Nightmare Fuel / Nine Inch Nails

Per site policy, Spoilers Off applies to all Nightmare Fuel pages, so all spoilers here are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

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The worst part about seeing a bound latex suit being filled with water? Thinking about the person inside.

Nine Inch Nails has created no shortage of memorable art in its decades of existence — memorable both in great senses... and not-so-great senses.

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Albums with their own pages:

• Broken
• The Downward Spiral
• The Fragile
• Ghosts series
• EP Trilogy

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Music:

Pretty Hate Machine

• Let's make one thing really clear, Pretty Hate Machine is not really a "scary" album. It's one of NIN's softer albums, which makes it quite an easy listen for any new NIN listeners. However, that doesn't mean it doesn't have its fair share of creepy moments:
  • The intro to "Kinda I Want To" can be slightly unnerving for any first time listener. The weird garbled voice and the moaning sound which loops for a few times and then bursts suddenly into the song may catch people off-guard for the first few listens.
  • The album uses a few unnerving samples, particularly during the track "Sanctified" which samples the movie Midnight Express during a scene where the main character is writing a letter home to his parents after being arrested for drug smuggling. This would be fine enough, but you would never know, as during this section there's a full-on distorted Gregorian Monk choir chanting ominously burying the sample. The song ends with a sample of screaming taken from the film as the sustained guitar noise bleeds into the next track "Something I Can Never Have". It should be noticed that this sample has been removed from the newly remastered version of the album—likely due to licencing issues—leaving just the creepy monk choir chanting.
    • The sudden jolts of static during the chorus of "Sanctified" can also catch people off-guard too for the first time.
  • "Get Down, Make Love" may be a uncomfortable listen for the first-time listener. From the samples taken from b-movies and porn, the loop of a female moaning, and the infamous section where there's a selection of various Queen songs garbled and sped up, which interrupts the song for a few moments, can really put people off the song until they get used to it.

With Teeth

• The entirety of With Teeth can be considered Nightmare Fuel to an extent, as the majority of songs are written during a period of writer's block Trent had after going to rehab to battle his substance abuse addiction. Songs such as "Every Day Is Exactly The Same", "Sunspots", "With Teeth", The Collector and many more can take a whole new meaning when looking at the lyrics from the point of view of someone trying to beat addiction.
• "You Know What You Are" is quite the paranoia fuel, especially when listening to the album with good quality speakers or headphones as we hear Trent's screaming vocals circle around the listener whilst he chastises himself for his past actions and calls himself out for being "full of shit".
• The final track, "Right Where It Belongs". Despite being uncharacteristically calm and quiet, the lyrics (which are basically arguing in favor of solipsism) are chilling.
• The album's scrapped incarnation as the concept album Bleedthrough may have been quite the nightmare, as Trent explained the concept being "loss and possible discovery of self, along with alternate layers of reality and perception set inside a nightmare you can't seem to wake up from; with lots of feedback". This new concept was very heavily promoted on nin.com, showing quotes from different Sci-Fi books, particularly The Lathe of Heaven, which is about a character who's dreams could alter past and present reality. The concept was scrapped, as Trent wasn't able to get it to work and not to mention the popular jokes associating the album's title with blood and tampons. The concept hasn't been scrapped entirely, as a lot of the songs on With Teeth mention the concept of things "bleeding through", and not to mention Trent's recent work with the EP Trilogy (Not The Actual Events, Add Violence and Bad Witch) sharing an almost similar (yet foggy) concept.

Year Zero

• The concept behind the Year Zero album and ARG: brutal, fascist American theocracy following biological terrorism, a drug-enhanced fanatical military, drugs in the water supply to subdue the populace and increasingly frequent mind-numbing visions of ghostly, god-like hands descending from the sky known as "The Presence." "Proof" found via scrambled messages from the future scattered across websites and audio and video found on USB keys discovered at concert venues.
• Hell, the album cover itself◊ is as unsettling as it gets. It depicts a photo of "The Presence" descending to Earth, or at least what can we understand of its form.
• The entire lore is pretty terrifying. Tribute websites dedicated to people killed in a bombing of the Academy Awards, a radio broadcast of an explosion at Wrigley Field, the diary of a child who watches his family die off...
  • The broadcast of the Wrigley Field explosion deserves special mention. From the very calm, monotone, emotionless voice of the radio broadcaster, who is the bomber of the stadium and describes his scarily detailed methods of bombing it, the very numerous and spine-chilling screaming of the crowds, to the ending where he snipes one of the game announcers. Coupled with a nightmarishly realistic tone, you have something you will never feel the same again after hearing.
  Game announcer: My skin is turning shit brown!
• The Tear Jerker Hour of Arrival site dips very, very heavily into Nightmare Fuel territory at the end.
  ITS HERE
  o my god, dj, it's over the capitol. o my god, o my god i'm so sorry.
  this is the beginning
  the stars are blowing out like candles, danny jane
  make a wish make a wish make a wish make a wish make a
• Also, the corrupt, scrambled appearance of the websites, caused due to the sites being sent back in time. Also, said event (as implied by "Hour of Arrival") seems to have occurred during the end of the world (February 10, 0000).
• The beginning of "The Great Destroyer"'s second half can be quite startling to a first time listener.
• Even though it's well known for being featured in the soundtrack of Need For Speed Undercover, "The Warning (Stefan Goodchild Feat. Doudou N'Diaye Rose)" is much more darker and unsettling compared to the original.
• At one of their concerts, a USB stick was found in the bathroom. On the USB stick was a single audio file which, when put in a spectrogram, revealed a phone number. Calling this phone number had you tapping into a call between a mother and her daughter, with the daughter screaming in fear about being caught in a club shooting. Listen for yourself.

The Slip

• "Lights in the Sky" is guaranteed to make the blood run cold in your veins.
• The Last Note Nightmare of "Corona Radiata", especially with the sounds of an infant screaming and cats hissing being heard in the background.
• The lyrics from final track, "Demon Seed" are sort of chilling, however:
  "It keeps growing"
  "And I can feel it breathe"
  "I have been trying"
  "To behave myself"
  "It keeps growing"
  "And I can feel it breathe"
  "I have been trying"
  "To tolerate you"

  "Well I am reaching the point"
  "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah"

  "I thought maybe"
  "I thought this would go away"
  "But it continues"
  "The only constant"
  "Every day"
  "Stronger"

Hesitation Marks

• The first track, "The Eater Of Dreams", starts with a bunch of odd bleeping noises and several synth melodies while a creepy drone becomes louder and louder until suddenly fading into "Copy of A". The robotic voice heard in the background before being cut short is pretty unsettling too.
• "Black Noise", right after "While I'm Still Here" destroys and suddenly swallows the entire track under a mix of echoing screams until the album closes on a very creepy and uneasy note.

Other

• Track 3 pf the Quake OST has distorted gibberish throughout, along with the horrid, squishing writhings of the Hell Mother Shub Niggurath.
• For those who played Doom³, you may notice that Trent Reznor's original theme for the game itself from the Alpha release is pretty unsettling compared to the other track used in the retail. It's full of droning, breathing noises, distorted guitar notes, and you can hear the mumbling voices in the background. It's like if you're stuck inside a dark cave with no way to return and getting chased by a horde of monsters. Very disturbing.

Music videos:

Music Videos

Pretty Hate Machine

• "Down in It," footage from which was analyzed by the FBI as possible footage of a "gang killing" before it was revealed what it was.
  • The story of the video was later featured on Hard Copy, who produced this semi-ridiculous feature on the story.

Year Zero

• "Survivalism" was the only track from Year Zero to be released with a music video back in 2007. With several hidden easter eggs for the Year Zero ARG, we follow a SWAT team commencing a raid on an apartment complex through different surveillance cameras showing the lives of the people in the apartment building whilst the band performs the song somewhere in the building. After panning through the different surveillance cameras (which show a topless woman putting on makeup, a gay couple having sex in bed, a team of graffiti artists working with stencils, a woman strung out on the fictional drug 'Opal', a couple watching television among other things) and seeing the SWAT team entering the building and going floor by floor. Near the end of the video we see that all the members of the apartment complex are disturbed by what seems to be noises coming from the hallway as we see the SWAT team burst down a door. The camera then pans to another CCTV monitor which shows the band's rehearsal room destroyed and covered in blood. The final shot shows the lifeless body of Trent being dragged around the corner of the CCTV camera showing the SWAT team were looking for the band.

Hesitation Marks

• The video for "Came Back Haunted" (EPILEPSY WARNING) was directed by David Lynch, and it shows. The seizure inducing flashing, the constant camera shaking on the scenes showing Trent's face, the very strange-looking photographs and clay models, it's exactly what one would expect out of a music video from the man who made Eraserhead.

Other

• "Deep," in which Trent drives around in his car, looking like one of the Uruk-Hai creatures from The Lord of the Rings, due to the fact that he had stolen a valuable safe, and was sprayed with a toxic dye that won't come out.
• "The Perfect Drug" is a music video that often gets put into several "scariest music videos of all time" lists. We see Trent in his "Count Dracula meets Severus Snape" look playing a grieving father going off the deep end after an absinthe binge in this Edward Gorey inspired music video. There's several disturbing factors to the music video even though it is not at all explicit or graphic unlike several other NIN videos. The imagery is surreal and terrifying but hauntingly beautiful.
• "Burn" is quite the disturbing video. In a similar fashion to the scrapped "Hurt" video (and '94-era live performances of "Hurt"), we see Trent in a warehouse-type location in front of a giant screen performing the song whilst images from the movie Natural Born Killers and other B-Roll material such as rotting fruit, old family movie footage, footage of the Holocaust, a Nazi rally, animal slaughter, wild animal fights, domestic abuse, and other things are played in the background. Throughout the video, we see different almost subliminal shots of Trent and the rest of the band dressed like characters from Natural Born Killers and demons. There's a particular shot of Trent which is quite haunting and memorable but it is a "blink and you'll miss it" moment before the second verse starts in where we see a dazed-looking Trent splattered with blood◊.
• Some of the live visual videos are a mixture of nightmare fuel and tearjerking. The most famous has to be the projector reel for Hurt which would have been seen in the scrapped music video too. We see shots of a decomposing fox, World War 2 executions, close-ups of reptiles, burnt concentration camp and holocaust victims, atomic bomb testing, and close-ups of Renaissance-era paintings of Jesus' crucifixion among other thought-provoking imagery. Similar footage was also reused for the 2013/2014 Tension tour dates. The 2005 visual reel for Eraser takes things up a notch. Whilst the original 1994 reel showed footage of a storm brewing in the desert slowing being consumed by bugs, the 2005 reel gradually shifts from peaceful landscapes and the animal kingdom to a highlight reel of the worst of humanity with a lot of footage taken from the Iraq and Afghanistan war at the time juxtaposed with stock footage of people enjoying their lives whilst all of this awful footage is being shown ending with the reversed footage of a mushroom cloud whilst Trent and the band scream the final lines of the song "Kill me".

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IT WON'T GIVE UP IT WANTS ME DEAD
GODDAMN THIS NOISE INSIDE MY HEAD
IT WON'T GIVE UP IT WANTS ME DEAD
GODDAMN THIS NOISE INSIDE MY HEAD

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