Erugh.
Numerous events during this Comic Book Run range from disturbing to unpleasant to even almost hellish, yet they are told with the gravitas only Chris Claremont could provide.
- The reason for Storm's severe claustrophobia: When she was a little girl, a plane involved in the Suez Crisis dropped on her family's house, killing her parents instantly, and burying Ororo under the rubble, where she stayed for days... with her mother's mangled corpse right in front of her.
- Ichisumi
◊ the Pestilence, a.k.a. one of Apocalypse's Horsemen. Her mutant power is to release an infestation of near omnivorous yume beetles stored within her own body by dislodging her jaw, spawning from her mouth in massive swarms either devouring or disfiguring her intended mark. She is also able to mentally link with them when they return to her as each and every individual being her colony consumes also imparts unto them; and subsequently upon their habitat/queen, much of the victims' memories. You think the power to control insects like Ant-Man's power is lame? Think again! - For Body Horror fuel, the Morlocks, the horribly deformed monster mutants lurking in the sewers of New York, and particularly their Evil Chancellor, Masque. His power is similar to that of the Tzimisce vampires of the Old World of Darkness, namely to magically twist flesh into whatever configurations he desires. In the comic where they kidnapped Kitty Pryde to force her to marry Caliban, it was revealed that most Morlocks are not born deformed: It's just policy that Masque gives new "recruits" new faces so they can never return to their old lives.
- Masque's creatively villainous use of his powers was mostly implicit/told-not-shown throughout most of the Claremont run, but towards the end he wrote some stories where it became horribly explicit, and Masque used it to abuse female(?) Morlocks in really nauseating ways.
- Genosha, pre-Magneto. Imagine South African apartheid, only directed at mutants, ramped up to a thousand, and with a side of Mind Rape and Body Horror thrown in for good measure. No, seriously; mutants are kept as a Slave Race and forced to use their powers to the advantage of the formerly impoverished and politically impotent island nation. To do this, they are forcibly bonded into suits that allow their human masters to completely control their actions, reducing them to near-mindless puppets. Their human masters also recklessly conduct experiments in bio-engineering and augmentation in order to further refine the usefulness of their slaves, including running deliberate breeding programs.
- Mr. Sinister from the X-Men comics. Yeah, whatever about the name, he is a scary son of a bitch. It has a lot to do with various fears (Unmarked dangers, manipulators, telepaths... something that can fuck you up real bad but you have no idea that they could). And that use of psychology that is on par with Hannibal Lecter's. Shapeshifting, the fact that someone could be effectively controlling you or your life without you knowing. He can just seem like a different person thanks to mind tricks and perfect shapeshifting. Hello, Paranoia Fuel.
- Sinister was originally a different type of character, considered too horrific to go to press as proposed. Ever wonder why such an example of Nightmare Fuel went by such a silly name? The original Sinister was the psychic projection of the bully in the above example. It was, essentially, a sentient mass of childhood fears, that itself matured and learned and grew older: your childhood bogeyman who had natural fears in his arsenal.
- Let's be honest, the entirety of what happened to Scott in Sinister's orphanage is completely terrifying: Let's imagine that you're a nine year old boy, who's just woken up from a year-long coma, the only member of your family who wasn't killed in a plane crash has been adopted and taken away from you to make you psychologically vulnerable, you're bullied by the other orphans and adults, and to top it all off a mad scientist from the 19th Century regularly takes you to a lab for experiments and wipes your mind afterwards, leaving us with no idea exactly what he did to you all those times.
- The Brood show one way that you can possibly make Xenomorphs even worse. The Brood are a parasitic, insectoid race that use other creatures as hosts for their offspring. But, rather than pulling a Chest Burster, the embryonic Brood absorbs the host entirely, stealing all of their memories and physically reshaping them into a new Brood. And unlike their inspirations, the Brood aren't mere animals — they're fully sapient and technologically advanced. They're just sadists who view all other life as "food".
- Special mention must be made of the Brood's primary means of intergalactic travel: the Acanti. A race of peaceful, highly intelligent, empathic, gentle knowledge-seekers who happen to be Space Whales with innate faster-than-light flight. Like the parasites they are, the Brood infect the Acanti's brains with a virus that allows them to utterly control the Acanti, whilst still leaving the gentle creatures awake and aware inside its now uncontrolled body. They then infest its living body, using it as both a vessel and a food source, slowly devouring it alive from the inside out over countless centuries in between using it to spread their foul species to countless new worlds.
- Chris Claremont's expansion on Jean Grey’s last moments in the space shuttle, to save/explain/make the best of the mandated Retcon about Phoenix. The dying Jean's conversation with the Phoenix entity is truly horrifying.
