High Octane Nightmare Fuel - Television Tropes & Idioms

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alt title(s): Nightmare Fuel Unleaded; Unleaded Nightmare Fuel; HO Nightmare

"Listen, if a book is going to give me night terrors right out of a Freud textbook involving me running through a Stockholm red-light district being chased by ravenous toothed genitalia all wanting me to pay them for the privilege of devouring me alive, you have to fucking tell me."

—Lothar Hex on Neil Gaiman's American Gods, in Exterminatus Now

(Here)

"Sometimes fear is the appropriate response."

—1, 9

There's Nightmare Fuel. And there's this, the intentional kind. This is not Nightmare Fuel turned Up To Eleven; even the adults are frightened of this stuff.

In short, if a work is

not intended specifically for children
intended to be scary

Then it's High Octane Nightmare Fuel. For unintentionally terrifying work targeted for children, see Nightmare Fuel. If it is meant to scare but fails to deliver, and becomes hilarious instead, it devolves into Nightmare Retardant.

For most horror films, that's the whole point. For some reason, many of us like to be scared on purpose, there may be a euphoria generated by surviving something that seems scary, or maybe we know that fiction can't hurt us and the idea of choosing to be scared without the danger is fun. In any case, this is normal. Others are fascinated by the very things that others avoid. Occasionally, it overlaps with Squick.

Specific types of High Octane Nightmare Fuel include:

Surreal sequences, usually animated.
Extreme violence and deaths which cross the line.
Public Service Announcements which employ terrifying imagery in a misguided attempt to keep people's heads on straight.
Nightmare Dreams, dream sequences and hallucinations straight out of nightmare.
Horiffically mutated, distorted, injured, or... unreal faces.
- Spawn of Uncanny Valley, anything that has crawled out of the valley.
Paranoia Fuel, when things that should be harmless, or on your side, turn nasty.
Primal Fears: possibly the most universally frightening of the mix; the dark, the unknown, snakes, spiders, being buried alive with rats gnawing on your toes...the last part, being an aspect of cannibalism/being eaten alive, something in turn existing as potential addendum to extreme violence. Stuff your entire species gets the creeps from.
Adult Fears. Those things children seldom worry about: economic failure, romantic failure, watching helplessly as your children die, or possibly even The End Of The World As We Know It.
Transformation Trauma, Transformation Sequences with plenty of Body Horror, including Chest Bursters. Nothing like people exploding as monsters emerge.
Corpses... DEAD ROTTING CORPSES. Remember kids, it's not the zombies that scare us, it's what they are.
Diseases. They have no intelligence to bear anyone ill will, but once an infection/outbreak occurs, the attack will never stop until they are completely annihilated...or their victims are.
Mutilation of specific body parts, such as the eyes, fingers, "manhood", head, or worse.
Fates so horrific one can only wish for death. Being turned into stone, being trapped in another dimension, being encased in a tomb for eternity, or worse...