This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.
Nightmare Fuel in Labyrinth.
- The puppets in this film can often be uncanny and grotesque, which probably isn't helped by how well they're brought to life.
- Here's the scenario: In acting out your favorite story in frustration, you manage to actually summon the goblins of the tale, and they steal your baby brother away. Nope, not terrifying at all! The shots of Sarah entering the darkened bedroom are purely unnerving, especially since the first thing that happens is the light switch not working, and then we see something under the blanket...which isn't there when Sarah lifts it. There are also the goblins hiding around the room, who disappear each time Sarah is about to see them.
- The Helping Hands are a bit frightening, given that they form faces out of themselves to talk, and, oh, they're a bunch of slimy greenish arms lining a long drop down a hole.
- The Cleaners' drill machine is much more lethal-looking than it has any right to be, and Sarah and Hoggle are chased down a tunnel with it in close pursuit.
- The ballroom fantasy has definite tones of depravity, and is conveyed as an uncomfortable adult situation that Sarah is entering, attracted and repulsed by it. All of the dancers are humans in goblin masquerade costumes, and everybody is just a bit unsettling.
- And it's a fantasy that Sarah's being made to have because she was drugged by eating a magic peach. She's looking dazed the entire time she's in the ballroom, and soon enough she's locked in a slow dance with Jareth himself. Jareth did the equivalent of slipping Sarah a roofie so that he could then take advantage of her sexually. The fact that Jareth is an adult male played by David Bowie and Sarah's a teenage girl played by a teenage Jennifer Connelly, makes this possibly the single scariest and most disturbing sequence in the entire movie. The David Bowie song playing during it, "As The World Falls Down", has a very creepy undercurrent to it, which doesn't help matters at all.
- It's also worth noting that it's implied Jareth created the dream down to the last detail. Once again, it's a dream of a party made up entirely of adults, save for Sarah, though she is intended to feel welcome there. It feels very much like an attempt at a tactic that real predators use to groom victims: trying to make them feel like they are mature for their age and can handle adult situations.
- The scene with the Junk Lady is rather low-key, but still incredibly creepy, as the Junk Lady heaps loads of toys and trinkets on Sarah in a desperate attempt to keep her in the mindset of a child and to prevent her from remembering to rescue her brother. The scene is in a recreation of Sarah's room, and while the Junk Lady begins by picking up a few toys around the room, she then pulls out from nowhere old stuffed animals, slippers, board games, and other trinkets from earlier and earlier in Sarah's childhood. She sits in her chair clutching her old toys, lost in memory, while the Junk Lady eventually stops handing them to her and starts piling them on her back, literally beginning to bury Sarah beneath them. The metaphor may not be subtle, but it's still unsettling to see Sarah oppressed by this figure trying to keep her a child away from her goals. Also, the strong implication is that, had Sarah stayed there, she would eventually become another Junk Lady! Eesh.
- It's a little scary seeing baby Toby on the edge of a staircase in the Escher Room, given that we don't know exactly what would happen to him if he fell.
- The Firey Gang, who can dismember themselves without it bothering them any, pulling off their limbs, heads, and even eyes. A little bit creepy in its own right, but when they're confused that Sarah's head doesn't detach like theirs, the solution one of them proposes is to just keep trying until it pops off.
- Humongous is quite frightening. He's a large robot made and piloted by the goblins to guard their gates, wields an axe that is as large as a tree, and can only say a deep, frightening "Who goes?" Just try to imagine facing someone that big in real life.
