Ironic Nursery Tune - Television Tropes & Idioms

Margery Daw from Shakugan No Shana was also named after one of these; in fact her spells rather obscure and creepy ones.
Many chapters of Kaori Yuki's Count Cain were inspired by Mother Goose rhymes, even some of those that were an integral part of the larger arc. Based on Agatha Christie's technique, these chapters usually start with the nursery rhyme, which gradually turns out to frame a ghastly crime.
The first thirty-odd seconds of Melodie from Noir are of the music box variety. The song then swells into a more rock-ish theme with the music box chimes heard heavily in the background.
- Chloe's theme, Secret Game is of the rhyme variant. This troper felt a chill up his spine the first time he heard it.
In The Visual Novel Animamundi, Georik's Little sister has a habit of singing. "Hot Cross Buns" wasn't so bad, it was in fact pretty cute. But "Baa Baa Black Sheep", "Lizzie Borden Took an Axe" and "Solomon Grundy" were creepy — especially for "Black Sheep" and "Lizzie Borden", Lillith was a disembodied head!. Notably, Georik tells her to stop singing because it was disturbing him.
A creepy, detuned chime features heavily in "The Doll House" from the Innocence soundtrack (released in North America as "Ghost in the Shell 2").
In Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex, the Tachikomas sing a children's song as they're being packed up and sent to the laboratory for formatting and disassembly. They think it's a happy song, and tell Batou as much. Problem is, the song is actually about a calf being taken to slaughter, who wonders why he can't grow wings like a bird and escape his impending doom.
- This troper got the impression that they knew very well the implications of the song, and used it to subtly shame Batou for allowing them to be sent away. They certainly explain in fair detail what the song is about, when Batou asks them if they know what it means.
  - It's not actually a children's song, though. (Despite having been taught in Japanese schools for some reason...)
Any anime or manga which quotes Tooryanse; the melody is known for being used at a lot of intersections, but the lyrics either talk about getting blessings for your child when it turns seven — first stanza — or burying it on its seventh birthday — second stanza. A recent example is Amatsuki.
How the hell did Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni avert this one? It was practically begging for every possible kind of creepiness.
- Well, not quite. You see, the game did use the same music box effect, just no particular tune. Honestly, though, it's probably closer to Soundtrack Dissonance.
The manga Judas gives us this: "Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep/And if I die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take"
- An old and traditional prayer.
  - that gets used this way all the time.
In Monster a fictional nursery story features significantly in the plot, and the ED consists of animations of the same.

Close Anime and Manga

Scarecrow, the Batman villain, also frequently sings "The Mockingbird Song". When written by Jeph Loeb, anyway.
The name of Solomon Grundy, Super Zombie of The DCU, was based on a nursery rhyme of a man "born on a Monday" and "died on a Saturday."
In The Invisibles, the demon Orlando leaves a recording of "Pop Goes the Weasel" playing in the house of a family he has butchered.
In Thunderbolts #120, Norman Osborn finally goes completely insane, puts on his old Goblin costume and starts killing people.In between cackling and declaring that he's God, he joyfully sings John Barleycorn: A traditional folk/Drinking song that personifies wheat and barley and describes the harvesting process in the most violent way possible. Though the song was originally meant to be disturbing, having the Green Goblin sing it during a massacre makes it even worse.
- "They hired men with scythes so sharp to cut him off at the knee. Bound him about the waist and served him most barbarously."

Close Comic Books

In a commecial for Heinz Green Ketchup that was released at the same time as the movie version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas a man is at someplace fancy and there are three bottles: A ketchup bottle, mustard, and a green ketchup one. He pours the green ketchup on his hotdog and eats it, he then transforms into an anthro grinch (this is a real ad, it's not a fake one) resembling the Jim Carrey version from the film. In the background elf-like puppets sing warped versions of Christmas carols.
This Australian road safety advertisement uses "Happy Christmas" to absolutely soul-crushing effect.
This Troper still finds this Rainbow Six 3 ad to be...highly disconcerting.
A Public Service Announcement this troper remembers started with a closeup of a black mother singing Mockingbird to her todler... and the camera slowly panning back to reveal she is kneeling in the middle of the street where her baby had just been caught in the crossfire. The paramedic running up, then stepping back dejectedly as she continues to sing haunts this troper.

Close Commercials

A classic example: the movie M starts with a group of children singing a skipping song about the 'man in black' who is coming to 'chop you up'. The rhyme itself was a sarcastic subversion of a popular operetta tune by Walther Kollo, with a bunch of violets ("Veilchen") turned into 1920s serial killer Fritz Haarmann's (possibly an inspiration behind the film) weapon of choice, an axe ("Beilchen").
- For that matter, Lorre's whistling of "Hall Of The Mountain King" counts. Not exactly a nursery song, but still creepy.
Josh Peck's character in Mean Creek tells a rhyme about a man whose brains got splattered all over the wall.
In Profondo Rosso the killer plays a creepy children's song before committing her murders.
Linda, in The Evil Dead, sings a creepy little song to the tune of "Ring Around the Rosie" while in Deadite form. "We're gonna get you, we're gonna get you / Not another peep, time to go to sleep."
- Annie's mother-turned-Deadite from Evil Dead 2 sings "The Mockingbird Song" to try and lull her daughter into a trap. Later, Annie distracts her possessed mother long enough for Ash to get the edge over her by singing the same song.
- And in Army of Darkness, Ash sings London Bridge while killing miniature versions of himself. Definitely played for laughs though, especially when he steps on a nail and the tiny Ashes finish the verse for him as he gasps in pain.
Black Christmas (the original) has the deranged 'Billy' singing 'Daddy's gone a-huntin' while rocking a chair in which he has placed the corpse of a girl he murdered.
In Chakushin Ari (the original version of One Missed Call) there's the Ringtone which announces the you're gonna die this day, at this hour, in this way message, which is then revealed to be a theme tune from an old children's program.
The Nightmare On Elm Street series has a fairly well-known rhyme associated with its dream killer, Freddy Krueger: "One two, Freddy's coming for you..."
Rosemary's Baby uses some very music box-type music.
The Pirates Of The Caribbean films use the original Disney song, "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life For Me)," to creepy effect; primarily by having a young girl sing it slowly and in a minor key, instead of a pack of pirates singing upbeat and in major. This is then inverted in the After The Credits scene in At World's End, with Will Turner, Jr. singing it in its original major key.
- Another POTC example is "Hoist the Colors", first sung by a young boy and his fellow pirates on their way to the gallows.
- A half-example: Davy Jones frequently plays a quiet, sad little song from a music-box on his pipe organ, where it is much louder and more bombastic. The tune and the music-box are both from Tia Dalma, the woman he once loved.
  - Listen careful-the same song also functions as a leitmotif for the two characters.
The brief, creepy rhyme by Hughes Mearns ("Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish that man would go away.") gets a fair bit of use in this trope — for one example, it is used in voiceover in the psychological horror movie Identity.
The scene in The Birds where the children are singing in the school as the crows gather is a perfect example.
Before the infamous "Here's Johnny!" scene in The Shining, Jack Nicholson's character goes through a bit from "The Three Little Pigs" before hacking at the door with his axe. "Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in.... Not by the hair on your chinny chin chin? Then I'll huff, and I'll puff, and blow your house in!" And let's not forget his Madness Mantra, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
In Open Season, a hunter that barely seems competent during other scenes suddenly appears very menacing when quietly singing "Teddy Bears' Picnic" as he stalks the protagonist, a domesticated bear who'd been released into the wild and snuck into the cabin not knowing who the owner was. That the bear's former owner had used this song as a lullabye earlier in the film doesn't help.
Manhunter introduced Hannibal Lecter with some tinkly music box-type soundtrack. He then starts talking about Graham's family ("That aftershave is something a child would select.")
- Likewise, its remake Red Dragon involves similiar music when Graham is looking at photos of a kid's bedroom, where the kids in question have been brutally murdered.
- And in Hannibal Rising, he forces an ex-Nazi to sing a German children's song before he kills him. A song that had also been used in Hansel and Gretel, just to make the point . . .
The Nightmare Before Christmas features the three musicians playing an off-key, really creepy version of "Jingle Bells." However, since this is Halloween Town, where everything is supposed to be scary and creepy, Jack Skellington congratulates them instead of sending them off. Their later rendition of "Here Comes Santa Claus" is arguably better than the original.
The Quartermass Conclusion featured a children's nursery rhyme containing seemingly innocent lyrics that indicate that the terrible inexplicable events occurring in the film have happened before.
Halloween III: The Season of the Witch features a recurring advertising jingle for Silver Shamrock novelties sung to the tune of 'London Bridge is Falling Down'. This becomes increasingly sinister as we learn of Silver Shamrock's actual purpose.
Inversion: Despite being an unbelievably creepy film, Pans Labyrinth managed to mostly dodge this, as the lullaby hummed by Mercedes is mostly used to genuinely comforting effect, as well as a meditation on how sad everything is.
Samara Morgan, the Creepy Child of The Ring, sings the following, nightmarish nursery rhyme to herself instants before being suffocated and tossed in a well to die by her adoptive mother:
"Round we go, the world is spinning.
When it stops, it's just beginning.
Sun comes up, we laugh and we cry.
Sun goes down, and then we all die."
- The melody was already the movie's leitmotif long before the rhyme itself was revealed, and was made even creepier after the fact.
The toy piano music playing over the opening and closing credits in the Puppetmaster movies falls into this trope.
A scene in Ice Age 2 has the main characters encounter some vultures and the vultures start singing "Food, Glorious Food" from Oliver.
The Night Of The Hunter includes a creepy children's skipping song (about a hanging), and multiple creepy lullabies. There are also a couple Ironic Hymns in there. At least the good woman defeats the Hunter at the end by singing counterpoint to the hymn.
A B-horror movie called Sleepstalker, in which the monster is an executed killer into a twisted, demonic version of the sandman, features a creep nursery rhyme about a child going to sleep.
This scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou which is meant to echo the sirens of the Odyssey, manages to combine creepy and seductive into one rhyme. (Given the lyrics, some creepiness is guaranteed).
"Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat" appears in Disney's version of Alice In Wonderland as part of the Mad Hatter's tea party. Disney really is trying to be creepy in this film, albeit in a child-friendly way.
Jeepers Creepers turned the title tune into a horrifying premonition.
"Mairzy Doats" is sung during a torture scene in The Cell.
In The Crow: City of Angels, a drug dealer precedes shooting a small child with "Hush little baby, don't you cry, Kali's going to give you eternal life."
In the '80s remake of The Fly a doomed Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) sings "I known an old lady who swallowed a fly...perhaps she'll die".
The opening sequence of Suspiria has a metallic toy piano playing over the heroines journey to her new job at a ballet school, to creepy effect.
- The infamously confusing trailer starts with a variation on "Roses are red, violets are blue."
- And then there's the creepy song used throughout Deep Red. If you hear it, you're wormfood.
In Absolute Beginners, hooligan Ed the Ted sings "The Teddy Bear Picnic" in a menacing tone on his way to a rumble.
The use of "Au Claire de la Lune" in The Bad Seed.
The opening theme to [[Poltergeist]].
Silent Night Deadly Night, being about an Axe Crazy in a Santa suit with a traumatic childhood, naturally features a few ironic Christmas carols generally heard before, or while, something particularly nasty happens. These are mostly things written specifically for the film rather than real Christmas standards, the most prominently featured being the Paranoia Fuel that is "Santa's Watching":
Santa's watching, Santa's creeping
Now you're nodding, now you're sleeping
Were you good for Mom and Dad?
Santa knows when you've been bad...
The German song Mamatschi will forever be remembered by most people as the song that played as children were taken away by Nazis to be killed as their mothers ran after the trucks, screaming. Thanks, Schindlers List!
In the opening seconds of The Lost Boys, before the footage starts rolling, a little child's voice can be hears singing the first two lines of "Cry Little Sister". Although this song is also used with full vocal chorus and music at the beginning of the film, and has since been covered by several bands as a Gothic rock anthem, that first soft-voiced a capella rendition sounds eerily like a children's nursery song.
Not actually a nursery rhyme but Marla Singer in Fight Club as she leaves the Paper Street house. "Gotta get off...gotta get off...gotta get off this merry-go-round..."

Close Film

The climax of the Discworld novel Thud! features a variant on this. Sam Vimes is lost in a cave, addled with pain, despair, and rage, and fighting off a pack of dwarfs not to mention possession by the Summoning Dark, a diabolical "entity of pure vengeance" brought about by a dwarf curse, when out of pure force of habit he starts to shout the words to his infant son's favorite book, "Where's My Cow?" (since it's six o'clock, and he always reads "Where's My Cow?" to Young Sam at six o'clock). Understandably, the dwarfs aren't sure at first how to react to the threat of a man with an axe and a sword shouting things like "It goes 'baa!' It is a sheep! That! Is!! Not!!! My!!!! COW!!!!!"
Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None features a rhyme about Indian boys being killed one by one, which many of the characters recognized from their nursery days. Said characters are killed in the same manner as the Indians in the song. There are even Indian dolls in the living room that disappear as the characters are bumped off.
- This is an arguably benign and harmless bowdlerisation of the original. Both rhyme and book were originally entitled "Ten little Niggers", one paperback actually featured a hanged golliwog (a kind of gonk doll based on a blackface minstrel figure) on the cover.
- Christie uses a lot of titles like this: Hickory Dickory Death, A Pocket Full of Rye, Five Little Pigs, One, Two, Buckle my Shoe, and Three Blind Mice (the story on which the play The Mousetrap is based). There's even a Lampshade Hanging in one book where Poirot chides himself for thinking about nursery rhymes so much. The Mousetrap also has a lampshade hanging, where one character likes to recite the creepy nursery rhyme of the title and another, noting the lyrics, wonders why children like to say such horrible things.
S.S. Van Dine outdid Christie in his novel The Bishop Murder Case, which features a series of murders each related to a different nursery rhyme. For example, the first victim is a guy nicknamed "Cock Robin", who gets shot with an arrow.
Midway through the Star Wars Expanded Universe "New Jedi Order" series, Mara Jade (former assassin for the Emperor) is told that she can probably be creepy even singing a nursery rhyme. She's amused, says that's easy, and sings the following fragment in a minor key: "Sleep, child, the night is mild, and slumber smiles upon you," making it sound as if "Slumber" is a grinning monster. Not only is it appropriate to the character, shortly thereafter a dark Jedi named "Lord Nyax" after a monster in a children's story appears.
"Who Killed Cock Robin?" is also used this way in the last Wyrd Museum book.
This Troper once read a Reader's Digest version of a book where the nursery rhyme "There Was a Little Girl" was used as a lead in to the protagonist's childhood memories...where it's then revealed that she'd been sexually molested by a neighbor for years.
In "Rebel Angels", the second book of Libba Bray's Gemma Doyle trilogy, Nell, a Bedlam patient, sings the old nursery tune Jack and Jill in a creepy manner every time we see her. Also, when the Bedlam patients have a little performance in front of their benefactors, she makes up a creepy little song about various vaguely ridiculous-sounding evils and how to defend them. Everyone thinks it's funny, but it later turns out it was a message for the heroines because every thing she said was true...
In Tim Lott's 'Fearless', the Whistler, X-17, never speaks, she only whistles nursery rhymes. Quite creepy.
In the YA novel The Children of Green Knowe, there's a fictional children's song about a tree that's posessed by an evil spirit:
Green Noah, demon tree
Evil fingers can't catch me...
Not sure if this qualifies, but 1984 features two nursery rhymes: "Oranges and Lemons" and one which begins: "Under the falling chestnut tree/I sold you and you sold me." The latter is, of course, disturbingly prophetic.

Close Literature

Oz: Beecher's Madness Mantra in Season 2 was an especially creepy version of this, considering that he had gone insane by that time.
The first Sapphire And Steel storyline had the malevolent Time using a nursery rhyme from a child's storybook to enter this universe.
- As does the fourth serial. The "Man Who Wasn't There" bit has had this troper literally screaming out loud.
- And in the third serial, the leitmotif for the changeling is a creepified version of the lullaby his mother sang him when he was a baby.
MST3K parodied this trope with the movie/episode Squirm, which has a child singing a lullaby over the opening credits. Servo chimes in and starts substituting the lullaby lyrics with the words "Evil little kid music...."
Are You Afraid Of The Dark used this a few times, I think.
The Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "Hush" opens with a rhyme describing the Monster Of The Week.
The seventh season finale of CSI includes a serial killer reciting a silly rhyme in a Nightmare Fuel-ish manner.
Storm Of The Century has "I'm a little teapot..."
- Its memorable "Born in sin, come on in/Born in lust, turn to dust/Born in vice, say it twice..." doesn't really count, though — they're rhymes, but clearly not of the nursery variant.
- This also appears in Rose Red. Stephen King certainly seems to love this rhyme.
Subverted in the Doctor Who episode "The Empty Child," where a girl uses "Rock-a-Bye-Baby" to actually put a Creepy Child to sleep.
- Other examples from this series include the use of "Ring a ring a roses" to represent a Creepy Child in "Remembrance of the Daleks", and a soon-to-be-Creepy Child in "Human Nature".
The Angel season 4 episode "Soulless" has Angelus sitting in a cage creepily singing "Teddy Bear's Picnic" to himself.
- The episode "Lullaby" prominently features Holtz singing "All Through the Night" creepily to himself. This is because he sang it to his daughter, who Angelus and Darla turned into a vampire.
- Another Buffyverse example- when Drusilla is torturing Angel in the episode "What's My Line: Part 2" she sings "Run and catch, run and catch; the lamb is trapped in the blackberry patch". Dru did a few of these...
Jekyll uses "Boys and Girls, Come Out to Play" as a leitmotif for Hyde.
In a second season episode of Alias Olivia D'Abo is forced to sing "Pop Goes The Weasel". As she gets to the "pop", she's blown to smithereens by the explosive vest she's wearing.
In a fifth season episode of Rebus, a man has had his wife and two children killed when his house was firebombed and has been reciting nursery rhymes on occasion since then. After shooting the two dirty cops responsible (killing one and causing the other serious brain damage), he recites "Pop Goes The Weasel" and then eats a bullet.
WWE wrestler The Boogeyman speaks almost exclusively in Ironic Nursery Tunes.
A skit on Late Night with Conan O'Brien involves Conan pulling out a guitar and playing a soothing nursery tune, while scenes of horrific natural disasters show on the screen and Conan sings about horrible things. (after the Michael Jackson trial: "Watch out, kiddies, Jacko's free!")
In The Wire, Omar Little is fond of whistling "The Farmer's In His Den" just before he kills somebody.
- In the US, this is known as "The Farmer in the Dell."
Life On Mars includes nursery rhymes spoken by the Test Card F girl.
There was a Howie Mandel skit where Little Bobby's mother was singing him to sleep with the Mockingbird Song, over Little Bobby's panic-stricken pleas to please stop.
In Firefly, the first episode (well, chronologically, anyway) has River rocking back and forth repeating, "Two by two, hands of blue." We don't find out until several episodes later what it means. Not a traditional nursery rhyme, but it definitely counts.
The X-Files used the haunted mansion variation with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" in the episode "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas". While adding a very creepy/ironic air, the song was also strangely appropriate for a tongue-in-cheek episode revolving around holiday-inspired murder-suicide.
- Also, in the episode "Chinga," the evil doll kills to the tune of the Hokey Pokey.
Season 7 of CSI uses the song "I Have a Pain in my Sawdust" (See also: Madness Mantra), as well as the creepy music box effect.
The Friday The Thirteenth episode of Psych uses the theme song of the fictional Camp Tikihama when it goes under the lake to reveal Shawn's Rick Astley pinata.
Let's go for the Joss Whedon clean sweep: the final notes of the Dollhouse Instrumental Theme Tune sound like a music box in minor key. Appropriate, given the title.
Tenaya7, The Dragon most commonly used in Power Rangers RPM, has a habit of whistling The Farmer In The Dell when she wants to be extra creepy.
In Carnivale, the Billie Holiday song "Love Me Or Leave Me" is heard in the background on occasion, usually when something freaky is going on.
An episode of Lost has Sayid and Shannon trying to translate maps that they've found from the French woman. Shannon recognizes the lyrics as a song she heard while in France, and starts singing a French translation of Bobby Darin's "Beyond The Sea". It's pretty creepy considering where they are, contrasting with the jovial tune of the song.

Close Live Action TV

In the third movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1, Mahler represents the funeral of a huntsman by a creepy minor-key version of "Frère Jacques," starting in the double basses and then expanding to the entire orchestra. You know what that means.
Lordi's "Blood Red Sandman" uses the off-key music box and an eerie Nursery rhyme couplet to add to the theme of the song's subject/singer as a sort of bogeyman.
Evanesence's song "Lose Control" has "Mary had a lamb, eyes as black as coal, if we play very quiet my lamb, mary never has to know."
Siouxsie And The Banshees' 'Mother' on their 1979 'Join Hands' album. The eerily decelerating music box plays 'Oh Mein Papa' while the dual lyric details a love/hate relationship with the narrator's mother.
Alice Cooper's "Wind-Up Toy" uses the broken music box by itself to introduce the song's themes of childishness and madness/horror.
The use of "Camptown Races" in Squirrel Nut Zippers's "Ghost of Stephen Foster" seems intended solely to evoke this.
"Out Comes The Evil" by Lords of Acid starts off by repeating the chorus of "Pop Goes the Weasel" twice. As the music slowly ramps up, the verse becomes a bit more... adult ("Half a pound of heroin/half a pound of treacle/that's the way the story goes/out comes the evil") and the song goes into full industrial techno mode.
Singer/guitarist/songwriter Morten Veland (ex-Tristania, Sirenia) seems fond of using these and Ominous Latin Chanting together. The winding down music box and little girl giggling that begins the song actually terrified this editor's friend.
Jonathon Coulton's aptly-named song "Creepy Doll" uses this in its verses.
The song "Mr Ouija" by the rap group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony has the group chanting a nursery rhyme like tune asking the Ouija board to tell them their future, and asking it will they die of murder,a bloody murder. all the while distorted demonic vocal are heard in the background.
- This troper wants to know what the hell was they smoking that day.
Nox Arcana is fond of invoking this trope:
- The band's debut album, Darklore Manor, contains a track entitled "Nursery Rhyme," in which a little girl recites a version of the archetypal bedtime prayer (cited below) but changes it to address the Sandman. Close listening reveals an accompanying grown woman's voice in the background.
- The aforementioned track is followed by one entitled "Music Box," in which the same little girl sings meaningless syllables over the melody.
- Carnival of Lost Souls includes the self-explanatory "Calliope," "Haunted Carousel," "Living Dolls," and "Pandora's Music Box." "Spellbound" is made to sound as though it is an old love song played on a phonograph, though its much longer reprise at the album's end is done in the style of heavy metal.
- Shadow of the Raven's "Annabel Lee" is played on a music box, though the result is more melancholy than scary.
- Grimm Tales, the newest album, makes use of this trope throughout. Strangely, there seems to be an unusual focus on dramatic orchestrations rather than music-box sounds.
Metallica's "Enter Sandman" makes verbatim use of a common rhyme-ish prayer in the middle:
Now I lay me down to sleep
Pray the lord my soul to keep
If I die before I wake
Pray the lord my soul to take

It does so in a distinctly creepy way. Listen to the song. Directly after comes another rhymish segment, this one original and more overtly sinister:

Hush, little baby, don't say a word
And never mind that noise you heard
It's just the beast under your bed
In your closet, in your head

The prayer can take on a distinctly creepy tone all by itself if you think about it the wrong way-in the Discworld novel Hogfather Susan notes that it was taught to Twyla and Gawain by their previous governess and the impression she got was that it carried the rider that the second half was the preferred result. At the time it was played for laughs, but now think about a child saying it with the same intent.

Tom Waits' song "Midnight Lullaby" makes liberal, and ironic, use of "Song of Sixpence", but not to creepy effect. Just ironic as in "I'm lonely and impoverished." He uses this trope to more standardly nightmarish effect in "Everything You Can Think Of Is True" and "Misery Is the River of the World."
Pink Martini's cover of Que Sera, Sera, reportedly inspired by the Hitchcock classic The Man Who Knew Too Much, starts off very slowly with a waltzing chime reminiscent of the circus in the background. Combine with China Forbes singing softly about how the future is not ours to see, and it becomes like a chilling little music box that you wish someone would close, except that it's so enchanting...
Martika's song Toy Soldiers has this as it's chorus.
Step by step, heart to heart
Left right left, we all fall down
Like toy soldiers
Beat by beat, torn apart
We never win, but the battle wages on
For toy soldiers...
- And Eminem's partial cover/sampling of the same title uses the chorus to surprisingly effective melancholy effect.
  - "Mockingbird", from the same CD as "Toy Soldiers", was Eminem's own particularly twisted take on "Hush Little Baby".
Rammstein has the song Spieluhr ("Music Box"), which is about a child who gets buried alive. The chorus includes a child's voice singing a ghastly variant of the German nursery rhyme "Hoppe, hoppe Reiter", which is in parts somewhat creepy even in its normal form.
- Let's not forget Hilf Mir, and it's original inspiration : "Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug". Refined Nightmare Fuel, and in a child's story book too...
Mylene Farmer has the song Chloe, which is performed in a light, sing-song-y voice like a child reciting a rhyme. The background music is creepy enough on its own, and the "la-la"s in the chorus don't help at all. Then you actually start paying attention to the lyrics instead of the overall tone and realize it's about a girl hitting her head and drowning in a stream.
To quote The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster's song "Puppy Dog Snails"...
What do we do with a puppy dog's tail?
What do we do with a bucket of snails?
What do we do with a boy like you?
We put them in a pot and we throw them on the fire!
Tom Lehrer's "MLF Lullaby" and "The Old Dope Peddler".
The [[Genesis]] song The Musical Box is a ghost story about a dead child whose ghost is summoned by his musical box. About halfway through, it quotes Old King Cole. The album is called Nursery Cryme
Ko Rn's Shoots And Ladders is a whole song about nursery rhymes, mentioning how many of them are not quite so innocent as they seem. And then goes into full-on creepy, weaving several rhymes into a rant.
Nursery rhymes are said
Verses in my head
Into our childhood they're spoonfed
Hidden violence revealed
Darkness that seems real
look at the pages that cause all this evil
- Another Ko Rn song, Dead Bodies Everywhere, features a creepy music box interspersed with the metal.
  - Regarding the "Shoots and Ladders" example above, Ko Rn singer Jonathan Davis used the example of the lyrics to "Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosie" being about the bubonic plague.
Nobody mentioned Michael Jackson's "Little Susie" yet?
The live version of the instrumental Rush song "La Villa Strangiato" from the album "Exit... Stage Left" featured Geddy Lee singing the lyrics to a Yiddish children's song during a very odd sounding guitar solo.
The majority of Rose Berlin's song "Coraline" is creepy, which is fitting when you consider the book it's based on. Then there's
"We are small, but we are many
We are many, we are small
But we were here before you were
So we will be here when you fall."
Of course, then there's Mack the Knife.
Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly white
Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe
And he keeps it … ah … out of sight.
Ya know when that shark bites, with his teeth, babe
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves, though, wears old MacHeath, babe
So there’s nevah, nevah a trace of red.
Now on the sidewalk … uuh, huh … whoo … sunny mornin’ … uuh, huh
Lies a body just oozin' life … eeek!
And someone’s sneakin' ‘round the corner
Could that someone be Mack the Knife?
Naturally, the Dresden Dolls and/or Amanda Palmer love this trope, or variations thereupon. In the album No, Virginia a song includes this verse "
Counting sheep
I lay me down to sleep
But I see
A sheep that will not leave
From the back
They catch him in a trap
Hit his head
and send him off to bed.
- Now there's a thought to keep you awake at night...
- And who could forget "Missed Me"? It's a song about a young woman who badgers and badgers an older man for a kiss, and gets him thrown into prison for it... which starts out, "Missed me, missed me, now you've gotta kiss me" and continues in that style.
And how about Emilie Autumn's "Miss Lucy Had Some Leeches"?
"Creep Show," by Kerli. Before the last chorus, she sings an Estonian children's song in a whispery voice. Not creepy to this troper, but it has that same effect.
Emilie Simon's "Ice Girl" uses a music box-like sound to both invoke the sound of ice and a creepy fairytale sound.

Close Music

In the musical Sweeney Todd, Tobias chants "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man" in an eerie voice as he picks up Sweeney's razor and slits Sweeney's throat.
- And let's not forget Mrs. Lovett singing "Nothing's gonna hurt you" while hunting Tobias through the sewers in the film version.
- Many of the songs from Sweeney Todd are disturbingly dissonant. Like when Sweeney has a beautiful round of "Pretty Women" with the guy he plans to kill. Or the cheerful song about how great the meat pies are. You know, those meat pies.
- The film may also contain an inversion: "Johanna", when sung in the movie, is a sweet and romantic song about love overcoming every obstacle. When heard on its own, the lyrics are very creepy.
  - This Troper would like to argue that it's creepy in context, not just on its own. I'll steal you indeed.
  - This Troper can't take the song seriously on any level - not after her friend started changing the lyrics to, "I'll peel you, banana..."
- No one mentioned "The Barber and His Wife" yet?
In Benjamin Britten's operatic version of The Turn of the Screw, the children are singing "Lavender's Blue," while the adults look on, unmoved by this show of innocence ("It is all a wicked lie"). This is mostly foreshadowing, as the plot hasn't gotten too creepy yet.
In the opera Street Scene, two nurses are reading a tabloid feature about the double murder of Mrs. Maurrant and Sankey, and sing about it to calm a crying baby. The second verse of this lullaby contains additional soothing thoughts about adultery and Domestic Abuse:
Your parents are a loving pair;
He smacks her face, she pulls his hair;
Their shrieks and curses fill the air.
She smashes plates, and he tears her clothes;
She lands a left right on his nose,
Until there's blood all over his mug!
Sleep, ladybug;
Sleep sweet and snug;
Sleep my lady bug-bug.
Howie Mandell's version of "The Mockingbird Song" in one standup routine takes a horrifying turn for the worse (for the bird, anyway) very early on.

Close Theatre

One rather memorable scene in Clock Tower 2 (Clock Tower in the US) involved ghostly children singing a fictional creepy nursery rhyme about Scissorman.
- It's not the Struwwelpeter one, is it?
  - No, it's one written specifically for the game, "Little John from the Big Castle" — you may have read or heard it elsewhere, it's surprisingly popular for how obscure the game is in the US.
The Voodoo-themed game Shadow Man contained some genuinely creepy music and sound effects throughout, but none more so than the theme to the area called the "Playrooms". Here, a decidedly on-key music box plays along with the background noises of giggling children, horrified screams, and the bone-chilling sounds of someone being ripped apart with power tools.
One of the Little Sisters you see early on in Bioshock can be heard singing a creepy little song to the tune of "Frère Jacques". You'll also hear music from the 1940s playing in the background in certain areas, and it continues playing as you fight off hordes of splicers.
- Probably the most creepy is when you have to slaughter nearly 20 splicers to the tune of "How Much is that Doggy in the Window?" in the Little Sisters' Orphanage... which is secretly home to a downright Orwellian conditioning lab that turns little girls into the ADAM-gathering Little Sisters.
  - It really doesn't help that, seeing as Rapture has, socially speaking, long since fallen apart at the seams, and is starting to do so literally as well, the jukeboxes aren't in working order any longer, so not only are you killing splicers to "How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?" you're actually killing them to "How Much Is That Doggy In Th- Doggy In Th- Doggy In Th-".
  - The orphanage isn't the worst use of that song, not by a long shot. The worst use comes in Fort Frolic, where it's playing when you enter the flooded wine cellar. Why is it the worst? Because you enter the cellar by passing through two rows of plaster statues that are Nightmare Fuel Unleaded all by themselves - and because it's your first clue that those statues might not be all they seem...
- Splicers are often heard singing "Jesus loves me, this I know..." when they are looking for you.
Both versions of "Ashley's Theme" from Wario Ware use a music box tune combined with sweet singing from Ashley as an ironic counterpoint to the actual attitude of the character, who is a a sinister, near-emotionless, teenage witch who has tried to turn another character into potion ingredients, and who practices and researches dark magic to do things like turn plants into giant monsters.
- Averted in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where it was arranged as a big band tune. Although Japanese Ashely's singing is still pretty creepy.
- Ironically, the original Japanese lyrics boil down to "Ashley is awesome. Isn't Ashley awesome? She's a little bored and wants friends, though. But she's awesome."
American McGee's Alice. Several tracks utilize toy instruments; the "Pale Realm" level music includes the chorus of an old children's song. ("My Grandfather's Clock", according to The Other Wiki.) As if the demonic children with exposed brains weren't Nightmare Fuel enough, right?
- That's pretty understandable, as the lyrics are about this clock stopping when the owner dies. Made this troper frightened and teary when she first heard the original version.
- Blood, which was also a McGee work, made a frequent use of the music box in its soundtrack.
In Trapt, there is a tune known as 'The Man-Eating Music-Box', which is indeed often accompanied by the cracking of bones and the sound of flesh rended, as the titular music-box devours its latest victim.
One of the puzzles in Silent Hill 2 involves combining three music boxes in the lobby of an empty hotel. Together they produce a haunting, nursery-rhyme-like melody.
- Also, in 'The Reverse Will' there is a vocal sample of Laura reciting the rhyme 'Now I lay me down to sleep/Ipray the Lord my soul to keep'. But reversed.
- Let's not forget the skipping rhyme about the hanged men.
The background music for Clock Town's Final Day in The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask is somewhat similar to, if a bit more frantic than, the music that plays during the First Day. Until you turn up the bass, that is, and can hear the creepy, dooming countermelody that is supplementing the happy normal music.
Meteos. Planet Jeljel (Magmor in Europe). Concentrated Nightmare Fuel in an otherwise light-hearted game.
- Yep, the light-hearted game about preventing planetary annihilation.
Thief: Deadly Shadows. The coming of the Big Bad is prophesized in a variety of nursery rhymes.
Another classic, from The 7th Guest:
Old man Stauf built a house
And filled it with his toys.
Six guests were invited one night
Their screams the only noise
Blood inside the library,
Blood right up the hall,
Dripping down the attic stairs...
Hey guests, try not to fall?
Nobody came out that night
Not one was ever seen
But old man Stauf is waiting there *evil chuckle*
Crazy, sick, and MEAN!
- Don't lie. It scared you, too.
- One scene in the game has a shorter version of the rhyme that has different lyrics, is sung by children, and is played backwards.
The one of the trailers for Dead Space features a pained female voice singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" while scenes of corpses, blood, and decapitations flash on screen.
- It appears in the actual game, too... towards the end, when things start to become genuinely frigthening. It's juuust at the edge of your hearing... mixed in with the everpresent sound of Necromorphs scuttling through the air-ducts. I think the beginning of Chapter 10 is the first place it appears. Even after 9 missions of survival-horror, it manages to make everything a whole other kind of creepy.
  - If you let the game run without pressing start it plays through the beginning bumper, too. The bumper is pretty much like the trailer.
- Plus the trailer is basically a screamer , and it makes the words sound so creepy I assumed it to be their own version of the lyrics. (When this blazing sun is gone...)
  - According to the other wiki, the lines are actually from the original English lyrics from 1806. It uses the first three stanzas and the last two lines of the last stanza. The reason it seems odd to us is because really, all everybody remembers is the first stanza.
This troper remembers a Puzzle on Resident Evil 3, in which there are two music boxes, one of them sounds quite normal, whereas the other one sounds like something Nemesis would listen to while hunting down STARS members. The non-creepy sounding one was the one needed, but hearing the creepy one first reeeeeeealy didn't help considering this troper was being chased by ol Nemmie at the time.
Random snippets of children's songs among other things play during SHODAN's voice clips in System Shock 2: in this excerpt, one can clearly hear Shirley Temple's "Animal Crackers in My Soup" at 3:51.
In Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri, according to the Dream Twister's associated quote, the final transmission from Assassin's Redoubt is "Mary Had A Little Lamb". Considering that Assassin's Redoubt belongs to the Spartan Federation (the Proud Warrior Faction Guys) and the Dream Twister boosts psychic attack power, this is likely the product of some very heavy-duty Mind Rape.
Tales Of Hearts opens with this ditty:
Sleeping princess in the Forest of Thorns
Princess dreaming for a thousand years
Long is her hair of emerald
Like rose crystal are her cheeks
Sleeping princess in the Forest of Thorns
Never awakening from her slumber
Damned by the poisonous thoughts
of the devil with scarlet hair
Within the spines of the Forest of Thorns
Dream forever and ever as the world ends
Someday, the black moon will fall
And the white moon will crumble
Prayers for release wither
Consumed by the monsters that live in dreams
And pearly tears, too, shatter
Wrapped up in thorns, until the day the nightmares come to life...
Until the day the hero stops the nightmares.
- Of course, at the end of the game when the day is saved, the heroes compose a new, more hopeful version of the fairy tale.
Starsiege (mech-combat precursor to the Starsiege: Tribes First Person Shooter franchise) describes a conflict between humanity and Killer Robots that are Humongous Mecha. The manual and intro cutscene are filled with charming children's songs:
Teddy kicks some dusty
Cybrids are all rusty
Mommy's burning!
Mommy's burning!
All fall down!
Little old Peter
Missing his liter
While Herky plays in the red
Down came the glitches
And burn us in ditches
And we slept after eating our dead.
Killer7 does this, with Emir Parkreiner humming Greensleeves/What Child is This? as he murders the Smiths.
Mario And Luigi Partners in Time does this with christmas music in Hollijolli Village, with a very depressing rendition of typical christmas music used as Mario and Luigi journey to a village being destroyed by the alien invader shroobs at Christmas.
Tales Of Vesperia has a melancholy musicbox play during the Player Punch fight of Yuri VS Estelle.
In one of the last levels of The Suffering, you witness three mysterious Puritan girls singing "Ring Around The Rosie" while dancing around the ancient site of a witch-burning. Then they giggle insanely and transform into Infernas.

Close Video Games

Sluggy Freelance has this gruesome nursery rhyme derivative for the return of the evil kittens.
Parodied in this Medium Large strip (second from the bottom).

Close Webcomics

In KateModern: Precious Blood, drugged-up serial killer Terrence calls "Little pigs! Little pi-igs!", probably referencing The Shining. He also uses the (already slightly creepy) Breeniverse chant "The Hymn of One is fun!" after describing carrying out a ritualistic murder.
Cillian Crowe in Survival Of The Fittest singing 'happy birthday' to himself, while not exactly a nursery rhyme, embodies this trope perfectly. That is, if you consider that he was currently thinking about killing the person he was talking to at the time — insisting on showing him his 'present' (a meat cleaver).

Close Web Original

In the flashback in Return of the Joker, Batman and Batgirl return to the condemned Arkham Asylum. As they walk through the dilapidated halls, they hear Harley Quinn singing "Hush, Little Baby." And it only gets worse from there.
- Hush, Little Baby is just a creepy song. It has always creeped this tropette out, Lord only knows why. It's just got a creepy cadence to it, I guess. -Shudder
In Daffy Duck's Quackbusters, Daffy finds himself in a parody of The Exorcist, and the possessed Sybil stand-in goes Jekyll & Hyde on a classic: "Mary had a little lamb... BUT I ATE IT!!"
The Mad Hatter, based as he is on the Alice in Wonderland character uses these as part of his schtick. In one scene in the animated Batman series, he's stalking Bats through a giant maze, taunting him with "Twinkle, Twinkle, little Bat! How I wonder what you're at!"
In The Simpsons, when Bart and Lisa believe Ned Flanders has killed Maude, we see him heading up to the attic, where Lisa's hiding, carrying an axe and singing "Mary had a little lamb". Even though the audience knows it must be a Mistaken For Murderer plot (even if they've seen it before, and know exactly what's going on), it's still very creepy.
In Shrek Lord Farquaad taunts the Gingerbread man by holding his missing legs and saying "Run run run as fast as you can, you can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man!".
- Do you know the muffin man?
  - Who lives on Drewery Lane?
In the Justice League episode "Only A Dream", John Dee torments the heroes by trapping them in nightmares. Batman, being one of those who's managed to not fall asleep, attempts to block Dee's influence out of his brain by constantly humming "Frere Jacques". What makes it creepy is the end of the episode, when a wide-eyed Dee is humming the same song, having been trapped in a catatonic state by a power backfire.
When Spongebob Squarepants abandoned his civilized life to live amongst the jellyfish in one episode, Patrick didn't take it too well. He eventually decided to hunt Spongebob down and keep him in a jar as a trophy. When he was explaining his motives, a music box tune played in the background.

Close Western Animation

Who'd have thought that catchy rhyme we all danced to with our friends in the schoolyard, Ring Around the Rosey, was actually about the Black Plague? (The connection is purely apocryphal, but the theory has risen to such prominence in popular culture that it's often cited whenever the song is mentioned. Heavy metal band Brocas Helm even used this nursery rhyme as the chorus of their song Black Death.)
After Snopes.com put out a "lost" legend that the rhyme Four and Twenty Bluebirds was about piracy I've never been able to look at it the same way again. Fake or not, it's an interesting connotation.
According to most scholarly interpretations, the English nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons' is either about sex, or the execution of King Charles I (when all the bells of London rang), or both.
- It's used for ironic effect in 1984: the Thought Police echo the creepy final lines as they crash in and arrest Winston.
- "Under the spreading chestnut tree... I sold you, you sold me..."
This troper used to always love the catchy little tune of "Alouette" as a kid. But then she took French class, and learned what the song actually means.
- For the record, it's a rather graphic description of the preparation of a bird for supper. I.e. it has to be plucked.
Humpty Dumpty, the rhyme about the egg that fell and couldn't be put back together again, is about losing your virginity.
- This troper has heard that it refers to a large cannon. An item typically placed on walls and of interest to royal military forces.
  - It was a cannon in the seige of Colchester during the English Civil War.
- This troper would like to note that, #1- Humpty Dumpty just means a very clumsy person. #2 It is never mentioned that he's actually an egg. Humpty Dumpty is possibly just a normal person falling off a wall and dying horribly at the bottom...
  - This troper heard it was originally a riddle: it's never mentioned that he's an egg because that's the answer. Now it's in It Was His Sled territory, though.
- This troper thought it was generally about things or beings (or even concepts) that can't be repaired anymore once they're broken.
Many tunes written by one Hans Baumann. He was a children's book writer eventually, and wrote in that style early on—however, the songs he wrote early on were for the Hitler Youth. Particularly unsettling is this one, which in a children's rhyming style contains the phrase "For today we rule Germany/Tomorrow, the world!"
- While the linked version translates to "today Germany will hear us" both phrases were in use at the time. Just replace the words in bold with gehört to change the mood from hopeful/uplifting to creepy/sinister.
This troper wonders why people put babies to sleep with a song about them falling out of trees.
- I think Roselie Sorrels covers this nicely.
"All right, it's 5:30 in the morning. That kid has not quit
howling now for six hours. You're getting sort of desperate,
breaking out into a cold sweat because you know that all those
other kids are going to get up in about another half hour and
they're going to demand cereal and peanut sandwiches and milk.
And you forgot to get milk. Oh, God. All the paregoric is gone.
It's gone because you drank it. Things are getting awful bad and
you need something else. Every culture's got one: it's the
hostile baby-rocking song. You just can't keep all that stuff
bottled up inside yourself. You need to let it out some way, or
you'd get strange . . . punch the baby in the mouth . . . and you
can't do that. You'd get an awful big ticket for it, and it
makes you feel lousy. So you take that baby and you rock it
firmly, smile sweetly . . . and you sing the hostile baby-rocking song..."
Yankee Doodle is a fairly common nursery rhyme in the United States. The song dates back to the Revolutionary War, and in context calls the average American (Yankee Doodle) a backwards hick with no sense of fashion.
- Already during the war it had been adopted by members of the American army, who sang it with an ironic pride. Now, the irony is largely forgotten, but the later verses are much more obvious in their deprecation of the Americans than the well-known first verse and chorus.
The German counting rhyme "Eins, Zwei, Polizei". Conjures up images of the Nazi Gestapo, IMO.

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