Basic Trope: A babysitter who is cruel or incompetent.
- Straight: Alice is a babysitter for the young Bob, and she ends up tormenting him.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is so abusive towards Bob that she literally kills him.
- Alice molests Bob.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is more incompetent than outright cruel, but does unintentionally cause Bob to get hurt a few times.
- Alice isn't outright cruel all the time, but is very strict.
- Justified: Alice is a Child Hater who's only doing her job for money.
- Inverted:
- Alice is friends with Bob.
- Bob treats Alice badly.
- Subverted: Bob is worried when he finds out his parents hired a babysitter for him, but later finds that Alice is actually a pretty nice person.
- Double Subverted: And then Alice gets unreasonably mad when Bob stays up past his bedtime.
- Parodied:
- Alice is very clearly evil, yet Bob's parents still trust her to watch their son anyway.
- Alice is a literal demon.
- Zig-Zagged: Sometimes Alice staying with Bob goes well, and sometimes it doesn't.
- Averted:
- There aren't any babysitters.
- Alice doesn't act cruelly to Bob at all.
- Enforced: To add conflict to an episode where Bob has a babysitter.
- Lampshaded: "Wow, my babysitter sure is horrible."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: George the Cranky Neighbor who hates Bob wrecking his lawn talks to Bob’s parents about using Alice's services, knowing that Bob is going to have the worst night of his life (so far) as a result.
- Defied:
- Alice realizes she doesn't like younger kids and decides to avoid having a job as a babysitter to not act horribly towards them.
- Alice gets fired after people learn how she treats kids that she babysits.
- Discussed: "Are you looking forward to spending time with Alice tonight?" "Oh no!"
- Conversed: "How in the world does a serial child abuser keep her job like that? Are there no kinds of law enforcement in this show?"
- Deconstructed: Alice's dismissive and angry behaviour towards Bob is because she's been under a lot of stress lately, and only took the job because she feels obligated to financially help her Struggling Single Mother; she'd rather be anywhere else right now, and Bob isn't exactly acting like a saint either.
- Reconstructed: Bob's refusal to follow Alice's commands results in Alice having a breakdown. Bob feels bad for making her cry and starts acting nicer towards her, which results in the two eventually bonding over their hobbies. She ends up becoming Bob's regular babysitter, giving her a steady source of income in the progress.
- Implied: How Alice treated Bob is unknown, but Bob mentions that Alice wasn't a very nice person.
- Played for Laughs:
- Bob is a Bart Simpson-style Babysitter's Nightmare and Alice and him spend the entire night in a Tom-and-Jerry style Roadrunner Vs Coyote Escalating War.
- Alice too the "sitter" part of "babysitter" a bit too literal and spends the whole night sitting down on Bob.
- Alice is only a "babysitter from Hell" because Bob thinks she is. When she makes the (quite reasonable) threat to tell Bob's parents he misbehaved, Bob sees Pinhead saying "we'll tear your soul apart!".
- Played for Drama:
- Alice's mistreatment of children lead to her being arrested and/or sued by angry parents.
- Bob is a Babysitter's Nightmare because sitters obviously tried to treat him like a child. Encountering an abusive adult is thus divisive amongst the babysitting community, those who think it is Laser-Guided Karma and those who make clear this is no longer The '50s and they cannot turn a blind eye on child abuse no matter how much the child is a "devil".
- Alice is a thief or kidnapper who gleefully exploits being allowed entrance into people's homes to turn the kids into hostages.
- Played for Horror: Alice is a child-killing Serial Killer, a sociopath who unleashes bloody Disproportionate Retribution on Bob for doing something stupid in her presence because he is a kid, a sexual predator who does things to Bob that no censor in their right mind will allow to be seen, or the "from Hell" part is literal and she is a demon in a most definitely unfunny way.
Back to Babysitter from Hell right now, or I'll tell your parents how badly you behaved tonight.
