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Nightmare Fuel Unleaded
"You're my wife now."
Papa Lazarou, The League of Gentlemen

A catch-all term describing story elements which were meant to either amuse, entertain, or be only slightly scary to its adult audience, but which -- in execution -- are so trauma-inducing that they may cause people to void themselves in terror.

This trope is named after the phrase "Good Old-Fashioned Nightmare Fuel", used by Mike and the 'bots at least twice in Mystery Science Theater 3000 to describe trauma-inducing sights and objects in films that appeared by design to be originally intended for children. It's a common result of crossing the line from comedy to sadism, but can also be a result of Fridge Logic applied to a programme's premise or Values Dissonance, among many other sources.

Often overlaps with the Uncanny Valley.

Specific types of Nightmare Fuel Unleaded include:

(If you can't tell what differentiates this from regular Nightmare Fuel, this is for media intended for adults, rather than the children and young adult media that makes up regular Nightmare Fuel.)

For unintentionally terrifying children's programmes, see Nightmare Fuel, and subtropes. If it's meant to scare, see Horror Tropes, but if it fails to scare and becomes hilarious instead, it devolves into Nightmare Retardant.
Examples:

Anime
  • In the anime movie Akira, Tetsuo practically becomes the Anthropomorphic Personification of Nightmare Fuel.
    • First, after his first escape from the lab and his rescue from the Clowns by Kaneda and crew, he gets assaulted by horrific flashes of the future, including a nightmarish hallucination where he falls and hits the ground and spills his guts onto the ground and tries to scoop them back up.
    • There's the nightmare scene. After undergoing the experiment, Tetsuo is left to recuperate in what looks like a child's bedroom. He wakes up to see all the toys come together and form some kind of gigantic teddy bear with a monster-like right hand and a milk-spewing toy car that proceed to try to kill him.
    • And then there's the mutation scene, where Tetsuo loses control of his powers and transforms into a giant human amoeba that consumes everything it touches, including Tetsuo's poor girlfriend Kaori, who is popped like an insect in a little explosion of blood.
  • Mayuri Kurotsuchi from Bleach. Pick something, anything about him at random and it qualifies.
  • Just about anything involving Johan Liebert in Monster. And let's not get into the storybook from episode 37.
  • We've gone this far without a mention of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni?
  • Much of the events of Ayashi No Ceres...and on top of all that, for some reason this troper found herself intensely disturbed by the stiletto/dagger that can form from out of Tooya's inner wrist. Plus that monster underground (only included in the manga) that had resulted from an innocent girl mutating when she tried to put on the hagoromo and fused with it? NOT pretty. AT ALL.
  • Hansel and Gretel from Black Lagoon, at their worst.
  • Some of the more disturbing scenes of Elfen Lied, including, of course, the first ten minutes of the anime.
  • Considering it's upbeat beginning, the sudden shift in tone, combined with some genuinely disturbing material pushes Narutaru straight into this trope (and then there's the manga...).
  • The ending to the anime Berserk.
  • The first 6 minutes of the first episode of the anime Shigurui. For this Troper, it was one of the few things that actually caused physical revoltion.
  • Despite being the hero (or Anti Hero/ Heroic Sociopath) of the story, Alucard from Hellsing is pretty damn scary. Anything from his near permanent Slasher Smile, to his very bizarre transformations, to his general insanity can induce nightmare in viewers. Then there's Incognito...
  • The ninth Black Jack OVA in its entirety. Especially once you reach the halfway point, wherein you get to view the most horrific Fan Disservice you will ever see. And don't get us started on the blood-spewing tumor shaped like a mutated human face.

Video Games
  • Stalkers in Half-Life 2 are mutilated, forcefully cyborged vestiges of human beings, who are completely dependent on their mechanical limbs, and forced into service to alien rulers. What is terrifying is that it is implied they know who they were before, and they are also implied to be immortal.
  • Don't forget about the Ichthyosaurs from the first game. These underwater dinosaurs would swim at rapid speeds towards you growling. Not to mention that, in a particularly annoying bit of realism, most of your best guns don't work.
  • The new improved Headcrabs in Half-Life 2 also qualify. While the standard issue headcrabs look pretty harmless, during the "We Don't Go To Ravenholm" level, two new, creepy, spidery types of headcrabs were introduced. The long-legged "fast" headcrabs, which produced skeletal, inhumanly dextrous zombies that slobbered like dogs while they mauled you. The even scarier venomous black headcrabs, which reduced your health to 1 whenever they bit you, hissed like rattlesnakes, attached themselves in groups of four to a corpse, which attacked by hurling them at you and couldn't even be killed by hand grenades. This editor (who is just a little scared of spiders) had to pause the game at some points to shudder involuntarily.
    • Of course, all headcrabs count as a form of unleaded Paranoia Fuel, due to their tendency to show up absolutely anywhere. Hiding in alleyways, skulking in storerooms, lurking in air vents, clinging to the underside of your chair as you surf the Internet...
    • Headcrab zombies on fire make a disturbing "human dying in agony" sound, especially chilling if you are the one who set the zombie on fire initiating the torture and death of the underlying innocent human. Apparently, in headcrab zombies, the human consciousness is gone but the part that feels pain remains.
      • In fact, if you play a headcrab zombie's cries backwards you can hear the human crying out in agony, begging somebody to kill him. *SHUDDER*
      • A sample is here.
  • Husks in Mass Effect are the reanimated corpses of human beings with their nervous systems replaced with technology. The process is done by impaling them on a spike. In fact, they don't even have to be dead to be converted into Husks. The geth (robots) don't look creepy (they have flashlights for heads), but the noise they make when they spot your squad made this troper nearly stop playing when he first heard it. And then there's Shepard's nightmarish visions of the Prothean war with the Reapers, which mainly consists of the Protheans getting torn limb from limb by evil cyborgs.
    • And then there's the Thorian. A sentient plant that controls minds through Pavlovian Mind Rape is bad enough. Then you find out that those that do get infected by Thorian spores slowly rot away while they're still alive, turning into Thorian Creepers, and promptly lose your lunch.
  • The nightmare sequences from Max Payne, which include such gems as: the terrified, pleading and weeping voice of Max's late wife Michelle; the baby crying (and screaming at one point if you fall during the second sequence); creepy music box music; the door from the bathroom being boarded up violently; and lots of creepy imagery, including a cradle on a red floor surrounded by candles like a demonic altar.
    • The scream is actually from a parody of Twin Peaks that is briefly seen in the game, but it's horrifying nonetheless.
      • The first time this troper ever saw the game, his friend was playing through the hallucination level where Max has to follow the trail of his own child's blood to the room where said baby was brutally murdered. It's fair to say that this dissuaded him buying his own copy of Max Payne.
  • Even though the Silent Hill series are initially set up to be scary, some moments are disturbing in unusual ways. For example, you get used to killing weird monsters while walking through rust-and-blood covered interior, but Vincent's startled question: "Monsters? They look like monsters to you?..."
  • Killer 7 has such fascinating boss encounters as a pair of Japanese businessmen who rise from the dead after having their heads blown open, and then attack by shooting their exposed brains at you. Not to mention the fact that the Heaven Smiles' laughter still haunts this editor's nightmares.
    • Frankly, this troper finds the boss fight against Andrei Ulymedia in the CLOUDMAN scenario as one of the most frightening boss fights in all video gamedom: after turning into a heaven smile, he slowly chases you though a maze of ambulances, all of which are horribly vivid and unnatural colors, and he is trailed by a huge string of what can only be described as bloody tentacles sprouting from his back. It doesn't help that he kills you in one hit, and you can't look around corners in the game...
    • The less said about Curtis Blackburn and his "hobbies", the better.
  • The "bathtub scare" in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem was the scariest part of the game for this editor. If you walk Alexandra Roivas into the upstairs bathroom of the mansion and have her approach the bathtub, you're treated to a dramatically zooming-in shot of Alex hallucinating her own naked and mutilated corpse in a bathtub full of blood, accompanied by her letting out an ear-piercing shriek of terror. This is certified by this troper, who managed to jump on his couch when seeing this for the first time, which is a lot considering he's always ice cold no matter how scary is the stuff he's playing.
    • This editor's thoughts when he saw that scene was more "Holy shit, the people who made this knew what they were doing." than "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!". The worst part for him was the entirety of Maximilians chapter. Any attempt to summarize it would be in vain. And when you think that it's finally over and go back to controlling Alex, you find the worst part of it all: the voiceacting over the autopsies.
    • Hell, the whole game was Nightmare Fuel - the screaming in the background when your sanity is low and the accompanying music stayed in this editor's memory for a long time, often keeping him up until 4 in the morning. Also, the 2nd floor painting changing into a scene straight from Hell gave him a nightmare where he woke up in a room full of evil paintings that did bad things when you took your eyes away from them.
  • The Shalebridge Cradle from Thief: Deadly Shadows is a non-stop ride through this trope, being filled to the brim with ghostly whispers, flickering electrical systems, tortured and mindless inmates that won't stay dead and so much more. Oh yes, and the building itself is alive and it hates you.
  • The Boogey Man character in King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride was so terrifying that it caused this troper to stop playing the game. Not only does the character show up if you stay in one place for too long and eat you if you fail to run fast enough (being a princess, you have no weapons), but he comes back later in the game; you are required to blow a horn to advance, but if you happen to have blown the horn once before, you must stand in a very specific area of the screen to do it again. Try it anywhere else and the Boogey Man will jump up, exclaim "Thanks for inviting me to dinner!" and eat you on the spot. (Of course, the King's Quest games were annoying like this in general.)
  • Everyone agrees that the Zerg were pretty messed-up. But the Infested Kerrigan may have been pushing it, especially in her introductory cutscene. Similarly, a few cutscenes of Terran characters being killed by the Zerg were like something out of a B Movie, only scary. Complete with Southern accents.
  • The worst ending of Disgaea 2. The fact that you don't see what is going on arguably makes it all that much worse.
  • The Floormasters in The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker are skinny, black hands on arms that pop up when you walk close, latch onto your head, and drag you into a black abyss while making some kind of inhuman screech.
  • Most of the Dark Brotherhood quests from Oblivion are supposed to be scary... but there's still nothing like the room of the traitor near the end, containing, among other things, random body parts, random bloodstains, a diary that reveals he is quite obviously insane, and his mother's rotting head.
    • There is also the mutilated corpse of your boss-up-to-that-point, right after that. Made especially creepy because he was killed by his bosses, which are now both your bosses and standing right there like nothing's wrong. Most of them seem to have enjoyed it, actually.
  • This editor remembers a sequence a little under halfway into the otherwise-amusing Blood Rayne, when the zombie body-possessing monsters are about to be introduced. You've spent all this time fighting through a Nazi stronghold, and suddenly there is nobody. Anywhere. Nobody shooting. All there is is a freakish, disembodied voice mocking you. Even Rayne gets a little creeped out. And then you find corpses... that start rising. And then their heads pop off. (It didn't help that the enemies were pains in the backside to actually kill...)
  • Most of the Reservoir Dogs game is Nightmare Fuel of some kind... if it isn't the cops begging you not to kill them, it's the grim inevitability of this might be It Was His Sled, but 5 out of 6 main characters' deaths, or your ability to cut off hostage's fingers. However, what really qualifies for Nightmare Fuel Unleaded is Mr Brown's driving level. There's something about playing out what you know to be the last few minutes of life of a man who's just been shot in the head, and add that to the fact that the screen keeps getting splattered with blood, your vision is going, and the wonderful actor playing Brown launching into a 'So, Like a Virgin'-esque speech with a voice that obviously knows what's coming, this troper found this much more disturbing than any of the violence in the movie.
  • The introduction of the Licker in Resident Evil 2. When you enter that room (you know the one I'm talking about) and whatthefuckwasthat you glimpse a skinless,man-sized thing padding across the outside of the window like a gecko. You look back and... nothing there. Your paranoia approximately doubles,ready for you to meet it for real a tad later.
  • System Shock 2. The origin of the cyborg midwives. The giant poisonous spiders,the audio logs that detail the fall of the von Braun,the annelid hybrids that beg to be killed or warn you as they attack,the Many,SHODAN -- I could go on.
  • And also Bio Shock. Anything relating to Sander Cohen in that game will probably make someone void themselves. For this troper, it was probably the "The Wild Bunny" recording.
  • The Fatal Frame series, but especially the first game. The ghosts of the Crawling Girl, Long-Armed Man, Broken-Neck Woman, and Blinded Woman are more than enough to provide endless nightmares, but then there's the audio tapes, and the very concept of the Rope Maiden... who is tied down to a stone altar by her wrists, ankles, and neck, and then savagely torn apart in order to maintain the seal on the hellmouth under the Mansion.

Film
  • Freaks. Just Freaks. If Johnny Eck running didn't creep you out the ending will scar you for life. This film ruined Tod Browning's (of Dracula fame) career. It was banned in the UK for 30 years after released, but is now seen as a classic.
    • As someone who takes his screen name from Johnny Eck, this editor wishes to point out that Eck was a really really cool guy.
  • The (in)famous "opening of the Ark" sequence from the finale of Raiders of the Lost Ark is incredibly jarring for a viewer who has thus far enjoyed an action/adventure movie with a relatively light tone and Bloodless Carnage. The shot of the melting face - quickly followed by an exploding head - would have been enough to give plenty of theatre-goers nightmares, although it is hardly as effective now considering how much it looks like a model.
    • That's nothing compared to Temple of Doom. Pulling people's hearts out, enslaving children, crocodiles and chilled monkey brains feature, although the most terrifying thing of all is that they brainwashed Indiana frakkin' Jones. It's not easy to see your hero attempt to kill his love interest when you're six.
    • And to round out the trifecta, you have Donovan's rapid aging in Last Crusade after he drinks from the wrong Grail. The scene was disturbing enough to make this troper close his eyes and cover his ears for years. "He chose poorly," indeed.
  • Pan's Labyrinth. We knew it wasn't a kid's movie, but did it have to be so violent and disturbing? (The fact that the main protagonist is an innocent kid makes it even more so.)
    • The violence was pretty bad, but good Lord, the Pale Man. This editor barely even remembered the kid getting his face beaten in with a bottle after watching that thing come after the protagonist with his hands up.
    • Similiarly, the The Devil's Backbone was downright terrifying sometimes. That kid in the Argyle sweater...
  • There's a creepy scene in the MST3K episode Devil Doll, where Demonic Dummy Hugo is sitting motionless in his cage. After a long lingering shot in dead silence, his eyes make a slight movement (reminding us that he is indeed, alive) and the camera pans across the room. Not even Mike and the bots' excellent riffing can diffuse the terror of that horrifyingly subtle little moment.
    • Speaking of MST 3 K, "Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders" isn't an episode to watch alone late at night. It's a terrible film and not scary during the day, but disturbing enough--in part because it's so badly made--to be rather spooky at the time of night/morning when everything is spooky.
  • Pink Floyd: The Wall. In particular, Comfortably Numb and Goodbye Blue Sky are nightmare fuel.
    • And The Trial!
  • The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, also a brilliant example of Paranoia Fuel. Contains the most messed-up set design in anything ever, as well as a psychotic sleepwalking Conrad Veidt.
    • The Man Who Laughs has more Veidt, this time as the most unbelievably disturbing-looking protagonist in all of film. See the page on Slasher Smile, and you too will understand.
  • The intro to Eraserhead. That's not to say that the rest of the movie isn't nightmarish as well, mind you, but the simple sight of The Man In The Planet crouched motionless by the window, wrapped in shadows, and then twitching slightly, is probably the single most disconcerting thing in the universe.
  • Any sequence involving the man in the bag from the J-horror film Audition.
    • Actually, pretty much anything Takashi Miike touches. If you have seen his contribution to Masters of Horror, "Imprint", I feel your pain. If you haven't seen it, for the love of God, keep it that way. Your sanity thanks you in advance.
  • One Hour Photo. Period.
  • The unofficial mascot of the movie One Missed Call: a sinisterly smiling face with screaming mouths for eyes. Granted, it is a horror movie, but the mascot's appearance crosses the line. It doesn't help that they show it every time they advertise for the movie...
    • Or that they hung posters with that thing on it all over this troper's local mall!
    • Scenes from the sequel to the original One Missed Call creeped the hell out of this editor.
    • As did most of the Korean movie Bunshinsaba.
    • Actually, just thinking about it I'm getting the willies just from thinking about the doll from the Japanese movie Rinne (Reincarnation).
    • And the scene from The Grudge with the shower and the hand coming from her head.
    • And that scene in Dark Water where the woman's found out that she's being haunted by a dead girl who drowned in the water tank and the girl is still IN the water tank and she comes home and her little girl is floating face-down in the bath and she's being chased by the dead girl and she runs for the lift and gets in and the dead girl's getting closer and closer and then the dead girl comes out of her apartment but it's not the dead girl it's her daughter and she looks down and SHE'S HOLDING THE DEAD GIRL! OH MY DEAR SWEET LORD SHE'S HOLDING THE DEAD GIRL! RUN! RUN! RUUUUUN!
    • I'm gonna just go ahead and say everything from Asia that could be considered to be in the horror genre.
  • The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate includes a graphic depiction of a murder by asphyxiation with plastic wrap. The victim gags and vomits while his eyes bulge and he claws desperately at his assailant, all to no avail. This editor still can visualise it with disturbing clarity despite not having touched the film since two years back.
  • The character of Pizza the Hut in the otheriwse hilarious Spaceballs, a living mound of meat, cheese, and pepperoni who delivers threats instead of taste while his crony picks off parts of him to munch on. His final fate, as read by a news broadcaster, was that he got stuck in his car and ate himself. "To death." Uuugh.
  • When a Stranger Calls Back, (The made-for-TV sequel to the original When a Stranger Calls.''), has an innocent schoolgirl stalked by William Landis, a psychopathic ventriloquist who, in the film's climax, paints himself to look like the wall behind him, so if the lights are off, he's practically invisible. It sounds cartoony, but when you see him do it, and realize that it could actually be done in real life, it's utterly creepy.
  • If the part of 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL deactivates the crewmembers' life support systems doesn't creep you out, you are a freak. A freak, sir!
    • And speaking of which, the scene where Frank gets killed and flails around for a few seconds, then stops moving... then when Dave has to get back inside the Jupiter with no helmet... and the scene after where Dave finds the monolith...*shudder*.
  • Two Words: Humma Kavula!
  • Other two words: Freddy Krueger. Even Robert Englund, his portrayer, admitted on having nightmares with him. How ironic.
  • The 2007 Beowulf's portrayal of Grendel. Crispin Hellion Glover is a scary man.
  • While El Orfanato was a pretty scary film all around, three things in particular merit this list: 1) the bit with the medium and the screaming, invisible children, 2) the car-crash, 3) Tomas.
  • The Asphyx (UK, 1973)
  • Terry Gilliam's surreal movie Brazil (1985)
  • Science gone horribly wrong! The original movie The Fly was creepy and psychologically horrible (imagine you were the poor wife), and the 1986 reimagining was just plain Squicktastic Body Horror descent into madness and horror.
  • Hellraiser I and IV.
  • Event Horizon (1997)
    • Oh God. This troper was Genre Savvy enough to go to bed before the horror ramped up; his friend, who persevered nonetheless, cannot bring himself to re-watch the film even after almost a decade.
  • The Russian movie Nochnoy dozor (2004) (aka Nightwatch).
    • Having seen the movie numerous times...which part or parts did you consider Nightmare Fuel?
  • Neo's first entry into the real world in The Matrix. Oh, don't tell me you weren't horrified. And then the explanation of how it works...and how humans are fed...and how people jack in to the Matrix...and did we mention that our bodies could be taken over by evil unstoppable programs at any second?
  • The 'Giant Insects' sequence in Peter Jackson's King Kong. Especially when the loveable English cook (Andy Serkis) gets... well, absorbed by a couple of them. You don't need a phobia about insects to be utterly horrified by this sequence. Luckily for this editor, he does have a phobia about insects.
    • Andy Serkis himself described them as "Freudian penis monsters." The equivalent scene was actually cut from the 1933 original because the trauma hurt the story's pacing, and is now lost forever.
  • In Heavy Metal, the most disturbing story is hands down "B-17." Whether is the extremely graphic death toll on the plane's crew, or the rampaging zombies the dead turn into or the fact that the only survivor lands on an island utterly surrounded by the living dead aircrews is a matter of opinion.
  • The Death Note film spinoff L: Change The World pulls this off with the symptoms of the killer virus at the centre of the plot. The various sores with the severe bleeding and the tears of blood make its victims look disturbing, not to ignore their moans and screams of pain. The named character who uses a syringe of infected blood to commit suicide and deny the villains use of him continues screaming even when the camera isn't focused on him, and when he is "neutralised" the last shot the audience gets of him is his wholly bloodshot eyes along with his severely charred face. L describes his impending death by heart attack as peaceful, and this editor is inclined to agree if the alternative is so much worse. There is, also, the after-the-film consideration of how horrible such a virus, described as a mix of influenza and ebola but "100 times" as infectious, would be. Sometimes thinking too hard is bad...
  • This troper felt more than a bit uneasy while watching some scenes from "Ghostbusters". He also has a best friend who threw up during the Stay Puft Man scene from and has an extreme dislike of marshmallows because of this.
  • The poster alone◊ for Zombi 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters/Zombie was enough to terrify this troper. The menacing tagline didn't help at all either.
  • Recorded Live, a student film by S.S. Wilson, the man behind the Tremors series. A man goes to a job interview, only to find there's nothing in the office but a film reel with "do not erase" written on it. Suddenly the film comes to life and advances on the man, who runs for his life. He discovers the film can be driven off with a magnet, but eventually it outsmarts him by moving under the carpet and springing up from beneath him, enveloping the poor bastard and leaving nothing behind when it move away. Then it sends out another letter to a job applicant, and returns to its reel. Did I mention the film makes a "fast forwarding" noise every time it moves? You'll never hear that sound the same way again.
  • The Mummy. Yes, I know. But the scene where the mummy re-makes itself out of bits of living people...
    • Specially the one which appears tongue and eyeless.
  • Laura Linney's plot in Love, Actually is a little bit of this, and a little bit of Tear Jerker.
  • House is a comedy-horror movie. And yet, there is something about those giggling hag creatures that try to drag that one kid up the chimney that may have been pushing it.
    • This troper, thanks to this movie and his Jerkass brothers, still can't stand to be in, or even near, a basement staircase...
  • The exact fate of Maralena in Cloverfield.
    • This troper hasn't seen Cloverfield, but has read Wikipedia's plot summary of the movie. There are scenes throughout the movie of two of the characters' holiday some time before the monster attacks New York. The Wikipedia article specifically mentioned that in the last of these scenes, something is seen to fall from the sky into the ocean. The implication that this was the monster scared me more than anything had for years.
  • The movie Barefoot Gen shows graphic animated depictions of people's eyeballs and skin melting in the 1945 Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings. Graphic. It even has a dog trying to escape the blast but melting along with the others. Scenes from the movie exist on Youtube, but this troper is not linking them.
  • If the dead baby in the movie Trainspotting didn't creep you out, Renton's withdrawal hallucination of it crawling on the ceiling will.
  • Batman Begins asks the question: "Would you like to see Dr. Crane's mask?" It doesn't help that he's using a chemical that could literally be called Nightmare Fuel.
    • Dear lord, this troper had nightmares involving the end sequence where the Narrows are just teeming with Fear Toxin, and all the escaped convicts see Batman flying above. Their collective hallucination paints Batman as a huge black shadow with GLOWING RED EYES! It then distorts his voice to an even more horrible growl... Though it is quite the subversion in that it's the HERO that's terrifying.
      • One wonders how much of a Shout Out that is to the Moth Man...
  • The twitchy, headshaking ghosts in the House on Haunted Hill remake, especially the scene where one character finds herself videotaping of a ghostly vivisection (in an empty room), and then senses something behind her. She turns, sees a shadowy figure peer around a corner wayyyyyy down the hallway, and in an eyeblink its RIGHT THERE IN HER FACE OH MY GOD HEADSHAKING TEETH BLOOD ARGH ARGH ARGH...
  • Donnie Darko. Frank. 'nuff said
  • The "Once there was a pretty fly" montage from The Night of the Hunter.
  • To avoid ruining the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, let's just say The Thing.
  • Creepshow, most notably They're Creeping Up on You! It didn't help that this troper has an insane phobia of roaches, centipedes, or, (let's just face it) pretty much every bug you can think of.
  • Rosemary's Baby. The scariest part is the nightmare sequence, where Rosemary dreams (correctly) that she is raped by a demon.
  • The movie version of Stephen King's It is chock full of Nightmare Fuel. Just hearing what that movie was about when I was seven made me afraid of clowns. The scene where the sink starts spewing blood is horrifying and disgusting, and made even worse by the fact that the Beverly's dad doesn't even see the blood.
    • Also, any scene in which Tim Curry has those damned fangs. The shower scene in which he lets out a loud uneartly roar before chuckling and looking directly towards the camera still gives this troper nightmares.
      • Speaking of adaptations of Stephen King stories, "The Raft" caused this troper to have a paranoia about lakes that lasts to this day, more than fifteen years later.
  • The Saw movies do it for this troper. Especially after seeing:
    • The Razor Wire Maze in the first one.
    • Dr. Gordon saw his foot off in the first one.
    • Amanda in the pit of needles in the second.
    • Detective Matthews smashing his foot with the toilet tank lid too free himself, then snapping it backwards, in the third.
    • The "Classroom trap", "Angel trap", and "The Rack" (A crucifix which slowly broke the victim's arms, legs, and neck, in that order) in the third one.
    • The "Knife chair" (and the result) in the fourth.
      • The Knife Chair can be described as "Push your face into the knives to hit a button that can free you." The result? He charges Jigsaw, who sidesteps, and makes him fall into razor wire.
  • This troper gained a fear of skinny people thanks to the Body Horror happy Thinner, based on a Stephen King story.
  • This troper remembers watching "Labyrinth" when he was four or five and it scaring the ever-loving bejeesus out of him. Especially the scene with the fieries. Now, he loves the movie and, indeed, got the DVD simply so he could learn all the words to "Chilly Down". Also, while we're on the subject, he was horribly afraid of the talking trees in "The Wizard of Oz".
  • One Word: Begotten
  • Threads. A completely realistic depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear attack on seventies England, mostly set in and around Sheffield, then a primary target due to being a major industrial centre. It's not just that the depictions of the effects of radiation sickness are complete in all their vomit-inducing glory (not the least of which is bloody vomit), it's the fact that you know these characters are utterly, utterly doomed yet they keep going. It's like watching a corpse looking for its severed head. It was supposed to be some manner of public information film, or parody thereof, especially the way the character introductions are so Soap Opera. It so disturbed a class of nineties teenagers that they asked to stop watching it in class, despite the fact that this course of action would have meant actually doing work instead.
  • Anything that happened in {{1408}}.
  • Videodrome. If anybody is able to watch this film without even so much as even flinching, my only words to them is "get away from me, you sick, soulless psychopath."

Live Action TV
  • Space 1999: The very premise of the series scared some in a way Star Trek never did. Whenever the base lost personnel and equipment, that's it. There will be no replacements, and they are in growing danger of running out, especially since they apparently have no production facilities. At least in Star Trek Voyager, the ship had Neelix to rustle up supplies.
    • There's also the episode "Dragon's Domain", and that scene with the tentacled monster dragging screaming personnel into its mouth and spitting out dessicated corpses...
    • This troper caught one of the later episodes involving a pair of twins with some kind of voodoo power. The girl produced a very lifelike clay bust of Dr. Russel's head and proceeded to sink her fingers into the middle of the bust's face. The resulting scream of agony escaping from Dr. Russel's own fingers as she pressed them over her own face still haunts my thoughts.
  • The Australian miniseries version of "On the Beach" shook and shocked this troper more than anything else has. It's not enough that the entire population of Earth dies, but the final moments are dedicated to scenes showing how each of the main characters are killing themselves, including a family of a couple and kids who proceed to inject themselves with cyanide syringes before all falling into eternal sleep on their bed. There's no gore involved at all, but emotionally it's just destroying, especially if you make the same mistake as this troper and end up relating yourself and your beloved to the events; even typing about it gives me very unpleasant memories of it.
  • There were a lot of disturbing situations in "Friday the 13th: The Series", despite its overall cheesiness. One of the freakiest for this troper involved a body-transferring amulet. A Corrupt Hick with a penchant for stuffing animals (and people) is shoved down the stairs by a chair containing the decayed stuffed corpse of his grandfather and is on the verge of death; rather than dying, he transfers his mind into the corpse. Normally, this would restore the corpse to a living, intact condition, but perhaps being rotten and stuffed with sawdust was too much to overcome. When the madman reappears, he hisses eerily, "Why die?", as if even life as a decaying monster is better than death to him. (Unfortunately, captioning revealed that he actually says "Time to die," which is too trite to be really scary any more.)
  • What, no-one mention the New Battlestar Galactica movie Razor (2007) yet?
  • The Rovers from The Prisoner. Imagine, if you will, a large, white, bouncing balloon, that constantly emits a low, quavering whistle, and which roars mouthlessly as it attacks, lunging at its target and pressing against his face. Imagine seeing the impression of said face from inside the Rover. Now imagine seeing this at night. As a child.
  • Everything that ever happened on The League of Gentlemen, especially if Papa Lazarou was involved.
  • In Search Of was a documentary series that had a combination of a spooky music score and Leonard Nimoy's narration of supposedly "real" paranormal ideas guaranteed to induce nightmares.
  • The original Twilight Zone and Outer Limits were full of them. To Serve Man. "Its good that he went into the cornfield". Etc...
    • It would be remiss not to mention the Twilight Zone '80s revival. "Something In the Walls" is enough to fuel a thousand nightmares (and made this troper swear off any kind of patterned wallpapers,) but "The After Hours," "A Little Peace and Quiet," and "Examination Day" are utterly terrifying.

Western Animation
  • The high points of the 1939 short Peace on Earth.
  • Wonder Showzen freaked out this troper when she was just tubing one night. From the initial warning that this show isn't some happy little "Sesame Street" with horror movie trailer music/screaming in the background, to its creepy little opening involving footage of someone chucking knives at a little girl and creepy, jerky animation with pictures of nuclear explsions among other things. And don't even try and ask about the sketches (which is even more disturbing when you realize that these are real children between the ages of 5-8 saying and doing some of the stuff that's on this show)...
  • Xavier: Renegade Angel has it's fair share of disturbing moments, but the worst offender of all has to be during 'Signs from Godrilla' when Xavier comes to a small town where the inhabitants rush over to him, cheering and even lifting him up into the air like they're happy to see him...just before suddenly eating him alive.
  • Metalocalypse is full of these, especially the music video segments. In fact most of the episodes end with what could be considered Nightmare Fuel.
    • While the OTT-ness of most Metalocalypse violence does (in this troper's opinion) make it more funny than terrifying, he must admit that the part in the second series where the prisoner from Die-For-Dethklok.com uses half of his dead brother's face as a mask for a small child was... not... nice.
  • The episode of Futurama where Fry is sent to an asylum for mad robots and "cured" to think he is a robot. The fact that nobody tried to save him, not even the Planet Express crew, was deeply unsettling (although the episode made up for it with Bender claiming to be Napolean).

Literature
  • There's a gruesome little illustrated sci-fi novel titled Man After Man which involves various genetically modified beings -- including a gargantuan "meat creature" with no recognizable head or limbs. And The Reveal that sits this book confidently in Nightmare Fuel territory? All of the genetically modified beings -- all of them -- were the descendants of the humans who stayed on this planet during the colonisation of space! After millions of years, the people sent off into space became Planet Looters and unknowingly returned to Earth. The invaders are quick to start eating and taming the human-derived freaks -- and for their next trick, they end up wiping out all life on Earth more complicated than bacteria. This troper first read the book in her early teens and nearly had a conniption fit.
    • The author has a whole series of illustrated sci-fi. Man After Man is essentially an alternate history of the earlier After Man, which tracks the evolution of species after humanity basically wipes itself out. The New Dinosaurs is an alternate history in which humanity never existed in the first place. Very unsettling -- if you don't agree with the author that Humans Are Bastards...
  • Also there's Future Man. This contributor does not recall the author, but it did have Isaac Asimov as the guy responsible for the introduction. This predicted such delights as futuristic battery chickens with no heads or beaks, being little more than lumps of flesh hooked up to nutrient and waste-disposal lines; humans modified for life in space (microgravity and vacuum) without spacesuits (they looked much cooler than the ones in Man After Man, however...) as well as underwater human beings.
  • In this same "future humans" vein, All Tomorrows. The artist's unsettling (but very good) art doesn't help any...
  • This editor has been horribly disturbed by the scene in Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky where a woman enters her kitchen but discovers that her cat has been turned inside out, making him into little more than a mass of pink flesh blindly creeping around the kitchen... which is still alive and conscious.
    • Oh, blurgh! This editor is now having trouble keeping her dinner down just reading the description of the scene. Note to self: as enjoyable as Ubik and Counter-Clock World were, definitely give Eye in the Sky a solid miss.
    • Sure, the cat scene is grotesque, but the fate of Floyd Jones in The World Jones Made is much, much worse. After he dies, he gets to spend one year in agony locked inside his decaying body. Which he ALREADY EXPERIENCED and is now getting a rerun of thanks to his strange, free-will-crushing version of precognition.
  • I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream: Explaining why, in all its various nightmarish facets, would take longer than actually reading the story.
    • And if that doesn't disturb you enough by itself, try the video game. But at least they allowed the character some kind of dignity if you got the right ending. In the book all of humanity is screwed.
    • Nimdok is the character: A Jew who became a Nazi and killed his parents (I cannot make this shit up.)
    • In fact, just about everything Harlan Ellison has written. The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge, for starters. There's a special level of human fear to the concept that the entire universe hates you, and no one will help.
  • Any psychology textbook discussion of lobotomies.
  • The Ray Bradbury short story There Will Come Soft Rains describes the activities of an automated house, long since abandoned but still running on its programming. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that humanity went was destroyed in a nuclear war at some point in the past (there is a reference to children's shadows burned into a wall). The house still runs, until it finally succumbs to decay at the end, but nobody will ever live there again. The title refers to a poem about how life will continue even after the end of humanity; the story basically says, "Not if we screw things up first". Haunting.
    • Lots of Ray Bradbury stories fall into this category, esp if they've been made into Twilight Zone episodes, for example, "The Elevator", "The Burning Man"...
    • This editor recall a Bradbury story about a funhouse with mirrors and a midget.
      • Possibly, the above reference is regarding "Something Wicked This Way Comes", which is a story about a demonic carnival that enslaves people by as a price for fulfilling their desires. This editor recalls being forced to watch the movie, which is even scarier than the book, by her second grade teacher as part of a unit on Ray Bradbury. If you need an emphasis on how scary this movie is, especially to a seven year old in a darkened room: it managed to scare me silly with a scene about spiders even though I actually love spiders. I am still reluctant to ride a merry-go-round.
      • No, the story alluded to above is "The Dwarf", a freaky little story from The October Country. Frankly, every story in The October Country belongs here.
      • And one story about a man who developed a phobia of his own skeleton, especially his 'teeth. His freaking teeth''. Worse yet, his skeleton started to hate him, and in the end, deserted him...
    • Three words: "The Small Assassin".
    • This editor can't be the only one who cried herself to sleep while reading Farenheit 451. Or really, cried and then couldn't sleep.
      • That editor is far from alone on that one.
  • Almost anything Wayne Barlowe has ever drawn. This editor was scarred for life by the depiction in one book of a Changeling as an almost featureless, naked baby with skin cracked and crumbling in places, revealing it to be hollow.
  • The entirety of 1984, vicious propaganda, endless war and all, culminating in Winston's hideous Mind Rape at the hands of the Ministry of Love, with the last few lines deserving to be in its own category of terror.
    • Some people actually like 1984 precisely because Big Brother wins. Or So I Heard.
  • HP Lovecraft is usually a pretty scary guy, but then he writes, with almost no warning, a story like "Facts Concerning the Late Sir Arthur Jermyn and His Family" and you never want to speak to anyone ever again.
    • That story is tame compared to "The Colour Out of Space". Or worse, "The Rats in the Walls".
      • Imagine playing "The Rats in the Walls" as an RPG. Now, add in that, during the entire game, you can hear a faint skittering. Soft at first, but then you hear it. Yes, it is rats. But nobody is saying anything. Do you tell them? But what if they don't hear it. Are you going mad? (A Sadistic GM had a CD Player in his lap, set on the lowest setting, under the table.)
      • This troper played "The Rats In The Walls" in video game form. It's called Eternal Darkness.
      • This editor adores rats, and still got nightmares from that story.
      • The rats are the least thing to fear in that story. When you realize what the heck are those spongeous pig-like creatures and you try to visualize the last scene... damn, this troper still has "daymares" thinking of it...
    • Nah, Pickman's Model takes the cake.
    • HP Lovecraft has spawned nightmare fueling authors as well. A fairly good collection is The New Lovecraft Circle. One of the stories in this volume, Robert M. Price's "Saucers from Yaddith" has a mildly silly title that lulled this occasional editor into a false sense of security before bringing out the phrase "Jungle Gym of Flesh." Body Horror city.
      • On this note, author Ramsey Campbell is a good Lovecraft successor. Specifically, The Darkest Part of the Woods invokes old English legends, Asian-style freakish body corruptions, Squick situations that are oddly tastefully handled, more Body Horrors...
  • Jack Vance's short story "Seven Exits from Bocz" (1952).
  • "The Mysterious Stranger" by Mark Twain.
    • Heck, the adaption of The Mysterious Stranger as part of an children's claymation film called "The Adventures of Mark Twain" (1985) is even creepier. Apparently that scene was cut or banned from the movie for being too disturbing? Or maybe "concerned parents" didn't like the philosophical and religious implications. In that regard, the adaption distills the original quite faithfully.
  • Imajica by Clive Barker.
  • Blood Music by Greg Bear.
  • Hyperion and its sequel, by Dan Simmons.
    • Hyperion isn't all bad, though the little Bikura people (who'd been stunted by the prototype cruciforms) were quite frightening, especially before you knew what was going on. This troper thought those midgets were considerably scarier than the Shrike and its aptly-named Tree of Pain.
  • Neil Gaiman's short story "The Problem of Susan" is an interesting read, discussing the importance of children's stories and the rather cruel treatment of Susan in the Narnia books. Then, at the end of the story, we are treated to a Squickily allegorical dream sequence involving someone getting eaten by a lion, but still living, thus having to watch their siblings get eaten before their very eyes. And then there's bestiality. Seriously.
    • This editor was not bothered so much by the bestiality as he was by whom it involved, Jadis--ewww. It didn't help that Aslan had always been a character he loved dearly as a child. If seeing him slaughter the Pevensies wasn't bad enough, there was his final line: Lucy had always been his favorite... Thank you, Neil Gaiman, thank you very much...
    • Messrs Croup & Vandemar. That is all.
  • If House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski doesn't at least make you shiver at some point, you are not human. Particularly in the sections where Johnny starts analyzing The Navidson Record a bit too deeply and begins to believe he's being stalked by a monster "so quiet...you can only hear it as silence" and whose presence is completely undetectable until it rips your throat out. He then implies that anyone else who reads the book will encounter it as well.
    • And then there's the infinite physically-impossible labyrinth inhabited by nothing but a disembodied growl.
    • Shiver? This troper jumped at every sudden noise for a week.
    • Shortly after reading House Of Leaves, this troper was staying in a guest room at a friend's house. He woke up in the middle of the night and was convinced for some time that the closet door was in a different place than it had been when he went to sleep.
      • And now this troper hates you because that very idea will be gnawing at her brain forever.
  • Most of Heart of Darkness. Especially the scenes of the labour camps, when Marlow starts comparing the Belgian overseers to demons. And the severed heads on pikes outside of Kurtz' station.
  • Most of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction is too nondescript to really qualify for this, but in the little-known tale "The Facts in the Strange Case of M. Valdemar", a man hypnotized on the brink of death is frozen there for weeks. When he's brought out of the trance, he rots, in a matter of seconds, into a putrid mass.
  • Richard Preston, best known for his non-fictional accounts of diseases like ebola, wrote a novel about a fictional bioterrorism threat called The Cobra Event. The disease in the story is spread like smallpox, but results in a rare neurological condition where the victims are compelled to eat their own flesh. One of the worst cases involves a pathologist who becomes infected while performing an autopsy on one of the victims, and later ends up slicing open his forehead, peeling his face down, and gnawing on it while it's still partly attached to his skull. This troper's mother loaned her the book for a car ride, and knew exactly which scene she was reading when the yelps of disgust started.
  • There's a short story called "A Birthday" by Esther M. Friesner in which everyone is specially nice to the sweet, peppy protagonist, and lets her leave work early, because it's her little girl's fifth birthday. It becomes clear that her child is an AI simulation, whom she can only see through computer terminals she's logged into, ATM machines and the like. Why? Because the protagonist never gave birth, but had an abortion as an accidentally-pregnant teenager. This is government policy: all women who have abortions have to see their simulated baby through every networked computer, and watch it growing up, and become attached to it. And then, on the child's fifth birthday, the simulation is terminated forever. The government wanted to make sure the women "went on being sorry for a long time". The protagonist says a last goodbye and commits suicide. It is the saddest thing this troper has ever read, and completely prevented her from being able to get to sleep the night she read it.
  • The short sci-fi story Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds features a mysterious 'Only Smart People May Pass' tower on an otherwise-deserted alien planet. The maths puzzles inside get progressively harder as the investigators move further and further up... and the penalties for wrong answers get progressively more horrible. In the end, it turns out that the strange rocks the protaganist found on the plain around the tower were actually the shredded remains of his friend, who was diced by the tower and ejected like confetti. Repeatedly. And that's one of the lesser punishments. It takes on a whole other level near the end, as it is strongly implied that there is nothing at the top of the tower anyway, making the protaganist's light-years voyage, irreversible cybernetic modification, and death of the rest of his party utterly pointless.
  • Large chunks of The King in Yellow, including Mr. Wilde and his homicidal cat, the ambiguous fate of Hawberk and his daughter, the hideous night watchman and what he does to Jack and Tessie, and, of course, the unanswered question of just what the titular Fictional Document is about.
  • Stanislaw Lem's "The Futurological Congress" has many such moments, but the second half or so takes the cake, growing scarier and scarier as it gets to the ending. Basically, the utopian future in which most of the story was set is shown to be a hallucinogen-powered Lotus Eater Machine designed to hide the bleak, dystopian reality from the masses, so as to avoid a panic and desperate fighting over the scarce resources. The members of the scientist council behind this have access to a counter-drug of sorts, that allows them to see beyond this veil. Then it gets worse - they develop a stronger version of this counter-drug, and the protagonist sees to his horror that there is another layer and things are even worse than they seemed at first. He runs out into the streets in a panic and inhales more of the counter-drug, only to see the world around him devolve into more and more horrible dystopian scenarios. By the end of it, the human race has devolved into malnourished, mutated, hairy, tailed freaks, while all civilisation has practically ceased to exist and an ice age is coming to finish it all off. An obvious implication is that this might not be the last layer either... The ending is sort of optimistic, as it all turned out to be a hallucination induced by the early versions of those advanced hallucinogens and the protagonist wakes up back in the present, but that scarcely dulls the sheer horror.
  • Two words: Angela Carter.
    • Nights at the Circus: the main character is led through a hallway filled with jeweled eggs, each of which contain the life of a woman murdered by the person leading her, while an ice sculpture of her melts into a spread of caviar and an animatronic orchestra plays really creepy music. Three chapters later, a bunch of tigers are fused with a bunch of mirrors to form sentient shards of glass with orange stripes that are hot to the touch. I Am Not Making This Up.
      • Earlier in the book, there is a long scene involving being raped inside a Megalithic tomb, a woman with eyes on her chest, a girl whose face is permanently covered in cobwebs, a seemingly normal (but not particularly nice) character who turns out to be a gigantic, demon-possessed doll, a man who delivers a three-page rant about obscure rites and cults before trying to sacrifice the main character to the Earth Goddess while children play in his front yard, and a comatose woman over whom another character (who is winged) hunches holding a sword for a very long time. Remember, this is in a single chapter. (And this is probably her least creepy book. And it gave this troper, who read all of Roald Dahl without a peep at the age of five, nightmares for weeks.)
  • Pet Sematary by Stephen King. All of it. 'Nuff said.
  • This troper remembers an illustrated book called The Watertower (I cannot remember who it was by). Two boys go up to a watertower for a swim, but Boy A forgets a towel and goes back to get it. While he is gone, Boy B is, is stalked and attacked by... SOMETHING. Well, that doesn't seem very scary: but looking through the book at all the subtle details in the pictures - the strange shadows in the corners of the pages, the creepy grins on the townspeoples' faces, the symbols seemingly burnt onto their hands - builds up a wonderfully nightmarish paranoia, and in the last page, we see that Boy B's pupils have turned into the symbol painted onto the watertower. The fact that you never see the "monster" and the book abruptly ends is not good for people with, well, imaginations.
  • To a small extent, The Cutie, a short story by Greg Egan. Damn you, ambiguous endings!
  • World War Z is loaded with Nightmare Fuel. From the horrific images of armies crumbling under endless tides of graying, mindless ghouls to the insane tale of the French military's battle against the zombies in the Paris Catacombs, the book has no shortage of chilling apocalyptic imagery. And that's not even getting into the hair-raising, often tragic tales the various survivor interviews weave.
  • The Screwfly Solution - Men find it scarier than women apparently.
  • Koji Suzuki's Spiral, sequel to his more famous Ring (where watching a cursed videotape will kill the viewer in a week.) Beginning with Ando's autopsy of Ryuji (one of the two protagonists in Ring) we're shown how Sadako really kills her victims, including impregnating poor, innocent bystander Mai and discarding her torn corpse after a days-long gestation. If that wasn't bad enough, by the end it's revealed that Asakawa's Ring report has actually helped Sadako spread her curse through all forms of media, and, eventually, all of mankind will be replaced with clones of Sadako, capable of infinitely reproducing themselves.

Comic Books
  • Garth Ennis' Preacher has a Corrupt Hick with a Squicky sexual fetish. Also, the humiliating injuries of Big Bad Herr Starr become disturbing after he gets emasculated by dog-bite and his penis is replaced with a rubber tube.
    • Also from Preacher 4 words - The Meat Man Cometh
  • Warren Ellis' Ruins, a version of the Marvel Universe where everything went horribly wrong. Everything. Powers go out of control, mutilating and killing their owners. Not to mention all the "Happy Accidents" ending in death or worse. Cannibalism, child prostitution, Body Horror and even MORE mutilation.
  • The "24 Hours" chapter from the first Sandman story arc is highly disturbing. If you've read it, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, let's just say it involves a rather large amount of Mind Rape.
    • And actual rape. Not to mention John Dee's horrific body. And.... Let's just say it's reason enough to make The Sandman seem even more nightmarish than the fact that several of its characters are nightmares, or are set
    • This troper bravely continued reading after that first arc, only to be re-squicked by what Thessaly does during A Game of You. I know the man was dead, and not a nice guy when he was alive, but there was no need to do that to him.
    • First, this troper was squicked when it was revealed the man's ribcage was filled with ravens and then he became squicked even more when Thessaly cut off his face and nailed it to the wall. He finally gave in to having nightmares when at the end of the arc, its implied that the man's tongue is still wiggling around somewhere.
    • This troper was more freaked out by the side story about the one living boy trapped in a boarding school full of undead people returned from Hell than she was by anything else in the entire series -- and considering the general creepiness and squickiness levesls, that's really saying something.
    • And this isn't even getting into the spinoff series Lucifer. Elaine Belloc getting made into a lantern pretty much tops the list. But we also have such gems as an innocent couple trapped in an infinitely large mansion without any food, water or means of escape.And let's not forget the Jin En Mok.
  • While unable to remember the name of said illustrated novel, this troper remembers a comic he found in his school library, of all places, which followed the lives of an indefatiguably jolly elderly couple in the days immediatly after a nuclear war. At the start of the comic, they appear entirely unscathed, but as they prepare to go to bed on the final day, their skins are grey, the wife's hair has fallen out, and husband had blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. It's fairly obvious that they never wake up. What's truly horrible about it is their complete Genre Blindness, which somehow makes it far worse for the reader than it would if the characters actually understood what was going on. It also didn't help that the couple looked and acted lot like this troper's own grandparents.
  • Pretty much anything and everything by Jim Woodring, including his Frank series.

Music
  • The Device Has Been Modified, a remix of dialogue from Portal. It makes everything so damn creepy, especially at the end...
  • Quite a lot of music by Tom Waits, particularly songs like God's Away on Business, Army Ants, and Earth Died Screaming. From the names alone, guess how frightening they are. And don't even get me started on Dog Door. Even apart from the lyrics, there's the simple fact that they're performed by Tom Waits, who could sing Happy Birthday and have it sound like a death threat.
    • This is parodied by Bill Bailey in his interpretation of how Tom Waits would perform the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice: "Blood on the cheese! / Little mousey running for his life / You goin' t'Hell / In a mousetrap..." Which is itself a bit Nightmare Fuelish, if you think about it.
  • Intention of "Slide" by the Dresden Dolls = mildly creepy; Effect of "Slide" by the Dresden Dolls = REALLY INCREDIBLY TERRIFYING!!!
  • Don't listen to Radiohead's OK Computer album on repeat on headphones as you try to sleep. You will get nightmares
    • Really, the only disturbing songs are Climbing Up the Walls, a song about people living next to an insane asylum being unable to sleep at night for fear of someone coming in the house (sung entirely in a slurred, unintelligible tone), and Fitter Happier, which isn't even a song at all, and more of a poem that was recorded using a text-to-speech program. These are the lyrics, and when read in a featureless, robotic voice it is rather unsettling.
    • Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' isn't too great for sleeping either...
      • This troper never had any trouble when she'd listen to it at night on camping trips. On the other hand, though, "Echoes", from Meddle, is damn creepy somewhere around 2 AM in the semi-wilderness of a campground.
  • Muse album Absolution is pretty standard fare Hard Rock, until the latter half of the album, where it just gets darker, and darker, and darker, culminating in a song arguably about murder-suicide and conspiracy theories; Ruled By Secrecy.
  • Murder Ballads by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The whole thing, but especially Song of Joy and The Kindness of Strangers. Of course, if you listen to an album called Murder Ballads NOT expecting to be creeped out, then you probably deserve everything you get.
  • There's a little-known Pulp song called Freaks that this troper once made the mistake of listening to while alone in the house at night. Once being the operative word.
  • Down In the Park by Gary Numan.
  • Pick a Nine Inch Nails video. Almost any NIN video.
  • This troper is constantly creeped by the song "El Muelle de San Blas", by mexican group Mana. The song is about a woman who waits for her sailor fiancé and how she becomes old and irreversibly insane in the process. The insanity begans with her wearing every day the same dress she wore when he left ("so he didn't get her wrong"), and is implied in the end that she died alone in the dock.

Tabletop Roleplaying Games
  • The World Of Darkness sourcebook Asylum probes the fear of lobotomies for all it's worth, tying it into a setting where having one's brain destroyed is not the worst thing that can be done in the asylum. It's one of the most unsettling books in the line.
  • The Swedish RPG KULT may well be one of the creepiest roleplaying games in existance. "Death is only the beginning", indeed. Roll Hellraiser and a twisted version of Gnosticism into one, add evil angels and insanity-induced mutation into monsters, and you understand why most KULT characters start out already fucked up. Or cursed.
  • The German RPG Engel comes close, though. Unless you play it as a superhero/D&D hack-n-slay setting, which would totally kill the creepy.
  • Unknown Armies, a game of modern fantasy and oddity.
  • Little Fears, where the players play children and one of the opponents is the Anthropomorphic Personification of sexual molestation.
  • JAGS Wonderland. If Lewis Carroll and H.P. Lovecraft sat down together to write a role-playing game, it'd look a lot like this.

Tabletop Minatures Games
  • The concept of Servitors (personality-wiped prisoners or vat-grown clones turned into slaves) in Warhammer 40000 is pretty unpleasant to this troper.
    • Oh dear. If servitors are creepy, what about the entirety of the rest of the setting?
      • An alternate dimension that is literally composed of the worst nightmares of an entire galaxy's worth of aliens. And the only viable method of interstellar travel is to t