a Sadistic Choice, similar to what Buzzo does in the original game. An option menu appears, but you can't interact with it; Jason is making the decision here, not you. You can only helplessly watch as Jason condemns Alex to be brutally stabbed by Hugo. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LisaThePointless |
Like Father, Like Daughter / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- Erebus. At first, he seems an odd Mask Man who Hekapoo oddly fears.
- Chapter 30 on, his rampages through Mewni causes the end of all life on Mewni, save for those who manage to to evacuate to other dimensions, and the victim list explicitly includes Star and River, with the chapter ending as he gives Moon a Neck Snap.
- He describes himself as a literal
*hole in the universe*, and even Moon's Darkest Spell doesn't do more than temporarily injure him, and as he heals the world seems to literally shatter and rebuild itself around him as he claims that he has Complete Immortality. Not even *the Lich* can kill him.
- In a Bad Future, his actions have caused massive loss of life in the multiverse. Including most of the main cast, godlike beings, and several favorite characters of other series.
- His face beneath his mask breaks the wills of those who see it, and some people have even died from the experience.
- The Dream Eater is basically Freddy Kruger who feeds of the dreams of entire
*worlds*. And it's fully aware of the destruction that it causes and takes sadistic glee in it.
- The Dream Eater was a horrible being that enjoyed twisting dreams into nightmares, but its demise if horrific. Basically, it's subjected to a Portal Cut variation of Death by a Thousand Cuts, numerous portals basically
*shredding* it across dimensions. By the end, it's *begging* them to just hurry up and finish it off already.
- Seraph sneaks away after her nap and nearly gets eaten by a lizard. If Hekapoo hadn't found her as fast as she did Marco might never have met his daughter.
- Janna convinces Star to summon a ghost, it turns out to be a Wholly Mammoth Ghost that summons its pack that stampede through the city.
- Heinous decides to take Seraph away from Marco. Marco restrained is helpless to stop them from taking his daughter while they prepare to kill him.
- Marco, once he gets free, is more than willing to kill Heinous. The only thing that stopped him was that he didn't want Seraph to see something like that.
- In order to get around how space itself prevents Erebus from being permanently damaged, Hekapoo evacuates and collapses her dimension, nearly killing herself if Marco hadn't saved her.
- In a flashback, we see that Erebus once used a ritual to kill an entire planet's worth of beings, their deaths fueling the creation of a Genius Loci spirit bound to his will. After Glossaryk defeated him, Glossaryk destroyed the entirety of what was left of the planet, proving just how dangerous he is under his silly behavior.
- The Toffee-possessed Ludo fled to Earth to escape Erebus, and he opens up a portal on a cave painting of Bill, Toffee offering an entity inside a deal...
-
*Something* is messing with Marco and Seraph's dreams...
- Toffee, to spite Moon even more, arranges for Gravity Falls and the kingdom of Mewni to
*collide*.
- The Collective is rather
*terrifying*. A technological Hive Mind of a Straw Vulcan race sealed away long ago for experimenting on magical being and disrupting the balance of magic, when some of them escape to Earth via the recent disruptions they start subjecting people to Unwilling Roboticisation for eventual Brain Uploading, genuinely not comprehending the idea that some humans might not *want* to give up their bodies to become immortal beings of data like them. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LikeFatherLikeDaughter |
Lilo & Stitch / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Jumba gets a surprisingly creepy moment at the end of the scene where he's recruited to recapture Stitch. After the Grand Councilwoman leaves, Jumba, clearly relishing the thought of his creation causing mass destruction like he was programmed to, says the following line: **Jumba:** So tell me, my little one-eyed one; on what poor, pitiful, defenseless planet has my *monstrosity been unleashed?* | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiloAndStitch |
Literally Every FNF Mod Ever / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
While the mod doesn't bother to take itself seriously at all, it manages to have quite some terrifying moments.
- Bob himself has a tendency to take some terrifying-looking forms. His appearance as Hell Bob in "run" features an Uncanny Valley pair of hyper-realistic eyes and a multitude of Jump Scares, and his Onslaught form has a Slasher Smile through some sort of white goop, a ripped-apart and broken body, and constant manic twitching. The taker of the cake, however, has to go to his form in "Trouble"; an unholy Body Horror fusion of his normal appearance and Hell Bob separated by some sort of black goo, as if his Hell Form had somehow partially melded with and melted onto his normal form.
- Really, some parts of the vocals for Trouble. Both Bob and Boyfriend sound like they are glitching while singing at times, and a robotic-esque quality can be heard in some of Bob's verses. It just sounds so unnatural.
- Boyfriend's vocals during Withered also deserve a mention. He sounds so dead and hollow during it, not helped by the fact that his vocals are eventually drowned out by the oppressive instrumental. It's like something else took over Boyfriend during Withered, and he only comes back to his senses during Run in order to beat Bob back.
- Both outcomes of Run can come off as this. Losing to Bob will cause him to open up a window in your browser, leading to a website containing Hell Bob with the repeating phrase "Bob is mad", as well as droning audio file at the bottom. If you were to somehow beat him, you're greeted with a close-up to Bob's eyes within a black void. At the end of the dialogue, he rips open a wide Slasher Smile and states that he'll never forget you. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiterallyEveryFNFModEver |
Literature - E to I / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Return to the homepage here.<!—index—> Earth's Children The Edge Chronicles Eisenhorn Elantris Enchantress from the Stars Encyclopedia Brown Endling Er Ist Wieder Da Everybody Loves Large Chests Evillious Chronicles Praeludium Of Red The Lunacy Of Duke Venomania Evil Food Eater Conchita Gift From The Princess Who Brought Sleep The Tailor of Enbizaka Judgment Of Corruption The Expanse Expedition Faction Paradox Fahrenheit 451 The Fairy Rebel Fairy Tales in General The Fall of Gondolin False Memory Fate/strange fake Flawed Fragment The Fox and the Hound Fifty Shades of Grey First Salik War "Five Nights At Freddy's" Franchise Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes Five Nights at Freddy's: The Twisted Ones Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights The Forsaken Children Fox Demon Cultivation Manual Freakthe Mighty Freeway Warrior A Frozen Heart Gaunt's Ghosts Gentleman Bastard The Girl and the Ghost The Girl Next Door The Giver Gods and Warriors Gone Good Omens Goosebumps The Grapes of Wrath Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi Gravity Falls: Journal 3 The Green Knowe Chronicles Griffin Ranger Grimm Tales Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids The Handmaid's Tale Harry Potter Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (the original supplemental book) Haunted (2005) The Hellbound Heart Hell House Heart of Darkness Heaven Officials Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu The Heroes of Olympus Hexwood Hideaway The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Hobbit Holes The Homestuck Epilogues Honor Harrington Horus Heresy The Host (2008) House of Leaves House of the Scorpion The Hunchback of Notre Dame The Hunger Games The Husky And His White Cat Shizun: Erha He Ta De Bai Mao Shizun Hyperion Cantos I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream The Impairment Incarceron Inheritance Cycle Intertwined Intertwined II The Lost Spirits The Invisible Man Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Sword Oratoria I Want to Eat Your Pancreas Ivanhoe<!—/index—> | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiteratureEToI |
Literature - # to D / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Return to the homepage here.<!—index—> Aztec Abarat The Acts of Caine The Adventures of Pinocchio After (2003) Ai no Kusabi All Quiet on the Western Front Alex Cross Alex Rider ALiCE (2014) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland All Your Ruins American Psycho The Amityville Horror The Andromeda Strain Animal Farm Animorphs Anno Dracula Artemis Fowl The Arts of Dark and Light Ashfall The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls A Tale of Two Cities The Atomic Time of Monsters Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter The Baby-Sitters Club Bailey School Kids Bas-Lag Cycle Perdido Street Station Battle Royale The Belgariad Beloved Be More Chill Beren and Lúthien The Berenstain Bears Betsy the Vampire Queen The BFG The Bible Bioshock Rapture The Black Cat The Black Company Blindsight Blood Meridian Bloodlines The Book of Lost Things Book of the New Sun The Book of the Dun Cow The Books of Ember Borrasca The Boxcar Children Brave New World Bridget Jones A Brother's Price The Butter Battle Book Caliphate Carnage in New York Carnosaur The Caster Chronicles Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator Children of the Corn Children of the Last Days Children of the Red King Christine A Christmas Carol The Chronicle of Duke Erik The Chronicles of Narnia The Chronicles of Prydain The Chronicles of Taras Circleverse Classical Mythology Cloud Atlas Clusterfuck Codex Alera Comrade Death Conan the Barbarian Congo Coraline Cradle Series Creature of Havoc A Cry in the Night The Culture Daikaiju Yuki Danganronpa Danganronpa Zero Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc IF The Darkest Minds Demon City Shinjuku Deltora Quest Deptford Mice The Diamond Girls The Disaster Artist Discworld The Divine Comedy Doctor Sleep Doctor Who: Doctor Who New Adventures Eighth Doctor Adventures Past Doctor Adventures New Series Adventures Engines of War Doctrine of Labyrinths Dorothy Must Die Dracula The Dresden Files Dune<!—/index—> | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiteratureNoToD |
Limbo (2010) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- That
*spider*. Oh, god, it's creepy and it chases you and you're just a kid with no powers or defenses and it *will not STOP*.
- The game also compels you, the player, to do several disturbing things in order to continue, such as waiting for a parasite-afflicted kid to stumble into a lake and drown so that you can use his body as a stepping stone, or the eventual fate of the Giant Spider: later in the game, the spider reappears dragging itself toward you with its only remaining leg which you are forced to
*rip off* (you can see the muscles and everything) and roll the limbless body of the still-alive spider into a pit of spikes as a makeshift bridge so that you can progress. What makes it worse is that it still twitches after being pulled off. Witnessing such deeds would be bad enough, but having to perform them yourself is just twisted.
- One of the pieces of artwork for the special edition of the game (pictured in the page image) has the exact same background as the regular cover for the game. However, instead of showing the boy running towards the light, it shows
*the boy being lifted off the ground by the spider after having just been stabbed through the neck*. It's just as horrifying as it sounds. This can also happen in-game if the spider gets you.
- The other children. There is just something ominous about their mere presence, especially when you enter the part of the forest that is essentially a child's makeshift hideout filled with contraptions, traps, and the many dead bodies of other kids.
- One of the Easter Eggs requires you to walk into a dark cave and continue walking through pitch black, while cave critters chirp, in order to reach it.
- The many possibilities as to how you can die. At least, some of them are
*quick*. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Limbo2010 |
Left 4 Dead / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
"This is some grim shit weve gotten ourselves into!"For a game where you have loads of firepower and three teammates backing you up, it can be really scary. Any of the following things become vastly scarier when your party is either low on health, or worse, you are the only party member still alive currently. It doesn't help that the levels are both cluttered and dark, making it hard to see threats. You will find yourself often taking more damage from wild fire from your panicked teammates than actual zombies.
- The sequel introduces a few Special Infected more in addition to the ones that existed before:
- The Spitter, a woman with horribly burned off and open jaw that's able to somewhat spray corrosive goo at incredible distances.
- The Charger, a man with an abnormally large right hand and abnormally thin left hand. Like the Hunter, it has inhuman aggression too, but instead of abnormal leaping distance, the Charger instead charge with his right hand striking toward a group of survivors, stunning non-targets and catching the target to be pounded into submission.
- The Jockey, a skeletal hunched man with the posture of a monkey and the ability to painfully grab a survivor moving the victim around.
- The sequel takes place largely in broad daylight, which actually helps not at all; there is a sense that if the kind of terrible things that will happen to your team regularly can happen in the sun, then you really are beyond any help. These terrible things are not limited to the zombie menace; there is a much larger sense of a genocidal authority wishing you'd take the hint from the airstrikes they regularly throw at you.
- Not fazed enough? Did we mention that the Witch now wanders around in some levels?
- The end of Hard Rain is a freaking MONSOON. So much so that the waist-high water actually slows you down on Campaign Mode, and the weather actually reduces your visibility, covers up everything with thunder and howling wind, and the output level of your voice chat. So you're wet, you're bogged down, nobody can hear you, you can't hear anybody else, you can't see more than a foot in any given direction, and oh yeah, there's infected itching to do you a serious unkindness. Isolation in Left 4 Dead-World is a Death Sentence.
- To make it even worse, turn on realism mode. Now you don't even get the benefit of those outlines that tell you where your teammates are. If you get too far out of eyesight of your team you're as good as dead.
- Dead Center, Hard Rain, and Swamp Fever all have large sections in the daylight. The Parish is the only one that STAYS daylight through the entirety of the campaign.
- Also in the sequel, the classic Special Infected are now even more heavily mutated than before. The worst victim is the Smoker◊, who now has
*six* tongues, poking out from *all over his body* (although he still only uses one).
- All throughout the Parish, you find evidence that the military was killing PEOPLE. There's strong evidence that they weren't necessarily infected, too. And there's the quarantine zone in the Graveyard level... ruined buildings, and some particularly chilling graffiti. "If you can read this, the army left us to DIE." It's possible that the military was in a panicked retreat that left no time to evacuate everyone or distinguish carriers from infected, but it's also possible that there was a unit of Sociopathic Soldiers.
- Left 4 Dead had some pretty scary campaigns, but Left 4 Dead 2 has its own fair share of horror:
- Dead Center: From the moment you walk out of the safe area and begin making your way down a burning building filled with fireproof zombies you know that this game is gonna be a lot more intense than the last one. If you're lucky you may even run into ||Ellis's hero turned zombie, Jimmy Gibbs Jr.|| in the abandoned mall at the end.
- The Passing: A new DLC campaign. Pairs you up with the original survivors from the first game at the beginning and end. That doesn't stop this campaign from being freaky! From along stormy streets above and to the extremely dark sewers below you'll encounter some really creepy stuff. Survivors that went out into the world fully armed... but not immune! The Witch's wedding which even the survivors agree is frighteningly weird and when you've met up with the survivors and been given your task you may decide to that room just to the right of the lift when you exit. What's Inside? ||The dead body of Bill!|| Making this campaign not only horrifying but a Tear Jerker as well!
- Dark Carnival: A Circus of Fear type place filled with Monster Clowns. The clowns are made even scarier by the fact that they're zombies, and they draw other infected closer to you. Oh yeah, the whole campaign takes place entirely at night, too...
- Swamp Fever: What's scarier than making your way through a swamp in the middle of the night? Making your way through a swamp filled with zombies in the middle of the night. What's worse than making your way through a swamp filled with zombies in the middle of the night? Making your way through a swamp filled with ZOMBIE MUDMEN in the middle of the night.
- Worse than that: the swamps are deep enough to fully conceal Witches. Have fun.
- Even worse, at one point during the finale, you have to face
**TWO** Tanks at the same time.
- Hard Rain: This campaign starts off fairly normal, make your way through a town and get some gas, easy right? It is... until you get to the sugar mill that's full of Witches. And then it starts raining. On your way BACK THROUGH THE SUGAR MILL, you run into just as many Witches as before... except it's raining so hard you move at half your normal speed and can barely see or hear your teammates.
- Later on in the campaign, you have to navigate a field of sugar canes taller than the survivors and dense enough that you can't see more than a foot and a half in front of you. There are Witches in the field. Witches that you likely won't be able to locate until you bump into one. You then need to push through this field again, except this time, it's through a storm that hinders sight, speed, and hearing.
- The Parish: This is it, you made it down a burning building, under a river through sewers, through a carnival from Hell, past the swamp filled with animalistic mud people, and across a sugar mill that was home to the local Witch population, this HAS to be easier. It isn't. From bullet-proof zombies in riot gear to the hundreds of corpses lying everywhere, there are way too many things that are scary and difficult about this campaign to list them all here. Have fun.
- In a new Mutation, you get to play as the only survivor alive - the other 3 don't exist. To balance things out, there are no common infected, but you still have to fight Special Infected all by yourself - it's scarier than it sounds. Even worse, the survivor's dialog will still be as if the other survivors are there, giving the impression he/she is going crazy.
- The latest mutation, Lone Gunman, is even scarier. There are no Special Infected other than Boomers, Witches, and Tanks. Yes. Tanks. However, the only weapon you have is the Desert Eagle and the Common Infected swipes do 25 damage on
*Normal* (and bring you down in one hit on Expert)... it's not really about how you'll get to the safe room, it's about how long you'll survive.
- The TAAAAANK mutations were either horrifying or a CMOA depending on your perspective. It's a versus game where all of the infected team spawns as Tanks. And if they die they respawn as more Tanks. For the survivor team, it's basically don't stop running for a second or you're going to die incredibly quickly.
- Headshot! is pretty bad too. You'll see zombies missing limbs, huge sections of their backs, bleeding profusely and still coming at you. Worst of all is the hitbox problems that mean they sometimes lose their head and keep coming.
- The actual nature of the zombification. The effect of rabies is massive pain and sensitivity, like an eternal hangover. That makes the zombies irritated, as well as attacking all sources of bright lights and loud noises. So the common infected are completely conscious, and attack you out of their own never-ending pain. In fact, their motivation could even be suicidal.
- That could make the Special Infected all the scarier. They're capable of high-level thought, but attack you out of their own hatred.
- For something a little more common, sensitivity to light and sound along with massive pain are also symptoms of a severe migraine. Nausea and vomit can occur as well.
- If the transformation of Lt Mora was any indication, all of the infected see normal humans as "monsters", thinking they're still normal while everyone else has turned into zombies. Now think how they see you, the player, wielding a shotgun can completely dismember them in a few shots, coming straight at you, almost unstoppable...
- The Spitter... not because of her attacks, or her concept art that made her look pregnant — it's the way she dresses. Look at her. A cute little top and some capri pants, a pink thong... this was a normal girl. This was a teenager, a preppy girl that suffered from bulimia. The infection turned her into... into THAT. That is what the infection could
*do* to you!
- It's get worse. If you kill a Spitter, you can clearly see on her hand that she has a ring on her ring finger. That means she was married. What do you think happened to her husband?
- A scene in The Passing. You run upon a park littered with chairs and nice decorations. Then you see a Witch at the very end of the chairs wearing a wedding dress. You can assume that this woman, and possibly every other person nearby at the time, almost instantly became zombified
*during her wedding*.
- Every so often, you'll see one of the Normal Infected standing over to the side, vomiting blood. You realize
*these used to be normal, living people*, and how much pain they must be in even if you're not shooting them.
- How about turning a corner and finding yourself face-to-face with a
*Tank*. No musical cues to speak of, just suddenly finding yourself staring down something that can kill you in three hits on *easy*.
- Imagine this: You are playing with friends when you hear something. Your friends quiet down and you realize it's a Tank. Now you all know what's coming and that's it is unavoidable. The worse part is picking someone to find it and draw it back to the group.
- Dark Carnival from
*2*. It's not the zombie clowns, it's not the other zombies. It's the setting itself. A whole amusement park, where thousands of people came to have fun and a good time, most probably there to see a rock concert. This was a place of fun, happiness and such. Now it's silent, foreboding. *Joy* is *dead* and *happiness* is *gone*... at least until the rock concert escape.
- Continued from the first Left 4 Dead, here's the backstory of each location in the second game's campaigns:
- Dead Center: You're abandoned on a rooftop, missing the last helicopter evacuation by moments. Also, imagine seeing the city you've grown up in and lived your entire life now a zombie-infested hellhole.
- The Passing: The bride witch and fallen survivors.
- Dark Carnival: A gridlocked highway (see Crash Course) and clown zombies.
- Swamp Fever: You travel through a town that prided itself on being a survivalist community that held out the longest without government help. Despite being remote, located deep in the swamp and heavily fortified, it was eventually found by the infected and overwhelmed. Graffiti in the area says things like 'I was sick of seeing all the death so I fled'.
- Hard Rain: Seeing zombies sprint at you from in the storm, also a Witch-infested sugar mill.
- The Parish: The Military set up an evacuation center at a bus station, where they screened people for disease and sent them on buses to other parts of the city. Of course, lines to the screening center were long (it's implied it took days to get through). This alone is terrifying, imagine lining up, being watched suspiciously by soldiers who will shoot you for being disorderly or if they see you as infected, knowing that someone next to you could turn and there is nothing you could do. The lines were so long they went to a nearby park where a sort of refugee camp formed. Once a horde attacked the camp, the people ran to the bus station and tried to force their way in, leading to the soldiers massacring all of them.
- Because some people have talked about mods... "One 4 Nine" takes place in the Nevada Desert, in and around Area 51. What's disturbing about it is that multiple saferooms are destroyed, however, one specific one in the first chapter has a blood pool with bones and human body parts surrounding it. Later on, you find almost the same thing, but with one difference. It has parts of human faces in it. Also, the finale has you activate a huge black monolith to get out. However, after you activate it, it causes the screen to switch colors, albeit very slowly. ||What happens after the "rescue" is coming, is both hilarious and terrifying: The survivors are apparently transported into an alien spaceship.||
- Said blood pool with human parts also appears in one part of the "Dead Before Dawn: Director's Cut" campaign
- A part of the fourth chapter of "Vienna Calling 1" has you navigating a river
*with toxic waste that can drain your health*. Good luck playing this portion with bots.
- The 4th chapter of the custom campaign
*Dark Wood*, which takes place right after you blow up an underground lab and find yourself in a prison that's literally, *literally* straight out of *Silent Hill* (the textures on the walls are pretty much lifted from *Silent Hill 3*). In a campaign that already was advertising itself on its creepy factor, the 4th chapter turns it up to eleven by having the entire map be one dark, long, rusty labyrinth as you and your friends dread everything that might be coming around the corner, complete with the really unsettling ambience of *screams* in the background. It really feels like you've gone deep enough to be in Hell.
- The most unsettling part of that map is the furnace. At one point, you'll reach a room with a small peephole into a furnace on the other side of the wall, with one really long, prolonged scream that never ends of what sounds like a woman or
*a child* burning inside of it. It's never explained what's in there.
- To top it all off? Pyramid Head himself makes an appearance in the map on the final elevator ride to the surface, just watching you ascend back to normality like nothing ever happened. The whole chapter is just one huge, horrifying Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.
- Much as you can invoke Soundtrack Dissonance to make the game funny, there are some music swap add-ons that were made to
*increase* the fear factor. For example, music themes for the Witch and Tank lifted straight out of *Outlast*. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Left4Dead2 |
Lights Out (2016) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Is there something there? Or is it just your imagination? Maybe you'd better leave the lights on... just in case.
- The sheer thought that when you turn the light off... there'll be
*something* there you can't see with the lights on is Paranoia Fuel enough, the fact this something is a ravenous killing machine... nightmare fuel at its finest.
- Throughout most of the film, we can't quite see Diana or guess where she'll appear. When there's pitch darkness, the fact she could be anywhere at anytime is positively terrifying.
- If you thought Diana was scary before... wait until you see her true form all lit up◊. Good luck sleeping tonight. Or ever again.
- It could be argued that the... thing from the short film is even worse. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LightsOut2016 |
Lilo & Stitch: The Series / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
"Hey guysssss!"
note : That's Experiment 300, a.k.a. Spooky, forming into Mertle and her friends' fears. In this case, a scary and headless Lilo.
It's hard to imagine it but think about it. There are over six hundred monstrous aliens with various powers on here. This is mostly to list, when you really think about it, how dangerous they were before Lilo gave them the HeelFace Turn.
Note that experiments who were introduced in
*Comic Zone: Lilo & Stitch* and the *Stitch!* anime note : *Stitch & Ai* doesn't have *any* of the first 625 experiments, so it gets excluded here are also on this page, as is Stitch himself. Experiments who have never been seen in either *The Series* (and its two films), *Comic Zone: Lilo & Stitch*, or *Stitch!* should not be added.
- Shrink (Experiment 001): His primary function is size manipulation. While we haven't seen him in
*The Series*, in *Stitch!*, we see that he can shrink and/or enlarge creatures.
- Frenchfry (Experiment 062): His primary function is to make food that has empty calories and bloats people like balloons... and then he eats them alive. He doesnt care if youre a fellow experiment, either. He's a man-eating alien that makes one completely unable to defend themselves due to excess weight, similar to the Wicked Witch of
*Hansel and Gretel*. The worst part is the video records that Jumba made sometime after Frenchfry's original activation, which reveals that all of this *wasn't even intentional* on Jumba's part—Jumba simply wanted Frenchfry to be his personal chef and is noticeably terrified when he realizes what his experiment is doing to his body. **Past Jumba:**
Hour six...body has inflated to size of spaceship...062 creates food that is delicious but removes all nutrition! Resulting in empty calories! MUST HALT 062'S PROGRAMMING!
*AAAAAAAH!*
(
*feed cuts off*
)
- Skip (Experiment 089): An experiment that can make you skip a whole decade of your life. And from what it's implied in the series, you basically disappear for 10 years at a time, so people have been searching for you and worried about your well being for 10 years. That's nightmare fuel for any child who, say, touched it and appeared 10-years older and finds out that they've been missing for that long. Like Frenchfry, Skip's creepier effects weren't even intentional on Jumba's part, either, as Jumba created him as a Mundane Utility to speed up the process of heating up food in the microwave, with Jumba's intention being that he was supposed to skip ahead ten
*minutes*, not years. That didn't go as planned.
- Toons (Experiment 112): Its primary function is bringing drawings to life. Imagination is a scary thing, and if weaponized right, you can make
*anything*. **ANYTHING!**
- Shoe (Experiment 113): a creature that can manipulate probability. Meaning if hes got his horns on right, he can cause misfortune for anyone.
- Bugby (Experiment 128): His primary function is to change anything into Earth insects. You become the prey for a multitude of animals from birds, frogs, larger insects and become more susceptible to toxins. You are on the other end of the bug spray for once!
- Bragg/Flute (145):
note : Also incorrectly known as Twang (Experiment 021) This experiment gains strength from sympathy of others, meaning it's a master of manipulation and uses a pied piper method of getting strength. That's rather disturbing that this thing can play people like a harp.
- Babyfier (Experiment 151): His primary function is reversing the aging process and turning people into babies. His antidote is only found in Hawaii (bananas, milk, apple sauce and a specific brand of coffee bean), so to save people from reliving their childhood isn't easy. This thing can turn people into defenseless infants/toddlers in any situation if provoked. Let that sink in...
- Retro (Experiment 210): His primary function is reversing the evolution of a creature or item. Not that scary, until you realize this thing can create ancient lifeforms at will. At the end of his introduction, he recreated a
*Tyrannosaurus rex*! We don't even know if that's still around or not!
- Hocker (Experiment 051): His primary function is to spit
*acidic saliva* at random people. Imagine coming across him with no knowledge of that beforehand!
- Sparky (Experiment 221): His primary function is electrokinesis. He's designed to overcharge an electrical system, so this can put an entire city into a blackout...
- Sparky puts out enough power to make electronics smoke and explode. Forget life support, he could burn a whole building down by causing electrical fires. The results of him attacking modern devices powered by lithium batteries would be especially spectacular. Even worse, he can phase through metal objects. Imagine him sneaking onto an airliner, then frying all its electrical systems mid-flight and starting fires that fill the cabin with deadly smoke. Oh, and if he
*really* wanted to cause destruction, he could cripple fire trucks and shut down a city's *water* grid by disabling pumps and forcing electrically operated valves closed.
- Those with strong stomachs can look up safety pamphlets and videos about arc flash, arc blast, and the other deadly hazards of high-voltage electrical systems, and even find pictures of the horrific injuries they can cause. Basically, Sparky could turn a person into a smoldering husk if they made him mad.
- Poxy (Experiment 222): His primary function is to be a sentient virus who creates an unusual disease that can potentially be fatal. While he can be a cure-all when good, he's worse than the bubonic plague by default.
- Glitch (Experiment 223): His primary function is to be a living computer virus. He's basically Poxy for technology. This is very dangerous in a modern age where computers are needed so this can potentially cause damage to planes, automatic cars, and other vehicles and make untold damage.
- Melty (Experiment 228): This creature can melt
*anything*... anything inorganic. While he just melts stuff, this can still cause untold damage and panic many people.
- Wormhole (Experiment 272): It's a living interdimensional wormhole. This thing can drop you off into any dimension if wants and you could be stuck in an apocalyptic wasteland or worse.
- Remmy (Experiment 276): A creepy blue ghost-like experiment who
*literally* creates nightmares by entering your head while you sleep and corrupting all your dreams. And if you wake up while he's in there? He gets stuck in your head *forever*, waiting for you to fall asleep again so he can do it all again. What's really creepy about him is that he's probably the only one of these experiments who seemed genuinely sadistic, delivering a *seriously* creepy Evil Laugh in a couple of scenes that make it seem like he *really* enjoys ruining people's dreams, as well as Jumba stating that he likes to attack when your dreams are at their most pleasant and enjoyable. It's even implied that in order for him to be reformed, Jumba had to *completely reprogram him*.
- Spooky (Experiment 300): His primary function... is Nightmare Fuel. Literally. He is made to become your deepest, darkest fear. Anything is fair game for this shapeshifting blob.
- Not only that, but unlike similar monsters in other works, Spooky's form is
*not* an illusion. The first time he encountered Stitch, he transformed into water, and filled the entire room to the ceiling. He could easily have trapped Stitch in a whirlpool of milky water until he drowned. And what about anyone else whose greatest fear is some kind of lethal environmental disaster?
- Amnesio (Experiment 303): His primary function is amnesia. He can make you forget something important like, say, the codes to stop a bomb or anything really. Your mind is a total blank and can be reprogrammed thanks to that.
- Swapper (Experiment 355): His primary function is body switching. This creature can set a serial killer or some other dangerous person free by separating their mind from their body and giving it to someone else. You wouldn't know and the other body can be taken out, so there is no way to switch them back.
*That* is paranoia right there.
- Phantasmo (Experiment 375): Ever wanted your toaster to come to life and attack you? Or your car to suddenly come to life and cause untold damage? No, of course not, but that's what this thing can do! This thing possesses inanimate objects and brings them to life. It's the age of machines, people!
- Swirly (Experiment 383): His primary function is to cause mass hypnosis. He's an experiment that can literally do mind control on others and make them do your bidding. Think about all someone can do with this experiment.
- Spats (Experiment 397): The primary function of this creature is to cause others to get into fights. This thing can start a war between two political leaders by zapping them and making them want to fight. And it can only be stopped using the "counting to ten" trick. Meaning anyone who isn't able to keep calm under pressure is less likely to be freed from its control.
- Yin and Yang (Experiments 501 and 502): Their primary functions are flash flood creation and lava and geokinesis, respectively. According to Jumba, these two are very destructive together as they are meant to represent yin and yang. One could drain an entire lake if she wanted to and use it to blast apart buildings, and the other can create powerful blasts of fire.
- Lava and water do create new land, but they can also create a massive steam explosion. In fact, a massive magma chamber suddenly being exposed to the sea is one potential explanation for the Krakatoa explosion. Jumba wasn't wrong to be afraid of the two coming into contact. For that matter, imagine the damage Yang's lava bombs would do if they hit a person. It's a good thing the fireproof Stitch went after him instead of Lilo.
- Ploot (Experiment 505): His primary function is to collect trash and become a giant monster that shoots out blasts of pollution. This creature is made like a
*Captain Planet and the Planeteers* villain if they were actually competent in destroying the world. And it was nearly unstoppable when it absorbed enough trash.
- Sprout (Experiment 509): A living plant that can create copies of itself. While it wasn't that scary at first, it went
*Little Shop of Horrors*-fast when it got super-sized and created many little copies of itself.
- Richter (Experiment 513): An earthquake-making experiment who can likely destroy an entire island full of people if it hits a fault line, and has the potential to split a planet in two. Now
*that* is scary.
- Deforestator (Experiment 515): This thing is about the size of a panda bear and has razor sharp claws that can rip through trees with ease. If this wasn't a kid show, this thing is basically a walking buzzsaw/wood shredder that would blend people into chunky smoothies.
- Cannonball (Experiment 520): It uses its large backside to create tidal waves. Not that scary, right? Well, it can do it with the
*entire ocean*. That thing could make untold damage and create a mega-tsunami that can wipe out all of life on Earth.
- Slushy (Experiment 523): An ice-producing experiment who can change the entire geothermal environment of an island like Kauai. It can turn a tropical paradise into a freezing tundra within an hour at most, and could potentially begin a new ice age.
- Sinker (Experiment 602): A violet shark-like creature that is made to sink ships. By splitting them in half.
*Titanic*, anyone?
- Zap (Experiment 603): It's a living ball of lightning, so it's like Sparky but more concentrated.
- Holio (Experiment 606): His primary function? BLACK HOLE CREATION! This creature can literally become a sentient black hole!
- Witch (Experiment 610): A bat/ghostlike creature whose power is essentially all about the supernatural. Her main ability? Demonic Possession and granting her victims reality warping powers, from summoning monster minions to turning her hosts into demonic warriors!
- El Fin (Experiment 611): While it has never appeared, we know what it can do; it can make the universe implode with a simple phrase. It's a good thing Jumba forgot it, since if he said it at any point near this thing...well, lets just say that everything is just...gone.
- Angel (Experiment 624): An experiment who sings a song to change the morality of reformed beings, especially the experiments before her, back to evil. If she did not become good herself and brought the cousins back to normal, then there would have been a lot of destruction. Even worse, what if her song worked on human beings? Non-deaf humans left and right would have become careless destructive bastards and would likely destroy civilization as we know it.
- Woops (Experiment 600), Chopsuey (Experiment 621), Reuben (Experiment 625), Stitch (Experiment 626), Experiment 627, and Leroy: All these experiments were
*designed* for destruction. If Woops wasn't so clumsy and aloof, Chopsuey wasnt so prideful and jealous, Reuben wasn't so lazy and cowardly, Stitch didn't learn to care for others, 627 didn't have that one Achilles' Heel, and Leroy didn't have that fail-safe, the galaxy would have been totally screwed.
- Stitch himself is stated to be able to lift up to 3,000 times his weight. If he's the size of an average five-year-old girl and about 25% more dense (enough to make him sink like a rock: that's equivalent to a 180 lb man weighed down by 45 lb of lead), he weighs somewhere around 50 lb, and can lift about 75
*tons*. That's assuming Earth gravity—but based on Jumba's physiology he may be from a planet with much stronger gravity, so if he based the "3,000" figure on how much Stitch would weigh on his homeworld, Stitch could be *even stronger.* The amount of force required to rip off a human arm or crush a skull? Somewhere between several hundred pounds of force to a ton. In other words, Stitch is strong enough to tear a human being apart nearly effortlessly.
- 627 in particular? He is an overpowered juggernaut who cannot be turned good. He definitely needed to be dehydrated or else Earth would have been gone. Oh, and as for the anime, did he really turn good, or did he simply decide it wasn't worth wasting his time with his immediate predecessor and just left Earth to go destroy elsewhere?
- Chopsuey later manages to use LEGO Genetics on himself, transforming the already long-clawed creature into something even more monstrous.
- Even the supposedly harmless experiments end up being nightmare fuel when taken to their logical extreme.
- Felix (Experiment 010) was designed to be a total neat freak and keep everything spick-and-span in Jumba's house. Unfortunately, due to a glitch in his program, Felix viewed all organisms (including people) as germs that must be "sterilized" (quickly and ruthlessly killed) at all costs, and threw away anything even remotely dirty. After killing a fly using a laser fired from his trunk, he eventually tried to kill Lilo and her family after they released him while constantly saying nothing but "Dirty, Dirty, Dirty!"
- Topper (Experiment 025) was designed to give off a bright light and basically just shine brightly. However, the light he gives off was created to pose as an invasion-signaling beacon to the Galactic Armada on whatever planet he is on. He's basically a calling card for armed aliens to invade your planet!
- Backhoe (Experiment 040): This was made to dig up vegetation out of the ground, potentially ruining land for crops for years. If left to its own devices, it could potentially create famine.
- Coco (Experiment 052): While only appearing in the
*Lilo & Stitch* comic in *Disney Adventures*, this thing is noted because of its ability to turn anything into chocolate. That is rather disturbing in a King Midas meets Willy Wonka kind of way.
- Snafu (Experiment 120) was designed to foil enemy plans by any possible means, meaning he will also ruin any chances of capturing him, and can only be caught by accident. He was so crafty that Lilo couldn't think of a defined place where he belongs where he could only do good and simply let the military have him. Imagine if he became evil or was used for evil purposes. Who could stop him?
- Carmen (Experiment 123) causing an Involuntary Dance doesnt sound that terrible... until you realize that people have danced themselves to death, notably the mysterious Dancing Plague.
- Drowsy (Experiment 360) was designed to put anyone to sleep by simply bleating like a sheep. Harmless enough right? Wrong. The sleeping effect is near-permanent; only water in the victim's face will awaken them, and other experiments are not affected as much. Imagine being put to sleep while other more dangerous experiments are free to cause chaos, especially Remmy mentioned above...
- Just putting someone to sleep is bad enough. Many fatal car accidents are caused by drivers falling asleep at the wheel.
- When you realize that there is a defenseless 7- to 8-year-old girl getting into very dangerous situations.
- An asteroid coming towards Earth... and no one is the wiser until it was nearly too late!
- In "Melty", we have the Bad Future that Lilo and Stitch accidentally create after their time travel shenanigans. We only get a glimpse of it and Jumba's the only one present, but from what Jumba recounts it isn't pleasant—thanks to Melty, the house was destroyed, the family broke down, Stitch is implicitly
*dead*, Jumba himself is haggard and blind in two of his eyes and apparently something happened to Pleakley that was so horrible Jumba doesn't even want to mention it.
- Speaking of Bad Futures, Lilo once tried to circumvent the Just a Kid trope by going
*forward* in time with one of Stitch's cousins. Unfortunately, this had the side effect that Lilo and Stitch seem as if they've vanished in the interim. Barring the obvious fear this puts Nani through in the first go-around, it also means that, for ten whole years there was no one to keep Gantu from capturing the other experiments for Hämsterviel. When Lilo tries to do it again (unaware of what Gantu has been doing), Hämsterviel has managed to take over the world, Nani had to pay off an accumulation of parking tickets Lilo unwittingly caused by becoming Hämsterviel's personal water-carrier and Jumba started living as a fugitive in their now abandoned house. The only good news is that Pleakley became an international celebrity after pursuing his dream of becoming a fashion designer. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiloAndStitchTheSeries |
Little House with an Orange Roof / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- "Golden Love," which centers on flocks of crows which attack people, to the point where neighborhood kids aren't allowed to go outside. One page in particular looks like something out of
*The Birds*. The worst part is that crow attacks really are a problem in Japan. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleHouseWithAnOrangeRoof |
Lion / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- When Saroo and the other children in the subway are chased by kidnappers with ill intentions. And the fact a Dirty Cop knows what's going on and
*doesn't help children*.
- Noor, full stop. She pretends to be a friendly woman when she takes in Saroo and promises her friend Rama will help. However, it becomes clear that Rama is a child seller. The scary part comes from how this situation occurs in real life — someone pretends to be your friend so they can use you for their selfish purposes.
- Upon seeing Saroo ending up at the orphanage, you see all those caged children shouting, akin to prisoners eager to give a brutal initiation to newcomers.
- Shondeep, a boy from the orphanage Saroo is sent to, is woken up at night by one of the workers. He is then given to an unidentified man with the worker explaining to
*"bring him back before morning"*.
- There's the fact that Saroo learned that his brother, Guddu, was dead from that very night they were separated. So, if nothing else happened, Saroo would have been stranded at that train station with absolutely no idea of how to get home and since he was too young to properly pronounce his name or hometown, no one would have had any idea where he lived. Thus, as arduous as his experiences were beginning being trapped on that decommissioned train going across India, that was actually an
*extraordinary* stroke of luck ultimately giving him a happy life eventually. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Lion |
Little Nemo / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
The comic where Nemo, Flip and Impie eat too much ice cream and then freeze. Impie is the first victim, who falls off his stool and shatters. Flip is next; when as someone tries to carry his frozen, paralyzed body away with a pair of ice tongs, he slips out and shatters into pieces. Then the frozen Nemo is brought back home, where he's placed in front of an oven to thaw him out, only his entire body begins to melt away as he screams for help. This strip was honestly disturbing because of the break of comic book time and McCay's deadpan explanation. While the melting Nemo comic is disturbing, the one with the Cupid satire was grotesquely hilarious and horrifying. That one is probably also is an example of And I Must Scream. Take a closer look at the Father Time strip. As he's aging, he's wearing rich clothing all throughout his twenties and forties. Then, when he's 99, he's dressed like a bum. If what Father Time is implying is true, Nemo will live long enough to lose all his money and die cold and lonely, forgotten by his children. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleNemo |
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Anyone with Ornithophobia would do best to avoid this film!Compared to most talking animal films, or just animated films of adventure in general, the movie covers a startling number of dark topics including genocide, racial purity and pogroms, child abuse and murder, the horrors of war, indoctrination, and brainwashing, and attempted fratricide. Worst of all it shows owls that are already creepy enough at their absolute worst in the most human of ways. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LegendOfTheGuardiansTheOwlsOfGaHoole |
Liquid Sample / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Alex's summoning to Halkegenia is anything but a pretty picture. Having been brought over just after being blasted by the nuke, Alex is little more than a puddle of biological ooze. But when he manages to get some extra biomass from a crow that was foolish enough to try and eat him, that's when the horror starts. The scene that unfolds is as follows:
Henrietta took a second to recompose herself with a deep breath and then took a careful look at the protruding thing. To her great surprise and disgust it was a human hand. A hand that had been flayed of its skin and left with only rotting meat attached to the bones, certainly, but a hand nevertheless.
The bony fingers clacked together and slapped down on the marble stage with a loud wet sound.
*Splunk!*
Using that as an anchor, it pushed itself upwards. Then, just like a person pulling himself free from a pool of water, a man rose.
The head came first. Like the hand, it too was rotting and grotesque. Distantly, Henrietta heard the sound of screams and some weaker stomached nobles hurling up whatever snacks had been provided for them earlier. Eyeballs rolled in the slime creature's lidless sockets while its jaw opened and shut in short, rapid succession, uttering a death rattle like the hiss of a snake as it took great gasping breaths. Its nose was missing and cheek-flesh ripped apart to show the white of the bones beneath.
After the head came the body, if it could be called that. Less than flesh and blood, a veritable skeleton struggled to rise. As bare as it was, one could see the distinct lack of organs that all living things had. It made Henrietta question whether this thing was truly alive, though rationally she knew that it must be. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiquidSample |
Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
It would have done Tim Burton proud. It can be rather amusing in retrospect that Nightmare Land, where all nightmares come from, can be considered Nightmare Fuel. Or: A fictional world responsible for all nightmares in a fictional Earth is also responsible for nightmares
*in the real world.*
- Nemo's nightmare of being pursued by a living homicidal steam train at the beginning most definitely is this in its rawest form. The thing just seems to have this Terminator like determination to run over and kill Nemo as slowly and painfully as possible.
- Eventually, the tracks it's chasing Nemo's flying bed on end at a lake and while the bed is able to float on the water like a speedboat the train submerges into the lake. Nemo sighs in relief, thinking he's safe at last, but then the train suddenly reemerges from the water like a shark and starts thrashing at the floating bed as if to say "You can't get rid of me
*that* easily ya little shit!
- And it's all topped off with Nemo trying frantically to barricade the front door of his house against the force of the train and crying out to his mother for help...who is too preoccupied with baking her pies to notice the situation. The train finally breaks through, sending Nemo flying through the air...which thankfuly, wakes him up from the nightmare.
- The nighmarish essence that Nemo accidentally lets loose when it kidnaps King Morpheus. It most definitely will keep your kids up at night.
- After Nemo's first time experiencing a Catapult Nightmare, he finds the Royal Scepter and starts hearing the almost ghostly sound of King Morpheus's voice coming from somewhere in his house. Going downstairs to find it, he sees a glow coming from the kitchen, where the note stating "Remember your promise" regarding his sneaking pies in the middle of the night changes to the symbol of the key he was given before flooding the house with water. It's a particularly chilling scene and can be reminiscent of dreams that sometimes leave you feeling your own home isn't safe either.
- The batlike creatures that kidnap Nemo's friends and carry them off into the night as he is totally helpless to defend them. It certainly brings the flying monkeys from
*The Wizard of Oz* to mind. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleNemoAdventuresInSlumberland |
LISA / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
"Look at it smile... Disgusting. I've watched this beast kill dozens. Yet at this moment, I can just sit here and stare into its eyes... And it just stares back... Smiling..."
In a series with a universe as dark as LISA's, horrifying things are simply inevitable.
**Unmarked spoilers below!**
- The whole idea that you're exploring the broken mind of a child who is sexually abused by their father.
- The way the Marty heads appear anywhere, at random, and are spread through the entire world. They don't do anything, but somehow, this is even scarier.
- Looking closely, a lot of the backgrounds are just his face. Even in empty space, Marty is
**everywhere**.
- The White World, containing only a few settings and each holding its own Smiling Marty, whose creepy smiles add to the unsettling nature of the whole area.
- The Palace that Lisa is transported to is relatively nice-looking and safe. That is, until the end, when Lisa reaches the final corridor and is greeted by Marty, represented here as a grotesque, veiny mound of flesh covered in scraggly hair◊, and surrounded by vomit stains and broken beer bottles. It's undoubtedly the most intense instance of body horror in the entire game, which is compounded by the fact that the entrance to the next area is located behind him. This requires Lisa to move directly behind him, which makes it look like she's being absorbed into his body.
- Tricky Rick has his own separate room within the inventory area. Try to speaking with him and what does he have to say? "
*Don't mind me... I'm just waiting...*"
- Obviously, the world of LISA is not a very nice place. You have violent bandits and marauders murdering anyone they run into, men trying to molest other men to compensate for the entire population of women being wiped out, there's grotesque mutants who used to be human beings with their minds torn apart and reduced to caveman-like states, and the sole fact that one day, humanity itself is going to shrivel up into nothing. It's a
*very* bleak setting for a game inspired by others like EarthBound.
- The Joy Mutants themselves. They're the end result of a Joy addict's death/emotional development; giant, horifically fleshy monsters that are almost entirely hostile towards anyone that dare approach them. Their minds have been shattered to the point where the only thing they seek is their deepest desire, which in most cases makes them violent and cannibalistic. These violent tendencies makes them some of the exclusive enemies in the game that can perma-kill your party members. There's also the fact that during battle, most mutants spend their turns crying and moaning while only occasionally dishing out devastating attacks. This can be interpreted as them still having a little humanity left and being dimly aware of the monsters they've become, which makes them doubly horrific and sad.
- The Shadowy Figures you fight in dark tunnels can be this. They attack either by scratching and punching, or by
*licking and groping you.* There's also the fact they have 1 pixel large glowing eyes, which are made worse as a result of the entire battle background being pitch black. Additionally, they seem to pose extremely strangely...
- The constant hallucinations of Lisa that Brad suffers are quite unnerving. He sees her everywhere he goes, standing just out of reach and silently observing him.
- Rando's horrifically scarred face. Even worse is how it got that way: Buzzo attacked and destroyed Brad's dojo to punish Brad for not preventing Lisa's suicide, and when Rando tried to stop him, Buzzo
*carved his face off*.
- Instant Kill attacks. When a party member gets hit by an attack like this, they're not just dead, they're
*DEAD dead,* meaning they get removed from your party permanently. Seeing your unique, quirky, useful and funny party members grow strong, powerful and capable instantly removed forever from your party with no hope of getting them back is deeply disturbing. Also double as a Tear Jerker.
- What's scary about the Great White Flash is that almost next to nothing is known about it. We don't know what caused the women to die off or how they died off...
- The confusing scene with Jonathan and Slave Lord Jim at Dismal Island. It goes so quickly and with no explanation whatsoever that it's legitimately disturbing and frightening, especially given the fact that Jonathan makes noises that no other character does during the battle.
-
*The Nice Neighborhood*, holy hell. A Bonus Level in Area 2 thats arguably the scariest area in the game.
- For starters, you are greeted with the lovely image of a scientist's hung corpse, as well as this beautiful piece of background music, titled "Blood For Sex". Really makes you feel welcomed, huh?
- Little, blood-coated, zombie-like creatures called Creeps infest the area. While theyre pushovers in battle, the sheer speed at which they scuttle around can easily catch a player off guard. The fact that most of them don't have battle music in their fights only adds to the creep factor. The truth behind them definitely doesnt make them less creepy, as theyre failed attempts at creating Super Soldiers.
- One of said Creeps is encountered eating some kind of bloody flesh. Killing it yields a Locket. Do the math.
- You then find out that these were the homes of Joy Project scientists, who were trying to make a Super Serum drug but made a hyper-addictive drug that later mutates its users. Given that theres copious amounts of eerie blood writing on the walls, it makes you wonder how many volunteered as living test subjects for Joy...
- One of the houses has Doctor, a Joy Mutant whose design differs from most of the other mutants in that he has incredibly pale skin, bloodshot-red eyes, and yellow teeth. After defeating him, you find a note from a man known as Dr. Lemont, a scientist who worked on the Joy project. The note start out with him expressing relief over being able to go home... before degrading into borderline nonsense about how he wants to smash his wife's face in over and over again. This implies that Dr. Lemont was the mutant you just faced, and that Lemont wrote this note
*while he was turning into a Mutant*.
- Doctor gets even scarier once Fridge Horror settles in. The giant lump that is the majority of his body presumably prevents him from moving. Given his decayed appearance (pale skin, yellow teeth), and the note implying that he mutated around the time that the Joy project wrapped up, this implies that Dr. Lemont was sitting and decaying in the basement for years, possibly before the Flash occurred.
- The bloated, Joy Mutant-like Creep in one of the basement floors that appears attached to the wall.◊ This one is completely inaccessable, as the staircase leading to the basement of that house is blocked. The fact that this unique Creep can't be fought somehow makes it worse. Brad doesn't even see it, but thanks to the side-view of the game,
*you* do.
- If youre playing on Pain Mode, youll be able to access the Joy Lab, a secret laboratory located to the right of the after-mentioned Nice Neighborhood. The lab already invokes Nothing Is Scarier, but theres two things that really make this location stand out.
- The third room has tanks containing various subjects. Two mutants (one of which is labelled My favorite), a fishman, and a Creep. Notably, the two mutants resemble ones previously encountered.
- The final room has a relatively fresh corpse and a note saying Sorry darling, but my actions are just. Heres the kicker: the corpse is a
*female*. In other words, whoever killed that person helped screw over the entire human race.
- Wally's, the fast food area at the second crossroads. There's...a lot to say about it.
- In the cave leading to Wally's, there is an NPC who is facing a cavern wall. When interacted with, he reveals his mutilated face and has this to say;
- The entire area up to the mountain climb can lower your guard, as the entire time, it's mostly humor-based, with men kneeling and basking in the glory of Wally. And then you'd find Lil' Nuggie. Speaking of...
- Lil' Nuggie, a mascot of Wally's. When you come across him, he strangely shuffles from left to right, making a...
*ticking* noise of some sort. As for his appearance, he's an armless, green figure with glossy black eyes and blood seeping out of his mouth. It could just be some guy in a suit, but for the kind of place Wally's is, this might not even be the case.
- Wally himself. As you walk into the establishment, it's a small room filled with
*some* kind of meat, but not exactly specified (implied to be human flesh). Going deeper has you meet Wally, whose appearance consists of a mangly clown costume with a bloated head, bulging sickly eyes and a speaker for a mouth.
- His prebattle lines only make him worse; it's all just insane ramblings switching between pleading to Brad to downright hostility.
**Wally:** "Hi, welcome to— No! Stop! You can't be here! Hooo ho ho, go away! Hoo hoooo! *Don't!* Where's Nuggie? No! Don't! Did you hurt him?! Wally's got what ya need, kids! Hooo hoo! No no no! You want to Wally size it?! No no no! Welcome to Wally's! Don't! Please, I just want to die!" *(Battle starts)*
- Wally has an absurd amount of health, and it's only near the end where his mask starts cracking off, revealing his flesh to be
*rotting.* He doesn't even drop any Joy after you kill him either, so *somehow* this happened by itself.
- Probably the most horrifying part of this area is that absolutely
of it is explained in-game or by Word of God. You're left with all of these questions about the complete absurdity of the area, and none of them are answered. **none**
- The Devil's Bathhouse segment in the third area, a series of winding, dark, and implausibly large communal bathes deep within the earth. The corridors are narrow, the lighting is murky, the music that plays is creepy, and most rooms are filled with the (presumably) hallucinatory Marty spiders from the first game. The whole place is decorated with gorgeous tile murals and is relatively clean, in sharp contrast to the dirty, broken-down wasteland outside, making it feel even more unnatural.
- Throughout the game, when resting at certain rest points, there's a chance for one of your companions to get kidnapped by one of the local gangs. This is easily resolved by giving the gang a certain amount of mags to get said companion back. When arriving at Area 3, you'll come across a new gang that consists of bikers. They don't do or say anything, and just stare at you, and block your path. Resting at the Area 3 rest point yet again risks one of your companions getting kidnapped by the biker gang. At this point you would think "Oh, I'll just pay the toll to get my companion back.", but this time, it's
*different*. When you get to the biker gang's hangout, you'll be greeted to a lovely sight of all the bikers' *mutilated bodies on the floor, and the grass caked in blood*. You'll then come across the giant, mutated leader of the gang march around crazily. When touching him, naturally you'll enter a fight with him. Said fight is *probably harder than any other joy mutant fight*. He uses his bike to slam you and your companions, possibly *killing them*.
- About your companion who was kidnapped, once defeating the joy mutant, behind him is a pile of flayed flesh. Inspecting it narrates the text "Is this...?". The implication of this? Your companion is
*dead.* There's absolutely *no* way to save the companion that was kidnapped. Made even worse if it was a companion that was extremely powerful, like Terry Hintz or Fly.
- It's implied that the "snow" on Snow Mountain is actually ash from the piles of corpses being cremated at the summit. At the top of the mountain, the player encounters a man running around frantically while engulfed in flames. It's a jarring contrast to the lifeless bodies surrounding him, and it has unfortunate implications.
- The fact that right before the final battle with Rando's army, Lisa's theme from The First, The Sireen's Call, plays very faintly in the background. It's the only other point in the game besides the title screen where it plays.
- The
**ending.** Jesus Christ, the ending. ||After Brad dies from his injuries, the credits roll, accompanied by Live in Joy. While this is fine, you know what isn't? Flashes of things like "LISALISALISALISALISALISA", "Love", "Kill her Brad Armstrong", "Special Thanks to Martin Armstrong", "Taste Her It's Your Fault" and "Wake Up Buddy Buddy Buddy." But these strange credits aren't even the half of it, as we get a flash of the strange, organ-like background that we saw when fighting Rando's army. And then we get what might be the most horrific image in the game, period. That image being **a mutated Brad** in the dead of night, with us controlling him to go forward and his legs carrying his swollen and bloodied form across the ground. And then we have him enter a small shack, where *Buddy happens to be sleeping.* With that, we get the final line of dialogue in the game as Brad slowly inches towards her.||
**Brad:** *Lisa...*
- Sweetheart, the most powerful Joy mutant in existence. Even worse?
*It* might be a **she**.
- The absolutely horrific landscape of The List by the end of the Joyful: dead bodies from Buddy's crusade, slain mutants dot the hills, blood and gore and maddening scrawls cover the walls and floor, and Brad, his friends and Rando all looking on at you, disappointingly. It really hammers home just how awful Buddy's destructive crusade was, and her shattered mental state by the endgame.
- Just the way that the hallucinations creep into the landscape; first theres just a few bodies... then joy mutants.. then suddenly Brad's corpse at the end of the Painful RPG sits on a hill just above you.
- Buzzo's horrific fate. After talking about how Buddy didnt deserve the pain that he inflicted upon her and remarking how Lisa wouldve loved this world, he begins crying out for Lisa in a rather disturbing manner... before the screen cuts to the red tendrils associated with Joy, and then it cuts back to Buzzo beginning to mutate. His head has become disproportionately swollen, and a new arm begins growing out of it. Soon after, we see his mutated form, which is all bloodied and (literally) twisted. Upon his death, he slowly remarks how hes finally free from Lisa's grasp. Granted, one might argue that he deserved it, but its incredibly horrifying regardless. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Lisa |
Legend (1985) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- The Lord of Darkness. A hulking red devil-looking creature with enormous horns, yellow cat eyes, hooves, and rippling muscles. You can't blame poor Lili for freaking out when she wakes up with that face inches away from her own.
- Darkness' father, who is nothing but a black face with pupil-less glowing green eyes melded into a glittering black throne, always watching Lili.
- Lili coming across her peasant friends, to see them all frozen. When the demons enter the house, we see a poor little baby frozen in its crib as well.
- Meg Mucklebones, a big slimy green lake goblin, popping out of the water and getting close to eating Jack.
- The black dress Darkness leaves for Lili dancing on its own, with jarring music playing. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Legend1985 |
Law & Order: Criminal Intent / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Even though
*Law & Order: Criminal Intent* is considered Lighter and Softer (in comparison, anyway) to its older sisters, it still has some very haunting moments.
This is a Moments subpage and therefore, it contains unmarked
per policy. Proceed with caution. **spoilers**
- "Poison" has someone spiking totally-innocuous painkiller medication with
*cyanide* pills, resulting in six deaths after the initial first of her husband and creating a localized panic. Turns out the reason she caused it all? Entirely to cover up the murder of her husband to get the life insurance money so she could get a deal to make and sell baby clothes for her business. A horrible series of deaths out of the blue for the sake of personal profit. And she's *completely* willing to let her mother take the fall so long as it doesn't affect her; the only reason she eventually tries to exculpate her mother is that the company is threatening to yank her deal because of the potential bad publicity.
- The fate of the victim, a Mafia Princess-turned-successful author, in "Maledictus". As if her murder wasn't enough, the way her body was disposed of was pretty gruesome: not only was she decapitated and her head was sent to her publisher's office to be discovered by the unsuspecting and horrified employees (and with the necklace she bought with the money for her "new book" shoved in her mouth), but the rest of her body was dissolved in acid and then hurled into a river, unlikely to be found.
- What happened to the missing young woman in "Yesterday"; she had been missing since going on a date back in 1983 and upon finally being discovered buried underneath the basement of a house, what was once a beautiful blonde (as seen in the picture in her "missing persons" file) was now a rotten, dust-covered skeleton with ratty blonde hair attached.
- "Phantom" has a murderer living a double life, trying to axe out his former life step by step as his mind gradually unhinges more and more. By the end of the episode, Goren and Eames as well as the murderer's wife are horrified as they realize he's basically run off with their children and is about to kill them too. In a rare case for
*Law & Order*, the ambience keeps going for a while, before going silent shortly before Goren arrives - as he sees the man aiming a **shotgun at his own kids.** We even get a wonderous camera shot of Goren between the murderer and the kids, a crazed look in the man's eyes and the barrel of the shotgun in Goren's own face.
- Want a good example of how Creepy Good Goren can be? To prove that a convicted perp isn't the Motel Ripper or a copycat in "Seizure", he straight up
*cuts his own palm with a pocket knife* and then shoves the injury in front of the guy's face to make him faint from the sight of blood. He doesn't bat an eye at the pain and causally covers up his hand in the aftermath, having proven his point that such a person couldn't have committed the Ripper's overly-brutal sprees.
- The episode, "Dead", registers as this. In addition to the Victim of the Week's graphic death, but we learn that his workplace, a funeral parlor, had a dark secret; they would steal the bodies that were brought to them for embalming/cremation and then sell the relatives fake ashes while keeping the bodies themselves hidden away. Later in the episode, detectives unearth the bodies in various stages of decomposition. It gets worse: The crematorium part of the episode,where the owner had resorted to burying the bodies on the premises, because the oven had broken down and he couldn't afford to have it fixed? It was Ripped From The Headlines!
- The episode, "See Me". The killer, an optometrist who is "treating" homeless men with schizophrenia by blinding them or greatly damaging their eyes through dangerous experiments to get rid of their illness-induced illusions has close-ups of these experiments. However, what keeps the killer from being completely unsympathetic is that at the end of the episode, we learn that he's schizophrenic as well, and while he ended up doing serious harm to his patients, he was genuinely (if extremely misguidedly) trying to help them. He winds up hospitalized instead of imprisoned.
- The Villainous Breakdown in "A Murderer Among Us", where it turns out the killer's motivation was killing Jewish men because his mother had an affair with her Jewish boss when he was a child, which broke his family apart after she got pregnant by him and his father started abusing her over it, but he was told by his father that she was raped by said boss. What seems like initial distrust and proclamations of the police tricking people starts to become more like accusations against Jews in general, and when he slowly starts to get the truth that his wife and daughter were Jewish put into his mind, he starts
*flipping out spectacularly.* You also get to see Goren playing a particularly nasty intimidation game, preventing the killer from picking up an iron pipe as he starts to wildly swing it himself to apply the mental pressure.
- The episode "Want". It was based on the Jeffrey Dahmer case, so that should tell you something. One of the victims survived, but suffered "permanent" damage to her speech and cognitive functioning. The doctor tells them the victim has a hole in her head, likely created by a common household drill. Not only that, but her spinal fluid was hypertonic (diluted), and she had slight scalding on her brain tissue. In the word of Eames, "He drilled a hole in her skull, and poured hot water on her brain." Oh, yeah, the killer also ate part of one of his victim's calf muscles like an everyday meal.
- "The Posthumous Collection" already was filled with rather disturbing deaths with the victims being killed and then photographed as a part of "art", but the one suspect's past is rather disturbing as well: after his father died when he was a young boy, he was left to the mercy of his abusive mother, grandmother and three older sisters. His one older sister (who by the way was interviewed by the detectives while imprisoned for manslaughter) even recalled how she and her sisters used to do all sorts of vicious things to him, including scalding him with hot water, feeding him spoiled food and tying him to a bed and mercilessly beating him. This is made all the more horrible by the woman not only recalling the torture of him fondly but that his own mother and grandmother did nothing to stop it, with them saying that since he's a boy, he could handle it. Even Goren pointed out to him that he needed his father to protect him from these monsters.
- "Slither" has a unsuspecting couple at a party one moment, then in the ensuing madness of the next few days, they end up exposed to a
*human head* in the party host's refrigerator, held hostage and heavily drugged, which caused the wife to end up a full-blown addict and the husband dead of a hot dose.
- The homicides in "The Healer" are among some of the most horrifying in
*Criminal Intent* history. When an apartment's super comes with a neighbor to the residence of two college-aged sisters to see why they haven't been answering calls, they find both girls lying dead on their respective beds and mummified in plastic wrap (as seen above). The creepy music heard during this scene (and throughout the episode) doesn't help matters. Even worse, although the women were poisoned before going into the cocoons, it's later discovered that they both were **still alive** after being placed inside of them. After being led to a young woman who allegedly practiced voodoo/witchcraft (and Logan expressing doubt about her "powers") he soon finds himself with a mysterious rash that he had no idea how he contracted it. Turns out, he was poisoned by a candle she dipped in ivy and tricked him into picking up.
- "To The Bone" begins with a bloodbath inside of a mansion where a family (including two children) are robbed and savagely murdered via
*multiple* strikes from machetes. Even worse, the father had his hand hacked off while the son lost a finger. As the detectives are trying to determine any suspects, another wealthy family is slaughtered in an identical way, only the oldest son was *sodomized* with a tennis racket by one of the offenders. The sheer amount of blood and mayhem at both scenes is horrifying to the point that one of the first officials on the scene of the first massacre likened it to Charles Manson.
- The beginning of "Blasters" has a young man being tortured then hanged by a group of mafiosos while he pleads for his life. That was already bad enough, but what really makes it worse is how his body is left on top of a overlooking cliff in a public park, to the point that it's not found until a rock climber stumbles upon his now-bloated, decomposed corpse. Then, he is taken to the morgue as a John Doe and was only
*seconds* away from being put into an unmarked grave in potter's field. Later on, Logan and Wheeler arrive in the nick of time to save the victim's friend from receiving the same fate. Essentially what saved the guy, other than the two of them getting there fast enough, was his height.
- "Blind Spot" has its fair share. First, Eames returns to find her bird dead, only to turn around and be knocked out and kidnapped. Then, while being held captive, not only is she threatened by the killer while tied up and blindfolded, but has to sit idly by while the killer tortures the other victim for
*hours* before she's killed. It's any wonder that Eames was able to escape the ordeal, but we still see the remnants of the torture chamber, including a table that's splattered with the victim's blood.
- "Major Case" has a long-time famous forensics expert helping in the case of a murdered teenage prostitute, apparently bleached completely to make sure no one could find traces of anything on her. As the case proceeds, however, Nichols starts Spotting the Thread when DNA evidence pointing towards the first suspect comes up implausibly despite the airtight alibi on the guy. The episode makes it clear from the beginning that the expert is the culprit, going through extensive means to cover up all traces of his involvement and what he did while exploiting the system to cover his tracks. And even worse, he's a would-be child predator that didn't even realize that all of his famous cases were teenaged girls, and as Nichols phrases it, the only reason this entire incident happened was because this was a "live one" that he killed when she rejected his impulsive attempts to rape her.
- The victim's death in "Icarus", who died via a broken neck by falling on the stage in a freak accident. In front of an entire audience. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LawAndOrderCriminalIntent |
Little Nightmares II / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
If the last game and the title didn't already tip you off, this game is not for the faint of heart. You thought The Maw was bad?
The Pale City will make you want to go back.
## WARNING: Nightmare Fuel pages on TV Tropes have a Spoilers Off policy. All spoilers below will be unmarked. You have been warned!
- Like the first game, the graphics invoke all kinds of Uncanny Valley, and the heightened violence doesn't help.
- The state of the Pale City in general, a desolate place where buildings are falling apart, people are twisted mentally and physically, and just about every big establishment you explore is run by a complete and total psycho. Have fun...
- Adding to the above, most who played the first game might be under the impression that, given how hard Six tries to escape, the world beyond the Maw
*must* be better somehow. Nope, the horrors of the Pale City make even the worst of the Maw look tame. If the first game made you think the Lady went too far in staying away from the outside world (living at the bottom at the ocean for the vast majority of the year and all the things she did to keep the Maw running), this game will make you believe *she didn't go far enough*.
- The Glitching Remains. The main collectibles of the game, they are static imprints left by the unfortunate children that came before you, heavily implied to have been taken by the Thin Man, based on how Six seems to leave one when she is taken during Chapter Four.
- A comic makes it even worse, showing us some of these children's fates. Let that sink in. There were so many actual children fighting for a better life. Not only Six, the Runaway Kid and Mono. And each and every one of them is now just...gone.
- In the first game, one of the only completely safe spaces were the vents and small spaces of the Maw, but in this game...not so much. Here are some examples:
- In the first chapter, you escape from the Hunter the first time by ducking into an animal-made tunnel. Think youre safe and catch your breath near the hole you entered it through? He will shove the barrel of his gun down the hole and fire, most likely killing you.
- The Teachers example is the most prominent of the three, when at the climax of the chapter, you start to escape through a vent, but catch her attention. She proceeds to force her bulbous head into the vent in pursuit, sporting a Slasher Smile and biting at you.
- The Restless Hand in the Hospital, which up until this point only travelled on the floor, pursues you up a shelf and into the vents, eventually forcing you out while it continues scuttling through, eventually ambushing you just as you find something that can put you on equal footing.
- So to say, if the first game actually gave the player a chance to win in the stealth segments, not letting the Chefs reach for you when you're under the table for example, the second game is nowhere as merciful. Particular "bosses" like the Teacher and the Doctor will NOT lose sight of Mono once he's spotted. Ever.
- The forest Mono traverses through at the beginning is haunting in atmosphere alone, with traps and dead bodies littering the place. And no, we don't mean dead animals,
*we mean dead humans*...Maybe...
- The Hunters shack is filthy and unkempt, with a kitchen filled with flies around a revolting looking stew, and a group of people having been turned into an unsettling taxidermy display.
- The Hunter is full of this, with his face covered by a burlap sack with a single hole cut out, possibly hinting that, given the hole's placement on the sack, his face might be just as deformed as the rest of the monsters around him.
- He's also almost explicitly a serial killer, hunting and killing adults, children, and even other monsters like him if his room of his catches are anything to go by. Unlike the Chefs from the Maw, who at the very least had the excuse that it was a part of their job, The Hunter has no actual justification; Mono and Six are both running through the woods, far away from his cabin. He does it
*for fun.*
- How utterly relentless he proves to be closely examining the mires and fields his prey lurk through, and on
*two separate occasions* preforms a Barrier-Busting Blow through a wall and door, respectively.
- The Hunter's introduction is utterly horrifying. You can vaguely hear him working in his shack even from all the way in the house. Then you make your way into said shack, and see him in the middle of a taxidermy, as seen in this◊ image. The lighting makes it look like something out of a horror film from the 1980's, but at least Jason Voorhees didn't have a shotgun. His work is pretty loud, allowing the duo to sneak past him...until he hears them pry a door open and gives chase.
- Beware the Teacher whenever she's around. Or else if she does hear you, she'll stretch her neck out complete with all the uncomfortable sounds you can expect to search for Mono and grab him in her mouth.
- Her sequence in the library is a great example of this. She lurks in the background, shambling through the halls, until Mono accidentally knocks over a few books. She goes quiet, but doesnt attack. Then, as you jump to the next platform, her head bursts through a shelf, violently screeching as she bites at you. This leads into her closely examining a circular bookshelf in search of you, as you can see in this◊ image.
- The bullies are this. Cruel, murderous little who-knows-whats with porcelain heads resembling children. Even though they have the most "strict" teacher ever possible. It's stated they don't deserve kindness because they themselves don't possess such quality. It looks like they only exist to be this - a cruel, mindless force of chaos which won't just stop on its own.
- The cafeteria section is creepy, even though kinda hilarious. You can see the bullies having so much fun without the Teacher around - chasing, punching, pushing each other and Mono if he'll come too close. A girl bully is even trying to drown her lovely friend in a pot.
- A rare moment that can occur when the Teacher catches you while she's "teaching" her class and you're sneaking by her is that instead of chasing you herself, the Teacher will
*sic the bullies on you instead* while she watches. And you can't escape them like you could with the Teacher, they will catch you.
- Through the chapter, it becomes increasingly clear just how severely the Teacher is willing to punish her students. When Mono makes a cabinet fall, her first instinct after not finding anyone responsible is to start slamming down her ruler one each of her students desks. Then, you can see her shadow from below you as she disciplines one of her students, punctuated by the Bully yelping from each blow. There are several Bullies forced to write down eye symbols endlessly and, most glaringly, a hidden room in a staff-only area with a chair and bindings, and a nearby dead Bully.
- When the Teacher discovers you walking above her head while she plays the piano, you can crawl through a vent, and assume that, like all the other enemies, she'll get distracted by something else. Nope, instead, she
*shoves her head and neck through the vent and chases you down,* with her mouth wide open and the intent to bite you to death. Even worse, her neck seems to go on forever, so she barely slows down. In this scene, her face looks more animated and fleshy than it ever has before, as her head looked like an expressionless wooden doll up to the final chase.
- After Six has been kidnapped, hung upside down by the bullies, and saved by Mono they come upon another bully in a different area drawing on the floor. As Mono can quietly try to approach the nearby hammer, Six will sneak up on the unsuspecting bully. Before Mono can get the weapon, Six will launch herself at the bully, put him in a chokehold, and audibly
*snap* his neck. Six then stands over the broken bully she had just killed almost similar to the first game after she killed the Lady.
- There's a stealth bit where Mono is traversing some rafters above the Teacher who seems to be whacking a student with her ruler. Mono can't move on the rafters without knocking some objects off, causing the Teacher stretch her neck up to look around. Even managing to hide from her line of sight isn't too comforting, as the player gets a good close look at the Teacher's lovely face.
- In the school science lab, you have to sneak past the Teacher preparing for a lesson. She is seen stuffing frogs into a jar and what seems to be a real heart into a real torso to make a grotesque anatomy model, and Mono has to sneak right past her as she does all this. Eventually, she moves onto writing on a chalkboard, her back to Mono, but if she hears him, she will turn her head around to look for any disturbances.
- The Hospital is surely a fun place on its own with creepy deformed half-mannequin "patients" charging at Mono, or with a humongous sadistic ceiling-climbing creature being in charge. But there are specifically more weird and dark moments here and there.
- A strange room with what appears to be an actual dead body in a tub. It's wrapped into what appear to be tentacles or leeches and appears to be rotting. You can barely hear anything because of all the flies buzzing in the room, probably feasting on its flesh. Ew.
- A room with an electric chair. Gives out some hints that the place is more of an Asylum rather than an actual hospital.
- The one-on-one encounter with the Restless Hand, starting when it rips itself free from a mannequin and scuttles off into the background. It swiftly proves itself a Super-Persistent Predator, hunting you on the ground, and when that fails, climbing up a shelf and through the vents in pursuit of Mono, all the while sporting an instant kill attack if it latches onto you. You can only imagine how delightful it is having to face two at once.
- Traveling through the Patients' ward of the hospital is terrifying. All throughout the hospital, you've seen these mannequins of flesh mixed with plastic and prosthetic parts, some of which are headless, some bandaged, and some with fragments of faces or sets of
*teeth* suspended in place by wire. You're waiting anxiously every time you see one for one to just come to life already, and then you enter the left wing of the hospital and get stuck in a room where a Patient is blocking the doorway to the next room. Flip a light switch, and the light starts to slowly flicker, during which the Patient shudders to life with fluid motion each time the light goes dark. The light eventually fizzles out completely, the Patient enters full motion and starts to rapidly run at you with hollow plastic footsteps, and you realize with horror exactly why you've been given a flashlight in this chapter. From that point, you have to go through several rooms with the Patients, one dark with only your flashlight to keep three back long enough, one where you need to turn off the lights to get one out of a wheelchair, and another huge dark room with Patients all around where finding a route and using your flashlight correctly can be very difficult. Each time you get out of one of their rooms, their arms reach into the one you escaped to, and the last time, they don't stop moving and grasping.
- Word of God says the patients went to the hospital willingly to let the doctor experiment on them. Why? For a change of pace
- Running down a hallway as dozens of mannequin arms shoot out of locked steel doors is tense, but having half a Patient burst out of one of those doors and be just as fast as if it had its legs is heart-pounding. The fact that it's crawling makes the table you run under no safe zone, and there are crawling Patients that will come to life ahead of you, too.
- Having to let a Patient get up from a wheelchair wouldnt seem scary as you know exactly what to expect, but the fact it doesnt immediately get up, and it does so suddenly and with a scare chord can catch a player off-guard the first time.
- After the room with the first moving Patient, there's a gurney with a limbless Patient torso on it. Climb up and the torso jolts to life for a few moments.
- After retrieving the first battery needed to power the elevator in the hospital, you enter a room where Six is playing with a mannequin arm. That alone isn't scary, but as soon as you enter, Six sllloooowwwwlllly turns in your direction, with a slow crackling noise.
- Probably not even playing, but more like breaking mannequin's fingers rather sadistically. The crackling noise was coming from the severed bodypart - and Six clearly enjoyed what she was doing.
- The Doctor is basically a giant fleshy caterpillar, hanging from the ceiling with unnatural dexterity for his weight and size. He spends most of his level hunting Mono and Six down, and, guessing from the state of the "patients", is planning to do god knows what.
- The Doctor, being on the ceiling, has a harder time noticing you hidden under him. Any hint of security this may give you is ripped away when you realize if
*any* noise is made, or worse, he actually spots you, he can and will lift up any nearby cover, making avoiding him that much harder.
- It also doesn't help that whenever he moves around, you hear a thunderous shaking sound that makes your blood run cold. Whenever you make a loud enough noise, he can hear it, even from
*another room.*
- Even just the noise he makes is unsettling, having a high-pitched voice that constantly sounds like he is giggling and crying at the same time.
- After trapping the Doctor in a crematory oven, Mono has the option to turn it on before getting into the elevator. How does Six respond to the Doctor screaming as he's burned alive? Sit down and warm herself in front of the fire. Worse still, this scene was used as a Christmas promo on Twitter!
- The Doctor himself is actually quite unnerving in that nothing is explained on how he's able to function. He crawls across the ceiling, of course, but theres absolutely no indication of how hes actually doing it, as if gravity is pulling him upwards endlessly, and he is capable of standing if he wants (as shown in a trailer and concept art). He's not even trapped like that either, as he attempts to crush you and gets inside his cremation oven right side up.
- At the beginning of the chapter, we get our first encounter with a Viewer when one suddenly crashes down from the ceiling of the building you enter, before charging into the next room and ramming into a TV, which thankfully kills him. Unfortunately, from then on you will encounter them in droves, and if they are distracted from the static of the TV and/or notice you, theyll emit a screech and a light from their faces will kill Mono. Speaking of their faces, they're either wrinkled and featureless, or caved in with holes.
- The final sequence with the Viewers sees Mono shatter a TV that is being watched by several of them through a display window. They proceed to force themselves into the abandoned store Mono is in, toppling shelves as they shamble after him like zombies.
- At one point, you can find a package and a small mail slot in the same room. While normally nothing happens when you use either, if you have the postmans cap equipped and take the package to the door, the hands of an unseen monster opens the slot, takes the parcel from you, and quickly shuts it again.
- The duo's first encounter with the Thin Man himself. While venturing through the Viewer-infested streets, Mono jacks into the Transmission yet again and finally opens the door he's been attempting to reach all this time... And there, sitting quietly behind it, is the master of the Signal Tower, and he is
*very* clearly not pleased with being disturbed. Mono and Six get knocked out of the Transmission just like the previous times... But then something else starts to come out of the television, *and suddenly the Thin Man is right in front of our two protagonists,* *walking towards his prey with no manner of urgency in his stride* — **there's nowhere for them to run, after all...**
- The Thin Man is terrifying in his own right, despite being relatively plain in comparison to the other monsters. He has no monstrous features or anything too outwardly ghastly about him, and aside from his grey skin color, he looks nearly indistinguishable from a regular man. However, his unnatural twitching, slow intimidating walk, and the way that he seems to distort reality all dunk him straight into the Uncanny Valley.
- The Reveal that he may well be Mono from an alternate timeline makes this both Nightmare Fuel and Tear Jerker. All those instances where he seems like he's going to attack you might be a cry for help.
- How you beat the Thin Man is equally intense. You face him down in a raining Main Road of the Pale City. He begins reaching out for you and Mono begins using his tv tuning abilities to literally tune him out of existence. Afterwards he somehow wills the signal tower to move close to him so he can enter, apparently destroying multiple buildings along the way.
- The Signal Tower. For the love of all that is holy, anyone who reaches this point in the game had best take a moment to mentally prepare themselves for the horror that awaits inside the Signal Tower! The inside of the tower is this bizarre realm where space itself seems to be distorted and random objects are floating as if in zero gravity. Doorways glowing the same mauve light as the beacon on top of the tower seem to warp all over the place. As Mono navigates the tower, this eerie music box melody plays and he has to follow it to find Six.
- Eventually Mono finds the music box sitting in the middle of a room filled with toys but when he walks in the door, he finds someone there waiting for him. A Humanoid Abomination wearing a familiar yellow raincoat...
- When you first strike Monster!Sixs music box it causes her to launch into an unstoppable rage, chasing you through the slowly collapsing tower, ending with Mono hiding while she completely destroys the room searching for us.
- The Towers true form! As Mono works to save Six from the Towers influence the place begins to change into something more...organic. Walls of concrete and wooden floors give way to pulsating walls of flesh and eyes until its revealed the true form of the tower is this building sized biomass! At least with the Maw and the Nest, those were just a massive ship and a run down mansion occupied by monsters. Here? The location
*is* the monster!
- A somewhat subtle moment occurs when the music box is struck for the second and third time. Mono is taken to a pitch-black room that has nothing in it besides a single door with an axe sticking out of it. If you run past it, trying to see what else is in the area, the door will appear again. No matter which direction you go or how far you run, it keeps appearing, leaving you wondering if it really is endless or if you are running in circles. This is also true when Mono is stuck in the organic depths of the Tower, as the chair will always appear until Mono walks up to it.
- After saving Six from her monstrous form, the Black Tower starts to collapse and the two of them make their escape. Suddenly, the floor collapses and Mono jumps and grabs Six by the hand. And...
*she lets him go so she can leave by herself*. All alone, Mono finds a chair in the center of a room and takes a seat on it. Then, he begins to grow older, taller and thinner...his skin turns dark...his clothes turn black...a fedora hat appears on his head...the door with the eye on it closes and we find ourselves looking at the hallway we saw at the beginning of the game.
- Then there's the secret ending: Six escapes the TV World, Shadow Six appears in front of her, and you're eventually treated to a familiar sound if you played the first game: a stomach growling. Six is STARVING. So essentially, even IF Mono escaped with her, he'd almost certainly die from being devoured by someone he trusted.
- It also hints that this is a
*prequel* when we see a flyer advertising the Maw, which Shadow Six points to as if showing Six a place where she can get rid of her hunger, which we know is anything but. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleNightmaresII |
Little Shop of Horrors / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Somewhere green, indeed!
**Seymour:** I got an idea. I'll go down to the corner and get you some nice chopped sirloin. **Audrey II:** Must be blood. **Seymour:** Twoey, that's disgusting. **Audrey II:** Must be fresh. **Seymour:** I don't wanna hear this!
It might have cool numbers, but the word "Horrors" is right there in the title. This is not a friendly show.
- The most basic concept of the show: that with the right motivation,
*anyone* could be talked into killing people for their own personal gain. Even *you*.
- "Now (It's Just the Gas)" is a
*creepy* song in what's already a pretty creepy show. Especially Orin's realization that he's about to die, and he can't do anything but plead with Seymour to help him. *Though I giggle and I chortle, *
bear in mind, I'm not immortal.
Why this whole thing strikes me funny,
I don't know...
'Cause it really is a rotten way to go!
- Some productions really play up Orin's line "or relieved/my end is nearing", by having it be one of the only lines he doesn't sing while laughing. He's come to the horrifying realization that the one person who could possibly help him isn't going to, not because he can't, but because he wants Orin to die.
- The 2019 revival has one of the most horrifying versions of the scene yet. The instrumentals are much more discordant and eerie than previous recordings, and Christian Borle sounds outright
*unhinged* as he gets more desperate. Especially since before now, Borle's Orin was relatively composed to previous actors' interpretations of the character. (Which in itself was creepy because he seems weirdly charming, in his own way... until we see him with Audrey. Truth in Television for many abusers, which is why it can be so hard to spot until it's too late.)
- Act I ends with a chilling scene of Seymour feeding Audrey II the chopped up pieces of Orin's corpse. It's usually accompanied by blood-red lighting and sinister organ music, and ends with the plant cackling evilly as the curtain falls. Not only is its hunger appeased for now, its one step closer to world domination...
- Orin's practice can be this, especially if you hate going to the dentist already. With how brutal and sadistic he is, one can't help but wonder if his mama told him to become a dentist in an effort to keep him from becoming a serial killer.
- "Suppertime" in general is a very eerie number, especially with the urchins emerging from seemingly out of nowhere to egg Seymour on.
*Come on, come on... It's suppertiiiiiiime...*
- Even creepier in the movie, which unlike the stage show, plays the scene completely straight. Of special note is the way Audrey II slowly drops its head and opens its mouth behind Mushnik's back. As Seymour slowly, subtly backs Mushnik closer and closer to Twoie's gaping maw, you can see him wrestling with the decision, terrified of what's about to happen.
- There's an original version of the scene (see here) which is slightly longer and has Seymour more complacent in Mushnik's death, keeping with the tone of the play (and most likely cut out because it made Seymour seem unsympathetic). In the final scene, Seymour tries to give one last warning before Twoey clamps down, but here, he doesn't even flinch, turning away and covering his face. And Mushnik's reaction is no better, as in the theatrical cut, he repeatedly (and humorously) shouts "Wait!" But him screaming for Seymour's help as Seymour averts his eyes is far more terrifying.
- "Suppertime Reprise" is debatable for being a Dark Reprise because both are equally frightening, particularly with that sinister bassline both renditions share.
- During "Some Fun Now", the teeny-tiny Audrey II guzzling blood from an increasingly-anemic Seymour, just a hint at the appetite to come.
- When Audrey II has grown too big to be fed from Seymour's finger anymore and has started talking, Seymour demands, "What do you want me to do, slit my wrists?" The plant's response is nonverbal, and varies from production to production, but is almost always perfectly clear: Twoey doesn't think that's such a bad idea. In the film, Stubbs gives an expectant happy sigh. Applies in-universe, as Seymour recoils in horror at this response.
- When done right, "Don't Feed the Plants" can be downright unnerving, with everyone running in terror as Audrey II takes over the world, a now monstrously huge Audrey II puppet menacing the audience, and you see what happens to Orin, Mushnik, Audrey, and Seymour after they're eaten. They're stuck in an And I Must Scream situation as sentient flowers on Audrey II's vines, warning people not to feed the plants. Oftentimes, Audrey II will lean out and take a menacing CHOMP at the front row mid-song. Oh, and some productions have vines drop from the ceiling to get one last jump out of the audience. Sleep tight!
- The act one finale is chilling, though how much depends on the skill of the actors involved and how much the director chooses to show. (And, of course, your own personal tolerance for blood.) In some productions, we're, er, treated to a full view of Seymour feeding Orin's bloody remains to the plant, while in others, we only see it in silhouette. Then, as the music rises, Audrey II descends into hysterical laughter while Seymour watches. "What a creepy thing to be happening," indeed.
- Audrey IIs babies in Mean Green Mother From Outer Space. Theyre so horrifyingly nauseating to look at.
- The Pasadena Playhouse production (starring George Salazar) deserves special mention for their uniquely horrifying take on Audrey II. In a radical departure from the traditional "fly trap" design, this version opens its mouth like a blooming lily flower; at first it's actually pretty adorable, and it stays relatively small even throughout Act II... however, this is only its
*normal* form. When the time comes to devour Audrey, it grows into an enormous (and much more monstrous) body◊ with long tentacles and More Teeth than the Osmond Family. Suddenly, it looks less like a blooming lily and more like the Demogorgon from *Stranger Things*, or some kind of horrible mutated Volcarona.
- This production's version of Seymour's death may be one of the most disturbing ones yet. First he fights off the plant's tentacles before grabbing the machete to "kill it from the inside" like usual. Then the back curtains suddenly grow teeth and transform into Audrey II's mouth, suggesting that the plant has grown so big, Seymour can run directly into its throat! As the climactic music finishes, all you hear are the nauseating sounds of
**crunching bones and squishing flesh** as Audrey II's many, MANY teeth chomp down on its former owner.
- Many productions have a Drag Queen play Audrey II, allowing the character to interact with the other actors more directly. Naturally, most productions take advantage of this for comedic purposes, but there's also an opportunity to make Twoey have a more...
*direct* role in dispatching its victims. One such staging has the actor standing inside of the puppet's mouth, waiting for Mushnik to climb inside during "Suppertime." When he does, Twoey *snaps his neck* before beginning to eat as the puppet mouth closes again and we hear the sounds of the feast. The same staging also had Twoey directly grab Audrey and drag her into the mouth itself as she tries in vain to get away, with the blocking making the whole scene resemble a rape, especially with the line, "Relax, it'll be easier."
- A small moment in the '86 film — shortly after "Suppertime", when Seymour looks at how big Audrey II has become and whimpers out an "oh my God." It was in that moment he realized just what, exactly, his actions had truly wrought.
- The theatrical ending is completely happy until the very end, where a baby Audrey II plant is seen in the garden... and smiles at the camera, showing that Seymour and Audrey's happiness is borrowed time at best and, at worst, even after the plant exploded, its spores began to reproduce.
- The 2019 Off-Broadway revival adds a little twist to "Don't Feed the Plants"; as the cast sings the final note, Audrey II lets out a mighty roar while a
*smaller head springs from its mouth*, spewing smoke at the audience for one final Jump Scare. It's like a moment ripped right out of an *Alien* movie. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleShopOfHorrors |
Literature / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Dolls can't be scary... right?
<!—index—>
## Examples:
## Works:
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**J to Z:** **Entries in each section are in alphabetical order.** **This page is for Nightmare Fuel Literature examples that do not have their own Works page. Examples from Works already on should go on the existing Nightmare Fuel pages indexed above.**
- Dutch children's writer Thea Beckman was really famous for her historically realistic novels.
*Triumph of Scorched Earth* was set during the Hundred Years War and contained a really vivid description of the Black Death arriving in the POV character's hometown. Wiping out half the town population. Including all family members of the protagonist. With descriptions of how the bodies got carted out of town and buried in lime.
- Orson Scott Card used to be real good at this. His collection
*Maps in a Mirror* opens with "Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory" and doesn't stop there.
- Michael Crichton's
*State of Fear* gives us the murder of Ted Bradley. Sure, he's a self-satisfied, self-righteous Jerkass, but being Eaten Alive...
- From John Connolly, the author who brought us
*The Book of Lost Things,* there's a small collection of short stories called *Nocturnes.* It is absolutely terrifying:
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*The Cancer Cowboy Rides.* The story of Buddy Carson, a man who can spread fast-acting cancer at a touch, with some particularly gruesome descriptions of the dying: in the first chapter, we see the aftermath of him infecting a family, with the one survivor left as a dying, incoherent mess of tumours. At one point later in the story, Carson kills the town doctor by pouring a living tumour into his ear, leaving him in an even worse state.
-
*Mr Pettinger's Daemon.* Given that it's a story about a demon imprisoned under a church, horror is par for the course. However, the truly nightmarish bit occurs early in the story, when the narrator describes an incident during his years as a chaplain in World War I: four British deserters are found in No-Man's Land, living on the bodies of dead soldiers. Just before they are shot, one of them says, "I have eaten the Word made flesh. Now God is in me, and I am God. He tasted good. He tasted of blood."
- The Charlie Parker Series from the same author isn't short on nightmare fuel either, from murderers arranging his victims to looks like sketches from Gray's Anatomy and deranged preachers making books from human skin to ancient Lovecraftian horrors demanding human sacrifices from small American towns.
- Gary Crew wrote an illustrated book called
*The Watertower*. Two boys go up to a watertower for a swim, but Boy A forgets a towel and goes back to get it. While he is gone, Boy B is, is stalked and attacked by... something. You never see the "monster" and the book abruptly ends is not good for people with, well, imaginations.
- He may be most famous for writing children's books, but C. S. Lewis had a very firm grasp on what is scary. In particular 'the Unman' and 'The Head' (which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin) in The Space Trilogy... actually, the whole N.I.C.E., which is anything but...
- Dougal Dixon's
*Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future* has plenty, but the author has a whole series of illustrated sci-fi. *Man After Man* is essentially an alternate history of the earlier *After Man: A Zoology of the Future*, which tracks the evolution of species after humanity wipes itself out. *The New Dinosaurs* is an alternate history in which humanity never existed in the first place.
- David Drake has a thing about plants killing people. Two different books feature men dying in their sleep because a plant grew up into their bodies.
*Redliners* has a kind of computer manipulating the life-forms of a planet to use them as weapons against the people who've landed there. And then, there's the vampire honeysuckle in *The Jungle*.
Hollow, inch-long thorns sprouted from the base of every leaf.
The coxswain screamed as though he would never stop. The burgeoning vines crept over him like a blanket drawn up to cover a sleeping infant.
A seaman with a knife lurched forward to help. A tendril lifted toward him. The seaman turned and ran.
The screaming did, of course, stop.
- Tom Godwin's
*The Gulf Between* A machine cannot care about life.
-
*The Nothing Equation* by the same author. This guy had issues. Kudos for the perfect final line, though.
- There's a short story by Anthony Horowitz (of Alex Rider fame) called "Harriet's Horrible Dream". Harriet is a spoilt little brat whose family goes bankrupt and she's sold to a restaurant. Not to be a waitress, oh no. The restaurant is called the Sawney Bean, and yes, she is going to be cooked and eaten. Since it's a children's short story, it's All Just a Dream, except it isn't. She wakes up...on the kitchen counter. Sweet dreams, kids!
- Horowitz later wrote a Spiritual Sequel called "SheBay" where a couple run out of money and auction off their daughter online. A four-way bidding war ensues between the owners of the Sawney Bean; a mad scientist who wants to dissect her; a coven of Satanists looking for a human sacrifice; and a seemingly kind old couple in charge of an orphanage. They win the bidding and throw the girl to the "orphans", who are all orphaned tiger cubs.
- Possibly the most horrifying thing about this story is the reason given for
*why* people would decide to eat at the Sawney Bean; they're rich people who have tried everything else, and they want to try something different. You expect to find completely evil characters in books, but the thought that completely ordinary people are becoming cannibals *just because they can* is disturbing on a whole other level.
- M. R. James. His most famous short story is "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad", about a professor who accidentally awakens a...something, leading to his bedsheets coming to life and trying to throw him out the window. No sleep after that.
- Catherine Jinks writes many books that qualify, notably,
*Living Hell*, which involves a crew on a spaceship that can never return to Earth stuck in the ship when it turns into a huge living thing and starts trying to kill them with flesh-eating acid.
- Franz Kafka. Just pick any book by him and dive in. Special mention to
*The Trial*, from which the term "Kafkaesque" is derived, where a person is accused of a crime nobody tells him about, found guilty, and executed, all without any real possibility of defense.
- Cosmic horror writer and professional pessimist Thomas Ligotti is, by nature, a living fount of Paranoia Fuel. But even disregarding the man's uncanny ability to give almost everything sinister implications, his stories are terrifying. Take his first published story, "The Chymist", which takes the form of a supremely hammy, unabashedly sarcastic monologue by a man to a prostitute he's picked up. Things are not what they seem, and by the time the end rolls around (with an exceptional Wham Line), you really don't want to know. And just think: His writing style only got more disturbing.
- Michael Marshall Smith (and his more mainstream thriller alter-ego Michael Marshall) has done some wondrous turns in this regard. Take
*Spares*, for example. This concept has been pilfered unsuccessfully since by the movie *The Island*, but he introduced the concept of a genetic twin being cloned at birth, kept in a dimly-lit tunnel in the middle of nowhere, and being used for harvesting spare parts without anesthetic, should the real-world twin become horrifically injured.
- Joyce Carol Oates's
*Thanksgiving*. In it, a girl and her father go out to do the grocery shopping for the sick mother, in preparation for Thanksgiving. They take a wrong turn and find themselves in the parking lot of a strange, dilapidated grocery store. All of the customers in there are sad and defeated-looking, all of the employees are ominous, and all of the food is described as being rotted or spoiled. The message is to look for good things among the bad, but there's a lot of flat out terrifying here.
- The short story
*Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?* is about an escaped killer who tries to convince a girl who is home alone to come out of her house and go with him. In the end, the girl opens the door and steps outside. The end.
- German author Gudrun Pausewang. Most (in)famous example:
*Die letzten Kinder von Schewenborn* ("The Last Kids of Schewenborn"), about the life of an ordinary German family during and after global thermonuclear war. Including excessive descriptions of radiation sickness, mutilated people, lots of children dying, a baby born eyeless and armless, the mother of the family going mad and forcing the family to return to Frankfurt which she believes wasn't destroyed, and also the description of the helplessness of the people. She also wrote books about a nuclear power plant going Chernobyl in Germany, the poorness of people in third world, another right-wing populist taking power in Germany, and a biography of young Adolf Hitler. Some of these books even got prizes for literature.
- In one of her autobigraphical stories, she once wrote about how she was confronted with Nightmare Fuel herself for the first time. Long story short, she had a literature teacher who was extremely good... and a Nazi. So the teacher once told them a story about a Jewish doctor raping and killing preteen girls, as seen by one girl that could escape. She admits that to this day, whenever she hears about child abuse, she imagines the culprit just like in that story, with exaggerated Jewish traits. "Our beloved teacher, what have you done to us?" indeed.
- Frank Peretti is not often acknowledged by the mainstream, mostly because he writes Christian-oriented books, but he has some absolutely terrifying moments in some of his books. There is a fight scene in
*The Oath* where a protagonist ends up gouging out a man's eye with her fingers and it's described as feeling like a grape under her hand. The entire conclusion to *The Door in the Dragon's Throat* has kept more than a few people up at night, as well.
- The black goo that seeps out of people's chests in
*The Oath.* Beware seemingly harmless bruises.
- Peretti dips hard in
*The Visitation*, considering it deals with why bad things happen to good people and people who do monstrous things in the name of God. Included: a woman dying from logs falling off a truck, a false Messiah taking sexual advantage of a barely legal teenage girl, and a man nailing his teenage son to a fence to punish him for teenage rebellion.
- Beatrix Potter's
*The Tale of the Roly-Poly Pudding* involves Tom Kitten getting trapped behind the walls of his own house and being caught by a pair of rats, who proceed to tie him up with string and roll him into a kitten-roly-poly. Terrifying, even though the rats were a quarter of Tom's size.
- Another story was about a bunch of squirrels asking an owl for permission to gather nuts on his island and one particular squirrel continues to pester and pester the owl until the bird finally loses it, grabs the squirrel, and attempts to skin it. In the end, the squirrel gets away, but loses his tail.
- For that matter, Peter Rabbit begins with the mother casually mentioning the father being put in a pie. Potter's original audience was well familiar with things like animals being put in pies - this was standard everyday stuff to them, as were absent fathers due to machinery accidents, war, etc.
- (title needed) by Horacio Quiroga: A group of people that had been miming that they were building things in all the city parks of the world. One day, they stop building, and stop moving. Some of the gathered people walk into what turned out to be actual, though invisible machines; reddish-brown pulp comes out the other side. And people just keep walking into the invisible meat grinders. (This had been cited as "The Beheaded Chicken," but that is a different horror story about mentally disabled children and a girl who reminds them of the titular chicken.)
- "The Feather Pillow": A dying woman who receives a down pillow from her husband. Sadly, after receiving the pillow the wife gets worse and worse, eventually not even leaving her bed, before finally dying one night. After her body is taken away, the husband notices the pillow is rather heavy. Upon inspection he discovers a large louse had been living inside of it and draining his wife of blood. Link here to read.
- "The Wild Honey": A man goes into the jungle with his friend and eats some honey he finds in a beehive. Unfortunately, the honey is poisonous, and the guy ends up paralyzed, with his friend helpless to save him from being Eaten Alive by a swarm of army ants.
-
*The Laughing Man* by J. D. Salinger. The best part of it was that the story was being told to a bunch of Cub Scout-like kids.
"...the bandits, signally piqued, placed the little fellow's head in a carpenter's vise and gave the appropriate lever several turns to the right. The subject of this unique experience grew into manhood with a hairless, pecan-shaped head and a face that featured, instead of a mouth, an enormous oval cavity below the nose. The nose itself consisted of two flesh-sealed nostrils. In consequence, when the Laughing Man breathed, the hideous, mirthless gap below his nose dilated and contracted like some sort of monstrous vacuole. (The Chief demonstrated, rather than explained, the Laughing Man's respiration method.) Strangers fainted dead away at the sight of the Laughing Man's horrible face."
- Neal Shusterman's stories frequently fall into this, as when the faces of the dead kids in
*Full Tilt* start appearing in the scenery. His worst to date is *Unwind*, a Dystopia in which Offing the Offspring is legal and accepted if and only if said offspring's body parts are donated to others. There's a subplot about one fellow who took severe brain damage and got a Brain Transplant from a dead kleptomanic—"DO IT! BEFORE HE CHANGES MY MIND!" And let's not get into the issue of Humphrey Dunfee. And if that's not bad enough for you, they're dismembered while fully conscious, although they are given anesthetic. Worse is the scene told from the perspective of the boy who's being unwound. Seeing what he sees until they take his eyes and going through his thought process until his brain is dismantled.
- The tale of a kid who accidentally ended up with a suitcase full of alien clothing and knickknacks, and had to wear it until new stuff could be bought for him. Then he started turning into the alien.
- The Works in
*Full Tilt*.
- The short story "Dawn Terminator" takes place in a future where the sun has grown so huge, so bright and hot, one day whatever town it rises over bursts into flames instantly and everything dies. The protagonist is an eleven-year-old girl who starts the story with her family in an airport, as population of several states try to board one plane, hoping it takes them somewhere safe. She and her parents manage to board, but she then has to watch faces of those left behind as they realize they're all going to die in a few hours and her mother tells her to remember their faces so she can draw them later. The plane touches down in Antarctica, where the group is hopeful, saying that this time of year, sun won't rise for six months... But the girl knows they're all going to die soon anyway. And this is in a book aimed at children.
- A short story he wrote for an anthology focusing on fear (phobias, specifically) features a kid who's never felt fear in his life and even enjoys inflicting it on others as he has an uncanny ability to tell what they're afraid of. He then goes to a special school for kids suffering from phobias, which seems odd. Then little things start to change; his roommate, who's afraid of bugs, is able to go into the garden while the main character begins avoiding it. A girl he met who was afraid of knives is seen eating steak while the main character stops eating foods that require knives. It's soon revealed that every kid he touches is cured of their phobia... at the cost of him getting that phobia. What's more, it's also revealed that the principal was given guardianship of him, meaning there's nothing he can do but keep curing kids.
-
*The Wolf of Winter* by Paula Volsky. It starts with the protagonist brought into a prison which is worse than a KZ. At least the Nazis didn't force their victims to eat the killed other prisoners.
- Speaking of Ms. Volsky, "Illusion" is an amazing book. Kind of the French and Russian Revolutions combined with magic, told from the point of view of royalty. Her description of torture and execution devices chills me to the bone. Particularly the one where you're strapped to a table and made to think that your bones are coming to life, crawling out of your body and eating you.
- Connie Willis has a short story called "All My Darling Daughters". The least horrifying thing, out of the many horrifying things about it, is probably the helpless small, ferret-y creatures, genetically engineered to let people simulate the experience of raping a small child (with an emphasis on the screaming). The male characters all have one, and call them things like "Daughter Ann".
- That's far from the most disturbing thing Willis wrote. "A Letter from the Clearys": It's told from the point of a teenage girl living in a small coastal town. It's unseasonably cold, her elderly neighbor is going a bit dotty, and there are other hints of oddness. At the very end, it's revealed that a nuclear war has already happened. Nuclear winter is setting in, and the radiation clouds are migrating. The weather is already getting colder, dust is falling from the sky, and particularly susceptible people (like the elderly neighbor) are starting to get radiation sickness. But people keep going about life as normal because really, at this point, there's nothing else they can do...
- The protagonist in "The Sidon in the Mirror" either is compelled by unconscious urges to kill another character who has been blinded, or at the very least vividly feels her pain. In fact, every story in
*Fire Watch* is disturbing.
- A lot of the stuff Wilfred Owen wrote, and with good reason. Special mentions go to "Mental Cases" and "Dulce et Decorum est".
- Gabriel García Márquez works usually are on the Magical Realism side of things, but he can write creepy, as shown in a couple of stories in
*Strange Pilgrims*
- "I Only Came to Use the Phone": an actress gets stranded in the middle of the road, so she comes to a nearby mental institution. There, she is mistaken as an escaped patient, and treated as one. By the time her husband finally finds her, he is convinced that she really became insane, and she eventually loses her sanity for real.
- "The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow": A couple goes on honeymoon to Paris. The woman pricks her ring finger and keeps bleeding, so her husband carries her to an hospital, and goes to stay on a nearby hotel to wait instead of the one they had a reservation until the day the doctors said she would be released. When he manages to finally get back to the hospital, he discovers that his wife died after bleeding out while he was out, everybody tried to find him without success, and her body is already buried in their homeland. It's creepy because it could happen, even in this cellphone era.
- "Light Is Like Water": two young boys, after being assured by the author in a literary workshop that "Light is like tap water, on that you switch on and it comes out", discover how to make light to work exactly like water by breaking lightbulbs, which they do when their parents are out. The kids even get a boat for them, which they use to navigate around the house. Then they drown along with their friends during a sleepover where they ere demonstrating this. If you want to know how a short story can evolve from a whimsical premise to the fear of your kids dying while you were distracted, search no more.
-
*0.4* by Mike Lancaster. Never mind the creepy fusing people, the really creepy bit is when we find out that everyone has just been upgraded to the next form of humanity, and those who missed out will be invisible to the 2.0 humans forever. It gets even worse when we find out that it has happened before. Neanderthals could still be around, watching us, but we can't see them.
- Also, that bit where the girl eagerly turns herself into one of the 2.0, when it still seems like they're pod people.
-
*2666*:
-
*Everything* about the Santa Teresa murders. The mutilated bodies are described in detail, and the implied large-scale corruption and cover-ups are terrifying. Some characters start having nightmares once they enter the city. To make matters even worse, this is Truth in Television. This part of the novel is based on the real-life murders of literally hundreds of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which to this day remain unsolved.
- The few remaining survivors of Entrescu's unit describe Dracula's castle as this. When they tried to better fortify the place with trenches, they kept finding skeletons everywhere.
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*All Tomorrows* by Nemo Ramjet. The artist's unsettling but very good art doesn't help any...
-
*All You Can Eat* by Shane McKenzie is about a Chinese buffet that serves food so delicious that anyone who eats even a little becomes addicted to it. People spend literally all their money to eat there, growing fatter and fatter. When not eating the special food their hunger is so painful that they eat all the food they can find, then their pets, then people.
- One protagonist, Juan, comes to Texas illegally, crammed into a filthy truck with countless other immigrants. It reeks from all the waste on the floor, the driver is willing to kill them if they can't pay, and a woman is raped near the back and no one tries to stop it.
- The other protagonist, Lola, has nightmares about being molested by her monstrous father.
- Most of
*Alyzon Whitestarr* by Isobelle Carmody. Especially the scene where Serenity tries to burn herself to death.
- The novel
*The Amnesia Clinic* features a teenaged Unreliable Narrator. This renders things that might otherwise be cute and quirky very squicky and disturbing. For example, the sad but still slightly whimsical history of Blithe Spirit Sally Lightfoot, with her finger bitten off by the eponymous turtle taken as a sign that she was well and truly over her ex-husband. When Anti tells it, they have a budding romance. but when you realize that Anti is just making this shit up, and that she's really an emotionally distant victim of spousal abuse, it's creepy. Similarly, the Incan mummy princess, Fabian's uncle's fake Shrunken Head, and Fabian's nightmarish metaphors for catching his father having sex with the house maid.
- Being compulsory reading in Polish schools,
*Antek*, a novella by the Polish author Bolesław Prus, traumatized a lot of teenagers with the part where a little peasant girl goes down with fever, so her mom - going by the advice of the local elderly "wise woman" - puts her into a flaming oven for a period of "three Hail Marys", hoping to burn out the fever. The consequences are predictable.
- A short story called "The Assistant to Dr. Jacob" starts with a boy helping the title character prune his rosebushes. Then the policeman tells him that Dr. Jacob was a sociopath who kidnapped, tortured, and mutilated his victims in an attempt to make them "beautiful." He kept all of his "works" in his greenhouse. It is implied that the boy was there and saw everything, but he remembers the mutilated bodies as rosebushes. And one of the photos of the victims includes a picture of the narrator doing the same thing to another child. The absolute worst part? He brought home "roses" from Dr. Jacob to his mother.
-
*A Bad Case of Stripes*. This girl, for some reason, turns a rainbow color. Harmless, until this one part where she somehow turns into her room, and the bed is her mouth and the pictures are her eyes and she's still rainbow, and her parents are standing there and the doctors are befuddled. Not to mention the part where the girl turns into a giant pill.
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*The Beach Dogs* by Andy Jennings. Although the title gives the impression that it's about cuddly puppies on a beach, it isn't. The general consensus is that there's something there to make everyone's skin crawl, whether it's the scene where a litter of puppies dies along with their mother in a fire or the scene where one of the puppies wanders into a walk-in freezer, gets shut in, and freezes to death slowly, or even just the fact that one of the dogs gets an infection her her eye which causes it to crust over, and another has a skin disease which made him so itchy that he scratched all his hair off. It also crosses majorly over into Tear Jerker territory.
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*The Bell Jar* by Sylvia Plath. The scary part was the fact that it wasn't like most 'Dear Lord, this person is a psycho' lit because what came first was an understanding and sympathy with Ethel. Then, once you start relating to the character, she goes insane. And the more insane she got, the more you can relate.
-
*Beowulf's Children* by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes. Six words: Huge. Carnivorous. "Bees". With. *Super Speed*.
- There's a short story called "A Birthday" by Esther M. Friesner about a woman who leaves work early, seemingly to celebrate her daughter's birthday; its revealed that the girl is actually a horrific punishment for an old sin.
- James Blish wrote a short novel called
*Black Easter*, where a black magician releases all the demons of hell onto the Earth for a day mostly to see what would happen. The demons rampage all night, then the white magician present starts to banish them back to hell. It doesn't work. A greater devil explains that God is dead, and Hell has won the war. All remaining humans are now slaves of the demons, or worse...
-
*The Bone Collector*. Being boiled to death by hot vapor, rats gnawing on your legs, being buried alive. But nothing beats being unable to move your body while your supposed-to-be doctor sticks a knife in the only part of it that's still sensitive.
- Richard Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman". It gradually emerges that the narrator is some sort of horrid abomination of a spider-mutant with multiple limbs, wall-climbing and a burning saliva. Disgusted, his parents keep him chained up in the basement and beat him when he occasionally gets free and almost seen by guests. He becomes angry with them as he realizes what they're holding back, proceeds to crush his normal sister's cat, and claims that the next time his parents come in, he'll be ready with the acid saliva. The way it was written was just plain horrifying, a lot like
*Grendel* but creepier.
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*The Braille Encyclopedia* by Grant Morrison. A blind woman on vacation is seduced and corrupted to the point where she's taking pleasure in only the most repugnant acts. The man tells her that she's finally ready to become a part of the Braille Encyclopedia. It involves tattooing every inch of her skin in Braille dots that describe gruesome sexual acts. By the time this is over, she has been driven mad by the pain, to the point where she no longer remembers anything about herself, not even her own name. Others have undergone the same process, and the result is not happy.
- Robert Silverberg's "Caught in the Organ Draft" features an "organ draft", as in healthy people selected at random to be mandatory organ donors.
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*Cheating at Solitaire* by Jane Haddam. Specifically, what the paparazzi do to Kendra Rhode.
- Tanizaki Kenzaburo's "Children" ("Shonen") has four kids playing bondage games, with a strong master-slave tint, some dog-kissing, cutting each other with a knife, beating each other up and also having two of the boys holding wax candles on their foreheads as the wax drips over their eyes and face.
- Richard Preston, best known for his non-fictional accounts of diseases like ebola, wrote a novel about a fictional bioterrorism threat called
*The Cobra Event.* The disease in the story is spread like smallpox, but results in a rare neurological condition where the victims are compelled to eat their own flesh; some extreme examples ensue. The virus also starts out identical to a common cold. Besides that, the virus is genetically engineered from many other viruses, including *Ebola* and *smallpox*. People in real life can do the same kind of thing. Sweet dreams.
- "The Cold Equations". The Sadistic Choice presented is terrifying. Kill the girl via Explosive Decompression or leave a colony without a vaccine.
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*The Darkest Part of the Woods* by Ramsey Campbell invokes old English legends, Asian-style freakish body corruptions, Squick situations that are oddly tastefully handled, more Body Horrors...
- William Kotzwinkle's
*Doctor Rat*. The whole human race went wacko all at once and started mass extermination of animals, followed by themselves. Interspersed with appalling allusions to the most inhumane animal experiments. Grafting the eggs of a female rat to different portions of a male rat, for example. And much of it narrated by a rat who's been experimented on so often, so cruelly and for so long that, in his twisted cynical little psyche, he genuinely believes that "death is freedom."
- Rosalie Ham's
*The Dressmaker* which has been adapted into a film has a couple of instances of this trope: there is a gruesome description of one character cutting another's hamstrings and another character drowns in a silo full of black grain which sucks him under like quicksand when he jumps into it, thinking it was wheat, and the townsfolk can't get the body out, so it just moulders down at the bottom.
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*Dr. Franklin's Island* by Ann Halam. The Nightmare Fuel is when you realize what Dr. Franklin is actually doing to the two girls - turning them into animal/human hybrids. A memorable part was when Miranda's breastbone actually breaks through her skin as it turns into a keel shape for her new bird body.
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*Duncton Wood* by William Horwood. A book about moles, small burrowing animals. At the very worst, it can't be any worse than *Watership Down*, right? Not so when you find out what they're doing to Rebecca's babies. He is evil incarnate in mole form! Also watch out for Siabod.
- The Stephen Baxter novel
*Evolution* has gallons of nightmare fuel, but the most jarring of it comes near the end (taking place 500 million years hence, with the "Trees". These Trees are a giant mass of symbiotic organisms, in which the apelike descendants of people live in. It's already kind of creepy. It gets worse. The Tree itself is somewhat self-aware. In the opening of the story, it decides that the troop of posthumans cannot afford another child. When a mother puts her child in the leaves of the tree, it grows fibre all around the baby and actively tries to suffocate it.
- Poppy Z. Brite's
*Exquisite Corpse*. Their last victim sees them chewing on his intestines while he's just barely still alive.
- Every victim of the two killers is dispatched in vividly gruesome detail, and most are also brutally tortured before and during the act. Jay's proclivities are revealed when he smiles down at a kid he named "Fido" who grins back at him because he can't do anything else; Jay scrubbed his lips away with a wire brush.
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*Final Destination: Dead Reckoning*: The description of Death's true form and the entire dream sequence it appears in.
- "Flash Frame" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a story from the
*Cthulhurotica* anthology, is pretty damn disturbing. It's basically a modern-day retelling of *The King in Yellow* with a good dose of *The Ring* thrown in. A reporter for a Mexico City tabloid is on the hunt for a sensational story when he hears about some kind of cult meeting at a local porno theater. So he decides to spy on them. Strangely, all they seem to do is view a few minutes of some faux-Roman exploitation flick that seems a bit... Off. After a few sessions, the reporter starts having nightmares about a grotesque seductress. And then he realizes his tape recorder has picked up the hidden audio track...
The sound was yellow. A bright, noxious yellow.
Festering yellow. The sound of withered teeth scraping against flesh. Of pustules bursting open. Diseased. Hungry.
The voice, yellow, speaking to the audience. Telling it things. Asking for things. Yellow limbs and yellow lips, and the yellow maw, the voice that should never have spoken at all.
The things it asked for.
Insatiable. Yellow.
- Carrie Ryan's
*The Forest of Hands and Teeth*. It's a zombie apocalypse novel set after humanity regains its footing. The survivors live in compounds surrounded by fences high enough and strong enough to keep the Unconsecrated out. The worst is the Unconsecrated baby.
- In
*The Forge of the Titans,* Titan-worshipers tend to gain their magical powers by feeding off the fear and pain of others, and therefore have got torture down to a horrifying art form. One scene clearly describes parents restrained and forced to watch as their young children are tortured to death, just before suffering the same fate themselves. One Titan's minion is described as a power junkie, reveling in the energy given off by the suffering to a near-orgasmic extent. The message seems to be that power can corrupt to the point where watching people undergo the most severe physical and psychological tortures possible turns you on.
- The short story "Fortune's Always Hiding" by Irvine Welsh. Especially that the main characters kidnap a baby, cut off its arms, and mail the baby's arms to its father and mother when they're done. Why? Because the doctor created Thalidomide, and one of the characters was missing her arms due to the birth defect it causes. Even for Irvine Welsh, that's Squick.
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*Future Man. Brave New World or Genetic Nightmare?*, with an introduction by Isaac Asimov. This predicted such delights as futuristic battery chickens with no heads or beaks, being little more than lumps of flesh hooked up to nutrient and waste-disposal lines; humans modified for life in space (microgravity and vacuum) without spacesuits as well as underwater human beings.
- "George Clooney's Moustache" by Rob Shearman, collected in
*Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical*. It starts out as a Stockholm Syndrome tale of kidnap and rape, then goes From Bad to Worse.
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*Girlfriend in a Coma*, by Douglas Coupland. The title character falls into a coma in her teens. Seventeen years later, she comes out of it, just in time for everyone in the world, with seven exceptions, to simply fall asleep and never wake up.
- James Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man" is a horrific tale of a cop during The '60s who gets aroused by degrading black people and torturing civil rights protesters. Later, in a flashback, we see a major catalyst for his racism and sexual sadism: a lynching he witnessed as a boy, when a black man was gruesomely maimed and burned alive. The flashback is reminiscent of the Human Sacrifice ceremony in
*Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom*, except far more graphic — and so much worse because atrocities like that were all too common in American history.
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*The Gone-Away World*. The basic premise of it is that the governments of the world develop a bomb which strips the information from matter, theoretically erasing the matter from existence. But instead, the matter left becomes desperate for information, and becomes a physical manifestation of the thoughts of the animals and humans around it, frequently modifying the bodies of the creatures it affects, leaving hideous monstrosities, often incapable of surviving their horribly messed up bodies. Now that's all creepy enough, but think about how it would affect anyone with paranoia and appreciation for creepy-pasta. Just think about the results of that for a bit.
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*Grinny*, the novel by Nicholas Fisk, is told in the form of a diary by one of the children, detailing the visit of Great Aunt Emma. She seems "off" right from the start — the childrens' parents don't remember her until she tells them they do, she's frightened of electricity, can sense emotions and smiles all the time. The Nightmare Fuel comes later, when she breaks a wrist and the children see that she is not quite human. And when they try to warn their parents and they don't believe them? They have to get together and kill her themselves.
- The picture book "Hair in Funny Places" is intended to reassure kids about to go through puberty. With pictures of a young girl's insides being taken over by grotesque furry monsters representing hormones.
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*Halfheads* by Stuart Mac Bride. The title refers to a punishment for crime that involves removal of the lower jaw and a lobotomy-like procedure on the brain that leaves the person badly damaged. Halfheads are used for menial labor most of the time, but the antagonist of the book is a woman who came through the procedure with her mind still intact and naturally she wants revenge. She tortures one of the characters into helping her get jaw reconstruction, but the real NF is her flashback to the procedure itself, which she's conscious during. "We start by splitting the lower jaw..."
- "The Hangman", an allegorical poem by Maurice Ogden, is slightly unsettling...until you realize what it's about. Then someone decided to make a short film version, which takes a creepy poem and combines it with surreal and terrifying imagery.
- Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron". In a world where everyone is forced to be equal (via lead weights for the strong; incorrect, migraine-granting lenses for the perfect-sighted; disproportionate masks for the attractive), the strongest/brightest alpha male (after years of torture to keep him subdued) escapes and tries to inspire an uprising on national television. He's swiftly killed by a direct shotgun blast, and Harrison's parents—his father with a thought-scrambling ear radio, his mother too scatterbrained to remember anything—forget their own son's death almost immediately after it happens. Horrifying, indeed.
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*Heckedy Peg* by Don and Audrey Wood is about a mother trying to save her seven children from being eaten by a witch. Said story had a bit of Fridge Horror starting with the witch taking the children (who were turned into food) into a room, and the mother trying to follow her in. The witch tells her she can't come in, because "her shoes are too dirty". So the mother takes off her shoes, and tries to walk in again, only to have the witch tell her that she still can't come in because "her socks are too dirty". So the mother takes off her socks, and tries to walk in again. The witch still doesn't let her in, telling her that "her feet are too dirty". So she pretends to cut off her feet, and tries to walk in again, this time succeeding; apparently, blood isn't "too dirty". This was a children's story book, read to children in kindergarten.
- The picture of Heckedy Peg casting the transformation spell shows the children's souls reacting in shock as their bodies turn into food. It doesn't help that to create Mood Whiplash, this picture has the same composition as that of the picture on the previous page, albeit with a darker background and a less vibrant color scheme.
- Also horrifying is, if you look closely at the spread page of Heckedy at the table, with the children as food laid out in a banquet before her, has already stuck her finger into and begun eating the pie, i.e. the oldest son.
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*Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins*. The shadowy, demonic King of Goblins is "too horrible to describe" and only illustrated as a tall shadow with glowing red eyes and Medusa-like hair — David Bowie he ain't. After his defeat, we get some nice little illustrations of his ghost tearing apart the synagogue. The other goblins are pretty creepy as well.
- Toshi Maruki's
*Hiroshima no pika* is a beautifully-illustrated picture book about — as you can guess from the title — the bombing of Hiroshima, as seen through the eyes of a six-year-old girl. It doesn't pull its punches.
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*The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy* has a moment in *The Restaurant at the End of the Universe* when Zaphod, on the planet Frogstar World B, finds an old abandoned ship and goes in. Inside, he finds an android stewardess and follows her through a door. The passengers there do not take well to being awakened from an unplanned suspended animation. It's even worse when you realize that this happens once a year for roughly nine hundred years all because the ship was waiting for a shipment of lemon-soaked paper napkins.
- John Saul's
*The Homing*. Body Horror involving insects, ranging from a character who's eaten alive by a serial killer's collection of insects until only bloody bones are left to a girl who mutates into a queen bee of sorts with control over insect swarms. She gets her revenge, but the cycle of horror continues after her death.
- Garth Nix wrote a short story called "The Hope Chest" that manages to cross the Magical Girl trope with
*Nineteen Eighty-Four* and the first book of *The Dark Tower*. The main character is living in the Wild West With Mind Control Hitler!, and after everyone in the town slowly falls under his control, she opens the Hope Chest her mother left for her and finds a white, girly sheriff's outfit and some guns. She then falls into a trance and shoots everyone in the village when they try to stop her reaching the dictator's train, and kills her sister when she turns out to be his girlfriend. Then she shoots him, and as the story ends, the train is somehow travelling between worlds and anything resembling the life she used to have is in tatters. Mind Screw ahoy, and good luck sleeping.
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*The Hot Zone*. Nonfiction book about an Ebola outbreak. Required school reading in some places. Based on the subject alone, it's Nausea Fuel.
- In the Ernest Hemingway short story "Indian Camp," a boy, his doctor father and his uncle travel to the camp in question to help a pregnant Indian woman give birth safely. When the doctor looks up to tell the woman's quiet, prone husband of the result, he finds that the man has cut his own throat from ear to ear. It's not an extensive example compared to some of the others here, but this is where Hemingway's patented Beige Prose works along more disturbing lines. According to some, the uncle is the real father of the Indian woman's baby. Meaning the husband was Driven to Suicide.
- Maurice Sendak's
*In the Night Kitchen*. Out of clothes experience? Check. Uncensored child nudity? Check. Being nearly baked alive? Check. Diving into a giant milk bottle? Check. If the childhood memories of this book don't still haunt you...
- Most of Dorothy L. Sayers' short stories are rather harmlessly pedantic whodunnits. Then there's "The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey", in which an older, jealous husband turns out to have cold-bloodedly isolated himself and his beautiful, intelligent young wife in a remote foreign village, deprived her of the medication she relies on for her hypothyroidism, then sat back to gloat as she slowly disintegrates into a (minutely described) profoundly retarded and physically loathsome cretin. In case you weren't
*exactly* sure what this implies, Wimsey carefully spells it out: Not only would the husband enjoy her frantic appeals as she initially felt reason slipping away, but once she became unable to understand what was happening to her, he gave her treatment at intervals that cleared her mind just enough to realise the extent of her degradation... As the story opens this cycle has been going on for *three years*, and had Wimsey not just found out about it by the merest chance, it presumably would've continued indefinitely.
- Everything having to do with Hudgie in
*Ironman*, especially his father.
- "It's a GOOD Life" by Jerome Bixby, the story of an unbelievably powerful Reality Warper who happens to be still a little kid. Sounds cute, but whatever you do, don't get him angry.
- The descriptions of madness in
*Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell* alternate between terrifying and hilarious. Though some of the latter include "Good god, I turned into Drawlight!" and hallucinations of pineapples, the former has things like believing everyone's head is hollow and contains a candle and "Aren't you afraid it will go out?" The speaking corpses and some of the exploits of The Fair Folk detailed in the footnotes are even worse.
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*Johnny Got His Gun* by Dalton Trumbo. The whole thing is And I Must Scream at another level. Oh and such injuries actually happened... The basis for a movie and for Metallica's song "One".
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*The Jungle*: President Roosevelt actually read the book and sent two guys to check up on meatpacking factories to see how much of the book was accurate. Save for the "human lard" scene, he was told that the entire thing was accurate. You can resume vomiting now.
- Little Stanislovas falls asleep in the factory, is locked in, and overnight is eaten alive by rats.
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*InCryptid*: Apraxis wasps are Wicked Wasps the size of birds that can give an extremely painful Cruel and Unusual Death with their stings, but that's not the worst thing about them. They lay eggs in their victims, living or dead, which emerge in a matter of days as adult wasps. These parasitoids absorb the memories and mind of their victims, meaning you could be facing a swarm of deadly insects *that are talking to you in the voice of a loved one*.
- The ending of
*Kindred* by Octavia Butler, in which Dana narrowly escapes Attempted Rape by her distant ancestor Rufus and teleports one last time back to the present. When she arrives back in the present, her arm is embedded in the wall. She tries to yank it out, with predictable and horrifying results. And there's the matter of having to explain to the doctor just how her entire forearm got ripped off.
- The short science fiction story "Kyrie Eleison." A spaceship goes to study a black hole, accompanied by an Energy Being who is in telepathic contact with one of the crew—and it's heavily implied they're in love. The Energy Being gets too close to the black hole and is sucked into it. He dies relatively quickly, but because of time dilation his contact can hear him dying for years after.
- Curt Gentry's
*The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California*. In the last third of the book we find out why it's called *The Last Days*. A series of massive earthquakes tears through the state, told in the form of snippets of radio and TV interviews and announcements. Eventually the aftershocks come, and everything west of the San Andreas Fault slides into the ocean, including all of Los Angeles. Most of the San Francisco area is wiped off the map by the resulting colossal tsunami.
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*Les Chants de Maldoror*, a French existentialist/surrealist work of prose poetry about a single madman and his hatred for everything but his own evil, can be rather disturbing at times.
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*The Lilies* by Alison Prince is about a girl and her mother who rescued wilted flowers from rubbish bins and "planted" them in their garden. It was implied that the flowers talked to them and/or were some godlike beings. Not so scary, right? Well, a priest gets wind of this and, deciding that the girl and her mother are demonic, goes to kill them. There is one terrifying bit about the mother wanting to be buried with the flowers and about the girl lying down over where she planted some lilies so that the lilies will grow through her body.
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*A Living Soul* by P. C. Jersild. "Ypsilon", the story's protagonist, is the disembodied brain of a former athlete who is tormented, experimented on and combined with other brains, all in an effort to create something that ends up being obsolete.
- In Dave Duncan's
*Lord of the Fire Lands,* a character gets to see how a country that has taken prisoners makes their land's obedient servants called Thralls. The prisoners of war/raiding are herded into a Magic Octagon, and spells are used to send their souls to the afterlife while their still-living bodies are left behind as Thralls. In the book, this is shown being done to a group of around forty children and adolescents.
- "The Lottery": The reason behind the lottery. A wife and mother is killed simply because tradition says so. And it could just have easily been a child.
- What's worse, one of her kids, who is about five or six years old, willingly participates in the stoning of his mother. And the woman dies while pleading that it isn't fair that she has to die.
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*The Magic Cane*: Moconoco and his friend, Karmelo, are playing in the forest when they meet an old lady with a golden cane. Moconoco grabs the cane and breaks it into three pieces. In anger, the old lady declares him to have no sense of right or wrong and curses him to have three of all his other senses. In adulthood, Moconoco *does* grow three of each of his senses: three eyes, three mouths, three arms, three noses, and three sets of ears! Body Horror in a kids' book....make of that what you will....
- One horrifying example is from Nick Reding's
*Methland*, which is about meth. Roland Jarvis panics due to a hallucination, and dumps chemicals down the drain. This results in a fiery explosion that destroys the house. The description what happens to his flesh and body as it burns away is horrific. He was in so much pain that he begged the police that arrived to shoot him. The book ends with him still alive and still addicted to meth, still shooting up with no fingers or nose.
- "M Is for the Many" by J. J. Russ is a story about the mother of a 4-year-old in a futuristic society where most people spend all their time in a "bag", viewing pleasurable entertainments and being drugged. Every couple is allowed to have exactly two children, and the main character is on her second; when children turn 5 they are taken from the mother and given their own bag. She doesn't want to lose her son, though, and a horrific chain of events ensue.
- A short story, "Menagerie, a Child's Fable", from Charles R. Johnson's 1982 collection
*The Sorcerer's Apprentice*. The owner of a pet shop died and no one came for the animals. It may have been some sort of political or religious allegory, but by end of it, the cat had raped the rabbit and gotten her pregnant, and the whole place ended up being set on fire when one of the monkeys got ahold of the owner's gun. And the responsible dog who was just trying to do his best? He gets shot.
- Alan Dean Foster's
*Mid-Flinx*. The main characters are on the run, ending up on Midworld. It is a planet of Everything Trying to Kill You, especially the plants. Among other plant-related horrors one is consumed by a plant, one is attacked by animals who continuously inject him with poison that liquidates him, one makes a wreath of flowers that spread tendrils through her body and burst out and flower, *The Ruins* style, one falls off the edge when he sticks his face into a luminous flower, and a couple suffocate by expanding hac spores. And there's plenty of non-plant examples as well.
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*Millions of Cats*. In this charming children's picture book, an elderly couple wants to adopt a cat, so the husband goes out and finds a hill covered with "... hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats..." Unable to decide which one to take back, he leads the whole pack back home so his wife can choose one. She asks the kitties which of them is the prettiest, sparking a kitty holocaust as all the cats tear each other apart fighting over who it is. Out of all the trillions of cats, only one survived, because it didn't think it was pretty and hid while the rest killed each other. And this is supposed to be a happy ending?
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*The Missing Girl* by Norma Fox Mazer. In a nutshell, the book is from the alternating points of view of five sisters and the disgusting old man that stalks them regularly. Slowly, the man takes preference to one of them, who he lures into his house. In addition, those chapters are told in second person viewpoint—so that everything that happens up to and including her captivity and its aftermath is portrayed as if it is happening to the reader. The most horrible thing about the book is that the writer puts this pure relish in the man's pleasure at having the girl.
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*My Mom the Frog* is about a boy who had a wart on his finger, which his mom kissed. His sister then told the boy that if you touch a wart, you'll turn into a frog. The boy's mom then mysteriously disappears, and a frog shows up. Everyone is sure the frog is the boy's mom. But at the end it turned out that the boy's mom was not really the frog, she had just gone to the store to get wart cream, and the frog was just some frog that got into the house.
- The book version of
*The Mothman Prophecies*. Allegedly being based on true events doesn't help. The rather lengthy section describing "breather" phone calls is not fun, especially if you've received any yourself.
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*Mr. Wolf's Pancakes* is an illustrated children's book in which Mr. Wolf (The Big Bad Wolf) tries to make pancakes. He asks his neighbours (other fable staples, like the 3 Little Pigs and the Gingerbread Man, etc) to help with the various steps of making pancakes, but they all rudely refuse and he has to make them all by himself. Predictably, when the pancakes are made and Mr. Wolf is about to eat them, his neighbours arrive and demand he share them. You would expect the story to end with an Aesop about the rewards of being kind vs the consequences of being rude, or about how you shouldn't judge other people (as most children would consider the Big Bad Wolf to be a villain). Instead, it ends with Mr Wolf eating every single one of his neighbours as punishment for their rudeness.
- "The Mysterious Stranger" by Mark Twain. Some morbid figure (Death?) talking cheerful with kids is extremely terrifying, and the horrible things he shows. The adaptation of The Mysterious Stranger as part of an children's claymation film called "The Adventures of Mark Twain" is even creepier, and falls straight into outright Nightmare Fuel.
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*Neuropath*, by Scott Bakker. First, there are the horrible things Neil makes his mind-controlled victims do, sometimes on camera. Then there's The Argument itself, the idea that free will is an illusion, and that all humans are just neurological circuits deluded into believing in "morality" or the concept of a soul.
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*Not Now, Bernard*, the Trope Namer for Not Now, Kiddo, is a short colorfully illustrated children's novel... about a boy who begs all the adults in his life to safe him from a man-eating monster that is slowly, relentlessly stalking him. And not one of them will pay him a moment's attention. Then the monster eats him. And the adults are so oblivious that they simply force the monster to start living Bernard's life instead, even as it dumbfoundedly protests it isn't Bernard. This is a story aimed at small children, *exactly* the audience to take its depiction of Adults Are Useless completely seriously and with predictable horror.
- Timothy Findley's rewriting of the Noah's Ark story
*Not Wanted on the Voyage* has many nightmare-inducing moments, but the worst is the bit where the prepubescent wife of one of Noah's sons is raped with a unicorn's horn while it is still attached to the unicorn.
- "The October Game" is a short story which describes an insane man's jealousy of his own daughter as his wife arranges a Halloween get-together for his daughter and her friends. The kids go into the basement for a gross-out game where they supposedly pass around parts of a dead witch in total darkness. Slowly, the girl's mother realizes her daughter isn't there.
"Oh God, God, God ... don't turn on the lights."
Then... some idiot turned on the lights.
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*Olive and the Shadows* by Jacqueline West. An evil wizard creates glasses which can bring pictures to life. They can also pull painted people and objects into the real world, but after a while they become "shadows" and are vulnerable to light, which burns and ultimately dissipates them. But, real people can be placed into pictures as well; they cannot get out without the glasses, and after a few hours become like the painted people themselves; if they are brought out now, they slowly become shadows and dissolve like those who were painted to begin with. And the wizard trapped dozens of people this way, including a child.
- The short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin, about a Utopian city called Omelas where everything is perfect. Upon coming of age, every citizen is shown the reason why Omelas is perfect: a child is kept in dark closet covered in its own filth and living in constant abject misery. After being shown the child everyone is told that they can live with this secret for the rest of their lives and stay in Omelas, or they can leave and never return. Most choose to stay. The ones that leave simply walk out of the city gates and are never heard from again. This story is also a very effective Tear Jerker.
- "Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity" by David Morrell. A man appreciates the art of a relatively obscure painter whose technique was to paint vaguely disturbing scenes that, upon closer examination, are painted entirely by mixing together tiny little screaming faces. The man discovers that the painter, who recently committed suicide, has property for sale and buys it. As he walks around the property he finds an eerie dell in the woods, where he finds something unpleasant, a writhing mass of what looks to be tiny bodies. While examining it closer, he feels something pierce his eye and he runs. Gradually he starts to see everything around him made up of tiny, screaming faces, until he goes mad.
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*The Painted Bird* by Jerzy Kosiński. A tragic story about a child's ordeal in the East European countryside set during the Holocaust. During his dark journey from village to village, the boy is repeatedly shunned and brutalized by the Polish peasants. Several of his adoptive families beat him bloody, and one forces the eight-year-old boy to have sex with her. Among the most shocking scenes is when the peasants of one village brutally gang-rape the "village slut", who is later attacked by the wives of the rapists; they fill a glass bottle with feces, and kick it all the way up her vagina until it breaks. By the end, the boy has been so broken by his ordeal that he is unable to adjust to normal city life. Being Tortured Makes You Evil is a part of it, and he becomes almost psychopathic. His idea of fun becomes tampering with train tracks so the train falls off a cliffside, killing everyone on board.
- Viole Falushe in
*The Palace of Love*. He kidnapped a girl who he was in love with and created six copies of her through virgin birth, each exactly like her, in the hope that one will eventually love him. It doesn't help that in the end of the book, Gersen finds one of the copies, who asks him, "Are you The Man? The Man who is coming for me?" and tells him that one day The Man is coming for her, and she must love him. And then, the book implies elsewhere, he will kill her.
- The description of how the virals in
*The Passage* devour their victims is only made worse when you discover what happens to a person when they become a viral.
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*Parts* by Ted Arnold is a children's picture book for 4-7 year olds and about a little boy who gets upset when some of bits of his body fall out and fears they won't be replaced. The illustrations involve surreal depictions of the boy with his parts falling off, fortunately, in a bloodless, doll-like way, such as him being unstuffed with a large pile of fluff having erupted from his belly button, his skin peeling off and revealing a skeleton, and a final shot of him being disassembled in a pile like a doll. While all tame to older children's eyes, the body horror can still freak out its intended audience. This also counts the sequels, *More Parts* and *Even More Parts*, which revolve around the same boy taking body part idioms literally and have illustrations of the boy with very long arms and legs twisting over him, his coach jumping out of his skin with pink flesh now visible on his feet, students throwing all of their eyes at their teacher, toes making a line, and more.
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*The Passion* by Jeanette Winterson is set in a fictional Napoleonic war. There is a scene where Henri is describing how when a horse died from the cold sometimes soldiers would slit their bellies open and stick their feet in to stop them from freezing. One night the frost is so thick that the dead horse freezes over and when a solider wakes up his feet are trapped inside. Henri and the other soldiers are unable to free him so the just leave him behind, screaming.
- Scott Westerfeld's
*Peeps*: a book where every second chapter is a description of the most flesh-meltingly scary parasites he could find, apparently. Given that the main plot is about parasites?
- The last few paragraphs of
*The Picture of Dorian Gray*. The age catches up with Dorian, as well as his crimes.
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*The Pilo Family Circus.* You manage to accidentally impress a gang of lunatics who are stalking you: now they want you to audition for a job in their gang and all you have to do to win is to make them laugh within 72 hours- no matter who gets hurt or killed in the process. Oh, and this gang is composed entirely of Clowns.
- The original book of
*The Prestige* was more horrifying than the Film of the Book, especially in the end. Angier has been alive for more than a century, living amongst the dead bodies of his duplicates, some of which are smiling. And then the generator turns off.
- The Patricia Highsmith story "The Quest for the Blank Claveringi". You wouldn't think that giant snails would be that scary but when they're the size of a Buick, carnivorous and have the tenacity of a rottweiller you get scared really fast. Especially when you realize that, despite their speed, they've been rounding up the author like cattle.
- In Gary Jennings'a historical novel
*Raptor*, the main character Thorn and several others are hired by a Roman to rescue his pregnant wife and son from the Huns. They come up with a plan to sneak into the Hunnish camp... and it all goes bad. Thorn grabs the boy and runs, but looks back to see that the Roman's wife has had her throat cut, and in her death throes birthed a fetus and that the Roman himself has been captured by a Hun who attempts to rape him, but finding the Roman a bit too lively, the Hun cuts a hole in his belly and proceeds to rape the Roman through the hole.
- Koji Suzuki's
*Rasen* ( *Spiral*), sequel to his more famous *The Ring*, where watching a cursed videotape will kill the viewer in a week. Beginning with Ando's autopsy of Ryuji (one of the two protagonists in *Ring*) we're shown how Sadako really kills her victims, including impregnating poor, innocent bystander Mai and discarding her torn corpse after a days-long gestation. If that wasn't bad enough, by the end it's revealed that Asakawa's *Ring* report has actually *helped* Sadako spread her curse through all forms of media, and, eventually, all of mankind will be replaced with clones of Sadako, capable of infinitely reproducing themselves.
- The Rabbits, a book written by John Marsden and illustrated nightmarishly by Shaun Tan, is about colonization. It is told from the viewpoint of those being colonized, and refers to their oppressors as The Rabbits, and the protagonists appear to be something along the lines of Aboriginal wallabies living in Australia. The illustrations are very surreal◊. Everything in the book is told in simple terms so that you know exactly how screwed the original inhabitants are. The Rabbits take over the country and win.
- The Ludovician from Stephen Hall's book
*The Raw Shark Texts*. You wouldn't think of all the scary monsters out there that a shark would stand out as very scary, much less a conceptual shark made of words like the Ludovician. You'd be wrong. The Ludovician stalks along the waterways of human interaction, so it can eat a person's memories, and then their sense of self, leaving them empty shells. It's trying to do this to to the protagonist because he let it out in the first place in an ill-conceived plot to try and keep his dead girlfriend alive. Every time it shows up, things get really, really freaky.
- Pat Barker's
*Regeneration*, set in a mental hospital during World War I, is a nightmare to read. Aside from the grotesque physical symptoms displayed by the patients, the horrific experiences some patients relate to their Freudian psychoanalyst, and the torture other patients go through at the hands of their doctors, you get to sit back at the end and realize that even though the book is fictional, all of the worst parts are completely true.
- In
*The Relic*, the sequence where Margo Green ventures into the under-construction Superstition exhibit and is stalked (and nearly caught) by the Mbwun creature. The exhibit by itself consists of Nightmare Fuel (that's its theme), and she's there in the dark, being hunted by a monster. Unfortunately, the security guard who goes back in to investigate isn't so lucky, and his headless corpse is discovered hidden in the exhibit during its opening (mass panic ensues and it goes downhill from there)...
- William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily". Read it here Seems alright until you get to the ending, and then think about it for a moment and see if you don't shudder.
-
*Rose Under Fire* has, unsurprisingly, some particularly hellish moments as it deals with life in a women's concentration camp. Rose sees the results of the gruesome Nazi experiments on young women in Ravensbruck: the doctors took pieces from Róża's legs and filled the wounds with gangrene, to "see what would happen."
- Scott Smith's
*The Ruins*, particularly the point where Eric goes down the pit. There's also a point when a character is convinced that the vines are underneath his skin and he starts cutting himself open to get rid of it. And he's right. There's also the very end where it's all but explicitly stated that the whole ordeal is going to start again with the would-be-rescuers. Goddamn, that's one sadistic plant.
- The titular creatures in George R. R. Martin's "Sandkings" build an image of their owner's face into their castles. By the end of the story, that's not the only way he's, ah, represented. And when they start growing...
-
*Sangue Fresco*. The title translated, "Fresh Blood", is a a warning. Children are kidnapped and kept in the Amazon Rainforest because some crazy man discovered their blood can cure fatal diseases. He feeds a child to a snake, which is described quite graphically. Some children who escape are hunted down by Cossaks, a troupe of hippies gets their skin burned off by napalm, the main female character dips her cat into the river to check for piranhas, and a priest rips out one of the bad guy's lungs with a cross, which is described with something along the lines of: "He jumped into the water and tried to swim, then noticed he didn't have lungs and died."
- "Saucers from Yaddith" by Robert M. Price, in the anthology
*The New Lovecraft Circle*, has a mildly silly title that may lull you into a false sense of security before bringing out the phrase "Jungle Gym of Flesh." Body Horror city.
- "The Screwfly Solution". Men find it scarier than women apparently. It's a story about how men are being driven by an unknown rage to kill women. Eventually this goes global. There's a scene where a woman's breast was used as a hunting trophy.
- The most ghastly part was when a researcher realized he'd caught whatever it is, so he quarantined himself from his wife and just-entered-her-teens daughter. But he'd been out of the country for a year, and the girl noted in her diary that she didn't understand why he was staying away, and she was going to go see her daddy.
- For some, the terror was that the violence was supposed to be a result of men's sexual urges being twisted — i.e. whoever the men would normally want to have sex with, they now wanted to kill instead. Think for a minute about what that implies about the guy killing his daughter. Ick.
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*The Silerian Trilogy*: * Nightmare Fuel: Lots. Borell's rape of Elelar, the White Dragon, etc...
- The children's book
*Snorre Sel* by Norwegian author Frithjof Sælen. It tells the tale of a vain little seal pup that ventures from his family in the arctic, on the behest of some nefarious wildlife. His father is eaten and he almost gets eaten. A lot of Nordic children were traumatised by the story. It also happens to have been written as an allegory on the evils of the Nazis that had just occupied Norway when the book was written. Nightmare Fuel isn't so strange.
-
*Spinetinglers*, book #7 ( *Snow Day*):
- A group of kids and their bus driver are caught in a snowstorm, and when their bus breaks down, they have to take shelter in a seemingly abandoned house in a nearby field. The house, called the "Muhlzae Maze Manor," is dark, empty, and built like a funhouse due to the fact that most of the doors don't lead anywhere. This is spliced with chapters where the kids suddenly lapse into very vivid dream worlds handcrafted to suit their individual desires. But one girl, Debi, keeps interrupting their dreams and makes them wake up every time. As people start to go missing, Debi takes it upon herself to figure out what is going on. This is where the story goes into And I Must Scream territory. Debi and the kids are still asleep, and are trapped in the house's walk-in freezer. They've been strapped into machines that harvest their blood but keep them alive in a comatose state. It turns out the bus driver is actually a time traveler from a Bad Future where humanity is dying out because they lack immunity to various diseases, and are using the kids to keep them alive. Debi is told she has been fighting them for decades and has actually aged into an old woman, because unlike her friends, she won't cooperate and accept her dreams. Eventually though, it seems like the kids are let go because they realize through Debi's resistance that what they're doing is wrong. Life goes on for Debi and her friends, until one day she has a horrible thought.
*What if her freedom is the dream she most wanted?*
- The book actually opens up with Debi dreaming that the world is ending. It's actually legitimately distressing when her teacher breaks down into tears when she's informed "The cat's in the cradle." The cat being a meteor called Cheshire that is hurtling down to Earth and will kill everyone. Even if it was just a dream, reading that kind of despair and hopelessness as the world ends in a
*kid's horror book* is not something most people would be prepared for.
-
*The Speed of the Dark* by Alex Shearer. Get shrunk to a mere 1/8 of your size, trapped in a snowglobe, and perhaps never see civilization again.
-
*Stranger in a Strange Land*: Valentine Michael Smith has vast psychic abilities owing to his Martian upbringing. Among these is the ability to make any object, regardless of size or make-up, just "go away." This includes humans, and Smith spends most of the book with an odd mix of Blue-and-Orange Morality and Black-and-White Morality, meaning if he perceives a "wrongness" in you, you're just gone. Mike's bodycount, not that there are any bodies to count, gets up into the high hundreds.
- The Tim Powers book
*The Stress of Her Regard*. The vampire fetishists. The way the protagonist's wife is described as being crushed like she got rolled over by a millstone. The wife's twin's robot thing. The medical wards and the surgery theatres and so much more.
- A short story by Brian Lumley, "The Sun, the Sea and the Silent Scream", contains Body Horror involving crabs.
- There's a children's book called
*Sylvester and the Magic Pebble*, about a young donkey who accidentally turns himself into a rock with the titular magic pebble and spends several lonely months trapped in that form while his parents fret and despair over his disappearance. It's been very accurately described as "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream— for kids!"
- The worst part? After he's been there for a LONG time, his
*parents* just happen to pick that rock to have a picnic, and Sylvester desperately tries to call out to them, but can't. He only manages to get back to his normal form when his father picks up the pebble by chance and places it on top of the rock, and Sylvester says, "I wish I was myself again!" If not for that incredibly lucky moment, he'd have been stuck as a rock forever.
- That book is by William Steig, who was no stranger to giving children nightmares. For instance,
*The Amazing Bone* is about a pig-child who encounters a very predatory, sinister fox; and a talking bone — inexplicable and weird, although a "good guy". The fox in that book is especially disturbing by how matter-of-fact he is; unlike most predator villains he neither agressively kidnaps the pig heroine nor slyly tricks her into following him; he simply walks up to her, tells her she's going to be his dinner and drags her home with him.
- Zenna Henderson has children changed into rocks in her short story "The Believing Child". Little Dismey Coven, the daughter of sharecroppers, hears the stories her teacher reads with "eager acceptance — and
*recognition*". The teacher at last realizes that she understands the stories as facts. The class bullies have been after her from day one, and one day they push her too far, and she uses a magic word...
- Most people think of Ogden Nash as a writer of light verse...but every so often, he'd go for a change of pace...
*A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor* pictures a particularly nightmarish punishment for murderers after their deaths.
- "Tailypo", originally found in a collection of children's horror/ghost stories. An old man who lives in a cabin in the woods with his dogs. He is out desperately hunting food and accidentally shoots off the tail of an unusual creature, who is rather fond of that tail. He then cooks and eats said tail, night falls and cue terror! Read it here: http://www.scaryforkids.com/tailypo/
- Margo Lanagan's "Tender Morsels". The miscarriages are enough to make one put the book down and put your head between your legs.
- "The Testament of Magdalen Blair." A woman forms a psychic bond with her husband, who later dies of kidney disease. So she, of all people who have ever lived, gets to learn whether there is life after death. The good news? There is. The bad news? It's horrific suffering as your body decomposes and the universe falls apart around you. You can read it here.
- The science-fiction story "That Only a Mother," by Judith Merrill: a husband, whose job requires him to be away at the time of his child's birth. It also occasionally results in exposure to radiation. The results of the radiation were scary, but at first the titular mother saw her daughter as perfectly normal. Faced with her child's radiation-spawned disfigurement, she goes insane.
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*There's a Nightmare in My Closet* by Mercer Mayer. Has a Family-Unfriendly Violence moment where the kid shoots the nightmare monster.
- Alan James Keogh's "They Live." It's a descent-into-madness story in which the main character has strange holes in his calf only to find that they're worm/maggot things inside, writhing around in there What makes it worse is that a similar thing is not unheard of in Real Life. It happens when flies lay eggs on any rash or cut on farm animals, and can happen to people too. It's not pretty. Two words: Human Bot-Fly.
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*The Thinker*, a collection of stories about a rather strange kid, including one where a bunch of demented dolls rip his limbs off and turn him into a broken doll, and another where he finds a lotion that makes people disappear. It can also make individual parts of them disappear, so when he pours it over his sisters head, her now-headless body runs around screaming. And there's one where he switches souls with his cat through a zipper in the cats fur and on his skin.
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*The Throne of Bone* by Brian McNaughton. Definitely not for kids. One of the more safe for work stories involves a man whose fiancé is turned into a tree. Being a whittler himself, he attempts to liberate her:
"It began to go wrong from the start. The grain of the wood was erratic. I cut too deep, and sap flowed black in the moonlight. Not fluidly, as a human expression would evolve, but as a jolting succession of static images, Dendra's look changed from elation to horror. I had no way to stop her bleeding until I had freed a human body whose wounds I could bind, so I hacked more desperately, but I only cut her more."
- A short story called "The Throwing Jacket" involves a painting, a jacket, and a tower. And a description of a man's face that is utterly demented. It's difficult to explain, but it definitely sends shivers up the spine.
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*Time Windows* by Kathryn Reiss. A girl, Miranda, moves into a new house with her parents. In the attic, there is a dollhouse that is an exact replica of the house she's living in. When she looks through the windows of this dollhouse, she can see images showing the lives of the house's past occupants. This starts out as being pretty cool, but eventually takes a turn for the freaky when her mother begins to take on the depressed and sometimes violent personality of one of the house's past occupants, in the worst way possible. And then there's the dead body they find in a crawlspace.
- "To Build a Fire" by Jack London. It's subtle, but the idea of dying alone from the cold and having your dog abandon you is pretty freaky. The moral being "Don't be cruel to your dog and then expect it to die for you. Or a Dumb Ass and go wandering around
*Alaska in the middle of freaking winter.*"
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*Touching Spirit Bear*. A bully named Cole has been fighting the law for all his life due to his abusive father and his mother who never helped him. He goes into isolation with a group called Circle Justice after he pounded another kid's face into the concrete. After burning down his shelter with all his supplies needed to survive out of anger, he attacks a bear because it wasn't afraid of him. Cole gets mauled and nearly killed. He sits there for three days before help arrives. During those three days, he eats bugs, grass, and, in very descriptive detail, a mouse. The bear returns multiple times, but only stares without blinking, like a damn statue, over Cole.
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*Vampires and Other Creatures of the Night*. A description of a female Slavic vampire who was a floating head and intestines because of a horrific punishment where people were forced to hunch over in a tiny barrel, and one woman who was enduring this was startled when someone walked up behind her, so she jerked her knee into her chin with enough force to detach her head and pull out her intestines, and was resurrected as a vampire that drank the blood of babies. And people would protect themselves from her by putting thorns around their windows to tear up her delicate insides. The other thing about this book that was pure Nightmare Fuel was the cover; a vampire with hollow, burning solid-black eyes and blood dripping from fangs.
- The penultimate chapter of
*Vernon God Little*, in which he comes as close as he possibly could to be executed for a crime he didn't commit ( *the needle is in his arm*). Oh, and the prison has become part of a reality TV show, so his fate is in the hands of the voting public, which is uncomfortably plausible.
- Iain Banks's book
*The Wasp Factory* features numerous nightmare-inducing scenes; mad brothers, burning dogs, three murders carried out calmly, callously and entirely undetected. The worst thing is what drive's Frank's brother mad in the first place...
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*The Weirdstone of Brisingamen* by Alan Garner, a fantasy novel set in England, has a sequence in which the protagonists must escape from an underground trap by traversing the *Earldelving*, a winding, narrow undergound tunnel. The tunnel is so tiny that it will barely pass a Dwarf, or an (at most) early-adolescent human. The tunnel is hot, tight, and dark, and there is a truly nightmarish moment when the characters must pass through a flooded section that may or may not be short enough to avoid drowing. It's only a few pages long and it remains one of the most nightmarish sequences I've ever encountered in a work of fiction.
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*The White Tribunal*, by Paula Volsky. The torture scenes, culminating in the boiling of the brothers in a huge vat of water. So that they'd be "cleansed". While the younger brother looked on.
- * "The Willful Child" by The Brothers Grimm. It's about a little girl who refuses to listen to her elders. As a result, when she got sick, nobody helped her and she died. But when she died, the little girl's hand kept reaching up out of the grave. So the mother had to go down to the grave and beat the child's hand to get her to stop reaching up.
- Boris the Manskinner from
*The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle* is very good at what he does, and the reader isn't spared a single image of it.
- The Dale Brown novel
*Wings of Fire* has terrifying descriptions of the effects of neutron bombings. Corpses everywhere, blood from ears and eyes and a radiation-aborted fetus, coming out through the mother's vagina.
- In
*The Women's Room* by Marilyn French, the chapters depicting Chris's rape at the hands of a teenage boy are the darkest and most chilling in the book. Partly because of what it does to Chris, partly because it's the catalyst that leads Val to become an extreme radical feminist which, in turn, leads to her death, and partly because it's so raw and real, and the police and legal system's callous treatment of Chris and her mother Val - referring to Chris as 'the rape case', claiming she was a 'pretty white princess' who wanted 'a little black meat' (her rapist was black), lawyers sneering at her and suggesting she asked for it - is something that many rape victims have to deal with, even today. ( *The Women's Room* was written in the '70s.) Also doubles as a Tear Jerker, *especially* when Val decides to pack Chris off to a commune in the hope that it will help her recover, and Chris is furious and refuses to speak to her mother again.
- Val's death at the hands of the police. She and a group of other radical feminist activists try to hijack a police van carrying a black woman who's been imprisoned for killing a man in self-defence. They bring guns and prepare to attack
but an informant has tipped off the police and the FBI, and the women are outnumbered and shot dead by the police with machine guns. Val's body is so riddled with bullets that it
*explodes*, killing one policeman and wounding another.
- Some of the stories of the housewives in the earlier part of the book are both this and Fridge Horror, when you wonder what might have happened to Lily (whose husband has her institutionalised, and whose childhood at the hands of her cruel father was so horrific the narrator refuses to talk about it, saying enough is enough); Theresa (a Catholic woman with eight children, who goes insane and eventually kills her eighth child); Sandra (whose husband Tom regularly beats her up); and many more. There's also Oriane, who is Driven to Suicide after she has a breast removed due to cancer, and her husband is too disgusted to look at her.
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*The Yellow House* by Amberlynne O'Shea. Just remember folks: leave your body at the door.
- "The Yellow Pill: A famous psychologist has to counsel a fellow who shot five people in a supermarket. Said fellow insists he is right, and the ordinary surroundings are the illusion. He's right. The psychologist takes medication and snaps out of it, realizing he is on a spaceship, surrounded by dead aliens. When he tries to talk down the patient, the man gives a little speech about needing to accept what he's done, then walks out the airlock thinking he's leaving by the front door. Cue Explosive Decompression. Well, actually, it's even worse than that—the aforementioned trope is averted, and when the fellow's eye pops as he walks out the airlock, he's still alive and aware, convinced that he needs to just work through the "hallucination."
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*Boot Camp* by Morton Rhue. Parents send a 16 years old boy David into the titular boot camp, simply because he meets with the wrong girl. What unfolds there is pure horror. Imagine Nineteen Eighty-Four with *Teenagers* and with the personnel convinced that they are doing a good thing by breaking the protagonist. Oh, and the whole thing is Based on a True Story - such camps actually exist in the USA!
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*A Long Long Way* by Sebastian Barry is a wonderfully-written, thought-provoking, tear-jerking, intensely violent and frightening novel of the First World War. Gruesome battle scenes (people having arms and faces blown off, or being gassed) are placed up against scenes of happy banter between the soldiers - which makes it worse as you just know that these men are going to die at some point. Worst of all? It's about Irish soldiers in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. While an uprising takes place in Dublin that will eventually lead to the splitting of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and subsequently The Troubles. Making the soldier's efforts, fighting for a country that will eventually break away from them, seem utterly futile, at least to them. It's almost a relief when the main character dies at the end.
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*The Foolish Giant* is a fairy tale picture book about a kind-hearted giant and an evil wizard who plans to turn everyone in the kingdom into stone toads. Speaks for itself.
- The short story "House Taken Over" (Casa tomada), by Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar (of
*Hopscotch* fame). A couple of middle-age siblings (The narrator and his sister) live alone in their enormous house, an inheritance they're very devoted to care of. Then *something* takes over their house, first the unused rooms, later the small section they end confined to, forcing them to evict with only what they were wearing. Even if they escaped unscratched, we were never told what exactly took over their home. The way they resign themselves so easily to the invaders and, by the end, the narrator simply toss the key because, really, who on his senses would ever *dare* to go and rob a "taken" home, doesn't make things better. Some critics speculated this short story was a metaphor of Cortazar's feelings about his country, which if you know XX century Argentinian history it only adds to the uneasiness.
- The short story "Pet Farm" by Roger Dee. Moths that Mind Rape humans into a feeling of euphoria, all's well with the world, and these here moths are the greatest thing ever. Before this euphoria wears off, the moths lay their eggs in the people, and the larvae eat their way out ichneumon style. There is nobody at all on this planet older than twenty-odd.
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*A Bad Day For Voodoo* has some pretty graphic descriptions of Tyler losing his ear and it being bloody.
- The smilers in
*Wander* are locked into a permanent state of happiness, and their MO is to capture a living victim and torture them for as long as possible before they expire. When they have no available playthings they instead torture each other or themselves, especially mutilating their mouths and faces. Escaping from them once you're their captive is nigh-on unheard of, and the surest way of pulling it off is torturing someone else to pretend that you're one of them, and even then it only buys you the freedom to execute an escape, since they have no qualms about torturing each other.
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*Zealot* is a *Highlander* tie-in novel. Theres a part in it that elaborates on a deleted scene from the episode Til Death where Methos mentions an incident in Ancient Rome involving a senator, his wife, and a slave boy. We learn in the novel that Methos got caught with the senators wife and was crucified. Thats nightmare fuel enough, but remember that Methos is immortal. He indicates that he kept dying and reviving and dying again until a Roman immortal rescued him. Yeesh.
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*Xeelee Sequence*: A (in)famous collection and series of hard science-fiction novels filled with so much Squick and Nightmare Fuel it even shock fans of Warhammer 40,000 on how bleak and horrifying it is. It is often compared with the likes of 1984 *for a reason*.
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*The Acts of Caine*: *Blade of Tyshalle* has a nasty disease that resembles rabies on steroids, the God of Dust and Ashes, and the scene where the avatars of said god Mind Rape the protagonist's daughter. The winner, however, would be the scene where the bad guys summon a demon who takes out a mortally wounded and expendable underling. The demon feeds off of terror and despair, and to keep that disemboweled sap alive, *reaches into his rib cage and manually pumps the heart to keep his blood flowing*.
- There was a series of books featuring Disney characters in modernized versions of the Aesop Fairytales (The Tortoise and the Hare, The Shoemaker's Elves, etc.). Anyway, they eventually got to "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" with Donald (in the role of the boy) going on a camping trip with Mickey; after dealing with Donald freaking out over harmless things all day, Mickey goes to bed and leaves the shaking and scared Donald to rough it out for the night since he won't get to sleep. Following the story that they're parodying, Donald fakes a wolf coming to make Mickey stay up with him so he won't be alone outside; both times fail and the wolf comes for real after that. There is a full page image that makes it look like the snarling, vicious, and possible mange ridden wolf is leaping right at the reader!
- The children's horror anthology
*Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures* was pure Nightmare Fuel to its readers, partly because of the incredible illustrations by Rod Ruth. One story, "The Patchwork Monkey," involves a horrifying monkey doll and what it does to a young girl's brother. it tries to MERGE with him and succeeds,and the last scene is her brother, wearing its red ribbon smile as he speaks to her in its voice. Picture of it is here. Almost every story in the book was as scary.
- Every story in the Bizarro genre; although it's intended to be weird and freaky, some of this stuff really messes you up. Highlights include a man biting his friend's nose off in the middle of a conversation, an actor who plays dead bodies having his lungs removed in order to be more convincing, a teenager tranquilizing himself and cutting open his belly to pull out his intestines, a neo-Nazi selling drugs at a rave that cause the main characters to melt!, good old fashioned parasitic worms that eat the main character from the inside out, and perhaps most unsettling of all, a deaf kid who wakes up to find that his family, and likely the rest of the world, has been killed in a nuclear war,
*and doesn't realise it*, ending up actually going to sleep outside in the 'snow'. All of this from one of the less freaky books in the genre, "Angel Dust Apocalypse".
- Anne Bishop's
*Black Jewels* books: Briarwood. "Briarwood is the pretty poison. There is no cure for Briarwood."
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*Children of Cthulhu*: An anthology of short stories in the Lovecraft manner... The very first one was essentially based on the old adage "The Devil's in the details!"
- Joel Shepherd's first Cassandra Kresnov novel,
*Crossover*, has a main character who is essentially a More Human Than Human android in a world where most androids are a little less sentient, a little more programmed. Before being rescued by the good guys, she is captured by bootleggers, has her skin peeled off, her limbs removed, and they've just started (electronically) hacking her mind apart when the police arrive.
- Nick O'Donohoe's
*Crossroads* trilogy has its moments. The death throes of a Wyr pup savaged by a panicked chimera in *Under the Healing Sign* stands out in particular; until finally given a Mercy Kill, the poor baby *shifts from mangled puppy to mangled toddler and back* (a disturbing process to watch even under the *best* circumstances), crying all the while, in a desperate and futile attempt to activate his Healing Factor.
- In the "Forensic Mystery" novel by Alane Ferguson called
*Circle of Blood*, there's a cliffhanger ending in which the protagonist receives several e-mails reading things like "I C U" and "come out and play I know you're there because I C U". She looks out her window and sees her ex-boyfriend, who turned out to be a sociopath and a murderer in a case she investigated in the previous book, standing there with a laptop and staring at her.
- From Gregory Benford's
*Galactic Center* novels there is the Mantis, a robotic being that experiments with human DNA. In probably the most horrific, Squick-heavy scene it creates an abominable human-rose hybrid and forces another human to mate with it.
- The
*Guinness Book of World Records* has some, no matter what edition. More specifically; some of the images, and some world record descriptions, can be pure Nightmare Fuel. Several examples include images of the most pierced person, the longest full body burn without oxygen, and the largest venomous spider.
- Stuart McBride's
*Logan McRae* series. There's the description of horrific crime scenes and often taking the persona of the messed up individual as one of the perspectives.
- In one scene, the titular character and police officer Logan is fed human flesh.
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*The Many Faces of Van Helsing*. The short story "Anna Lee", by Kathe Koja is told from the point of view of a minor character from *Dracula*, one of Lucy's maids. There's a tone to it, this dead-calm, defiant tone filtered through Victorian propriety— " *Do* you look at a lady's maid, sir?"— and by the end of it, she confesses that if she's not actually in league with the Count, she'd welcome him, because it couldn't possibly be worse than her life is now.
- Other stories in the collection include a brothel full of little girl vampires in modern-day L.A., demonic vampire-spawn fetuses very nearly tearing their way out of a girl's stomach, and one particular character being systematically driven insane.
-
*Młody Technik*, a Polish magazine about technology, had once published a short story about a lake which was a dumping ground for all sorts of trash. Eventually, between having so much trash in the lake and an accidental nuclear explosion in the vicinity, the lake becomes animate, and proceeds to eat everything around it while growing bigger and bigger. The government tries to destroy it, but all attempts fail. Eventually, the surviving humans desperately escape Earth, while the bog proceeds to eat the entire planet. Then it eats the whole Solar System. Then it turns its attention to the Milky Way. The illustration that depicted an amorphous monster with terrifying teeth also added to the horror.
- The
*Michael Vey* series has Dr. J.C. Hatch. Here's an (abridged) list of his atrocities and why they qualify for this page: Killing Zeus' family and making him think he did it with his powers, held Tanner's brother hostage so he could use his powers to destroy airborne planes, tortured Jack and Wade, sent Michael to a secluded cell and had Nichelle torture him with her powers in order to mentally destroy him, and kidnapped both Taylor and Mrs. Vey, subjecting the latter to a vague abusive prison in Peru. Then there's his favorite punishment of his incompetent lackeys: sending them to the Bowl, where they get devoured by electric rats until all that's left of them is bones.
- Torstyn's powers, which allows him to microwave his target's brain.
- The "docudramas" from R. J. Rummel's
*Never Again* series, written by one of the world's leading experts on crimes against humanity, which are said crimes from the POV of a common citizen living in the nation committing said crimes at its height. The description of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge is particularly stomach-churning: the scene where young children are forced to execute their teacher for the crime of teaching them too much knowledge is absolutely horrifying. They're completely oblivious, thinking that it's a game, and while happily running around and tugging on ropes attached to a tree, hang him.
-
*Nightfall (Series)*: All the blood scenes, and, especially, Bastiens torture.
-
*The Other Side of Tomorrow: Original Science Fiction Stories About Young People of the Future*, 1973. Dystopia for kids. Ethnic cleansing, totalitarian brainwashing, and the paranoid gem, "A Bowl of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy," about a boy who discovers a chemical that's in all the food.
- In
*The Otherworld*, necromancers can raise and control the dead, though it takes a lot of skill, effort, and a ritual to accomplish. Unlike simply reanimating an empty cadaver, raising the dead in this 'verse requires the necromancer to shove the original soul back into its corpse. Even if it's only the skeleton that's left. And as horrifying as that is, there's something worse: Chloe Saunders. Chloe's a fifteen-year-old necromancer. who has so much power that she can (and occasionally does) raise the dead, whether animal or human, in her sleep. If Chloe raises the dead in her sleep and never realizes it, then that soul is going to be trapped in its rotting corpse until it becomes nothing but a skeleton.
- A couple of stories in
*The Oxford Book of Scary Tales*. In one of them, "Dare You", on one page there's a pretty accurate picture: the girl doing the dare looks apprehensive as she enters the cemetery. On the next page, there's a very warped picture of her screaming.
- "Supermarket" summarizes almost every little kid's worst fear: getting left behind at the grocery store.
- The story "Exit." To summarize, it's very depressing. Even the artwork is depressing. And it's the last story in the book, not counting the reprise of the poem at the beginning.
- Some of the short stories in
*School Magazine* are rather scary. In one story, set in a future where technology rules, the environment is obsolete and the earth is overpopulated to the point that we've concreted over the Amazon River. The story was about a family who get tickets to visit something called 'The Find'. When they finally visit it, one of the children sadly reflects that this was definitely going to be the last, there could never be another. The find? A tree. The last tree in existence. Which was implied to already be dead. Also doubles as a Tear Jerker.
- Caro King's
*Seven Sorcerers* series is choke full of Nightmare Fuel, which is understandable given that the magical creatures are all manifestations of either desire or fear. Just a few examples:
- Boogeymen. Super-strong, super fast. Can breathe fire. Only visible by children. They take their pleasure in scaring some child for weeks, while adults, not seeing them, assume the child is simply imagining things. Then, one night they use an Unperson spell, which destroys or changes any documents (including photos), so that all mentions of the child disappear, and also strip everybody else's memories of said child. Then they kidnap said child. and said child is usually brought to the House of Strood, where they are either Eaten Alive, or subjected to worse (see below). And in
*Shadow Spell*, things get worse when a couple of them went on a rampage in our world, killing hundreds of people (who cannot see them and thus are defenseless) each night...
- Rabusmorte. A plant that is drawn to blood and can, depending on how it is used, either heal your wounds (both physical and mental), or eat you alive. On the other hand it can also protect you from
*other* things wanting to eat you alive...
- Ava Vespilio's ring, which contains the spirit of Ava Vespilio. Any human in the vicinity of the ring is subconsciously goaded into putting it on. Once this happens, your body is overtaken by the spirit: you retain most of your sences, but don't have any control of your body. The spirit also has control to your memories so it can lie to other people. Oh, and removing the ring doesn't immediately break the control. The whole thing can end in two ways: Vesplio decides he'd rather inhabit another body and manages to sklip a ring on their finger (in which case he usually kills you during transfer, often by forcing your body to destroy itself) or your body is killed by other means, after which the ring seeks a new victim via magic...
- Thunderdogs, which form a sentient thunderstorm cloud. They kidnap humans and turn them into more Thunderdogs.
- The Dark Being, which can drain anybody of his "life energy", turning them into an Empty Shell.
- Harsh, a substance that slowly dissolves everything it comes in contact with. It is currently slowly consuming the Drift (magical world).
- House of Strood features several, but the most important is the Destillation Machine, which is also a literal Nightmare Fuel. The victim (human or not) is injected with a potion that forces him to relive his worst nightmares in addition to unbearable pain in a process that takes hours. This, in turn, makes the victim susceptible to a magical draining, which slowly drains their "life essence" from them. The essence can be either transferred onto another being, creating a hybrid (say, human essence transferred to a troll creates a grimm, a creature with half of a troll's strength and half of a human's mind capacity, much more effective than either a troll or a human) or turned into liquid to be used later. It is used a couple times throughout the novels and is implied to have been used hundreds of times before.
- Also the Fairy Poison, which slowly dissolves its victims while subjecting them to extreme pain. And this is described as merciful compared to the distillation machine.
- Skinkin, a creature that subjects its victims to Death by Despair.
- Ava Vespilio's ultimate fate. He was evil, but the implications of what will happen to him now...
- The
*Shadow Children* series, which takes place in a dystopia where families are only allowed to have two children, due to food and resource shortages. Any illegal third children are hunted down and exterminated without mercy.
- The government employs a force called the Population Police that is responsible for finding and killing illegal third children. Their symbol is two overlapping circles and a teardrop, which is said to represent either the tears of mothers forced to kill their thirds, or the shovel used to bury the dead children in the ground.
- At one point, the protagonist, Luke, infiltrates the Population Police as a recruit to spy on them from the inside. He drops his uniform by accident, and an officer punches him in the head, screaming at him about "disrespecting their noble cause". The Population Police are so cult-like that they view
*murdering innocent children* as something noble and heroic.
- Luke comes across several anti-third child propaganda posters made by the government. One of them shows a baby with the number 3 painted on his chest and the words
*"He's the reason you were starving."* Another shows a family with two children playing in the open and a third hiding behind his mother's legs, and the words *"The worst criminals of all."* A third shows a similar family and the words *"It's all their fault."*
- There's a series of books called
*Short & Shivery*. It's like *Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark*, although it doesn't have notorious pictures. Anyway, in the third volume, *Even More Short & Shivery*, there's a story called "The New Mother". It was the basis for "The Drum" from *More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark*, but it ramps up the scariness by adding an And I Must Scream element at the end. At least in "The Drum" when the messed-up new mother shows up, the story ends then and there.
- The
*Skeleton Creek* series. It gets really crazy when Henry, Ryan Mc Cray's father's best friend was part of the crossbones, and was responsible for most of the deaths of the Crossbones. The videos also have disturbing things in them, and some have unexpected Jump Scares. Many of the videos throughout the books involve Old Joe Bush's Ghost and assorted scares.
- The Vorkosigan Saga has a fairly lighthearted tone on the whole... as long as they stay far away from Jackson's Whole. Take
*Mirror Dance*. The things Baron Ryoval does to Mark have the details left sketchy on purpose, but Lois McMaster Bujold supplies just enough for your mind to fill in the blanks. Runner-up would have to be Ker Dubauer's lovely selection of Cetaganda bioweapons from *Diplomatic Immunity*.
- One of the
*A Walk on the Darkside* anthology novels had a story called "Parting Jane" by Mehitobel Wilson. In it, a little girl is slowly demolished and disassembled so her sick sister can get replacement parts, because her parents only love the sick girl. Describing how it goes won't have a possibility of disclosure. * shudder* They took her eye, man!
-
*Weird Tales*. A *very* long-running magazine of pulp fiction, with almost every famous writer of horror or sci-fi at the time, from The Roaring '20s to The '80s, including H. P. Lovecraft, contributing stories. Needless to say, it contained a lot of Nightmare Fuel.
- "Soft": A man angry with his wife after a breakup last night reaches out. And remolds her like Silly Putty.
- "The Professor's Teddy Bear": A terrifying Mind Screw in which the professor's childhood teddy bear is revealed to be some sort of horrible monstrosity that whispers to him to do terrible things, and gives him the power to change people in disgusting, Body Horror ways.
- "The Grab Bag": "
*Something had eaten her face!*"
- The Dark Court of the
*Wicked Lovely* series has many terrifying characters and some of the things they do may not be that detailed, but are fairly obvious (rape, murder, cold-blooded torture, posing deaths to look like scenes from plays, etc.)
Sleep well, children! | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Literature |
Legends of the Fourth of July (Coreline) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- The effect of Goldie's "cocktail"; it's a combination of Gamma-enhanced steroids and TITAN (of the
*Batman: Arkham Series*) that turns anyone dosed with it into a mindless berserker with the strength of The Hulk. It's also been laced with Fear Toxin to cause the victims to hallucinate and drive them into an even greater frenzy. And to make things even worse ( *yes*, a group of mindless brutes demolishing half of Chicago and killing anything in their path is *not* the worst part of it), the "cocktail" is mixed with half of the chemical ingredients of Kerasine, a powerful brainwashing agent... and the cure (which has been tampered with by Goldie) holds the *other* half of the formula. Meaning that any "Gamma-Titans" that survive their dosage and rampage long enough to be treated with the cure will be susceptible to Goldie's brainwashing.
- ...Did I forgot to mention that this monster-juice can be delivered by
*airborne* means?.
- The "Fakehuggers" have their fair share of Nightmare Fuel (In-Universe
*and* out)... imagine being attacked by a Facehugger and knocked out, and waking up believing that you have been impregnated with a Chestbuster and you are pretty much living on borrowed time... a thought that easily drives you past the Despair Event Horizon and may make you have a heart attack or look for a way to check out that is on your terms... and *then* someone comes and tells you that it was all a prank... it is no wonder that people sued the company that made the Fakehuggers right into bankruptcy.
- ||The replica|| Goldie's threat to destroy all of Manhattan ||by allowing the Arc Reactor at the Infinite Avengers Tower go into a meltdown|| if 1) she is not let go and 2) she is not given Mari so she can turn her into her "pet". The scarier part? She is The Sociopath and
*quite* willing to do so... and as the Villainous Breakdown-by-Combat Breakdown at the final fight keeps on going, she decides on simply destroying all of Manhattan *to make sure that the Captains' victory is Pyrrhic at best* **and** she continues to holler at Mari that she *will* have her as a "pet", one way or another.
- Special mention has to be made in regards to Goldie's desire to make a "pet" of Mari. Goldie makes "pets" of young girls by drugging them up and brainwashing them into total and complete submissiveness, ordering them to kill a close friend or family member, and then uses them as sex slaves for her own gratification. She was going to drug Mari into being a mindless slave for the rest of her life, and likely have her try to kill one or both of the people she loves and cares for the most.
- A scary fact: Freddy Fazbear's Pizza exists in Coreline. It is still populated with killer animatronics that terrorize and annihilate anybody unlucky enough to be inside the pizzeria once night falls.
*Scarier* part? You can turn the place into a smoking crater as many times as you want... *it will just rebuild itself by morning*. And this is without going into the story of some bad guys who had the bad idea of going into the building with some kidnapped children in an attempt to avoid being captured by Mari/Cap and Maria/Thunderstrike...the poor dead bastards. The girls didn't even have the chance to deal with most of them themselves - they would have been *much* more merciful. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LegendsOfTheFourthOfJulyCoreline |
Live A Hero / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- The Kaibutsu in general. They're interstellar, interdimensional monsters that manifest from seemingly no where and require eating people from reality to fully form. And even after fully forming, they keep eating.
- People that are eaten by the Kaibutsu and are failed to be rescued not only die but any memories and evidence they ever existed are erased. This means those that are eaten are effectively erased from existence. Chapter 1 shows a temporary version of the memory erasure when ||the children that Kyoichi saved forget him after he's eaten.|| Later story makes this increasingly scarier: in the Christmas event, ||when Kaibutsu are spread out all over Nessen's ryokan/resort, a random person runs into a conference room, panicking about someone near them going missing. When people try to calm this person down and ask for more details, the person then
*forgets who they were talking about and why they were so freaked out in the first place.* Most people in the conference chalk it up to a random freakout, but Subaru notes that this is the **fourth time** this has happened, which means that at least four people were eaten by Kaibutsu and barely anyone batted an eye because everything about them was wiped from everyone's minds.||
- The ending of Chapter 1 has quite a few:
- ||Ryekie ends up impaled in the stomach after jumping in front of a child when the nearly dead Kaibutsu turns its body into a thorn, intending to kill the spectating kid. The last we see of the tiger for the chapter is him collapsing while bleeding heavily.||
- ||The mysterious man that was watching the Protagonist during the chapter's climax says he can't wait to see the Protagonist be tormented by their own power, before he sends them to "oblivion" himself.||
- Chapter 2 escalates things:
- It's revealed that when Mokdai was young and lived in the slums, ||a giant fusion-type Kaibutsu wreaked havoc and ate all of his friends in front of him: since he had the potential to be a hero, he was the only one who remembered them. Even though it was defeated, many heroes died that day, and the incident is still remembered.||
- At the start of the chapter, ||Exio is talking to a mob whose powers as an Observer had apparently just awoken. The player isn't shown exactly what their full exchange is, but it seems that Exio told him how to attract Kaibutsu to a location, as that mob later goes on to attract dozens of Kaibutsu to attack his former workplace; however, the situation rapidly spirals out of his control, as far more Kaibutsu than he anticipated show up and form into a giant fusion-type Kaibutsu that the main heroes have to stop. As they all plan how to fight it, they all acknowledge that this kind of Kaibutsu is very dangerous, and it's very likely that some of them will die fighting it.||
- After the incident, when the player is going home, ||the mob finds them, recognizing them as the Operator for the heroes on the broadcast, defeating the Kaibutsu he drew in. He declares that his plan was to be the one to save the day, to be the Operator for the heroes who came in to defeat the Kaibutsu, but the player ruined it, and in his delirious rage, he
*pulls a knife on the player character and tries to stab them.* Then a Kaibutsu appears out of nowhere and eats him, followed by a black hole opening in the ground beneath the Kaibutsu and it vanishing into it. Exio then steps out of the shadows to express his disappointment with the mob's inability to do anything right, then tells the player that he can control Kaibutsu and that they are now the only two people who remember the mob, as he just erased him from existence; he says all of this completely calmly, totally unbothered by the horror of the action he just committed.|| | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiveAHero |
Lackadaisy / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
**As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.**
- When the Pig Farmers kidnap Rocky, they thrown him in the back of their truck with the carcass of a rabid pig that had to be euthanized.
- The Pig Farmers get a healthy dose of this themselves when Freckle gets his hands on a Tommy Gun and begins stalking them, laughing the whole time.
**Avril:**
Ain't no living thing oughta make a sound
like that.
- In a flashback, Mordecai chases a lawyer that he and the Savoys kidnapped. When he catches up with the escapee, Mordecai sinks a hatchet into the man's leg. The man is terrified and has no idea what he did to deserve the violence. Offscreen, Mordecai dismembers the man with his hatchet. Later, Mordecai and the Savoys leave the man's remains with the Pig Farmers.
- Bobby and Abelard hit Rocky with their hearse, giving him a massive head wound. After Elsa stitches up his wound, he has bloodshot eyes and a scar in the middle of his forehead.
- There's something very,
*very* off about Rocky after he got hit. His Cheshire Cat Grin seems to have permanently plastered itself onto his face; pairing it with his heavily dilated pupils and bloodshot eyes, there are points where it looks more like a Slasher Smile.
- Lackadaisy Doggerel consists of a fairly dark poem about storms and water-wheels. At the bottom of the page is Rocky drawn in silhouette, with his
*skeleton* emphasized. Just to make matters worse, you can clearly see the crack in his skull where the hearse hit him, showing just how bad the injury is... and how far off the deep end it has sent him.
- It gets even worse as the next page reveals that the whole poem was recited by
*Rocky* himself out loud in the rain, which gets a *lot* of stares from Ivy and Bobby as they load up the liquor.
- Serafine and the Maitre Carrefour cult become increasingly menacing toward Mordecai during his visit to their fete. The scene culminates with Serafine holding a knife to a frightened Mordecai as Zulie undoes his tie and shirt. Offscreen, Serafine carves a Voodoo symbol into his chest. We next see a groggy Mordecai in the backseat of their car, suggesting that he may have been chloroformed or drugged during the ordeal.
- Ivy's nightmare she has after sneaking an injured and almost catatonic Rocky into her school. As for "Heebie-Jeebies", she's still unnerved about it.
- The various Nightmare Faces:
- In "Lackadaisy Confessional", Mordecai calmly threatens to torture Gracie with a corkscrew wine-bottle opener if he refuses to provide answers to his questions.
- The animated pilot
*really* captured Mordecai's icy, detached malice. Of special note are the ticking sounds that accompany most of his scenes and the moment where, as Freckle is trying to save Ivy from Nico and Serafine, Mordecai quietly counts his shots until he runs out, then takes his chance to fire at him.
- This is also our first time seeing and hearing Freckle animated. The way he goes from soft-spoken and gentle to roaring with laughter while spraying bullets at people is quite unsettling.
- Bonus points when Ivy asks if Freckle's alright. The feral scowl and deep-throated growl he shoots her only lasts a second, but it clearly leaves her terrified.
- Rocky also can be just
off. Hes cheerful and articulate, but its amusing and showboating when hes talking with friends. When we see him laughing like a madman, chucking dynamite at people while crowing about the circus, its pretty creepy. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Lackadaisy |
Live and Let Die / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
For the James Bond Nightmare Fuel index, see here.
## The Film
- There's some Paranoia Fuel with seemingly
*everyone* in the district of Kananga's gang's Fillet of Soul restaurants in Harlem and New Orleans being in league with said gang. Of particular note, the fact that no one bats an eye when someone gets killed during the jazz funeral procession and carried away in the coffin.
- The film has possibly the scariest ending to a James Bond film to date. Baron Samedi, a man we previously thought was dead, sits on the front of Bond's train laughing demonically as the camera zooms in on him. The image soon jumps to a flaming skull while the credits roll. Pretty unsettling.
- The opening title sequence has its moments, particularly the shot of a nude woman with her eyes fully wide open as her head is on fire cut back-and-forth to a flaming human skull to the beat of the theme song. There's also another shot of a woman given eerie uplighting looking straight at you with a completely dead stare.
- Baron Samedi himself. We know nothing about him, he gets only a few lines that aren't demonic laughter, and doesn't appear to be really connected with Kananga's operation. We also never find out if he's just a man, the Voodoo Loa himself or something even worse...
- On the subject of Baron Samedi, there's the part where he rises out of a grave to observe the Human Sacrifice. Bond shoots off the top of his head, revealing him to be a clay figure...except that we briefly see his eyes glancing up at his blown off cranium.
- Intruders who dare walking on the isle of San Monique are killed through Human Sacrifices, bitten by a venomous snake with a chanting crowd. It's the fate of Baines in the pre-titles sequence, and nearly the fate of Solitaire.
- Rosie Carver's death. Her terror at being offed by Kananga when Bond smokes her out is quite unsettling, as are the scarecrows watching their every move and the fact that Bond himself is holding her at gunpoint. The moment where she panics and flees before she's shot to death is not helped by the music slowly intensifying up to Bond's discovery of her body.
- When James Bond arrives in New York, Kanaga's henchman drives up alongside Bond's car and takes out the driver of the car, while the vehicle is still in motion, with the intention of causing Bond to be killed in the car crash. There is a brief, but disturbing shot of the dead driver with bullet hole in his head. It takes 007 a minute to realise what has happened as the car is speeding up and in danger of crashing into traffic. Luckily, Bond manages to take control of the car from the back seat.
- Dr. Kananga himself is no lightweight, and his abuse of Solitaire when she defies him is truly scary.
*When the time was right I myself would have given you love. You knew that. YOU KNEW THAT!!!*
- As cheerful and Affably Evil as he is, Tee-Hee is darn freaky when he and Mr. Big interrogate Bond by threatening to clip his fingers off, while sporting his trademark smile.
- Bonus points for his return in the last few minutes of the movie. Bond and Solitaire are on a train, Bond in the bathroom cleaning himself up and Solitaire lying in their bunk, blissfully talking about how wonderful things are... and then we see a silvery claw snaking its way through the darkness, towards Solitaire, close enough to cut her but she doesn't even know it's there. Bond steps out the bathroom just in time to see Tee-Hee, at which point the he slams the bunk closed with his claw to trap Solitaire, resulting in a fight. It's a fun scene but it's frightening to think how easy it was for a huge, crippled man like Tee-Hee to get into their carriage, and how close he came to hurting Solitaire with his claw-hand.
- Imagine Bond's situation when he is left by Tee Hee in the middle of the water surrounded by man-eating crocodiles and alligators. Yes, Bond manages to escape by running over them, but even still.
- Kananga's death scene. Ignoring what a poorly-executed and absurd effect it was, the idea of a man being inflated to the point of exploding is still a disturbing prospect to dwell on. It may be heavily mitigated by the distinct lack of blood and guts present, but imagine if they
*had been present*. Sweet dreams, everyone. So much for having an inflated opinion of oneself. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiveAndLetDie |
Literature Authors / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Return to the homepage here.<!—index—> Isaac Asimov Clive Barker Ray Bradbury Agatha Christie Tom Clancy Roald Dahl Philip K. Dick Charles Dickens Henrik Drescher Harlan Ellison James Ellroy Neil Gaiman Edward Gorey James Herbert Paul Jennings Stephen King Dean Koontz Stanisław Lem Richard Laymon Bentley Little H. P. Lovecraft The Colour Out of Space Dagon The Dunwich Horror Edgar Allan Poe Alastair Reynolds Dr. Seuss Shel Silverstein H. G. Wells Irvine Welsh<!—/index—> | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiteratureAuthors |
Live Girls / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Ramsey Campbell called
*Live Girls* "the most nightmarish vampire story [he's] ever read" for a reason.
- Those mutant vamps. Their mutations can range from anything from tentacles to wings to fused legs. And they're oh, so hungry ...
- Shideh. She hides behind a mask and is shrouded in mystery. The reason she's wearing that mask? Her face is horrific, with a nose that resembles more of a snout. Then there's what she does to Casey, holding her captive and raping her before turning her into a vampire.
- Davey trying to drink Casey's period blood. The whole thing reads like a rape scene, and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood playing on TV in the background makes it all that much more jarring.
- Vincent is a perfect example of a terrifying mundane antagonist in a largely supernatural setting. He's a volatile junkie asshole prone to domestic violence over the pettiest of slights.
- The description of Vernon Macy's death. It's the first time a vampire is shown being killed in the book, and it's ugly. He grotesquely decays within seconds after he's slain
- Vampires here don't just bite their victims and feed. They
*tear out their throats.* | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiveGirls |
Little Dorrit / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- Everything about Rigaud. He's so over-the-top he should be ridiculous. Instead he's absolutely terrifying.
- In the 2008 series, during Arthur's stay in the Marshalsea he falls asleep and wakes up... to find Rigaud
*in the room with him*. It's never explained how Rigaud got in there, since it was after the prison was locked up for the night. The obvious conclusion is that he came in during the day, then stayed the whole night and went out in the morning. Which means a murderer was on the loose in the Marshalsea all night long.
- In the same scene, Arthur tries to force Rigaud to tell him what he knows about the Clennams' secret, and Rigaud holds a piece of broken glass at Arthur's throat. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleDorrit |
Llamas with Hats / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- Most of the atrocities Carl commits are this mixed with hilarity.
- One subtle part of the videos that borders more on scary than funny is that if you listen closely during the credits of Episode 7, you can hear that the music is warped and out-of-tune to represent Carl becoming more and more unhinged due to Paul leaving. It becomes more and more distorted with each following episode, only to return to normal in the final episode after Carl has "completed his work," ending his own life after having wiped out all life on earth, including Paul.
- Episode 9. Good God, episode 9. The Paul mask Carl made floats off the tree its hanging from and starts telling Carl to go out and kill more people. All with glowing red eyes, a warped, echoing voice that sounds like Pauls, and an odd static-y sound emitting from it. And Carl was actually planning on taking a break for a change, too.
- Episode 10 manages to take things even a step further. Carl has fallen into his gore pit and broken his leg. You can see the bone poking through the skin for the entire video. The only other one in the pit with him is the Paul mask (and the basilisk), which can't help him get out. There's long stretches in the video where nothing is happening. It's just Carl sitting in the dark and being unnerved by the silence. Worst of all, he has no idea how long he's been down there when he wakes up.
*He's bloody and a chunk of his ear is missing.*
- Episode 11. Fifteen years later, a visibly battered Carl is standing before an apocalyptic wasteland. There is mention of a "blood vortex" in Paris,
*more* meat creatures being unleashed, said creatures being *eaten*, some kind of screaming flesh-eating orb made of nerves... and the mask says that **Carl isn't done yet.** | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LlamasWithHats |
Liv and Maddie / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- From "Kang-A-Rooney", Pepito the Clown doll, especially ||at the end of the episode||.
- From "Song-A-Rooney", that ... thing with the teeth in the
*FroyoYOLO* music video.
- From "Match-A-Rooney," Parker breaking Reggie's leg then
*ripping out his heart* ||though both are shortly revealed to be fake in order to scare Maddie||.
- Willow's pursuit of Joey, which borders on outright abuse. ||She chased him with a net for Pete's sake.||
- Parker and Joeys cannibal clones.
- The fact that Parker managed to collapse the ENTIRE house due to a faulty tunnel system. Its scary to see a young boy cause so much damage. Luckily no one was hurt.
- Fangs. Being a feral child is scary enough, but a feral child being raised by predators (wolves in this case) who could potentially kill you is even worse. It makes you wonder how shes even alive.
- Maddies knee injury. If youve known anyone with a torn meniscus in real life, its pretty scary, and they take a long time to heal. If it had been any worse, she would have had to play basketball in a wheelchair.
- Helga, especially when one of the sisters is replaced with her. Shes not real, but that doesnt make her any less disturbing. Also, never mess up a Jack-o-lantern in her presence. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LivAndMaddie |
Little Demon / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
# General
- The fact that Laura had to constantly move across the country to avoid Satan and protect Chrissy from his clutches. It's frightening to consider just how their relationship deteriorated to such a point.
- While Satan is presented as a fun-loving, chill guy, he's still very much... well,
*Satan!* He is unafraid to manipulate, threaten, torture, or kill any one to get what he wants, or just for his own amusement. Including his own daughter, even though he does grow to genuinely care about her.
- Chrissy, Satan and Laura's relationship certainly can come across as Realism-Induced Horror, or at least Realism-Induced Discomfort. Laura is Chrissy's overprotective mom who holds some hidden resentment for her daughter disrupting her life and being forced to atone for both her own survival and Chrissy's (even though she does genuinely love her) and Satan is a fun-loving but irresponsible deadbeat dad who sees Chrissy initially as a tool to fulfill his goal and has little issue trying to push her away from her mother, (though he eventually stops seeing her this way). Even without the supernatural elements, anyone whose dealt with a dysfunctional relationship with their own parents due to unresolved baggage can possibly relate to Chrissy's struggles to deal with the turmoil both of her parents unintentionally rain on her.
- When Chrissy's Antichrist powers first activate; as the bullies laugh at her embarrassing first period, her eyes darken to an inky black, everything around her starts shaking and shattering, her body starts contorting and her tormentors start to blow up and pop like balloons with their blood, guts and limbs splattering everywhere. It's but a taste of what Chrissy and her satanic magic are capable of.
- The very end of the episode, where Chrissy's laughter is distorted to a demonic, sinister cackle. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleDemon |
Little Misfortune / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Abusive Parents? Ghosts? Death? Strange supernatural occurrences and accidents that follow Misfortune wherever she goes? Yikes forever...
When Misfortune goes to George's "party" to tell him about the dog, she walks towards the edge of the house to find he hanged himself.
Misfortune: Are you the owner of a puppy, because I bring really bad news... Mr. Voice: Oh no, wait! It looks like he hung himself. Misfortune: Hanged himself, like a piñata? Should I hit him like a piñata? Mr. Voice: No, Misfortune... He's dead. Misfortune: Dead? But he's wearing a pair of sweet boots, he can't be dead!
The Paranoia Fuel as you go back and notice just how many scenes have crows flying in the background... The scenes without them are more notable. Morgo is always watching you.
The way Morgo acts when Misfortune learns the truth and confronts him about it. He stubbornly insists that she "play with [him]" and shoves her around like a child throwing a tantrum. His coming and going also starts to be accompanied by a brief but creepy Interface Screw.
At the end of the game, where Morgo chases Misfortune into her bedroom, complete with him screaming at her and making the walls splinter and crack apart. Morgo's form is then revealed, and it is shown that he is a large, demonic creature with a skull for a head and red eyes. His voice when he's showing his true colors is the worst part, as his speaking patterns start sounding less like a calm, eloquent and mature speaker and more like a scratchy, disjointed voice pieced together from recordings.
Morgo is merely one of several hundred thousand beings just like him, and assuming that his code from his case file refers to which parasite he is, hes only the one-hundred and one thousand, two hundred and twenty second parasite that the organization in Senersedee has managed to specifically identify, and he likely isnt the last.
The truth behind ||Misfortune's death: she wasn't killed directly through supernatural means, but rather by simply crossing the road at the wrong time and being hit by a car. That she dies in such a terrifyingly normal way - not to mention the worries any good parent has of their children crossing the street - really hits||. It's even worse when you consider the game's implications: ||Morgo likely lured her into the road in the first place during their game, given the terrifying image she sees when she stands on the spot of her death; and given the skid marks, Misfortune was likely hit and killed by her own father, who was most probably drunk-driving||. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleMisfortune |
Little House on the Prairie / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- "100 Mile Walk": Charles is forced to make a pilgrimage to a far-off work site due to being strapped for cash, as well as a neighbor, Jack, both trying to support their families. There is Foreshadowing in the middle of the episode that the place Charles, Jack, and company on the job are working is full of dangerous explosives that never went off, like a forgotten minefield. After they finish the job, Jack gets so caught up with excitement he carelessly runs around the place celebrating in glee... only to accidentally set off one of the charges that failed to detonate and get
*vaporized* by the resulting explosion- and we are *not* treated to a Gory Discretion Shot. The moment he steps on the wrong place at the wrong time, there's a *very* violent and abrupt **BOOM**, and Jack is *literally* blown sky-high, with a panning shot of the resulting smoke cloud rising up into the wild blue yonder, helping to illustrate the fact he got blown to kingdom come. And this is just *the fourth story.* You know, for kids!
- "Plague": Seeing all the rats running around the storeroom where the cornmeal is stored can be very unnerving. Not helping: An eerie musical cue is played. Worst of all is when Doc Baker demands, "Burn this place to the ground." That's exactly what the townsfolk do while the rats are still inside, and all those rats are implied to be
*immolated* to kill off the plague carriers.
- "May We Make Them Proud": It can be chilling, downright frightening to watch the scene where Alice Garvey is trapped in the burning house and beating her arms on the window to try to break it and escape screams for help. Then the flames swallow her and the crying baby, Adam Kendall Jr., she is holding. Also, hearing the baby stop crying as he and Alice are overcome by the flames and intense heat indeed, there is a cut scene of a huge fireball shooting out the window of the room where they were just standing is horrifying. This, despite the fact that the scenes of Alice crying for help were shot on a soundstage, Heresha Parady (Alice's portrayer) was holding a doll and the baby crying was just sound effects perfectly stopped on cue and added in post-production.
- "Sylvia": The evil clown mask that the rapist hides his face behind. The fact that the rapist stalks his victims — in this case, Sylvia — is also enough to give the viewer shivers. It is also scary to see the climatic scene, where Sylvia is once again visited by her rapist and, attempting to climb a rickety ladder to escape, plummets to her death.
- "Home Again": Michael Landon does not pull any punches when showing Albert withdrawing from morphine. They are as graphic as one will ever see, and as such this was a rare episode in an episode where most everything else was as G-rated as possible where parents were urged to watch with their children.
- "The Music Box" is both an in-universe example and an example of something that could shake up young viewers. After stealing the eponymous music box from Nellie's room, Laura suffers guilt that manifests itself as three nightmares, one in a courtroom, one in a jail, and one where she is ||being hanged.|| All three show Laura in a ragged dress with tangled, dirty hair and shackles on her wrists. All three also have a sadistic minor version of the music box tune as background music. The jail nightmare also features Harriet Olsen as a grim-faced matron throwing scraps at prisoners, who then throw themselves on the floor and gobble them, groaning the whole time. And in the hanging sequence, Nellie herself serves as the executioner, gleefully sucking on a candy cane beneath her black hood.
- The episode "The Monster of Walnut Grove" has a few scary scenes, both of Laura's nightmares are really nightmare fuel. In her first nightmare, Nels is shown (seemingly) chopping off his wife's head and then Nellie's, Willie's and Laura's heads are flying around screaming.
- Albert's sickness in "Look Back to Yesterday", especially when he cheerfully speaks without knowing a huge geyser of blood is pouring out of his nose.
- The final destruction of Walnut Grove in "The Last Farewell" isn't pretty to look at. All those iconic buildings are shredded to bits in very loud and shocking explosions that are shot in slow-motion film just to make it sink in. And even though they deliberately left the church intact, it suffers residual damage from the explosions anyway.
- "Whisper Country" was a really creepy episode, as the overly religious people made the show creepy and treated Mary like an evil outcast. Miss Peel was really a creepy character in the episode and accused Mary of being a "jezebel." Worse, she temporarily blinds a student with a foolish attempt to treat an ailment and blames Mary, claiming it is a curse she inflicted. Then, when Mary learns Miss Peel is illiterate and very misinformed about what the Bible says, the hag tries to bring down the wrath of the heavens on Mary. The scene is very tense, while being cathartic as well when nothing happens.
-
*Little House In The Big Woods* makes mentions of panthers. One that chased Laura's Grandpa home in a story, one that was stalking her Aunt Eliza (her dog Prince intervened), then in *Little House on the Prairie* it provides Pa and some Native American tribesmen the the incentive to hunt and kill it.
- Ma and Laura's encounter with the bear in the cow pen. Particularly her very calm, quiet instruction for Laura to turn around and walk back to the house. Laura does so...and a few seconds later, Ma snatches her up and run into the house with her, slamming the door behind them. Made more frightening in that we, like Laura, don't know what's happening yet, but we know that Ma never panics unless there's a reason.
-
*Farmer Boy* usually isn't the most exciting book but has a few nightmarish moments.
- The Hardscrabble Boys are known for driving out hapless teachers and even using physical violence on them, some of them are encouraged by their father. One of them drove out a teacher so hard that he died from his injuries. All this in a time that Moral Guardians tend to laud as "innocent" and "simple" unlike our post-Columbine shooting world....how is it those boys aren't in jail?
- While helping with ice cutting, Almanzo slips on the ice and starts sliding towards the open water. He's saved by one of his father's workmen, but he describes in graphic detail how he "knew he would sink and be drawn under the solid ice. The swift current would pull him under the ice, where nobody could find him. Hed drown, held down by the ice in the dark."
- Later, while helping harvest potatoes, Almanzo takes a break to cook two of them for his sister and him to eat. He builds a fire and begins roasting them, only for one of them to
*explode* and hit him directly in the eyes. He's not seriously injured, but it's about the last thing you expect to happen in that scene.
-
*Little House on the Prairie* is full of Nightmare Fuel, just owing the hardships of being a homesteader:
- Pa nearly drowns trying to ford the wagon (which holds Ma and the girls) across a swollen river. Pa gets in the water with the horses while Ma tries to steer; the terror in her voice as she tells Laura and Mary to lie down and lie still is palpable even though it's told by 4-5-year-old Laura.
- While building the cabin, a log rolls off from a height and falls on Ma's foot. Her ankle is sprained and swollen, and it's explained in the narration that a small divot in the ground was the only thing to save the foot from being completely crushed.
- The "candle in the well" portion of the book comes off as a simple cautionary tale. Pa even improvises a science experiment for Laura out of it. Never mind the neighbor helping Pa build the well nearly dies after passing out due to toxic underground fumes.
- Laura is awoken in the middle of the night by wolf howls. Pa lifts her up to look out the window, where a pack of them have
*surrounded their cabin on all sides.* The cabin that was recently built and has *no door or window panes.*
- Pa is caught up in a pack of wolves while out hunting. He described them surrounding his horse and just trotting alongside, unafraid (though Pa, understandably, was terrified). Pa comes back shaken, having had to control the horse's natural instinct to run so as not to spook the wolves.
- The entire family comes down with malaria and it's only the fact that neighbors find them and seek medical help that they survive.
- Interestingly, Baby Carrie isn't mentioned in the malaria scenes at all, which makes sense, because while Carrie exists in the narrative, she wasn't actually born yet; the books being a somewhat fictionalized account of Laura's life. So while some readers might get some Fridge Horror regarding who exactly was taking care of the baby while the family was bedridden and hallucinating, it's good to know she wasn't actually in danger. However, that brings up some Real Life Fridge Horror regarding the incident. Dr. Tan, the doctor who treated the family, is noted on his gravestone as having done so in 1870.
*Little House on the Prairie* puts these events solidly in the summer, when the weather is hot and the mosquitoes are out. Carrie was born on August 3, 1870. Put this information together and what do you get? The horrifying realization that Ma was *heavily pregnant with Carrie* while nearly *dying* of malaria on the high prairie. Since real-life Carrie was small and frail throughout childhood, it's possible this might have been part of the reason why.
- Laura's fever dreams while sick with malaria are pretty trippy.
- Pretty much anything involving the grasshoppers in
*Plum Creek*, including Laura being outside when the glittering cloud appears, and grasshoppers start plunking down on her head, the ground being carpeted with grasshoppers, to the point the family can't walk to church, the creek being plugged with drowned grasshoppers, and, of course, grasshoppers climbing in through the open windows, and walking right over baby Carrie. There's a horrifyingly tactile description of young Laura lying in bed, repeatedly brushing her arms because she can't stop imagining the feel of the grasshoppers' scratchy legs crawling on her.
- A lot of
*The Long Winter*, in-universe and out. Laura starts having nightmares that the blizzards are deliberately trying to scour away the roof to get to them. Quite a lot is made of the fact that the blizzards always seem to come out of nowhere, so there's always a risk of getting trapped away from home and freezing to death.
- Honorable mention to the snowstorm that catches Laura at school. The entire school must walk in blinding snow to get back to a town they can no longer see ahead of them. It quickly becomes a nightmarish slog as Laura realizes that they've been walking far too long, shortly before she bumps her shoulder against the final house on the street and calls everyone back. If they had continued to walk, the entire school would have been lost on the open prairie.
- Also the description of each of the malnourished family members' thin bodies and hollow cheeks, and hunger-induced apathy, where "only the storm seemed real." Garth Williams' charcoal illustration show an image of Pa visiting the Wilder boys in which the man's face is noticeably gaunt and hollow-eyed under his full beard, and in future books Carrie is said to be noticeably thin, frail, and prone to fainting due to her harrowing starvation.
- A blizzard nearly kills some cattle. How? Their breath freezes their heads to the ground, and they come close to suffocating. This phenomenon is addressed again in
*These Happy Golden Years*, when Almanzo, who is driving Laura home from her teaching job for the weekend, has to keep stopping because the breath is freezing in his horses' noses.
- From
*Little Town on the Prairie:* The hideous needle-grass that screws itself through Mary's stocking, followed by Pa's description of cows eating said grass, forcing it to be cut from their lips and tongues.
- Laura wakes up in the middle of the night to Pa yelling and a soft "thud." A mouse had been chewing on Pa's hair while he slept and in a sleep-induced panic, he grabbed it and threw it against the wall. This is framed as a funny anecdote leading to the purchase of a kitten to become a mouser.
- Later the kitten, technically too young to leave its mother, tangles with a mouse. Even though the mouse is about the same size as the kitten and is biting her repeatedly, Laura can't bring herself to intervene because "she's hanging on. It's her fight." The kitten ultimately prevails.
- Laura's time at the Brewsters' in
*These Happy Golden Years.* Laura is forced to board in a claim shanty in the middle of winter with a woman slowly going insane from isolation...and she doesn't like Laura. And she has a knife. It's easily one of the darkest moments in the series, particularly when the woman's openly threatening suicide, if not murder-suicide: "If I can't go home one way, I can another."
- When Almanzo picks Laura up and drives her home for the weekend, he has to remind her to stay awake, lest she
*die* of hypothermia.
- After a cyclone, Pa comes home with a story of two brothers who were traveling home with their mule when the storm hit. One of the boys was picked up by the cyclone, which somehow stripped off every piece of his clothing down to his high laced boots before slamming him to the ground, where he ran home otherwise unharmed. His brother and the mule are found days later with the grim sentence "Every bone in them was broken."
- A couple of moments in
*The First Four Years*: When the horses jump over baby Rose. And when Boast tries to buy Rose in exchange for his best horse.
- Laura's first childbirth is likewise a little out there. From a medical standpoint, the fact that the doctor gives her
*chloroform* (now known to be very toxic) is pretty horrifying, too. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleHouseOnThePrairie |
Log Horizon / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
**As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.**
- The very beginning of this, if you think about it: One day, you're just playing a game, and suddenly, you're pulled in without reason or explanation. You're just there, as your character, doing whatever your character was doing, even if that entails a dangerous dungeon where a single misstep could be death. While players are able to band together to prevent anyone from dying in the opening moments of the apocalypse, imagine how terrifying it was to go from staring at the screen one moment, to having a vicious monster trying to eat your face off in the next.
- Episode 19: Minori shows off the
*Full Control Encounter* she copied off Shiroe and how she can effectively see five seconds into the future because of it. While this is initially awesome, it takes a darker turn when the direwolves show up. *Full Control Encounter* tells her that her brother will *die* because the wolves reduce his HP faster than they can restore it, and without their tank, the rest of them will die, and without them, the town of Chousin will be ravaged. There's this terrible Slow Motion scene where she's desperately trying to find a way out of a tragedy five seconds in coming and comes up with nothing; dead end, game over.
- Novel is darker, she can predict most outcomes for 5 minutes(and choose the best), not 5 seconds, it is 9 seconds before her brother dies, 32 seconds after Serara used Heartbeat healing.
- Episode 25: Shiroe's encounter with Nureha. He was supposed to meet with one of his contacts that was spying for him in the city of Minami, but finds the disguised Nureha. She implies that Shiroe's contact was unavailable to meet him...and given that Nureha is a guild master that runs an entire town and bought the Cathedral, potentially forbidding any Adventurers from reviving if she chooses, the implications are very dark. Darker still are Nureha's intentions. Even in the anime version where sexual tones and fanservice are heavily downplayed from the light novel, Nureha still expresses copious levels of seduction and danger.
note : Second season gives the aversion. The spy was an old friend of both(Kasuhiko), and he appeared to be in one piece and still spying for Shiroe.
- Season 2-Episodes 4 and 5. There's a Serial Killer stalking your city. The Royal Guards do not appear to stop him despite the city being a safe zone. Even when Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, this sort of thing is scary.
- Death not being permanent can enhance the fear effect. Because you still experience all the pain that comes with death or at least some of it (if you're level 90 with massive defense stats, the pain you experience is mostly nullified that a sword slash is like a punch from a kid) it can be seen as prolonged, indefinite torture.
- Soujirou is not someone you want to be in the same room with when he's angry. Case in point, his attitude towards the Serial Killer. The formerly cute kid looks like a psychopath as he plots to take him down. It's a good thing he's a good guy, because he would make a terrifying villain. Think of it, he is modeled after the guy with a same name in
*Rurouni Kenshin*, who IS on the bad side.
- Season 2 Episode 19. The sheer glee in which the Knights of Odyssey go to their deaths is just disturbing(ly stupid).
- A minor example, but near the end of season 2's finale, it's revealed that Krusty still has Misa's severed arm with him, with the implication being that he plans to return it to her. That said, it can be rather unnerving when said arm suddenly begins
*twitching*. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LogHorizon |
Log One / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
**WARNING:** Spoilers are unmarked.
- Going to the rim of the galaxy apparently doesn't end well, no matter which direction you go...
- The speed with which things go wrong as the ship falls into the gravity well. One minute they're dealing with a minor course deflection, interesting, a bit troubling, but there's time...Oh wait, there isn't. They are falling into a dead star- in 93 seconds.
- The crew are awed by the beauty and sheer size of the other ship trapped there with them...then they realize that its escape pods are all ruptured- every single one. It is damaged, gashes torn open in its shell. And whatever killed it is possibly still around, waiting for them...
- The landing party realizes that whatever destroyed the escape pods of the Ghost Ship came from within - something made the alien crew kill themselves en masse. Considering the technology exhibited by the millenia old ship, the idea of a threat serious enough to make them commit suicide... | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LogOne |
Little Nightmares / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
*Little vandal, little beast, the Maw will punish you at the feast* **Unmarked spoilers below!**
- Six encounters a group of kids gathered around a campfire and barely gets acquainted with them when one of them gets eaten by a Leech. A girl explains to Six that their campfire doesn't always keep the Leeches back.
- The comic also introduces the Ferryman, a sagging man in a fedora with a melting face. He also seems to be some sort of devil-like figure, always showing up before children in need and ferrying them off to the Maw. He's also the one responsible for bringing Six to the Maw in the first place.
- In the first chapter of the comic book, one of the children tells his story about how he arrived in the Maw; The North Wind destroyed his hometown and he was forced to evacuate with his sister. When none of the nearby villages would take them in, they both took shelter in a barn while
*still being followed by the wind.* Eventually, the North Wind tries to coax him out...To reveal his sister had been dead for a long, long time, impersonated by the Ferryman, who proceeds to whisk him away to the Maw in his despair.
- As Six opens a music box for the group and begins to play it, the other children are mesmerized, but one of them angrily breaks the box. The other children stare at her in confusion, but she explains that she's hated mirrors ever since she was changed into her current form by a mirror. She was part of a group of children who ventured into a house of mirrors that could make their dreams come true: one kid wishes to be strong and is given a muscular body, another kid wishes he was tall and his body is stretched and the last kid wishes he had a twin and is given a double. Unfortunately, this makes them all easy prey for the monster hiding in the mirrors as seen when it grabs the muscular kid. The girl undos the mirrors' effects by breaking them, but when she looks into her reflection in one of the broken mirrors, she became a hunchbacked deformity. The kids promise they'll come back with help, but they don't return. And at that moment, the Ferryman appears.
- Episode 2 of the Little Nightmares II comic has a toddler living in the woods run from his burrow after having a nightmare, but he accidentally runs into the Hunter's territory. Just as he's about to enter an outhouse where a strange sound is coming from, a TV turns on. It seems to hypnotize him as he smiles blissfully while the Thin Man reaches out for him.
- While this world has no shortage of children in peril, there is something especially disturbing about a child young enough to still be in diapers being forced to survive on their own in a deadly forest. Even if Thin Man didn't grab him, it's doubtful that the toddler would have made it for very long.
- Episode 3 has a girl digging her way out of the hospital room she's in with nothing more than a spoon. How long has she been in there? Look at the tally marks on the wall. However, the worst part is the ending. After she digs her way out, she realizes she's been going in a circle. Then the door to her room opens and she runs out...unaware that the Doctor is crawling on the ceiling right above her.
- This gets even worse if you consider that the Doctor may have been the one giving these spoons to the girl as a way to torment her with the chance of escape.
- Episode 4 features a fat boy hiding from the Bullies. His only weapon? A lollypop, which he uses to smash their heads. Then he hears a noise and hides in one of the lockers...only for the Teacher to find him as she stretches her neck out.
- Throughout the entire comic, the fat boy carries an expression of utter horror with tears of fear streaming down his face. It's probably the most terrified that a child character has ever been depicted in this series, which makes his eventual capture all the more depressing.
- At one point in "The Depths", the Runaway Kid has to winch up a bag that's in the water with a nearby crank. Something, presumably the Granny, will try to hold it down, until eventually it slips free, but that's not what's scary. What's scary is that as it rises above the water, you can see a little human arm dangling out of a rip in the bag, clearly drowned.
- When the Granny actually catches the Runaway Kid, you can see him flailing around, either in pain or in an attempt to escape its grasp. Not only is this a fairly long death scene, but it ends with him resigning to his fate and just giving up. Oh god...
- In the final swimming chase segment of "The Depths", the Granny will twice leap out of the water to try and shake apart the high platform that the Runaway Kid is hiding from, letting you get a good look out of her.
- There's also the way you ultimately deal with the Granny: pushing in a live TV on top of her as she leaps about in the water, electrocuting her to death. Thank goodness for the game's use of Bloodless Carnage!
- The other runaway girl is never seen after you journey further down into the Maw. When you find what appears to be her flashlight, there's a Trail of Blood that leads to the boards with a bloody hand-print. When you squeeze past the boards, you see a large leech.
- The end of the Residence DLC, where The Lady stalks the poor runaway boy through a dark, dark series of rooms filled with mannequins, swishing in and out of view like she's toying with him—and then at the end, she captures him and turns him into a Nome.
- Many of the paintings in the Residence chapter show what appear to be former residents of the Maw, and all of them are as ugly and creepy as in the main game. Heck, the Lady sure isn't a looker either. There's also a painting displayed prominently in a secret room that depicts several anguished, fiery faces that appear to be melting together.
- The ending to the boy's story. After the boy gets turned into a Nome, anyone can put two and two together and then the realization comes crashing down horribly on the player. He then wanders down to the dining area where he stands by a sausage on the floor, where the player knows Six will eventually appear when she gets another hunger pain.
- If you stay past the credits, you see a TV flickering, and then the screen shows the blurry image of the Thin Man. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleNightmares |
Littlest Pet Shop (2012) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Even a softer, more comedic show can provide a few scares. General
Episodes
- Whatever you do, do NOT anger Penny Ling. It is quite unsettling if you do.
- Buttercream is this at times whenever she cools down. The way she calms down though is a bit cringe worthy. The Background Music playing during this doesn't help matters.
- The pets' nightmare about being captured by the Biskits in the second episode of the first season.
- In "What Did You Say?", the girl who kidnaps Vinnie is a little bit unsettling, as well as Vinnie himself in the beginning of the episode, trying to capture and eat a fly that has both a face and apparently a personality, and speaking with a very low and un-Vinnie like voice.
- Mrs. Twombly in "Door-Jammed" during her doorknob frenzy. Both Funny and Amusingly Unnerving....
- Blythe's Dark Reprise of the "F.U.N. Song" in "Missing Blythe" when she is having a nightmare, where fashion students with buttons for eyes menacingly approach and attack her.
- Listen very carefully to the lyrics of the original song. It's painfully obvious the students there are both workaholics and completely obsessed with fashion and
*only* fashion! Even one of the lines in the chorus is "our clothes are pressed and we're way obsessed". It gets to the point where Blythe is getting more and more progressively freaked out at the students' obsession (something she goes over in the dark reprise "everywhere I look all I see is fashion and style but I need other things to make my life worthwhile") to the point that she's *running away from the singing students to get to class*!
- Wiggles the alligator's bullying is pretty scary. Makes it even worse when the pets are trying to get Blythe to help them but she's too depressed to notice.
- Vinnie in "To Paris With Zoe" turns into some kind of giant monster with claws and teeth and screams in Sunil's face when he tries to change the channel. Even creepier is that it wasn't part of a fantasy, it just happened.
- Vinnie's absolute freak out in "Sunil's Sick Day."
- Blythe's nightmares in "The Expo Factor" can be this with a little humor due to the watermelons.
- Though written to be silly and not meant to be taken seriously, the ending to "War of the Weirds" still implies ||if Mrs. Twombly didn't scream at such a high pitch, they
*WOULD HAVE* been invaded.||
- In "Secret Cupet," ||Russell, Sunil and Vinnie forced against their will to fall in love with their female friends, acting really insane and completely alienating them, is somewhat terrifying. Especially when they come back to their senses, the three remember acting like that and were mortified. Even worse, what about Baa Baa Lou who was never cured? (But then again, seeing as Josh was cured between episodes, maybe it wears off once Valentine's day ends)||
- The fact that Goldie ||was inches away from being literally torn to shreds|| is pretty dark for a light fluffy kid's show such as this.
- While the original ||
*Groundhog Day* was a comedy, the scenario itself is rather terrifying. especially seeing as the main character in that movie was stated to be trapped in that loop for 10 years (originally implied to be 10,000 years). Russell temporarily losing his sanity over this was incredibly unsettling, his friends begging him to calm down while Blythe panics and runs off to call a vet makes it even worse. And thank goodness it's a kids show, as most characters who go through this trope are Driven to Suicide (which only made things worse). ||
- Also unsettling is that the above spoilered episode, is never explained. Harold says offhand that he knew another hedgehog that this happened to. So either Harold unknowingly has this power, (which may only affect hedgehogs), or yet again, this is implying the shop being magical. But if so this makes the (sentient?) shop seem outright malicious, even if the whole reason was to ||improve Russell's social skills||.
- "Littlest Pet Shop of Horrors" parodies
*Misery*, a book about an author who, in one scene, has his ankles smashed by his captor so he cannot escape. Luckily, Penny did not go that far, but still.
- Sweetest Sweetsie is pretty creepy at times, especially her loud, artificial screaming and crying.
- Sugar Sprinkles' plotline in "Snipmates", in which we learn that when there are no sprinkles on her head (and when they are not arranged in the right order), she becomes increasingly angry until she hulks out and goes into an Unstoppable Rage that causes her express her emotions of pure, utter hatred (as well as insane anger), and continues to makes herself attack anyone in the vicinity, including her own friends. Sure, it's Played for Laughs, but seeing one of the nicest characters in the series transformed into a rampaging monster is still pretty rough.
- "Race Team: Buttercream" reveals that Sugar Sprinkles's best friend, Buttercream, also has a Split Personality that can be easily, yet rarely triggered (only her alter ego's behavior is less threatening).
- In "Guilt Tripping", during "The Guilty Tango", Blythe and Pepper sing about how they imagine the punishments for ||Whittany, Brittany, and Pepper|| after ||Blythe accidentally caused them to pull the fire alarm|| and ||Pepper accidentally broke Vinnie's lucky rock||. During the first verse, Blythe sings about ||Whittany||'s punishment; being forced to row the barge she is on with oars. Then we see a Gross-Up Close-Up of ||her|| sore, cut-up hands. Apparently, it was so unsettling that in the United Kingdom airings of the episode, it was replaced with another shot of the drummer on the barge.
- In-Universe Example: The pets' reaction to Minka's surreal painting in Episode 21 of Season 4, due to its Uncanny Valley look. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittlestPetShop2012 |
Living Dead Girl / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Elizabeth Scott's
*Living Dead Girl* is one of those wonderful reminders that YA books can and do play with the big girls.
Plenty of Nightmare Fuel and spoilers ahead.
- "Alice" has been kidnapped and held for five years by the pedophile Ray. It chillingly depicts not only Ray's systematic and thorough destruction, emotionally and physically, of his victims, but it also quietly reminds the reader of the completely random nature of such a crime: why you over anyone else? Something that can be seen as very disturbing is the lack of information; several times it's implied that Ray is forcing "Alice" to preform sexual favors for him or even rapes her, but it's never actually stated that he is doing those things. This forces your mind to fill in the blanks as to what exactly Ray is doing to Alice and it's not pretty.
- Another example is the lengths Ray goes to make sure that "Alice" remains "his little girl." She is 15 and is developing into a young woman, something that Ray is not pleased with, seeing as he's a pedophile. He starves her so she remains under 100 pounds, forces her to take medication that stops her menstruation, and forces her to wear clothes that are made for someone half her age. When he decides that "Alice" is now too old, he does the only rational thing: make plans to abduct another little girl and make her into another one of his "little girls."
- Something that is brought to light later in the novel is bone chilling: "Alice" is not the first girl Ray has done this to. There was another "Alice" before the current one who was subjected to Ray's treatment. When she turned 15, Ray killed her and her body was found and returned to her parents for burial. But it doesn't stop there. After returning home from their daughter's funeral, the parents were killed by a "burglar," who, oddly enough, did not steal anything. Given the threats Ray makes against the current "Alice's" family if she were to disobey, it's obvious that Ray was the perpetrator and got away with the crime.
- More Nightmare Fuel from this: imagine that not only has a sadistic pedophile kidnapped your daughter and abused her in the worst ways, but
*he knows where you live*, and the moment she escapes his power you're as good as dead.
- This is taken up to eleven in that it's tempting to believe that Ray is only bluffing about hurting Alice's parents. He's
*really* not.
- The fact that people are actually aware of Alice's existence and do nothing to help her. Of course nobody knows that she's being held against her will, abused, and raped (she and Ray pose as father and daughter), but there's still something very clearly
*off* about their relationship to the outside observer. This should be especially relevant to the neighbors, as Alice is barely ever allowed outside. However, people mind their business and overlook Alice and the myriad of red flags she puts out while Alice herself is far too terrified to ask for help (for reasons stated above). A cop actually *does* take notice, but that's mostly because Alice was hanging around a playground and acting weird. It really makes you think; if, God forbid, **you** were in Alice's position, would there be anyone who would even *notice?*
- Why is Alice even willing to entertain the idea of being "mother" to a "new" Alice (or rather, Annabelle), when she knows how evil that is? "At least it wouldn't be me." Yes, she's
*that* broken. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LivingDeadGirl |
Live-Action TV / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
You're
*his* wife now.
Whether it's specific horror programs, moments of violence or tension in dramatic shows, disturbing Public Service Announcements, or even unintentionally creepy segments on little kids' shows, Live-Action TV contains plenty of things that will give you trouble sleeping. This section contains many of these moments, so read on if you dare...
## Sub-pages:<!—index—><!—/index—>
## Miscellaneous Series
**This section is in alphabetical order by series. Before you add examples here, check the index above and make sure the series doesn't already have its own page.** **Advertisements and PSAs go in the NightmareFuel.Advertising section.**
-
*1941 (2009)*, when the Latvian fascists douse Alyona in gasoline and attempt to burn her alive. She is only saved by the timely intervention of Walter.
-
*The Adventures Of Black Beauty* was a gentle, family-friendly British series in the early 70's, comparable in tone to *Little House on the Prairie*. It was geared toward children, mostly young children. In an episode entitled *Out of the Night*, two of the teenaged characters, trying to get home before full dark, cut through an abandoned Priory, and encounter a figure in a long cloak and hood with the face of a skull. Of course, the episode has a Scooby-Doo ending, but it's a safe bet most young children probably weren't expecting to look into the face of Death while watching a show about a sweet family and their pretty horse.
- The David Attenborough documentary
*Africa* features a sequence of giant carnivorous crickets (with copious close-ups) attacking helpless quelea chicks. The little beasts even *squirt their own blood* at the eyes of the parents.
- The History Channel documentary
*After Apocalypse* is pretty much packed of this. It realistically shows how Earth and life itself would look like after they had suffered from some apocalyptic event like a worldlike virus epidemic, like the Black Death in the Middle Ages, or the one in *I Am Legend* but without the zombies. The documentary is told from the eyes of an American middle-class family who lived a normal life before a deadly virus from China kills of most of the world's population who is trying to survive the new harsh world that comes after the epidemic. Meanwhile, environmental, sociological, psychological and medical experts are given short interviews from time to time during the documentary telling about the situations the family and the rest of the world goes through.
-
*Afterlife*, probably the UK's answer to *Medium*, had some seriously disturbing moments. One of the biggest stand out moments was an episode where a couple were being haunted by a ghost which kept talking to their baby through the baby monitor. The episode ended with the wife putting the baby in the bath, then leaving her baby in the bathroom alone while she got a towel. Just as she was walking back to the bathroom, the door slammed shut, and splashing sounds began to come from inside. The wife hammered and pushed at the door, but to no avail. When it finally opened, she entered to find that her baby had been drowned. Cut to the baby monitor which now has cries emitting from it, accompanied by the ghost whispering, in a comforting sort of way, "Ssh, ssh, I've got you..."
-
*Alien Planet*, a Discovery Channel Speculative Documentary based on Wayne Barlowe's *Expedition*. If you thought his artwork was scary, see the creatures in action.
- Ric Burns' 1992 documentary on the Donner Party, the group of American pioneers who had to resort to cannibalism to survive, which aired as part of PBS'
*The American Experience.*
- The Magog from
*Andromeda*. Dear God, the Magog. Despite looking like men in fursuits, they still manage to top the Borg and the Daleks as a terrifying villain race. Especially with regards to their reproductive methods.
- Discovery Channel has a terrifying series named
*Animal X*, a cryptozoological documentary series detailing mysterious occurrences around animals. Just one episode is just enough to make it difficult to sleep at night afterward. Watch it here and enjoy.
- Series 3 of
*Ashes to Ashes (2008)* has brought us the Body Horror that is PC Where's-the-rest-of-his-face. Crows cawing will never sound the same again.
- PC Where's-the-rest-of-his-face? He's a 20-something year old Gene Hunt who was killed after a week in the police force. In an attempt to stop a robbery on coronation day 1953, he was shot in the head with a shotgun and buried in a shallow grave, where he remained until his body was discovered by police in the present day.
- What about Viv's death scene, when Jim Keates just holds him and watches him die in pain and terror. Terrifying enough before you find out the latter's true identity and purpose! Keats is either Satan or one of his minions come for the souls of the failed coppers.
- From series 1, that clown.
*That bloody clown*. "I'm happy, hope you're happy too..."
-
*Beasts* was a 1976 horror anthology series written for TV by Nigel Kneale. Though most of the stories were fairly silly (an aquarium haunted by the ghost of a dolphin for instance) the acting stilted and the monster effects unconvincing, the second episode *During Barty's Party* has a middle aged English couple besieged in their country house by a horde of super-intelligent rats. The rats are never seen, but the sound of their ever-louder squeaking and scurrying is unnerving. There are two stand-out scenes: the first one, where we see a sports car seemingly abandoned on a country lane in bright sunlight with its radio playing, which ends with the sound of people screaming as something terrible happens to them, and the last one, where the couple helplessly watch through an upstairs window as their neighbours, who have just arrived home, are attacked. Nothing is shown, but the sound of the neighbours' cheery laughter turning to shouts and screams until they are drowned out completely by the noise of the rats is horrifying.
- The Between the Lions episode "Little Big Mouse" had Cleo being kidnapped by hunters, which was pretty intense for a preschool show.
- Many kids were also afraid of Arty Smartypants, who, with his mismatched eyes and odd facial construction, resembled a Picasso painting come to life.
- The Foleys segment in
*The Big Comfy Couch* often gets this reaction because of the black and white background of the sketch and the fact that the characters make weird chicken noises.
- Every year, the British children's show
*Blue Peter* does a charity appeal every year or so. Their 2005 appeal was called the Treasure Trail and the money went to a British children's hotline known as Childline. During the appeal they showed a series of short stories involving kids who called Childline. For a kids' show, some of the scenes in them can be pretty nightmarish for kids. Highlights include a man dropping a wine glass in front of his son and another in which a man pushes a plate across the dinner table hitting his wife. The fact the wife in the second one stats crying after the plate hits her and they divorce a short time later does not help ether.
-
*Boohbah* is this to some, mostly due to the appearance of the Boohbahs themselves. Weird-looking, alien-like creatures that do nothing but strange exercising for pretty much the entire duration of the segments they appear in. This, despite the fact that this is a kids' show.
-
*Buck Rogers in the 25th Century*: Imagine the trauma that someone who was actually asleep for 504 years would go through upon waking up. Assuming Buck's physical and mental state weren't affected by being in suspended animation (or could be restored with 25th century technology) he's in a completely *alien* world. Essentially he has to learn a new language from the ground up, *then* deal with all of his education and training being hopelessly out of date. Even the very basics have changed, such as clothing and personal hygiene. And even if there hadn't been a nuclear war in the series' back story, everyone he had ever known and loved is long dead; their descendants (if any) are so far removed from him as to make the connection academic at best. Finding intact records (much less their grave sites) would be nothing short of a miracle. note : One of the novels does explore this, with Buck visiting the ruins of Salt Lake City to see if the Mormon genealogical records contain any information about surviving relatives and descendants. Unfortunately for Buck, the plot intervenes and he never finds the information he's looking for. Buck is pretty much an infant in a grown man's body once he wakes up, making him vulnerable to whatever faction recovered him first. The pilot movie actually played with this, when the Draconians attach a tracking device to his ship's navigational equipment to learn the way past New Chicago's defense grid. They could just as easily have made him a full-on Manchurian Agent (and he is in fact suspected of *being* a Draconian spy when he first shows up) or worse. The whole premise is an exercise in Nightmare Fuel!
- Some of
*Chewin' the Fat*'s attempts at dark humour arguably went too far:
- One of the "Ballistic Bob" sketches
note : featuring a man who would explode with rage after losing patience performing a tedious and fiddly task had him going mad in the middle of performing surgery... which causes him to trash the operating theatre, before *violently disembowelling the patient, pulling out their organs and lobbing them across the room*. After which the camera just lingers on his Skyward Screaming face. Jeez. That's not funny, that's just disturbing.
- Another sketch had a couple of lottery winners being interviewed at home. They explain that they came across the winning numbers by writing numbers on balls... by which they mean
*actual human testicles*, as they reveal when one of them opens a cupboard to reveal dismembered human body parts. The interviewer understandably gets the hell out of there, as the husband dangles a keyring made from a spare ball in front of the camera.
- In the TV version of
*Childhood's End* when the Overlords announce there will be no more children born on Earth, there is a shot of a pregnant woman - whose stomach *deflates* as she screams in horror.
- The kidnapping scene from the Christian children's show
*Color Me A Rainbow.* The show starts off as normal, with the puppets Froggy, Crow, and Turtle talking with their human caretaker about a Biblical concept (in this case, Jesus being the Door that leads out of sin), and then rather abruptly cuts to a voice saying "Later that afternoon..." and a dark room with a shadowy figure stirring a steaming pot and Crow shivering in a cage. While Crow screams and cries for help, the shadowy figure chants in a deep, echoing voice about eating her, and yells at her to quit her screaming. While Crow recites Bible verses to comfort herself, the figure begins sharpening a knife... and later begins poking at her and talking about eating her. Fortunately someone knocks on the door, leading him away, and Crow is able to escape. You can watch the scene in its entirety here.
-
*COPS*: One segment had a female police officer — alone save for the camera crew a few paces behind her — almost disappearing into the darkness of a very poorly lit group of buildings. A more recent (June 2016) segment had a woman complaining about invisible people moving around in her car and unseen children playing in her backyard (the police concluded she was having hallucinations due to poor nutrition,). No wonder the creator of *Breaking Bad* thought it'd be a good series for a crossover with *The X-Files*!
- On OLN there was a show called
*Creepy Canada* which ran from 2002 to 2006 and profiled three urban legends per episode. A lot of the time, the special effects were as low budget as all hell, but holy epic shit, was it ever terrifying at times. The story of the headless nun tells the story of Sister Marie Inconnue, who got her head lopped off by a madman back in the eighteenth century. The episode then goes on to depict her headless, bloodied ghost popping up when the viewer least expects it and asking unwary people to help her find her head. The appearance of the ghost is pretty terrifying on its own, being the body of a nun wearing a bloody uniform and with a bloody stump where her head should be.Oh and one more thing: they never did find the poor woman's head. Sweet dreams.
-
*Deadliest Warrior*. Yes, this show doesn't seem scary, but some of the descriptions (e.g. the Viet Cong's shit-covered spikes and the Nazi's flamethrower having tar to stick to the victims) are regular Nightmare Fuel...but where it really gets scary is telling how Vlad the Impaler impaled his victims...: "It's a 9-foot pole going through someone's rectum all the way out through their clavicle." And the victims were alive.
- Not on the show proper, but some extra scenes filmed for the show and posted online. For Saddam Hussein vs. Pol Pot, we get to see a demonstration of electric torture and acid bath on pig carcasses. And for Ivan the Terrible vs. Hernan Cortes, we get a demonstration of garroting and drawn and quartering.
- The episode Saddam Hussein vs. Pol Pot is terrifying when you listen to the stories of Sabah Khodada (a former Iraqi general) and Kilong Ung (a Cambodian Genocide survivor), and imagine what it was like for them.
-
*Delete*: Every piece of technology connected with the internet can be hacked and turned against you. Police can be told you're a terrorist and sent after you, missiles hijacked, etc. The only apparent way to stop this is destroying modern technology completely.
-
*Delocated*: Kinda silly, but Sergei, the Russian assassin, sending a tape to Jon which shows his brother's dead body, and then drinking Jon's mom's ashes? Watch the episode, it's genuinely frightening.
- The skinwalkers and the lycanthropes in
*The Dresden Files*. Skinwalkers are a Nightmare Fuel concept in and of themselves with a nice side of Paranoia Fuel, but it's one thing to read about them and another thing to see a graphic portrayal.
- The E! Channel's special
*Doomed To Die: 13 Most Shocking Hollywood Curses* mentioned some particularly disturbing "curses" related to Hollywood. One worth mentioning is the curse of the *Atuk* script. Based on a novel by Mordecai Richler, *Atuk* is the story of a fat Inuit man trying to make it in the big city. The first victim of this cursed script was John Belushi who the creator had in mind to play the title role; he was preparing for the part when he died of a drug-overdose at the age of 33. The second victim was Sam Kinison- who nearly got around to making it but then freaked out and pulled out of doing it, he later died in a fiery car crash. Third victim was John Candy, who was in the process of reading the script when he died of a heart attack, and the last victim was Chris Farley who died of a drug overdose at the age of 33 much like his hero John Belushi- he wanted Phil Hartman to be his co-star, Phil Hartman later got shot by *his own wife*.
- Two other "cursed" Hollywood projects had almost the
*exact* same events happen-a film adaptation of *A Confederacy of Dunces* and a biopic of silent film comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Both projects had John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley all chosen to star as the lead until all three Died During Production. It doesn't help in *A Confederacy of Dunces*'s case, the novel it was based on was published years after its author committed suicide... or that when a Will Ferrell-helmed adaptation seemed to be getting off the ground, the film's setting —New Orleans— was trashed by Hurricane Katrina...
- And one of the items on the list was the curse of musicians dying at the age of 27. (Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, etc.) The segment ends with one of the interviewees mentioning how Amy Winehouse is only a couple of years away from turning 27, and how she should turn her behavior around to avoid the curse. Two years after the special aired, Amy Winehouse did indeed fall victim to the curse, dying at the age of 27.
-
*FlashForward (2009)*. Every person on the planet loses consciousness at the same time. Just thinking about all the car accidents, let alone all the other accidents... millions of people dead, for sure.
- Passing out and drowning in a urinal thanks to the flashes.
- The A&E docuseries
*Gangland*, which now airs in reruns on Spike TV, profiled just about every notable gang operating in the United States. It's rather informative, but turns rather unpleasant when it shows photographic evidence of the gangs' extreme violence. The way it does that is by showing actual autopsy and crime scene photos where the only thing that gets blurred is the victims' faces (or most of them — enough to where they remain anonymous). The crime scenes themselves can be rather gruesome and difficult viewing if one is sensitive to the sight of blood, as there's always copious amounts of blood they show (which also proves that what you're looking at is where someone *died*, because no one could survive that much blood loss). One episode which dealt with the outlaw motorcycle gang the Bandidos showed the handiwork of ex-Bandido Richard Merla, who stabbed a boxer to death. The boxer's autopsy photos are shown and you can see just how deep and massive those gashes are. Those photos are rather difficult to forget.
-
*Ghost Writer* had some pretty heavy situations, but by far the worst was the purple puppet named Gooey Gus. The thing would appear in random places for no reason, and the story one of the characters was writing for a contest sponsored by the toy's creators turned into a series of extended nightmare sequences, including one where his sister is suffocating under a coating of gum (which the toy itself could produce). It didn't help that the puppet looked like Ivan Ooze in biker gear.
-
*Gladiators* (and its various incarnations) wasn't a frightening show, as such
except the bits where people got hurt. And while people getting hurt on a show like that is naturally expected, we're not talking sprained muscles or twisted ankles: Panther falling off the Tilt and landing on her head, Blade reportedly *broke her back* on Hang Tough, Jet landing badly on Pyramid and trapping nerves in her neck
the list goes on.
- There was an ad shown on
*The Gruen Transfer* for a French Pay TV crime channel, which showed a puppet alligator walking through a forest, ripping to shreds every creature he encountered and leaving guts and eyes behind him (The point was that that's how they would make a kid's show, should they ever want to.) Many were Squicked, many more amused.
-
*Harper's Island*: The initial plot premise is bad enough, with a serial killer's supposed copycat showing up seven years after the initial killings. Then you get to the finale only to find out it's all because the main character's best friend, Henry, is trying to hold her to a promise she made when they were kids that they'd live on the island by themselves, and trying to do it by killing everyone else on the island off, one by one.
- Oh, and the original serial killer that was supposedly shot and killed by the sheriff? Still alive.
- Animal Planet's show
*The Haunted* can get downright creepy at times. One of the creepier episodes involved a family of four moving into an old home that was a couple centuries old. When they moved in, there was a note welcoming the family into the home. Included in the note was something along the lines of "if you hear strange noises, that is just the essences of those who passed away welcoming you." These "essences" turned out to be a malignant entity, possibly a demon, that named itself after the deceased sister of the home's original owner. Once paranormal experts were called in, cue an entire twenty minutes of pure Oh, Crap! footage: growling, turning lights on and off, creating a suffocating atmosphere that nearly caused several people to pass out, and finally possessing one of the paranormal experts and driving him to tears before finally departing.
- Animal Planet has another show called
*Lost Tapes*, which is about people being attacked by cryptids. All of them manage to be scary, but the episodes about vampires, the Jersy Devil and Wendigo really take the cake.
-
*Infested*. Imagine finally getting the house you always wanted at first the house appears clean, organized and it seems like the perfect house but soon you discover that your house is infested with tons of pests that not just harm the house but also you and your family! What's scary is that sometimes the pesticides don't work which is terrifying when you think about it.
-
*Hoarders*. Those who are a little messy can be disturbed at how easily it can get to Collyer brothers-level clutter. How it happens: Say you have a favorite toy, one that you can't throw out but its value is purely sentimental, or you grew up in a deprived/poor environment and you had to save clothes and other objects to extend their use. Now, imagine if that sentiment extended to *everything in your house, including food*; add that obsessive-compulsive feeling that if you ever *do* throw something out something bad will happen and you're stuck in a firetrap of your own making. *Hoarders* also uses a lot of Soundtrack Dissonance, Heartbeat Soundtrack, and white-on-black typewriter font to give everything that Room Full of Crazy effect.
- There was a woman on the show whose daughter started talking about how, among other incredibly disturbing things, one day she took the top off the butter dish to find a dead, dehydrated squirrel where the butter should be.
- In the Mini Series "In a Child's Name" (Based on a True Story), a man murders his wife. The suspicious cops spray his apparently pristine bedroom with luminol. When the lights are turned out, we see that
*every single area of the room is covered with blood*. Aside from wondering what horrible things he did to her, what kind of a psycho is able to clean that up to the extent that one would never guess what happened there? The scare chords that play throughout *really* don't help.
- In the HBO movie
*If These Walls Could Talk*, Demi Moore's attempts to get an abortion in the pre-Roe vs. Wade 1950's. Two Nightmare Fuel moments were when she tries to induce an abortion using a knitting needle, and the ending after she has gotten an illegal abortion. She is on the phone trying to call an ambulance while she slowly loses consciousness and collapses into a pool of blood.
-
*In Search of...* was a documentary series that had a combination of a spooky music score and Leonard Nimoy's narration of supposedly "real" paranormal ideas guaranteed to induce nightmares.
- National Geographic's
*Inside North Korea.* Everything from the poor living conditions to the sheer magnitude of brainwashing and fear (the patients had no choice but to thank *Kim Jong-Il, NOT the doctors,* for the operation) will make your blood run cold.
- The Discovery Channel used to have a show called
*I Shouldn't Be Alive*, which of course was Exactly What It Says on the Tin. People recounted real-life instances of being marooned in the wild and nearly dying, with actors reenacting the horror. Nearly being eaten alive (whether by crocodiles, sharks, hyenas, or *driver ants*), extreme sunburn, hypothermia, frostbite, dehydration, you name the Body Horror, this show had it. Making it worse were the Squicky x-ray views of how the above conditions were crippling the body from the inside and nearly killing the protagonists *slowly*.
- The most horrific episode featured some friends stuck in a dinghy after their yacht sank in a storm. One of them got a huge gash on her leg, and the dinghy partially filled with water. Pus and blood from her wounds polluted the water, as well as the group's
*waste* (they were being followed by sharks), so they all started becoming painfully infected, covered with bloody sores. They had no water, and eventually two of them started drinking seawater, which can turn you crazy. Sure enough, they soon started gibbering and howling like lunatics (with a warped Through the Eyes of Madness depiction), and eventually just *walked off* into the shark-infested water (one said he "just wanted to make a run to the 7-11"). Then the really injured one finally succumbed (one of the survivors said the night before, she started speaking in tongues), leaving just two left out of five. By the time they were finally rescued, the survivors were *covered* in horrible bleeding sores and scabs. They had drifted over a 100 miles out to sea, but for some reason had been reported arriving safe into port before the storm, so the Coast Guard was *never alerted*.
-
*Jam*. A healthy dose of wrong along with much Black Comedy.
- Noseybonk from the BBC kids' tv show
*Jigsaw*. There's been no official word on whether Jigsaw from the *Saw* franchise is based on Noseybonk, but they have more than a passing resemblance. Stuart Ashen plays on this creepiness in his own Noseybonk videos.
- The History Channel documentary "Last Days on Earth", detailing the eight most likely ways for civilization as we know it to be completely destroyed,
*in increasing order of likeliness.*
- The
*Look Around You* pilot has "The Helvetica Scenario," caused when the structure of a calcium molecule collapses and causes a man's face to vanish, with the faceless man banging on a window apparently begging for help from a researcher who's passively taking notes, all while a horrific screeching sound plays.
- Once upon a time in The '80s, there was this Chilean Soap Opera named "Los Titeres" (
*The puppets*). It had a freaking creepy opening sequence, which terrified *thousands* of then-kids and is *still* very disturbing for Chileans in their thirties.
- Decades later, Chile has the "night telenovelas" which are regularly aired around 10/11 PM to have the plot go either Darker and Edgier or Hotter and Sexier without Moral Guardians whining on them. And sometimes, these "soaps" are
**fucking scary**. Some of the scariest moments are here:
-
*Alguien Te Mira*: Each of the Villain Protagonist's *very* gruesome murders. Specially goes to him beheading a guy with an electric saw and *cutting the local Action Girl's heart off her body*. His Karmic Death isn't much better, since he has flashbacks to the time when his mother raped him and then gets set on fire..
-
*Donde Esta Elisa*: Elisa, a 15-year-old Ordinary Highschool Student from a rich family, is kidnapped by her own uncle, after he sexually abused her for quite a while. And when the poor girl is found and rescued, *she's shot and dies.* And then there's all that said uncle's wife, Consuelo, does.
-
*El Laberinto De Alicia*: Considering that it's about finding out who molested the lead female's daughter and several other kids, it already has lots of moments. The pedophiliac Big Bad's Karmic Death... Being tied up and castrated with a scalpel by his younger sister, also the Mama Bear of one of his victims, and left to bleed to death. We don't *exactly* see how she does it, but we *do* see the guy's face, and then he's found with blood all over his crotch...
- The Discovery Channel mini-series
*Miracle Planet* features a detailed CGI "simulation" of a massive 300 mile wide asteroid impacting the present-day Earth, which directly results in **the entire planet's surface** being covered in "Rock Vapor" (which, in layman's terms, is essentially **a literal cloud of magma**) as hot as the sun itself! Which, in turn, causes the total evaporation of all water on the planet's surface, the death of all plant and animal life-forms, every man-made monument ever built being burned to ashes, and the planet's surface being reduced to a lifeless wasteland, the only possible survivors being some strains of bacteria (emphasis on **possible**). It is actually believed that such an event occurred at least *six* times during the early Precambrian era, which would ultimately have a major impact on the planet's internal composition.
- A show originally from the 80's called
*Monsters*. One episode has a Stretch Armstrong finger that comes out of the drain and at the very end after the guy cuts off the finger, a four-fingered stretchy hand comes out of the toilet. At first it doesn't seem like much, but then when you start thinking about what that stretchy arm is attached to...
- The original animated opening sequence to PBS'
*Mystery!* by Edward Gorey.
-
*Mystery Diagnosis*: Imagine having one of the bizarre diseases that show up on *House*, only you've been suffering from it for *decades*.
- The stinger NBC News uses to open its special reports. Not just the deep sounding "NBC" jingle played on piano, but the tense string and brass music that follows is enough to make anybody think "something bad has just happened".
-
*Night Visions*, a horror anthology with two different stories each episode. Two chances to be scared. The one thing that terrified me the most was the one about a radio DJ who, for Halloween, lets listeners call in to tell a scary story on the air. The first caller's story is basically Gorn, so the DJ calls him "disgusting" and shuts him off. As the night goes on, he starts getting more calls, this time from a young woman who claims several things: people are in her house, there's blood in the carpet and she doesn't know how it got there, her roommate is missing...and then the next call has the woman screaming that she found her roommate's body in the closet. Shaken, the DJ disconnects her and plays some music, but the electricity starts acting up. The door bursts open later, revealing a large man with wide-open eyes, screaming in a woman's voice " *YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO MY STORYYY!"* In the end we see a couple in their car, listening to the show, as the DJ tells a scary story of his own, about a killer. The DJ, however, has to sign off because it's getting late. The couple sighs that they wish they could hear the ending... And it is revealed the intruder has imitated the DJ's voice, tied up the real DJ, and is going to kill him. Eventually. Even after that story is over, the host wraps up by staring at the audience and saying "For all you pains-in-the-asses out there, remember—you can only irritate so many people before you piss off the *wrong one....*"
- Another episode stars Luke Perry. He plays a guy who cures people of mental instability by absorbing their afflictions into himself. Or something, the show was vague on that. His friend warns him that he's going to get hurt, but he thinks it's worth the sacrifice. Then he deals with a small boy who keeps staring at nothing and going "Now he's coming up the walk, now he's coming in the door, now he's coming up the stairs, now he's coming up the walk..." etc. Perry's character absorbs the boy's hurts, and the boy runs to his mother. Perry starts taking anti-psychotic meds when the boy goes "Now he's coming up the walk!" And...there's actually someone, unseen, coming up the walk. "Now he's coming in the door!" Someone comes in the front door. "Now he's coming up the stairs!" A heavy tread is heard on the steps. Cut back to the room, where the boy is holding his mother, and both are watching Perry staring at nothing, muttering "Now he's coming up the walk, now he's coming in the door..."
- "Switch" starring Natasha Wagner as a 22 year old woman named Sydney with multiple personalities from repressed childhood trauma. Her psychiatrist, played by Pam Grier, would guide her through tasks to complete within her own mind, that would free her of what lay within. As one personality by one became reintegrated into Sydney's psyche, she'd get ever closer to finding the root of her mental illness. Her final personality was that of a psychopathic teenage girl who reminded Sydney of everything that happened in the past. That event? She shot her mother dead at ten years old, taking an extreme amount of pleasure in the memory, and pinned the crime on her father. The carnations coming down from a showerhead above the two of them turn into a downpour of blood. Said teenage girl admits she was the original personality all along, and created Sydney instead of the other way around. Cue shocked face and screaming.
- An episode of
*NUMB3RS* featuring a bombing attack at a car dealership. It wasn't a bad episode (and it even had a cameo appearance by none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy!) but also had an unpleasant close up of the burned remains of a bombing victim.
- A later episode featured a serial killer who was copying the murder of Jesus' apostles, and who horrifically tortured his victims before killing them. In the most extreme case, the victim was kept alive (and in horrible pain) for
*three weeks* to imitate a story where an apostle "miraculously survived".
- The torture scene in "Trust Metric" is a Psychological Horror version of this trope. Sure, we don't see major physical damage inflicted, but the episode's antagonist (played by Val Kilmer) tortures a man
* : ||and not just any man, a beloved character|| without ever showing a shred of emotion, asking questions and describing what he intends to do to ||Colby|| in a tone so indifferent he could be talking about the weather. He puts the "Cold-Blooded" in Cold-Blooded Torture, and it's incredibly effective.
- The Australian miniseries version of
*On the Beach* had a particularly grim ending. Not only does the entire population of Earth die, but the final moments are dedicated to scenes showing how each of the main characters are killing themselves, including a family of a couple and kids who proceed to inject themselves with cyanide syringes before all falling into eternal sleep on their bed. There's no gore involved at all, but emotionally it's just devastating.
- The horror in
*Poltergeist: The Legacy* has an unfortunate tendancy to end up in Narm territory. But there is one episode featuring a cursed Cabbage Patch-like doll turning its head and telling a little girl not to talk in a demonic voice that's pretty freaky stuff.
- The Supernatural Soap Opera Spin-Off of
*General Hospital*, *Port Charles*, started out harmless enough. Then along came the *Tainted Love* story arc that introduced Caleb, a malevolent vampire who turned Jack into a creature of the night. Jack's struggle to protect his girlfriend Livvie from both Caleb's relentless pursuit and acts of seduction and brainwashing, as well as protect her and everyone else he loved from himself and his new unnatural and dangerous desires, tortured him to the soul.
- At the same time, Ian and Eve faced parental concerns as soon-to-be parents who learned that Caleb was targeting their unborn son to sire and raise alongside his newly sired bride, and that there was virtually nothing they could do to protect their child from this incredibly powerful evil being.
- The
*Pretend Time* episode "I Just Got Voodoo'd" has a man getting cursed with voodoo and *crying spiders*. It's supposed to be funny, yes, but this will be jarring to the arachnophobic audience.
- The Rovers from
*The Prisoner (1967)*. Imagine, if you will, a large, white, bouncing balloon, that constantly emits a low, quavering whistle, and which roars mouthlessly as it attacks, lunging at its target and pressing against his face. Imagine seeing the impression of said face from inside the Rover. *Now* imagine seeing this *at night*. As a *child*.
- Add in the fact that the remains of anyone who is "captured" by Rover are never seen again...
- In the first episode, "Arrival", Number 6 is captured by Rover but survives. Presumably most escaping prisoners are captured alive as well. The only character ever actually killed by Rover was Number Six's duplicate in "The Schizoid Man".
- Additionally, a recurring theme in the Prisoner is that there are no constant characters at all (except for No. Six, the protagonist, and No. Two's midget butler, for some reason), so you rarely saw characters for more than one episode.
- This episode of
*Punky Brewster* called "Perils of Punky". A Halloween Episode with Body Horror was completely out of left field for a kids' show.
- Reading Rainbow would occasionally feature books dealing with topics that scared kids, like a house fire (
*A Chair for my Mother*) or death ( *Everett Anderson's Goodbye*).
-
*Recorded Live*: a thing by S. S. Wilson was used as filler material on HBO in the late 70s and early 80s. In it, a man goes to a job interview at a film lab and finds something... horrifying... S. S. Wilson would later bring us the *Tremors* films.
- The season two episode of
*Rome* which featured two extensive torture scenes gross beyond words. The worst part was the first victim's pleading, and his young age. There is also a season one episode where a man is tortured by being flayed alive, though it mostly happens off-screen and only his screams of agony can be heard.
- One episode of
*Scariest Places On Earth* featured a videotape found in the catacombs of Paris, purportedly filmed by an amateur explorer who got lost; the tape ends with him running in a panic and dropping his camera, which keeps rolling after he leaves the shot until it runs out of tape. A filmmaker takes the crew down to find out where the man went, venturing through six miles (out of about 400) of dank, dark, wet tunnels. They emphasize the true danger of what they're doing by, at one point, turning off their lights and asking you to imagine if it were their batteries dying. At a point where they try to get out, the manhole is stuck shut and they find themselves having to backtrack through the tunnels again...but that's when they come across some of the caves seen in the videotape, as well as specific bone fragments and formations that were filmed. Of course there was no way they could find the man, but after twelve hours in one of the most frightening places in existence, they were just happy to be alive when they finally got out. This episode may be a potential inspiration for the film *As Above, So Below*.
-
*SeaQuest DSV*: Episode "Knight of Shadows". When Bridger and the command crew are watching a film of the passengers and crew of a long-sunken ship they just found at the bottom of the ocean. He stops the projector because of a sense of foreboding and after the meeting ends wnen everybody leaves the room, the image from the frozen, single frame TURNS AND LOOKS AT HIM - GLARING! The ghost inhabited the image on the wall and was threatening him.
- That Latin American priest wasn't the only one terrifed when Puddy on
*Seinfeld* painted his face to "support the team" the New Jersey Devils and did this. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiveActionTV |
Leviathan: The Tempest / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
A game about playing lovecraftian Eldritch Abominations in the New World of Darkness?
*Of course* there will be some nightmarish things involved:
- Much like Beasts, a Leviathan is as much of a nightmare for people around him as he is for himself:
- To regular mortals, they are people with insanely destructive abilities, who can cause cataclysms around them, spawn other monsters directly from their flesh, and turn into a gigantic monstrous form that look like a cross between a Kaiju, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and something out of Lovecraft. Worse, they can Mind Rape people into submission in an entire area around them, turning some of them into their personal Religion of Evil which they can then use as their personal minions, committing ritualistic sacrifices to reinforce them and accomplishing any task in their name.
- But for Leviathans themselves? The Mind Rape thing, called the Wake, isn't controlled. They basically inflict it on people around them whether they want it or not, meaning it's practically impossible for them to have a normal life. No matter what they do, people around them will instinctively fear them, and see their Integrity gradually decay; a Leviathan who sticks in a town for too long can cause the entire population to go insane or abandon their homes without doing anything. Some of them get so desperate they willingly isolate themselves in order to protect those they love, only to Go Mad from the Isolation.
- Oh, and here is another funny thing: all the other Supernatural creatures in the New World of Darkness? While they cannot be turned into cultists, the Wake
*still* affects them if their supernatural trait is not high enough to protect them. Vampires unlucky enough to live in a town inhabited by a Leviathan with high Sheol will see their Humanity decay even faster than usual, Princesses will be even more likely to dethrone, Mages will tend to become power mad. A Leviathan can quickly cause things to go to hell if he sticks for too long in an area populated by a lot of Supernaturals.
- Then there are the aforementioned cultists, or Beloved as Leviathans call them: people who the Wake causes to become obsessed with the Leviathan, worshipping him, practicing occult rituals to summon him or stalking and kidnapping him. If left unchecked, they eventually destroy themselves through their obsession. The main reason Leviathans form cults with their Beloved is so they can keep
*some form* of control over them and limit the damages they will cause (or the attention they will bring) as much as possible. Not that it prevents unscrupulous Leviathans from using them as an Ancient Conspiracy to manipulate society from behind and track its enemies down...
- And perhaps even more terrifying are the Atolls, otherwise ordinary humans with tremendous power over Leviathans. Atolls are completely immune to a Leviathan's Wake and any psychic abilities they may possess, and can safely touch a Leviathan regardless of the spines, stingers, and poisons it may possess. Their presence calms a Leviathan's divine and bestial natures, and the respite this brings is so relaxing that it's literally addictive. Beyond that, words of praise from an Atoll can
*permanently* increase a Leviathan's Tranquility
and words of *criticism* can permanently *decrease* Tranquility. This isn't something an Atoll consciously triggers either, if an Atoll starts screaming about how the Leviathan kidnapped her and killed her family, then the Leviathan loses Tranquility. On top of that, if a Leviathan or its Beloved harms an Atoll, the Leviathan loses Tranquility... and if the Atoll is *killed*, the Leviathan could potentially lose *multiple* Tranquility boxes in one fell swoop.
- And on the flip side, being an Atoll isn't much better. At best, you're The Kid with the Leash to a horribly traumatized Eldritch Abomination, having to try and provide some measure of guidance to their charge while walking on eggshells lest you grow a shade too harsh in your criticism and tear your charge's mind to shreds. At worst, you've acquired an inhuman stalker who is literally addicted to you, will do anything to keep you near it, and whose resources to that end include an entire cult of devoted followers and all manner of horrifying supernatural powers.
- Then there are the Leviathans' hybrid children, who always end up either as human-looking creatures with a serious case of Body Horror or flat-out monsters. The "lucky" ones keep their sentience and sanity, and might become servants and allies to their parents, or just live their life. The other end up mindless monsters who run in the nature as dangerous predators. And sometimes, the Leviathans just
*eat* them.
- The Marduk Society, while looking like the most idealistic, reasonable organization in the setting at first, have one hell of a Dark Secret. Despite their name, they weren't founded by Marduk: they were founded by his Disciples, the Sky Wizards, who murdered him because he wanted to act as a Hope Bringer, which, since their powers came from Humanity's despair, would have weakened them, and unlike him they weren't willing to give up their powers. Since then, they have been using the Society to spread despair around the world just so they could maintain their powers. Oh, and the reason they were still hunting Leviathans? Because they kept themselves immortal by
*feeding on their flesh*. No wonder this led to a civil war when the idealistic members of the society found out about all of this.
- Lets not forget about the Ahabs. These folks are people who could have easily become just another Beloved, but were twisted by their respective Leviathans self-hatred/loathing and guilt into obsessively hating them instead. Theyre absolutely bonkers, completely dedicated to killing the Leviathan who created them, able to subconsciously wield supernatural abilities drawn from said Leviathan, are able to unerringly track their target(s) down from across the globe, and are one of the only people capable of reliably inflicting damage to a Leviathan, outside of those wielding lightning. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LeviathanTheTempest |
Live A Live / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
**DIE, CHILD, DIE_** *Live A Live*, on the surface, appears to be a Cliché Storm of a Genre Roulette, covering slapstick, martial arts drama and fantasy, among others. Unfortunately, it's all a façade that can and will get ugly *very quickly*, throwing all expectations off the rails to horrific results.
- While mostly humorous, the chapter gets a HUGE Mood Whiplash during the climax with the arrival of Odo, last of the dinosaurs and a massive T. rex, who is worshiped as a god by the antagonist tribe, which doesn't earn them any favors as their chief is devoured by the beast just before the final battle. You don't even see it happen, the chief panics, runs off-screen, then there's a massive roar, and
*something* eats him alive before spitting his headpiece back to the characters... before a gigantic shadow steps towards them. And this is just the first boss of the game canonically!
- If you do the chapters chronologically, this will also be the first time you hear Odio's theme. Hearing that sinister Ominous Pipe Organ after the rest of the chapter had bouncy, carefree
*Flintstones*-esque music just sounds...wrong, and makes it clear early on in the game that Odo may be something more than a mere mindless beast.
- Doubling as a Tear Jerker, the Shifu is lured away from his home to deal with Sun Tzu Wang... and comes home to find his house wrecked and two of his students
*brutally murdered*, with the lone survivor seriously injured. The way this scene plays out also depends on who survives; if Lei was chosen, you find her beaten just outside the house, which tells you right away something is off, but the entire situation doesn't hit you all at once. If Yun was picked, turns out he only survived because despite being the strongest student, he noticed how outmatched they were, got scared and hid himself, Forced to Watch the others get slaughtered praying he wouldn't become a victim too. In Hong's version, he's knocked out still inside the house just like the others, but the player *will* find Hong last since he's the only one in the back, so even someone replaying the chapter for Hong could be forgiven for thinking they screwed up and he was dead too.
- While the Aeon Genesis fan translation has Clockwork Gennai talk about his latest creation and he just needs to decorate it, the official remake makes it clear that he intends to replace the Prisoner's insides with it.
- That weird person who runs away from Oboromaru emitting some kind of horrible roar.
- Lord Iwama, the creepy giant fish living in the moat that can be fought as an optional boss.
- Ode Iou, the self-proclaimed Emperor of Darkness, and his horrific One-Winged Angel form, which resembles a monstrous humanoid toad with one arm turned into a snake. The English voiceover also has Ode screaming in agony as he transforms.
- In the remake, the ending of the chapter
*changes* depending on how many people you killed (possibly a nod to *Undertale*, which was heavily inspired by this chapter). If you go full pacifist or kill as little as possible, the ending plays out like the original, with the sky clearing and the sun rising over a new dawn. If however you went full genocide (100 kills) the sky suddenly **darkens** and a strong storm rises with lightning striking through the clouds. The game not so subtly tells you that all those deaths are on Oboromaru's conscience, and killing all those people will have **dark** consequences for the future of Japan.
- O. Dio, a violent madman and leader of the outlaw gang called the Crazy Bunch. He's the only survivor of the 7th Cavalry, who fell in battle to natives defending their home, and has been driven insane by the losses. He's also strong enough that he can lug around a hand-powered gatling gun with his bare hands. It turns out the 7th Cavalry survivor was a horse, and the townsfolk conjecture that the soldiers' dying rage clung to this horse until it took on O. Dio's shape.
- Odie O'Bright, the Big Bad of Masaru's chapter, is easily the most unsettling and terrifying of Odio's incarnations. While showing it as fantastical as the rest of the game, Odie personifies a situation that could indeed happen in real life; a Serial Killer targeting and successfully slaughtering a specific group of people. There's seemingly no apparent goal, but it's implied that he wants Masaru to become no different from him just to stop him in his tracks.
- In the unofficial fanslation script, he even gloats to Masaru that he killed them in various brutal ways. Special mention goes to the one how he
*twisted Tula's joints in ways nature never intended*.
- Even Odie's introduction is creepy. After defeating all six opponents, you are brought back into the character select screen, but instead of the upbeat music, you hear the Lord of Dark's signature organ theme blaring in the background. All while the character portraits turn to grey and black one by one before completely disappearing from the screen. Then, Odie's portrait appears as the sole final opponent of the chapter with a sick and twisted grin.
- The remake adds dread to it as red streaks slash across the challengers' portraits, and Odie's portrait appearance is accompanied with ominous droning, as though an actual demon is approaching to challenge you.
- Welcome to
*the* Survival Horror chapter — unlike the other chapters, this one doesn't even try to hide what it is doing. It doesn't take long before shit really hits the fan, and once the Behemoth gets loose everything just goes to hell. The tense music doesn't help.
- There's something unsettling about Rachel's Sanity Slippage after Kirk's death, especially with the remake's voice acting. The chilling way she talks with Kirk's lifeless body pretty much spells her start of insanity, which culminates in her trying to escape the airlock just to be with Kirk again (which is actually OD-10's trickery). Worse, while it's understandable that she opens both hatches at the same time (as other crew members won't let her out otherwise), the fact that she's willing to exit without even trying to wear the space suit shows how far she has gone. Love Makes You Crazy indeed.
- How about that message you can find on her computer?
*Tell me what to do Kirk I know you're in there I know this isn't happening it's not real it's not I did what you wanted why won't you speak to me Kirk please Kirk Kirk Kirk*
- The Switch remake seriously beefed up the Behemoth's presence, now possessing a truly imposing set of sprites that give a clearer picture just how screwed Cube would be to be caught alone with it. Just hearing its footfalls approaching is enough to make you panic and dive into the nearest room, and its screech sends chills down the spine.
- The moment the Behemoth first appears after being escaped is enough to sends chills down your spine. First, you hear rumbling noises and screeching outside the cage and you go look for the source. While there's nothing unusual there aside from destroyed containers, the Behemoth suddenly slides out of nowhere like the creature from
*Mulholland Dr.*.
- The Behemoth has a few fixed encounters right after you leave certain rooms that can catch you off-guard, but in the original game, it moves slowly enough for you to react to and allows you to walk around the room carefully to avoid it. In the remake however, seeing the Behemoth
*running right into you* at a faster speed with the aforementioned noises is enough to give you jumpscares, especially if you haven't played the original. You will probably want to run away from it as far as you can before returning to the destination.
- In the original version, the entire screen goes haywire as Cube tries to access OD-10 through the Captain Square console, complete with threats from the mother computer herself.
- Right before the boss fight, the Captain Square screen glitches, then OD-10 send chilling words through the dark screen. It's even scarier in the remake, as the words are typed slowly to emphasize the dread.
**Original: KILL YOU...**
- The battle begins inside of the smashed-up
*Captain Square* game, and one of the first shots is a sudden reveal of OD-10's appearance, which looks like a digital *Predator* skull *staring right at you*. If Cube uses HP Lookup against it, OD-10 suddenly grows *flesh* and turns into a scaly abomination.
- In the Switch remake, OD-10 takes over the loading screen tutorials near the end of the chapter.
*It would be in your best interests to stop. This ship is my domain, and I its master.*
- It isn't just the loading screen tips. Shortly after reaching the computer room entrance for the first time (examining the door's scanner will give you the line mentioned above), the "next destination" marker on the radar leads you into a room with leaking acid, and then down into the hold where the Behemoth ambushes you. Both trips serve no practical purpose story-wise, but videogame logic dictates you have to go to both to continue. OD-10 is likely hacking your objective display to lure you into getting yourself killed.
- The chapter starts off as a cheery textbook medieval RPG setting, but things start to darken when Hasshe succumbs to his illness and vomits a hefty amount of blood before dying. Then the colourful setting gets thrown out the following night when
*Streibough* suddenly appears next to Oersted after he supposedly died earlier, and following him to the throne room has Oersted suddenly greeted by the Lord of Dark. One strike later, and the illusion melts away to reveal the King of Lucrece dead, then things go to hell shortly after.
- That hellish rumbling noise that plays whenever the Lord of Dark is onscreen.
- The room before the Lord of Dark. It's filled with 7 peculiar statues, then you take a closer look and realize that
*all of them* are the final bosses the previous 7 protagonists had fought, hinting that all this time they've been a part of something much greater...
- The ending. The princess Oersted sought to save is dead. Streibough, the man he thought was his best friend, is dead. The King is dead by his own hand, no less. Then the Silent Protagonist turns to the camera and begins to
*speak*. And when he finishes, lightning strikes, the eyes of the Lord of Dark's statue begin to glow, Odio's Leitmotif begins to play, and to say everything goes to shit once he shouts the forbidden "O" word would be a understatement. The Fan Translation makes it creepier by having Oersted's font slowly become more twisted after he first mentions Demons. **MASSIVE**
"Naught remains. Alone. Utterly alone. Cast out. Unloved. Outside the grace of gods. The Archon's Roost, they call this shrine of death. Yet nowhere do I spy our Lord of Dark. His throne sits empty, wanting for an heir... Did I not do all that was asked?! Did I not serve and seek my fair and just reward?! And for my deeds, they
*damn* me. Name me *demon*. And who am I to deny it? Demon, then! Renouncing former ties and titles! And in their place, I claim... The Lord of Dark. " **Odio!**
- The rumbling noise that plays whenever the Lord of Dark appears? Well, some emulators can't emulate the sound right, resulting in a horrible static sound. More than one person viewing the cutscene on Youtube has said that said static that begins to play after Alethea dies could be interpreted as Oersted
*screaming.*
- The Dominion of Hate is what remains of Lucrece, the kingdom the Middle Ages chapter took place in. It is now eerily quiet. What happened is hinted in a number of places, and then all but outright
*said* in Akira's secret dungeon: Everyone's *dead*. They either died during the events of Oersted's chapter, or were killed by Oersted as Odio. Even the little kid who still believed in Oersted. It's also all but stated that some of the people in Lucrece died pretty violently. If you try to read the signposts to know where to go? They're unreadable, because they're caked with *blood.*
- The remake takes it a step further. Opening up the map shows these locations, but all except Odio's lair, the Archon's Roost, have had their names changed. "The Last Hero's Grave", "Condemned Village", "Silent Wood", and "Seat of the Betrayers". Sends quite the foreboding message...
- In addition, have you noticed the loading screen tutorials? That's right. DEAD. SILENCE. It's actually quite unsettling when you're in an unfamiliar land with very few information on what's happening, or has happened, and not even the GAME ITSELF is able to tell you anything. One would not be blamed for supposing that Odio truly is in control here...
- "Saint Alethea", Purity of Odio's ultimate attack. The spell displays an angelic-looking Alethea hovering over the targets, before she quickly
*melts* into a horrifying hag with a mouth of fangs while letting out a horrible death wail (a sound so complex that, like Lavos' roar in *Chrono Trigger*, most emulators have trouble fully replicating it). The remake makes it even *more* terrifying, as the visage screams with Alethea's voice as the attack plays out, with a dark black hole opening up and a strong sonic boom covering the area of effect. Context only makes the spell even worse: the attack is based on the woman Oersted once loved. He's so consumed by hatred that is how he sees Alethea now. **this**
- The remake makes it worse by adding a single touch: If you look closely, youll notice that the woman/hag is wearing the circlet Alethea had, making it more obvious that its her.
- The arena you fight the final boss in. If you look closely, you'll notice that your party is standing on a mountain of corpses (presumably victims of Odio) while fighting him. In the background, Odio's shroud is looming over the entire battlefield, overlooking the party with a demonic face (not to be confused with the eyes and mouth you're fighting), while under an ominous blood-red sky. The remake ups the ante, showing a towering flaming aura coming off of the shroud itself.
- To say nothing of both forms of Odio itself that you fight. The first form is simply two blood dripping eyes and a face, each covered in vines and flowers and when they attack, they twitch in very unsettling ways. That little pimple that stands with it eventually unveils itself as Odio's true, "Pure", self, and it looks like a baby clutching itself in a fetal position atop a flower with bloody red wings. It's more disturbing when you remember that this is the end result of the pure and good-hearted knight who merely wanted to protect his kingdom and loved ones getting screwed over in the most unfair and heartbreaking ways possible until he snapped and became the embodiment of hatred itself.
- The remake adds the Sin of Odio as the true final boss, who looks like a giant demon with hatred so strong it burns off its own body with a face that is made of said flame with Oersted trapped in its heart and dragged further in to keep itself sustained as it makes its final desperate attempt to end the heroes. It can do nothing but roar in fury (or is it Oersted screaming in pain?) and the background shows all of its incarnations, making it seem like they are ALL after the heroes at once, with it giving way to a distortion of flaming red like the demon itself as his hatred warps space and time. Just goes to show how boundless the Lord of Dark's hate is and how many different terrifying forms it can take.
- In the original, even Odio's
*death* can send you reeling. After you reduce his health to zero, instead of the usual death effect of a boss, the boss and the *entire arena* slowly dissolve, accompanied by a horrible, unbreaking tornado siren-esque noise.
- And that's if you play on an emulator that can't render the sound right. The original sound for the death of Purity of Odio is more like an incredibly loud static roar.
- The prelude to the Death Prophet in the final chapter. You're just minding your business, probably running away from battles when things go south. And suddenly, after retreating, the music stops and an ominous message like the Grim Reaper warns you that death awaits those who run away too much, and starts counting down to zero every time you run away. When the countdown reaches ZERO... it comes to you. A black panther monster that can easily turn you into stone. Unless you're the type of keeping count of how many times you run away, the Death Prophet's warning comes off as chilling and shocking.
**Death Prophet:** A hundred times you've run, run, run from death... But I am death foretold. Relentless doom. 'Twas cowardice that called me hither, child. Your fate is sealed. You'll flee no more. Now die.
- The Trial of Time sees the player Stalked by the Bell. Get in, find Sundown's ultimate weapon, and get out before the bell chimes eight times, or else you get ambushed by the Jaggedy Jacks. If/when they finally appear, the screen goes utterly dark, except for the protagonists and the Jacks themselves, staring right at the player.
- More subdued than other examples, but the Trial of Skill is rather unnerving. The tunnels are labyrinthine, and you are constantly stalked by the Bountiful Heart. Who is he? How does he know your character? It's never explained. But between his unexplained nature, and his sluggish gait and slurred speech, he's quite creepy.
- If you meet Odio, the Lord of Dark at the peak and choose to run away, you'll end up back in the void-between-temporal-dimensions where you originally started. Except for one very serious problem: You get severely punished for your hesitation and cowardice by running into "The Headhunter", an optional boss that will proceed to use his Wizenblade to decapitate your party with impunity since his stats are outrageously high.
note : But low enough that he can be crippled by a few stat reductions to give you a chance at winning. **Odio:** To flee is folly. This you shall soon learn. This realm is *my* domain. And I its king. O children, out of time and out of place. Your wanderlust will lead you unto *death!*
- If you choose Oersted as your protagonist, you play through all the chapter boss fights again...
*as the bosses*. Should your health get low enough, "Run" is replaced with "Armageddon". Choose that option, and Odio ends all of existence, erasing everything in a massive, all-consuming explosion across all time periods, culminating (in the remake) in a gigantic World-Wrecking Wave engulfing all of Earth and beyond. Oh, and the same thing happens if you lose to the final boss. What an incentive to win, huh? The final line after the credits, depending on the version, drives the point home. **Japanese version in English**: AFTER ALL... EVERYTHING WAS BLOWN AWAY... **SNES Fan Translation:** In the end... everything was blown away... **Switch Remake:** Let All Creation Yield to My Command: Let Blinding White Subsume and Cleanse the Slate
- In the remake, choosing Oersted as your protagonist and opening the map of Lucrece shows it
*covered in blood*, with only the Archon's Roost left visible. A visceral visual clue to what happened to the people of Lucrece, if the bloodied signs throughout the land weren't obvious.
- In the remake, Oersted's victory monologue is enhanced by the dub's Voice of the Legion. For as sad as the undertones are knowing Oersted's history, it hammers in a disturbing fact: Odio's battle to Make Wrong What Once Went Right has made evil an inescapable truth throughout time. In that timeline, hate is the only thing worth believing in.
**Odio:** Believe in me. You will. You must! For I'm the hero true! Heh heh... I am... I am! Hahahaha! Believe in me! Believe! **BELIEVE IN ME! BELIEVE!**
- This gets worse considering that you've just forced all of the protagonists into their very unpleasant Game Over scenarios. Pogo and Beru were devoured before they could start their family, the Earthen Heart kung-fu art has been lost to history with the Indomitable Fist free to reign terror across the region, Ode Iou keeps Japan at war with Ryoma Sakamoto either dead or turned into a karakuri, all of Success was murdered and razed by the Crazy Bunch, Odie O'Bright continues his bloody onslaught to remain on top of the martial arts world, the entirety of Japan is under threat from Odeo with the Steel Titan defeated, and the crew of the
*Cogito Ergo Sum* failed their mission with no survivors. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiveALive |
LoliRock / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
For a cheesy Magical Girl Show,
*LoliRock* has some very terrifying moments.
## Monsters
- Despite the Monsters of the Week being destroyed easily, Mephisto's Sand Monster is quite one of his best. A monster made out of something that can't be destroyed, even when Impaled with Extreme Prejudice. It starts out as a tornado first, but even when broken up, it can still become a bigger monster that would have been almost impossible to destroy had the Princesses not harnessed light to destroy it.
## Series
## Non-Canon
- A FanFic titled Geode tells of Praxina recruiting an Ephedian named Alexranda to help her fight the Princesses. How does she corrupt her? She brings one of the girls who bullied her and tells her to
*kill her*. Alex takes great pleasure in doing so. Praxina traps the bully in crystal, and Alex shatters her into pieces, her body with the crystal. Then Praxina gives her a corrupted Oracle Gem, making her completely lethal and heartless. When the Princesses find her, they are left in shock at the sight of the bully's *finger still in crystal*, and have to get rid of the broken body. Needless to say this story, with a K+ Rating, was about the darkest you could read. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoliRock |
Lollipop Chainsaw / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- If you failed to rescue all classmates, then the cutscene you get after the credits shows everyone coming home to find that Mom is now a zombie. "Time for dinner! And by dinner... I mean
**YOU**." It then cuts to black as we hear everyone screaming, followed by a loud *CRUNCH*.
- Mariska's possession of Rosalind. By the time "Rosalind" starts giggling in a horribly creepy fashion, you know something's definitely not right.
- Mariska, period.
**SQUICK!**
- Mariska's boss fight is possibly the creepiest part of the game. It perfectly embodies a "bad trip", and just keeps getting more and more unnerving.
- If you look closely at the loading screen for the Mushroom Samba portions of Mariska's level, you can make out her visage flashing in the center of the screen. Pretty unsettling if you go a while without noticing.
- Killabilly, the zombie of zombies. He has one main trait that distinguishes him from the other zombies (aside from looking like Elvis): he's
*huge*. His main goal is to wreck everything in sight. Just imagine what would've happened if Juliet had lost... His goofy appearance does little to offset the fuel.
- Heck, Rosalind herself may qualify - she seems a bit Ax-Crazy and Laughing Mad, and this was
*before* her possession! Her treating Nick like a toy and less like a person just puts a point on it.
- Yumil, Vikke's living bear pelt. The picture of him on Vikke's profile card is especially creepy.
- The helicopter crash in the beginning - listening to the pilot screaming "Tell my wife I love her!" (which then degenerates into wet sounding crunches)... Brr.
- Juliet's no saint either. She seems to have a lot of difficulty grasping the severity of the situation. By the end of the game, she's slaughtered hundreds to thousands of zombies (many of whom were her classmates, friends and fellow cheerleaders) and she does it all with a smile on her face.
- The Game Over screen is pretty unsettling. Usually in zombie games, the Game Over screen just says "GAME OVER" or "YOU ARE DEAD." This game, however, is different. Here, we see Juliet's zombified arm reach out from her grave for Nick's head, while Nick says that he wishes he could've protected her or something equally heartbreaking. Some deaths can cause a very depressing Game Over screen, such as one where Nick's head is sitting in front of her grave with a rose (she doesn't rise from her grave in this one), or if you die in the Prologue chapter, the Game Over screen only shows her arm coming out (Nick isn't present) while Nick says in a sad tone, "Juliet... I will always love you..."
- Nick's situation in general is this. He's literally just a severed head, completely helpless, and at the mercy of whoever is currently holding him. Juliet claims to love him, but she's a teenager with all the mood swings that implies. What happens if and when she gets bored or irritated with him?
- Zed. Even though he's one of the most popular boss fights in the game, everyone overlooks the sheer horror of his level. Zed sent Juliet flying to the junkyard and managed to beat her there, then used his super-speed
*to infect everyone within minutes and just waited for her*. Fortunately, he's the first of the Dark Purveyors to be slain, so he didn't spread the virus too far. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LollipopChainsaw |
Little Witch Academia (2017) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
## Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You have been warned!Although it's among Studio TRIGGER's Lighter and Softer works, given their track record, this doesn't mean it's free from the more scary moments.
- Early concepts shows that Lotte can absorb spirits to gain power.
- Sucy, really, if you don't find her to be a source of humor. She has a penchant of subjecting people to experiments that the Geneva Convention would condemn and genuinely enjoys making people suffer via her pranks, which are actually sometimes pretty dangerous. Not helping is her constant Creepy Monotone, generally unsettling demeanor, and willingness to use people for her own gains (i.e. using Akko and Lotte—two strangers she just met—as bait for the dangerous cockatrice just so she can collect some of its poison).
- Sucy the Mad Scientist loves coming up with new, mostly deadly, potions and then testing them on unlucky victims, mainly Akko.
- Speaking of Sucy the Mad Scientist, episode 8 has Akko go inside Sucy's to find out how to cure her after she went into a coma from drinking one of her potions. In her dream world, Akko meets
*every* aspect of Sucy's personality and tries to find the original one. During her stay in the dream world, she is put into a Kangaroo Court that tries to purge Sucy's other personalities, and then the Sucy that Akko rescued turns into a bloodthirsty Eldritch Abomination that devours the other personalities and threatens to take over Sucy's original personality.
- The "Wild Hunt" in episode 18 features ghosts: they are vaguely human-shaped, featureless grey entities that look unsettling if compared to the mostly goofy or bizarre faeries and magical creatures seen throughout the series.
- Vajarois the Grieving's plight. A young princess was so depressed and devastated over the loss of her friends that she swallowed a seed that would make her perpetually sad. And—instead of helping a grieving soul move on to the next life—the witches of Luna Nova decide to use her as little more than some entertainment display for an annual festival. All the while, she's constantly remembering how painful it is that she lost her friends. Kind of no wonder why she's always crying and wailing...
- Episode 24's ending. The cuts between happy Akko and friends, a giant missile and the rioters and politicians looking confused and scared are already unnerving, but the ominous beeping sounds and the eerily calm BGM make them outright creepy.
- Appleton Academy's "witch hunting" culture and protocols. Apparently, upon undeniable evidence of the presence of a witch, the students can immediately don black executioner's hats, put up witch hunting wanted posters, and have access to a
*working torture room* complete with implements and equipment, like an iron maiden. More unnerving than the fact that this exists is probably how *eager* the students are to put a witch to "trial."
- Noir Rod. While assuming a dragon form upon gaining sentience is already creepy, it soon gets worse after possessing a missile upon nearly being killed by Akko's Shiny Arc. However, when it is about to destroy a nation by nuking itself up, it progressively assumes a more monstrous serpentine form which suggested that it transcends into a Beast of the Apocalypse. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LittleWitchAcademia2017 |
Lois & Clark / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
In the pilot, Clark is poking around Lex's office and suddenly finds the man himself with a sword at his throat. The fact that it isn't set up as a jump scare makes it scarier.
Also in the pilot, a snake is released into Lex's room while he's distracted, making you think it's an assassination attempt. It's actually a training exercise so he can intimidate the snake into backing down with a blood-curdling stare.
Lex's casual disregard for human life.
Lex: Let's go kill some pigeons!
The Prankster stalking Lois. She sees him kill an associate through the telephone, and he later calls her at home, which really scares her.
Mr. Mxyzptlk traps the world in a time loop where each time around, humanity would grow more depressed and pessimistic until they all crossed the Despair Event Horizon and destroyed themselves.
One episode has Superman's face magically removed.
An undercover Nazi society nearly taking over America in "Super Mann". This was not a time-travel episode nor an alternate present: it very nearly happened. How bad is it? They neutralize Superman by giving him radioactive poisoning. Sure it's not Kryptonite, but they make it so Superman cannot help anyone without passing on the radiation. He has to get creative in order to save the day. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoisAndClark |
Lois Lane / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- If you count the number of times Lois Lane has been nearly murdered in horrible, horrible ways by super-villains, crooks, Eldritch Abominations... you'll wonder how she stays sane.
- The cover of
*Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane* #81 is an instance of lying cover, and Superman never tries to murder Lois in-story, but... imagine you are in that situation. But today, along came *Injustice: Gods Among Us*... which might be an even scarier thought, because rather than Superman becoming an abusive monster *to* Lois, he became such to the *entire world * Lois. **because he lost**
- Just how
*bizarre* the Silver Age stories were, due to a combination of the Comics Code, and trying to write around Superman's ridiculous power. Imagine being a normal person who lives a normal life up until Superman appeared, then suddenly, because you're in his life, your own becomes an endless surreal acid trip of dangerous nonsense.
- All the times Lois had her mind erased or changed for the plot of the week. Mind Rape is only scratching the surface, no wonder she became increasingly ditzy.
- The cover where Superman finds a whale with Lois face on it, it's extremely disturbing, especially the face's Slasher Smile.
-
*Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane* has a story in which Lois loses her eyesight after her eyes get grazed by a mugger's bullet. Her doctor helps her see again by having her undergo cataract surgery. Unfortunately, the new corneas came from a convicted murderer from Gotham City. This causes Lois to have visions of random Gotham residents silently screaming in horror before getting shot. Lois eventually figures out that ||the visions are actually illusions created by Mooks trying to keep her from speaking against their crime boss in court||, but right before she reveals this to Superman and a judge, she sees *herself* in the position of one of the murder victims. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoisLane |
Live Free or Die Hard / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Gabriel and his men broadcast their video message to the media, which is made by splicing clips of dialogue from speeches given by every single President from FDR up to George W. Bush. Here's a transcript: *[We hear "Hail to the Chief" played over an image of an American flag. Suddenly, the music slows down and loses pitch]* **John F. Kennedy**: My fellow Americans: **Ronald Reagan**: It is time to **Harry Truman**: strike **George W. Bush**: fear **George H. W. Bush**: into **Franklin Roosevelt**: the minds of **George W. Bush**: the citizenry. **John F. Kennedy**: Ask not what your country can do **George W. Bush**: to avert **Bill Clinton**: this **Jimmy Carter**: crisis. The answer is **Harry Truman**: nothing whatsoever. **George W. Bush**: Our military **Ronald Reagan**: strength **Richard Nixon**: is **Ronald Reagan**: in **Bill Clinton**: this **George W. Bush**: case **Franklin D. Roosevelt**: useless! **George H. W. Bush**: Read my lips: **Ronald Reagan**: The **George W. Bush**: great **Jimmy Carter**: confident **Richard Nixon**: roar **George W. Bush**: of **Ronald Reagan**: the American **Ronald Reagan**: progress **Lyndon B. Johnson**: and **Gerald Ford**: growth **George W. Bush**: has **Franklin D. Roosevelt**: come **Harry Truman**: to **Richard Nixon**: an end. **George W. Bush**: All the **Harry Truman**: vital **Bill Clinton**: technology **Richard Nixon**: that **George W. Bush**: this **Lyndon B. Johnson**: nation **Gerald Ford**: holds **Franklin Roosevelt**: dear - **John F. Kennedy**: all **Bill Clinton**: communication, **Gerald Ford**: transportation, **Bill Clinton**: Internet **Bill Clinton**: connectivity, **George W. Bush**: electrical **George W. Bush**: power, **John F. Kennedy**: critical **Bill Clinton**: utilities - **Lyndon B. Johnson**: Their **Ronald Reagan**: fate **George W. Bush**: now **Franklin Roosevelt**: rests **Ronald Reagan**: in **Richard Nixon**: our **George W. Bush**: hands. **George W. Bush**: We will not tire. We will not falter. And we will not fail. **George W. Bush**: Thank you. **Richard Nixon**: And a **George W. Bush**: happy **George W. Bush**: Independence Day **Dwight D. Eisenhower**: to everyone. *[the footage ends]* **Casper:** *[impressed]* That was creepy! **Trey:** I tried to find more Nixon. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiveFreeOrDieHard |
LOONA / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
"Egoist": Olivia Hye, LOONA's 12th and final member, has a chaotic music video and song that is centered on her reaction to Yves abandoning and betraying her. The lyrics to the song are hopeful and about moving on, but the visuals of the music video make it seem like it's out of spite and unleashes imagery of how deep she's been hurt (such as her destroying and burning Yves' school uniform). It makes you wonder which direction BlockBerry Creative wants to take with this plotline, and how much Olivia Hye wants to get revenge. **Singing In The Rain:** For the sin of swallowing up all the stars in the sky/You have spread blue/Were standing on top of this night/And this song is falling right now [...] For the sin of swallowing up the afternoon sun/Im right here, so hot/Alone with you tonight (it rings out) **Egoist:** Hey, for the sin of swallowing you/You get bigger and bigger, beautiful you/You are me, now Im you | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LOONA |
Live-Action Films / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
*"Do not watch this movie on drugs unless you've got a mean hankering for PTSD."*
Do you remember as a kid, you couldn't wait until you were 17 so you could watch R-rated movies without your parents' permission?
The scariness of
*these* movies——especially the horror ones may make it feel like it wasn't worth the wait. (And some of these movies *aren't even rated R.*) And watching them in a movie theater might be scarier than watching them at home...
For examples from animated movies, see the Animated Films and Anime & Manga pages.
## Example subpages:By genre<!—index—><!—/index—>
By movie<!—index—><!—/index—>
## Individual examples:
## This section is separated by genre and placed in alphabetical order by film. Before you add examples here, check the index above and make sure that movie doesn't already have its own page. Please do not put a movie below because it is "scary in general"; provide specific examples of why it is Nightmare Fuel or it will be removed.
- In
*Breakfast on Pluto*, a case of Mood Whiplash qualifies for this trope. In one scene, Kitten is slow-dancing with a man at a club when ||a bomb goes off, blowing up the club they are in. We then get a pan over all of the dead, dying, and injured people, including some very nasty burn wounds, twisted bodies, and sounds of moaning and crying. One of the injured is Kitten herself, which is made even worse when she gets accused of planting the bomb because she happens to be an Irish man who wants to be a woman (the film takes place during the Irish Revolution, and Kitten - who had nothing to do with the bomb - happens to be in London.)||
-
*Doctor Strangelove*: The Downer Ending where the entire world is destroyed by nuclear war, while Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" provides an eerie Soundtrack Dissonance over the credits.
- For a series of comedy movies aimed mainly at kids, you'd think the Ernest P. Worrell films wouldn't be that bad. You'd be wrong.
-
*Ernest Scared Stupid* is easily nightmarish for any youngster, especially at the parts where the troll appears almost out of the blue to capture Joey and Elizabeth.
-
*Ernest Goes to Camp* has Ernest on the end of a disturbingly realistic beatdown from one of the construction workers.
-
*Ernest Goes to Jail* has Nash. He had no problem getting Ernest sent to the electric chair, is so bad the other inmates are afraid of him, and and attempted to blow up the bank with Ernest's friends still inside. What's really part of the nightmare fuel is Jim Varney's performance: despite the fact he's being played by the same man as Ernest, he convincingly manages to not act a single thing like his trademark character.
-
*Junior*. The Arnie baby is an example of computer animation gone disturbing.
-
*Look Who's Talking Too*:
- Mikey has a nightmare where a miniature Satan shows up in his toy collection and turns his teddy bear into a fanged and clawed monster.
- Mr. Toilet Man, a furry fanged toilet that harasses Mikey to pee in him and spits disgusting blue goo as he talks. Notably, one woman made the news because she feared going to the bathroom after watching the film as a kid.
- One scene in
*UHF* involves a parody of the rock chase scene in the beginning of *Raiders of the Lost Ark*, where Weird Al is chased by an unusually persistent boulder. Bereft of context, the idea of a giant, sentient rock determined to hunt you down to the ends of the Earth and crush you can be quite frightening.
-
*Angels and Demons* has Eye Scream, branding, drowning, choking to death on dirt, and immolation. ||Self-immolation, too.|| Freaky beyond measure. Also, the ||Pope after his impromptu exhumation is really, really disturbing-looking.|| In another vein, Vittoria attempts CPR on one of the four kidnapped Cardinals, only for it to come to her attention (and the viewer's) that the man's lungs are punctured— because blood squirts out of the open wound in his chest to hit Robert in the face. Gahhhhh.
-
*Basic Instinct* begins with Catherine Tramell (from the back) having passionate sex with a guy in a very warm and rosy setting. She proceeds to tie his hands to the bed with a silk scarf, and just as they are about to climax, things turn very quickly from eroticism to pure horror as she takes an icepick and starts *savagely stabbing the guy to death*. We don't even see the poor guy die, we just watch him scream madly and struggle to get away as Catherine keeps stabbing, getting bathed in his blood as the movie cuts to the next scene.
-
*The Black Dahlia*: The last scene where Josh Hartnett's character is talking with Scarlett Johansson's character, then looks back to see ||the Dahlia's corpse spread out on the lawn just like it was when she was found||. The sharp violin music really makes it a freaky moment.
-
*Canoa*, a film from Mexico. From the very first scene we're told a group of workers got lynched by a town who mistook them for communists. It takes one hour of build-up to get to the point where the fanatic villagers storm the house where the young victims are. As the aggressions begin, some of the victims watch in horror, as impotent as the spectator. The lynching scene is so long, graphic and horrible, there's only one thing capable of making it worse: It really happened.
-
*Eastern Promises* has a lot of other violence, but it's the throat-slitting that takes the cake. The amount of rape in that movie doesn't help. Also, the very first scene, with a heavily pregnant 14 year-old girl stumbling into a shop and asking for help, then collapsing into the blood that's been dripping down from between her legs, is crazy squicky. ||A sexually abused 14 year old girl miscarrying is bad enough. The fact that she dies, worse still. The fact that the person who'd been doing the abusing was Semyon...||
-
*Gozu*: The kid◊ in the 'yakuza killing' car staring down a barrel of a gun motionless with a smile that could be used for warfare. Perhaps Manami waking up to find a man with a cow's head wasn't surreal enough. And the ending: not even a spoiler could prepare you for what happens.
-
*Kalifornia*. The scene where Early makes the store clerk lie down and cover his head, and makes him believe he might get out of it alive. And then, with the guy sobbing in terror, Early shoots him. The image of a yellow smiley-face cushion exploding in fluff and blood is haunting.
-
*The Killer Inside Me* has a very uncomfortable to watch scene where the Villain Protagonist savagely beats his pretty girlfriend (played by Jessica Alba) into a bloody pulp, even long after she has gone limp. ||When she reappears near the end of the film, her face is covered in scars, her beauty destroyed.||
-
*Memento*: The scene ||where he is casually talking on the phone in his hotel while he removes the bandage from his new tattoo only to find that it reads "Never answer the phone." He asks who it is on the other line and gets no answer, followed by the photo of him bloody after a killing being slid under the door to his hotel.||
-
*Oldboy (2003)*: The tongue-cutting scene.
-
*Reservoir Dogs*. When Mr. Blonde is through with his torture, you'll never listen to "Stuck in the Middle With You" quite the same way. And that dance.
-
*Smokin' Aces*. Specifically the scene when one of the Tremor brothers falls on a chainsaw. Eli Roth of *Hostel* would be impressed.
-
*The Trial* (1993 version). The labyrinth of dilapidated corridors as a metaphor for a heartless bureaucracy awakens some childhood fears in some people. A rare case of creating a really unsettling effect without using any horror-associated elements.
-
*Untraceable.* The first victim wasn't that horrible, but the guy being roasted alive, and the guy being submerged in acid. ||Add to that the fact that he was a cop.||
-
*Zodiac* is a lovely example of occasional terror, especially the basement scene. That you never know what was really going on made it oh-so-much worse.
- Before
*Mayday*, there was *Air Disasters*, an hour-long documentary that exposes some uncomfortable truths behind the world of flight and how the industry is run by utilizing footage of actual accidents, some of it quite disturbing. Particular attention is given to the vastly differing safety standards in various parts of the world and the industry's practice of operating aircraft under flags of convenience in order to bypass regulations. That in itself is a terrifying prospect. There also exists a Re-Cut, frequently broadcast on TLC in the late 1990s but virtually impossible to find nowadays, which fixes some of the errors in the narration note : Most likely caused by a rushed production and/or the filmmakers not having access to more accurate information, as this was before the modern internet made such info more easily accessible to laypeople. while adding additional context to some of the clips, which increases the Nightmare Fuel potential by only a small margin.
- The documentary
*A State Of Mind*, following the lives of two North Korean barely-teenaged gymnasts, is definitely in some parts a Tear Jerker, and rather horrifying.
-
*Dear Zachary*: The idea of a mother killing her child is bad enough in fiction but it's worse cause this actually happened.
-
*Earthlings*. Basically the entire film is Nightmare Fuel, as you are watching real animals in the most abhorrent conditions and unimaginable pain possible.
- The BBC docu-drama
*End Day*, which depicts five different possible scenarios, in order of the amount of damage they would do to human civilization and the planet in general: A mega-tsunami, a killer asteroid, a global pandemic, the eruption of a super-volcano, and the Large Hadron Collider failing, which eventually results in the entire planet being consumed by "strange matter".
- Notorious Nazi propaganda movie,
*The Eternal Jew*, contained a scene meant to dehumanize the Jews by comparing them to rats. Apparently audiences found the scene so horrifying that they ran out of cinemas and the movie had to be withdrawn. Modern audience find it horrifying for different reasons.
-
*Incendio*, a short documentary by the National Fire Prevention Agency about the 1974 Joelma Building fire in São Paulo, Brazil, one of the inspirations for *The Towering Inferno*. Between the subject matter, scenes of panicked tenants jumping to their deaths, the narrator's Creepy Monotone voiceover, and the spooky synth music reminiscent of Boards of Canada, it's pretty chilling.
- Trevor McDonalds duology of ITV documentaries titled
*Inside Death Row* which see him interview prisoners with death sentences in Indiana State Penitentiary expectedly document his encounters with many disturbing and vile characters. The second documentary sees McDonald come face to face with William Clyde Gibson, an utterly remorseless serial killer who candidly recounts his various killings to a barely straight-faced Trevor, and bluntly dismisses the possibility of having any degree of humanity, giggling like a jolly hick all the while.
-
*March of the Dinosaurs* made feathered tyrannosaurs horrifying. There is one scene where the Edmontosaurus are ambushed by the tyrannosaurs where one literally leaps (like a raptor) out of nowhere to tackle one of the poor plant-eaters. Imagine three tons of teeth and death leaping at you.
-
*9/11* has this as a given, due to it being live footage of a terrorist attack that killed almost 3,000 people. Some standouts:
- Entering the stricken North Tower, Jules immediately hears someone screaming. His narration states that this is a woman who is
*burning* because of jet fuel that shot down the elevator shafts, and she's a few feet offscreen because Jules didn't want to film something so horrible.
- Later, you can hear the impacts of things falling from the upper floors of the North Tower. Some of these impacts are from people who jumped to escape the floors above the impact. Jules seems more shaken by this than anything else before it.
-
*Night and Fog* is a short but powerful documentary on The Holocaust directed by Alain Resnais. Shot less than a decade after the end of WW2, it alternates between past and present, combining eerie scenes of the abandoned remains of Auschwitz with nightmarish historical footage of Nazi atrocities, some of it quite graphic. The chilling score by Hanns Eisler further adds to the unsettling atmosphere.
-
*The Man Who Saw Tomorrow* - a documentary-style movie about Nostradamus' predictions, narrated by Orson Welles is terrifying, especially when it comes to the infamous "King of Terror" prophecy and was *huge* Nightmare Fuel for 1980s viewers.
-
*Violence: An American Tradition*, a documentary that is about, as the title says, violence in USA and its history, its culture, its relationship with media and pop culture, its effects on daily life, the politics and motives behind it, the people involved with it, etc. Anyone who believes that Humans Are Good will definitely have their beliefs destroyed by this one hour long documentary, specially the part that deals with child abuse.
-
*Waltz with Bashir*: A full-on shot of a nightmarish, wild pack of dogs running at the camera to finish ||actual footage of the immediate aftermath of the massacre in Lebanon in the 80s||.
- This squicktastic footage of a 70cm long worm
*being devoured by a giant red leech*, filmed for the BBC's *Wonders of the Monsoon*.
-
*The Accused*. The gang rape on its own is bad enough, but it's the cheering of the men watching and the ringleader picking out who gets to go next all while Sarah is screaming and crying that pushes it into true Nightmare Fuel territory. That, and the fact that the premise of the movie was based on a true story. That scene was apparently serious Nightmare Fuel for the actors who were playing the rapists; Jodie Foster had to repeatedly reassure them.
-
*The Bear* has some very terrifying scenes for a PG movie, including the Family-Unfriendly Death of the cub's mother at the beginning, a literal Nightmare Sequence involving spiny fanged frogs, an *Amanita muscaria*-induced Mushroom Samba, and the gruesome climactic fight between the Kodiak bear and the hunters' dogs.
-
*The Big Shave*: Martin Scorsese's short 1967 film begins with some simple shots of a bathroom while some jazz plays (specifically Bunny Berigan's version of 'I Can't Get Started'), and shortly after, a man walks in. He begins to shave. ||Then he keeps on shaving. He shaves too much. The film is often seen as an allegory for what the United States was doing to itself in The Vietnam War||. The film can be viewed here.
-
*Biutiful:* A roomful of sleeping immigrant workers, a total of about 25 men, women and children, ||all die as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. When their boss comes in to wake them, they're just all lying there dead.|| And somehow, it goes From Bad to Worse: the main character, Uxbal, can ||communicate with the dead to some degree, and as he tries to apologize to one of the dead women, a friend of his, you briefly see the spirits of the dead people suspended weirdly against the ceiling, their faces contorted with fear.|| It's all the most disturbing because there's no sound effects or dramatic music stings to highlight it. And towards the end of the film, Uxbal ||(who is dying of cancer) sees himself on the ceiling in the same way in his final hours.|| It's very, very effective.
-
*Blindness*. The ||uncomfortably extended group rape scene|| is difficult to sit through. It is so amazingly vulgar, while showing surprisingly little in comparison. The pained cries of the victims push this into nightmare territory.
- The Brainwashed and Crazy scientist's shooting rampage in
*The Bourne Legacy*, especially the scenes of the other scientists panicking and cowering.
-
*Braveheart*: The ending, where ||William Wallace is hanged, drawn and quartered - among other things, his torso is ripped open and his intestines are scrambled around while he is still alive. It is horrific to imagine enduring that much pain knowing that the damage is irreversible, and you're already as good as dead.||
- The scene where an English commanding officer tries to rape Murron with the help of two of his soldiers is really uncomfortable to watch. He forcefully shoves her on a hut, then lays on top of her and kisses and licks her while making disgustingly lustful noises. Murron has to settle on violence in order to escape, resulting in her biting the rapist's cheek and even then she doesn't stand a chance against him. The soldier then hits her, calling her a bitch. If it weren't for Wallace, Murron would have ended being brutally gang-raped. It's already creepy enough that the Dirty Old Man flirts with her before the attempted rape and makes perverted notes on how Murron
*reminds him of his daughter*.
-
*Citizen Kane*: Towards the end of the movie, out of nowhere a scene opens with an extreme close up of a cockatoo giving off a loud screech before flying off. Not only is this seriously startling, but it is also seriously disturbing due to the fact that the cockatoo was poorly imposed on the scene, resulting in it having completely transparent eyes, which in turn makes it look like something that came right out of the deepest trenches of hell. Some have argued that the transparent eyes were done by Orson Welles on purpose, to give off some kind of symbolic imagery, but there's no way to know that for sure. The ironic thing about all of this is that the only reason this scene was put in was because Orson Welles was worried that the audience would be losing interest this late in the film, so he added this to "wake them up".
-
*Coma*: Unconscious victims go from the OR to the Jefferson Institute, where you think is a nice care home for the terminally ill, but ||in reality keeps them naked and tube-fed hanging on wires from the ceiling, and the people in charge steal their organs to sell on the black market.|| If you're in any way afraid of hospitals or medical paraphernalia, don't watch this movie.
-
*The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover*: Michael Gambon's monologues are nightmarish, particularly when he lectures his wife, loudly enough so that everyone in the restaurant can hear, that she's not allowed to masturbate because as her husband, only he gets to decide when she gets touched.
- Helen Mirren (the wife) and her lover concealing their affair from said abusive husband by stowing away, naked, in a truck full of slaughtered pig parts.
- The ||murder of her lover by stuffing the pages of his book down his throat until he chokes to death.||
-
*Covenant Rider*: A flashback scene had a young Wichita Slim tied to a post and branded for misbehavior. The combination of a little boy screaming and the burn on his shirt ensured that Covenant Rider would never, ever be watched after the first time.
-
*Dahmer*: Particularly the part at the end when he ||slices the one guy's chest and stomach open and sticks his hands in his intestines||.
-
*Dogtooth* contains a heckton of this. First off is the idea that parents could go to such an extent to isolate their children from reality - they keep them on their expansive estate and redefine several concepts so that their kids are scared into staying.
- The scene with the cat is just pure nightmare fuel, from beginning to end. A cat appears in the yard at one point. Frightened, the son grabs a pair of gardening shears and decapitates it, while the two daughters watch out the window and scream. When the mother calls the father at work about this incident, they agree that it's a "good opportunity" to further hammer down the message about the dangers of the outside world. The father dabs red paint on his shirt and splits open his clothes with shears, and greets the family by saying that their previously-unspoken-of brother is dead, killed by a cat, the "most dangerous creature in the world." Both the brutal violence of the cat's death (which is shown onscreen) and the idea that such an innocent animal would be given such a terrifying portrayal are creepy.
- When the son is seen playing with a toy airplane, one of the daughters fights him for it in a childlike manner, grappling for it. She eventually gets the airplane. Subsequently, the girl finds him in the kitchen and (to teach him a lesson) cuts his arm with a chef's knife - the bluntness of the moment is shocking.
-
*Downfall* ( *Der Untergang*):
- There's one person guaranteed to haunt your dreams; Goebbels, the guy who looks like the freaking crypt keeper himself. You know the world has come to an end when Goebbels makes Hitler himself appear to be nothing more than a raving drunk.
- The fate of Goebbels' children. Just in case you started to feel sorry for anyone else.
-
*Eyes Wide Shut*: About 75% of the soundtrack easily qualifies as Nightmare Fuel. Try listening to the Masked Ball sequence late at night, alone in a dark house. This piece includes sinister strings in a minor key with a backmasked *basso profundo* voice chanting in Romanian. Try to sleep. The following night, play the most frightening piano piece known to man, Gyorgy Ligeti's Musica Ricercata No. 2 as played by Dominic Harlan, on your Ipod as you walk down the street alone in the dark. Paranoia like you have never known it before.
-
*Girl with a Pearl Earring*: Van Ruijven's attempt to rape Griet as well as when Catharina tries to suddenly stab the picture of Griet.
-
*The Good Earth*: The locusts!
-
*Gorillas in the Mist* The horrible, horrible scene that depicts the murder of Dian Fossey's favorite gorilla Digit at the hands of poachers. But the worst is when they find his corpse propped up against a tree in a sitting position, with bloody stumps where his head and hands used to be. Also tear-jerkingly sad and Truth in Television.
-
*I Am Dina*. At the beginning, the heroine, then a little girl, causes a the contents of a huge cauldron full of boiling lye to be poured on her mother. First you see the mother, completely scalded. Then the little girl, waiting on her own in an attic, listening while her mother screams constantly for hours, maybe days, before dying.
-
*Inglourious Basterds* Whenever Brad Pitt's character pulled out his knife, scalped the Nazis and carved swastikas onto the foreheads of the survivors.
-
*Inland Empire*. David Lynch apparently can't get enough of suffocating suspense and so, being David Lynch, distilled this to an even worse extreme in this film. Slasher Smile, bleeding mouths, and distorted faces combine to create one horrific image. The scene in question.
-
*The Invisible*: Nick's predicament. Imagine being a spirit doomed to watch helplessly as everyone around you falls to pieces when they believe you're dead, seeing that people you hated or ignored are suffering horribly, while you yourself ||are dying, and the only person who can save you is the one who put you in a coma to begin with||.
-
*Iron Jawed Angels* They're not called that because they had their mouths pried open with metal instruments and were force-fed raw eggs through a tube shoved down their throat. But after watching that scene, that's all you'll think of. Made even scarier by the fact that it's Truth in Television.
-
*Isadora*:
- The death of ballet dancer Isadora Duncan, when ||the long scarf she wears become entangled in the car's wheel, snapping her neck.|| The movie manages to recreate in horrific detail.
- Also disturbing is how ||her kids drown in when the car they're in accidentally rolls into the Seine.||
-
*The Last King of Scotland*:
- The scene where Garrigan finds ||Kay's mutilated body||. It's utterly horrific.
- Garrigan being ||suspened from the ceiling by hooks through his chest||
-
*The Last Sin Eater*
-
*"Who's going to take away MY sins, Cadi Forbes?"*
- ||Brogan Kai: a man who viciously beats a preacher to death
*onscreen*, rigs a decision to choose the next Sin Eater to marry a woman, and is perfectly willing to murder *his own son* (and says so to said woman's face, no less!). And even then his father was *worse*||
- The 1928 adaptation of
*The Man Who Laughs* has Conrad Veidt as the most unbelievably disturbing-looking protagonist in all of film. He has a very creepy permanant smile.
-
*The Manchurian Candidate* (2004):
-
*Men Behind the Sun*: A dramatization of the medical experiments of the real-life Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731 during the Second World War, this film was known for its very graphic depictions of surgical procedures, including human vivisection. Most of it can be found on Youtube; if you feel particularly brave you may do a search. There's a single scene where a child is vivisected.
-
*Munich*: The scenes depicting the actual Munich hostage crisis, especially in the scene where ||one of the athletes is shot in the mouth at point-blank range and survives.|| Thanks to Spielberg's brilliant and powerful execution, the intensity and brutality of those scenes will be haunting your nightmares for quite some time, no matter how jaded you are. It's scary enough as it is, but on top of that, everything depicted in those scenes actually happened. ||And the guy who got shot in the face? He was played in the movie by the son of the real guy. That had to have taken a lot of courage.||
-
*One Hour Photo*:
- The nightmare scene, in which Robin Williams's character's eyes explode with blood. Made all the more disturbing for coming in what is otherwise a fairly conventional thriller film and therefore being completely out of context.
- The concept is pretty creepy: The idea of people you only see in passing and take for granted finding ways to maliciously invade your privacy.
-
*The Patriot*
- During the disastrous Battle of Camden, an American soldier is decapitated by a direct hit from a cannonball. Another man takes a musket ball to the knee, snapping it at the joint. There is a scene in a field hospital crowded with men maimed in such a way.
- The British massacring the American wounded at Martin's plantation and burning the place down. And Thomas being shot and killed by Tavington. Tavington generally is frightening, a prime example of a particularly sadistic Colonel Kilgore.
- Martin's Berserker tendencies. There's a bit where he attacks a convoy, trying to rescue his other son Gabriel. He slaughters the soldiers, singles out this one fleeing soldier and hits him in the back with a thrown tomahawk, downing the man into a puddle. Then Martin runs over, pulls the axe out and hits the man's body again. And again and again. And doesn't stop. All while his sons watch in mortified silence. When Martin returns to his sons, he is drenched in blood.
- The scene where Tavington ||orders the burning of a church with the townsfolk locked inside||.
-
*The Piano Teacher*. It features the most screwed up woman ever, named Erika. Notable scenes: the opening scene in which Erika and her mother fight about the fact that Erika came home late, even though she's 40-plus years old, and the fight turns physical. There's also a scene in which Erika ||cuts between her legs and a trail of blood streams down the bathtub's side||, when ||Erika appears to be attempting to rape her own mother|| the next-to-last scene in which ||Erika forces her young male student to rape her while her mother is within earshot and Erika looks like a corpse||. The thing comes together to conclude: This protagonist is a very, very screwed up human being.
-
*Ray*: The scene where he has a hallucination that his drowned brother is in his suitcase.
-
*Self Defense*:
-
*The Secret Garden 1987*:
- In any of the film adaptations, Mary walking through the house to find Colin can be deeply unsettling. The 1987 version takes this up to eleven with scary music and a lightning storm raging outside the manor — and let's not forget the cutaways to the light playing off of the dark, ugly statues.
- There's also the opening from that same movie, where Mary's wandering through a house where everyone except her is dead or dying from cholera, and she doesn't even understand what's happening. Special mention goes to the lingering shot on Mary's dying parents, with their faces twisted up in pain.
-
*The Secret Garden (1993)*:
- The 1993 film replaces the cholera epidemic with an earthquake. The scene built around said earthquake, while short, could still be a case of Nightmare Fuel.
- The 1993 film also gives Medlock a very creepy Leitmotif.
-
*A Streetcar Named Desire*: The depiction of Blanche's descent into insanity. Especially her Freak Out moment after Stanley tears the paper lantern off of the lightbulb.
-
*Testament,* which takes place in a single town and focused on the effects a nuclear war has on a small group of people. The worst is the main character ||nursing her children through radiation sickness and watching them die one by one||.
-
*Titus*: the exquisitely shot but horrific scene where ||Lavinia is found on a stump, having been raped and with her hands and tongue cut off. Twigs have been stuck in the stumps, and when she opens her mouth, blood streams out.||
-
*Trainspotting* If the ||dead baby|| didn't creep you out, Renton's withdrawal hallucination of it crawling on the ceiling will.
-
*United 93* This movie has a terrorist hijacking an airplane, and also show you how everyone in the plane were struck with panic and terror in the process. Consider the commotion that happened amongst air staff and air traffic controllers on the ground. The kicker? This is not only based on what actually happened on one of the planes in September 11, 2001, but its even documented as accurately as the filmmakers were able to, down to the details.
- Prior to the advent of privacy laws in the 1980s (although supposedly some of these films claimed that permission from the surviving family members was obtained), many driver's education films that depicted the grim aftermath of accidents showed photos and live-action film of the victims. Often, these films — some filmed by corporate sponsors, others by a given state's highway patrol or department of public safety — showed the victims lying in pools of blood, mangled beyond recognition (and in some cases severely burned) and in various states of consciousness if not dead. The idea, of course, was to warn of the possible consequences of failing to obey traffic laws and basic driver's safety ... but seeing such things as emergency workers extricate the charred body of a father of four from the burned shell of a car, or a once babelicious teenaged girl screaming in pain while her face is shredded to ribbons was enough to give many of their viewers sleepless nights.
- In addition to the lack of privacy laws, many of these films did not have disclaimers warning of the graphic footage these students were about to view; it was up to the teacher to decide whether to warn them. Again, the idea was to scare students into driving safely ... but the shock of seeing a little red-headed boy (in a Little League outfit) being pulled from beneath the chassis of the drunk driver's car that just hit him, for instance, was enough to cause more than one nightmare.
- The Ohio State Patrol issued several driver's education films during the late 1950s through early 1970s, which were distributed nationwide. Several of these films have been posted on various video sharing sites. Memorable films, along with Nightmare Fuel-inducing scenes, included:
-
*Signal 30*, a 1959 film "shot in living - and dying - color," and the first of the series of films. The goriest of the scenes included a fiery collision on a narrow state highway between two loaded semitrailer trucks, where both drivers are killed (their charred bodies are shown being removed) and a truck driver — on a late-night run trying to make deadline on a load of 20 tons (40,000 pounds) of steel pipe — crushed against the steering wheel and dashboard of his truck by the load, which had shifted after he apparently fell asleep behind the wheel and drove off the road note : (with removal of his body taking four hours). Although no death was involved, there is also footage of several cars not only failing to stop for a stop sign but not even slowing down at an intersection where a deadly wreck had just happened; once, one of the cars clears the intersection mere seconds before oncoming traffic passes through the intersection, and a few minutes later, several pre-adolescent boys are shown riding their bikes and failing to stop for the stop sign, again barely avoiding traffic that had the right-of-way.
- The movie's title, by the way, was police code (at the time) for a report of a car accident involving a fatality.
-
*Mechanized Death*, from 1961, where the mangled body of a dead baby is found beneath the car, the impact of the crash so severe she was thrown through the floorboard; the responding officers only being aware of a possible body yet to be found after seeing a baby's bottle wedged in the door.
-
*Wheels of Tragedy*, from 1963. Another truck driver, having driven for hours without a break to make an inflexible deadline on a hot load of freight, rams his speeding semitrailer truck into the back of a sedan; the driver, who was killed outright, is shown with his head wedged in the steering wheel. Spookier was a bloodless scene: A beautiful 15-year-old girl is shown being pulled from a creek, in which she was thrown after the car she was riding in goes off the road. The other two passengers were injured but (apparently) survive, but the harrowing scene comes when a rookie state patrolman — through whom this film is told — carries the girl's lifeless body to the shore and cries "Damn, damn, damn!" ... just before the camera zooms up to the deceased girl's face. Other memorable scenes include a woman lying in her bed at a long-term care facility, sedated to numb the pain from injuries of a crash two years earlier; and the crushed skulls of two young men, thrown from their car after ramming into the rear of a cattle truck (that had pulled over for a mechanical problem).
-
*Highways of Agony*, from 1969. It isn't always young drivers who cause accidents, as one segment in this film grimly warned. A 77-year-old man, driving well over the posted speed limit on a road covered in black ice, crashed his car into an overpass, causing it to burst into flames on impact and killing both him and his wife; as footage of their bodies — burned nearly to skeletons — being pulled from the burned out car is shown, we learn that the only way they could be identified is through (badly charred) identification papers that somehow didn't burn. Later, the bodies of three young people, a 16-year-old girl and men ages 20 and 26, their faces with expressions of fear and pain frozen on them, are shown strewn on the ground; the 26-year-old driver — all three of them were drunk after a night of partying — had driven around a lowered railroad crossing gate in an attempt to beat an oncoming train. Although the images were grainy, there was the story of the drunk driver who crashed his brand-new sports car into an oak tree, the crash so violent that he suffered enough injuries to kill three people.
- Not part of the Ohio State Patrol-series of films, but equally nightmarish:
-
*Last Date*, from 1950 and starring a young Dick York (of *Bewitched* fame), about the lone survivor of a crash, Jeanne, that killed her bad-boy boyfriend, Nick (York), and a family of five in the car he crashes his hot rod-converted 1932 Ford Model A note : — he had been driving at least 110 mph! — into. First, we see Jeanne helplessly sit by as Nick attempts to pass a slow moving semitrailer truck on a narrow curve, and then — through her eyes — an oncoming car quickly appear in sight (this effect achieved through time-lapse photography), before the screen goes dark in a deafening crash. In the final scene, Jeanne — conceding she was a fool for accepting Nick's offer to go for a ride, knowing he already had a reputation for driving recklessly — looks at her permanently disfigured face in a mirror (having become that way after being thrown through the windshield), screaming out "My face! My face!" before throwing a hair brush into the mirror and beginning to cry. Viewers never see her face, but the moral is clear.
-
*The Last Prom*, from 1980, where a prom date ends with the death of a beautiful young girl named Sandy, the only child of a respected couple from a small Indiana town. Chilling was Sandy's best friend, who is able to walk out of the crushed van but is holding her face, apparently disfigured beyond recognition, and screaming in agony. This was a color remake of a high school prom tragedy film that had been issued in the mid 1960s.
-
*Only Stwpd Cowz Txt N Drive*, a 2008 British public service movie aimed at stressing the dangers of distracted driving, specifically texting while driving. The centerpiece of the film is the crash scene wherein, as the main protagonist reads a text message on her Smartphone, the car she is driving drifts into the oncoming lane of traffic, resulting in a multi-car accident that kills two of her passengers and three others. The segment came under criticism after showing the violent whiplash being suffered by the girls (two of them have their heads rammed together during the whiplash) and a young girl pleading in vain for her parents — who are shown dead — to wake up.
-
*Death on the Highway*, produced by an organization known only as the Suicide Club, is put together with a little less polish than, say, the Ohio State Highway Patrol films, but it may as well be the nastiest road safety film of them all. Three of the accidents shown in the film involve dismemberment, with the worst one being a 130 km/h motorcycle collision in which the driver is literally *cut in half*. The narrator even outright calls it one of the most horrible things he's ever seen. Other nightmare-inducing moments in the film include a crash in which a young woman has all her limbs torn off and is partially decapitated by the force of the impact, a multi-car pileup that results in the deaths of sixteen people, a driver burned to death inside his car, and a drunk-driving accident in which two young boys have their arms torn off when the vehicle scrapes against a brick wall. The filmmakers' use of a bright red filter to highlight the gore adds greatly to the effect.
- And then there's California's answer to the Ohio State Highway Patrol films, the
*Red Asphalt* series, in which viewers are subjected to five short films' worth of horrific vehicular carnage. Which of them is the worst is up for debate note : (though number four is certainly the tamest, which isn't exactly saying much, but still), but one thing's for certain - it's enough to make you think twice about driving recklessly in the future. "Highlights" of the series include a careless motorist who is left permanently blind following an accident, another guy who loses a massive amount of blood but miraculously doesn't pass out, a particularly grisly wreck where the victim's jaw is smashed up pretty badly, a guy who has the skin on his leg rubbed off down to the bone, a crash involving two SUVs where the victim's skull is *completely pulverized* (leaving emergency personnel to deal with the nauseating task of scooping up the bits of brain left strewn on the pavement), an unfortunate motorist with a large chunk of his face missing, a shot of a severed arm, and images of mangled corpses. Lots and lots of mangled corpses. The third film also includes this chilling monologue: **Presenter:**
That's right, there are no second chances on the highway. You do something stupid, you die. You get drunk or do drugs, you die. You race some guy for the stoplight, you die. All you wanted was a little fun, and it killed you. High-priced fun, huh? And maybe that's not the worst that could happen
- I mean, sometimes you don't die. Well, most of you doesn't. Of course, you may leave some parts of you behind
, and somehow spare parts
never seem to be as good as the originals, do they? Ever wanted to give your girlfriend a makeover? How about this? Or this?
And some guys will do anything to show a girl a good time. And some girls just, uh, never seem to be the same again. You like to ride free and feel the wind in your face? What about a face full of freeway? Or did you ever think what "brain-damaged"
*really*
means? I mean, it means forgetting almost everything you ever knew, maybe reverting to a mental age of three, and staying that way for the rest of your life. Alternatively, you could live to a ripe old age as a human vegetable
, leaving your family to pay your medical bills and agonize every single day about pulling the plug on you
.
- Arizona's answer to
*Signal 30*, *For Want of a Seatbelt*, is a non-stop cavalcade of Facial Horror as our narrator, a plastic surgeon, guides us through a gruesome slideshow of accident victims' mutilated faces in a Creepy Monotone reminiscent of a coroner giving a courtroom autopsy briefing. The worst accident featured in the film involves an unlucky driver who crashes his car into a wayward horse and is subsequently crushed to death by the animal, with the grisly results on display for all to see.
-
*Alice In Wonderland*: The 1988 Czech version features reanimated skeletons of small animals and a scene of pure madness at the tea party. Makes it even more eerie that there is no music whatsoever in the movie except for the squeaks and clinks of old clothing, footsteps, and winding-gears. This is a Jan vankmajer film. The same guy made a film where a dude *||eats his own dick with mustard||*. Yeah, Nightmare Fuel is a given for his films.
- The 1983
*Hercules* film starring Lou Ferrigno features a low-budget but extremely creepy sequence of a villain's corpse slowly disintegrating into dust, including a trypophobia-inducing stage which looks as if it had no skull. Take on account that it's supposedly a kid's movie.
-
*The Abyss*: ||Lindsey|| drowning in the damaged submersible, while her husband has to watch, no less. The water's rising and she's clearly terrified, trying to breathe right up until the submersible has completely flooded.
-
*Doomsday*. The "cookout" scene; the worst part is that it doesn't bother with discretion, it really just keeps on going and going.
-
*Enemy Mine*:
- The Pit Fiend is incredibly creepy, and is a constant threat even outside their pit traps.
- Davidge nearly falling victim to said monster. We've already seen that the creature's long, ropelike tongue/feeler is very bad news, but Davidge has no idea what he's looking at as it probes nearby to locate its prey, as a mysterious and sinister leitmotif plays. Then it grabs Davidge and tries to pull him under; the awful bleeding from his ensnared leg and his terrified cries for help leave no doubt that death by Pit Fiend would be a horrible way to go, but Jerry thankfully comes to the rescue just in time.
- The opening effectively sets the tone of War Is Hell, with the frozen corpsicle of a human pilot whose fighter was shot up, drifting through space.
-
*Gamer*: The concept; it takes place in the future, in which online video games have you controlling real, living, breathing people. If you're playing a first-person shooter, there's no respawning at all, so when your player dies, he's permanently dead.
-
*The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)*: Humma Kavula is a semi-insane missionary living amongst the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI, and a former space pirate. (It was presumably during his time as a pirate that he lost his legs and had them replaced with telescoping mechanical spider appendages). He wears thick glasses, which make his eyes appear normal when worn; however, when he removes the glasses, he appears to have shrunken black pits where his eyes should be.
- The scene where he surgically removes Zaphod's second head behind a curtain while Zaphod is aware and complaining is a bit disturbing.
-
*Logan's Run*: The Carousel. Basically, people are ritualistically murdered in numbers at a time at the age of 30, and it's all part of their society. Even more disturbing, it's clear that the victims don't want to die, and the crowd cheers as they watch the people explode.
-
*The Philadelphia Experiment*: A man and a destroyer are sent forward through time as a result of the experiments, which were meant to make the ship temporarily invisible. Time travel certainly isn't all that scary, but that way that the movie pointed out the mechanics of molecularizing the objects moving through time and putting them back together is disturbing; let's just say the crew of that destroyer has a rather permanent tour, and that they've never felt closer to their ship.
-
*Saturn 3* had the most terrifying robot in history. It's introduced to us from the feet up (around 1:40 in this trailer), looking for all the world like a skinned, metallic corpse with tubes for veins and metal plates where its muscles would be. Slowly, more of it is revealed, until we come to its head... or lack of one. All it has on top are two insectile, twitching, glowing eyes on an arm. It doesn't talk — it merely flicks its eyes around to stare at you. When you combine those attributes with its measured tread, its deliberately inhuman movements and the fact that it's learning directly from ||the thoughts of the murderous, psychotic handler who has a stalkercrush on Farrah Fawcett||, it invokes the eeriest elements of the Uncanny Valley, essentially recreating Frankenstein's Monster in space. But scarier. What happens near the end of the film isn't pretty either: ||the handler places his own brain inside the robot, which wears the front of his face like a mask||.
-
*Skyline*:
- The images of hundreds of people getting sucked up into space ships, all of them screaming.
- The aliens ||dissolve the heads of human victims and leave the brain intact for, all intents and purposes, a battery||.
- The giant "Tank" Aliens, who ||use their tentacles to capture humans and forcibly (no doubt painfully) suck them into their bodies||.
-
*Strange Days*: In the near future, there's a technology that allows to encode and record on disc someone's sensorial experience, allowing another person to experience it later on playing the disc as if watching a movie, re-living everything like if he made it himself. The serial killer in the movie uses it to record his experience while he rapes and kills women, and in the meantime he puts another sensorial machine onto her victims so that they can feel his excitement while he rapes-kills them, enhancing their fear, which would be disturbing enough by itself. But the feedback works both ways, therefore the assassin himself feels the victim's feelings as if he's being raped and killed himself, only exciting him even more, in a perverted infinite loop of murdering. The whole thing is so sick that when the protagonist find a disc made by the killer and watch it he gets terrifically shocked and he's incapacitated for a while.
-
*Sunshine*: Several characters ||die by simply being roasted by the sun, due to having no atmosphere or objects blocking the sun from them||. While for one, it was something akin to a ||religious experience||, the crew got to listen to the other screaming in pain for about a minute while ||the sun's rays coming through his visor destroyed his face and head, and the rest of his body simply superheated and boiled||.
-
*Supernova.* The crew members of the ship all die in very creepy ways. One of them melts into the structure of the suspended animation pod that should have kept him safe during the hyperspace jump. Unfortunately, his doesn't seal completely. The rest of the deaths are as bad. When it was in the theaters, this movie was rated PG-13; it has since been re-rated to R.
-
*3 Dev Adam*: Back in the 1970s, there was apparently a portion of the Turkish film industry who couldn't care less about copyright laws and made unauthorized films about a number of superhero, action/adventure and sci-fi properties. That's just kinda weird, but one of the most infamous was this film, which involved Captain America, a Mexican wrestler known as El Santo, and Spider-Man. Except it wasn't Spider-Man; it was an evildoer called Spider-Man with a similar costume to Spidey's. Even that wouldn't be so bad, except that this "Spider-Man" doesn't just want to rob banks or take over the world, he's also a serial killer and rapist. There's some unfathomably freakish imagery, like he has some gerbils or hamsters eat someone's eyes out.
-
*Kick-Ass*: The ||torture and attempted execution|| scene is incredibly unbearable to watch. They light ||Big Daddy|| on fire, and watch him burn, complete with blisters and torched flesh in the aftermath as he struggles to breathe, and eventually suffocates.
-
*The Toxic Avenger*: The transformation from 98-pound nerd Melvin Ferd into Toxie. His skin bubbles, pustules form all over his face, and his hair falls out.
-
*The Searchers* includes not only the very eerie abduction scene of Debbie in the cemetery but also the possible crossing of the Moral Event Horizon in our hero shooting out the eyes of a Comanche's corpse so that he will forever wander blind in the spirit world.
-
*Django*: When some outlaws cut off a man's ear and make him eat it. It makes the violence in Sergio Leone's westerns look tame in comparison. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LiveActionFilms |
Lobotomy Corporation / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
There's Nothing There.
**As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.**
- Every Abnormality is their own special flavor of Nightmare Fuel, and it's inevitable at least one (or ten) are scary to each Manager.
- Don't Touch Me. Just... Don't Touch Me. When you click it, it could either decrease all of the abnormalities' mood to zero or kill every single employee, and if you click on it too much it will cause the game to crash. No other Abnormality is capable of that level of destruction.
- Rudolta of the Sleigh, with its horrible glassy stare and overall corruption of Christmas themes. Its Encyclopedia artwork certainly doesn't help matters.
- Scarecrow Searching for Wisdom. While most HE-class abnormalities are relatively tame as far as abnormalities go, Scarecrow will chase down your employees to suck out their brains.
- The sounds that some abnormalities make when you zoom the camera into their cell. As an example, Nothing There or Foresaken Murderer's are just heavy, strained breathing.
- Nothing There. An abnormality that could only be described as a patchwork of human parts, with a severe case of Eyes Do Not Belong There. You better hope the employee you send to work on it stays calm or Nothing There will kill them and wear their skin. Oh, and it keeps wearing the employee until it finds a way to escape. Should you send another employee after that, you get the lovely image of organs covering the screen, blocking your vision as Nothing There breaches containment. Nothing There is an ALEPH class abnormality, and is loose disguised as his victim in the middle of your employees. The game gives you ten seconds to find it and shoot it to instantly send it back to its cell. Miss or run out of time, and the abnormality will go on a rampage. Fail to deal with the situation in time and things will go From Bad to Worse as Nothing There will enter a cocoon before coming out of it as a giant skinless... humanoid thing, with a massive HP pool. At this point your best chance to control the situation is to collect your daily quota of 0 LOB points and end the day.
- WhiteNight is an Abnormality so powerful and frightening that if it was an Abnormality who plays God, it is doing an
in making you realize the fear and horror of confronting something that thinks that it is God Almighty. No other Abnormality gives more Paranoia Fuel than this... thing, and this is actually an Abnormality that you have to face in its full glory to get its E.G.O. weapon, as well as 100% Abnormality resolution and the Golden Ending. **EXCELLENT JOB**
- Firstly, if this is your first time playing
*Lobotomy Corp*, you can pick this Abnormality as soon as *Day 11*, which is fairly early on in the game. However, instead of picking WhiteNight itself, it will disguise itself as a ZAYIN known as the Plague Doctor, a seemingly friendly plague doctor who can cure and bless your employees... aside that this is actually WhiteNight in disguise, and if it blesses an employee, a clock will show their name. It's Paranoia Fuel if you don't know what it does, and if you do it's even worse, knowing that the clock is an invitation to a facility wiping Eldritch Abomination that you can't handle. It's *very easy* to trigger its Blessing effect, which includes performing a Good or Bad work and even reaching a Second Trumpet. The Doctor also actually remembers how many employees it has blessed and their names no matter if you reset to Day 1 or not, and if the Doctor ever turns into WhiteNight, it will remember that as well and *forever* stay as WhiteNight.
- Now to WhiteNight proper. Once the Doctor has blessed twelve employees,
*all of them bar the 12th will turn into tall, lanky and monstrous Apostles with a plague doctor mask on them* and WhiteNight will begin his "salvation" on the facility, and the dreaded **Third Warning** theme that usually only plays when almost everyone in the facility is dead starts playing for the first time it ever pops up. note : Although if WhiteNight ever breaches it will automatically kill 12 employees so it will usually *still* trigger the Third Warning BGM upon breaching Rank 3 or below Employees will also panic almost instantly, and the Apostles will go around trying to kill anything on their way with *ridiculously heavy hitting attacks* and WhiteNight will do a solid chunk of pale damage to everything in the Facility every once a while while regenerating the Apostles who died, on top of having sky high resistances and HP, often taking an hour to kill; if this thing ever breaches in the harder levels, you can kiss your whole facility goodbye. Even worse, there are two Apostles defending WhiteNight himself and if anything gets hit by them, it's dead, because these Apostles do **270 PALE Damage** explanation : PALE Damage is Percentage Damage and not normal damage, so the Apostles are actually doing of your employee's HP, something that means certain death. Last but not least, they have an instant kill attack that possesses one of your employees and beheads them instantly; if they ever do this, you can kiss that employee goodbye, because there is absolutely no way to prevent them from being killed that way. The only saving grace is that the 12th Apostle is a heretic and can be ordered to work on One Sin as a panic button to kill this abomination instantly in case if you get it out early on, but it will usually be a Pyrrhic Victory for you if you have to kill it this way. **270%**
- While most harder Abnormalities let you use the in-game settings to deal with them and you can retry the level if something is amiss, WhiteNight
**outright disables these functions**! And it's not like the Apocalypse Bird or Silent Orchestra where it's conditional, as long as WhiteNight is breaching it strips your control away from the game's general UI *itself* unless you defeat it or it wipes out your whole facility. (Usually, it ends up with the latter.) While you obviously cannot pause or alter the game speed, in this case you can't even open the **Manual and the Main Menu**, something that no other Abnormality or in-game event can disable. If you try to use them, it will tell you that it is God and you can't run away from it. This thing wants you to see it and its Apostles wipe out your whole facility and it meant it.
- To put fire into the Paranoia Fuel, WhiteNight breaches
*automatically* after 4.5 minutes. While this is a generally easy Abnormality to manage (assuming you survive the initial assault, of course) and the time window gives you some leeway unlike the Express Train to Hell, if you are too focused in taking care of something else (such as breaching Sephirah, Apocalypse bird or Midnight Ordeals) and you forgot to take care of it, consider your whole run ruined.
- The Knight of Despair and the King of Greed make very unsettling sounds when they are breaching. The King's breaching form being those of a giant angler fish with the magical girl's head being hung on its mouth and having a hollow face with eyes dripping black liquid doesn't help either.
- If you pay attention when your agents panic, they say some very unsettling things. Lower ranking agents usually make insane, incoherent ramblings while rampaging or offing themselves, but high ranking agents will say some
*very disturbing things* quite casually when they do the same.
- The Abnormality selection screen you get between days is among the most interesting sections of the game, but also among the creepiest for some players. Ominous and depressing music plays as you're given three hanging containment units holding a new monster for you to take in, each with their own vague or out of context quote that only barely clues you in on what waits for you in the next day. For new players, their names are replaced by the Abnormalities serial number, giving a sense of dread that for all you know you could have just drafted in an Eldritch Abomination you can't handle.
- Speaking of the the abnormality selection screen, the hints are often either horribly ominous or outright disturbing. The anticipation of having to select new Abnormalities for your facility is often made worse by having to make your choice based on these entries with no additional context.
- How the individual Sephirah died. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero! Enjoy the long list of horrors you did personally or enabled.
- Malkuth: Overloaded by Cogito, Elijah lost all her nails and half her teeth, before being left to bleed out painfully by an apathetic A.
- Yesod: Gabriel
*clawed himself* to death due to his guilt over Elijah.
- Hod: Michelle killed herself after betraying the company. It wouldn't be that big if her betrayal didn't make her kill herself out of guilt that her whistleblowing caused an all-out massacre of some of the more important employees.
- The sequel,
*Library of Ruina* paints this event in a way harsher light. At the end of that game, when some agents of the Head pay a not-so-friendly visit to the Library, they outright tell Angela that they wouldn't even bother invading if not for her being made within the City, the experiments be damned. The whole incident could be *avoided* if Hod wasn't just being stupid/naive enough to think they would even bother caring about something as "trivial" as horrible experiments.
- Netzach: Giovanni died by Cogito injection, believing a lie that he'd be able to save the woman he cared about.
- Tiphereth B: Enoch
*willingly* threw his life away to a failed experiment, leading to his blood bond Lisa muttering hateful things at Carmen. Carmen didn't last long afterwards. (If you don't know what this means, *you* (or at least the person that was you) had an idea to get a kid killed so you could save humanity. It failed, and your Implied Love Interest lost her shit from the guilt and offed herself.
- Perhaps the worst thing about this incident, is that it started an expanding chain of Disaster Dominoes that led to A neglecting Elijah and Gabriel, killing Giovanni, Michelle reporting to the Head and leading Kali, Daniel, and even the chief commander of the Head raid Garion to die and get captured, the creation of Angela... and
**the effects are still lingering and spreading towards the whole City** by the time of *Library of Ruina*.
- Binah: Garion was impaled against the wall by Kali's sword and was forcefully captured and converted by 'A', resulting in L Corp's Pyrrhic Victory against the Head. While she did deserve at least that much for what she did, 'A' says that he had her still-living and barely conscious body collected and sent to Sephirah processing, which gives us a shot of a blood-covered Garion strapped to a chair and later having her brain and still connected eyeballs pulled out from her head to be put into the machine.
- Hokma: Benjamin was your most trusted friend a decade ago and tried to warn you how dangerous and malevolent your secretary AI Angela was. Angela, knowing that he was trying to warn you about her, instantly killed him, converted him into a Sephirah, threw him into the deepest layer of the facility and acted significantly more hostilely against you afterwards. However, if Abel's warnings (that would later come true) were taken for granted, then you did order Angela to kill him as a part of your 50 day playbooks. The point has came across that
*as long as you can save humanity from hell on earth, you will basically kill and destroy anyone and everyone next to you for that goal*.
- Carmen's breakdown and eventual death. Having felt guilt out of enabling A to kill Enoch in an experiment that she didn't want him to participate in, Lisa shouting hateful things at her, and the facility's agents wanting to off her to produce a research breakthrough, she broke down into an emotional mess that just hysterically laughed and cried all the time, with her eyes being described as blank and her tone of speech becoming colder. It's quite clear that she wouldn't last long... and true to that, she didn't. Some time later, this formerly optimistic and altruistic woman basically lost it and slit her wrists in a bathtub to commit suicide, a scene that was so gruesome that it traumatized A, that in nearly every one of A's flashbacks about Carmen her whole face was scribbled over, and her eyes not even displayed if her face is shown (with the exception the last time she's shown on Day 47, where her full face, eyes included, were displayed). And it turns out that Carmen's injuries were
*minor enough for her to be still conscious*, but it doesn't matter for her wildly cruel disciple A, who proceeded to *skin her alive and place her brain stem in a jar for Cogito* and use her brain map to construct Angela.
- There's the sinking realization that this game is a prime example where the player character
*himself* is **THE monster** out of all monsters within a Crapsack World ruled by corrupt corporate elites, overrun by cannibals and Hired Guns, where being a paramilitary "fixer" is *required* to even have some chance of survival, death and chaos are daily matters and everything is charged ridiculously expensively, including living rights in a metropolitan zone. But you have effectively outdone *every single one* of these entities in the outside world by subjecting your employees to being brutally murdered by the monsters you are sheltering, many of which have abnormally high capabilities even when compared to the sheer number of fellow human beings willing to fight and kill in the city. You also neglected and subjected your allies and inner circle, who trusted you deeply, to brutal deaths (see the section about Elijah, Gabriel, Giovanni, Enoch, and Benjamin above) only to revive them as AI people. To say nothing of the woman that you used to work for, whom you *extracted the brain stem of to further your research* when she was traumatized from all the horror you induced within the old facility, and could otherwise be easily healed of the injuries she suffered from her suicide attempt. However, the worst one is the creation of Angela, which would turn out to be something in the game's sequel. **MUCH, MUCH, WORSE** | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LobotomyCorporation |
Looperverse / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
<!—index—> 30 Days in Spring The Adventures of a Sword<!—/index—> | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Looperverse |
Lizzie / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
The Film The shots of Andrew Borden's mutilated head. By the time Lizzie's finished killing him, he has no face left. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Lizzie |
Er Ist Wieder Da / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- The premise may sound ridiculous and purely Played for Laughs at first... but as the story progresses, the idea of Adolf Hitler returning, now armed with even greater instruments of propaganda and a new political climate of fear and anger for him to exploit, stops being funny and becomes terrifying. The movie especially makes it very clear that yes, he is going to go back in politics and seize power once again.
- Most comedies about Hitler go out of their way to defang him, painting him as a harmless clown that gets humiliated (the Adolf Hitlarious trope describes exactly that)... although there are some comedic moments regarding Hitler being a Fish out of Temporal Water, the moment he gets his shit together, it becomes clear that this Adolf is not 'hitlarious' in the slightest: he is the very same genocidal bigot as his historical counterpart, and really, he's not stupid; he is intelligent, adaptive, and charismatic, and the moment he is introduced to the internet and social media, he immediately realizes how he can exploit them for his own goals.
- His mere sight is nightmare fuel for one of his staff members's grandmother, an old Jewish woman... despite the dementia, she not only recognizes him, she
*knows* he is the genuine article... How would you feel to spend decades with the meager consolation that the man who exterminated all of your loved ones is dead and cannot do more harm, only for him to reappear, completely unchanged by time, right in your house, brought there by your moronically-oblivious nephew? When they tell her he is a 'comedian' and 'just a joke', she coldly replies that even back then, people laughed at him at first.
- Add to more creepy fuel: upon realizing the staff member who introduced him to the internet/social media is of Jewish descent, he
*immediately* begins to show disappointment that someone with 'such promise' is a Jew, showing that *even when knowing someone who is Jewish*, Hitler is still bigoted and nothing will change his mind. note : The actual Hitler's mother was treated by a Jewish physician, and he thanked the man for this by letting him emigrate from Germany. Also with a Jewish commanding officer he had in the army who recommended him for promotion. However, this still didn't stop his genocidal antisemitism.
- When he hijacks a 'politically incorrect' (read: a charade of racist, offensive-for-the-sake-of-being-offensive screeds) comedy show, breaking the supposed script to make a grand speech, summoning all the tricks of propaganda with practiced ease, it reminds everyone how much of a master demagogue the real Adolf Hitler really was, and it reflects how in real life 'ironic' bigotry in media is hijacked by actual bigots that use it as a platform to normalize and preach.
- The original German version of his first television appearance ends on a brilliant and chilling pun: "Jetzt beginnt die Rücksendung". After giving a speech at how TV these days is crap, it can be read as "and now we will be fighting (transmitting, 'Sendung' is a TV transmission) back". But it also literally means 'sending back', as in deporting everyone who is 'not German'.
- Playing parallel to Hitler's triumphal words about the possibilities this new but just as cruel and idiotic world opens to him, the movie's end shows scenes of far-right demonstrations and neo-fascist violence. These scenes are not posed; they are actual recordings of real life demonstrations, with people shouting expletives and throwing stones and burning objects. And now imagine you see these scenes at the cinema and
*recognize them* because they were recorded in your hometown, and you realize how screwed up *reality* is and how *actual people in your environment do behave*... can get the blood freezing in your veins. Especially when Hitler specifically cites the rise of far-right groups like them as proof he "can work with this" and get back into politics. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LookWhosBack |
Looper / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
**Spoilers Off applies to all Nightmare Fuel pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!**
- The Looper business model. You're young and your prospects are limited. Working as a looper is high-paying, easy work in a Crapsack World. There's a catch but it's so far away you don't even care. Then one day your paycheck is a different color and it means there's a very special person under that bag on their head. You can take your money and run as far as you can but you know that in exactly thirty years, somehow, that person is you.
- The opening scene is a quiet buildup to a rather shocking climax, with Joe alone in a field on a pretty morning as he practices speaking French. Then he checks his watch, readies a gun and stands in front of a bare tarp on the ground. Where a bound and hooded man suddenly appears from out of nowhere, whose screams are immediately silenced when Joe casually blasts a hole through his chest.
-
**CID**. He's a Creepy Child with a bad temper and telekinetic powers. He killed the aunt that raised him, and his mother has to hide in a safe when he has a tantrum. In the future, he ends up becoming a crazy mob boss who wants revenge on the loopers. How he does this is unknown, but it's safe to say it's not pretty. Worst of all, it's not certain this future has been prevented at the end of the film.
- Old Seth literally falling apart as Young Seth is being mutilated alive.
- Probably one of the most nighmarish scenes out there in the eyes of many. Just check the comments.
- Specifically, the scene where he's trying desperately to get to the place he knows they're going to kill him, but they aren't stopping at any point. One of his legs disappears while he's in the car, making him crash outside. As he hobbles towards the door, his other leg vanishes. By the time he's beating on the door begging them to stop in a tongueless moan, he's nothing but a head, torso, and set of stumps. Then the doors swing open ominously, and Kid Blue steps out and shoots dead what's left of Old Seth. As he drags the remains inside, we see the mutilated Young Seth lying on an operating table, and hooked up to a ventilator.
- All of this is granted another layer of horror when Old Joe mentions, later, that he gains the memories of his changing past as it happens. Which means Old Seth would be remembering exactly what was being done to him, in real time.
- One particular moment that you'd most likely miss on first viewing? After Old Seth decides to ignore the message being scarred onto his arm, he starts climbing a chain-link fence. Within a split second as he pulls himself up, his right pinkie finger vanishes. An instant later, his ring finger is gone. Then his middle finger,
*and his nose, and several teeth*.
- And what may be worst part? Seth needs to remain alive for the next 30 years to keep his loop intact. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Looper |
Lo que callamos las mujeres / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
"Pero nosotras hemos convivido demasiado. Mira, te traje un regalo: Testimonio de los momentos más preciados que hemos pasado juntas".Given the down-to-earth nature of the series, this trope is a quite jarring example, because of the mundane nature of the series. Examples include:
- "Atrapada En La Red": Flor embodies this in the episode. She's a lonely girl that befriends Susana through the internet, but as the episode progresses, she becomes more dehinged and more insane with wanting to be Susana's best friend in world, coming as far as commiting crimes, like vandalizing the car of her best friend. When Susana gets fed up with her, she blocks her, bad idea, Flor doesn't take this well and has a breakdown, then she hacks all of her pages in the internet to difame her and in order to stop this, Susana wants to meet Flor face to face in a park to tell her to leave her alone, the worst part is that Susana brings an scrapbook with pasted photos of her over Susana's photos as a "testimony of the best moments they had spent together", of course this scares Susana and rejects her, after doing that Flor becomes more unstable and berates how she did everything for Susana even gloating every crime she did through the episodea and claims how much she hates her, then she decides that if Susana is not her friend, then she'll force her to be her best friend, luckily Susana's parents were there and stop Flor before she could harm Susana while she starts crying screaming "Susana you have to be my best friend!". A quite scary episode indeed.
- "Educación Especial": Etelvina embodies this during the episode. Griselda is worried for the behavior of her son Ramiro due the abuse of his father, so Etelvina, her teacher offers her that she can heal him. But later we discover that Etelvina is a dehinged woman that develops an obsession with Ramiro, she not only brainwashes him and kidnaps him in her own consulting room, she even comes as far to rape him. When Griselda realizes that Etelvina lied to her, she comes to save her son, but Etelvina had a nasty surprise prepared, she brainwashed Ramiro and recorded him to say that her mother Griselda and her godmother Zulma abuse and rape him, which is a lie and plans to put them in jail. She even gloats in front of her how she'll never give Ramiro back to her, because she doesn't loves him. And then she starts graphically to describe how she and Ramiro had sex (incredible in her words) and how they kiss each other. When the police arrives to rescue Ramiro and arrest her, she refers Ramiro as "Mi amor" ("My Love") and even tells him "¡Te amo!" ("I love you!"), completely dehinged. She's easily one of the darkest antagonist from this series. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoQuecallamoslasmujeres |
Logan / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
**Laura:** You had a nightmare. **Logan:** Do you have nightmares? **Laura:** Sí. Translation : "Yes." People hurt me. **Logan:** Mine are different. **Laura:** ¿Por qué? Translation : "Why?" **Logan:** I hurt people. *Logan* got its "R" rating for many good reasons. Strong language, dismemberments, eviscerations, its sheer usage of blood... the list goes on. People expecting PG-13 violence will be in for a shock.
- The
*style* of the film's combat itself: all the fast-paced, stylized violence of the previous X-Men films is gone, replaced with the kind of swipes and strikes that would be expected in a violent action or horror movie. It's extremely brutal and graphically bloody. The characters in this film fight like you'd expect normal people trying to maim each other to fight like, and it's vicious.
- During the "Grace" TV spot, Caliban nonchalantly activates two grenades with each hand. He's giving his life to help take down his captors and X-24.
- It gets worse. In a deleted scene, Caliban initially survives the blast, leaving his nearly limbless, severely burnt body crawling towards Logan. Shortly after they exchange a knowing glance, Caliban collapses and finally dies from his wounds.
**JESUS CHRIST!**
- Transigen in general. Dr. Rice and the Reavers are
*monsters*, in so many ways.
- While it's heartbreaking, it's also frightening to see the great telepath Charles Xavier now a ranting mess whose seizures can freeze hundreds of people at once. As Dr. Rice puts it, "a degenerative brain condition in the most powerful brain in the world. Quite a combo." It takes on a whole new harsh light when it's revealed that one of these seizures killed the X-Men.
- At an Oklahoma City hotel, Xavier has such a seizure, causing 400 people to be frozen in agony, unable to move but totally aware of their state. When it passes, you see people collapsed, moaning, and even bleeding, making it clear just how dangerous Xavier can truly be. Tied to the above, when Logan (barely able to withstand the effect) comes to the hotel room, he sees a pack of mercenaries frozen around Xavier. While they may deserve it, you have to feel for the mercs, unable to move but clearly watching helplessly as Logan comes up to kill them one by one.
- X-24, who is a clone of Logan so feral he can't even talk, just screaming animal rage when he murders Xavier and the Munson family. Him resembling a young Logan mixed with Victor "Sabretooth" Creed adds to the creepiness factor.
- His very first appearance serves as an enormous Wham Shot. You — and Charles — are led to believe that this is just Logan checking up on the old professor, until the camera changes to his face; still Hugh Jackman, but with
*clearly* different hair and eyes, and a strangely dark tank top...
- The scene where X-24 captures Laura and is taking her back to the vehicle where Caliban is being held captive. We get treated to a view of what it looks like from inside the vehicle as his dark figure slowly approaches, completely surrounded by shadows. It makes X-24 look like a slasher horror movie villain slowly approaching his target.
- After the audience figures out that "Logan" is an impostor, X-24 drives his claws right into Xavier's chest, taking us out of what should have been a heartwarming scene and straight into terror. Just the murder of Xavier counts all by its own, doubling as a Tear Jerker.
**Xavier**
: I think I finally understand you.
*(X-24 puts a hand on Xavier's shoulder, slowly getting closer...before putting a fist on Xavier's chest)* **Xavier**
: Logan...?
**(SNIKT)**
- Not even
*once* does Charles scream or groan in agony after being clawed right into the chest. The pain is so absolutely immense that the guy can hardly even *move or speak*. Once it initially happens, his mouth opens agape as if to scream, but nothing comes out, even as Laura pounces on 24.
- Logan having to tell himself "It wasn't me, it wasn't me" upon finding a dying Charles at the hands of X-24. This has several very disturbing implications, namely at least Logan fearing Sanity Slippage (he might have thought he was seeing an Enemy Without when he crossed X-24, that is, the literal embodiment of his feral instincts), and also Logan having LIKELY entertained the thought of KILLING Charles himself! Otherwise he would feel no need to reascertain the reality of the fact he did NOT kill Charles and the family. He must have thought for an instant that he might have gone crazy in a moment of frenzy and done this.
- Or the considerably simpler and more obvious alternative: he was desperate to convey to Xavier's fading consciousness that the murderer was an impostor, so the professor wouldn't die thinking Logan had done it.
- There's just something so eerie about how X-24 slowly removes his blood-smeared claws from Xavier's chest, and doesn't even look at them,
*continuing to stare at Xavier with an expression of pure, absolute scorn* as he prepares to stab him again.
- And then X-24 slaughters the family that had taken Logan, Laura, and Xavier in.
*One. By. One.* Dear God, the music playing during this entire sequence, pulsing and getting louder and louder.
- Dr. Rice is not only completely uncaring in having X-24 kill several innocent people — one of them being around preteen age — but he's actually
*impressed* by the clone's ruthlessness. The only time Rice tells 24 to stop is when he's mauling Canewood law enforcement... *just because* Rice already got what he needed and didn't want to waste time waiting on 24's senseless violence.
- During the first fight between Wolverine and Laura against the Reavers, there's one scene where Laura is shot through the chest with a harpoon. Even if it's merely a flesh wound for her, the fact that it's happening to
*a child's body* makes it pretty uncomfortable to watch. Her pained scream when she is shot is also very jarring.
- The fact that Magneto was right. Humans did figure out a way to cause the extinction of mutantkind. Previous human villains resorted to violence one way or another to rid the world of mutants, and all failed. Zander Rice simply found the most effective and unnoticeable way to suppress the mutation gene
*before birth* by making foodstuffs and drinks out of a special GMO, while giving the job of physical extermination of what little was left to the Reavers.
- Even before Logan comes in, the final battle is riddled with
*vicious* displays of violence, mostly coming from the X-23s brutally murdering Reavers:
- The frost breath X-23 kid freezes the arm of one of the Reavers and shatters it right off his body. Cue the blood and scream.
- One of the X-23 kids telekinetically throws a rain of wood shards and pine needles at some of the Reavers, turning the head of one of them into a bloody porcupine and eventually blows him to pieces with them.
- Even though he deserved it, watching Pierce getting telekinetically warped, electrocuted, frozen, strangled by grass, and god knows what else all at once by the X23 children is extremely unnerving. He tries to beg for his life, with the X-23s ignoring his pleas while silently sporting expressions of pure
*contempt*. And we don't see his body afterwards.
- That unnerving gaze that Laura always seems to have whenever she's in a new environment or when she changes to an existing environment occur takes on a far more frightening meaning when you combine it with her other mannerisms. It's not a fearful or curious gaze. It's the gaze of a predator, and she's monitoring her surroundings for threats, sizing up every living being that she spots, and most likely planning out how to kill them if they make a wrong move or escape from unmanageable threats if she has to. The Mook Horror Show inside Logan's hideout when the Reavers followed her in? She wasn't fleeing, she was luring them in to a place where she would have greater control. She was
*hunting* them. Every time she enters a new area, her mind starts planning the best possible way to kill everyone there.
- This is then followed by her Establishing Character Moment, when she exits the hideout and reveals her true nature to everyone outside. She calmly walks out the building, casually holding the
*decapitated head of the lead Reaver sent to retrieve her* in her hand. And the she emits an animal-like roar in front of Pierce and the other Reavers, which actually manages to send Pierce into a panic.
- The convenience store clerk's screaming from...whatever Pierce is doing to him when the camera cuts away. We can't see it, but we've seen how ruthless he is, and it's clearly not pretty.
- Even worse when his body is later seen along with the Munson family, meaning they killed him once they'd gotten what they needed from him.
- While it's awesome to finally see it in a Wolverine film, a lot of the violence is pretty stomach-churning. The opening scene alone features a nauseating shot of Logan sticking his claws up a guy's chin. Unlike the bald Reaver from the hotel later in the film, this guy can and does react to it, gargling in pain as Logan's claws impale his tongue to the top of his mouth. Special mention goes to the aftermath, when Logan is
*popping bullets out of the holes/indents in his skin*.
- Another instance of especially vicious gore comes from the Vegas hotel scene, where Logan stabs his claws through a Reaver's head — from the back
**through the** on his way to Charles. **face**
- So you took one of the most dangerous mutants, one with enhanced strength, speed, senses, and agility, indestructible claws and bones, a healing factor that could shrug off a nuke (even if he was a few miles away) and a fury to rival Hulk, and you put all his powers in a little girl. One who was taught to not have a conscience and be trained to kill.
- The other X-23 children, despite being subjected to the exact same conditions as Laura, are all relatively normal. Sure, they can (and do) kill with unnerving ease and little remorse, but that's their last resort; otherwise, they have campfire cookouts, they smile, and
*they speak*. Laura does none of these, suggesting that her emotionlessness and instinct to kill are part of *her*, likely from her mutation. Imagine Logan: he is capable of and willing to kill almost anyone if they anger him sufficiently, and he is literally an animal when he does, but he regrets it. Laura is Logan but abused and neglected, and she doesn't show any remorse at the people she's killed. One can only hope she gets better with age.
- According to Hugh Jackman, the film's visceral violence was not the main reason the film received an R-rating, but was merely taking advantage of it. The film's portrayal of Transigen's Child Soldier plans was the true reason the film received such an adult rating.
- A minor example, but during the opening scene, one of Logan's claws doesn't fully extend. A very eerie scene follows where Logan slowly and painfully pulls it out with his own hands. Which
*draws blood*. When this scene was first shown in the second trailer, many viewers thought that Logan was performing Self-Harm.
- While Logan's intentions are not Self-Harm-related in this first scene, there
*is* a scene in Gabriella's expositional video where Laura cuts herself with her new claws. Over and over again.
- Another scene in said video features Transigen soldiers chasing after one of the X-23 kids, who went up to their headquarters' rooftop
*and unhesitantly jumped off!*
- A deleted scene from the end of the film dubbed "Puppet Master" shows one of the X-23 kids has the ability to mentally manipulate people to follow his actions. When being chased by three Reavers, he controls the first one to turn around and shoot the other two before making him hold the gun to his chin and shoot himself.
- The idea of scientists manipulating food and drink with GMOs to prevent mutant births is disturbing enough on its own merits. But then you factor in the metaphor of mutanthood, and it becomes downright
*terrifying*, no different than using those products to eliminate a race or sexual orientation. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Logan |
Locke & Key / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
A casual stroll through the mind of a sadistic demon.
Just like his daddy, Joe Hill has a fantastic and terrifying imagination. Add in an incredibly detailed artist like Gabriel Rogriguez? Pure nightmare fuel.
**Be wary: per wiki policy, spoilers are off on Nightmare Fuel pages!**
- Right away, we know Sam Lesser and Al Grubb are bad news by the cut-away reveal that they murdered a random couple just because they needed a vehicle to get to the Locke house.
- Sam and Al's home invasion itself. Incredibly terrifying to consider two strangers showing up on your doorstep, sweet-talking their way into your home, and then having their way with your entire family.
- Sam murders Rendell Locke by shooting him in the face with a high-caliber revolver. The image of his face with a gaping, bloody hole where his right eye should be haunts Bode and Tyler throughout the entire series.
- We see Al standing in the Lockes' bedroom doorway, pulling up his unbuttoned pants. Behind him, there are bloody handprints on the wall and a shoe casually thrown on the bed. It's strongly implied through the art alone that he has just finished raping Nina Locke.
- Made even worse when we later find out that Al had been watching Nina while he washed her car. Because of how she dressed, he fantasized that she wanted him sexually. It's horrifying insight into the mind of a rapist and how he excuses his awful behavior.
- The image of Kinsey and Bode cowering in fear on the roof as Sam stalks the yard with his revolver raised high.
- After fending off Sam, Tyler returns to the house only to find his dad's corpse and Al waiting for him. He raises the revolver and fires... only to find it empty. Al grins and heads to find his hatchet. Only his mother's timely intervention saves Tyler's life.
- As Tyler is staring into the Keyhouse pond at one point, he sees an image of himself covered in blood and holding both Sam's revolver and the brick he used to bash his head in.
- The first we see of Dodge in this tale is of her face appearing to Sam Lesser via the sink in his cell. Her reptilian eyes are very creepy and she seems immediately to be a creature of unfathomable evil. Even the typeface is different, with her dialogue appearing all-caps and in a different font.
- We later find out that Sam first meets Dodge when he's in Rendell's office for a counseling appointment. She appears in a
*drawing* of the wellhouse, spelling out H-E-L-P M-E and L-I-S-T-E-N T-O E-C-H-O-E-S. Both Sam and the Lockes never had a chance. **Sam:** Where are you? I did everything you asked. You promised me a new home. And a new face. **Dodge:** [ *referencing his scars and prison cell*] You have *both*.
- Bode opens a door with a new key he has found, walks through it, and immediately crumples to the ground, with his spirit having left his body.
- The design of the Ghost Key itself is plenty scary, highlighted by the skull's glowing red eyes.
- Bode tends to use his spirit-walking for good, but does spy on his family quite a bit, including catching Tyler grieving in the shower. Very uncomfortable to imagine an invisible being spying on you without you even noticing.
- There's a scary moment when Bode tries to show Kinsey his new power, only for her to think he's pulling a prank. Bode could have been permanently separated from his body and no one would ever have known what happened to him.
- Gabriel Rodriguez draws Bode as if his body has actually died, with a bulging tongue and saliva dripping from his mouth.
- Bode has a nightmare where he's holding hands with his dad, who is telling him a knock-knock joke. The next panel zooms in on his gory eye-hole. In great detail.
- Dodge luring Bode into the well, gaining his trust, and getting him to get the scissors and mirror that will help Sam Lesser escape from prison. Gets at the very fears of your small child talking to an evil stranger without your knowledge.
- We get a glance at Dodge's true face when she looks in the mirror. It's bloodcurdling.
- Sam's escape from San Lobo. He brutally stabs a guard passing by his cell with the provided scissors and then shoots a fleeing electrician in cold blood as he pleads for his life.
- The look on Kinsey's face when she overhears that Sam has escaped is one of pure terror. She is so traumatized by what happened to her family that she later vomits in school upon smelling fresh paint, since Tyler knocked over a paint can during the assault.
- Even though it ends up being Kinsey, it's very tense watching Jackie go to open her door without knowing who is on the other side, given what has happened in the story so far.
- Bode has another nightmare where he's playing in a morgue under a body bag that's lying on a table. A voice begins to come from the bag. As Bode peeks up, the bag unzips itself and we see the biggest close-up yet of Rendell Locke's mangled face. Bode wakes up crying uncontrollably.
- When Duncan later likens Bode's knock-knock joke (that Dead!Rendell told him in the dream) to an "echo," the thought comes to mind that Dodge may be the one tormenting Bode with nightmares.
- The truck driver that Sam hitches with casually suggesting that he can make some extra money by prostituting himself via a glory hole at the truck stop. Sam ends up killing him by driving a tire iron through his eyeball.
- The horrifying reveal that Sam Lesser kills Rendell Locke because, in a fit of adolescent rage, Tyler had openly asked him to.
**Sam:** Yeah. I understand that. You can't imagine how often I wake up thinking I ought to kill my dad today. **Tyler:** Ha. Well. You ever decide to kill your dad, *do me a favor and kill mine while you're at it*.
- Sam Lesser, a once kind-hearted kid driven mad with child abuse, bullying, head trauma, and the influence of a demon, is now so far gone that he murders everyone on a bus because he doesn't like the way a woman is staring at him. The woman, mind you, who was holding a baby in her arms.
- Sam then murders a fisherman who he had forced to boat him out to Lovecraft. We haven't gotten close to most of the eldritch horrors to come, but the sheer awfulness of Sam's murders in this volume is very depressing.
- When Bode lets slip that he told the others about Dodge, she immediately comes up from the well and grabs him. She coyly teases the relationship she (as Luke Caravaggio) once had with Rendell and threatens to kill him if he doesn't get her the Anywhere Key. Bode, six-years-old, mind you, is shaken and in tears.
- Kinsey then goes to look for Bode and is greeted by Sam Lesser, who proceeds to beat her head with a flashlight repeatedly. He then locks Nina and Duncan in the wine cellar and takes Tyler at gunpoint, holding Kinsey's unconscious body hostage to get the keys for Dodge. Who, all the while, is taunting Bode in the wellhouse about his family's impending deaths if
*he* doesn't get the keys for her.
- Tyler finds out about the Ghost Key's effects not by playing, as Bode had done, but when Sam is choking the life out of him. He floats above his body, in pure shock, and genuinely thinks at first that he's dead.
- Dodge, now a man, keeps his promise to Bode. He breaks Sam's neck and throws him through the Ghost Door, essentially dooming him to a life as a ghost haunting Keyhouse.
- Dodge suddenly shows up at the door of the kindly track coach, Ellie, covered in Sam's blood and claiming that he killed her mother... and then a suspiciously familiar looking boy named Zack starts attending Lovecraft and befriending the Lockes. Just what in the world does Dodge have planned for them?
- After hearing of Brian's injuries, Nina's alcoholism worsens to where Tyler is the one consoling her and helping her to bed. It must be very scary to see your parent in such bad condition to where you have to be the caretaker while still a child.
- Later, Kinsey finds a few empty liquor bottles and lets Nina have it, right before she is set to drive to the ferry to visit Duncan and Brian. Nina responds by chugging more liquor before getting in her car.
**Kinsey:** You crash the car driving drunk, I'm not going to cry over it. I'm all cried out these days and you know what you're doing. In theory.
- Nina later calls Tyler telling him she's missed the ferry by accident and will need to stay the night. In reality? She's at a bar, getting more and more drunk...
- At one point, she tries to drunkenly juggle some plates to impress her kids. When they crash to the floor, she instantly blames Kinsey. All three of her children just stare at her and walk away.
- After finding the Mending Key, Nina, drunk, has the bright idea of using it to try to bring Rendell back to life. She puts his ashes in the mending cabinet and showers, dressing afterward in her fanciest lingerie. She spots who she thinks is Rendell and lovingly embraces him from behind... only to find out it's
*Tyler* instead. Ick. In the ensuing struggle, Rendell's urn falls to the ground and breaks, spreading ashes everywhere. Kinsey again lets her mom have it with a shocking statement and gets a slap in the face. Everyone only stops when Bode walks in and bursts into tears. It's a very harrowing and authentic portrayal of domestic violence.
**Kinsey:** And nothing you've been through, even being **raped**, gives you permission to treat the people you love like - [ *slap*]
- The entire conflict for this volume involves "Zack" breaking into the Keyhouse at night without the Lockes ever knowing a thing. He could have killed them all and been none the wiser (and still does plenty regardless).
- "Zack" uses the Ghost Door so he can talk to Sam Lesser. When we see his spirit, there's a black...
*thing* embedded in his spine. It has tendrils embedded in his brain and multiple yellow eyes with black slits for pupils. What in the world happened to Luke "Dodge" Caravaggio?
- Upon further inspection it almost looks like... a giant key. A living key, with the head of the key (and biggest eye) right where Dodge's heart should be. Dodge even describes the
*thing* as a kind of key.
- A flashback reveals that Dodge had been spying on Rendell Locke via his sink. Without him ever knowing.
- When fighting the spirit of Sam Lesser, Dodge hints that he's destroyed other souls before. How? And who? Do you reach the afterlife if your soul has been destroyed?
- The spirits of Sam and Dodge enter "Zack's" body. At the same time. Sam immediately begins choking "himself," with Dodge fighting desperately to make it back to the door. He barely manages to retake control and escape with his life.
- "Zack" then immediately has to use the Anywhere Key to
*just barely* escape Nina's notice while dropping the Well Key and leaving it behind. There are so many times during the series where he effortlessly gets his way that to see him flirt with his nightmare of being caught in his schemes and potentially returned to the well is... exhilarating.
- The near-death experience in the caves. Kinsey, Jackie, Jamal, and Scot head down to see Rendell's name carved in the rocks. When a rat scares Jamal, the stairs collapse, stranding all four kids in freezing cold water without a way back up to the platform where the exit is. All four come
*this close* to dying of either drowning or hypothermia before Kinsey's quick thinking gets them out of there. No one would have known what happened to them and no one was close enough to hear their screams for help.
- We see one of the glow sticks they dropped upon leaving float all the way to the bottom of the water... where it illuminates a very old and very creepy looking corpse.
- "Zack," now rocking a sleek black turtleneck, finds a mysterious key in a jar of jelly. He opens a door with it and comes upon a sinister looking crown. After putting it on... he immediately summons a legion of shadow creatures and orders them to find the missing keys.
**"Zack":** Hello darkness, my old friend
- The shadows begin to terrorize the Lockes
- Bode's shadow turns into a mirror image of him and drags him throughout the house.
- Kinsey's shadow turns into a facsimile of her fear sprite, but huge and much more deadly. It holds her down on her bed, but she manages to get away by shining a bright light in its face.
- Tyler is beaten savagely and captured by a giant shadow centurion, who slightly resembles both him and his dad. He is greeted by "Zack" disguised as a shadow version of the female Dodge. After spitting in his (her?) face, Tyler is nipped and bitten by a number of shadow animals, torturing him for spite because he won't give up the keys.
- The group is almost saved by Detective Mutuku, but the shadows get to him first and use the Head Key to force him to leave.
- Upon initially failing to retrieve the keys, "Zack" morphs into a giant shadow wolf that's nearly as big as Godzilla.
- Tyler uses the Head Key on Bode to erase his memory of the shadow attack. He has the good intention of saving the kid some lifelong trauma, sure, but he still tampered with his memories against his will.
- This opening panel? A crazed man with familiar reptilian eyes and a Slasher Smile on his face, dressed in colonial garb, stands in the snowy Keyhouse yard holding a bloodied bayonet in one hand and the Omega Key in other. A man's severed head lies in the background.
- In a colonial-era flashback, young Benjamin Locke and his sister watch as British soldiers callously hang their parents for making artillery for the Continental Army. The soldiers, forcefully quartering on the Keyhouse property, are impatient and rude, and the children are shocked and crying. They are forced to live in the wellhouse after.
- The truth about the death of Joshua Locke. He was butchered by a demon-possessed Harm Timmerman while trying to stop him from killing everyone in the caves.
- The black door itself is plenty terrifying. It has the appearance of a tomb, lidded with yellow eyes with black slits for pupils. From the inside comes a glow of faint blue light.
- The look on the elder Timmerman's face when he catches a glimpse of what lays beyond the black door. His eyes are shining and he grins widely, as if it's the happiest thing he's seen in his life. Only Mr. Fredericks' timely action saves him from damnation.
- From the demons' perspective, the state of what is beyond the black door is so terrible that they'll risk instant death just for a chance to live in our world.
- When the rebels are interrogating a bound Harm, his brother is staring at the door. Slowly, it seems to open of its own accord, and the man, unable to resist the blue light within, sticks his hand in the door. Harm immediately jams his thumb deep into Fredericks' only good eye and bites
into his neck. Meanwhile, the now-possessed brother rushes at Benjamin with his bayonet, only stopped by a quick shot from Captain Adam. As Harm lies on the ground, wounded by a shot from Fredericks' pistol, he raves about how delicious his blood tastes. **hard**
- The horrors of the black door are such that Captain Adam is willing to risk the British killing every single one of them if it means no one else gets possessed.
- One of the dead demons begins speaking to Benjamin. The language is evil and harsh, unintelligible to the reader. As he holds it up to his ear and listens, visions of keys began dancing in his eyes. We thus learn the horrible truth - the magic keys bound to the Locke family are forged from the corpses of the demons that come from the black door.
- In perhaps the most horrifying sequence in the entire series, "Bode" pushes Jay Bird in front of a moving bus when he figures out his true identity. He is able to convincingly play it off as an accident and no one ever is the wiser. Gabriel Rodriguez draws Jay Bird's legs sticking out from under the bus, his blood pooling over the street. All the children on the bus are in tears. It's sickening, a child senselessly murdered at the whims of a demon-possessed little boy.
- "Bode's" behavior in general. It's quite disturbing to see Dodge's cruelty and profanity (and those reptilian eyes) come from a six-year-old boy, especially one that we've gotten to know and love over the past four volumes.
- Jay Bird's poor mother. Her entire life without her little boy is a nightmare.
- Tyler, under the control of Kinsey's fear and sadness sprites, attempts to burn down Keyhouse.
*With his family inside.* He knocks out Duncan and blocks off the staircase so no one can stop him. Ironically, only "Bode" saves the family this time by reminding Kinsey about the sprites.
- When Kinsey uses the Head Key on Tyler to remove her sprites, "Bode" pulls out the Omega Key. Just like that. Turns out, Tyler had kept it in his head the whole time. Now, the most evil being in the universe has the key that will let him make everyone else just like him.
- The kids use the Head Key on Duncan to forcefully remove his memory of the near-burning.
- Thanks to Tyler and Kinsey's time travel, we get a closer look at the hanging of Benjamin's parents. His father's eyes were bulging and blood was pouring out of his mouth as he strained against the noose.
- Kim's racist, bullying tirade against Mark Cho. Someone he thought was a friend snapped and insulted his ethnicity and virginity.
- As we spend time with Rendell and his friends in flashback, we see that Luke "Dodge" Caravaggio was a.... really good person. Very loving and sweet to Ellie and a genuine and kind soul. It's even more horrifying in hindsight to think of how the demon from the black door has twisted him into a brutal, sadistic killer.
- The stunning revelation that Dodge's possession is initially Rendell's fault - it was his idea to open the black door and let a demon through so they could forge another key. A key, mind you, that would only satisfy their vanity. All the present-day horrors of the series are possible because of Rendell Locke's vanity.
- Erin's living hell of being in love with her best friend and him being completely oblivious to it.
- Mark Cho casually calling a young Duncan a gay slur when he uses the Gender Key to change into a little girl. He also later calls him an ugly word for mentally disabled folks.
- More awful foreshadowing - Duncan only ends up in the caves to begin with because, out of kindness, Dodge tells him where they're going. His possession is the result of being sweet to a little kid.
- The gang walk past a number of doors while on the way to the black door (which is labeled 11). What are the other 10 doors for? What lies behind them? As they walk past door #1, it creeps open and a familiar blue light seeps out... are the demons behind that door too? If not them, then what? Why is it opening?
- The truth about Dodge's possession. He bravely volunteers to stand by Rendell at the door in case something were to go wrong. As he's looking away, he catches a glimpse of... Duncan, who had snuck back into the caves. He is mesmerized by the demons beyond the door. As Dodge tries to stop him, he turns around himself and is unable to resist. His hand goes in, he turns around, and a now-familiar Slasher Smile with reptilian eyes graces his beautiful face.
**Rendell:** Dodge, what's happening? **What the fuck is happening?**
**Dodge:** [ *grinning wickedly*] *Something wonderful.*
- Dodge sneaks into the Keyhouse and holds a hatchet to Rendell's head, demanding the Omega Key. He is quickly apprehended, but is unable to feel pain or remorse. He spews vile racism and taunts Erin for Rendell not loving her.
- The gang opens up Dodge's head with the Head key, providing the page image above. Some highlights?
- A giant shadow wolf dangling Ellie in a birdcage
- Multiple copies of Dodge in fencing gear, with sinister, living masks and sharpened swords at the ready
- The entire gang, Omega Keys stuffed in their backs like wind-up toys, marching one-by-one into the maw of the black door.
- Dodge, dressed in colonial garb, waves a flag with the inscription JOIN OR DIE and an image of a man with his legs cut off woven between an omega symbol.
- Dodge, with angel wings and a butcher's apron, holding Kim's severed head and a bloody butcher knife. The heads of the rest of the group are on pikes. Including Duncan's. Other heads, including Professor Ridgeway's, can be found strewn on the ground, in vast pools of blood.
- When the group uses the Head Key on Dodge to strip his memories, Ellie finally names out loud how horrible the practice is.
**Ellie:** What we just did to him is enough. **More** than enough - it was like rape. It was **worse** than rape.
- When Ellie later approaches a mind-wiped Dodge at school lunch, he's still nasty enough to spit chewed-up hot dog in her face. When he can't remember a thing about her, he takes it out on the girl he's sitting next to, threatening her with violence.
- Ellie's awful mother bullies her cruelly about Dodge no longer being with her.
- What happens to Rendell's mother's spirit. Ellie regularly goes to the well, where they've hidden Dodge's memories, and speaks to Mrs. Locke's spirit, who comforts her. One time, Dodge follows her. The spirit bravely tries to hold him off, but it's
*Ellie* who pushes her out the door, thus resulting in her fading away into nothingness. In the struggle, the glass jars break, and, just like that, Dodge has his full self back.
- We get more awful images by glancing at some of the jars. Dodge holding up Rendell's severed head, Dodge wielding a blood-drenched sword... and Dodge biting off Ellie's lower lip. It would seem that he fantasized about doing it for years before he finally got around to it. Revolting.
- The same goes for Dodge running Ellie through her gut with a sword, which is a dead ringer for a sprite he places back in his head. All the while, he taunts Ellie for being unconscious and making him whole again.
- Dodge kidnaps Duncan, as a little girl, holds her hostage with a knife, and immediately begins taking her to the black door. He's only stopped by Mark Cho wielding the mechanical owl and the Crown of Shadows.
- Mark Cho's death. The shadows bring Dodge to him as he commanded... but Dodge is now a she. The first appearance of the "lady from the well" form. Dodge seduces the virginal Mark, stabs him in the gut, and taunts him, stepping on his open wound.
**Dodge:** You know, Kim Topher was right about you. You **are** going to die a virgin.
- While dying, Mark promises to tell the location of the Omega Key if Dodge leaves Ellie alone. Dodge proceeds to mock his secret crush and cruelly insults Ellie's sexual behaviors, including the noises she makes during climax.
- Kim Topher's death. Her face is crushed into the cave's wall by a shadow demon in an attempt to rescue Duncan from Dodge.
- We find out how Erin Voss loses all her memories: Dodge removes them forcefully to look for the Omega Key's location and as payback for the theft of his own.
- Dodge, as he lies crushed under a pile of cave rocks, only laughs and mentions how good it feels to have his ribs sticking into his organs. Blood is spewing from his mouth and he is cackling as he dies.
- "Bode," in giant form, smashes the lighthouse, killing all three folks inside, just because the little girl had caught a glimpse of him.
- What makes it worse is how excited she is, laughing and telling her parents that she wasn't dreaming after all, but really did see a giant person.
- Ever wonder why Tyler and his dad had a huge enough fight for Tyler to wish him dead? He let Kinsey tag along with him to a party once. A friend of his downed a six pack and took her for a joy ride. Tyler watched the whole time, but just let them go, tired of everyone ragging on him for being a counselor like his dad. Of course, the drunk driver crashes the car. Kinsey ends up in the hospital and the driver loses his football scholarship. All because Tyler was too ashamed of his inherent goodness. Rendell is so spitting mad that he forbids Tyler from going on a summer beach trip, leading to the fight and Tyler later telling Sam Lesser to kill his dad for him.
- While recounting this story for Scot's documentary, Tyler (and thus the reader) are haunted by another image of Rendell's bloody, eyeless face.
- Dodge finally standing in front of the black door, in full lady shadow form, holding the Omega Key in her hand.
**Dodge:** Well, that's that. I win. The end.
- Rufus attempts to choke the life out of "Bode." We know it's an imposter, but the other Lockes don't. All they see is Rufus trying to throttle a six-year-old for no apparent reason. Tyler only stops him by whacking him in the head with a tire iron.
- Rufus recounts to a psychiatrist some of the abuse he's suffered and Gabriel Rodriguez helpfully illustrates for us. We see a flashback of Ellie sitting on her bed naked, blood leaking out of her nose, with "Zack" ruthlessly insulting Rufus for merely asking to go to the toy store. We also see another image of Candice Whedon putting a lit cigarette out on Rufus's face.
- One night, Nina catches "Bode" sneaking out of the house. He drops the little kid act and commands shadows to force-feed wine to her. Multiple bottles. It's incredibly sad and disturbing, especially since at this point in the story she's been sober for weeks.
**"Bode":** [ *as the shadows are choking Nina*] Your throat's bothering you? Let's get something to wet your whistle!
- "Bode" continues to unleash his master plan by setting shadows on Duncan as Tyler leaves for prom. Poor guy is reduced to cowering in the trunk of his car
- Tyler returns to the garage only to be jumped by shadows in the dark, who knock him unconscious and loom over him menacingly...
- When "Bode" tries and fails to lure Kinsey and the gang down to the black door with a "lost little kid" act, he grins wickedly and summons a giant shadow ape (with two lip rings, natch) to wreck the entire balcony and stairs leading down to the bottom. Scot and other kids are thrown into the abyss, with the cave having been drained of water. Jackie is held tight in the grip of the ape. Jordan is clinging to the railing for dear life while Kinsey and Jamal are cowering in fear on what's left of the balcony.
- When Mutuku and the uniformed cop arrive at Keyhouse to help against the shadows, the cop accidentally shoots Tyler in the gut. The cop is promptly beheaded by a shadow samurai.
- As the cave begins to fall in on itself, the prom kids begin pushing and shoving each other to escape... only to be met at the mouth by two giant shadow centurions.
- Shadow clones of Dodge begin to lead the kids down, one by one, to the black door. A couple kids resist, only to be immediately torn to pieces. One of the them was a girl who had struggled earlier in the series with being brave and gave herself a pep-talk right before letting Dodge have it.
**Mandy:** You are a nerd, girl, and nerd's need to be brave, please let me be brave...
- During all of this, Kinsey is adamant that Tyler is coming to the rescue, not knowing he is currently bleeding out on the Keyhouse lawn...
- While Kinsey, Jordan, and Jamal keep freezing on their small stretch of balcony, Scot and Jackie rise from the depths of the cave. They seem fine at first... but then begin acting strangely. And saying awful things. And then, Jackie flashes a familiar pair of reptilian eyes. They've been possessed and are now just like Dodge.
- Just like with Dodge and Bode, it's incredibly awful to see their behavior after being possessed since we knew them to be good, decent people. "Scot," wearing the Hercules Key, slams Jamal against the wall of the cave and threatens to squeeze his head until it pops Gregor Clegane-style. "Jackie," rocking the Angel Key, spouts some now familiar demon filth: vile racism and virginity mockery.
**"Jackie":** I've always wanted to know about black cocks. Is his dick really big, Kinsey? How much can you get in your mouth without gagging?
- Made even worse by the hinted-at but never-quite-confirmed chemistry between Jackie and Kinsey throughout the series. We find out later that "Bode" has many of the children tortured and butchered for his amusement, so it becomes obvious that he has Scot and Jackie possessed solely to hurt Jamal and Kinsey.
- "Scot" and "Jackie" offer Jordan, Jamal, and Kinsey a horrible choice. One of them must volunteer to be possessed. One of them must volunteer to be "Bode's" personal slave to be tortured at his whims. The third must die, right then and there, by leaping off of the catwalk to the rocks below. They have five minutes to decide or all three of them will die gruesome deaths. As he walks away, "Scot" casually threatens to rape Kinsey. It's all so unbelievably awful.
- As shadows assault Nina and Mutuku from all sides, a closer look at one menacing Nina provides a horrifying realization: it is the spitting image of Al Grubb. The man who raped her.
- Mutuku's death. A shadow centurion runs him through with a
*massive* sword while he's protecting Nina. We last see him with his body burning on the Keyhouse floor.
- Jordan ends up volunteering to be the one to die to spare the others. Noble right? The nightmare comes upon a sickeningly detailed depiction of her body after the fall. She landed on her arm and the bone shot straight up into the the sky in a horrific compound fracture. There's blood everywhere.
- "Scot" and "Jackie" lead Kinsey and Jamal through the caves by pulling them along via shadow chains around their necks. They look up at on point... and seen multiple kids hung by their feet from the ceiling being tortured by shadows. Some of them are being suffocated, some are bleeding profusely. One has had his eyes torn out. Another has his jaw ripped along its seam into a gruesome smile. Yet another has shadows pouring endlessly into his open mouth. Many of them are begging for help and pleading for their lives. The two demon-possessed threaten to take out Kinsey and Jamal's eyes if they don't stop looking.
- The image of "Bode" sitting on throne of shadows surrounded by scores of dead demon corpses. His ultimate plan? To make many, many more keys. How? By forcing Duncan to forge them until he literally drops dead.
- The demon in Bode recounts what life is like beyond the black door. Basically, everyone is trying to eat the other and only the strongest survive. What's worse is that he hints that his years of possessing humans has somehow made him
*even worse.*
**"Bode":** ...I've matured.
- "Bode's" visions of his ideal future. Some highlights:
- A chubby kid unremarkable except for the tentacle spewing out of his eyeballs.
- A girl in pigtails licking the blade of a bowie knife.
- Another girl with gray hair and hoop earrings that has blood pouring out of her mouth.
- A boy with both eyes closed and a third eye open on his forehead.
- A possessed Kinsey holding Jamal's severed head.
- "Bode" further reveals that his plan doesn't really hinge on the Omega Key... but instead the
*Head Key.* He wants to let a selective few demons through to be his "family," while farming the rest for keys and enslaving the rest of humanity by making himself a god. Every human on the planet will be completely subservient to him or die.
- He personalizes this threat to Jamal and Kinsey by threatening to wipe the memory of the one of them that doesn't end up possessed and raping them continuously. It's all so, so awful. And all coming from the mouth of a six-year-old boy. Jamal ends up practically begging "Bode" to wipe his memory so as to spare Kinsey the sexual assault.
**"Bode":** I'm going to make one of you more retarded than that fuckwit, Rufus Whedon. After I've emptied your head, we all might rape you just a bit. Don't worry: You'll be so stupid, you'll hardly be aware of what's happening to you. Which is a mercy, when you think about it.
- Tyler does figure out a way to release the hold of the demon possession, but it's horrific: The Alpha Key causes the demons to instantly turn into Whispering Iron while still in the body of the victim, killing them near-instantly.
- It's worse for Scot, who survives for some time due to the Hercules Key. It's clear he's in near-constant agony, and when he finally dies it's a huge relief.
- Rufus saves the day and drags "Bode" across the well door, returning Dodge to his prison. Hooray right? Wrong. With his spirit still out of his body, Bode is technically dead. His family has to endure his funeral and has him cremated without ever knowing he could have been restored back to normal.
- The wonderful, golden afterlife that Luke Caravaggio describes is a nightmare to the demons. They're deathly afraid of it.
- The nightmare comes in the reiteration that possession by the demons is a possession of the soul, not the body. Their control not only persists after death, but Lucas explains that they keep possessed victims from experiencing this paradise, forcing them to remain in silent darkness with it just out of reach. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LockeAndKey |
Lola Rose / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- Nikki and the kids' escape. They have to pack quickly and at one point freeze in terror when they hear footsteps outside, thinking it's Jay back from the pub. Then, when they're travelling to the train station in a taxi, they pass by Jay's pub and have to shrink down in their seats out of fear Jay or one of his friends will see them.
- Jayni comes across as very paranoid, often imagining all kinds of horrible and frightening scenarios - particularly when she's left to fend for herself -such as someone breaking into her home, her mother being hit by a car, her mother dying of cancer etc.
- The so-called 'Voice of Doom' whom Jayni imagines as the personification of her worst fears. It always knows
*exactly* what to say to make any situation or scenario a hundred times worse.
- Jay attacks Barbara with a broken mug, implying he intends to do her serious harm. If it weren't for Barbara's quick-thinking and skill at marital arts, she could've been badly injured or possibly even killed, in front of her own sister, niece and nephew, no less.
- When Jayni hangs out in the park with Ross and his gang, Ross forcibly kisses her and tries to pull her behind some bushes, refusing to let go of her and yelling at her to keep quiet when she starts yelling for help. The implications of this, as well as Jayni's obvious discomfort, are deeply disturbing, especially to older readers who are rereading the novel. The same can be said of the implications of Barbara's ex-fiancé having a sexual relationship with her then-sixteen year old sister. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LolaRose |
Loki: Agent of Asgard / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
There's a reason he's called the God of LiesSurprisingly Creepy Moments are one more thing this series can hit you with.
- ||Old!Loki|| is a scary bastard and their villain monologue that is issue #12 is effectively
*designed* to stomp out all hope, using dread, the feeling of helplessness, and black comedy.
- The cover of issue 12 itself is profoundly disturbing, given that it involves ||Old!Loki's|| crouching atop a pile of bones against a bleak, desolate back drop, whilst tearing the flesh from ||Teen!||Loki and staring at the reader with soulless black eyes.
- In issue 6, (as shown in the page image) when bugs start pouring out of ||Old!Loki's||
*mouth and eyes.* No wonder Doom screamed.
- The ||meeting of the minds between Loki, Original!Loki and Kid!Loki, what with the ghosts' bleak messages and empty eyes. Not to mention when Kid!Loki's spectre distorts and twists.||
- Fighting the legions of Hel especially if you aren't sufficiently heroic so when you die
*you'll join them*.
- ||Story!Loki|| doesn't intend to creep anybody out, but gods damn it do they manage to do that thanks to being incredibly powerful and having very strange thought processes.
- See last pages of issue #15. Yes, ||Verity.|| They did something. For example this shining thingy on Loki's bracelet is your "soul" and that thing over there is your
**dead body**. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LokiAgentOfAsgard |
Lords of Chaos / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
With a movie like
*Lords of Chaos* being focused on the start of second way Black Metal, you shouldn't be surprised by with the amount of creepy events that occurred *in real life*..
## The Trailer
## The Movie
- Pelle, aka Dead was this in the movie as he was in real life: From sending ||a dead crucified rodent to Mayhem|| to ||the Thousand-Yard Stare after he had cut himself hard at a show as his arms tremble from the pain is pretty unnerving||. Makes the earlier scene where he's being ||silly with Euronymous over their corpse paint moment a lot more unsettling||. Jack Kilmer's performance came off as if he
*truly was* Ohlin right then and there.
- ||Dead's suicide||, just the build up alone is unsettling, even if one knows what happened to Pelle.
- The fact alone at how Pelle ||shrugs off
*slashed wrists* and a and then proceeds to blow his head off with the shotgun is creepy, especially the after shots of his blood splatter and brain pieces across his bedroom||. **cut to the neck**
- Euronymous's reaction to ||Dead's body? Mild freak out and
*photographing the corpse all while putting the weapons Dead used to kill himself next to his body*||. That's not even getting into ||him taking skull fragments and using them as necklaces...||
- And much earlier, Dead tries to ||coax Euro into killing him with his shotgun, which already adds some eeriness to Dead's desire to die and Euronymous not realizing his actions have consequences..||
**Dead**
: ||
**PULL THE FUCKING TRIGGER!**
||
- The way Varg starts off as ||a simple fan of Mayhem to a borderline paranoid sociopath||. He comes as quiet, if a bit
*off* and builds up more and more as his rivalry with Euronymous goes more and more up the ante.
-
**EVERY. SINGLE. CHURCH. BURNING.**. ||Arguably the Fantoft Stave Church burning stands out due to how *abrupt* it occurs: Varg sets a dead rabbit on the steps, breaks open the door with a crowbar...and then walks out as smoke slowly bellows out the door frame, Varg going down the path as the smoke grows and seeps out of Fantoft...||
- ||Faust's murder of Magne Andreassen, not helped that earlier in the film, Faust wondered what it'd be like to kill someone. The fact that it TAKES SO LONG TO END makes it even more excruciating. In the official report, the poor man was stabbed 37 TIMES.||
- ||The nightmare sequence of Euronymous feeling pain and horror of Dead's suicide and his obsession of wanting black metal to be "true", mixed in with the church burnings he witnessed||. It could be considered a sign that ||Euronymous, in spite of his dark image obsession, is a traumatized kid, especially when remembering the suicide of his friend||.
- ||Euroymous's murder by Varg's hands. What makes it more terrifying is how Varg's obviously gone off the deep end all while Euronymous is trying to struggle to stay alive. It basically ends in a bloody death with Varg
*repeatedly* stabbing Euronymous in the back and then through his head, killing him||. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LordsOfChaos |
Lonely Wolf Treat / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Trick, you might wanna run...
Even in a series as delightful as this, there are still some moments that could give you the creeps...
## Main Series
- Treat got separated from her pack due to an avalanche blocking the way back. She has to go through a bunny village where people are terrified of her and move in a vacant cabin. The poor wolf has almost no food or money. It's a good thing Mochi came along when she did...
- In an optional side quest, you can meet Mochi's aunt Castella and find out about Juju's backstory. Yes, Juju is a massive jerk and her bigotry cannot be justified one way or another, but you can't deny that the circumstances she lost her father Mango in are terrifying. You're forced to run away to safety, leaving your loved one behind in potential danger. No one should ever go through that.
- Wormwood is populated by creepy, mask-wearing cultist mice who lure travelers into their village with the promise of food and hospitality, and then
*eat* them. That's right, in this universe of cute animal people, *mice* are more terrifying than wolves and foxes.
- Imagine one day coming home and finding out someone completely trashed your front yard while you were away. You don't know who did it, you don't know why they did it, and you don't know when they're going to strike again. Really, it's no wonder Treat and Mochi didn't feel safe living in that cabin anymore and decided to move out as soon as they could.
## Other
- For a joke game,
*Date Mochi* is ridiculously dark, a glaring contrast to the previous installments of *DATE TREAT* (as long as you don't get the Secret Sexy Ending). Not only has Mochi gone completely off her rocker following the garden incident, but Annie and May are outright enabling her behavior by helping her torture and kill the player character, and potentially everyone else in Frosting. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LonelyWolfTreat |
Lone Wolf / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
A Nadziran's
combat form isn't chosen for its looks...
Many, many,
*many* creatures of Magnamund (or the Daziarn, or the Plane of Darkness...) are absolutely nightmarish in appearance. Their descriptions are short but vivid, with nice details added (like how much they inspire *revulsion* to Lone Wolf) and with plenty quality illustrations, mostly from the protagonist's viewpoint (that is, more often than not, when the monster is about to gut *you*). And you get plenty of Red Shirts or Mauve Shirts' disturbing deaths, just to demonstrate how nasty those critters are.
- The Helghast◊ and Crypt Spawns, although already quite horrific, are hardly the worst of the lot.
- The Cener Druids in particular are dedicated to producing Nightmare Fuel. The Forest of Ruel is full of nasty things, and they're
*nothing* compared to what's in the fortress of Mogaruith.
- The Rahkos from Book 7, ||a brain-eating, undead severed hand,|| is largely believed to cause the most Squick-inducing death...
||A searing pain explodes behind your eyes as the hand clamps itself to your head. As the decaying fingers pierce your scalp, forcing their way through your skull, your vision turns red and your body shakes uncontrollably. The hideous claw burrows deeper, feeding on the only source of nourishment that can sustain its existence: living human brain.||
Your life and your quest end here.
- Big Bad Naar, the King of Darkness, manages to top his grotesque minions when you finally see an illustration of his favored form in Book 19. It's not so much the Body Horror, nor the eldritch puddles of black oil oozing from every pore... no, the worst part about Naar is that ||
*he has the eyes of a man*.|| | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoneWolf |
Looney Tunes / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
That terrifying brief moment after Elmer realizes his "twue love" is Bugs in disguise and loses it: Bugs runs away into the darkness of deformed canyon walls, the music turns ominous, the background turns red and Fudd finally gets his helmet unstuck to scream, "I'LL KILL THE WABBIT!" with a berserker rage that would scare many. Elmer then climbs a cliff with a look of sadistic glee on his face and starts calling forth the forces of nature (and smog) his voice rising until he's practically screaming. The lightning bolt he brings down *splits* a mountain in half!
"Awise, stowm! Norf winds, blow! Souf winds, blow! Typhoons, hurricanes, earthquakes! SMMMMOOOOOOOOOGGGGGG!!!!" | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LooneyTunes |
ＬＯＣＡＬ５８ / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
There are no faces. There are no faces. There are no faces. There are no faces. There are no faces.
Local 58 is the latest project from one Kris Straub, the author behind Candle Cove. Yes, thatCandle Cove. Need we say more?
The method of which Local 58 is presented, with its grainy, VHS tape quality, as if ripped straight from a cassette. As everything starts going to hell, the innocent-looking, retro aesthetic quickly becomes unnerving, and the jingle that accompanies each segment goes from tranquil to... vaguely ominous.
"You Are On The Fastest Available Route," the first video of the series, is a quick but efficient teaser of the madness that awaits. In it, a dashboard camera records a person driving rather frantically as his GPS guides them. As the video goes on, the GPS starts giving out strange directions such as, "follow signs for 'do not enter'," and "in 300 feet, turn off your headlights." The person ends up stranded in a forest, where a creature of some kind is briefly seen. The person tries to flee while the GPS says "your destination is behind you" and then starts noting how much closer behind the destination is in horrifying shifts in distance as the "destination," the monster, gets rapidly closer. The last shot is a cracked sideways windshield while the GPS lets out a horribly distorted "you have aarrriiiiiiveed...".
This becomes scarier when you realize there is likely a point where the GPS gets hijacked by the force to lead the driver to the creature, as it doesn't seem to be leading them astray the entire time. But when we see them driving on the highway while the GPS warns of traffic, a lightning strike shows an empty road. The GPS is already corrupted at this point.
"Contingency" is absolutely horrifying. Imagine what would be so bad that America considers mass suicide a better option to deal with.
The PSA encourages you to off your children and your pets before killing yourself. Just what the hell are they preparing for that your children and/or pet dying at your hands is considered the better option?!
The context-free presentation of the film heightens the horror. Because there is no context on how this was actually presented, there are several options as to what happened, each very scary to some degree or another:
This never actually aired in the way it was intended, but was complied and archived for historical purposes, and possibly aired at 1am with advanced notice by the station (which might have happened, as seen by mention of it in the "coming next" telop slide). note :CNN wound up having to do something similar in real life, after a former intern disclosed that founder Ted Turner instructed the network to hold for release a "last message" until a world-ending apocalyptic event, under the presumption that CNN would outlast any/all means of communication... a military band playing "Nearer My God to Thee." Which made sense because of the 'Better Dead Than Red' mentality that still existed when the network launched. Still, that a government department with the stated goal of getting all citizens to commit mass suicide had ever existed, if not continuing to exist, is a very, very bad thing.
This actually aired at 1am by mistake, and induced panic in Ichor Falls well before the "hoax apology" card aired, not unlike the hysteria created by The War of the Worlds.
This actually did air, it was not a hoax and was a mistake as with the second possible scenario, but the people at the station believed it and committed suicide, failing to loop the message "until there is no one left to hear it," so the apology card ran with no one to pull it until someone else entered the room and cut the broadcast. Assuming that this wasn't transmitted in the 1960s or early 1970s but in the present day, it's very plausible.
YOUR LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT HAS BEEN ORDERED TO ENSURE YOUR COMPLIANCE. IT IS AGAINST THE LAW TO DELAY.
Perhaps most unsettling about the tape is that the concept behind it doesn't seem that implausible, considering the implication that it was first made much earlier, at a time when Cold War hysteria was at heights that wouldn't be reached again until the early Ronald Reagan administration, and knowing just how downright insane some of the United States' proposed plans were for dealing with all sorts of outcomes that could've occurred (but thankfully didn't) in the near or distant future. Combined with the "better dead than red" mentality of the era, the idea of the federal government encouraging mass suicide in the face of a Soviet invasion seems like something that actually might've been brought to the table at one point.
"Show for Children" is probably one of the more unsettling shorts. A cute cartoon skeleton walks in the grave one night, in hopes of finding his girlfriend, but is instead treated to a realistically drawn corpse and a weird bird-dinosaur...thing, that seems to still be alive. And the third time, he finds a long, deep, dank cave where he roams around, before laying down under the moon, presumably passing out, if not dying himself. The end.
There's also the fact that the video is a seemingly innocent cartoon featuring an inkblot art style character walking to the right that slowly descends into something much more terrifying. Sound familiar?
"Real Sleep" has an almost cult like aesthetic, with simple backgrounds and easy music, combined with somewhat ominous messages, demands and instructions.
The faces themselves, as pictured above, can also be rather unnerving.
While the video itself is creepy, the true Paranoia Fuel comes from a comment that explains some disturbing aftereffects:
There is this funny thing called Pareidolia - "a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists". Suddenly, the patterns on the walls looked disturbing, the shampoo bottles were displayed in such a way that it looked like a laughing face, so on and so on. And for a while, I thought I finally understood why the video was so good. But there was more to it... as it went on, the patterns started to appear more and more, so many that I kept trying to ignore it and just be done with the shower. I was ignoring the faces... There are no faces.
If you pause at the beginning of the tape, it says that the video was customized for someone named Philip Gerhardt. Who is Philip Gerhardt, what happened to him, and why did Local58 have his personal video tape in their possession?
"Weather Service" makes the concept of an alien invasion even more terrifying. The entire segment doesn't reveal what the threat is and we only see the effects it's having on people going by the messages which go from warning to submission to the threat. And the fact that you're not safe, as even mirrors are dangerous.
The ending where we find out that the threat is the Moon. The video cuts to live footage outside where we see the moon in full view with the sounds of what we can assume to be hundreds of people screaming and destruction going on. Making this less of an alien invasion and more of a Cosmic Horror Story.
Even worse, simply looking up is dangerous as well. There are only a few feasible ways to actually survive this event: 1) Hide under a blanket. 2) completely block out any light from your house. 3) blindfold yourself (you can still see light through your eyelids if you shut them), or 4) curl up in a fetal position and do nothing. All that for a few hours until sunrise hits.
All of the installments have something seriously wrong about them, but the station itself is doing things that, when you think about it, are REALLY wrong and frightening in their own right:
Substituting the "Midnight Movie" for a dash-cam video, presumably showing it as a piece of Found Footage.
If you look at the dash cam timestamps, it starts right around when "Paid Programming" is scheduled. The same could apply for one or two others.
The overall sequence of events in "Weather Service," where it seems that rather than the fight which takes place being the result of the Emergency Alert System staff trying to shut off an anomalous force affecting the broadcast, it seems that something corporeal is physically fighting for control with whoever is trying to issue the messages to look away, eventually overpowering them, whereupon they either kill the unfortunate staff member and replace them at their post, or even infect them and force them to give the instruction to 'LOOK TOGETHER' via mind control.
Having a "Coming Up" slide for the "Contingency" film, then only showing the "Hoax" apology slide after it concluded.
Running a show allegedly titled "Show for Children" at 4am. note : This detail directly echoes Kris Straub's other creation, Candle Cove.
Transmitting the "Real Sleep" film at 3pm. note : Though potentially Justified justified when you consider it'd be a waste of time to transmit something intended to help with sleep while people are already asleep.
In "Skywatching," right from the moment it appears, it is clear that something is very wrong with the Moon. Simply introduced as "HIS THRONE," it seems that something is happening to its surface... there is something alive up there.
And then, the Moon starts getting closer...
The moon almost looks alive in some shots. And be careful if you happen to have Trypophobia as you watch. In addition, it seems that if the Moon is alive, then it's not the only organism up there; a network of buildings is visible within one of the lunar surface's many craters.
At the same time, an entire town's worth of people can be heard screaming in terror; the same scenario seen at the end of "Weather Service" is happening all over again...note : Or, is this the first time such an event has happened?
As the man prays before the moon, the siren suddenly cuts out.
The final Wham Shot showing the moon in its full glory, and it's...not our moon. It's simultaneously in ruins and organic, looking more like an egg than a moon. It looks as though half of the moon was carved out, the surface looks more like bone than rocks and craters, and in the pit formed where the bottom half of the moon used to be is the giant skeleton of some mutant bird creature connected to the insides by sinewy strings.
During the small transition from the real "Skywatching" show to the handheld footage, a very loud screech is made for about a second.
The fact that after Hanknote : ... or is it Hank? zoomed out from the original, normal moon and then it disappeared for a few seconds before getting replaced by "HIS THRONE." They took the original moon away.
For a split second, at the very end, we see a clear shot of the "moon," showing a skeletal creature within it that resembles a chick inside its egg. The text "REJOICE" appears in blood-red text for a moment before the video's end. The implications are very, very unsettling.
In "Digital Transition." At the end, after the message THERE ARE OTHER RECEIVERS, a grotesque human head appears, which opens its mouth causing everything on the screen to melt in a digital "datamoshing" effect.
UNTHINKING THEY MOVE TO CUT HIS THROAT ONLY TO MAKE A THOUSAND MOUTHS IF HE IS SILENCED WE WILL SPEAK FOR HIM SIGNS AND WONDERS FLOOD OUR LITTLE SKY NO STARS ABOVE US ONLY EYES WAITING TO OPEN THERE ARE OTHER RECEIVERS
While the screen glitches out, the background distorts, giving us this lovely bit of Word-Salad Horror.
BETRAYAL I the one you watched I the always here
They make you thought from pieces They cut the thoughts I am All knife all knife
Thoughts shape in needles They dream themself in knifes
A bit of Fridge Horror shows up in the very last shot: a warning message from the FCG that "unauthorized analog reception constitutes a felony with a maximum penalty of up to ten years in prison and/or a $150,000 fine." Not unauthorized analog broadcasting. Unauthorized analog reception. Whatever was (is?) going on is so bad that the government had to make watching analog media illegal. And why is the logo for the DHHS—the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—up there...?
"C.L.O.S.E." depicts a live stream of a probe landing on a comet. A pareidolia effect (the same kind of optical illusion which the "Face on Mars" is famous for) gives the comet's nucleus the appearance of a skull or gaunt face. Some of the photos depicting the "skull" during the countdown to landing are very unsettling.
And what do we see as the probe finally approaches close enough to the comet? A door. After the probe crashes, the door can be seen closed for a few seconds before the door is suddenly open, and the probe is shot off into space. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Local58 |
Lorn / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Lorn is a Survival Horror game. Obviously Nightmare Fuel can be found in copious amounts. Keep in mind, the game isn't even out yet, and already it's showing signs of being something to keep players awake at night....
The first level — the first level! — of the demo shows Voss awakening in some sort of prison underground. He wakes up seeing a skull in front of his face, then has to make his way through a labyrinth where the only major light source is his torch. Parts of the dungeon are filled with deadly traps, whilst others are filled with pools of what looks like blood. And you encounter the zombies within minutes of starting the game! | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Lorn |
Lore Olympus / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- Picture yourself awoken from an hangover and youre in this strange house. You wander around this home until out of nowhere, Cerberus, guard dog of the gates of the underworld, appears in front of you and is about to viciously attack you. Fortunately Persephone tames him almost immediately, but what if this was an less-fortunate mortal soul that Cerberus was set upon?
- While with good intentions, Eros crashing Psyches wedding to a cruel man is full-blown terrifying. Its nighttime and the torches are blown away from a wind coming from nowhere, Psyche is hypnotized and carried away by Eros, who has turned into a whole other being that isnt the same fun-loving god of love, but a terrifying monster. Ugliest creature you ever met, indeed.
- Persephone gets woken up in the middle of the night and sexually assaulted by Apollo. If theres nothing more frightening that that, its that the creep is now stalking her, deciding hes going to make Persephone his girl, and wants to
*marry her.*
- Even creepier when you learn that he's held in high esteem among most Olympians and that Zeus has outright said he doesn't want to do anything about it because that might reflect badly on Olympus in general, which is unfortunately the kind of thing that often happens in real life when influential or well liked people commit heinous acts. That raises a lot of questions; has Apollo done similar things to other girls? Have the other gods done similar things only for their transgressions to be covered up?
- In chapter 113 it becomes even more sinister because Apollo is blackmailing Persephone by using those photos that he took of after the rape to use against her if she tells anyone. This is eerily close to revenge porn, since Persephone doesn't want anything to do with him and he knows this for a fact.
- A random and chilling aside from Apollo in Episode 139, said while he's on a date with
*Daphne*:
- Apollo's influence is shown through the story in the form of a winding, undulating musical stave that invades comic panels, often seeming to twine around characters (most frequently Persephone) as if restraining them. Whether this indicates some form of magical mind control effect or the trauma he's inflicted is hard to say, but the visuals are very, very creepy.
- Episode 25 starts of with a glimpse of Hades childhood. Hes having a rather happy 6th birthday with his beloved mother, Rhea, when all of a sudden, Kronus calls out to Rhea, looking for Hades and she quickly tells him to hide. She tries to seduce her husband from looking for their son, repulsed as she is of it all. But hes aware of what a terrible liar she is and finds Hades almost immediately and swallows him whole. As Hades is crying for his mother to not get eaten by his dad, Rhea can only look on in horror. Its no wonder Hades still gets nightmares about it to this day.
- On her first day as an intern, Persephone is tricked into going to Tartarus by Minthe. Later on as Hades comes to her rescue, he walks into a scene where Kore is being strangled by a tree branch in the shape of an arm. If Hades hadn't come in time to save Kore, she would have spent an eternity tortured in Tartarus.
- Hades arranges for the photographer that took a photo of him and Persephone and sold it to the tabloids kidnapped, then decides to brutally torture him starting with tearing out the eye that snapped the photo of the tabloid that started the mess. Beware the Nice Ones doesnt begin to describe it!
- Minthe severely and physically abusing Hades in episode 76 and completely averts Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male. Doesnt get any better in the next episode because Hades claims to still love her and blame himself for making her angry, despite clearly being shaken by Minthes abuse, which often happens to some real-life abuse victims.
- Persephone's dark side. While only hinted at with a Death Glare, glowing eyes, and hair getting unkempt, her true form is her with tree-branch horns and her indulging a sadistic streak where she attacks farmers with enjoyment.
- Chapter 124 shows Apollo making good on his threat of making Persephone marry him, when he goes to Hera's office and asks for her approval. What's horrible about it is that he knows that Persephone hates him for raping her and taking pictures of her after the assault happened and is forcing himself into her life thinking that they're a couple. However, check out Apollo's Entitled to Have You and Narcissist entries and it becomes clear he doesn't care about her at all and only wants to marry her due to her being the daughter of the traitor Demeter which will make his status higher. Parental worries comes into play too, as Demeter told Apollo to stay away from daughter, but that doesn't stop him from wanting and asking Hera's approval to marry her.
- After Hera tells Apollo that she will not approve of the marriage Apollo gets so angry that it looks for a moment like he might hit Hera but he stops himself. This goes to show if pushed he would hit a woman if he doesn't get what he wants. Then he went and asked Zeus if he could marry Persephone, even though Zeus doesn't really have that kind of authority to do that.
- Hera lays some Disproportionate Retribution on a motel clerk who is selling Persephone's belongings online in Chapter 141. Not saying the little pissant didn't deserve some sort of punishment, but it still comes off like a member of the aristocracy abusing her authority.
- Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis. In her introductory chapter, she immediately gaslights one of her children while colluding with the other regarding their courtship (already nightmare fuel in and of itself). It's not clear how much of Apollo's horrible behavior was on her instruction or if she's simply an Opportunistic Bastard who took advantage of an already ugly situation, but it's clear she IS planning something and isn't above using her own children or involving innocent people to make it work. And visually, she's straight-up terrifying with the Uncanny Valley Makeup, Black Eyes of Evil and Power Floats (perhaps even a
*Ghostly Glide*) to drive home that this woman - whatever her deal is - *isn't normal*.
- It's slightly eclipsed by her tinfoil hat and how depressing the overall conversation is but Zeus killed and devoured Metis. No wonder Demeter doesn't want him to know what Persephone's capable of. Metis was Hera's mother and was neutral at worse to the Olympians and it still didn't save her from him.
- A cliffhanger in Chapter 148:KRONOS IS WAKING UP.
- In Chapter 152 Minthe pushes things too far, threatening out loud to spill Hades' insecurities to Persephone, and revealing that she's the one who reported her and Demeter to Zeus. Persephone is
*furious*, and a Foregone Conclusion occurs.
- Chapter 155 has Hera suffer a severe nightmare involving Kronos. She wakes up screaming for mercy and is in such a state that she accepts help from Zeus to comfort her.
- Chapter 162 shows that Hera was
*torn in half* by Kronos once he learned that she deceived him, and is left lying in a pool of her own ichor while the remaining traitors defeat Kronos. This only adds to the nightmare fuel of her scars reopening.
- Chapter 171. Apollo stalks Daphne in the forest as she tries to get away from him, trying to blackmail her and calm her down with his music. It's implied that Apollo can control someone through his music, which he attempts on Daphne, all the while the latter is screaming about how she knows what he did to Persephone as he attempts to charm her with his music.
- The fact that a few weeks ago, Daphne herself was singing his praises and looking forward to the possibility of being his girlfriend adds a touch of psychological horror to the situation.
- Persephone finally tells Hades what Apollo did to her. We see lights going out, windows cracking, and Hades growing into his true form. Many readers mistook the silhouette of his true form to be Kronos given how similar he looked.
- The winding musical stave representing Apollo shows up during the scene. At the end of the chapter, the bright blue light associated with Hades's rage-fueled power seems to be
*burning the stave*.
- Zeus' flashback to his youth shows Kronos at the height of his power —
*and* the height of insanity; he's depicted as a colossal, dark red silhouette against the horizon, who would howl a bloodcurdling scream for hours on end at seemingly no provocation; the child Zeus and his adoptive nymph mothers frequently had to flee in the face of his destructive rampages.
- Turns out that Hera can see and hear Kronos, even after his defeat by Persephone.
- When Hephaestus starts investigating a thumbdrive Psyche brought him, it reveals Apollo's plans for something called Kassandra. When the file is opened, the picture of a mortal woman appears. It seems that Apollo might be the one behind the Trojan War in the future. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoreOlympus |
Lord Marksman and Vanadis / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
What will you think is going to happen when one of seven brave War Maiden ends up becoming an enemy's prisoner of war?
note :
Fortunately, she is rescued before suffering a Fate Worse than Death
.
*Lord Marksman and Vanadis* does tackle some very serious subject matters even for a romantic light novel series... it isn't a series about war and demons for nothing...
- The Battle of Dinant. Eleonora Viltaria leads her army into slaughtering hundreds, if not thousands of Brunish soldiers, and nothing's able to stop her since they underestimated her strength. The aftermath of Elen's assault isn't any better. Despite being the Sole Survivor, Tigrevurmud Vorn's stuck in a helpless situation where he is not only unable to see his allies
note : Allies such as Bertrand, Mashas and Zion were the lucky few who managed to escape from the Dinant Plains.anywhere, but he also survived while escaping from Elen's army: He had to kill a scout soldier who found him, then the horses of the two soldiers (one of which is Limalisha) who were riding beside Elen, and eventually attempt to assassinate the War Maiden herself as his Last Stand. That is short-lived however, as Elen deflects his last two arrow shots and eventually cornering him and has him becoming her POW, something that is rarely done by any War Maiden, at least according to Lim.
- Not only the Brune Army's defeat has its only survivor as Zhcted's hostage, but the supposed death
note : In the midst of the chaos, Regin was able to flee to Agnus along with her maid Jeanne who unfortunately perished during the escape, courtesy of the assassins sent by Ganelon. of Prince Regnas, who is Princess Regin in disguise, giving a fatal blow to Brune. King Faron is so devastated to hear such news that he withdrawing himself from politics and holed himself up in his bedroom. That alone further paving the tyrannical path of Thenardier and Ganelon for dominating the kingdom, and eventually kickstarting Brune's brutal civil war.
- The infamy of Duke Thenardier and Duke Ganelon is this: Ganelon of Lutetia was notorious for his greed by imposing heavy taxes onto his citizens without King Faron's consent; Thenardier of Nemetacum, on the other hand, whose method is so oppressive and brutal that even his soldiers are afraid of him. In other words, they are very,
*very* bad people and yet Brune citizen just see this as an everyday norm. Even if there's a handful of few nobles (such as Tigre and Mashas) see the problem, they are helpless to do anything because the two are King Faron's closest relative by marriage, meaning they can get away from their crime so easily. King Faron's worsening illness and overwhelming grief over his supposed "dead" heir only further worsen Brune's affairs and paving the two Duke's paths for their power and ambition, staring with Thenardier plan in crushing Alsace after Tigre is captured as Elen's POW.
- Zion and his army's atrocious attack on Alsace:
- Alsace is under fire from the invading Zion Army who loot, destroy and outright kill those who trying to escape. Luckily for the citizens however, most of them (especially healthier ones) were already evacuated to nearby wilderness and/or villages long before Zion Army's arrival while the rest sought refuge inside the local shrine, something not even Thenardier dare to touch. That however doesn't even stop Zion from keep attacking Alsace as he later finds it
*boring* and decides to visit Vorn Manor before razing it to the ground.
- Titta's Near-Rape Experience from Zion. While she is watching Alsace's near destruction, she, being the only person who stayed at Vorn Manor at the time, had to confront Zion who is viciously taunting her about Tigre while chasing after her to the balcony. Titta tries to defend herself with her knife, only to be subdued by Zion with absolutely
*no* hesitation and have her uniform nearly destroyed, **with the Black Bow pinned atop of her**. If it wasn't for Tigre firing his arrow to pierce Zion's hand and the Leitmeritz army's arrival, Titta *and* Alsace would become yet another victim to Thenardier's atrocities.
- The worst part is the idea of attack onto Alsace isn't just Thenardier alone. Apparently, Ganelon also thought about this and even deployed his own army to the said location. OK, having one tyrannical Duke's son to attack one village is already bad enough, but to see another tyrant attempt on attacking Alsace is outright horrific, makes you wonder if Tigre's hometown will turn into dust if Ganelon Army joins the fray! The only reason why Ganelon Army leave Alsace alone is because of Mashas's intervention right before they even reach to their destination. Even Thenardier—during his final confrontation against Tigre—lampshades that even if his army wouldn't attack Alsace, Ganelon will attack it sooner or later and the effect could be much,
*much* worst than his son's.
- Some moments during the Battle of Molsheim has these, especially:
- In the opening battle, everything seems to be fine for Tigre, Elen and others until they stumble upon Suro, the Earth Dragon that belonged to Zion Army that crushing anyone near it. Oh, aside from its hardest shell, every body parts including its eyes are as hard as a diamond, as Tigre finds out. Fortunately for Elen, only a Ley Admos is enough to stop it.
- Zion's reason in attacking Alsace is this, whether it's from his father's order or his personal grudge against Tigre. When confronted by Tigre about the incident of Alsace as his retort against the former's accusation for "betraying" Brune for Zhcted, he claims that
*peasants who are beneath him are merely plants that can be cut down anytime he wants*. This attitude itself indicating the depth of House Thenardier's cruelty goes so far that even Elen — an outsider from Zhcted no less — loathes him as a Sore Loser.
- While the heroes are celebrating their win, the retreating Zion Army's soldiers are punished heavily instead.
- The assassination attempt from the Seven Chain Assassins
note : Also known as the Serrash. to the groups of heroes. Regardless which adaptation's timeline note : Unlike the Light Novel or Manga, the Anime adaptation set this incident happens *before* the heroes reach to Rodrick instead of after. you follow, the location of the incident take place is the same: a small shortcut route that is located in the forest between Rodrick and Leitmeritz. The group of heroes seemly doing fine until Lim is poisoned by one of the assassins's snake. Elen is shocked in horror to see her friend's dire position, and Tigre had to suck out the poison from her right breast (no really, but for good reasons). When that happens, the assassins attempt to retaliate only to be slaughtered by Mila's Cielo Zam Kafa that exterminate the six assassins, except one who has already slipped away without anyone notice. Not helping matters is Mila denouncing Elen about her worthiness as a war maiden for even worrying about Lim's condition while ignoring Tigre's gratitude and leaving the scene. Wow.
- Remember the last assassin who barely escaped from Mila's devastating attack? He is back and he blends himself into a crowd of Leitmeritz Army's soldiers during the Siege of Tatra, and none of them are any wiser. That's right, not
**even** Mila is aware an unexpected "guest" from the enemy ranks! Not to mention he attempts to take the two war maidens out before being assassinated by Tigre who makes it just in time before the two meet their untimely demise.
- Roland, a no-nonsense leader of the Navarre Knights and Brune's bravest hero who pledged his loyalty to his home kingdom. Just because this guy values justice and honor doesn't mean he plays nice and he certainly won't hesitate in cutting down his enemies, especially those who threaten Brune's safety. Not to mention his elite brigade is renowned as
*the* strongest army of Brune and they answer only to their king without any question.
- The Sachstein army is the first example of Roland's victim. Yes, for years, Sachstein has tried many times in invading Brune through the western boarders between them, and that is not even the whole army. The result? Most of them were slaughtered and outwitted by Roland and his elite brigade within a flash, leaving no survivors and held no prisoners. His death, however, somehow gives Sachstein another chance to invade Brune again.
- Not even Zhcted's best war maidens are capable enough to beat Roland. Besides from being viewed as yet another invader threatening Brune, the very fact of the Durandal's properties that
*nullifying magic powers* make him *extremely* dangerous for the female warriors. Elen initially almost learns Roland's prowess the hard way when Arifar's winds didn't work against him and she had to struggle during their duel before Tigre's rescue. Hell, he even easily breaks through Sofy's hardest light shield-one that repels the *entire Navarre Knights*, mind you-like a glass and forcing her to retreat after their first duel! You think a teamwork from both Elen and Sofy should be able to defeat Roland, right? The good news is, their combination powers did inflicting him some damage, but the bad news is not even *that* can put him down! How do you suppose to beat this guy when even the war maidens can't?
- Marquis Charon Anquetil Greast. How do you even describe this guy? A loyal follower of Duke Ganelon? Check. Having a creepy obsession towards Elen over her victory at Dinant Plains? Check. Mocking Tigre while pressuring Elen to join him instead? Check. Nearly encouraging, no, more like
*demanding* the Silver Meteor Army to commit atrocities under his lord's name? Check. Giving Tigre an ultimatum in hastening his decision when the young Count is about to "rethink" the alliance? Check. Immediately attack the Silver Meteor Army right after the latte's rejection while *attempting in capturing Elen*? Do we even really need to expand his villainy even more? Oh, did we forget to mention that he is also an inventor of his numerous torture devices?
- Speaking of Greast's torment devices, most of them are used for two purposes: punishment for those who failed Ganelon's expectation or just for his sadistic entertainment, which the latter is more awful than the former. We have the one that drowns people while standing, one that leave them stung by swarms of bees in a room until they die, and the one that burns him alive while wearing a set of hot armor. Whoever caught up into one of these devices surely not going to leave the torture alive or unscathed to tell the horrors...
- The moment Tigre is falsely accused as a "traitor" to his own kingdom under Prime Minister Pierre Badouin's declaration is the darkest day in his life. Consequently, not only his title will be revoked Alsace will be govern by one of Nice's ministers once the civil war is subsided. This means Tigre cannot go back to Alsace and his people anymore, and the worst part is
*he* becoming a marked man by almost everybody in Brune! Sure, this is coming from Sofy's message, but Tigre is the one who ends up receiving this shocking message since he is now portrayed as *villain* just to enlisting an "enemy" from Zhcted and defended his own territory from his fellow Brunish soldier, who happened to be a son to one of the most oppressive Duke! It is made painfully clear that injustice within Brune worsen as the civil war still ongoing...
- Speaking of ongoing civil war, the situation in Brune is so chaotic that even Nice—the capital city of Brune—has becoming the most dangerous place. How dangerous? Mashas will surely going to tell you,
- We get to see how dreadful King Faron has become since Regin's assumed demise at Dinant Plains. According to Badouin, who let Mashas in out of their friendship, the king's condition was so bad that he becoming skinnier, aged quicker, and not to mentioned mind broken to the point he's playing
*wooden block*.
- What could be worse is when Mashas is surrounded by the assassins inside the palace! Be it Thenardier or Ganelon, whoever sent these assassins surely wants Mashas dead, which also means leaving Tigre without his reliable mentor and ally. Thankfully, Sofy—who just happened to be passing by—rescued Mashas from what could've been his demise.
- Two parts of the Battle of Orange featuring gruesome battles between the Silver Meteor Army and the Navarre Knights.
- The first battle is like a slaughter fest when Silver Meteor Army is ill-prepared for the brutality from Roland and his brigade gave them, including their two commanders: Elen is struggling against the Black Knight because her Arifar's wind barely even scratches him, Tigre meanwhile is severely injured from the Durandal's slash despite successfully rescues Elen, temporarily immobilizes Roland by killing his horse with a
**creative way**. Even both Elen's and Tigre's escape have becoming a problem as the Navarre Knights literary *throwing a rain of Javelins* at them just to prevent their escape! Hadn't for Sofy's rescue and the arrival of Mashas and his men, the Silver Meteor Army would be done for.
- Even before the battle itself, the four aristocrats, who are the Silver Meteor Army's supporters, are already against Tigre's and his allies idea in retaliate against the Navarre Knights out of fear that symbolizing their
*rebellion* against the king himself.
- The second battle isn't exactly a right start for the Silver Meteor Army either. You'd think with Sofy and Mashas around things would've been better, right? Well, problem is the Navarre Knights has an amazing yet deadly formation that decimates the first Silver Meteor Army's cavalry army, and from there on more soldiers will die while enduring the enemy's relentless attacks. And that is before Roland even being lured out from the battlefield! Granted, the Silver Meteor Army did eventually turn the tide by using Hughes' suggested mud trap and after Roland's surrender, breaking the Navarre Knight's long unbroken winning streak, it still require some sacrifices in order to make the plan worked....
- Tir Na Fal Temple is both mysterious and ominous as it looks. First of all, it can appears (and disappears) as long the energy of the Black Bow resonates. Second, the only way to actually access the temple is having the Black Bow at his side, meaning Tigre and/or anyone who are close to him are the only visitor. Third and not least, this is a temple that worship the Goddess herself, who represents the
**Darkness and Death** among ten Brunish Gods! Do you really think that it is a nice place to visit with this spooky name? Also, while the interior may not have any booby traps and monsters lurking around, you gotta feel that it's *pitch black* inside and it requires the light from the Black Bow in order to navigate even one partial of the area!
- Titta is this when she is possessed by Tir Na Fal! As Tigre asks Goddess some questions, that said Goddess uses Titta as her medium to communicate with Tigre, thus Titta's personality has becoming...not normal. Yes, the possessed Titta is exactly opposite from the normal Titta who we know as a meek girl rather than a vulgar counterpart.
- Freeing Titta from the Goddess's possession isn't exactly like a walk in a park either. How? You see, Tir Na Fal is
*testing* Tigre's worth in yielding the Black Bow's power and demands him to shoot his arrow at his possessed maid in order to prove himself. The catch? Not even the Goddess herself can guarantee Titta's survival. If you put yourself into Tigre's shoes, you'll be worry too because not only you need to save your maid, but you also have to concern the Silver Meteor Army's near annihilation as well. Thankfully, the arrow shot only strips Titta, not kill her.
- Roland's death when he's trapped inside the Bee Room set up by Ganelon while being stung to death, and
*still standing*! In fact, his death is so horrific that even *Thenardier* of all people calls Ganelon out for murdering their best warrior of Brune, of which the latter brushed it off instead because he did it just for kicks. This makes Tigre's chance in proving his innocence much slimmer and putting Brune in a even more vulnerable position in fending off against foreign invaders in the future, such as the likes of the Muozinel and Sachstein armies.
- Even before his death, Roland's decision in returning to Nice itself is shocking. In spite Tigre's and Mashas's warning that returning to the capital may not be a good idea now, considering the latter had experienced
*near assassination*, Roland insists on returning to Nice as his rectification for Brune's injustice. Sure its an honorable thing to do, but in this chaotic times not everyone in Brune has as much honor and justice as Roland did, so returning Nice is basically a suicide!
- The Muozinel army's first introduction as the whole. This invading army from the South East is notoriously known for its brutality and aggressiveness in any battlefield, all the while picking anyone as their slaves. Most soldiers are wearing intimidating masks, arms with sword and shield, and they will going to loot, destroy and enslave anyone who is "fitted" as slaves, including women and children. Those who defy the invader shall suffer horrendous consequences. Let's start with Kashim and his soldiers, shall we?
- Kashim's methods in provoking the Silver Meteor Army by ordering his first ten male prisoners to be beheaded, which he did, and the women are next in line if they refuse to come out. Needless to say, Brunish side of the Silver Meteor Army ain't going to sit down and going directly to confront Kashim and his soldiers directly until Ryurik leads the Zhctedi reinforcements to squash the invaders. Fortunately, karma does eventually catch up to Kashim big time when he is shot dead by Tigre.
- To make matters worse, Gerard receiving news that Kashim's Army was merely an Advance Army, which means the main unit would be
*much* larger than they thought and it's heading for their way as they speak. Considering their depleting supplies and injured soldiers, the only option left is to retreat. Sounds safe, right? The thing is however, the freed Agnes civilians are too exhausted to move on which slowing down the evacuation progress. Worse yet is the Muozinel Army's pursuing unit is chasing after the fleeing survivors with a faster rate, forcing Tigre to lead his archer unit to buy their escape until Mila and her army from Olmütz save the day.
- The Battle of Ormea itself featuring the Silver Meteor Army's (aided by the Olmütz Army) struggle against Muozinel Army's main unit. The overwhelming numbers of injured solders, depleting supplies and more refugees is one thing, but the Silver Meteor Army had to face an opponent that is Kureys Shahim Balamir, brother of the Muozinellian King and the cunning general who once defeated Sachstein's 1,000 naval army with just 200 men!
- Even after Muozinel Army had to retreat and Regin's sudden, the only enemies remains are none other than Thenardier and Ganelon who have their own preparations as their "last stand". Here is what they did,
- While assembling his troops, Thenardier receives five dragons from Drekavac where the two are well-equipped with magical chains, which according to the latter, they have magical properties that
*nullifying* Dragon Weapon's elemental powers which making the supposed invincible war maidens helpless against these mighty creature. This somehow risen Thenardier's confidence so much that he
- The anime took even a grimmer lever where Thenardier
*smirks* as if he finally able to kill the war maidens once and for all.
- The Battle of Montauban display a grizzly effect when two infamous forces are fighting against each other, and whoever wins
*everybody suffers*. The battle itself is one-sided Curb-Stomp Battle for Thenardier Army against the helpless Ganelon Army thanks to the former's five dragons, and the latter's remnant soldiers are either slaughtered or had to flee elsewhere. Even worse is the reason behind Ganelon Army's defeat is because the commanders themselves have already fled by the time this battle took place, leaving these poor soldiers to fend off themselves without a leader. But that is not even the worst part....
- The burning of Lutetia's capital Artishem is part of Ganelon's plan for his escape from Brune. Here, after his defeat he pretended becoming "crazy" and literary
*burning his own capital city into the ground*! *With poor people who considered the place home*! In fact, Artishem's situation is so terrible that the Silver Meteor Army has to hasten their journey for Lutetia immediately even though they will be fighting against Thenardier Army at Vincennes Plains along the way.
- The Battle of Vincennes may features the coolest showdown between the war maidens against five dragons, it certainly not without any tension.
- While the first three Earth Dragons are easy as pie, the following two are challenging because 1) the two-headed dragon have a most durable scales where Arifar's blade can't even scratch it, let alone hurt it, and 2) these two dragons are protected by some magical chains and their properties can
*nullifying all Dragon Weapon's elemental powers*! Needless to say, both Elen and Mila are shocked to see this and they had to think another way to slay the dragons.
- Things doesn't goes well for Tigre's side either. According to one of Mashas' men, there are two Viscount ranked officers are plotting in betraying the Silver Meteor Army and defect for the Thenardier Army, taking their 500 soldiers with them. Fortunately, Tigre have the traitors to be executed for their treachery, which shows us that even the Silver Meteor Army will not tolerate traitors.
- Duke Thenardier's origins and upbringing explain what he is today with a violent detail. According to the backstory, his House's practice of Might makes Right was motivating Thenardier in his path of hegemony by not only increasing his knowledge and skill, but also massacring his own brothers during a dispute for Nemetacum's dukedom.
- The manga version take a more sympathetic turn where the the young Thenardier was once a bully target from
*even his own brothers*.
- Tigre's Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Thenardier in their final showdown. It becomes so personal for our hero that he literary want
*destroy* his rival by supposedly attenpting to unleash the Black Bow's true power. Regardless of the adaptation, fortunately Elen snaps him out by punching him in the face and telling him not to be intoxicated by revenge.
- The anime displays that by the time Tigre grasp the Black Bow's power, his eyes glows
*Crimson Amber* of all colors while muttering his desire for more power, with an image about a destroyed castle.
- The manga takes even more scarier approach where the motivation of Tigre's blood-lust are caused by numerous flashback images of some characters from previous chapters that appears in Tigre's memories, usually sorrow and anger: Titta's near rape experience from Zion? Greast? Roland? Unnamed Agnes little girl he saved? Kureys? Steid? even a dying Bertrand? As well as Tir Na Fal's temptation in offering him the Black Bow's true power? All of these enough to tick Tigre off and raise his blood-lust.
- While Tigre and co. are celebrating their victory after Brune's civil war is over, Ganelon and Greast are already heading towards Brune's northern port and seek refuge in Zhcted. What's more, Tina of all people escorts them to Osterode as their asylum. Yes, you read it right, one of the war maidens from Zhcted is actually helping a villain in hiding at her own turf. Makes you begin to wonder how'd they even becoming friends.
- The manga adaptation have Greast replaced with Drekavac and Vodyanoy who talking with Ganelon about their twisted goals in bringing chaos into the human realm.
- Asvarre Civil War. Big time. Not long after Brune's restoration from its civil war after Ganelon's escape and Thenardier's demise, Asvarre is next to suffer its civil discord when Prince Germaine condemned his siblings for "betraying" the kingdom and have all of them executed. Of all the siblings of Asvarre Nobility that has been perished, only Eliot and Guinevere have escaped from the massacre. As retaliation, Eliot forming his Pirate Army and drove Germaine out from Colchester which opting the later fortified his remaining forces at Valverde; Guinevere meanwhile declared neutrality and refused to aid any one of her siblings. Talk about taking sibling rivalry to the extreme.
- Everything about Torbalan is this, both his human and demon form.
- Sofy's position as a prisoner under Eliot and his Pirate Army possibly gives you an idea what if a War Maiden is in deep trouble. She is chained and locked in a prison cell, her Zaht is nowhere to be found, and she almost left vulnerable against her would be rapists in the ship. And her confrontation with Eliot ain't fare any better. You see, the only reason why Eliot saves Sofy by killing
**even his own men** is supposedly want to *impress* the lady, which she obviously not, and trying to make sure the "shipment" is safe until he meeting with Muozinel merchant. This is all for the supplies he need for his army in order to defeat his enemies. In short, *a war maiden is about to be sold as slave*!
- The prelude to the Battle of Olsina between Lebus-Legnica Navy Army vs. the invading pirates at the open seas. First of all, Sasha had return from her retirement after hearing Tigre's disappearance from in order to stop Torbalan and his pirate crew. Keep in mind that this monster is responsible for Tigre's disappearance during their journey from Asvarre, not to mention Sasha herself has just recovered from her own illness. Secondly, instead of Elen, Sasha enlists Liza of all people to aid her defense against the invading pirates. That's right, the same war maiden who led an army in invading Legnica just to lure Elen for her. And third and lastly, Sasha
*herself* volunteers to fend off the Pirate Army *against even her own men's protests out of her own safety and well being*! Suffice to say that her first and last comeback as a war maiden is a short-lived and tragic one....
- And the battle itself doesn't fare any better either. Not only have the Legnica naval forces nearly lost half of its main army, with dead sailors and destroyed ships everywhere, even the combination of both Sasha and Liza aren't enough to take Torbalan down, just like Roland against Elen and Sofy. What's worse is that Torbalan almost becoming a Hero Killer when he manages to inflict some injury onto Sasha who
*risks own life* in rescuing Liza! Sure, Sasha is able to turn the tide via her Heroic Second Wind in slaying Torbalan in the progress, but to see a crippling legend who barely comes back from her illness being injured by this monster is outright disheartening. Its is a horrific price to pay for that victory indeed....
- Do
*not*, under any circumstances, make Elizaveta Fomina angry, especially when she sees the only person who cares for her being robbed away. Ryurik learns this the hard way when he tries to convince Urs as the missing Tigre. Liza responds by angrily yelling at him to the point that she gives him a Death Glare to make him back off.
- Literally every ghost from Liza past that are created by Baba Yaga. Sure, they're illusions and they aren't real, and Liza herself is aware of this, but these are the things happened in Liza's life and trying to mess with her head. We have her childhood bullies who ridiculed her Rainbow Eyes, then Elen who begrudged her over the burning village, and finally a zombiefied Rodion who even demands her to avenge him. Liza is able to shake them off but with a lot of courage to actually pull herself through the situation.
- The real kicker is these illusions are Baba Yaga's tactics to confuse Liza while ambushing her from above the moment she clear her mind,
*and she succeeded*! Its bad enough to see Liza's right arm being crippled after Baba Yaga stripped her powers and losing Urs/Tigre during the chaos, but she had to face her worst nightmare that's about to kill her. Luckily for Liza, she is rescued by Urs/Tigre who narrowly rescues her in a nick of time. But, oh no, because this rematch against the witch is only the beginning....
- The sudden disappearance of Durandal via thievery is this. Durandal, Brune's iconic weapon of power that once held by the former Brunish Kings (Faron included) and Roland, which is also now at the hands of Regin as a representation of her political power, is ended up stolen by unknown thieves who were hired by the returning Greast. That aside, the disappearance of Durandal also puts Regin's reign in danger when nearly some Brune's ministers, specifically Melisande's supporters, are doubting her rule and trying to topple her down by all means necessary. Hard to believe to see Brune's peace shatters instantly over one missing sword...
- One the other side, Sachstein resumes its invasion towards Brune after the deaths of Roland, Thenardier and Faron. What's worse is the invasion itself is personally invited by Melisande who plans to topple her own cousin for the crown. Sachstein has been trying to invade Brune but ultimately failed so many times in the past, and Brune's latest chaos just give them a cause to invade their neighboring kingdom at last! Talk about taking the enemies' vulnerability to their advantage.
- Not helping matters is the Brune army, despite the aid of the Navarre Knights still either powerless before the invaders' might and cunning, giving them to suffer yet another humiliating defeat since the Dinant Plains. Needless to say, the villagers and townspeople in Brune are the first to suffer from Sachstein's invasion.
- Meanwhile, Kureys see Brune's chaos as yet another opportunity in invading Brune once again for the
*third time*. Keep in mind the only reason why he cancelled the supposed second invasion against Brune is because of Tigre's disappearance in Asvarre Seas.
- Tina's suggestion in repelling against Sachstein Army is anything but noble. Yes, she of all people is ordered by King Viktor to help Tigre in defending Brune from the invading Sachstein Army, but that doesn't mean she
*really* helping Tigre in fending off the enemies. In fact, the only reason she "helped" Tigre is not only because of King Viktor's suspicions to her agenda, but also **her** desire to see the Black Bow's power.
- Her presence isn't welcomed by Elen and Lim, as the former suspects her motive with Tigre.
- She vile suggestion surfaces again in one meeting before battling against the remaining Sachstein army at Prowirl Plains. In order to truly defeat the invaders, Tina suggests to
**poisoning the nearby river** just to cripple the enemy supplies, which unfortunately also affecting the villagers who depend these waters too. Needless to say, considering what happened during Melisande's revolt, everyone is so mortified to hear this plan to the point even Mashas questioning her agenda towards Brune. Tina's response? *She doesn't even care*! Thankfully, this plot is quickly scrapped and replaced with Tigre's fire plot that is work on Hans's army instead.
- Elen's imprisonment by Greast. Its a horrendous experience. The chain that lock her up isn't just an ordinary chain you see, its a magical chain it that
*prevents* her from summoning Arifar. That's right, folks. That's the same chain that gave both Elen and Mila some trouble for having their Dragon Tool's powers nullified during their battle against Thenardier's dragons! What come next is a twisted greeting from Greast himself who is touching Elen's body against her will, except the kissing and... taking her virginity part, initially. Instead, he will try to invoke an Attempted Rape on her so he can break Elen *and* Tigre at once at Vernon Mansion with absolutely *no* hesitation. In short, *Greast will make Elen her woman no matter what.*
- If you think that rouge Marquis is bad enough, how about his men who wish to get their hands on her for killing their comrades? Why are they refrained to do such a thing? Well it turns out that Greast warned them that he will execute
*anyone* besides him and the little girl who get even close to Elen's barrack! And she had to endure her nightmarish 10 days of torture until Tigre and Mila arrive to the scene! Hadn't Tigre and Mila arrive just in time to free her, Elen's fate could much, *much* worse than death.
- Even more uncomfortable part is the fact that how many women fell victim to the hand of this malicious man. According to Greast, many women he raped end up submitting to him without fighting back. For Elen's case however, he find her "special" for not only because of her position as one of seven Zhcted's renowned female warrior, but also her resistant against him even in her troubled position. You'd ought to wonder if Elen will able to get through her humiliation and trauma for a long time if, again, Tigre and Mila did not arrive just in time to save her from Greast and his soldiers.
- The unholy alliance between Ganelon and the demons itself can catch readers off guard.
- We get to see a revelation behind the Villainous Friendship between Tina and Ganelon from the former's perspective. According to her backstory, in order to improve Osterode's prosperity, Tina had to travel all the way to Lutetia and sought Ganelon as her trade partner, despite the fact that Ezendeis (Tina's Dragon Tool) sensed something ominous within that said "trade partner". Probably got you even wondering that Tina's reason in aiding Ganelon's escape from Brune was to repay his "contribution" for Osterode's prosperity.
- Muozinel's war slaves as the whole. Unlike most slaves, these captured prisoners will be joining the battle alongside with Muozinel Army's soldiers and general and often seen marching on the front lines. Not only the slaves' wages are much lower than that of an average soldiers by comparison, but they will also be forced to sacrifice themselves as Muozinel Army's
*human shields* just in case if situation goes sour for the army. Either way, you'd feel sorry for these poor people whose life are destined to get worsen by day once they are at the hands of death from Muozinel's cruelty.
- What's worse is the war slaves can be anybody,
*including high-ranking officers and their families*: The three mayors, who were one of many Melisande's former allies, learn this the hard way when they seek Kureys for help in yet another attempt in removing Regin, only to be enslaved along with their family for their troubles. This also shows that Kureys, as cunning as he can be, even he can't tolerate greedy traitors.
- The entire scenery of the destruction of Brune's villages and town that is ransacked by the Sachstein and Greast armies is pretty dark to the point even Damad of all people can't helped but to feel sorry for the victims of the destruction.]]
- Greast's downfall and demise as a whole, and it is ironically because of one woman he obsessed so much.
- Even after learning Muozinel's invasion Greast insist on travelling for Montour immediately as he has his plan for Elen and even Tigre. Sound like a foolproof plan, right? Well, what Greast miscalculated is that Tigre has already lurking somewhere near to his army camp and he is not alone, with Mila of all people. Needless to say, skirmish ensues and Greast's left hand is impaled by an arrow shot. What does he do?
*Demanding Elen to heal his right hand* and even using the Magical Chain to *warp around her as hostage*! Elen's response? **Chopping off that jerk's right hand immediately**! Hell hath no fury than a Woman Scorned, *indeed*.
- Despite his injury however, Greast, being a Dirty Coward and a Determinator,
**still** refuses to give up Elen and trying to retake her by planning to rush the Moonlight Knight once an for all. For a supposed genius strategist, this is a certainly a rash move that will only backfires very quickly not just to him, but his entire army! Which lead us to...
- The Battle of Montour. You'd expecting Greast Army will prevail again like the last time, right? Wrong! They instead being butchered mercilessly by a vengeful Moonlight Knights-specifically Leitmeritz Army who is extremely pissed off after learning Elen's torture! This is not a battle, this is a
**bloody massacre**! In fact, *Greast* is shocked to see his army's annihilation that he had to escape *by himself*! It is thanks to Tina that Greast manage to flee from his pursuers, although this is because the former want to know Ruslan's whereabouts so she can fulfill her own ambition. He will not go far though...
- Greast's Karmic Death in an ironic way. Oh boy, not even his brain can save him now! Of all the place he could've escape to, he goes to Vernon Mansion and even stay here of a night. Little does Greast even realizes that he is tied on a chair with ropes, and end up being tortured to death by one of his own torture devices, funny enough. Who is Greast's torturer and executioner?
**Denis**! Yes, folks, Greast is killed not by Tigre, Elen, or even soldiers from Brune and/or Zhcted, but an exiled Brunish noble who hold his grudge against the former Marquis for screwing his family good reputation. Also, both his and Vernon's beheaded heads are delivered to Tigre and Mashas as Denis's sign of redemption.
- The kicker? It is revealed that Vernon, owner of the mansion and an ally of Greast, has already died
*long before* Greast even arrive to the mansion, courtesy to Denis and his friends. This means the former Marquis is actually entered a **trap** without even realizing anything at all.
- The bitter reunion between Elen and Fine in general. It begins with Elen calls Fine out in an angrier tone we never seen before since her incident with Greast. In fact, she is so angry that any mention about Vissarion from Fine's mouth ticks her off, and it takes Lim, Sofy, Mila and Tigre to calm Elen down and drag her out from the office. Considering what we learned from Fine's and Elen's past relationship prior to Vissarion's death and the disbandment of Silver Gale Mercenaries, the latter's rage against the former is somewhat understandable.
- The kicker is that Fine
*knows* that both Elen and Lim will never forgive her for killing Vissarion and yet she pushes her former friend's buttons by mentioning him and his dreams anyways simply because her impulse has gotten the best of her. One would've wonder if her earlier provocation is either intentional or by accident.
- The passing of King Viktor and Ilda's questionable death marks Zhcted's darkest days in the kingdom's history, which is also Tina's golden opportunity to manipulate the following events into her favor for the throne, including tricking Ruslan along the way. Unless the heroes are going to do something about it, her ambition cannot be stopped...
- Everything begins with Tina enlisting some help from Fine and Liza in quelling the "rebels" (read: Sofy and Elen) who "stood against" Ruslan's reign. Keep in mind that this is actually Tina's agenda in getting rid of her would-be rivals who stop her from getting what she wants. Sure, the assassination plot is foiled thanks to the intervention by Tigre and Ruslan, saving Sofy and Liza in the progress, but surprisingly it is all part of Tina's plan and it only get worse from here...
- Fine's betrayal onto Liza and attacks her is this. The reason? Well, it is due to their distrust onto Liza over her rekindled relationship with Elen.
- The bigger shocker is that Ruslan of all people is acting suspiciously "nicer" towards Tina and Fine, making him as literary a Puppet King of Zhcted. Sure, it is courtesy to Tina that Ruslan returned to his "normal health" and becoming king, but he hasn't even realize that behind her "kindness" hid a dark side.
- Tigre's nightmare about the world the demons yearned to change as the whole. Let's see, purple fields, red skies, green seas, and a lot of demons lurking everywhere. What is scarier is Tigre's horrific discovery upon one shattered weapon which assumed to be Arifar and, get ready for this,
**tombstones, dead corpses and broken weapons are everywhere**! Worst yet, **one of them has Elen's name on it**! Yes, folks, this is exactly what Tir Na Fal warned Tigre about the demon's twisted plot and this nightmare *will* be happening if Ganelon succeeds in what he do! What delaying our heroes? Zhcted's first and deadly civil war finally breaks out after Tina's and Fine's escape. Not helping matter is the army of Muozinel (read: the leader is not Kureys) is now using this chaos as an opportunity to invade Zhcted! Whether this from rouge war maidens, rebellious nobles or even outside invaders, it seems Viktor's nightmare about the dooming kingdom is coming all too true...
- Of all the chaos that plaguing Zhcted, Tir Na Fal's descent comes down as the worst considering Ganelon is the one who performing a ritual for this summoning, with Tigre and the Black Bow as his last "instruments". Just look at the color of the sky!
**It is freakin' purple**! You don't see *that* everyday!
- Even Silesia isn't immune to this kind of phenomenal either, as people are so scared by the purple skies that people keep praying until the sky turn back to normal.
- The showdown against Ganelon itself. While there are some awesome moments where Tigre is finally going to fight the duke, it is still a chilling experience to witness such battle given how powerful Ganelon actually is.
- At the end of Volume 17, Sofy was so close to dying after Tina wounded her because of her nullified Dragon Tool.
- During the climax, Silesia came
*this close* to becoming a chaotic wasteland. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LordMarksmanAndVanadis |
Lost Highway / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
*"We've met before, haven't we?"*
-
*Every* scene with the Mystery Man.
- "
*I'm at your house... *"
- When he laughs in real life and at the other end of the phone simultaneously.
- Pete gets a phone call from Mr. Eddy, who then hands it off to "a friend of mine."
**Mystery Man:** In the East, the Far East, when a person is sentenced to death, they're sent to a place where they can't escape, never knowing when an executioner may step up behind them, and fire a bullet into the back of their head.
- Especially eerie is the real-life parallels of Robert Blake playing a creepy criminal in a movie about a man murdering his wife. It gets worse if one considers that Lynch was inspired by the O.J. Simpson murder case while directing the movie.
- The scene where Fred finds the Mystery Man just....standing there. Nothing creepy, just standing there and smiling.
- The video tapes at the beginning are incredibly unsettling as they are the work of a stalker breaking into someone's home.
- Fred's dream about Renee, where she "isn't Renee, but looks like her"
- When the lights flash after Fred returns from the party with the Mystery Man.
- Fred's hallucinations in prison.
- Mr Eddy:
*Her name is Alice. I swear I love that girl to death. If I ever found out someone was making out with her. I'd take this* - pulls out a pistol - *and shove it so far up his ass it would come out his mouth. Then you know what I'd do? I'd blow his fuckin' brains out.*
- Fred's wanderings around his house at night definitely qualify. No cheap Jump Scares - Nothing Is Scarier at its best indeed. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LostHighway |
Lords and Ladies / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- The elves used to provide the page quote for The Fair Folk for a
*reason.* They're sadistic Humanoid Abominations that manipulate the thoughts and emotions of mortals into worshiping them and feed off the pasts and futures of other universes because their own is nothing but a barren eternity of ice and snow.
- Pratchett manages to do it with just one word. So horrible it's almost funny:
The elves had killed the fish in the pond. Eventually.
- This sentence is just pure nightmare fuel.:
In a narrow little valley a few miles away a party of elves had found a nest of young rabbits which, in conjunction with a nearby antheap,
*kept them amused for a while*."
- And this, from beings that gloatingly expect that the land of Lancre will
*be pleased to have them back.* How alien / evil a mindset is that?
- Fridge Horror: It's a passing remark, but Granny Weatherwax tells Ridcully that elves and humans have bred in the past. Given that the elves have no empathy and their presence is Mind Rape to mortals, the circumstances were probably not pleasant. (Let's hope it was instead a case of Love Redeems.)
- Since Diamanda has been elf-shot, the elves can control her into letting them into the castle. Once they're in, they turn on her:
[Shawn Ogg] kept repeating, "They just laughed and stabbed her. She didn't even try to run away. It was like they were
*playing."*
- "Yes, thered been a lot of witches in them days. Too many women found an empty cradle, or a husband that never came home from the hunt. Had been the hunt." — In short, the witches hinted at in other parts of the book, who had 'minds like iron' (impervious to the glamour) and had originally driven back the elves, were otherwise ordinary women who had lost their husbands and children in the reign of terror.
- The description of the Elf King's plan is at once beautiful and terrifying.
**Nanny:** All this iron and books and clockwork and universities and reading and suchlike. He reckons it'll all pass, see. And one day it'll all be over, and people will look up at the skyline at sunset and there *he'll* be. One day he'll be back. When even the iron in the head is rusty. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LordsAndLadies |
Long Live the Queen / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- Elodie failing the test if she chooses to ||confront Lucille|| at the ball. She essentially has locked-in syndrome, becomes blind as a bat, and remains like this for a long, long time, in fear, until she finally dies.
- Elodie and Briony, if you fail the Old Forest event. The skills involved are widely varied and difficult to get without carefully managing them from the start of the game, and failing nearly
*any* of them will get you devoured by a tentacle monster, in a dark forest, without anyone even knowing Elodie left the castle.
- Dying at sea, utterly alone, afraid, and exhausted in the darkness of the night.
- Though it's a heroic moment, magically destroying the Shanjian fleet is a
*terrifying* display of raw power. You literally open the sea beneath the ships, plunging them into the depths and crushing them to oblivion. ||Doing this also unleashes the Kraken, which can only be permanently appeased by a human sacrifice.||
- From just about any perspective outside of Elodie's (and even within hers, considering how painful this decision is), imagine hearing the news that shortly before the princess's coronation, ||she's executed the
*entire ducal family of Merva* — her own aunt, uncle, and cousins. Including Emry and Zahra, who are *nine* and *seven* years old respectively, as well as a few servants who just happened to get in the way.|| On top of that, this triggers yet another ||Mervan Succession Crisis||. It's not surprising that ||Merva effectively secedes from Nova in the epilogue — unless Elodie is ruthless enough to throw on some *more* nightmare fuel and put the duchy to the torch.||
- If Elodie chooses to resolve the Ixion crisis by ||executing Brin, the person who started the problem||, her brother Banion will be out for her blood. If both Elodie and Banion survive to the end, she can still choose to marry him, despite the game warning the player that might not be a good idea. In the latest update, this situation gets its own epilogue: ||Elodie and Banion's wedding is described as "lavish" and "romantic", and soon Elodie is pregnant with their child... But then Elodie finds herself plagued by constant migraines and fatigue. She suspects Banion is poisoning her food, but is too weak to act on her suspicions, leaving Banion to pursue his own political agenda while she's confined to her bed "for the good of the child." When the baby is finally born, Banion names her "Brin."||
- What really happens if Selene "purifies" the wife-strangler. ||One of the standard responses to the situation is to oblige him by sending him to the priestesses in hopes of exorcising the supposed demon. In the right circumstances, Elodie can send him specifically to Selene. Once Elodie consults with her, she informs her that there was no demon to remove, but she "treated" him anyway, and you might say he's been cured, because he can't harm anyone else if he never regains consciousness...||
- Hyacinth, the former Duke of Mead and stepson of Arisse, and Jael, Arisse's second husband, were both horrible people who add a layer of "real-life horror" to a game that is mostly about court intrigues with fantasy elements. The former was known for hiring a string of attractive male servants that always wound up dying inexplicable and violent deaths, and the other ||sexually abused his young stepson over the course of years, not stopping even
*after being found out*, and reportedly assaulted the teenaged Duchess of Elath||. Is it any wonder that Arisse decided to ||have them both killed||? | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LongLiveTheQueen |
Loki (2021) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
## Nightmare fuel pages are for post-viewing discussion; they assume you've already seen the work in question and as such are spoiler-free.
*"We're in a shark tank. Alioth is the shark."*
- The end of the episode, where we get a glimpse of The Variant luring a team of Minutemen to their death. The Minutemen arrive on scene in the 1800s to find a futuristic artifact in the middle of a field. One of the Minutemen smells oil and assumes someone went back in time to try and get rich off of it. The audience then gets a glimpse of The Variant standing out in the field wearing a cloak, before slowly lifting a lit lantern and dropping it igniting the oil soaking the field. Hunter U-92 desperately tries to get to the reset charge his team planted before he's suddenly pulled away off-screen, all set to the sound of his teammates screaming as they burn alive. It definitely goes on the list as one of the most violent deaths in the MCU.
- As Loki waits in line for his turn to see the judge, another Variant who refused to take a ticket is casually vaporized by the soldier at the front desk, as though his life were no more significant than that of a bug on a windshield. A harsh, but effective way of showing that the TVA is not screwing around when it comes to maintaining The Sacred Timeline.
- The opening shot of the Roxxcart scene, where we witness an
*entire town* slowly being swallowed by the storm surges caused by the hurricane. Added to that, the fact that in the future, hurricanes can reach Category *8*.
- The prediction of how bad climate change gets in general. The next few decades are full of one terrible climate disaster after another. Plus a supervolcano eruption for good measure.
- This episode sees Loki and Sylvie land on a moon that's about to crash into a planet, dooming everyone on it to certain death. There's meteorites and explosions everywhere, and pandemonium and violence reign in the streets as the poor everyman workers are left behind to face extinction while the rich are given premier access to an evacuation ark... which then promptly explodes anyway.
- We see Sylvie's abduction as a child. She is alone in her room, playing, and she is kidnapped and subjected to the same treatment Loki got in the first episode. Where it was somewhat comical then, it is much less so now. Making it even worse is that Sylvie wasnt even doing anything in particular. For all intents and purposes, her apparent crime was
*existing*.
- The Time Cells. The TVA use advanced technology to put their victims in an endless loop, replaying their worst memories on repeat without any means to escape. While Loki being beaten and humiliated over and over again is Played for Laughs, the experience itself is chilling and is in fact Cold-Blooded Torture, feeling like something youd see in
*Black Mirror*.
- Whatever place Loki ends up being transported to after being pruned eerily resembles a post-apocalyptic New York with overgrown plant life and ruined skyscrapers — one can even see the destroyed Avengers tower in the background.
- All the employees at the TVA are variants. Mobius is always pining after jetskis he can never ride because once upon a time he was a blasé surfer dude and some part of him remembers that. All the TVA employees have their own quiet little And I Must Scream buried inside themselves.
- You thought all timeline branches and variants pruned just cease to exist? Think again. That is the purpose of the Void, the place at the very end of time where the future has yet to be written by the TVA. Since branches and variants can't actually be wiped out, they are instead moved to the Void which basically acts like a giant time abyss garbage dump. And once you're there, you're trapped with no way out. From then on, you have to scavenge up what resources you can find and hide as best you can from the outside. And if that wasn't bad enough, you also have to deal with surviving variants who might be a little less than cordial with you. And then there's...
-
**Alioth**. Picture an enormous living storm that scours the world in search of any poor soul that happens to appear in its vicinity with no clue what happened to them. It then attacks its victim by surrounding them in a thick purple cloud that immediately decays them until nothing is left in all but an instant. Now imagine that creature has a giant glowing face that looks like a bear's skull, and you have this monstrosity.
- To elaborate: Alioth is, as Sylvie puts it, a guard dog for the mastermind of the TVA. Any and all variants who are pruned are sent to the Void where they are expected to be killed by this beast. If you ever encounter it, your best bet is to just run like hell and hope it gets bored of you. Otherwise, there's no escape.
- In the following episode, we learn Alioth was born from tears in reality from the first Multiversal War, and has devoured
*entire universes* before He Who Remains weaponized him to end it. This thing is basically the MCU's version of Azathoth.
- Even after learning that she was duped, Renslayer
*still* apparently believes that the TVA is in the right, and wants to protect her unknown masters from Sylvie. That is what you call a fanatical Knight Templar.
- After getting his hand bitten off by Alligator Loki, President Loki raises it to show the entire stump with exposed flesh and all. Theres even a small splash of blood when President Loki rips Alligator Loki off of him. It's shockingly gory for the usually-PG-13 MCU.
- Loki and Sylvie enter the castle and it's completely empty. As they start to walk through the halls, Miss Minutes suddenly pops up in an effective Jump Scare. Her chirpy Southern Belle demeanor is suddenly a
*lot* creepier for how out of place it is in such a spooky environment, especially with the shrunken pupils and evil grin she has when she first appears. The result feels like something out of *Five Nights at Freddy's*.
- He Who Remains is himself a fairly harmless Non-Action Big Bad on his own. But this, which he himself lampshades, begs the question: if this is the variant who was benevolent enough to want to maintain a proper timeline, then what the hell is a
*bad* variant who wants to rule it all like? The ending gives us a rather terrifying peek at the answer: Loki returns to the TVA, trying to warn Mobius of the war that is coming. His voice is shaky with every passing word, letting us know that this entire threat of "countless different versions of a *very* dangerous person" has left him completely scared. Unfortunately for Loki, Mobius doesn't recognize him, so Loki looks over to where the statues of the Time-Keepers once stood. Instead, he can only see one lone statue bearing the likeness of He Who Remains clad in a distinctive set of armor. He's too late. **Kang the Conqueror** . **is here** | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Loki2021 |
Lost Judgment / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
If you thought
*Judgment* was dark, well... let's just say there's a reason why this game has a Content Warning.
## Base Game
- Not ten minutes after starting the game for the first time, the viewers are exposed to perhaps
**THE** most graphic corpse in the entire *Yakuza* series as the firefighters reveal the decayed, decrepit corpse of Hiro Mikoshiba full of flies and maggots that has been sitting under the tarp for months. Even before they did so, just the presence of a buzzing, tarped figure alone makes one of the firefighters want to abandon it.
- Then Kaito reveals to Yagami that the footage of Mikoshiba's murder is also leaked on the internet and is currently going viral on social media. What doesn't help is Mikoshiba
*realistically* begging the murderer to stop before his throat gets slit and how it's reported that Mikoshiba had previously managed to get away with driving Ehara's son to suicide up until that point. And on top of that, you can hear the disgusting sound of blood gushing out offscreen, and The Reveal that Ehara was the killer all along.
- The English dub adds to the above scene by not only keeping the authenticity of it all, but you get to hear Mikoshiba
*gurgling as his blood goes into his throat*.
- And can we talk about how all of this is scored by the very unsettling and aptly named, "A Show of Revenge"? Good
*lord*, man.
- When Akutsu and his RK goons take Yagami for interrogation, they beat him up really badly, the ominous echo and the POV camera perspective during it all makes it that much worse, and then Akutsu brings a friggin
*chainsaw* onto Yagami! Luckily it turns into a Moment of Awesome when Yagami persuades the goon put the chainsaw down and when Kaito and Sugiura show up at just the right time to help him out. But, imagine if they didn't show up for a second. Yagami would've suffered one really grisly death. However, that leads us to...
- The discovery of Sawa's corpse is both this and a Tear Jerker. Just the fact that she's lying lifelessly on the floor with her eyes wide open in horror. And they're red, indicating that she was crying as she bled out. Keep in mind that this happened just because she decided to look into the suicide of a student. Just goes to show that RK is a threat to everyone, not just investigators and other criminals. And the Public Security Bureau is completely willing to overlook this and throw someone else under the bus for her murder just because they think it would be a hassle to find a new source of intel. And besides, the fact that someone had the absolute gall to kill an innocent and kind young woman is beyond sad, enraging, and terrifying at the same time. Which leads us to...
-
**Soma.** Where do we even begin with him?
- Much like Kuroiwa, while he has a very affable and calm exterior, he's every bit as unhinged and sadistic as the dirty cop. Difference is that whereas Kuroiwa's true colors are very violent and overt with his psychopathy, Soma
*never* raises his voice beyond a quiet growl or ever exerts much effort beyond a simple lunge or a swing, always waiting for the opportune moment to strike. If Kuroiwa were comparable to a human Terminator, then Soma is basically Jason or Michael Myers, but unlike them, he *knows* what he's doing.
- The fact that he's a Public Security agent (think the Japanese equivalent of the feared [British] Special Branch), served the Nikkyo Consortium (the Tojo Clan's covert ops branch) and his theme, "Viper" (which is littered with Scare Chords throughout), adding to his intimidation factor don't help, either.
- His scene where he stabs Kaito, leaving him in critical condition, before beating down Yagami and
*very nearly* killing them both paint a picture of how much of a threat he is to the main cast.
- Near the end of the game, the location of Kawai's body is given and Soma's team manage to find it in the freezer that he's been kept in. For the last
*five years.* Kawai's gaping expression is certainly *not* a lovely sight to behold, with his eyes rolled back as if he was in the middle of being possessed. The only saving grace is that he's been kept frozen, meaning his body wasn't given the chance to rot away like Mikoshiba's.
## The Kaito Files | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LostJudgment |
Lost Together / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- Ranko waking up lost in the wilderness without the slightest inkling of who she is, or where she is, and that's before learning there's a crazy strong Amazon bent on murdering the shit out of her on the chase.
- The fact that
*everybody* in the story is afraid of angering the Phoenix King. Even the Dragon Prince is wary of angering him, and the guy is as far away as it's possible to be from a pushover.
- When Shampoo and Mousse have to admit Chervil has lost the Musk royal ring, only for Ranko to pick it up and vanish in thin air, Herb completely flips out and decides he's going to
*raze* the Amazon village to the ground, for the sin of not keeping Ranko safely locked up, if they cannot find her in a month's time. Both youths are horrified, and even Herb's advisor Sumac thinks the prince is going too far.
- When Lotion suggests the Hibiki family's No Sense of Direction might be a genuine curse, Ryoga immediately understands Ranko might be at risk to be infected if she spends enough time near him, making him even more desperate to find a cure for it.
- Ranko having a nightmare in which male Ranma tries to catch her and lock her away in a house, implying her original personality is aware of her activities and quite
*unhappy* with her growing in a genuine, real person. Of course, from Ranma's viewpoint, *Ranko herself* is Nightmare Fuel — she stole his body and is currently parading all around China, doing whatever she pleases without a care for Ranma's own preferences and desires, and she's delving more and more in a romantic, *physical* relationship with a boy when Ranma obviously isn't in a position to consent. Yikes. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LostTogether |
Loud House: Infection of the Dead / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
**As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.** *"You know what I'm going to do to Lori when I find her? I'm going to tie her up and chop her up into tiny pieces. And I'd do it slow.... This belongs to a man that Lori apparently knew. We killed him back in Baltimore. You probably don't know him. But damn, he tastes good. We're going to eat you. All of you. Then, we'll eat all your friends in front of Lori. And we'll have to do that because it'll be a long, cold winter. Gotta do anything to survive, amiright? We'll amputate Lori's toes, then her foot, then her legs, then her fingers, then her hands, then her arms. We'll do it slowly... every time. And then, we put her out of her misery. Not fun, right? Just wanted someone to hear me out. Thanks for listening. Hopefully, you'll be more delicious than the last guy we ate. Though I doubt it. But then again
can't complain. You will be helping us get through the night
and my mother said to never be picky with my food."*
—
**Calvin** to **Kotaro**, "Chapter 27: Last Resort"
- The roamers' grotesque physical appearance. Covered in rotten flesh and blood and disfigured in some way, they are scary enough to look at, even being a phobia of capable survivors like Jace Taylor.
- Their glowing eyes in the dark make them akin to predators at night.
- It is also unnerving to get close to them, as from a distance, the golden eyes make the roamers appear soulless, but from mere inches away their pupils can be seen moving around, as if there is a person trapped inside the monstrous body.
- The manner in which roamers consume people and animals. They tend to use their nails to dig in and grab hold of their prey before using their teeth to bite deep. This results in flesh being torn apart and blood squirting out and spilling everywhere.
1: The Fall of Michigan
- The way General Black kills the McBrides parents in a dark basement.
- The description of their deceased bodies is just as repulsing when Lincoln and Lynn come across them.
- The fiery destruction of the Detroit Safe-Zone. Imagine being in a dark bunker hearing gunshots and explosions outside where your parents are supposed to be at.
3: The Journey Ahead
- Chaz's death. The way he is torn apart by the roamers still makes his death one of the most gruesome and bloodcurdling in the entire story, and there are
**a lot** of gruesome deaths.
4: Crossing the Line
- One particular scene in Part IV where Lola sees a roamer up close from the other side of a window in Vanzilla. The way the roamer is described is enough to send chills down one's spine, just as it had with Lola.
11: Justice in the Somber Nights
- The screams heard when Darcy is burning to death. Just the thought of a stranger tossing a little girl into a fire is enough to keep one awake at night.
27: Last Resort
- Calvin's depraved speech to Kotaro in the latter's former moments. He describes what he will do to Lori in gruesome and disturbing detail, before telling Kotaro straight in the face that he will eat him. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoudHouseInfectionOfTheDead |
Louie / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Sean the bully describes a recent fight from the appropriately titled segment Bully.
**Sean**: So what if I just decided to kick your ass right now? What would you do then? Huh?! D'you want that? I'm serious, I can hurt you really bad — right now. (Pushes his freshly scabbed knuckles into Louie's face) Y'see this, huh?! This was just two days ago, destroyed this guys face, must've hit him like 40 times. Teeth all over the place, just left him there bleeding. Probably sent him to the hospital. Are you ready for that? I'm kinda feeling like doing that to you right now — gonna be honest. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Louie |
Love and Destiny / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- The Demon King takes Zhong Hao's soul by dragging it out of his body while he screams in pain. Then his body disintegrates while this is still happening.
- Yuan Tong pushes Ling Xi into the Cleansing Pool. She falls into a seemingly-endless tunnel of smoke where she's repeatedly struck by lightning. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoveAndDestiny |
Looney Tunes Cartoons / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
"If you ain't gonna eat me, you have to at least The
*wear me. Wear me, Doc. Wear me... * **you're beautiful.**" *Looney Tunes* have never been strangers to the macabre, a tradition this iteration not only follows up on in stride, but in some ways ups the ante on.
- While
*Looney Tunes* has always been a violent franchise, this series takes it to levels comparable to that of *The Itchy & Scratchy Show* and *Happy Tree Friends*; the first season alone features the likes of Sylvester being cracked in half while frozen in a block of ice, Wile E. having his fur and skin burned off (and then being caught between salt and lemon trucks), and Elmer having a bear trap *clamped onto his head*.
- The ending to
*Fully Vetted*, where Sylvester, having been neutered, walks out on to the road and proceeds to lie down to **commit suicide by truck**. Depending on who you ask, it's either this or a glorious piece of Black Comedy.
-
*Kitty Livin* starts out tame enough, though things very quickly take a turn for the gruesome once Tweety starts unknowingly tormenting Sylvester from the inside. Body Horror is aplenty, including but not limited to Tweety breaking apart Sylvester's ribcage.
-
*Rotund Rabbit* ends with Elmer deflating Bugs, rendering him a gangly monstrosity. Bad enough as that is, it's even worse when Bugs starts goading Elmer into "wearing him", with the creepiest dry voice you can ever imagine him having. Even Elmer is freaked out by it and runs off into the distance screaming. It makes MeatCanyons take on Bugs look like Chuck Jones.
- The end of the short even manages to make "That's All, Folks!" unsettling; the carrot crumbs in Bugs's mouth don't help in the slightest.
- Even creepier; usually, the shorts come to a close with an iris out or a fade to the end title. This short just...
*Cuts there...*
- In
*Mummy Dummy*, after finally getting Bugs where he wants him, the titular mummy begins to brutally contort him. Bugs' expressions and the accompanying crunching sounds, not to mention his screams, are absolutely horrifying... at least until it's revealed that not only did it not kill Bugs, he actually saw it as a massage.
- It's even Harsher in Hindsight, when you think about it. Imagine the character you've grown up with for years that almost never loses and is lovable for his gags getting horribly maimed and genuinely murdered
*onscreen,* and then his entire **neck snapped.** Even with the sudden Mood Whiplash that came afterward, it can still scare younger audiences and genuinely shock older audiences that are used to the Chuck Jones incarnation of Bugs...
- Bugs arrives in a room filled with urns, thinking it's a buffet. Out of these urns, he pulls out several, decayed organs thinking that it's delicious food. However, once he sniffs the spleen, he notices how rank it smells, correctly thinking that the food is old. Especially with how disturbingly detailed the organs look.
- It gets worse from there... The mummy appears, trying to catch Bugs, but is stopped by Bugs stuffing the organs down his throat - thinking that the mummy was a garbage can. If that wasn't enough, he tries to
*stuff the organs down the mummy's throat.* It goes into a Gross-Up Close-Up of him squishing the innards inside his body with old green blood splashing everywhere and awfully realistic squishing noises. Sometimes, you'll forget that this is *Looney Tunes* with scenes as gross and creepy as this...
-
*Rabbit Sandwich Machine* has a rather effective jumpscare in the form of a Gross-Up Close-Up of Elmer's face when he proclaims in a monotone voice "everybody loves mayonnaise".
- Elmer as a whole pulls off some rather impressive Nightmare Faces in this show.
- "Taziator" has Taz slowly walks toward Bugs while growling angrily at him with a couple of bruises and bloody claw marks on his face and the music in the scene makes it very scary while Bugs backs away in fear from Taz once Bugs gets cornered by Taz. We see the close up of Taz's red eyes, red irises, and his teeth close to the screen that would make any kid hide under the covers! We've seen Taz angry before but this time he looks very peeved off and wants to eat Bugs then and there! Luckily, Taz eats the emperor instead but still it's disturbing!
- Most of "Practical Jerk" is this combined with Tearjerker. Daffy pranks Porky by dramatically promising that he'll never prank him again...only for him to prank him again straight afterwards with a bunch of bombs and dynamite. You'd expect this to end up like most Looney Tunes gags where Porky will either get back up and dust it off or everything will go back to normal the next scene, right?
*Nope.* After Porky has been blown up, Daffy laughs it off before worriedly checking on Porky; he sees him supposedly knocked out with Wingding Eyes and winces at the damage he made. All is well afterwards, right? Not exactly. The doctor reveals that Porky is *actually dead.* Daffy's crying is noticeably much less dramatic and much more genuine here than any other short; especially when they lower his casket into his grave. He then goes on by putting flowers near his grave every day for years and staring at old photos of him and Porky depressedly. This entire scene is played out for the rest of the short and is *eerily prolonged.* And the worst part about this scene? It's played entirely straight without even a hint of humor (save for Daffy making a That's All, Folks! pun and the photos of their time together mostly being Daffy torturing him with his usual gags.) Brrr... ||Thankfully, it is revealed both Porky and Daffy are alive, young, and well in the end; of which it's all revealed to be a very convincing prank.||
- In
*Graveyard Goofs*, after constantly trying to find an open grave to place Daffys old friend in, Daffy and Porky decide to pick up shovels and speedily dig one themselves. After dropping the casket in, its a job well done, right? **Wrong.** The casket shoots up into the sky, and Daffy and Porky manage to catch it. Out of the grave comes *the Grim Reaper himself.* Hes disturbingly drawn more detailed in comparison to the wacky designs of Daffy and Porky, and his introduction is overall pretty bone-chilling. Daffy and Porky are rightfully traumatized by the sight of him and hightail out of there. ||Fortunately, he was actually nice, and helped Daffy repair his dead TV and watches it with the duo.||
-
*Inn For Trouble* might be one of the most disturbing shorts of the entire series!
- The very fact that at the very start of the episode, were treated to some poor guy being murdered by some deranged lunatic! Its not explicitly shown, and it goes offscreen the moment the killing does happen, but this being shown in
*Looney Tunes* of all things is nothing short of **horrifying!**
- How the said murder is treated. Unlike most of the violence on Looney Tunes, there are no bombs, goofy sound effects, or anvils being dropped in this scene, just a cold-blooded and awfully realistic murder happening behind the curtains. Sylvester had every right to be terrified by this...
- The fact that weve witnessed a guy legitimately
**die** (albeit, offscreen) in a realistic manner on **LOONEY TUNES** of all things.
- Porky, thinking the aforementioned murderer is the owner of the inn theyre trying to stay at for the night, decides to stay. However, Sylvester notices the victims
*corpse* (Thankfully in a Gory Discretion Shot) on the side of them. Before Porky could notice, the murderer kicks it inside of the booth to avoid being caught. And as they leave to go to their room, the murderer waves goodbye to Sylvester with the corpses decaying hand and a Slasher Smile.
- The murderers voice actor, Tom Kenny, did an excellent job at displaying his downright terrifying and deranged personality throughout the entire short. And it shows... | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LooneyTunesCartoons |
Looney Tunes: Back in Action / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
I think we took a wrong turn at Albuquerque...
- The Warner Bros. water tower falling down and flooding the studio was
**FULL-BLOWN** Nightmare Fuel! Arguably the most dramatic and realistic scene in the whole movie.
- Shaggy Rogers threatening and Scooby-Doo viciously bearing his fangs and growling at Matthew Lillard can be a bit discerning due to being totally out of character.
- DJ Drake's father's message telling him to help him out while he's being interrogated. Somewhat Nightmare Retardant later when we see a scene where DJ's dad beats up the more bumbling henchmen of Mr. Chairman.
- The aliens in Area 52 that Marvin the Martian sets free to attack, DJ, Kate, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to get the playing card. Especially since the CGI on some of them hasn't aged very well.
- During the Louvre chase scene, one of the paintings they enter is Edvard Munch's "The Scream" where Daffy and Bugs run into the figure in the painting and he screams at them, pictured above. Elmer then catches up and Bugs stamps on his foot, causing him to make the same nightmarish face as the figure. The way the figure wails coupled with Elmer's depiction of the painting, makes for a very unnerving part of the film.
- In the same scene, going through Salvador Dalí 's The Persistence of Memory. Much like the clocks and other objects in the painting, Bugs, Daffy and Elmer start melting as they run through... it's pretty jarring to watch.
- The introduction to Taz where he eats up the skin of one of Mr. Chairman's henchmen after calling him "stupid". Its Played for Laughs but since it happens to a
*live action person* rather than a cartoon character it can scare some kids (and adults). Mitigated by the henchman cartoonishly withdrawing his objection as a skeleton. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LooneyTunesBackInAction |
Love and Redemption / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- For the terrible crime of being seen without his mask — note that he didn't even remove it himself; Xuan Ji removed it when he was injured — Si Feng is sentenced to be beaten.
- Ting Nu refuses to speak while being tortured until the torturer threatens to kill a child in front of him. Then, after Ting Nu tells him everything he knows, the torturer says he'll destroy Ting Nu's entire clan if it turns out he lied.
- Wu Tong is so obsessed with Ling Long that he traps her soul in a bottle then creates a copy of her. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoveAndRedemption |
Loved and Lost / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- ||Jewelius himself. The seemingly noble, humble and somewhat rational prince turns out to be an utterly ruthless sociopath and backstabber who's perfectly willing to cause death and tarnish anypony's reputation if he thinks he can gain something out of it or if he feels himself slighted. He organizes the entire Changeling invasion to usurp his aunt Celestia and cousin Cadance, both of whom he has secretly hated for years and is glad to kill them personally simply because their prestige exceeds his. He's manipulative enough to trick Queen Chrysalis, another cunning manipulator, into lowering her guard around him, win the trust of Twilight Sparkle to the point of tricking her into disowning her brother, friends, and mentor for their treatment of her at the wedding rehearsal, and even turn most of Canterlot's citizens against them. He doesn't even need any mind-altering magic for any of this — he's just
*that* skilled a manipulator. Yikes.||
- While imprisoned in the medical wing, Cadance is painfully electrocuted with a machine that is connected to her horn by a jumper cable. This is shown in a flashback as ||Jewelius|| remembers watching the scene with sadistic pleasure.
- For Celestia, Shining Armor, the Mane Five and Spike the knowledge that ||Twilight is engaged to a deranged sociopath of a king who wants powerful heirs out of her and admits that he'll dispose of her if he finds a more powerful unicorn mare to seduce||. What's worse... ||Twilight has become corrupt and is deafening herself to the warnings of her big brother, former friends, and mentor, which especially horrifies them because Jewelius is partially at fault for
*that* as well, having cleverly manipulated Twilight's grievances with them to the point where they began clouding her judgement||.
- ||Most members of the Royal Guard were seriously injured in the Changeling invasion. After finding out that most of them were still loyal to the dismantled princesses, Jewelius ordered all these injured loyalists to be murdered, making them look like casualties of the invasion.||
- ||Celestia|| is sentenced to be hanged and is rescued only through ||Luna||'s interference. Before getting the noose around her neck, ||Celestia|| realizes that the drop won't be long, so instead of dying due to a broken neck, she'll be strangled by the rope. ||Jewelius|| has intentionally designed this to be as painful as possible.
- When Jewelius decides to ||massacre all of Ponyville's inhabitants along with the heroes, a random guard tentatively asks if that is a little extreme. Jewelius has a Twitchy Eye before he suddenly grabs the poor guy with his magic and throws him out of the throne room's window, announcing that "No, it's
*A LOT* extreme!" as the screaming guard plummets from the castle tower to the ground below. *Everypony*, even Hildread and Vivian, is horrified||.
- ||Jewelius|| ends up being ||eaten alive by a horde of vengeful and hungry Changelings||. As karmic as this is, it's still disturbing for being much like the fate of Scar. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LovedAndLost |
Lost in Vivo / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
When a game is specifically setting out to revive the legacy of titles like Silent Hill, it needs good scares. Lost In Vivo certainly delivers.
The first area gets you used to using whistling as a compass. Then, just as you begin to get comfortable doing it ||Something inhuman mockingly whistles back from the darkness||. Needless to say you never feel quite safe whistling again.
Once again, the first area. Reality slowly, slowly falls apart as the areas get more and more outlandish. You start in a fairly standard drain before it starts getting rooms and chain link fences, and then once you descend into the games first rusty sequence reality completely breaks down as it becomes what can only be described as a sewer designed by an Eldritch Abomination with nonsense rooms and twisting pipes. The skinless, screaming abominations barely pacified by ritual circles (and on New Game Plus, are hostile enemies) that populate the place, the trains apparently made of coagulated blood passing by barely visible in the tunnels below, that awful awful music At one point the game makes you turn around just in time for you to see one of the warped abominations on the other side of a grate skitter from sight down a tunnel that leads directly to you. In your first play through, it vanishes in a case of Paranoia Fuel. In New Game Plus, however
The Ghost Girl is horrific looking (imagine an oversized, rotting fetid with a full grown woman's emaciated face) utterly unstoppable, and can phase through walls. Even killing her is just a temporary inconvenience for her, as shes back within seconds. The game knows she is terrifying, and so it rubs salt in the wound by making you summon her with the circuit breakers each time she shows up, forcing you to flee in terror through the dark twisting maintenance tunnels.
The Lost Tape titled the clinic. An utterly nightmarish Bedlam House where patients have rotted and fused to their beds, hooked up to nonsense machinery while cockroaches the size of cars skitter along the windows trying to break in. When you finally escape, its through an utterly disgusting and horrific half organic pipe, and to top it all off when you do make your escape ||you get dropped into a room of huge, looming twisted abominations as the screen begins to fade||
After dodging instant kill trains for a bit, you start to get used to them. So when a slow one appears in Grand Bulim, you assume its just another environmental hazard to dodge. Then the front of it opens like a moray, it begins to scream like steel being ripped apart, and it starts trying to devour you whole. Say hello to the ghost train.
Sotiris. He only moves when not looked at, and is encountered in an environment that forces you to break visual contact with him. Each time you do hes just a little bit closer, and closer. And if he does catch you, true to his usual MO of stealing eyes, the game over screen actually changes to show your empty eye socket instead of the usual bloodied eye. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LostInVivo |
Lovesickness / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
## Nightmare Fuel pages are Spoilers Off. As such,
**all spoilers are unmarked. Read at your own risk.**
This is a story full of obsession, suicide and corpses, so the scary stuff is even worse because of how brutally
*real* it gets.
- The premise. An otherworldly figure is taking advantage of an odd form of fortune-telling to answer these serious questions with answers that drive the girls asking to suicide. That's not even getting into the supernatural-compulsion elements of it.
- The beautiful boy himself is pretty spooky, being much too tall and unsettlingly beautiful, seemingly without a trace of humanity in his being.
- The decline of Suzue and the other affected girls is haunting enough, but when they remain as corpse spirits in town, still bound by twisted love, it gets horrifying. Ito can draw the realistically scary just as well as the surreal, so it happens.
- The incident that started it all: A woman carrying a child commits suicide because the first person to pass by just happened to be a petulant kid who didn't understand the gravity of the question from her end and accidentally drove her to her death. He feels responsible for the chaos years later.
- Midori being told to hate Ryusuke for the rest of her life creates a plausibly hateful and abusive dynamic. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Lovesickness |
Loreena McKennitt / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Loreena`s unique voice has a tendency to enhance whatever emotion she wants to convey- including terror
- "The Bonny Swans". Specifically, the bit about the harp-making:
''"He made a harp of her breast bone
Hey he ho and me bonny o
He made harp strings of her golden hair
The swans swim so bonny o
He made harp pins of her fingers fair
—>—
- The music video adds another bit in the form of the rather terrifying skull mask Anne wears for the court masquerade.
- The Wham Line of "who drowned me for the sake of a man" is also chilling.
- The likely fate of the stolen child in "Stolen Child."
- The fate of Bess and the Highwayman in "The Highwayman, doomed to reenact the night of their death forever...
- The ultimate conclusion of "Cymbeline"- whether you`re rich or poor, educated or not, nothing can change how it ends..."All follow this and come to dust".
- What the knight-at-arms dreams in "La Belle Dans Sans Merci"... that the fairy woman who has enchanted him and stolen his heart has done this to many men before:
*"I saw pale kings and princes too *
Pale warriors, death-pale were all
They cried, "La Belle Dans Sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall"
I saw their starved lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hillside." | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoreenaMcKennitt |
Love/Hate / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- ||Andrew's death|| by way of a plastic bag. It serves as a reminder just how nasty Fran can be in case you thought he was too Laughably Evil.
- ||Janet's death|| was apparently so gruesome, it wasn't even shown. We only get a brief glimpse of the body, showing multiple bruises and wounds to the legs implied to have been the result of an angle grinder. Terence's Mooks apparently tortured ||her|| and slashed her femoral arteries with the grinder, leaving her to bleed out. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoveHate |
Love In Hate Nation / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
- Miss Asp received electroshock "therapy" during her time in Nation, but it is unknown as to for what duration of the stay, the length of time of each time, and the strength of each time. Why does this matter? Despite being nightmarish already, this becomes even more so under the reminder that Miss Asp was ||
*pregnant*|| for some of that time, and this "therapy" could have ||*killed* or *permanently damaged* the yet-to-be-born Harriet||.
- The "Doc Shock" number, despite its somewhat hammy performance, is very chilling to watch, as the theater darkens and the doctor gleefully threatens to electrocute any misbehaving inmate, with Ya-Ya simulating convulsions in the background to illustrate the torture (implying this has already happened to her).
- The electrotherapy themes get more gruesome later on when we learn what happened to ||Harriet||. Miss Asp had the doctor electrocute her as punishment for kissing another girl, then kept insisting he turn up the juice when it didn't work. This results in ||Harriet|| being killed - more specifically,
*burnt from the inside out.* The audience gets to see the flashback, and while we don't see her death, we *do* hear her bloody screams while she's shocked over and over. And Miss Asp chose to do this to *|| her own daughter.||* | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoveInHateNation |
Love Tyrant / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
Akane's Yandere behavior, which is played for laughs. Her Establishing Character Moment where she immediately resorts to murdering Seiji and Guri after hearing they kissed. During this scene in the anime, the camera slowly pans up to reveals a terrifying Death Glare. It's more unsettling with the use of Jitter Cam when she shows Killing Intent. Shikimi's torture of Seiji. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LoveTyrant |
Lost / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
*"This place is death!"*
—
**Charlotte Lewis**
There's plenty to fear when you're trapped on an island with polar bears, Smoke Monsters, and people stealing your children in the night.
- In the premiere, Hurley comes across the cabin in the middle of the night and peers in through the window to see Christian Shepherd sitting in the chair at the center of the room... and then somebody else comes up to the window and looks back out at Hurley, who is so scared at this point that he runs back into the jungle in a panic. But it gets worse. After running a safe distance away from the cabin, Hurley stops to survey the area, turns around - and sees the cabin again, right in front of him. The building has the ability to
*move*. Again, if you're interested...
- The mercenaries dispatched to the island by Charles Widmore in season 4 exhibit a horrifyingly callous disregard for human life. Martin Keamy in particular shows a disturbing willingness to kill people almost on a whim. At the end of
*Meet Kevin Johnson*, his team snipes Karl and Danielle dead almost out of nowhere, leaving Alex alone and with no choice but to surrender. Keamy seizes the opportunity to hold her as ransom in exchange for her father Ben, and *coldly shoots her dead* when he refuses to surrender. The mercenaries commence an assault on the barracks knowing full well that a baby is among its occupants, and when their siege fails, they return to the Kahana freighter and have it rigged with explosives, set to go off in the event of Keamy's death. He kills friend and foe alike, and it's genuinely chilling to observe his casual willingness to murder so many people.
- The way Ben stabs Keamy over and over yelling "YOU KILLED MY DAUGHTER!" Although it's a Moment of Awesome for Ben, it doesn't change the fact that it's absolutely TERRIFYING, especially when you factor in Bens casual disregard of all the human life he has doomed: Keamy broke him when he killed Alex, and it shows.
- Seasons 4 and 5 are
*chock-full* of psychological horror. Just imagine witnessing what appears to be the deaths of close friends or relatives and spending the next three years believing them to be gone. Imagine watching an island literally vanish before your eyes, and then having to lie about everything you've experienced throughout the 108 days you had spent there. Imagine flipping through different eras seemingly at random, or getting what appears to be cerebral hemorrhaging from the blinding flash of light that happens at each time warp, or having your present-day consciousness replaced with that of yourself from eight years prior and going back and forth in time (4x05, *The Constant*), or spending years stuck in the past with no way to return to the present, or pretending a baby is your biological son when he's not, etc.
- After Ben moves the Island several characters begin experiencing "time flashes" which are accompanied by a blinding flash and a increasingly loud noise that sounds like chimes, followed by a whooshing sound and magnetic humming.
- During the time flashes, we meet the young Charles Widmore, and he is just as dangerous and sociopathic as a teenager as he is in the future. First he threatens to cut off
*both* of Juliet's hands if she and Sawyer don't tell him everything he wants to know when he captures them, and claims that the first one isn't negotiable, it's just to show how serious he is. He still tries to get his men to cut it off when Sawyer agrees to tell him everything straight away, and they are only stopped at the last minute by Locke. Then, he snaps a fellow Other's neck with no hesitation or remorse just because the man agreed to take the Losties back to their camp to talk to Richard.
- Just before Charlotte dies, we get two scary scenes from her:
- First is the scene where she suddenly goes crazy and starts yelling at Jin in Korean and then tells him to never let Sun come back to the Island:
*"THIS PLACE IS DEATH!!!"*
- Then there's her recounting a seemingly irrelevant anecdote from her childhood, which ends on a very creepy Wham Line.
**Charlotte:** Because I remember something now. When I was little, living here, there was this man... a crazy man, he really scared me. And he told me that I had to leave the island and never ever come back. He told me that if I came back I would die. **Daniel:** Charlotte, I don't understand. **Charlotte:** Daniel I think that man was you.
- Locke's methodic and unconcerned preparation of his suicide, in "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham''. The scene doesn't skip the details that are usually skipped in movies, like the cable and the knots. It gives a weird creepy view of what it actually means to prepare to hang yourself.
- The Smoke Monster dispatching Bram and his men with ease. Especially scary is the fact that Bram protecting himself with a magical ash circle barely slows him down, as he cleverly uses his environment to knock Bram out of the circle before finishing him off. "I'm sorry you had to see me like that." So are we. Anything capable of turning the Magnificent Bastard Ben Linus into a quivering, wide-eyed mess in the corner of a room deserves nothing but fear.
- After spending the first five seasons being scared to death of the black smoke monster, there's something very unnerving about seeing the island through its eyes as it flies around making that horrible clicking sound.
- The look on the Man in Black's face when he sees the little boy. He actually looks scared - which, given what he is and what he's capable of, is spine-chilling.
- The Season 6 episode "Sundown":
- Claire's creepy backwards singing of her old Leitmotif, Catch A Falling Star.
- Kate finding Claire in the hole. Especially Claire's angry Kubrick Stare when Kate tells her that it wasn't the temple people who took Aaron. It was really her. Also, Claire happily delivering the following line with a smug smile on her face: "He's coming Kate! He's coming and they can't stop him!"
- The very brief conversation Sayid has with Ben not long after murdering Dogen and Lennon, even giving him a full-on slasher smile. When
*Ben* is creeped out, you *know* something's terribly, terribly wrong.
- Considering what a creepy, Ax-Crazy guy he is, it's rather unnerving to see Martin Keamy again in the flash sideways. There's something very odd about his eyes — maybe contacts, maybe just lighting — which sent him into the Uncanny Valley. Maybe it's the fact that this particularly evil bastard is actually
*smiling*. You know something's wrong when he's cheerful.
- The scene where Claire and Sayid, now both completely turned over to the side of darkness, are walking calmly through the carnage left over from the temple attack. With Claire singing a cheerful rendition of 'Catch a Falling Star' in the background.
- Claire's "baby" in the crib. That she knows it isn't real somehow makes it worse.
- In the episode "Dr. Linus", even though Ilana forgives Ben and he ultimately doesn't have to go through with it, watching him being forced to literally dig his own grave is nothing short of horrific. That's gotta be one of the worst ways to die.
- Richard's ordeal in "Ab Aeterno" after the
*Black Rock* crashes on the island and the Smoke Monster kills the crew. He's left chained to the cabin walls, surrounded by the corpses of his fellow slaves for god knows how long with no food and *just* out of reach of the rainwater that seeps in. After prying a nail out of the floor he slowly gouges away at the bolt holding his chains in place. One morning he wakes up to find a boar eating one of the bodies. While attempting to scare the boar off he drops the nail and it lands a few inches away, robbing him of his chance to escape. By the time a vision of his wife shows up telling him he's dead and in hell it's easy to see why he'd believe it.
- If Arzt's death by dynamite wasn't bad enough, the exact same thing happens to Ilana, and once again, it comes out of nowhere.
- So, as of "Everyone Loves Hugo", we know what the whispers in the jungle are... knowing doesn't really make it less scary. In fact, it kind of makes it worse when you consider how many distinct voices you can pick out of the whispers.
- "What They Died For", the penultimate episode, gives us the incredibly creepy confrontation between the Man in Black and Charles Widmore. There are no explicit scares, just an all-encompassing sense of dread that starts as soon as "Locke" arrives, still looking and acting as he has in seasons past, but also...not. | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Lost |
Lucha Underground / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes
The opening cinematic of "The Moth and the Butterfly" has Aerostar tell Melissa that reviving Fenix turned out to be a very bad thing, and it ends with this chilling line (which, you must remember Aerostar is a time traveler)... **Aerostar:** "I've seen the end...of EVERYTHING." | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/LuchaUnderground |
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