Nightmare Fuel / Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

In the criminal justice system, there are crimes considered especially heinous and horrifying, for prosecutors, victims, and audience alike. These are the examples.

CHUNG-CHUNG!

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

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Season 1

• Pretty much all of the episode "Stalked," but the last line really takes the cake:
  Detective Stabler... how are Kathy and the kids?
• The end of episode "Contact". The detectives successfully catch and ID the subway rapist because of his last victim, or rather, her pregnancy. But the creepiness comes in how he proclaims he wanted to impregnate her, to make her have his baby, and as he's being taken away, he claims to her they'll be a family when he gets out. Yes, this guy is so sick in the head, he believes a victim would want to raise a child with him. The episode ends as she cries while Elliot comforts her.

Season 2

• The end of the episode "Honor", in which a mother who testified against her son for murdering his sister is found dead with a Slashed Throat, courtesy of her own husband. Hell, pretty much the whole situation surrounding the family in question.
• The ending of "Pique", in which the killer is found naked in bed with his sexually abusive mother whose throat he has slashed. His final line of dialogue is especially disturbing.
  I told you; I'm not a little boy anymore.

Season 3

• "Execution" gives us Matthew Linwood Brodus, a sadistic serial killer of teenage girls who tortured, raped and mutilated 13 victims for as long as he humanly could without killing them in order to prolong their suffering for as long as possible. He even refers to one of his victims as "it" in a disturbing monologue recounting how he raped and tortured her before finally gutting her, even mentioning how warm her blood was when it sprayed over him.
  I can almost taste it...

Season 4

• Tragically, this real life case is disturbingly similar to "Resilience", in which a father artificially inseminates his teenage daughter. There are double points for being based on the crimes of Fred and Rosemary West.
• In a case of Ripped from the Headlines, it's only natural that the episode "Damaged" be loaded with nightmare fuel, as it was based on the case of Karla Homolka. The very idea that a girl could be messed up enough to force someone else to rape and murder her own adopted sister is horrifying, but then you have the added disturbing layer when you remember that the girl in question was raped herself, to the point that she is a complete sociopath with no empathy and no trust for anyone—to the point where she eventually admits that she feels like she's basically dead already. The details are different from the case that it was based off of, sure, but the core of the story is virtually identical. And terrifying.
• In the episode "Soulless", the perp of the day raped and drowned a teenage girl in a toilet and as a child burned a little boy to death. Even though he was only in the show for a short time, he was truly one of the worst perps in the season.

Season 5

• The episode "Home", where a mother is an extreme control freak over her home-schooled children.
• "Mean":
  • A teenage girl is found dead in a car trunk, throat slit and with dozens of little cuts all over her body, which the medical examiner informs us were made while she was still alive, arms and legs bound, with tiny nail scissors—the attacker(s) had apparently been stabbing her with the scissors then opening them in the victim's flesh. And it turns out that the attackers were the victim's close friends, also teenage girls. And you want to know what's really scary? The episode is based on the real-life murder of Shanda Sharer, which was actually far more brutal in many respects, notably that the victim was kept trapped alive in the car trunk for many hours before the murder. The murderers eventually burned her alive. Might we add...the real-life victim was 12.
  • When the teenage girls responsible for the attack are brought in to be interrogated, the ringleader eventually has a Villainous Breakdown when she hears that her friends are selling her out, pounding on the door and screaming at them to say it to her face.
  • The worst part: The dead girl was an Alpha Bitch who made another girl's life a living hell for years, sending her text messages about how fat she was and how she should kill herself. When the other members of her Girl Posse are sent to jail, the audience is led to think the victim will finally be left in peace, but another student stepped up to start bullying her in the Girl Posse's absence, and the victim snapped and shot her dead. As she's being arrested, the episode ends with her tearfully saying to Olivia, "They went to jail...and it didn't even make any difference. No matter what anybody did, it was never gonna stop." No other SVU episode has driven home as powerfully the message that school bullying is not, and never will be, harmless.
  • In between all that may have been the most extreme case of Adults Are Useless ever on network TV. The counselor saw the bullying as a "defense mechanism", an attempt to get a restraining order against the Alpha Bitch failed, and the parents were completely oblivious to their little angels' cruelty ("They were nothing but nice to that Agnes girl, and this is what they get?")
  • The final sting? The SVU detectives tried to get the Girl Posse on child pornography when they sent a photo of the girl changing around the entire school in a very cruel fat shaming exercise. As the victim had already had her 18th birthday by the time of the incident, this fell through. What it does mean however, is that when she snaps in the finale and kills her newest tormentor, she's an adult who murdered a minor. She's likely now going to a maximum security prison for the rest of her life.
• On the other side of the gender coin, "Brotherhood" was the first episode to introduce Tau Omega, a violent and misogynist fraternity whose members beat and sodomize their new pledges, secretly make recordings of girls having sex to sell as Internet porn, and get other girls drunk in order to rape them. They have an entire book filled with the horrific things they do to their pledges and advice on how to rape girls.
  Ledger entry: Spike a girl's beer with grain alcohol and watch her eyes roll over. Tell her she can sleep it off upstairs and let the games begin. Just make sure you dress her again when you're done.
  • Rob Sweeney, the fraternity brother in charge of hazing new pledges, is revealed to be a brutal sadist, so much so that even the fraternity leader (who wasn't exactly innocent himself) occasionally thought he was going too far. He took a pledge down to the basement, beat him with a paddle for 20 minutes straight, and then shoved it so far up his anus that he bled, insulting him the entire time and asking him if he was going to quit. He shows no remorse for his actions, remaining totally calm and coolly lying throughout the trial, only breaking down in tears when he is forced to read the Tau Omega ledger on the witness stand and reveal what he did.
    Entry: Pledge Cathy was being a weenie tonight, so we showed him what we do to weenies. He'll crap blood tomorrow, but we'll make a man out of him yet. I kicked the pledge and I burned him with my [cigarette], but he still wouldn't break. So I took the paddle. And I jammed it into him. Dahmer [the murder victim] said to stop, but I kept going until Pledge Cathy cried like a girl. Dahmer saw the kid was bleeding and he stopped me. Just like a bitch to be on the rag during initiation.
• "Careless": A 14-year-old foster girl, Megan, watches her foster brother be murdered by her abusive foster mother, who also cut her face with a cheese grater. The foster mother covers up her crime by sending the girl to a psych ward, where she is constantly told she is crazy and dosed with medication. Without the main character finding out the truth, she probably would have been locked up and confined for years.
• The final episode of the season "Head", is pure nightmare fuel. An exemplary principal, with a husband and son, is driven to extreme sexual compulsion and pedophilia via a brain tumor. The tumor grew on the principal's orbifrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls judgement, impulse control and social behavior. Because of its presence, the teacher literally could not stop herself from raping her student. Though it is removed by the end of the episode, there is no guarantee that someday the tumor won't grow back. Imagine if one day, you suddenly found yourself dealing with urges you couldn't control, urges that horrified you and went against your very being, and you had no choice but to act on them due to a compulsion you couldn't understand. The scariest part about this episode? Its based on a true story.

Season 6

• "Conscience" is dark as is, with a child being murdered and a boy named Jake having been the cause of it. Jake pleads innocence and that it was self-defense, only for the investigation to all point towards the grim reality: Jake was The Sociopath embodied, having hurt, harassed, and attempted to kill before with the likelihood that after just about getting away with murder here, he'd likely do it again. Kids Are Cruel doesn't even begin to touch this one. Then Jake decided to mock the boy's father, a doctor named Morton who unwittingly got him a lighter juvenile sentence, with his victory via one blatantly hollow, backhanded apology and a Smug Snake smirk. Morton proceeds to snap, throw a bystander at Stabler to briefly catch him off-guard, immediately grab an officer's sidearm before anyone even realizes what's going on, and shoots Jake dead on the spot.
  • To highlight how utterly fucked up this episode ends, Morton gets a "not guilty" verdict thanks to the truth about Jake coming out and the jury believing he had it coming, everyone is reasonably shaken because of how unreasonable this situation is to begin with and that Morton is technically getting away with child murder, Jake's mother is refusing to accept any of this, and Morton himself points out as the episode closer that he was as sane of mind in committing his pre-meditated kill as Jake was and admitting to Stabler's face that he manipulated them to get the opportunity; the defining difference between the two is that Jake would've killed again, and Morton wouldn't, making it clear that he thinks himself only better by a hair, and yet there's nothing anyone can do about it.
• With already one episode based on Karla Homolka ("Damaged" in season 4), the show decided to make matters worse a few years later with "Pure". The short version is a teenage girl goes missing, a Canadian man played by Martin Short pretends to be a psychic and "sees" thing about the case that no one would know. Of course she's later found dead, he did it because she was a virgin (whereas his wife was not) and in unearthing the crime, its motive and the couple's history, it's learned that a year earlier, the "couple's" baby was stolen from his biological mother...who the wife brutally murdered and then cut the baby out of her stomach.
• "Quarry". The detectives suspect that a convicted pedophile is responsible for the murder of a little boy. He promises to talk if he can be allowed to see his trophies. The detectives find a storage locker full of what looks like a hundred baseball caps taken from his victims. Adding to the horror, he's able to remember the name of every victim and the date of his assault, talking in a whispery, dreamy voice that makes it clear that he's getting off on the memory. It's thoroughly sickening demonstration both of the proliferation of these guys and the fact that they are genuinely aroused at the thought of hurting children.

Season 7

• "Raw" centers around a shooting at an elementary school, injuring multiple students and killing one. The family of one of the injured students had just moved to the city a month prior and didn't know anyone in the area yet, and when the shooters' motivations come to light later, it's implied that their daughter wasn't meant to be a target of the shooting at all. The parents of the boy who was killed in the shooting had recently adopted him, thinking they were saving him from a terrible life in foster care, only for him to be murdered on a playground. The latter gets even worse at the end of the episode; it turns out that the parents were the ones who organized the shooting so that they could get money from the life insurance policies they took out on him — and they weren't even neo-Nazis themselves, just willing to ally with whoever they could find to do their dirty work. They literally adopted an innocent child just to have him murdered for the money.
• Cora, a suspect's wife in "Starved". She was an longtime alcoholic and bulimic who went into cardiac arrest and ended up in an irreversible coma while her husband and her mother fought over her decision to die. Even worse, she Dies Wide Open while comatose where her eyes were open and blinking, but were unresponsive to anything around her.
• "Influence": A teenage girl with bipolar disorder goes off her meds and tries to kill herself in a car accident, injuring six people and killing another girl, who dies from massive internal injuries. Dr. Warner later states that she was trapped under the car for 20 minutes and was likely conscious the entire time.
• "Web": This whole episode, complete with Back Story, provides a lot. A woman's husband molested their eleven-year-old son, and was sent to prison. Their son didn't cooperate during therapy because of being extensively groomed. Four years later, her younger son comes forward to say he's being molested, too. They initially suspect the father, recently released from prison, but it turns out that it's actually his brother — the older son — who made child pornography of it. The mother convinces SVU to let the older brother come home for one night so he'll flip on the consumers of the porn. Instead, he's abducted and brutally beaten by one of them. Beginning to end horrible (although it does end with a bit of hope; after the abduction, the older son finally admits that he's not okay and needs help, and breaks down for the first time, implying that he now has a chance to get better).
• The perpetrator in "Fault" is basically Nightmare Fuel personified. He's a sexual sadist who once tortured a boy so severely that even decades later, the victim was afraid to leave his house, he kills three people to kidnap the family's two young children, and then he kills one of the kids (in front of the other one, no less) just to stick it to the detectives. Luckily, it's stated that he was so busy eluding the cops, he didn't have the chance to physically hurt the surviving child (though what she witnessed and the fear it would have triggered in her was likely enough to scar her for life).

Season 8

• In "Dependent", a lawyer's family becomes the target of extremely ominous threats, including swastikas spray painted on the door, garbage left on the doorstep, and the family cat being stolen, dismembered, and returned to the house in pieces (we only see a photo of the boxes it came in). To top it all off, they got a letter from a guy whose case the lawyer lost, threatening to burn his house down, rape his wife and daughter, and kidnap his son.
• In the episode “Burned” we get to hear if not see the true pain and suffering a burn victim must endure. We don’t see much of Valerie Sennet after she was set on fire by her ex, but we can see her face tense up in fear as the burn ward staff turn on the water sprinkler for her debridement treatment. The doctor treating her says that it will be a very painful debridement and that he doesn't expect her to survive. We then see the detectives leave the burn ward while Valerie shrieks in agony as her burned skin is literally ripped off her by water sprinklers.

Season 9

• A suspect who was trying to evade capture in the episode "Fight" ends up falling into a trash compactor and the detectives, after failing to gain the attention of the operator of the compactor, listen helplessly as he is screaming and pleading to be let out and is eventually crushed to death. Granted, he was a bastard, but it's still such a horrible way to die.
• The fate of the young girl who spoke out against the leader of her gang of homeless children in "Streetwise". When we see her autopsy photo, we see that both of her eyes have been gouged out and her face was nearly cut in half at the mouth.
• "Signature" is about a Serial Killer who rapes and tortures his victims for days, which by itself (and with the description of the injuries on the victims) is Nightmare Fuel. Special mention has to go to the discovery of his Torture Cellar. A table covered with blood and various torture instruments, a filthy bathtub use for dry-drowning, a television playing a tape of a victim being tortured over and over again for psychological effect...and a still-living victim trapped underneath the table, tortured to the point where she has gangrene. One of the most horrific uses of And I Must Scream, a Fate Worse than Death and Cold-Blooded Torture on primetime TV. And it's mentioned he has done this to twenty-four victims.
• The episode "Undercover" is chockfull of Nightmare Fuel. Olivia nearly gets raped by a prison guard captain. It's a cat and mouse scene with Liv trying her best to fight for her life. Unfortunately, Liv gets overpowered and the unspeakable would've happened if it weren't for Fin making the save.
• The Mind Rape games that Elliot and Olivia go through at the hands of Merritt Rook in "Authority". First, Rook tricks Olivia into submitting to him by telling her he's got a bomb and will detonate it if she doesn't obey him. Later, he tells Eliot that he's got Olivia and takes him to a houser that has two rooms separated by a wall and a window. In one of the rooms, we have a bound Olivia whom we can see through said window, and Rook says he's gonna torture her with electricity. To prove it, he closes the window and blocks it with a fold, then presses a button and we hear a female's scream. Which means, he is actually doing it. Then, he keeps pressuring, browbeating and trying to verbally bitchslap Elliot for some of the creepiest last moments of the whole franchise. Elliot doesn't break down, though, and then Rook reveals that the screams were recorded and the newly-released Olivia is unharmed. While it's a relief, it doesn't take the fright from the "torture session" away. In hindsight, the scariest part might be that when Elliot said to Rook "I don't abuse my authority" he actually believed it.
• Robert Morten in "Svengali" is a convicted serial killer and rapist who saw his crimes as art and told a young woman (the episode's perp) to kill for him. His affable yet chilly demeanor is truly unnerving; what's worse, he has a fandom of sorts who loves and idolizes him. The way he speaks of having sex with the young woman he charmed/brainwashed is more than enough to give one a shiver.

Season 10

• In "PTSD", Olivia suffers from the eponymous disorder as a consequence of the near-rape experience from season 9's "Undercover". It comes to a head when, while trying to break up a fight between two soldiers (one suspected of killing a female soldier and her unborn child) beating each other, Olivia hits her head and, without realizing it, comes mere moments away from shooting the suspect in the head.
• "Hothouse":
  • Jennifer Banks, a teenage prodigy, is abusing Provigil, a prescription stimulant, to help her study. Olivia finds one of her notebooks — her handwriting starts out neat but gets smaller and smaller and turning the next page reveals a chaotic mess of words scribbled all over, called hypergraphia. Way scarier than it sounds.
  • She later has a psychotic breakdown in the interrogation room that puts most serial killers to shame. "I just wanted to talk to her, that's all. And take the next ferry back. But she screamed at me! Why was I following her? She called me a loser! She said I was pathetic and dumb and that I was only at Morewood [their elite prep school] because my family is rich, that I'd never be able to make it on brains alone like her! She tried walking away, and so I grabbed her arm, and she pushed me! So I jabbed her chest with my pen, and she pushed me again! And so I pulled her hair, and I slammed her head into the railing, OVER! AND OVER! AND OVER AGAIN!"
  • What's possibly even scarier is that the girl showed very few signs of being insane before the abovementioned rant happened. She wasn't a sociopath or a serial killer, she didn't come from a poor or abusive family, she had no Freudian Excuse like most criminals under 18 have on this show. She cracked from a combination of pressure to keep up her grades at her elite private school and the drugs she was taking to improve her performance, which caused her to stay awake for six days. It's terrifying to think that a few outside factors could drive even the most normal person to insanity.
  • How about the end of the episode?
    DA: "My next case. 15, raped and murdered his six year old step-sister. No remorse. Says he'd do it again. You want him out at 21 too?"
    • What really sells the scene is that he just smirks proudly at Benson and Stabler like a sociopath, then it cuts to black.
• In episode 10, "Smut", the perp of the episode is a freak addicted to rape porn and drugs women into "consenting" to rape fantasies with him. The drugs eventually wear off and the women who were raped by him have no memory of the act, leading to Olivia having to tell a woman she was raped and showing her the video of him doing it to get her to testify. Imagine not knowing you were raped, and eventually finding out in the worst way possible.

Season 11

• In "Solitary", when a man placed on trial for tossing Elliot from the roof (he thought Elliot was coming to arrest him, although Elliot was actually about to tell him he'd been cleared) describes how spending nearly his entire sentence for a previous crime in solitary confinement drove him insane, Elliot decides to see if there's any truth to his claims by spending a weekend in the hole. What follows is a montage of Elliot getting a taste of how being locked up in a tiny cell with no human contact can be detrimental to one's mental well-being. The montage (devoid of almost any dialogue) lasts about five minutes, but it feels a lot longer (not just for the viewer, either: Elliot goes off on the guard because he thought he'd been left in for a week instead of just three days).
• The premise of the episode "Hammered" isn't anything out of the ordinary: a man wakes up and finds a bludgeoned and raped woman in his apartment and no memory of it because he'd been drinking. The Nightmare Fuel comes later when ADA Paxton has the crime lab make up a videotape showing the sequence of events in the killing, complete with realistic blood spatter, bloody hammer, and the unblinking, psycho-faced head of their main suspect, played by Noel Crane, photoshopped in.

Season 12

• In the episode "Merchandise", after a car hits a 15 year old girl it's discovered that she was starved to the point of death as well as raped so that she was pregnant. Even worse? Her brother killed her by pushing her in front of the car, because she was trying to escape the human traffickers that had them because their "masters" would take out their rage at her escape on him and the rest of the children they were holding. Later when they actually start closing in on the traffickers, the bastards chain up the kids and force feed them poison so that they will be dead when the police arrive and unable to identify them. SVU has done human trafficking episodes before, but this one was horrifyingly deeper than usual, especially exploring the desperate mindset of someone who has been utterly deprived of their freedom and their sense of security from minute to minute.
• The episode "Behave" has a truly terrifying premise. The victim, Vicky Sayers (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt) has been raped, but Olivia later uncovers it's not the first time this man has raped her. In fact, he's been stalking her for the past fifteen years, all over the country, and has raped her four times in that time span. The detectives later discover that, because he's a shipping mogul, he has warehouses in over a dozen major cities, and has been doing this exact same thing to numerous women for years. And this isn't bringing into account his Stalker Shrine to every woman he's ever attacked that Olivia finds...
• Good Lord, does the episode "Bully" have its fair share. A woman is found dead in her apartment, dead of a severed carotid artery which produced so much blood, it not only dripped down onto a blank canvas of an artist holding a show downstairs, but he then used a bucket of her blood to paint with. She was also shown to be sexually assaulted and her autopsy discovered she had an elevated blood alcohol level and that she was pulling out her own hair from stress, which she got from her job. Turns out, she was taping her boss, who in spite of presenting herself as a warm, "big sister" type to the victim, was in fact a workplace bully who screamed at and verbally abused her and her fellow employees and even slapped her around. After the world discovered what kind of a person she was, she held a press conference, blamed everyone else for her behavior and committed suicide by shooting herself in the head. Eventually, the real killer emerged as her "handsome" younger male employee who tried to get her to join the other coworkers in buying out their boss. He said that he just pushed her down in an argument, she fell onto a coffee table and cut herself on glass. What makes it worse, however, is the fact that in order to make it look like she had done it to herself, he then shoved the bottle of wine she had up the other end, which is a trick he learned from his mother, an alcoholic and former opera singer who did it to preserve her voice. Warner also told the detectives about it being an old trick used by teenaged girls so they don't get caught drinking that made Benson acted as an Audience Surrogate by saying "file that under 'Things-I-Never-Wanted-To-Know'."

Season 13

• The last few minutes of "Lost Traveler" reveals who killer of a 10-year-old Romani boy is: a seemingly nice 14-year-old girl. What's bone-chilling about the scene is how calm she is throughout. She seems only mildly annoyed at worst when her friend rats her out. When asked why she killed the boy (first torturing him and then strangling him) and framed a mentally-disabled man for it, she simply replies, "Why not?" Brr.
  • The girl's demeanor is also terrifying in retrospect. She originally comes off as nice and friendly, and in the end, she's cold, calculating, and just plain evil. what made her this way?
• In "Theatre Tricks," at a club devoted to "embracing sexual freedom", one of the performers is raped onstage while dozens of people watch, thinking it's part of the show even as she screams for help.
  • It gets even worse when the truth comes out; despite the victim having multiple creepy men in her life (including a guy spying on her with cameras planted throughout her home that she never knew about), it turns out the real mastermind behind the attack was her female roommate and best friend whom she'd grown up with. She set up a fake email address for the victim and a profile on a hook-up site, then contacted the judge she knew (through the site) had a thing for roleplaying rape fantasies in public, pretending to be the victim and setting up a "scene" at the theatre performance. The friend was angry that the victim always seemed to have things go right for her because she was more physically attractive, including getting the part in the theatre production that the plain-looking roommate had been sleeping with the director for. The most chilling thing? When the victim asks how on earth her best friend could do this to her, she replies without a single shred of remorse, "It's about time something bad happened in your life".
• "Official Story" includes a montage of witnesses and members of the squad being horrifically brutalized and threatened by the head of a military contracting company. One of his female employees was brutally gang raped by five of his men; he had her locked under armed guard in solitary confinement while she was suffering from internal injuries, then covered up the assault. The victim's father is knifed five times in prison; the victim herself is undressed, groped, and essentially assaulted a second time by three of the CEO's thugs; a drunk veteran who was a witness to the cover up is killed via alcohol poisoning while under protection; and Benson's house is trashed. If that wasn't bad enough, a thug calls Amaro's house, talks to his DAUGHTER, and threatens his wife, who is about to be redeployed.

Season 14

• "Vanity's Bonfire": Dia Nobile is a mentally unstable photographer who became a Yandere for Kent Webster, a married lawyer she had an affair with, befriending his daughter to get information on their family. When Kent's father had a lawyer place the baby girl, Tessa, with adoptive parents, Dia began plotting to take her back, stalking the parents and decorating her own loft to look exactly like Tessa's bedroom, eventually kidnapping her, which begins the plot of the episode. Notably, unlike most SVU villains, she's not a sadist or a sociopath playing games for her own amusement. She has convinced herself beyond all reason that Kent wants to leave his wife and daughter to form a new family with her and baby Tessa. When Kent rejects her, she punishes him by leaking details of their affair to the press, on the day of his and his wife's anniversary (which she was almost certainly aware of, considering her stalking habits). She is utterly lost and delusional, clinging to a fantasy that can never be real, and willing to destroy two other families to fulfill her selfish desires. Even her voice is high-pitched and strangely childlike, adding to her image as a Psychopathic Womanchild. It makes one wonder what happened in her past to make her so deranged...
  • On the side of Tessa's adoptive parents. Imagine that you and your husband have a baby through a surrogate mother. A few months later, your baby girl is kidnapped in broad daylight by a complete stranger who claims to be her biological mother. Then you find out that not only is your daughter actually this woman's child, but is not even biologically your child and was conceived from a completely different set of parents. On top of that, it turns out your lawyer faked your adoption papers without telling you and there's a chance that this crazy woman might actually get custody of your daughter on a technicality, leading the judge to order your child temporarily remanded to foster care until things can be sorted out. Thankfully, Dia is dead by the end of the episode, meaning that Tessa was likely returned to her adoptive parents, but we never actually see the outcome.
• In "Born Psychopath", 10-year-old Henry has no soul, pushing his younger sister down the stairs and slicing his mother's hand open with a knife. He then tries to kill his sister and locks his mom in the laundry room, then goes to his friend's apartment, ties him up and drowns his dog in the bathtub (we only get to see its leash draped over the faucet), after that he takes a five-year-old hostage with a gun and shoots Amaro, who is thankfully saved by his bulletproof vest. When Rollins asks him why, he tells her that he wanted to see if she would melt from the inside out and he thinks he didn't do anything wrong. Just before the credits he fakes tears and says he's sorry, but he quickly drops the act, and it's very clear to see that this kid is beyond help. It's a scary thought to think that your kid could be a heartless, soulless monster. Even Huang was freaked out by this kid.^note Even worse is that some children are like this in real life. Henry was never bullied and his family, for the most part, treats him well but still chooses to do so simply because he wants to without remorse.
• "Girl Dishonored": Tau Omega returns, this time when three of their members are convicted of raping a girl. The detectives discover that the fraternity is known as "The Rape Factory" around campus, when they discover many more victims who were forced to keep quiet by the administrators, who sweep Tau Omega's crimes under the rug to preserve the college's reputation. During the trial, the prosecution presents as evidence a T-shirt made by Tau Omega that displays a drawing of a hogtied and gagged woman in a bikini and the words "We don't take no for an answer!"

Season 15

• All the episodes surrounding the character William "The Beast" Lewis are filled with Nightmare Fuel. His character makes an appearance in a total of 4 episodes, highly unorthodox for a non-regular character in this series. Lewis is a sadistic, psychopathic Serial Rapist/spree murderer/serial kidnapper and his entire existence seems to be dedicated to moving from place to place looking for new victims to rape and torture. He consistently manages to elude police and is skilled at manipulating the criminal justice system to work in his favor. He has no remorse for any of his actions and does not seem to fear death (Lewis actually literally dies and comes back to life several times.) He proudly boasts about the heinous crimes he's committed (often while smiling) and his rape victims range from teenaged girls to elderly women. His long list of victims include Olivia Benson. He is shown assaulting her both on and off-screen and nearly rapes her twice; the first time he is interrupted and the second time he stops when Olivia refuses to give him the satisfaction of showing any sign of any fear or emotion whatsoever. Lewis meets his demise by eventually committing suicide right in front of Olivia in the last few seconds of the episode "Beast's Obsession".
• The entire episode "Beast's Obsession". The episode starts off with serial rapist/murderer William Lewis escaping from prison, recklessly raping, torturing, and killing innocent people and he later takes a 12-year-old girl hostage as his main goal is to have a final showdown with Olivia. The last 10 minutes are without a doubt the most graphic and disturbing; Lewis is physically shown sexually assaulting Olivia, first touching between her legs and her backside and later grabbing her breasts and forcefully kissing her. (At one point while she's forcefully bent over a table he undoes Olivia's pants and although it's not shown onscreen, it's implied that he touches her privates as well). He seems intent or raping her in front of his young hostage but appears to be displeased at Olivia's stoic response and changes his mind. Lewis finally forces Olivia into playing Russian Roulette with him, and they take turns putting a pistol with only one bullet to their heads and pulling the trigger. In the remaining last minute, Lewis tells Olivia to say "goodbye" implying that he is finally going to kill her but in the end he puts the gun to his own head and commits suicide. The episode ends with his blood splattering onto Olivia's face as she stares in horror.

Season 16

• The premiere, "Girls Disappeared," has a terrifying montage of witnesses to a gang-rape and murder being picked off. A pimp gets shanked in prison nine times by three men, a 14-year-old hooker is shot along with her john, a hitman is executed by lethal injection in a prison hospital ward, and then:
  "This is Sergeant Benson, Manhattan SVU! Shots fired at De Witt Clinton Playground!"
• "Holden's Manifesto":
  • The titular antagonist. Imagine a boy you didn't go out with as a kid waiting 10 years and letting his hatred and anger grow, going on a killing spree of anyone who didn't go out with him, even people he never even asked out. Some of the names on his list are of people he knew in kindergarten. What's really scary, however, is the fact that he continually justifies himself into a camera using logic that a lot of people in the real world use out of frustration at no one going out with them. And if that wasn't enough, everything he says is in a threatening/comforting tone of voice to really up the levels of nightmare fuel. Worse still, it's Ripped from the Headlines — and at least one similar incident has happened since.
  • The climax in particular is nail-biting, as Rollins has to rely only on The Power of Acting and her clever but incredibly risky manipulation of Holden to save the hostages, Amaro, and herself. Even when Rollins appears to have the upper hand, it's still terrifying because there's not a whole lot preventing Holden from snapping and just shooting her. And right when it appears she may be able to disarm him, he's very suddenly killed by a sniper's bullet, so suddenly it almost counts as a Jump Scare. And the blood splatters all over Rollins. Ick.
  • Are you a teenage girl or young woman, or the parent of a teenage girl or young woman? If so, this episode will terrify you. Things like this happen in real life with disturbing frequency, so seeing it on the screen, with so much screentime given to the antagonist, is Paranoia Fuel incarnate.
• "Glasgowman's Wrath":
  • It's Law & Order's take on The Slender Man Mythos, which features two teenage girls stabbing one's younger sister and then blaming the eponymous Glasgowman. As the squad investigates, the girls reveal that the older sister was seemingly forced into the act by her friend, who had delusions of Glasgowman. The friend is sent to a psychiatric facility, and the older sister is given a free pass. It seems as though the two were telling the truth, and they'll get the help they need. But at the very end, on the elevator after the trial, as the friend and the older sister stand side by side in the elevator in front of Carisi, he notices them make a pinky promise behind their backs...
  • The images drawn of Glasgowman are quite disturbing, even if the artist that created the character is pretty clearly harmless, if a bit anti-social and quirky.
  • Perry, the crazy friend, is practically the walking embodiment of Troubling Unchildlike Behavior. Early on, another mom mentions that she goes through a lot of babysitters (and later mentions that there's something "off" about her), and when the detectives check her social media page, they notice that she and Mia, the older sister, seem to be each other's sole confidantes, talking to each other and absolutely no one else. She spins an elaborate story about Glasgowman stabbing Zoe, the little sister, and kidnapping her and Mia, and when it's proven false, she rants in the interrogation room about how Glasgowman commanded her to spill "innocent blood" and how she stabbed Zoe, killed a cat (which she believed to be Glasgowman) and then stabbed herself. Even when asked on the witness stand if she knew that stabbing Zoe was wrong, she instead rambles about how Glasgowman is coming back to kill them all.
  • At the end, even though Mia knows that Perry is insane and tried to murder her little sister, she's still in league with her, as shown by the pinky promise they make at the end. Earlier, the detectives mentioned that she has no other friends who she talks to except Perry. From the looks of it, she's so desperate not to be alone that she'll do anything to keep her only friend, even if that friend is clearly a danger to others. Which is scarier: Mia putting her friendship with a serial-killer-in-the-making above her younger sister's safety...or the possibility that Mia might actually hate her sister to the point of allowing Perry to kill her?
• "Spousal Privilege"
  • Admittedly, one of their better ones as it illustrates one of the many reasons why it's really hard to leave a domestically abusive situation. A woman (Paula) is constantly making excuses for her husband so she doesn't lose her family, even if it means dealing with a shiner every now and again. The audience and detectives clearly see right through her defenses and can see she is literally stuck in a hell in which she and her son either gets battered and beaten by an abusive man who pays for everything and handles the bills; or doesn't and not only has no way to take care of herself but also puts her son's health in jeopardy. Once he's convicted, the cops are sure they've done the right thing but now have no answer for what Paula and her son is supposed to do at this point. With decent subtlety, the show illustrates that many victims are stuck in situations beyond their control with no chance to change anything.
• "Intimidation Game":
  • A woman who married rich is developing a video game and a gang of misogynistic gamers take offense to this. Starting with simply sending threats to her and assaulting her female employees, when she makes the announcement of her game, they abduct her on stage, causing a black out as a distraction. Then it gets even more depraved; the gang make and post videos of them beating the woman, raping her and forcing her to call herself a slut and deny her love for her husband. They see it all as a game and consider each video posting a form of "leveling up". When the police finally catch them, they have her wrists taped to a gun and set a trap for her to fire. Even when the gang's leader is killed and the rest are arrested, the poor woman is so broken by the experience, that as far as she's concerned, they won. As much as people love to mock this episode (the bad writing did not help), it's not at all hilarious for women gamers and those in the games industry who have experienced harassment in real life.
  • The woman getting "Swatted" is quite scary considering how often people who stream video games online have fallen victim to swatting themselves. Also considering past incidents with SWAT teams (like the one that seriously injured a baby with a flash grenade after going to the wrong house), it's not farfetched that a SWAT team could potentially kill someone who happened to fall victim to a swatting prank.
  • Someone already had. Gamers have been using the SWAT teams for what they consider pranks and not understanding the severity of what they're doing. For the records, on average, SWAT is not the team you call for diplomacy. If anything, they're called in when diplomacy fails. They're the "shoot first" division because that's their lives on a daily basis. Now imagine you're sitting down enjoying a game and all of a sudden you got a team of officers breaking into your house armed to the teeth ready to blow your head off because of an "anonymous tipster" who can really amount to a sore loser in a video game. Imagine actually being killed over a video game.

Season 17

• "Patrimonial Burden" covers a reality TV show family that has an unexpected pregnancy occur with their 13-year-old daughter, with all fingers pointing towards one of the sons who has the signs of a sex offender. The reality of the matter, however, turns out to be their pastor, who effectively raised and brainwashed the family into god-fearing individuals under his own thumb. And this was the second daughter he had done this to, while throwing that son under the bus to cover his own ass. Even worse, he's the family's attorney as well, and took advantage of the victim's fourteenth birthday to try to marry her with the family's trusting support. The sheer horror and betrayal they all face when he's arrested at the end is only accentuated by the pastor's downright predatorial proclamations of love and his calm mannerisms assuming there's no case against him. Carisi definitely said what most of the viewers were probably thinking, especially since corrupt priest are a hot button topic to him.^note He wasn't entirely acting. The episode is based Josh Duggar's molestation of multiple children, including his sisters. Peter Scanavino stated in an interview that the entire affair, and especially the Duggars' hypocrisy in attacking the LGBT community as "a danger to children" despite covering up their own son's actions made his blood boil
  Carisi:(disgusted) You really are a piece of crap.
• "Catfishing Teacher" seems like the typical case of kidnapping and sexual predatory factors by a school wrestling team coach, but the case has nothing to go by when the victim's testimony is pulled by the parents, and a former unconfirmed victim seems unwilling to testify. What the team finds happening instead is when he comes in with a "confession" from the coach, recording it while making sure the man feels utter agony. And he walked into the precinct to show this to the officers. Even as Benson and Barba clearly find him a troubled Sympathetic Murderer, the guy finds enough comfort in what he did that he pleads guilty and wants to reject a lawyer, got the best sleep in eight years and is glad to hear the coach bled to death. As an attorney prepping the first-degree murder charge puts it, "His life ended at fifteen."
  • What's more fun than watching the brutal torture of a child predator? Police trying to find him before he dies, and coming across a barely-moving, almost color-faded heap of what the bastard formerly was with blood all over, a knife in the leg, and a barely-recognizable face contorted into unending pain.
• The plot of "Townhouse Incident", where Benson's stuck in a home invasion hostage situation with no one else privy to her status enough to check in on her (at first), and dealing with a bunch of crooks that are way in over their heads and dealing cruelty for kicks before they realize how bad they messed up. It's Benson's absolute worst nightmare when she has to hear a 16-year-old neighbor of hers screaming from being raped by the drugged-up head of the group, and she's unable to do anything.
• "Assaulting Reality" deals with a reality TV contestant being raped by another, but in the process of the investigation the production team effectively edit and manipulate the whole thing to try to dramatize and gain views off of the incident. It culminates in the revelation that even the bathrooms and privacy of the contestants are completely compromised, the staff taking all the credit for the investigation process while emotionally manipulating the victim, and one of the staff members thrown under the bus and her career ruined to cover their own asses when the cover-up failed. The SVU are disgusted when they find out the truth of how amoral the staff were.
• The two-parter finale is downright bleak because even despite having quickly gotten the charges and circumstances against a rapist, it's who the rapist is that causes everything to go to hell. Gary Munson is a prominent Corrections Officer who happens to have the power of a union backing him, which starts threatening to kill the SVU team for daring to raise a hand against him. Even worse, his wife has to deal with the very real threat that he gave her an STD without her knowledge and is onto her urge to divorce him for realizing his crimes. Dodds even ends up fatally wounded and passing away for trying to stop the man from killing her in a hostage situation.
  • Dodds' fatal injury is terrible, because functionally speaking he lived through the injury and managed to recover despite an artery bullet wound to the gut. The reason he died? An unexpected medical complication where the flow of blood to his brain rushed into clots, rendering him braindead. Dodds Sr. utterly breaks down because of the absurdity of the situation, looking at his breathing son but knowing he's effectively dead.

Season 18

• In "Next Chapter", Carisi gets a gun held to his head — not as a threat, but by a man who has already made up his mind to shoot him. And then he hears the sound of a shot being fired. Even though that shot is ultimately to his benefit (it's Olivia taking out the guy with the gun), it probably took him a few seconds to figure out what had happened. What must he have been thinking for those few seconds?

Season 19

• In the first part of the season finale, Remember Me, when Lourdes Vega, the episode's victim, burns Miguel Lopez with a lit cigarette, his ear-piercing scream of agony can send chills down the spines of many.

Season 22

• In "Welcome to the Pedo Motel", the brutal way Lonnie Liston, a convicted sexual predator, dies halfway through the episode via lynching due to a conspiracy against him is unsettling to look at or even imagine.
• In the very next episode, "Our Words Will Not Be Heard", a group of masked criminals run a site on the dark web and commit torturous assaults, kidnappings, and even an attempted murder on camera for their leader's followers.
• "Post-Graduate Psychopath": Remember Henry Mesner, the evil kid from "Born Psychopath"? He's all grown up, and he's gotten even worse. He rapes his old psychiatrist's daughter, murders his father, step-mother, and half-brother, and kidnaps his sister and holds a gun to her head. He also stalked Rollins and took pictures of her daughter Jesse, along with giving her a stuffed animal he stole from the girl he raped.

Season 23

• In "They'd Already Disappeared", Velasco and Rollins are investigating a warehouse that a local kid told them was the home of a vampire. When they get inside, they find the mummified corpses of at least ten women, along with the fresh corpses of Tania and Beauty, the two women they were originally looking for.
• "Silent Night, Hateful Night" consists of another terrorist attack. Only this one is at specific religious locations and monuments.
• In "Video Killed The Radio Star", the episode ends with Mitch Kaplan walking into Robert Flynn's radio station and shoots him dead on video for raping his wife Ellen with the detectives watching all with visible horror in their eyes and expressions.
• "Once Upon A Time in El Barrio"'s opening scene shows the leader of a sex trafficking ring, Jorge Padilla murder a trafficked girl through arson ON SCREEN (her lack of reaction and the screams of her friends make this a whole lot worse). Later, when Velasco and Fin go to locate her body, seeing the corpse after it was already burned makes it even worse.
• "Tangled Strands of Justice" not only features a past rape victim as a perpetrator of grand larceny, but the attitude and behavior of a certain Detective Nadia Szabo manages to make the episode turn terrifying due to her hostility toward Olivia Benson and her complete disregard for the privacy of rape victims, past and present. Her extreme hostility is taken up to eleven when she storms into Captain Benson's room, pissed off later on.
  • The rapist/killer of missing 13-year-old Aretha Green revealing what he did because, as it turned out, he wasn't actually Aretha's biological grandfather (her biological grandmother had a fling with another man because Coleman worked a lot). This made Coleman believe raping the girl was not sinful because it was not incestuous.
  Coleman Green: I never meant to kill her. I loved that girl. She was the light of my life. And us together... She was not my grandchild. So it was not a sin against God.

Season 24

• The Establishing Character Moment of Elias Olsen in "The Steps We Cannot Take" where he enters the Singhs' residence wearing a welder's mask and pointing a gun at the Singhs before shooting them and kidnapping their daughter.
  • Word of God says the welder's mask was David Graziano's idea because he thought it would look scary on an SVU villain.
• In "Soldier Up", Duarnte showing Olivia a tree full of underwear from women raped by BX9 members. Just the sight of it causes Olivia to roar in anger.
  • After interviewing a BX9 rapist, an alarm sounds and Olivia and Duarte see said rapist being kicked and shanked to death by other inmates.
• "Intersection" doesn't just show us the aftermath of a rape, but shows us as it's happening. The perp, under the guise of an ambulance driver, drags a woman away to what seems to be medical care, but instead rapes her while she's concussed. Her fiance tries to help her by breaking into the ambulance, but he is too weakened from the accident to help her.
• "Bad Things" features the return of Elias Olsen who kidnaps a man named Mark Reed (who later succumbs to malnutrition due to Elias' imprisonment) because Mark bumped into him, which reminded Elias of his father. Awhile after being caught, Elias breaks through the two-way mirror from the interrogation room and attacks Muncy.

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