Nightmare Fuel / The Cure (Band)

"The spider man is having me for dinner tonight..."

• "A Forest," which has been described as the archetypal Cure mood piece, is based on one of Robert Smith's bad dreams.
• "Lullaby," which a review described as: "Probably the only song about being eaten alive, that people heard on the radio outside the month of October."
  • Or is it about something else?
    • Some fans interpret as being about rape. "Be calm. be still, be quiet now, my precious boy. Don't struggle like that or I will only love you more." Given this interpretation, this makes the child-like imagery of the rest seem quiet horrifying.
    • Word of God says that it is about scary stories his father told him just before bed, which freaked him out. The lyrics refer to a recurring nightmare Smith had as a result where he was eaten by a giant spider.
    • However, Tim Pope has also said at one point that he believes "Lullaby" to be about Robert's drug issues in the past.
• Pornography: This is their darkest album, and it sure sounds like it. Definitely not a good idea to sleep to this.
  • In fact, the album opens up with the lines: "It doesn't matter if we all die." Touching.
  • It gets worse. The last track, "Pornography," is filled with dissonant guitars, gloomy synths, backward snippets of unknown clips, and Smith's depressing vocals. Probably making it the band's darkest and scariest song. If you do sleep to it, you're more than likely to get jolted awake by the ear splitting feedback at the very end.
• "Icing Sugar" seems to be about a coked out murderer.
• The bone-chilling scream at the end of "Subway Song" is one of the most (in)famous Last Note Nightmares in music for a reason.
  • The scream is implied to be that of the woman from the song who is apparently being watched as she walks through a subway late at night.
  • Hell, Robert Smith's vocals alone are just creepy. The way he's whispering throughout the whole thing will send shivers down your spine.
  Turn around...
• You don't get much time to recover from "Subway Song" if you happen to be listening to the Boys Don't Cry album. Immediately following that we get what is easily the band's most infamous song, "Killing An Arab". While it's Overshadowed by Controversy these days due to the title, it's actually based on The Stranger by Albert Camus. As the title suggests it's about the title character killing a character who, in the book, is referred to only as "the Arab".
  Standing on the beach
  With a gun in my hand
  Staring at the sea
  Staring at the land
  Staring down the barrel
  At the Arab in the ground
  I can see his mouth
  But I hear no sound
• Some of their album covers are pretty creepy. These include Pornography◊, 4:13 Dream◊ and The Head On The Door.
• The music video for "Boys Don't Cry" gets creepy around the 1:45 mark when Robert Smith's eyes suddenly begin glowing red as he sings along side the child playing as him while Robert stands behind a curtain. The fact that Robert's essentially a silhouette for the whole video makes the glowing eyes scarier because of how much they stand out.
• The group’s soundtrack to the film Carnage Visors, a short film by bassist Simon Gallup’s brother Ric which was screened in lieu of a support act during the Faith tour falls squarely into this. nearly 28 minutes of gloomy, atmospheric post-rock crammed full of droning bass lines, looping guitar parts and a simplistic drum machine beat which all amounts to what sounds more like a soundtrack to the end of days than a film. Despite the endless repetition of the track’s motifs, it never crescendos. It just loops and builds ... over and over and over before abruptly stopping with a brief synth note. The song was slapped onto cassette versions of Faith, meaning this monster came after the already unrelentingly bleak title track. It doesn’t help that the film the piece was set to, which apparently consisted of animations of various dolls in different poses and acts is now considered lost with only Robert, Lol and Simon owning copies

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