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Nightmare Fuel: Michael Jackson
As a child entertainer, Michael was exposed to a lot of adult stuff he wasn't prepared for. One can imagine how scary sexuality and growing into an adult must've felt to him. Plus: his father regularly beat him. Watch Michael's angry way of dancing again and bear in mind what kind of emotional abuse and mental confusion he must have gone through...Suddenly this makes his dancing look disturbing, instead of cool.
His plastic surgery, which became creepier and more grotesque every year.
Never mind what the large number of oxygen tanks found in his apartment after his death might've been used for.
The famous "Thriller" video, an homage to 1950's horror films, which features him transforming into both a were-cat and a zombie (the former on-screen and quite detailed, what with the video being directed by John Landis), and ends with Jackson turning to face the camera with yellow cat eyes and a Slasher Smile in the final scene. And if those examples don't creep you out, then Vincent Price's cackling at the very end certainly will!
The lines "She showed a photo/My baby cried/His eyes were like mine" in "Billie Jean".
His music video to "Leave Me Alone" is so surreal that it can be frightening for very young children who don't know what's going on.
The music video to "Ghosts" had some scary moments as well.
From Real Life: Many people were and are still disturbed by Jackson, an adult man who lived alone in a large mansion, inviting children (including prepubescent boys) to stay with him and even sleep in the same bed as him.
"Morphine." It describes a patient being lured into an addiction to demerol by his doctor. Sounds familiar?
The "panther dance" epilogue of "Black or White". Emotionally powerful and set in a dreary, frightening back alley at night, it's inspired claims that it contains messages pertaining to the Illuminati via secretive, discreet symbolic and expressive body language. An alternate interpretation is that he's expressing solidarity with the Black Panthers, given that the sequence is bookended with him in the form of an actual black panther. Even if neither is true, there is something about the video that screams that there is something evil amongst the backdrop as Michael Jackson dances and stirs up commotion in his location.
It doesn't help that it's aimlessly violent and sexual, with copious amounts of crotch-grabbing. After it initially aired and complaints rolled in from families, Jackson allowed the segment to be dropped — not hard to do, since the actual song was over by that point. (Indeed, another theory about the segment is that he knew there was No Such Thing As Bad Publicity and decided to deliberately court controversy.) A reedit of the full-length version has random racist graffiti added, via CGI, to the items he smashes up.
Taken on its own, "Smooth Criminal" is a fairly chilling song about a woman being attacked during a home-invasion. The chorus repeats, "Annie, are you okay? Won't you tell us that you're okay?" and the line, "it was her/your doom," repeats throughout the song as well, suggesting that she was either killed or left for dead by the intruder.
Before you get too scared, though, the video, its use in a Sega Genesis game, and the cover of the song by a heavy metal band (Alien Ant Farm) make the song sound less scary in retrospect.
