Nightmare Fuel / Camp Camp

Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned!

Neil messed up big time...

It's more comedic than Rooster Teeth's other series, but it still has its dark moments.

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In General

• The Quartermaster. Neil describes him as "the bad guy from every horror movie ever", and it's not hard to see why given his gruff, low voice and his Hook Hand.
  • His first scene in episode two shows him dragging a large, bloody sack of... something across the ground, and later on in the episode is his brutal, unflinching murder of the king of the woodland creatures.
  • The things he keeps in his "Quartermaster Store" are a mix of just weird and frightening. Radioactive waste, the Encyclopedia Satanica, bags of hair collected from the campers, a box that extinguishes nearby fires and makes people speak in tongues... Any one of these would mark someone as bad news, and he has all of them and more.
    • Apparently the gibberish the box spewed was a backwards message with some ominous implications about him.
    Space Kid: (reversed) The master must not be made whole again!
  • He's also is/was in a Tontine with at least 2 other members. For those that don't know, a Tontine is a agreement where a pool and several players are formed. When there is one member of the Tontine left alive, they get to claim the prize. This seems fine at first, until you realize Tontines are illegal because they encourage killing other people for monetary gain. It's implied he killed his Quartersister on purpose, and is actively hunting down the other member.
    • It's also implied it's another family member
• The platypus might not seem like it, but the idea of one running around with a bunch of kids is fairly unpleasant to anyone who knows the symptoms of platypus venom. ^note  Pain so excruciating that morphine is useless, requiring doctors to sever the nerves leading to the afflicted area
  • A bit of Nightmare Retardant: Only male platypuses have venom, and since Eggs Benefits confirms that the platypus is a female, there's no real danger. Then again, even Cameron Campbell is afraid of getting kicked by it, so Artistic License may be at play here. It does have teeth, after all, even if they're not always visible.
• The fact that there is at least one known fatality associated with Camp Campbell, namely Jasper, is pretty horrifying, but it's also hinted that several other campers have met extremely unpleasant fates, like the camper who "technically" survived the camp inspection the year before Reigny Day.
  • Jasper is bound to Spooky Island forever, or at least until his body is found and put to rest. This means that a) Jasper's parents never got to give their boy a proper sendoff, b) Jasper might be stuck there forever, surrounded by Campbell's sex-dungeon and his lab full of abominations against nature and c) there's a child's dead body somewhere in the general vicinity waiting to be discovered.
    • Worse still, Jasper died in an explosion and so it's highly unlikely there's any body left to really discover and, whatever is left, is going to look horrifically maimed. Essentially, Jasper's stuck there forever.

Season 1

• The lab on Spooky Island lives up to its name. Some things, like the Pinky and the Brain gag, are kind of funny... then one of the test subjects writes out KILL ME on its wall.
• Though it's Played for Laughs, and Nikki ends up okay in the end, the Flower Scouts kidnapping Nikki is more than a little jarring.
• Nurf's attack on the other kids with a knife, particularly when he's advancing on a terrified Nerris.
• Neil trying to do a recreation of Harrison's trick by shoving a bunch of scarves down Nikki's throat. Her face turns blue and she starts foaming out the mouth while choking. It turns out that Harrison and Nikki were screwing with Neil, but still.
  • Also, after Harrison misfires the trick aimed at Neil and hits Max, the poor kid spends the episode visibly ill and puking up stage props. And no one else cares because Nikki is busy "learning magic" and Neil is busy trying to show up Harrison. It's clearly not comfortable for Max at all.

Season 2

• Everything about Daniel screams this, from his Brainwashing of the kids to the way his neck constantly shifts and cracks, and this isn't helped by the fact that he is basically a Palette Swap of David with all of the morals (and most of the sanity) excised. Even worse? He was only defeated because he drank his own poisoned fruit punch. Imagine what may have happened to the rest of the campers if he hadn't made that one colossal fuck-up. Not like it's that hard, though.
  • Also, as one YouTube commenter pointed out, throughout the entire episode, Daniel never blinks. Not. Once.
  • Jen (the Gwen-like potential counselor at the end), whose magazine offers one hell of a Jump Scare.
  • Brainwashed Preston stumbling out of the purification sauna while blankly staring at the camera is rather unsettling.
• Nikki falling into lava. It turned out to be just the kids pretending (Nikki was swimming in a kiddie pool of pudding) but for a second, it seemed like the show killed off one of its main characters in one of the cruelest and nightmarish way possible.
• Tabii receiving a fork to the eye in episode 7. It remains there for the rest of the episode, leaking blood.
  • Based on her following appearances and her reactions to it, it's most likely a permanent injury. Glossed over in conversation, yes, but still disturbing to think about considering she's still very much a child.
• The platypus eating its freshly hatched baby in episode 9.
• Episode 12 ends with Campbell swearing vengeance on David as he's dragged away by federal agents. This is a man who manipulated his way into becoming the prime minister of Thailand, double-crossed the Russian government, easily murdered two bears, and was willing to kill a child to get rid of a witness. If anyone can find a way out of Super Guantanamo and exact his revenge, it's him.

Season 3

• "The Fun-Raiser":
  • The first episode firmly establishes why you should never mess with the Quartermaster. In this episode, David and Gwen steal the Quartermaster's hook so to make a fundraiser in order to raise enough money to keep the camp running. When the Quartermaster learns the truth, he savagely beats the two counselors, beginning with grabbing Gwen by the neck and making them swear to him as he beats them senseless.
  • Even before that, when the kids are filming a commercial to raise money to give Quartermaster a new hook, Preston edited out all the footage of him because they were deemed too disturbing. And he is not wrong; poor Space Kid looked like he just saw Satan himself.
• The foreign exchange campers were ready to kill Max if they didn't get anything they could bring back to their respective countries. Even worse, Nikki (the only one who's watching what's going on) initially has no idea he's in danger.
• "Nikki's Last Day on Earth":
  • When the campers think Nikki is dying, she decides to have a Viking Funeral... while still alive. Luckily, Nurf has terrible aim.
  • While he deserved it, Nikki suddenly yelling at Max for being selfish can be slightly unnerving because Nikki is hardly ever depicted as truly mad.
• "Dial M for Jasper":
  • We finally find out how Jasper died: He was sent with David to "Regular Island" by Campbell to look for his "Ideas" folder, only to decide to look for evidence that would reveal Campbell's true nature. After an argument, David leaves and Jasper goes into a scary-looking cave by himself, and while he's there, accidentally sets off some dynamite, resulting in an explosion that kills him mid-sentence. And the worst part? David didn't even know that Jasper died, as it turns out, because he was told that his parents came to take him home.
• "Cameron Campbell the Camp Campbell Camper":
  • While he never gets too close to succeeding, Campbell manages to convince Ered's dads to let him be a mole in Camp Camp to get David to confess to coming up with the "Camp Camp" scheme. Even worse, it's an idea David gave him when David himself was a young child, certainly nothing criminal, but Campbell doesn't care and clearly blames David entirely.
  • The same episode reveals the utterly nightmarish lack of respect he has for kids, seeing them as vile creatures to the point that he's horrifically offended that David would choose the kids over him. David is simply shocked, noting that putting the kids first is his job and he can't understand why Campbell doesn't get that.

Season 4

• In "Camp Loser Says What?", Daniel returns as the Wood Scouts' counselor and we find out that they hired him even knowing he has multiple counts of murder against him. Then after spending the whole episode manipulating the entire cast, he tries to use Nikki as a human sacrifice.
• In "Squirrel Camp", Quartermaster is Devoured by the Horde right in front of the kids. Sure, he arises from the lake seemingly fine later in the episode, but then Nikki finds his headless corpse in the woods.
• Everything that happens to David in "The Forest" is this and a tearjerker because most of the stuff that happen to him can easily happen to anybody in real life.
  • While trying to tie up a canoe, David trips and hits himself in the head, knocking himself out for a while. He has a bump that lasts a whole day.
  • Because of the accident, the canoe goes along the river and David falls down a waterfall. The fall destroys the canoe and David barely survives. When he gets out, he spends a while vomiting water.
  • David climbing a mountain may seem like no challenge when he has a walking stick and he only needs to walk. But then Surprisingly Realistic Outcome when the mountain becomes steeper and it becomes nightfall by the time David, now at the brink of exhaustion reaches the top. He then gets attacked by bees when the log he's sitting on turns out to host their hive, falls down the mountain and gets stung.
  • After getting stung by bees, David has to make a fire, but it rains, so he has to sleep in the cold within a small shelter.
  • David's encounter with a female wolf that tries to eat him. While he scares her off with a rock on their first encounter, their second encounter has her bite David's arm and claw his chest. She then chases David to a chasm and jumps over it as she notices David hanging onto it. She doesn't make it and hangs onto David, clawing his back in a panic and making them fall down. David breaks his leg and she gets impaled on sharp branches and yet she still tries to eat him, leading to...
    • David's Rage Breaking Point against the wolf can be scary as he yells in rage at her for trying to kill him, crying as he lifts a heavy rock, and is about to crush her head with it. She can only close her eyes and await her death before David brings it down. Fortunately he doesn't do it, but the scene was still scary. Serious props to Miles Luna for his absolutely chilling performance.
  David: Why did you do this?!? Why?!? I told you to GO! Why couldn’t you just LEAVE ME ALONE?!? I asked you to go away, why didn’t you just GO? Why?! WHY?!? I told you, and you didn’t listen!
  • David's encounter with a Mama Bear is quite scary because even if he Took a Level in Badass in this episode, she easily manhandles him in terms of strength and is about to kill him. He only survives because he spared and befriended the wolf who tried to kill him earlier in the episode and she pulled a Heroic Sacrifice so that he can live.
  • There is something about David returning back to normal and then nearly breaking down in tears as he remembers the events of the episode. It appears that his Stepford Smiler tendencies have taken a darker turn after this episode's events.
• Let's just say that Space Kid's story at the end of "Campfire Tales" is fucked and leave it at that.
• During the fashion show in "Fashion Victims", Vera kills a random audience member. The only person who notices is Max, who is visibly creeped out.
• While the other Flower Scouts are spending their time with Ainsley, Sasha starts to undergo Sanity Slippage and hallucinates multiple giant copies of Ainsley's face surrounding her and saying "I'm living my hashtag best life!" in a creepy voice.

Season 5

• During his magic act, Nikki suddenly tears off her face to reveal Harrison, with the intended effect being to freak out Max and Neil, who were sitting next to her. Except Nikki was a very unwilling participant in that trick, as revealed when she tears Harrison's face off her body to reveal her own screaming face underneath it.

Specials

• "Night of the Living Ill"
  • Despite being a parody of typical zombie apocalypse movies, it still nails the horror movie atmosphere, making it far more tense then you'd probably expect from such a lighthearted comedy. The fact that nearly the entire cast is infected one by one probably helps.
• "Halloween Special: Arrival of the Torso Takers"
  • The fact that the movie referenced in the title of the special freaks Max out badly enough that he starts to believe its plot is happening right in front of him is pretty unsettling considering that Max was previously shown to be near impossible to scare, meaning the movie features some pretty extreme horror.
  • At no point do we see David blink during the episode. While creepy on its own, it's actually meant to allude to the below item.
  • Resident Knight of Cerebus Daniel makes his return. His plan this time around? Kidnap and replace David, make Max think he's going crazy, lock everyone else in the mess hall, and then kill Max, with David being Forced to Watch. And he almost manages to do it.
    • What's especially fucked up is that, when catching up to Max freeing David, Daniel complains that he has to scrap his plan for dealing with Max in lieu of just stabbing him outright "like some commoner".
  • If you're lactose intolerant, seeing Daniel collapse to the ground in pain after being in contact with chocolate milk should make you uneasy.
  • Daniel's fist punching through the ground at the end may keep some people up at night thinking about the logistics of how he got through the shelter's roof. ^note A minimum fallout shelter requires 3 feet of packed dirt and something strong enough to hold that up, but the entrance to one can be left open to the air if built right. Mr. Campbell clearly wanted as much to keep people out as to keep radiation out given the vault door, so we can assume that some extra metal is around at least the upper part of the entrance hole, requiring dirt around that to hold it in place. Thus, Daniel would've had to work to get through to the surface.