Nightmare Fuel / Saturday Night Live

You'll float too, Anderson!

Saturday Night Live's humor plays Nausea Fuel and Paranoia Fuel for satirical laughs, but doesn't really touch on Nightmare Fuel — at least not often. But when it does... hoo boy.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Season 7 (1981-82)

• October 31, 1981: The infamous Donald Pleasence/Fear episode has a few examples:
  • The "Jogger Motel" commercial starts off pleasant enough, before the actual joke hits: a group of joggers caught in a giant glue trap, struggling in vain to get free...and a few who are no more than skeletonized corpses. The ad ends with a cheery jingle and clever tagline ("joggers jog in...but they don't jog out!") leading to some serious Mood Whiplash.
  • The "I Just Killed My Husband" sketch might elicit this in some people. Christine Ebersole plays a woman who, well, just killed her abusive husband, singing a song about how lonely she now is as she cleans up the mess. The whole time, the husband's body is seen at the kitchen table with a knife sticking out of his back. Christine's character simply wipes up the blood around him as she sings, before sitting down next to him and reading the bloodstained newspaper she takes from underneath him as the sketch closes out.
  • Another sketch features simply a pair of hands carving a jack o' lantern against a black background. What should be a simple Halloween-themed bumper is elevated to deep horror by the fact that every time the pumpkin is cut into, blood seeps out of the cut (and is visible on the knife in some shots). Towards the end, the insides of the pumpkin are scooped out, and rather than pulp and seeds, what looks like human intestines come out instead. Add to the fact that the sketch goes by without any dialogue or explanation, simply "Psycho" Strings and some ominous drumming and chanting, and the whole thing becomes deeply unsettling.
  • The "Vic Salukin Show" sketch hits hard as well. Tony Rosato plays the host of a call-in show, offering a $100 prize to the first caller who can scare him. After a few failed attempts, he finally gets what he's looking for: a caller starts describing how he's been stalking Vic's daughter (made worse by him calling her "an attractive child" and describing the birthmark on her thigh) and wife, which visibly unsettles Vic. The camera then zooms in on the phone as the caller continues, describing how he'd like to come into the studio and kill Vic with a meat cleaver, breaking into hysterical laughter as the camera zooms back out...showing Vic, dead, with a cleaver stuck in his head and blood running down his face. The dead silence from the audience as the sketch closes is the cherry on top.

Season 12 (1986-87)

• March 21, 1987: A very, very, very disturbing sketch from 1987 where Phil Hartman plays an obstetrician who People Magazine is doing a story on because in 20 years of practice, he's delivered 4,300 babies, all girls. It becomes clear though that half those babies were boys and that the doctor convinced the parents they were girls and needed to have their genitals removed! Essentially he's mutilated 2000 little boys! When the People magazine reporter realizes this and confronts him, the doctor goes on an insane rant:
  "No! No, they weren't boys. They were little girls.. trapped in little boys' bodies.. [ music sweeps over him ] You see.. boys are.. bad. They have bad thoughts! Sometimes they disobey their mothers.. they have to be punished! [ sniffles ] But what do their mothers know, anyway.. [ weeping ] They're out all night with "Uncle Rudy"! But he's not my uncle! Why does she call him my "uncle"..? [ falls to the floor, crying ]

Season 17 (1991-92)

• May 9, 1992: From the Tom Hanks episode, What happens to Tim Meadows' character, the Only Sane Man at the end of the "Guy Who Plays Mr. Belvedere Fan Club" sketch

Season 18 (1992-93)

• October 3, 1992: Sinéad O'Connor's a cappella cover of Bob Marley's "War" enters this. Forget her infamous act after finishing the song, there's nothing right about the way she sings into the camera the whole time, with cold eyes, no music backing her, lit candles everywhere behind her, and especially when the camera zooms in towards the end. The shaved head doesn't help, either.

Season 19 (1993-94)

• February 12, 1994: The "Canteen Boy Gets Molested" sketch due to playing to the fear of child molestation (especially within a seemingly wholesome club as The Boy Scouts) for laughs. While Mr. Armstrong (played by episode host Alec Baldwin) didn't end up having sex with Canteen Boy (Adam Sandler), it's still disturbing when you realize that (a) Canteen Boy can't run away because Mr. Armstrong is too fast for him, (b) he can't tell anyone what happened to him because everyone thinks he's an autistic freak, and (c) even if he did just run away into the woods, there's the chance he could die from exposure or the animals living there. Fortunately, Canteen Boy does summon snakes to get revenge on Mr. Armstrong and the reruns have a disclaimer that says that Canteen Boy is actually a 27-year-old man who just acts like a child.
  • Which doesn't make it any better, as the Scout leader is now molesting an adult with limited mental capacity. And if he's not mentally disabled, he's still unwilling.
• The "swinging earring" rumor. In the last of his intros before leaving the show, Phil Hartman is sitting in a restaurant booth opposite a blonde woman, who was played by his wife Brynn. Allegedly, her earring is swinging despite her stationary position because, supposedly obsessed with fame and jealous of her husband's, she repeatedly tried to turn so that her face would be in the shot. While this explanation for the earring is unconfirmed, the theory makes the scene rather chilling considering that, on May 28th, 1998, Brynn shot and killed Hartman, and later herself.

Season 21 (1995-96)

• The "Wake up and Smile" sketch, mainly for how surprisingly violent and disturbing the events in the sketch escalate to. The sketch involves a morning news program celebrating its 20th anniversary. The hosts are depicted and cheery and enthusiastic as they should, but when the teleprompter brakes down, the hosts panic due to the lack of direction they are used to. To help fix the issue, they cut to commercial in the hopes that the prompter will be fixed when they return, but it doesn't work. Whenever the show cuts back, the hosts get more and more hysterical, to the point that Will Ferrell's character turns into a crazy cannibalistic tribe leader that turns his fellow hosts into savages. During a struggle for dominance, Will Ferrell's character decapitates the weather man after the latter challenges him. It should be noted that the viewers get a full view of the bloody severed head, with blood spewing out of the open neck wound as Will Ferrell begins to eat from it. Once the prompter finally gets fixed, the hosts, clearly shaken by what had transpired, sign off.

Season 25 (1999-2000)

• December 4, 1999: The TV Funhouse segment "Friends Apocalypse". It takes audio from a Friends episode of the group of six talking about trivial things while the end of the world happens all around them. Near the end, a creepy voice says "There is no more..."

Season 26 (2000-01)

• March 17, 2001: The Subverted Kids' Show from Germany that *supposedly* aired on Nickelodeon, which had the questionable title of "Der Lächeln Beherrscht" ^note The Smile Masters. Will Ferrell, Horatio Sanz, Chris Parnell, and host Julia Stiles all traumatized kids in the studio audience by being the Depraved Kids Show Hosts with No Indoor Voices, sang freaky skeleton songs, played extremely peculiar "what doesn't belong" games, and teach how to behave at funerals. Perverse, dissonant children's music played throughout, and everyone watching (including the kids on-screen) were mortified.

Season 34 (2008-09)

• November 14, 2008: The Digital Short "Everyone's a Critic". The sketch verges on Surreal Horror. ^synopsisAndy Samberg and Paul Rudd paint paintings of themselves and try to sell it in an auction. When the auctioneers see the painting, they all die or kill themselves. Turns out that it was a clip from a movie that Samberg and Rudd made called "Everyone's a Critic". Rudd and Samberg show the interviewer the painting from the movie and it ends with the reporter and cameraman dying.

Season 35 (2009-10)

• December 19, 2009: The Tizzle Wizzle Show digital short. Besides the drug-addled knife fight and the end where James Franco is freaking out over what happened, what's really scary about the sketch is that you don't see any of it coming. It starts out with a kids' show flavor and, since it's a Digital Short, viewers will immediately assume it's going to be something silly and funny in an Internet meme way.
• January 30, 2010: The Jon Hamm & Michael Bublé episode has this Game Time With Randy And Greg sketch, which shows hosts, Randy Dukes (played by Kenan Thompson) with Greg (played by Bill Hader)^note who's not an alien taking about the Super Bowl but the callers kept saying that Greg is an alien. Jon Hamm plays a coach for the Indianapolis Colts but gets attacked by Greg and turns into him. It gets ever worse that one of the callers stated that there more Gregs, which made Randy cry in fear. This sketch leads to a jumpscare by Greg in the end.
  • From the same episode, a fake commercial sketch about a fancy restaurant called, Hamm & Bublé founded by Jon Hamm & Michael Bublé^noteNow pronounces as Bubly. This became a Hilarious in Hindsight when Bublé started in a bubly Sparkling Water commercial in 2019 that only serves pork & champagne, champagne soaked ham & champagne with pork chunks inside. Michael sings about the restaurant in the tune of his 2010 song, Haven't Meet You Yet but when Jon walks away, he started singing about how this was a bad idea for a restaurant, having a story of meeting Jon at a party who got drunk & wanted him to make fortune, then got slapped by him and being held hostage.

Season 36 (2010-11)

• January 8, 2011: From the Jim Carrey episode, we have The Merryville Brothers. The creepy stilted movements and unchanging facial expressions of Jim Carrey, Bill Hader, and Taran Killam as the titular singing robot band, combined with the gruesome ending (Keenan Thompson's character was originally going to be beheaded on-screen, but the censors wouldn't allow it, though having him being dragged off-camera while a crude copy of his robot clone appears does make the point that he's going to meet the same fate as the women on the original 1970s film version of The Stepford Wives) make this skit more than a little unsettling.

Season 38 (2012-13)

• May 11, 2013: The Acupuncture sketch from the episode hosted by Kristen Wiig has been called the most terrifying sketch produced in the history of the show. Two acupuncturists (played by Kristen Wiig and then-new feature player, Aidy Bryant) attempt to give their client (played by Jason Sudeikis) an acupuncture, but not everything goes to plan.
  • The acupuncturists tricking the man into drinking his own blood.
  • The skin bubble that forms when the acupuncturists use masking tape to stop the bleeding.
  • The end where they leave the man to die while they flee to Mexico.

Season 39 (2013-14)

• October 26, 2013: On the Edward Norton episode, there is a sketch where two pest control workers (played by Norton and new cast member Brooks Wheelan) try to get rid of some possums in the vent. In the end, they get sucked in and presumably eaten alive while the office workers who saw then get eaten just agree that they didn't see anything.
• May 10, 2014: If the "Acupuncture" sketch from Kristen Wiig's episode counts, then the "Bikini Beach Party" sketch from Charlize Theron's definitely does. The entire sketch spoofs camp 1960s TV shows, with the surf music and beaches. The characters only casually mention the "big dead whale full of deadly toxic gases". When Taran Killam decides to serenade Theron near the whale, it explodes, covering the two with blood and whale guts, sending the audience into hysterics. (In much the same manner as the "Acupuncture", might I add!) Covered in blood, the two move over to the second decomposing whale opposite, where the exact thing happens again. (The explosion wrinkles the soft backdrop behind them.)

Season 41 (2015-16)

• February 6, 2016: From the Larry David episode, which aired the night before Super Bowl 50, we have another Totino's pizza rolls commercial. Vanessa Bayer is again cheerfully preparing snacks for "the BIG Game," while the men repeatedly keep saying "Go go go go go! TOUCHDOWN!" or "No no no no no! FUMBLE!" Once the pizza rolls are ready, she goes to deliver them...and sees that the TV isn't even on. As they keep cheering, she grabs scissors and yells for her daughter to get in the car, to which the men turn and reveal completely black irises. Followed by a promo for The X-Files.
• February 13, 2016: In the Melissa McCarthy episode, she plays a middle-aged woman Leslie Jones is stuck next to on a bus while making passively racist comments to her. Leslie repeatedly tries to find an out, asking the driver to pull over. The driver later states that there is a bomb on the bus that will detonate if he goes under 50 mph, a la Speed. The sketch ends as the driver pulls over and the bus explodes.
• April 16, 2016: In the Julia Louis-Dreyfus episode, the last live sketch stars her and Kate McKinnon as two dark-eyed, deep-voiced Human Aliens attending a Match.com Meet N' Match at an Earthly bar. They announce that they come from a Dying Race, and find two men eager to help them reproduce. When one of the Earth women tells the aliens not to call dibs on any guys, the aliens deliver a chant that gives her Laser-Guided Amnesia and a nosebleed. Unfortunately, the men prove "too weak" for extraterrestrial procreation, as making out with the aliens causes them to become Stripped to the Bone. All the while, the moderator of the event tries his hardest to treat all this as an Unusually Uninteresting Sight.

Season 42 (2016-17)

• October 1, 2016: The Margot Robbie librarian sketch. Robbie plays a sexy librarian who flirts with a student, then gradually turns into a demon that eats a banana peel rather than the banana, licks him with a lizard-like tongue, vomits acid, and straight-up murders somebody.
• October 22, 2016: In the Tom Hanks episode, "Haunted Elevator" has a few moments.
  • When the "Five Scar Restaurant" waiter shows off the head of the person riding the elevator on a dinner plate. (Kate McKinnon, thrilled and surprised, asks if that's why they take your photo in the park, showing Paranoia Fuel at its finest.)
  • David S. Pumpkins and his skeletons are either masters of Offscreen Teleportation or the elevator just stops in the same room, given they appear on at least four floors, and he's on 78 total. The last one is the worst: he somehow gets behind the people in the elevator seats, grabs their shoulders, and whispers, "Any questions?" You can't blame Kate and Beck for screaming at the top of their lungs.
• November 12, 2016: Dave Chappelle plays a parody of Negan, the Big Bad of The Walking Dead. He ultimately chooses to kill Tyrone Biggums, and uses Lucille to knock his head clean off.
• November 19, 2016: A sketch in the Kristen Wiig episode features a family overlooking the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in their apartment. The character balloons (portrayed with the actors' real faces, with unblinking eyes and creepy grins) start creeping towards the window, with freaky close-ups. Even worse is when one of them holds Kristin Chenoweth while hundreds of feet in the air, and we hear her shrieking before the balloon lets her plummet to the ground. (Though one character's comment that she failed to defy gravity provides Nightmare Retardant.)
• February 4, 2017: Steve Bannon, known for turning Breitbart into a "platform for the alt-right" and was one of President Donald Trump's main advisers is portrayed as The Grim Reaper, and is accompanied by dramatic, scary music whenever he appears.
• February 11, 2017: A parody of Fatal Attraction sees Trump's borderline insane adviser Kellyanne Conway (Kate McKinnon) try to seduce and kill Jake Tapper of CNN when he refuses to allow her on air after she made up a massacre to try to cover Trump's ass (which happened in real life). She nearly throws a knife into Jake's head, nearly slits his throat, and when he finally relents, she falls out of the apartment to her death. We see her corpse with her limbs all flayed the wrong way, but she then revives and reforms. She says she still has three lives.
• April 8, 2017: Louis C.K. plays a lonely, pathetic middle-aged man who hires a birthday clown so he won't have to spend his birthday alone. The poor clown gets more and more weirded out as he just blankly watches the act, until he warns a couple other kids' entertainers "You don't want this!" and casually accepts the guy revealing he's going to murder him, saying it fits perfectly.
• April 15, 2017: In the Jimmy Fallon episode, Bannon is fired as the de facto president, and Trump has him dragged back to hell by a bigger, scarier Grim Reaper. It's a pretty awesome moment that's also pretty damn terrifying, particularly since the actual Bannon is still high in Trump's hierarchy.
• May 20, 2017: The final episode of the season, hosted by Dwayne Johnson, had a commercial parody for a rather shady male enhancement drug known as Xentrex, which contains ingredients like rhino horn and ammonia hydroxide. The commercial has Johnson's character acting increasingly hostile towards his doctor, resulting in him beating said doctor up. The drug in question contains a rather disturbing list of side effects, and near the end, Johnson's character has a nosebleed while he lists off some of these side effects, which ends with him uttering "Hail Satan."

Season 43 (2017-18)

• September 30, 2017: Ryan Gosling plays The Unfavorite of a brother house-flipping trio, who continually brings up his far worse upbringing and gradually revealed depravity because of it while the others desperately try to stop him, all with Gosling's genuine acting chops making it very unsettling.
• October 14, 2017: If you thought Kellyanne Conway as Alex Forrest was bad, just try her as Pennywise. And she's already killed Rachel Maddow when Anderson Cooper runs into her, and gets him by turning into Hillary Clinton.
• December 9, 2017: The gift wrapping sketch in the James Franco episode approaches the acupuncture sketch in levels of disturbing bloody mutilation.
• February 3, 2018: An unaired sketch is an ad for a "step child" doll, with a Creepy Child pretending she's its evil stepmother, while Natalie Portman as the girl's mother is disturbingly supportive, much to her husband's dismay.
  • When the mother talks to the camera, the girl is in the background just staring at the doll... both remaining unnervingly still.
• One Weekend Update has a news story about teachers deliberately giving sleep-inducing drugs to children, after which Colin adds "worse, they woke them up with cocaine." The inset picture is a 'shopped photo of one such kid whose eyes are too freaky for words.

Season 44 (2018-19)

• September 29, 2018: Adam Driver's utterly committed and terrifying performance as Abraham H. Parnassus, basically exactly how you'd expect Daniel Plainview to turn out in his old age, still ranting about how he's spent his life destroying everyone who stood in his way, and whose final revenge against his greatest rival was having a son with the man's granddaughter.
• November 17, 2018: The Steve Carell episode has a sketch about a space station accident that leads to the deaths of some monkeys brought on board for experiments - the freeze-dried monkey props are one thing, but then we have Kate McKinnon turning in another landmark performance as a frozen dead cosmonaut that keeps bumping into the same porthole.
• December 15, 2018: The Matt Damon episode has a sketch about Christmas tree decorations that really shouldn't be used anymore but get hung up at the back of the tree anyway. Cecily Strong is the angel that originally graced the top of the tree, until a bad bulb caught fire and caused half her head to melt off, executed by a simple but still unnerving green screen effect. And then the creepy singing starts...
• March 2, 2019: The Scream parody with John Mulaney as the killer pulls of the horror parts surprisingly well, including the grisly death of the pizza guy the killer deliberately called there to freak out the victim - but there's plenty of Mood Whiplash as well when you consider that the "victim" is the emotionally detached and fatally indifferent Chad - who survives regardless. Hard to believe that the creepy killer is also the voice of Spider-Ham, isn't it?
• March 9, 2019: The Idris Elba/Khalid episode features a sketch about a chicken restaurant whose mascot bears an uncanny resemblance to Momo. Wih a tendency to stalk kids and a creepy high voice to boot.
• March 30, 2019: A Discover credit card ad campaign touting the ease of getting a real person on the line at customer service by showing people talking to themselves is spoofed with the customer service people actually being the Tethered, who are just as creepy as in the actual movie.

Season 45 (2019-20)

• October 12, 2019: A spoof of Joker offers a similarly Darker and Edgier origin story for Oscar the Grouch, and despite how ridiculous the premise is, David Harbour gives a quite legit threatening and scary performance that can actually make you want to see a full movie of it.
• October 26, 2019: The Halloween episode features a snack food commercial where Chance the Rapper eagerly shows off his bounty of snacks despite his famously strict parents, and it gradually becomes clear that he's murdered them to his friends' increasing horror as he makes some very unconvincing denials.
  "What's in the fridge, Jason?"
  "Nobody is."
  • Another sketch from the Halloween episode features several ghosts singing about how they died. Chance the Rapper's character sings about how he developed a fetish for electrical shocks, which eventually led him to shove a metal pole up his ass during a lightning storm and climb on the roof. He goes into pretty disturbing detail about being fried from the inside out, much to the disgust and horror of the other ghosts.
    "I started to smile
    Then quietly stopped
    When my insides fried
    And my colon popped
    And my ass burned off
    And my thing caught on fire
    And my face caught on fire
  And then I wet in my pants...
• Two of the three "at-home" episodes end with a silent shot of the now-darkened Home Base stage with only the credits music playing. This ends up giving an errie reminder of how much the pandemic had affected many people, including SNL.
• One of Aidy's "at-home" sketches starts with Aidy looking through her old childhood journals while she's stuck in quarantine. It starts off very cute and funny, until Aidy begins to suffer Sanity Slippage from being trapped in her house, leading to a quick montage of creepy images (including: Aidy's childhood photos being warped to look like Nightmare Faces, the words of her old journals floating around her, a random image of Aidy as an Oompa-Loompa, an image of Aidy with pitch-black eyes).
  Aidy: I can't keep looking back at the past and I have nothing inside of here that is the future. Help. Help.
• In another "at-home" sketch, Melissa and Mikey play Animal Crossing over Facetime, when the game starts insulting Melissa, and denies her passage to Mikey's island, before suddenly killing her character, stating "foul play is suspected". The whole thing feels like a Video Game Creepypasta.

Season 46 (2020-21)

• October 24, 2020: The Adele/H.E.R. episode gives us another horror-themed sketch starring Chad, which is creepier than the last. In this one, Adele plays a ghost whose house Chad happens upon one night, who asks him to tell the world the truth about her death; she was believed to have killed herself, but was really murdered by her husband. At this reveal, she unclasps her necklace to reveal a surprisingly graphic bloody gaping wound on her neck. Later, after Chad promises to reveal the evidence so she can move on, he leaves...through a wall. Adele turns to see Chad's dead body crushed under the suit of armor he tripped over earlier, with blood pooling underneath him.
• January 30, 2021: The Dividend is a take on the influx of children interrupting video calls. John Krasinski plays the father of a pair of Creepy Twins who unsettle the viewers with disturbing art projects, demonic voices and eventually appearing in the Dividend's studio.
• February 13, 2021: The Negotiator leans hard into the Marijuana Is LSD trope after a cop played by Regina King bites into a weed gummy while on the job. What follows is a cavalcade of Uncanny Valley nightmare fuel, including but not limited to Pete Davidson and Aidy Bryant in extremely creepy gummy bear suits, lava people from hell coming up through the ground, and Marge Simpson morphing into Satan with Empty Eyes. It's perhaps the densest concentration of Nightmare Fuel in an SNL sketch to date.
• February 27, 2021: An exercise "mirror" that projects various instructors guiding your workout turns out to actually be some kind of hell dimension, with Kate McKinnon as a woman who's trapped there with the others as her guards. Rather unusually, she plays the role totally straight and it’s very hard not to sympathize with her. And in the end, she escapes by tricking one of the customers into saying a spell that switches their places (though he's a bit of an Asshole Victim who didn't seem to care about her at all, unlike his friend).
• May 15, 2021: A spoof of The Muppet Show features Waldorf and Statler finally confronted by security over their heckling, culminating in Statler getting a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Seeing such a beloved childhood character beaten to the point his eyes are swollen shut, complete with disturbingly realistic puppeteering of an old man's shaking hands as he struggles back to his feet, is an image that's not leaving your mind any time soon.

Season 47 (2021-22)

Season 48 (2022-23)

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