Ironic Nursery Tune - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Ironic Nursery Rhyme

Once there was a pretty fly
He had a pretty wife, this pretty fly
But one day, she flew away
They had two pretty children
But then they flew away
Into the night, into the moon.

The Night Of The Hunter

"Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you when you're sleeping."

"Doctor Who"

A nursery rhyme used to convey an underlying creepiness, sometimes made into a theme tune that sounds like a music box that's slightly off key. It's mainly used to indicate someone with a Squicky past, a child molester or other psychosis. Ironically, due to this trope, it's very uncommon for anyone to use nursery music to indicate anything positive anymore, making it a common theme of Grimmification.

Occasionally the writers want to be more poetic with it, and a character will sing the lyrics to some bedtime song. This is sometimes handwaved as being learned from a nanny or grandmother, since they tend to be rhymes no one has used in the last century.

Oldtime songs like the works of Frank Sinatra are quickly becoming part of this trope. If you enter an ancient dilapidated mansion and something that the original listeners of are either senile or dead from old age plays over and over and over, then you're in trouble.

Often goes with the Creepy Child. See also Soundtrack Dissonance.

Examples:

Live Action TV

The first Sapphire And Steel storyline had the malevolent Time using a nursery rhyme from a child's storybook to enter this universe.
- Several uses, in fact, as does the forth serial. The "Man Who Wasn't There" bit has had this troper literally screaming out loud.
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...."
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 Around The Rosey" 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.
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.

Soviet Animation

A 1970s Soviet propaganda animation, featuring a brave Soviet boy being menaced by a Nazi tank, features said tank commander playing "Polly Put The Kettle On" (how it's known in English) on a harmonica when he's not firing at the kid. He tries to get the kid to play the song on his violin. The kid refuses, starts to play something else and gets machine-gunned.

Western Animation

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.
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!".

Anime and Manga

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.
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.

Comic Books

Scarecrow, the Batman villain, also frequently sings "The Mockingbird Song".
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.

Commercial

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.

Film

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.
  - Actually, that's director Fritz Lang himself doing the whistling.
Josh Peck's character in Mean Creek tells a rhyme about a man whose brains got splattered all over the wall.
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.
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..."
Two words: Rosemary's Baby.
- What nursery tune does that use?
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.
- The third movie opens with a kid slowly singing it as he is about to be hanged.
  - Actually, that was a different song, "Hoist the Colors."
- 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. 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 80's remake of The Fly a doomed Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) sings "I known an old lady who swallowed a fly...perhaps she'll die" which is a line from the song "The old lady who swallowed a fly".

Literature

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...

Video Games

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.
- It may not be fictional, if it's the rhyme I think it is-I once read a rhyme about a "Scissorman" who cuts off the thumbs of children who won't stop sucking them. Not all children's rhymes are pleasant-the Scissorman actually features as a minor character in the Discworld novel Hogfather, when the antagonists are in the Tooth Fairy's tower and are finding themselves haunted by their childhood nightmares. It's described as somewhere between an ostrich and a gecko and made entirely out of scissors.
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-".
- 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.
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.
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 slightly slower 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.
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.

Music

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.
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."
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" has a nursery 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
- Coincidentally, that's a very common prayer for children. This troper remembers it very well, and is now slightly scared by this Metallica connection.
  - Not coincidental, in a song about sleep and nightmares, to have an ironic nursery rhyme about sleep. The song also features a more overtly sinister mock-rhyme almost directly after:
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 itself can take on a slightly creepy tone 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.
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".
"Hoppe hoppe Reiter" in Rammstein's song "Spieluhr".
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.

Truth In Television (or rather, Falsehood In Television)

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.)
- Not entirely apocryphal. There is a serious proposal by a serious scholar, but it's buried through memetic mutation and chinese whispers. The link to the Black Death was to the version common in the UK Ring a ring a roses, and the version of the link that is 'debunked' on Snopes is a 'wild' folk version that links the Black Death to the version common in the US, which requires significant changes. Add to that some serious weirdnesses in the Snopes article on the topic (and this seems to be most netizens' lone source on this) and there is reasonable doubt.
  - There is still the problem of both versions not dating to the 1300s or anything close.
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, or both.
- It's used for ironic effect in Nineteen Eighty Four: the Thought Police echo the creepy final lines as they crash in and arrest Winston.
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.
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.
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!"
This troper wonders why people put babies to sleep with a song about them falling out of trees.

Webcomics

Sluggy Freelance has this gruesome nursery rhyme derivative for the return of the evil kittens.

Theatre

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 it's own. I'll steal you indeed.
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.

Web Original

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).
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.

In The Mouth Of Madness

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