The polar opposite of Accidental Nightmare Fuel: Something meant to be truly terrifying (or at least somewhat frightening or disturbing) which instead comes off as stupid, laughable, cute, or all of them. As with Accidental Nightmare Fuel, examples will often be subjective. Often caused by Special Effects Failure or Stock Sound Effects; sometimes, for older titles with now-outdated special effects, it can simply be an example of Seinfeld Is Unfunny. Of course, when used intentionally, it could be that They Plotted a Perfectly Good Waste.
May be caused by, or cause, Villain Decay.
Many B-movie creature features, especially those featured on MST3K, were chock full of this, since most of them had very low budgets and had to rely on puppets and guys wearing carpets over their heads for their creature effects.
Contrast Nothing Is Scarier, which is a possible way to avert this trope by not showing the monster at all and letting the characters — and audience — scare themselves with the fantasy of what it might be.
See also Narm. Compare Fetish Retardant for the Fetish Fuel equivalent.
Examples
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General
One episode of Doug illustrated this trope. Doug and his friends went to see a horror movie called "The Abnormal". Doug covered his eyes when the monster finally came on-screen; it had only been seen in shadow or in disguise until that point, adding to the tension. After suffering recurring nightmares over it, he eventually forced himself to see it one last time without looking away — only to discover the monster was a man in a ridiculous costume with an obvious zipper. When he told his friends about it, they all confessed they had looked away, too.
As almost a real-life reenactment of this, this was cited as one of the reasons the movie Signs is profoundly unscary: the aliens are genuinely frightening until we actually see them near the end of the film. The whole "melted by water" thing doesn't help their image either.
Stephen King actually identifies this trope in his non-fiction horror study Danse Macabre, and suggests that in some cases it is partly relief on the part of the audience after a build-up of tension. The bit describing this phenomenon features a quote from somebody who puts it (in rough lines) like this: "The heroine opens the door, and is faced by a ten-feet tall cockroach. The audience screams, but this particular scream sounds almost relieved. 'A ten foot tall bug is pretty horrifying,' they think, 'but I can handle that. I was afraid it might be a HUNDRED feet tall!'
Clive Barker also identifies this trope and tries to avert it, showing instead of hiding the gruesome. He's had some degrees of success as far back as Rawhead Rex. Nightbreed could be an subversion in that the monsters are much less scary after being exposed to the audience, but they're also the protagonists of the story. In fact, some are downright Gorgeous Gorgons.
Any time a gun does not fire correctly/make a sound during a scary piece of theatre, the scene becomes Nightmare Retardant. If it happens more than once, it is Accidental Nightmare Fuel for the director.
However, it not firing correctly might be Nightmare Fuel too, as someone might die.
Non-firing guns are made MORE Nightmare Retardant when the actor feels compelled to shout "BANG!" in the absence of the real effect.
One advertisement for Traveler's Insurance has a rattlesnake surprising a hare...except that its rattle was a baby rattle. Cue the hare falling over with laughter and other hares coming out and laughing as well. The snake is understandably mortified.
To elaborate, in once scene of the film adaptation of the famous Neon Genesis Evangelion anime, when one character is being brutally beaten to death, school children singing plays in the background. This was very much done intentionally, and really does up the creepy factor that the series became famous for.
Anime
As has been noted elsewhere on the wiki, Belial Vamdemon from Digimon Adventure 02 (MaloMyotismon in the dub). Way to just stand there and get pummeled, moron.
Oh, it gets even better than that. As many people know Digimon names are formed of descriptive words put together and ending with "mon" for monster. The word "myotis" is Latin for bat, ok so far, but then we find that "malo" is the Spanish word simply meaning "bad". That's right, folks, the Big Bad of Digimon 02 is the Bad Bat Monster.
And yet, "malo" is the word for "little" in many Slavic languages, which turns Bad Bat Monster into Little Bat Monster.
Contrast that to his original name's translation: Vamdemon=Vampire Demon Monster; Belial=the name given to Satan's form that is arisen upon the Earth during Armageddon.
And his Venom Vamdemon form in the first season wasn't much better, acting mainly like a fairly bland and stupid kaijuu wannabe with a supernatural backstory... up until the "crotch monster" came out. Then it divided everyone between freakish dismay and immature giggling.
Don't forget Apocalymon. While it may have been Accidental Nightmare Fuel in the original version, his quips in the dub make him the most pathetic Big Bad in the series until Belial Vamdemon. Still, some of his lines are pure fourth wall breaking awesome.
Apocalymon:-hysterical laugh- "WAIT, I'M SUPPOSED TO BE DEPRESSED!"
The Hellsing: Ultimate, while awesome in many ways, would probably have been a lot more frightening if it weren't for all the Gratuitous English.
The upbeat drums during the Nazis butchering Londoners while the Major er...ate lunch...epically? rather killed the scariness you'd expect of Nazi vampires killing random Londoners and reviving them as cannibal zombies. This display of callous brutality and the deaths of thousands of noncombatants at the hands of vampires was accompanied by a cheerful drum beat and a chorus of "AKUMA STALKING, DO DO DO DO!"Soundtrack Dissonance much?
The completely random Super-Deformed scenes destroy any sense of grim mood, however. The creators really should remember that manga and anime are different mediums and what works in one can completely spoil the other.
Random Security Guard Guy being squished with Mortal Kombat blood-spray in Patlabor Wasted XIII. It actually won an award in a magazine for being the most hilarious death all year.
Gantz is not scary or horrifying at all, in spite of the egregious amounts of gore. This is mainly due to the fact that, first off, the English dub borders on Gag Dub territory, and second off the series is already slightly Black Comedy to begin with. The manga, on the other hand, is a lot less campy and a lot more disturbing.
In Naruto, Pain is (arguably) very hard to take seriously ever since his true form has been revealed: an emaciated guy in a wheelchair with bright red hair that would make Carrot Top proud. Others can see his appearance as arguably even more scary and disturbing with the Fridge Horror attached.
Pain seems to get hit with this fairly often. There's his Motive Rants, which combined with excessive body piercings makes him sound like an Emo Teen...
Manga chapter 427, where he gets knocked across the room by twelve-year-old comic relief character Konohamaru.... Of course, he later recovers from the hit and doesn't even need to repair that body.
And, last but not least, the tropers who insist on spelling his name "Pein", which never stops looking like "Peen". And /or "Pain", which just fully underscores how emo he is.
Orochimaru is introduced as a thoroughly creepy character: eating people's faces off and taking on the role of an already creepy woman (?) and first making himself known by picking up a kunai knife with his tongue and talking about bloodlust because he lost some hair... which all comes into perspective after the Internet "outed" him as gay.
Bleach has the creature known as Allon, who is actually genuine Accidental Nightmare Fuel for the first few moments of its introduction. That is, until its ridiculous face is revealed (what we had thought was its face was more like a nose, and its eyes and mouth are hidden), and all fear is promptly forgotten.
Aizen has been going through some One-Winged Angel phases as of late. Unfortunately for him, these have only gotten sillier and sillier. The first one has garnered Fan Nicknames along the line of "Tube Sock Ninja" and "Condomman" and led to jokes about how Tite Kubo finally let his background artists design a character. The next was essentially him with a mullet, and as long as you focused on his eyes, only mildly Narmful. But then he went and morphed into a pretty butterfly a six-winged seraph with butterfly wings, and his next comment was drowned out by the chorus of laughter from everyone reading. Made even funnier by the fact that his earlier comments about evolving into a superior being had earned him the Fan NicknameButterflyzen, which was suddenly perfectly appropriate.
In Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, Barry the Chopper fails to look disturbing or scary twice, once with Alphonse Elric, the other with Riza Hawkeye. He later succeeds with some prison guards.
One Piece had Duval, whose first appearance was him in huge armor that didn't give out any detail whatsoever on who he was. Things were worse when he said that the Straw Hat Crew should know him. His armor is taken off, and he's...! an ugly man who looks like Sanji's wanted poster. After hearing all these theories on who Duval COULD have been, this turned out instead to be a Crowning Moment of Funny.
He is arguably worse after Sanji kicks him until he gets a facelift. The winking is terrifying.
This trope could probably go to the entire show. The Devil Fruit ability seems completely horrifying. When thought of realistically, it becomes hilarious when you realize the people using them are very different than us. The tool that can wipe an island off the map? A golden snail. A lady that can make any part of her body appear on any solid object? She made wings (and flew) from her arms. The boy that had to reconstruct himself after being hit by a train? Franky.
And that's not even getting into Thriller Bark. After watching that arc, you may never look at zombies seriously again. ZOMBIE NIGHT!
Maria's faces in the Anime adaptation of Umineko no Naku Koro ni. The original visual novel succeeded in making Maria creepy through subtle expressions and description. That's not mentioning her head on a plate, that instead of creeping most fans out, inevitably reminded them of Tako Luka, and thus ended up being morbidly cute. The Anime decided to take a different route◊... (Warning: Link is NOT an example of this trope.)
In the translated version of The Enigma of Amigara Fault, the sound effect DRR DRR DRR doesn't quite read in many people's minds the way the translator intended.
The monsters in Mermaid Saga would have been a little ridiculous no matter what, given their ridiculously oversize eyes. The capital mistake, though, was to have the first one in the manga be a still-sentient Woobie with a speech impediment. It's hard to take the later Smash Mooks seriously at all. (To be fair, the primary fear here isn't being killed by one of these freaks, but turning into one of them.)
Mimi no Kaidan, illustrated by horror master Junji Ito, features some prime nightmare retardant, particularly on this page. Works best on a small screen and out of context.
In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni much of the horror comes from not knowing what is causing all these horrible occurences to happen and why. As the second season explains more and more, much of the original horror is lost. Perhaps most notably in finding out that the sinister deity Oyashiro-sama is in fact Hanyuu, a Cute Ghost Girl who just wanted to help all along. On a similar note, in both seasons, there are moments where the "crazy faces" kill the horror.
Charlotte's One-Winged Angel form in Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a large worm made out of candy with a face that looks like a grinning clown (and not a Slasher Smile at that). It's thus hard to take seriously until it devours Mami.
Comic Books
An issue of Ambush Bug featured Quantis, the koala that walks like a man who is really Dr Quentin Quantis turned into a giant koala thanks to a serum containing the essence of cuteness. This giant marsupial even has the authorities going "Aaaaaw!" rather than trying to destroy it. It sounds really funny doesn't it? Then there's the fact that it goes "Niknak!".
As awesome as the recent Brainiac arc in Action Comics was (which actually contained fairly competent, if mild, nightmare fuel) it also contained spaceships shaped like skulls. No... I don't think so. (Still, skull-shaped ships in a Brainiac storyarc must be due to the Grandfather Clause.)
Your view on Christabella from Silent Hill: Dying Inside will probably range somewhere between "scary" and "creepy". But the moment she starts swearing like a sailor, you will most likely zero in on "ridiculous".
Film
The little break-dancing ghost boy in Insidious. All the tension and build up is sucked out of the room.
The scene in DragMeToHell wherein the goat is possessed by the malevolent spirit.
All four of the Scary Movie films, along with Stan Helsing, are based entirely on this trope.
Narrowly avoided during shooting of the original Predator. The original costume had a bulky space suit with a snake-like head sticking out that bounced around like crazy. It was everything the directors did not want and they demanded a new design after one day.
Eight Legged Freaks, though played for Black Humor, starts with -and quickly ruins- a potentially very scary premise: realistic-looking giant spiders are pretty horrifying, but the decision to give the spiders all sorts of "wacky" jabbering noises as they run amok destroys whatever potential horror the movie could have had. Unless you're arachnophobic, in which case it's High Octane Nightmare Fuel regardless of what the spiders sounds like.
The 1931 version of Dracula contains two misguided attempts at symbolism: a close-up shot of a Jerusalem cricket (which looks a lot like a giant bee) crawling out of a coffin and a "giant rat," played by an opossum. In the Spanish version of the film, the "giant rat" falls off of the ledge it is walking on during the shot. And then there's the armadillos and the "terrifying" rubber bats on strings in that and so many other early Dracula films.
Lovingly homaged by The Monster Squad, which fills Dracula's lair with rubber bats and armadillos.
The New Zealand horror movie Black Sheep is about rampaging, man-eating sheep, as well as a couple of weresheep. Although, given the nature of this movie and the fact that it's basically Shaun of the Dead replaced with ravenous sheep, this was probably intentional.
Of course, if you're like the protagonist and have a fear of sheep, then this film could quite literally scare the shit out of you.
Nosferatu: in the opening scenes the villagers claim a werewolf roams through the forest at night. The atmosphere is really creepy and the audience wonders what this creature will look like. When the protagonist goes to sleep the camera shows a wolf like creature walking in the forest, but it's clearly not a werewolf, left alone a wolf, but a striped hyena! And it's strange to downright ridiculous that this animal walks around in Transylvania, Romania.
The "bat suit" in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Apparently it was added because Gary Oldman didn't feel he could be scary enough for that scene. Ironic, since he was a lot scarier without the dippy rubber suit.
The title character from Robot Monster (pictured above) was a guy in a gorilla suit. And a diver's helmet.
Ironically, it was the MST3K commentary for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies?! - which definitely definitely fits here— was one of the earliest uses of the term "Nightmare Fuel"— the earliest being Santa Claus, which actually was pretty scary, but not in the intended scenes.
In Attack of the Prehistoric Women, the women at one point need to defend themselves from a ferocious dinosaur, played by a superimposed iguana.
This was very common in prehistoric movies from the 70s and earlier.
Night Of The Lepus is about giant rampaging killer rabbits... which are played either by cute little bunnies on a scale-model set, or people wearing garish rabbit suits. Yes, it's as hilariously awful as it sounds. Here. The saddest part is that the portions of the movie where the rabbits aren't on screen are actually pretty decent, and the miniature work is actually very good. It's just that, well, you've seen the clip.
To quote one succinct reviewer: 'The basic problem is, an ant magnified a thousand times is a monster, but a bunny magnified twenty times is still a bunny.'
One instance of miniature work that isn't good is the down-the-empty street shot... with the 'giant killer stagehand' stepping off to the side.
Beginning of the End featured giant mutant grasshoppers played by regular-sized grasshoppers crawling across pictures of the Chicago skyline.
Werewolf had a monster that changed its look throughout the film. One of which being the producer's own pet dog. Yuri's hair was scarier than the Werewolves.
Any character played by Tor Johnson. "Time for go to bed!"
As parodied in Tim Burton's Ed Wood. Although the above line was from The Unearthly, which wasn't a Wood movie.
Also, Lovecraft's extreme racism in several of his written works can seem so silly in our modern days that some people have trouble taking them seriously, no matter how horrifying the events.
A lot of the current SciFi, I mean, Syfy films suffer from this. Hard. No one is going to be scared of killer dinosaur FOSSILS.
Considering that SyFy Original Movies are made exclusively by the infamously B-quality Asylum Studios, this is hardly suprising.
Every now and then, SyFy actually comes up with ideas that sound promising and might be a little scary. Then the monster appears.
In a scene near the end of the film version of Day of the Triffids, the characters shelter at the top of a lighthouse while a triffid's tendril crawls up the stairs towards them. Unfortunately, it's quite obvious that the tendril is a sock puppet. Also, the Triffids themselves were basically giant sunflowers. SUNFLOWERS.
While the first movie in the series is pretty good, some of the other films of the Friday the 13th franchise fit this trope to a T. There is something strangely comedic about seeing a guy in a hockey mask wander around the woods like he's lost, machete or no machete.
The bits where Mrs. Voorhees assumes the character of Jason and starts saying things like "Kill her, Mommy!"
The production team and writers seemed to invoke this trope willingly for Jason X, when he's presented with a hologram of 2 busty, naked co-eds saying that they love partying and having unprotected sex. Hilarity Ensues. after a cut-back to the crew of the ship
The original King Kong was released as a very frightening horror movie and was effective as such for many years. There were people fainting in the audience when it was first shown. Advanced effects have made us jaded. The version from 1976 has aged even worse, mostly because it doesn't even try to have Kong move like anything but a guy shuffling around in a gorilla suit.
Spider-Man 3: Venom is pretty much the embodiment of Accidental Nightmare Fuel, so it's a little disconcerting to hear Topher Grace's voice coming out of his mouth. And whenever he talks he pulls back the face so Topher Grace's face can be seen; that also doesn't help.
They also thought it was a good idea to give him fanged teeth when he reveals his face. Seriously, what the hell?
There is one part of the video-game-to-film adaptation of Silent Hill in which the Creepy Child bursts into flame and says "Look...I'm burning." Owing to how subjective this trope is, you either were creeped out by it or laughed your head off.
In The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West, and her flying monkeys don't pack the terrifying punch they used to, though they still scare some younger kids.
The scene where the main character freaks out because everything around him had turned blue. It might have been meant to be silly, though: Sutter Cane was just determined to screw with the main character's brain in ways that would sound even sillier when admitted to a psychiatrist- which they do. But it gets truly ridiculous when a gang of heavily-armed villagers try to confront Sutter Cane at the cathedral, only to be scared off by... a pack of guard dogs. Maybe this was meant to show just how clumsy and easily manipulated they were, but with the impressive buildup, it's pretty disappointing.
The 1925 Phantom of the Opera appeared to have passed the test of time when it comes to this. Although reactions may not be as extreme today, the unmasking scene will still make many people jump in surprise. It even has the ever creepy uplighting technique. Unfortunately, when the Phantom jumps up and points directly at Christine after the unmasking, things that were once considered scary turn hilarious. The reason being that the actions is almost identical to the monkey's infamous pointing in Family Guy.
On the other hand, the Phantom in the 2004 movie musical version gets his mask pulled off to reveal... Gerard Butler with a nasty sunburn.
Listen to the noise the parasites in Cloverfield make. It sounds like Donald Duck, for God's sake. Or maybe Yoshi. Fortunately Clover's roar more than made up for the silly parasite chittering.
Jurassic Park 3 has the gem of a reply, "No, it sounds bigger," when one character asks another if the roar they just heard was that of a T. Rex. While not as frightening on a personal level like the velociraptors, Tyrannosaurus had made it known in the previous films that when he (or one of his counterparts) shows up, shit goes down. The addition of a "bigger" predator, by this point, loses all impact.
Especially considering ol' Rex himself already had a always a bigger fishmoment with the aforementioned raptors from the first movie. Stupid Worf Effect....
In The Creeping Terror, the eponymous creeping terror was an alien who ate things to study their biology (or something like that), and it was clearly supposed to strike fear in the viewers, but only made them giggle. It resembled a large carpet slug that shuffled along slowly, and its victims, instead of running away like most sensible people would have done, stood there and screamed while the creature ate them. The costume was such that the victims actually had to crawl into the hole in the front that was supposed to be its mouth.
Wes Craven's Cursed was a good example of this trope, where the scenes meant to be scary were downright funny, and the scenes meant to be funny were downright cheesy. From the predictable plot, to the bad acting, to the cheesy dialogue, this movie has it all. Strange how a film intended to reinvent the werewolf genre ends up falling back on every single Hollywood werewolf convention. To be fair though, the movie turned out this way in part due to Executive Meddling.
Then there's the scene where a werewolf appears above the balcony after Christina Ricci's character taunts its fashion sense, flipping the bird and roaring "fuck you!", before dying in a hail of bullets.
The 1989 horror movie Food of the Gods 2 has a scene in which giant rats attack a swimming competition. The cheesy special effects however, kills any shred of horror from the scene. The intercutting shots of panicked people in a normal sized competition pool with shots of ordinary-sized rats walking around and splashing in an obvious miniature pool had no credibility whatsoever.
The original The Food of the Gods featured similar "giant" rat scenes and was just as unscary.
Super Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II was supposed to be scary, but all anyone remembers is that he yelled, pounded a boardwalk above it, got crushed by the damn boardwalk while yelling some more, then died. Doesn't help that Super Shredder was played by Kevin "argh my quad!" Nash either.
Not that anything about Vacancy was scary at all (cookie cutter plot, bad acting, etc.) but the Ned Flanders-esque villain...
Boogeyman started out with some potential scary moments and some jump scares that actually worked, until the titular monster decides to show up. A poor-CGI mummy wannabe screaming at the protagonist does not good horror make.
Same thing when we finally take a good look at the Creeper in the first Jeepers Creepers.
Hostel II is just filled with Narm after Narm, and Special Effect Failure. Whereas the main character of the original Hostel gets revenge on his kidnapper by running them over, the main character of Hostel II places a tripwire in front of her kidnapper, hires a kid to steal her purse and cause her to fall over it, then approaches her in a Mask of the Phantasm-ish cloak. She lifts the hood up, then proceeds to pull a gigantic silver battle axe from beneath it and decapitate her tormentor. Then a group of ratty-looking gypsy kids who witnessed the execution come over and play kickball with the head.
Howling III: The Marsupials the second sequel to the '80s horror classic The Howling.
The poster for horror movie The Unborn. Not only does the ghost in the mirror look ridiculous, the main point of the poster is to show the Final Girl in her underwear. What can you do but laugh at its lack of shame?
The Reavers in Firefly were constantly hyped as being the most brutal and horrifying things in the galaxy. Their appearance in Serenity zombie wannabes with Salvation Army wardrobes disappointed some viewers. It doesn't help that they act as little more than mooks.
A scene in Alien vs. Predator: Requiem includes a maternity ward where dozens of chest-bursterspop out of the bellies of pregnant teens. Sound scary? Maybe. But the execution only draws an eye roll. Granted, this is probably because the movie already did this in an earlier scene, and the screenwriters had over-bet the ante in the first ten minutes by chest-bursting a 10-year-old.
Most of the 'horror' movies shown on USA's Up All Night (hosted by Gilbert Gottfried and Caroline Schlitt [later replaced by Rhonda Shear]) easily qualify for this trope. While there were a few gems in the rough, like the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series, they were far outnumbered by the campy B horror films like the above-cited Prom Night and Chopping Mall.
The movie Grizzly Rage was unbelievable nightmare retardant especially because you could tell they didn't have an actual bear on set.
The laughable part in Ju-On 2 when the hairdresser is in the room with all the wigs and then Kayako is IN one of the wigs and makes it crawl across the floor whilst the hairdresser shrieked in terror.
Also when you find out that a reoccurring bloodstain was formed by blood pooling around a victim's butt. It's a butt print. The rest of the movie failed to scare anyone with that bloodstain afterward.
The scene in the movie Mirrors (Hollywood remake) when the security guard starts cutting his own throat open. The movie wasn't so much Nightmare Retardant as an incredible bore.
Dennis from Cabin Fever. PANCAKES! Also the sign behind him that says "don't sit next to Dennis". Can be seen here.
The sign is a very funny moment. It's meant to be campy, and succeeds pretty well. The problem is, with so much unintentional camp in the film, you don't know whether to laugh or not. I laughed, because, what the heck?
Supposedly the scene from Rosemary's Baby where the titular character is raped by the devil is supposed to be one of the scariest moments in any movie ever. Some people find it tame, but your mileage may vary.
Try watching The Blair Thumbbefore watching The Blair Witch Project. Or any other horror parody before the real thing. It's almost impossible to take it seriously after that.
The sequel will remove all traces of taking the original masterpiece seriously.
The 2006 remake of The Wicker Man is a classic example. In one scene, the main protagonist Edward Malus dresses up in a bear costume and delivers a punch to an unsuspecting woman. And of course, the film features the infamous "NOT THE BEES!" line.
YMMV, of course, but the whole "Gimme the bat" scene of The Shining is actually pretty funny. The way he sticks his tongue out and makes those little motions with his hands is more comical than menacing, but what really cements it into this category is when he says "WENDAAAAYYY" in that silly voice. Re-enact in a mirror and try not to crack up.
The Haunting of Hill House has a scene where the heroine is lying in bed, and she can hear the ghostly voice of a child crying. It's pretty creepy. Then a woman's voice joins in, laughing. Not quite as creepy and mostly confusing, but not effect-ruining. And then a deep, male voice begins muttering something, but rather than sounding insane and demonic, it just sounds like a drunken Coach McGuirk.
Ghost Story has an scary scene of a guy encountering a walking corpse of a woman on a bridge and then being startled and falling to his death, but the effectiveness is blunted by use of campy music
The octopus creature in Bride of the Monster, when it's supposed to be attacking humans rather than just floating by itself in a tank, is obviously a rubber prop that doesn't even move.
The Moria goblins in Lord of the Rings make whooping sounds that sound vaguely like chickens.
The make up of the titular character from Hammer Horror'sThe Gorgon. To their credit, they don't show the monster till the very end of the movie and the rely on the reactions of its victims for the scares - something effective in this atmospheric film. When the Medusa is finally decapitated and you witness her mannequin head and the rubber snakes, you see why.
According to some the scene in the original House on Haunted Hill where a woman turns and sees an old hag looming behind her, followed by her exiting via obvious pulley floating away is uber-scary. But even Special Effects Evolution doesn't excuse her ridiculous pose and face.
The titular demon from Night of the Demon (1957). It's also known as Curse of the Demon. The film is actually considered one of the best horror movies of its kind, and it is still quite creepy and effective. However, the SFX for the demon when he finally appears on screen show their age. Still, when seen in context and in the proper mood, it's quite scary.
It's hard to find the fear in the original Blob after you've listened to the opening ditty.
The amazingly fake-looking shark featured in Jaws: The Revenge.
The plot is pretty laughable too. The most photorealistic shark in the world couldn't save that film.
While the rant scenes from Hitler in Downfall are certainly creepy, the most famous one has become a victim of Memetic Mutation and resulted in the "Hitler Parodies" most web users know. It's not so easy to take them seriously when you imagine Hitler being angry about Xbox Live among other things.
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Draco is torn between staying with his classmates and joining Voldemort and the rest of the Death Eaters. His frightened mother urges him to join Voldemort, so he walks forward, face set, uncertain and terrified. And then Voldemort gives him a big hug. While it's possible that the moment is supposed to be scary (after all, Voldemort is holding his wand against Draco's neck like a knife, presumably to keep him from backing away), the universal reaction seems to have been hysterical laughter.
Frankenstein Island. The entire film.
Prophecy has a scene where a mutant bear attacks a sleeping family. One of the family members, laying in a sleeping bag with just her face sticking out, attempts to escape the monster by bouncing away, still in the yellow sleeping bag. This hilarity is exacerbated when the bear swipes the poor girl, sending her flying upside down into a jagged rock as if she were shot out of a cannon, where she and the bag explode in a cloud of down feathers. What may have been intended to be a scary scene ends up looking like a Looney Tune gag.
The Beast Must Die is a well acted, well produced Amicus horror film. It almost makes you forget that the monster is played by a Big Friendly Dog. Then there's the gimmick of the Werewolf Beak added to the American cut of the film.
Literature
Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series introduces the reader to a form of demonic possessing spirit that utterly corrupts and destroys what it inhabits. Unfortunately, the author chose to introduce the spirit by having it possess a chicken. The line, "This was no chicken. This was evil manifest." is instant Narm.
Now, the idea of standing in a dark hut, with the rain pouring down outside, and trying to be polite to a chicken for fear that it will otherwise kill you in some undefined way is sufficiently insane that it could have been scary if the author had played up the surreality and bizarreness of the situation. It's just that Goodkind described the chicken as a rational threat - and from a rational point of view, well, it's a freaking chicken!
"The Chicken That Was Not a Chicken!" has become something of a memetic tagline for the series' degeneration. Frankly the fact that the evil corrupting spirits themselves are called "Chimes" didn't help.
It does not help the Chicken was clucking - Now if he described it as say... Hissing, it might reduce some Narm. Seriously, Clucking will never be a frightening sound.
"That's no ordinary chicken! That's the most foul, cruel, bad-tempered chicken you've ever set eyes on! It's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer!
Later on there was also Nicholas, a man transformed through foul magic into a terrifying creature known as... a Slide. As a general rule if you want your villains to be scary, you don't name them after children's toys.
The H.P. Lovecraft story The Rats In The Wallswould be terrifying...except that the name of the cat, which by the end appears in almost every other sentence, is Nigger-Man. Really. Mentioning it once is an eyeball-rolling case of Values Dissonance, but mentioning it over and over again transformed the mood from "Wow, this is scary!" to "Lovecraft, just stop it. You're being a dick." Although Lovecraft only used the name because it was the name of his own cat. And he was very fond of that cat.
The audio book version avoids this by never having the narrator actually refer to his cat by name.
A few of Lovecraft's made-up words, unfortunately, are inherently funny. Like "fungi from Yuggoth."
Also from "The Rats In The Walls," a mention of the Piltdown Man instantly ruins everything to anyone who knows about evolution and anthropology.
Call of Cthulhu. With all of the memetic mutation that surrounds this thing on the internet, you're willing to forget that it's a giant thing with an octopus for a head. At least until It's finally freed to spread madness and death across the world, only to be hit by a boat, prompting it to go back to bed. Imagine getting up in the middle of the night, going to the kitchen to raid the refrigerator, and having the sandwich you saved for your midnight snack jump up and smack you in the face.
Lovecraft's repeated use of the word "queer" in several of his works probably doesn't help.
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the scene where Bathilda is revealed to be a walking meat puppet hiding a giant serpent when Nagini comes pouring out of her neck, is clearly meant to be frightening, but... to put it in other words: SHE CAME OUT LIKE PEZ. Or one of those springy paper snakes in a candy tin!
This trope is invoked In-Universe with the "Ridikulus" spell that turns scary things into funny ones instead, as Boggarts can be properly exorcised by laughter. The Boggart being terrifying and then excised by laughter is a traditional mythology element.
The picture book The Teacher From The Black Lagoon does this intentionally, and in an unusual manner: by completely averting Nothing Is Scarier, it succeeds in Crossing the Line Twice. As an example, Off with His Head! can be scary. Screwing the head into a globe stand isn't.
There's actually a whole series of those, including the Librarian and The Nurse from the Black Lagoon. They all go so overboard with the horrible descriptions that it is, very intentionally, hilarious.
Insomnia by Stephen King: The hero finally faces the all-powerful Crimson King in a climactic confrontation to stop his murderous plans that would result not only in the death of a number of innocent people but ultimately doom the multiverse. Oh, and by the way, when the hero was little, he was really impressed by this big fish he saw once. They called it the Kingfish. And now... oh the horror... the mighty, demonic Evil Overlord takes the form of the Kingfish! Apparently the reader is assumed to share in the protagonist's briefly described trauma over a fish.
Stephen King does that sort of thing a lot. In Pet Sematary, one of the characters was always terrified by The Wizard of Oz, which her psychotic Ill Girl sister, Zelda, loved. Said sister died horribly while the character in question was watching; as Sanity Slippage begins to set in on everyone, people start occasionally referring to the thing (possibly a wendigo) in the other graveyard as "Oz the Gweat and Tewwible" in imitation of Zelda's lisp. It's pretty hit-or-miss; either the sheer surreality and invocation of whatever nasty depths of Accidental Nightmare Fuel scarred you as a child creeps you out, or you find the whole thing incredibly stupid and laugh yourself sick.
The children's book 'Ghosts of the Southwest' is about, as you might imagine, ghost stories about places in the American southwest, some of which are rather creepy despite the book being for children. But in all of the double-exposure photographs the author took of people acting out the stories, any tension is lost when we see that the "ghosts" are all wearing what is very obviously late 20th century clothing, even if they're acting out a story from the 1700s. Yeah... no.
Live Action TV
Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Ostensibly a horror series that was too shocking for TV in the '80s, in reality it's a 21st-century parody of laughably bad '80s TV horror. And it nails this trope spot-on.
Grindhouse does something similar, although more in the style of 1970s horror, specifically exploitation films.
Spoofed on Arrested Development. The monster in Maeby's horror movie turns out to be Nightmare Retardant it resembles the title character from ALF, which isn't helped by the line "This must be the creature that ate our cat!" She bases a new monster off a picture of her grandmother right after a facelift.
"I'm thirsty!"
Many of the monsters that appeared in classic Doctor Who, by today's standards, meet this trope. In fact, some of them were a joke even by the standards of the time they were made; even the most fanatical and determined classic series fan in the world would have a hard time defending the Myrka, for example. The new series isn't entirely free of this either: the monster in "The Lazarus Experiment" in particular has seen a few negative comments of this nature. However, the latter might not count, as Russell T. Davies actually said it was supposed to be fairly outrageous (although, that said, "it was supposed to look like that" isn't exactly an unheard-of defense when something goes wrong in this area).
Depending on the time period and the actual episode, as well as the viewer's exposure to them, even the more impressive villains such as the Daleks and the Cybermen can be potent Nightmare Retardant. As an example, compare the menacing and unstoppable Cybermen of The Invasion with the Camp Gay men in rubber suits from Revenge of the Cybermen. The fact that at one point Daleks had no obvious counter for stairs did not help.
No matter how dangerous, numerous and murderous Daleks are, there is one thing that cannot be denied. They look like salt shakers with a plunger attached or trash cans armed with random household junk. Terrifying in-universe, not so in real life.
There is also a clear distinction between viewers from Britain (who've been exposed to Daleks as the de facto terrifying scifi enemy), and those from elsewhere (who didn't grow up with them at all), with the latter usually seeing the Daleks as silly-looking, melodramatic, and unscary.
In a few cases, it depends on who's playing the Doctor and his companion. The Daleks (at least as of late) have been designed and redesigned to be able to stand eye-to-eyestalk with whoever is playing the companion. So the Rose Tyler-era Daleks were designed to accomodate Billie Piper (who's 5'5"), which made them look kind of short and not all that threatening (they usually only came up to chest height of the rest of the cast, kind of making them look like giant mailboxes◊). However, despite looking like a robotic team of Power Rangers, the new Dalek's (designed to stand with 5'11" Karen Gillan) are almost as tall as Matt Smith, making them a little scarier.
Several people have commented that Daleks frighten people not because they look particularly scary, but because of the way the characters react to them. Depending on the quality of the script and the acting, even trashcans armed with toilet plungers can be terrifying if they can make the Doctor go Oh Crap.
And now, after several years of (successful) effort at making the Daleks scary to people again, it has all been undone by Series 5 making a set of new Daleks who (despite their intimating and tall new design) happen to be painted bright, cheerful colours (white, blue, red, orange and yellow), making them look like Power Rangers. White has been used for Daleks before, and works fine, but a bright yellow Dalek is just...not scary.
The monster in the story The Invisible Enemy was so silly looking that Tom Baker reportedly broke down laughing during several takes, declared "How am I expected to talk to this fucking prawn?" in another and eventually started singing "Prawn Free...". Then again, Tom can just be like that.
The "Myrka" from ''Warriors of the Deep'', a pantomime reptile does not scary make. There's an Easter Egg on the DVD that consists of actors Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, and Mark Strickson (the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough) mocking it as the lamest monster ever.
The Absorbaloff from "Love & Monsters" looks like a walking lump of dough that grew hair and legs. It was designed by a little boy who won a Blue Peter contest. When he visited the filming, he understood immediately why it wasn't as scary as it was supposed to be... he had imagined it to be the size of a double-decker bus! At least in this case, the production team wasn't trying to make it scary.
"Daleks in Manhattan" taught us that even the most hideous monster ever designed looks ridiculous in a pinstriped suit and spats. This may have been intentional as the audience is meant to have greater empathy for a creature that gained a measure of humanity.
How about the attempted Nightmare Face in Silence In The Library? The Conspicuous CG and overall silly design make it impossible to view without sighing or facepalming. Quickly forgiven, however, thanks to the unbelievably freakyVashta Nerada.
That face is - and was - effective as a Jump Scare. When you see it for any length of time in, say, screenshots, not so much.
Far back in the first season of the original series, the producers tried introducing the Voord, dubbed "the successors to the Daleks" (the Daleks had been killed off in their debut serial and there was no indication that they would be recurring enemies yet). What resulted is men in silly rubber diving suits and big triangle heads. The fact that the actors would often trip over their own costumes probably didn't help either.
Canadian comedy series SCTV spoofs this with the recurring sketch "Monster Chiller Horror Theatre". A vampire called Count Floyd (played by Joe Flaherty) plays movies which he describes as being scary but it turns out most of them aren't very scary at all, much to his chagrin. Particular disappointments included Whispers Of The Wolf (because, despite that title, it's an Ingmar Bergman chamber piece) and most of the movies featuring Dr. Tongue (a Peter Lorre-like character played by John Candy).
Of course, even when Count Floyd discovers that the movie isn't scary at all, he still has to pretend it is, because that's his job. ("The odd couple? About a couple of bachelors living together in an apartment? Um ... and they drink blood! Yes!")
The Angel episode Smile Time has plenty of this and the opposite one. Seeing Angel as a puppet is hilarious.
Angel-as-a-puppet with Game Face on is even more hilarious.
Ghost Whisperer had a long period where they were constantly trying to do scary scenes. Simply hilarious. Especially that time they had the baseball ghost possessing the pitching machine.
The first season episode of Supernatural "Phantom Traveler" (obviously made before the writers figured out what they were going to do with demons) featured a demon which, when possessing people, spoke with a voice like Drago from the Jackie Chan Adventures.
An episode of The X-Files called "Teso Dos Bichos" had a pretty creepy beginning... people dying, supposedly killed by a vengeful jaguar spirit after excavating a sacred burial site. The episode had a fairly good atmosphere built up until the end when it was revealed that the killer was actually a whole lot of kitty cats. Also, Gillian Anderson is allergic to cats, which meant Scully had to be attacked by a not very convincing cat puppet. Needless to say, it drained all and any tension out of the scene.
Recently, Animal Planet, of all stations, picked up a supposed horror series called Lost Tapes, about "hidden creatures", monsters we don't normally see. Retardant factor #1: There is an episode about "Death worms" where an obvious puppet kills two ATV riders. Retardant #2: There is a blatant typo in the show's introduction with various messages of warning and exposition. #3: Said introduction is almost a minute long. Network Decay aside, it might be entertaining if not for #4: Acting that makes Unsolved Mystery reenactments look like the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Depending on your mileage the Crypt Keeper from Tales From The Crypyt could come across as this due to his use of puns. Arguably, that was the point, as the series celebrates cheese just as much as horror.
Many TV series featuring a werewolf. The Monchichi-looking "wolf" Oz became in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the chimpish-furrysuit wolf fom the shortlived Fox series Werewolf are good reasons to think twice about doing a serious werewolf series. This trope is often induced when the creators want to show too much of their monster; it's usually better to let your audience fill in the blanks instead.
Werewolves in "Dresden Files" went back and forth between creepy and funny. When Bob takes the face of one, the sound effects make most people jump and it looks okay for a second. Luckily, they know better than to prolong transformed sequences and overall it was fine. Barely.
The miniseries of Stephen King's The Langoliers was getting narmy enough before the flying Pac-Man hairballs attacked in a wave of Special Effects Failure so bad it destroyed reality in its wake.
It. You shoulda stuck with the clown, Stephen; he wasAccidental Nightmare Fuel. The spider just doesn't cut it. There are hints of another shape behind the spider, though, so make of that what you will.
The Ferengi, introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation, were originally supposed to be creepy, vaguely demonic-looking guys with batlike faces, and the series' main villains. General consensus from fans was that they were just annoying and kind of ridiculous. So in Deep Space Nine, they were used mostly for laughs, which generally worked a lot better. In the place of the Ferengi, they placed the Borg.
TNG episode "Night Terrors" was supposed to be a bit scary as conceived. Basically, everybody on the ship was unable to get restful sleep, and they were trying to play it up for some High Octane Nightmare Fuel, and you could tell—Troi (the only one on the ship able to dream besides the traumatized sole survivor Betazoid they found from the other ship) flying through a dim cloudscape with low and barely-audible mutterings, a few psych-outs with the ship's technology turning malevolent, and so forth. Instead, you're watching most of the actors play very sleep-deprived people who have trouble finishing sentences, being irritable and unreasonable without compelling motives to be that way (which while interesting in a cerebral way, didn't make exciting TV as far as the producers were concerned). The only really freaky things are Dr. Crusher hallucinating all the corpses she's autopsying suddenly sitting up and staring at her and Troi's flying "nightmares" (but mostly to actress Marina Sirtis, who was genuinely afraid of heights—the repeated "Where are you!?" line is pretty Narmy, and the cloud special effects were, as Frakes put it, "shitty [...]. That was below our standard").
Similar to "Night Terrors" was the episode "Schisms", which started off as a fairly creepy episode about Enterprise crewmembers being kidnapped and experimented on by unknown aliens... until you get to see the aliens doing the abducting◊. Apparently, the writer of the episode had emphasized in the script that the aliens should only be seen in glimpses to keep them vague and frightening... clearly, something got lost somewhere and we got fish-faced monks as a result.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 7: "From beneath you, it devours." Sure, it's supposed to be creepy, but I kept on expecting Bugs Bunny to pop up and complain about missing his left turn at Albuquerque.
Compared with the poorly translated version a pair of characters use, "It eats you starting with your bottom", it's much more intimidating
There's an episode of Degrassi High where Lucy films a low-budget horror film with a bunch of other students, hoping it to be scary and whatnot, but when everyone starts laughing at the terrible acting, shots and whathaveyou, she leaves the screening either in tears or on the verge thereof. Eventually the movie ends and everyone applauds, having loved the movie for its camp cheesiness, and she feels better.
The monster on Lost. Sorry, but a fake looking cloud of black smoke that flies out of the jungle and inexplicable sounds like a bulldozer isn't scary, and it's one of the least interesting of the island's mysteries.
Most of the Power Rangers/Super Sentai monsters, but a particularly egregious one was the Pudgy Pig. Zordon estimated that it would eat the entire world's food supply in 48 hours. This might have been terrifying, if it was even remotely plausible at the pig's apparent walking speed. It worked better in Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, where, the 48 hour limit isn't mentioned, most of the food-stealing was done too fast to see, and its effect is demonstrated with a family who almost starve to death as a result. Pudgy Pig's failings were apparently Lampshaded during Lord Zedd's arrival. When Trini wonders what the new Big Bad has planned next, Zack responds, "Gotta a feeling it ain't Pudgy Pig."
Most of the monsters visually created laughs instead of fear. You have monsters that were such things as a giant pineapple/octopus/clown thing, a tube of lipstick, a giant chicken (with a fork and knife as weapons), and a giant bottle of window cleaner (although to be fair to Pineoctopus, he did have that "Turn People into cardboard cutouts" thing to freak us out with.
Another noteworthy monster is Skelerena from "Mirror of Regret." A hyena monster and (as the name implies) skeletal, it looks pretty frightening - at least more so than the usual fare. But then you hear its voice - a high-pitched goofy one that borders on annoyance.
Though the absolute worst offender has to be Serpentera. It managed to travel far and vaporize a planet in its first appearance, but it quickly turned into a joke due to its inability to ever hold anywhere near that much of a charge again.
The "Outer Limits" had The Zanti Misfits for me. For a good half-hour, the episode plays out the mystery of a alien race that sends it's criminals to our planet. When the criminals get out of the pod, it turns out to be this silly looking ant with a human face. It's has to be seen to understand how funny it is.
That one episode where a couple is attacked by tumbleweeds... Think about that for a second... They're attacked by tumbleweeds. And yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.
In Robin Hood the outlaws are cornered by Guy of Gisborne, who releases his "secret weapon." This turns out to be a tiny, mangy, sick-looking lion that is so decrepit that it can't even walk in a straight line. Granted, the outlaws' fear is not entirely unfounded considering they had probably never seen a lion in their lives before, but the viewers at home are left wondering why the outlaws didn't simply kick it over. That probably would have killed the poor thing.
In The Inbetweeners, Simon freaks out a little bit too much because of a little problem at the end of series 3, episode 4. "WORK YOU UGLY TWAT!!"
In an episode of Blake's 7, our heroes are abandoned by the villain on a planet which is known to be dangerous, although just what that danger is is a mystery. It's finally revealed to be the hatching of giant ants. Unfortunately, the BBC prop dept wasn't up to the task of producing something truly scary, leading to the laughable scene of one of our heroines being menaced by what looked like a balloon with two sticks attached to it's 'head'.
The series Licence To Drill, about Arctic oil exploration, used in its commercials the lines "There are dark deeds done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold. The arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold." Sounds very chilling... unless you're Canadian or a fan of Robert Service, in which case you'll recognize them as the opening lines from "The Cremation of Sam McGee," one of the finest comic poems ever.
In season three of True Blood, Lafayette has a bad drug trip in which all the religious paraphenalia in his room comes alive and starts talking to him. From his reaction and the mood the scene was supposed to be unsettling. But, damn if those talking voodoo dolls were the cutest things you've ever seen!!
Music
Cradle of Filth frontman Dani Filth. Not because of anything he did on purpose, but because he got dealt an inconvenient hand when it comes to his natural appearance, which he can't do much about. You can put on all the heavy makeup and spiked clothing you want, but if you're a short bloke with a round face and upper-middle class accent, you're going to have a very hard time looking scary.
Except for Infinite Misery and From Skin to Liquid (and maybe Relentless Beating too) because they're instrumentals.
Alice In Chains. The music video for "Them Bones". It has some creepy scenes in it, but someone accidently left a water bottle in front of the projection screen used for a lot of parts. It's easy to miss it, but once you see it, you can't unsee it, you will always notice it easily. That bottle simply doesn't fit and instantly ruins the effect. Still a pretty nice video though, and Crowning Music of Awesome helps to make the oversight more tolerable.
Black Sabbath's self titled song. It's supposed to be scary, but Ozzy's "Oh no, no, please, God help me" comes out as funny. YMMV, of course.
While the music in some instances can be quite frightening, and some of the actions of the more "extreme" bands are certainly no laughing matter, the "corpse paint" of Black Metal is not scary at all, as most bands tend to look like KISS wannabes.
"Die Eier von Satan" by Tool sounds like a Nazi rally at first, with an ominous speech in German, coupled with the sounds of an ecstatic crowd and heavy industrial rhythm in the background. The track becomes a lot less creepy however, when you translate it and realize that the speaker is just reciting a recipe for hash brownies. This is intentional.
Tabletop Games
Atropus is a world of undeath, the afterbirth of creation. It's an Omnicidal Maniac who hates everything in the universe to an extent that makes even the most rabid demon prince look like the Tom Baker Doctor Who. It's coated in the frankly abhorrent Atropal Scions. The hitch? It's a floating head in space. The Elder Evils book makes this abundantly clear. While this may sound awesome if you're drunk in the right frame of mind, his face actually seems to be screaming "NNNNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM". Yeah, it's probably better to go with Pandorym or Ragnorra.
The G/D/Q module series from 1st Edition, one of the first campaign arcs in Dungeons & Dragons history, was egregiously undermined by a lame attempt at comedy. Having fought their way through three colonies of giants, the perils of the Underdark, and the Cosmic Horror that is the Abyss, the heroes infiltrate the dreaded lair of Lolth ... only to be confronted by a marilith demon who's a scatter-brained lobby receptionist. If the blatant sexism won't make you give up on the game in disgust, the sheer stupidity will.
Dark Eldar, Chaos and maybe Tyranid-focused players of Warhammer40000 will see the rest of the High Octane Nightmare Fuel so present in the franchise as this. If you could get used to the Squick-on-high, Accidental Nightmare Fuel-y, Eldritch rape fest of the guys you're using, you could look at all the other factions and laugh. The (helmetless) space marines look kinda silly, with their tiny bald heads.
Reading about the epic deeds of Roboute Guilliman is one thing, until you try to figure out how to pronounce his name.
For what its worth, according to a character in Space Marine, the last name is pronounced "GWIL-a-men".
The Primarch Ferrus Manus of the Iron Hands legion is also quite silly.
A The Night Horrors Chaos Space Marine chapter. BAT WING HELMETS? They're like Asterix crossed with a bad 80's hair-metal video. Made more narmful by the fact they're supposed to be the elite terrorists of the 40K universe. The all Chaos Space Marines, too; it's like the 1980's New Wave Of British Heavy Metal just never ended for them. And that wasn't scary to anyone but Mary Whitehouse.
The whole line was like that early on. The Noise Marines used to use electric guitars as standard weapons, the Orks were more human and dressed like a mix of football hooligans and rednecks, and the Squats were a race of dwarf bikers. The sillier elements were mostly pulled back and altered as the setting got serious and Grimdark instead of merely over the top.
The evil god of bloodshed is named Khorne. It's pronounced... "Corn". This has been parodied.◊
Speaking of Games Workshop, Chaos creatures in Warhammer are sometimes so over the top in their evilness they lose all capacity of being threatening. Look at the Beastmen: the codex thinks it's a good idea to repeatedly tell us that one of their way of desecrating human civilization is to defecate (!!!) on everything they revere. Beware the Beastmen, little children: THEY'LL SHIT ON YOUR ALTARS!
Religion
Back in the days of The Bible, giant leopards with bear feet and horns and monsters that look like lambs and speak like dragons were supposed to be scary, but now its very hard to take seriously people afraid of such things.
Fridge Horror kicks in when you read about giant "locusts" and "scorpions" in Revelation and wonder if maybe that's what helicopters and tanks looked like to John the Apostle's 1st-Century eyes.
Helloween4545 manages to melt away the terror of a good Survival Horror game just by his mild British accent and the way he reacts with looney humor to some of the events. Sometimes he'll be stalking after the horrible monster of the day saying stuff like "Here doggy doggy, I got a present for you, come and meet Mr. Shotty." There's also a spot in Penumbra where he comes out of a scary area and into a room with a huge blood trail, and just as the scare music starts he zeros in on a minor room detail with an excited "Oooh! Boots. Nah, not my type." How can you maintain a scary mood after something like that?
There's also his Dead Space LP, where he likes to mess around with body parts that he's stomped off of corpses using Kinesis.
While we're discussing Clock Tower 3, we might as well note that it had Nightmare Retardant built right in; the vicious killers chasing you are often introduced murdering someone in a gruesome manner, yet they fall victim to cartoonish, silly pratfalls that would be better suited to a Looney Tunes short.
Not to mention they generally look hilariously stupid. Hell, the last boss looks like Captain Morgan.
One of the bosses in Castlevania: Order of Eclesia is a Giant Enemy Crab that chases you up a lighthouse. The claustrophobic nature of the fight and the monster's intimidating size and appearance might've been kind of scary... except that it announces its arrival with one of the most pathetically done roars in gaming history, which instantly induces to laughter. "SHOOAAAARRR!" indeed.
Even if the roar was good, the trope-naming meme would've done the job. Troper suspects it's intentional.
One of the common complaints lobbed at Clive Barker's Jericho was that, while the monsters might have been effective High Octane Nightmare Fuel the first few times, the players became desensitised to the intended gross-out effect of the monsters too quickly. As the GameSpy review puts it, "There are only so many enemies you can run into with gaping, bloody holes where their naughty bits should be before you begin to bore of them. Oh look, here's another monster wearing some poor sod's entrails as a pull-over hoody..." Of course, it didn't help that you were backed by a semi-competent, well-armed team, eliminating whatever horror might have been got out of being solo and running low on ammo.
Silent Hill 4 has the infamous belching patient enemies. Made exponentially worse by the fact that they tend to attack you at the top of stairs. Why? Because they'll fall all the way down, belching on every step.
The first Silent Hill game was terrifying when it first came out, but the blocky, jerky, graphics sap a lot of the horror out, and what that doesn't, the terrible voice acting will.
The continue screen of the arcade version of Ninja Gaiden was quite creepy... or it would have been had it not been for Ryu's pathetic whimpering echoes of "oooooooh" in the end.
In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud and Co. enter the Cave of the Gi about two-thirds of the way through the first disc. At the back of the cave lies a giant stone head that, when approached, will start snapping its jaws. Which is somewhat startling, but not completely unexpected. What is unexpected, however, is that the giant stone head makes a very goofy face◊ before summoning the boss.
Pretty much any part of The House of the Dead 2 with voice acting is Nightmare Retardant:
"We're flying right over the Sunset Bridge. Something...or someone...has...taken...the city."
And then Sega shows that they did not intend to take horror franchises seriously with "The Typing Of The Dead". Wait, what?
While Eternal Darkness has a wide array of psychologically unsettling moments, and most of the monsters come off quite well, the potentially terrifying Corpse God Mantorok was completely shafted by the technical limitations of the GameCube. It also doesn't help when you realize that the Color-CodedElemental Rock-Paper-Scissors used by the other Eldritch Abominations is 100% analogous to that used by starter Pokémon.
Max Roivas has a series of deeply disturbingly narrated autopsies/journal entries on each of the monsters he encounters in the game. In one for Ulyaoth's Bonethieves, one of the most horrificBody Horror monsters out there who like to burrow into people chests with their scythe-like hands and use them as a meat suit/puppet, he claims he was able to detect the things even when they'd possessed his servants... because they smelled like vanilla. What?
The overuse of some sanity effects. If you enter a room and it's flipped upside-down, it's a bit surprising. Once you've entered five rooms that have been flipped upside-down, it's just annoying.
In F.E.A.R. 2, knowing Alma's backstory makes it harder to find her scary and takes away the mystery she had in the original F.E.A.R..
For others, it's the lack of the horror a Survival Horror game is supposed to have. There are some segments that have this, yes, but it comes so abruptly, almost like an after thought, that you could just spray and pray your way through them and look for some soldiers to steal weapons from after.
The third level of the third game in that series takes place in a shopping mall, after five to ten minuets of wandering around a deserted shopping mall and finding only a single wounded enemy guard in opposition you then find yourself in a small enclosed area with the knowledge that some beast of Alma's is hunting you... then you finally see the beasts that has been stalking you in the shadows since the start of the level... zombies. Grey skinned humans with who run right at you, some with melee weapons some without. Going into this level after doing a fair recent bit of L4D or its sequel leads one to draw the obvious conclusion, even without three other players for backup, common infected aren't much of a threat in a game where you have both slo-mo powers and freely regenerating health.
Painkiller: Overdose has several of these, but the most stand-out level is the Animal Farm. You have all sorts of demonic animals charging straight at you, most notably the evil chickens and sliced up bovine, the only human presence are either corpses or horribly-mutilated men with buzzsaws for heads and hooks for hands, blood is smeared all over the wall with messages like "help me" and "stop please stop i'll be a vegetarian" and "i'll join peta", the only things on meat hooks are severed human bodies themselves, and packages ready to ship with the label "HUMAN MEAT" are on them... Yeah. It's supposed to be creepy. But in the end, you're still fighting DEMONIC COWS and ELDRITCH CHICKENS.
Mother 3 has the Frightbots, which tell stories described as "pants-wettingly scary" or "so scary that you'll never go to the bathroom again." They have no effect on your characters.
The Mr. Saturns you're trying to rescue, on the other hand, are terrified. YMMV is cross-species, it would seem.
The Redead in Ocarina of Time traumatized a generation of gamers. In the sequel though, wearing a specific mask makes them start to dance rather than attack the player.
Made even funnier when the dancing is paired up with music.
And in Wind Waker, they look downright cartoony. Then again, so does everything in that game. That, and the glowing red eyes and the fact that instead of mock-raping you, then hold you in a head lock and chomp down on your head.
The Redeads in Twilight Princess are nightmare retardant compared to earlier versions. Sure, the scream is still there, but now they look like typical skeleton enemies instead of soulless mud dolls, and instead of hugging your face while you're frozen, they'll just hit you once with their Buster Sword knockoffs. Still annoying, but not nearly as scary.
Zant in Twilight Princess appears very creepy at first, when he wears a helmet fit for a Black Death doctor, doesn't move much, had no voice that we could hear, and generally acts like he was in full control of every situation. But leading into the battle with him, he proves to have a screechy voice, stomps around like a pouty kid in the most ridiculous shoes ever, moves in a cartoony fashion more becoming of Majora's Mask, and reveals his true face. That face is kinda freaky, but hardly intimidating. The interpretive dance doesn't help.
The battle against him certainly doesn't win him back any scary points. Zant is constantly screeching in said hilarious screechy voice, he jumps and moves around like he's off his Ritalin, and he only takes a few hits each round, making him seem less like a boss and more like a sentient, slightly menacing minigame compilation.
There is also that scene in which Lanayru tells Link the story of the Twilight Realm, which many consider disturbing. But keep in mind that Lanayru is holding an orb of light in his mouth. Next time you reach this scene, read the dialogue aloud as if you were holding something in your mouth, and that should make it a lot less creepy.
Chancellor Cole, the Big Bad in Spirit Tracks doesn't look scary at all. He looks more like a leprechaun with two hats than anything else.
Malladus' incorporeal form from the same game is probably worse, though; it just looks like a goofy cartoon skull-thing!
Malladus's form immediately upon resurrecting counts: the Demon King, powerful enough to resist defeat at the hands of the Spirits of Good...in the body of the approximately 12-year-old (and incredibly adorable) Princess Zelda. Sure, he (she?) has creepy red and black eyes and a black aura, but still.
Some argue that this is the case for The Imprisoned. The "Narm" section on that page's YMMV page calls him an evil Sesame Street character.
The waterwraith in Pikmin 2 can be scary... until you fight it at the bottom of the cave, that is. after you break off it's rollers, it runs around like a wimp and ducks for cover when you throw purple pikmin, to which you need to throw at him. Oh yeah, and for more nightmare retardant use the waterwraith-stone glitch.
Some in-game Nightmare Retardant appears in The Lost Crown: A Ghost-Hunting Adventure, when Nigel attends the May Day fair. In contrast to the legitmately-creepy scenes he encounters elsewhere, the fair's Haunted House train offers a cheesy display of backlit plastic skeletons and unconvincing Scare Chords, which even the ride's operator admits is lame.
Though most Jurassic Park games are scary, there's been a few exceptions. Trespasser is funny simply by being a busted game, Operation Genesis can be amusing to some minds by being a Wide Open Sandbox game combining tiny tourists and dinosaurs. But Warpath, the fighting game, is just hilarious. T-Rex and other large dinosaurs must have shrunk to reach their size versus smaller dinosaurs, and seeing Triceratops jump into the air and attack him is such a Crying Palaeontologist moment that all seriousness is lost.
Death Gate does this in the ending cutscene. Sang-Drax with voice acting is pure Accidental Nightmare Fuel — until the ending cutscene redraws the scary dragon into something that looks like it came from Cartoon Network, with a ridiculous cutesy look on it's face. The still-scary voice acting somehow makes it even funnier.
Facing Ashnard in Fire Emblem: Path of Raidence should be slightly creepy, except you are fighting in a flower garden. Described as the most beautifil flower garden in the land. Okay, now instead of being somewhat freaked out by the two dragons, Ashnard, and the best of Deian's Elite Four, I am laughing.
In Adventure Quest, the artwork for a lot of the enemies is extremely outdated, looking as if they were thrown together with a gradient and a line tool in Photoshop. If the monsters had a little bit of touching-up, they would look a lot creepier, but so far, the enemy designs have made more people laugh their asses off rather than try and take them seriously.
Much hay has been made about the Old Chateau in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl on this very wiki, and it certainly lives up to its distressingly creepy reputation... until you find its local specialty, the Old Gateau. Something about that Incredibly Lame Pun just makes it impossible to be scared.
While Pandora, the Final Boss in Revelations Persona, is freaky, once you beat it, it turns into its second form which is a gaint multi-colored humoniod butterfly. You just can't be scary if that's what you call a One-Winged Angel form.
Gitaroo Man combines this with Accidental Nightmare Fuel and very fast Villain Decay with the Sanbone Trio. They start out as Accidental Nightmare Fuel to a certain extent. To elaborate, you start out in your defenseless civilian form with almost no health. The bosses, three mechanized skeletons, are brutally trying to kill you with The Power of Mariachi. It sounds ridiculous, but it still makes you feel helpless. Then you get back your Transformation Trinket and get a chance to restore health and attack. The bosses are still imposing, but at least they're down to your level. The nightmare potential is completely dissolved once you get to the end of the song, where you destroy them with a guitar solo while they run around in terror like chickens with their heads cut off. They go from Prince Zowie's elite to cowardly cannon fodder in their first and only appearance.
It's been by and large agreed that there's something kinda freaky about the Chain Chomps in the Mario series. Later installments have them accompanied by cute barking noises which tones it down a bit. A bit.
Shigeru Miyamoto claims that the Chain Chomps were inspired by a childhood memory of a vicious dog leaping at him and stopping inches from his face...because the chain that its leash was attached to had reached its limit. Get this...in the Japanese version, Chain Chomps are called Wan Wan, which is the Japanese equivalent of "Bow-Wow!" Is this Fridge Brilliance or what?
Illbleed. Arguably the whole game is this. The ridiculous, off-the-wall dialogue, the frequent Breaking of the Fourth Wall, and the horrible, Narm-ness of the voice acting really detracts from any horror from the game.
Also, on the Marble Hornets DVD; watch the entries with the DVD commentary on. It's hard to take entry #1 seriously ever again while Troy Wagner (i.e. Jay) explains how Joseph DeLage (i.e. Alex) made a promise to go streaking if the video ever reached a million hits on Youtube. And they absolutely RUIN the Totheark videoes in terms of scariness. The boys realise they're too short for proper commentary, so they just put stupid jokes over the top of them. More or less the commentary removes all the scary and replaces it with pure, unadulterated funny.
Also, if you're unfamiliar with The Slender Man Mythos, you might mistake Slendy for Jack Skellington. In fact, in Seeking Truth, Zeke even refers to the drawings made by the first victim as ". . . what looked like Jack Skellington with about six extra arms and no eye holes, or any facial features, for that matter."
In the radio interview with the two creators, they mention how any attempt to make the Operator's head snap towards the camera in Entry 6 resulted in a A Night At The Roxbury head bop on the Operator. Cue Haddaway!
The whole mood is also a bit lost when you realize that, with Slendy spending most of his times watching hidden in the background, most entries on the mythos can be seen as Where's Waldo? 's spooky cousin...
This troper randomly refered to Slenderman as "Slendermensch" once and now I can no longer think of him by any other name, and the thought of this horrible Eldritch Abomination kvetching in the standard TV old Jewish guy accent is too hillarious to be scared by.
The Arise Flash Series, especially if the viewer is viewing Retsupurae's Retsuflash of the games.
With special mention to the infamous "John McCain Face".
Encyclopedia Dramatica has that page on Creepy Pasta. However, they also have that page for "Retarded Creepy Pasta", which were either attempts at creepypastas that fell flat, or silly parodies of creepypastas. (Some of the most infamous being "THEN A SKELETON POPPED OUT" and "THEN WHO WAS PHONE?")
Exmortis 3 - the third installment of a series of flash games - is considerably less scary than the previous two. Things become a lot less scary when your character becomes a superhuman that has telekinesis and can cause people / evil beings to explode. With his mind. This is especially pronounced when you come to a horror-filled room with a cannibalistic survivor that wants to eat you. Until you immediately pwn him and hold him up in the air with your mind. He practically pisses himself in fear, and the horrific feeling kind of... goes away.
This is a natural hazard for horror-themed Play By Post Games, given that they usually have a very crude art style in order to update in a timely manner. Even the better ones only become scary once you've been reading long enough to get sucked in—it's difficult to adequately convey the scariness of a particular section to someone who hasn't been read previous sections.
H(a)unting is a blog about three people and their encounters with Slenderman, who is one of the most genuinely creepy mythos creatures out there, particularly considering his origin-with the Rake and a second Slender-creature known as //IT// showing up later-and the Rake is essentially the main character's dog, Slenderman gives her candy for winning a pokemon tournament and brings her a flashlight during a storm, and can not only be beat up by her, but by her pet chicken too. Oh, and she's conveniently immune to Slendy and the Rake's powers, and is special in almost every way. Mary Sue much? In any case, you simply cannot be afraid of a Slenderman who is afraid of a silkie chicken, brings frightened girls flashlights, and gives people Reeses candy for winning a video game.
In Hyperbole And A Half, the main character tried to give her younger sister nightmares with a ghost story about blood, closets, killers, blood, ghosts, and more blood. It didn't work.
Western Animation
As an example of Nightmare Retardant within a series, the pilot episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy had the Grim Reaper confused and annoyed that the two children weren't afraid of him, which, along with Mandy's rather sarcastic response that he was "a truly terrifying and horrific creature", set the tone for the entire series to come.
Another in-universe example: the Boogeyman. He tries. Really.
An episode of The Backyardigans was based around this entire trope. The episode was titled "Scared Of You" and featured Tasha as a mad scientist with Austin playing her assistant, she gives Austin some secret notes and tells him it's a secret (a birthday invite because it's Austin's birthday in this episode) and tells him to find three monsters: A mummy king (Tyrone), a rather cute werewolf (Uniqua) and a vampire (Pablo). When he meets the mummy king at first, the mummy king is terrified of him at first but then says..."You're not scary", the same happens when he meets the werewolf and the vampire, he then points out that none of them are scary. Then at the end they reach the spooky castle where his master lives, the monsters all go and hide while he looks around, then everyone yells out "Surprise!" , and a big monster dance party starts.
The 1994 animated movie Felidae did have several scary and/or disturbing parts, but a nightmare about Gregor Mendel...Even if he was playing with rotting cat-corpse marionettes.
A non Treehouse of Horror example is the Screamatorium, a very low budget and pathetic ghost ride that features cheap ghosts stuck to the walls, a coffin containing nothing but a spring, and an old woman telling people about the "ravages of age." It then becomes hilarious when there's a skeleton that goes Hee Haw like a donkey!
There is a Treehouse of Horror episode where Flanders attempts to make a "Hell House", a religious alternative to Halloween haunted houses with intent to scare people, in this case, children, into being a good Christian. It starts off as Nightmare Retardant, with a crappy sketch where Skinner gets hit by a cardboard bus after looking at a smutty magazine, punished for thinking the human body is beautiful. The children think it's stupid, and thus fails in converting them, so Flanders prays to God to give him the ability to scare the kids into religion. This trope is subverted: God answers, and Flanders turns into a Satan-looking monster and forces them to sit in a hellish realm, and watch several Accidental Nightmare Fuel-esque scenes featuring the consequences of the seven deadly sins. By the end, the children promise to be good Christians.
Inverted and played for laughs with The Grumble, a character from an ice-show that looks like a man in a Dr. Suess-ian suit. Later in the episode, Homer knocks it out in a bar fight, and we see it has green blood.
Homer: What the hell is this thing?
One episode of South Park has live-action footage of "giant" guinea pigs terrorizing the town and its citizens.
The episode of Cow Days had an example of this too, with a haunted house that was decidedly un-scary.
"So, the Chamber of Farts has another victim, eh? Don't worry; there are no ghouls here. ONLY!!! FARTS!!!!!"
Invader Zim spoofed this trope a couple of times. Remember the disgusting, horrifying and unspeakably grotesque ROOM WITH THE MOOSE?????
Ultra Peepi to a lesser extent. His unbearable cuteness sweeps away all the horror he fairly causes among people at first, which makes it a whole lot easier for him to destroy the city (even the military refuses to attack the giant cutie-cutie hamster, cos "Awww will you look at his face? How could anybody possibly fire a cannon at THIS? ^_^"). But the point is that Ultra Peepi wasn't actually intended to be horrifying at all. He was supposed to be a genuine Nightmare Retardant, so that people wouldn't pay much attantion to the havoc the hamster's creating, therefore letting themselves be gradually killed off.
Other
Explored in this article '10 Scenes of Brutal Violence Guaranteed to Make You Laugh'.
Pretty much happens to anything scary if you choose to face your fears directly. Except for guns. Please do not face guns directly. Or hungry dangerous wild animals.
Done intentionally in this youtube video. It starts out showing a fairly horrifying soundtrack, and then doing so backwards, getting pure Accidental Nightmare Fuel. Then, it plays Gordon Freeman's soundtrack backwards. Followed by the sound made when a certain enemy dies. When played backwards, you get the song Bananaphone.
The entire Monster Clown genre. For those who, as children, never found clowns even slightly scary, it's hard to take such characters seriously, let alone be scared of them. Wonderfully lampshaded in The Tick: "People laugh at Proto-Clown, so Proto-Clown smash!"
Elephants and hippopotamuses (hippopotami?). Both are very large animals more than capable of killing you in half a dozen different ways if they feel like it. Both are so incredibly goofy-looking that in fiction they're more or less relegated to the comic relief of the animal world.
Also chimpanzes, who are regarded as really funny animals, despite the fact they've been known to kill people.
Feathered dinosaurs, especially those that sank into public consciousness as scaly, reptilian monsters (such as raptors or T. rex) might be viewed as such by people who are oblivious to the more "fearsome" birds of our time, or simply because some illustrations tend to depict them still acting like monsters but looking like brightly colored, overgrown turkeys (akin to prehistoric a Monster Clown), or as harmless-looking, cute feather-balls.
