Web Animation / Nightmare Tales

Nightmare Tales is an animated horror anthology channel on Youtube that specializes in scary stories and urban legends. Unlike many similarly themed horror channels on the platform Nightmare Tales mostly publishes completely original works of fiction rather than stories that are based on actual events or people, though as stated before many of their videos have some basis in real world folklore, beliefs or local legends.

While the vast majority of their episodes are self contained with little to no connection to the others there have been a few mini-series on the channel that are linked together in some way with recurring characters and lore. Nightmare Tales is also very popular among fans of Japanese horror thanks to its ongoing series exploring various Japanese Yokai and popular ghost stories.

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Nightmare Tales contains examples of:

• Abandoned Hospital: Episode 27 "The Abandoned Hospital" is about a couple of high school kids who meet up in front of a condemned hospital building when one of the lights comes on inside and they begin to hear the sounds of a baby crying. Instead of immediately heading back home or getting help they decide to investigate it themselves and find out what is going on. This results in one of the boys getting a twisted ankle that costs him any chance of the sports scholarship that he was hoping for but allows him to enter into the tech field and start a promising career as a skilled computer programmer instead.
• Art Evolution: The earlier shorts all tended to have a very cartoony look overall with very basic designs used for scenery and objects. As the series progressed characters tended to develop more realistic proportions, shading got better and backgrounds became much more vivid, atmospheric and memorable. Compare Episode 1 to the much more recent Episode 89 for example.
• Bad Santa: Episode 42 "Christmas 1996" heavily implies that Santa Claus himself has decapitated the protagonist's father as a way to start a relationship with his bitter divorced mother. But hey, at least he didn't give him any coal that year...
• Bears Are Bad News: Episode 99 "The Kingdom Killer" features a large rampaging bear that is slaughtering the local townsfolk as one of its major antagonists. Though it is soon revealed to not be the true villain of the story when the little girl who slays it brings news of its demise to the king...
• Bittersweet Ending: About half of the stories turn out like this in some way or another. While many of their protagonists manage to survive the horror they find themselves facing it's extremely common for them to lose something precious along the way or possibly even suffer a sort of cruel Fate Worse than Death by the end.
• Brown Note: Episode 63 "Tomino's Hell" is about a cursed poem of the same name that supposedly kills anyone who hears it read aloud in full. Thinking it's just a harmless prank a London DJ for an experimental radio station decides to read it out in it's entirety for his listeners. As expected, this goes very badly for him and anyone else who was unfortunate enough to be tuned in to the station at the time.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Sometimes the horrible monster menacing the characters turns out to be the good guy for some reason or another. One great example of this is Episode 85 "She Stands By The Highway Road" where the horrifying ghost girl with the evil smile that haunts a man driving down a lonely stretch of road turns out to be a benevolent figure. After she kills the man by forcing him to crash his car it's revealed that she was a manifestation of a doll owned by a little girl the man had thrown in his trunk sometime before.
• Downer Ending: Pretty common considering that Nightmare Tales is a horror series where no one is truly safe from the monsters and terror. It's not that rare at all for a story to end with every single one of the main characters dying or the bad guy winning.
• Don't Go in the Woods: Many characters suffer a gruesome fate during a trip into the local forest at the hands of a monster, hostile spirit or even a Japanese Yokai. Episodes 45 & 46 "The Banshee Forest" show a pair of young men learning the hard way to respect the sanctity of the woodlands they're passing through, for just one example.
• Dream Stealer: Episode 58 "Baku - The Dream Eater" tells the story of the famous dream-eating supernatural creature from Japanese legend as it torments a young boy so that it can devour his nightmares. Then, when he stops being afraid it settles for feasting on his hopes and dreams instead.
• Final Girl: Several stories end with a single named character surviving the entire ordeal, though they can be either male or female depending on the circumstances. That being said Episode 28 "The School at Night" is a complete inversion of how this trope usually plays out with the sole female member of the group being the only one who actually dies by the end... and it's a pretty gruesome and horrific death too!
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Episode 40 "Teke Teke" tells the famous Japanese urban legend of the strange woman who makes an odd "teke teke" sound near the train tracks and slices people in half when they get too close. Turns out she was once an ordinary school girl named Shiho who was bullied for being only half Japanese and met her demise by being bisected by an oncoming train when she fell onto the tracks after getting a cake for her fathers birthday. She definitely gets her revenge on her tormenters though...
  Shiho: Now you all know what it feels like... to be half Japanese.
• Hell Hotel: Episode 4 "The Hotel" has a young couple check into a seemingly abandoned hotel in the middle of nowhere with a very creepy atmosphere. The girlfriend is heavily unnerved by this but the boyfriend doesn't seem to care in the slightest. This is because he planned to sell her off to the mafia to settle his immense gambling debts and even opens the door for her kidnappers to drag her down the hall screaming, not caring in the slightest what happens to her afterwards so long as he gets to walk away clean. Unluckily for him however, the mob decides to bump him off in his car when he goes to leave, either due to their displeasure at being forced to collect his girlfriend as collateral... or to silence him as a potential witness to the whole shady affair.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: It can get pretty disturbing that the human characters in these tales often manage to prove themselves to be far more vicious, cruel and evil than the various man-eating monsters or vengeful entities that they end up encountering.
• Imaginary Friend: Episode 44 "Victoria and Charlie" focuses on a little girl and her imaginary friend. When her parents try to separate the two permanently Victoria goes missing and is no where to be found. Years later her mother has the entire mansion she was living in demolished in the hopes of recovering her body, but the ending implies that Victoria's mother was the only member of the family to actually exist and everyone else was imaginary as well.
• Lighthouse Point: Episode 48 "The Lighthouse Keeper" features a young man named Samuel taking up his new dream job as a lighthouse keeper in a remote and dangerous part of Canada. It isn't long before he finds out that this particular lighthouse is harboring a very dark secret...
• Mundanger: Most stories have some sort of supernatural threat like a monster or ghostly entity terrorize the protagonists while a few others manage to make due with simple human threats like serial killers, bandits and kidnappers.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The stories usually do a very good job of this when they need to. One great standout example is Episode 89 "A Room of Pitch Black" about a young boy and his family visiting an old relative's house after her death. While exploring the massive place he comes across a weird door with a red sash sealing it off and curiously opens it to see what is inside. Unfortunately, he can't see anything because the interior is absolutely devoid of any light, making it completely impossible to make out any shapes in the engulfing shadows. Then he hears some strange scratching sound coming from just a short distance away inside the room... which then begins moving towards the door.
• Serial Killer: They serve as the primary antagonists of several episodes, usually the more mundane ones. A guy with a knife may not always be as scary as a towering monster but he can easily be just as deadly as one and often adds a level of realism to the story being told.
• Toilet Horror: Primarily featured in Episode 20 "Hanako-San - The Toilet Demon", Episode 28 "The School at Night" and Episode 77 "The Eye in the Knothole" as well as a few others. The first two stories are about popular Japanese urban legends while the third is an original tale about a man who encounters someone or something stalking him around the outhouse at his parents old cabin.
• Twist Ending: Extremely common, most of the episodes end on a big twist that changes the whole nature of the story with its reveal. Double twist endings are also a fairly regular occurrence, just to catch viewers expecting a twist off guard.
• Urban Legends: One of Nightmare Tale's biggest draws is its vast collection of videos on Japanese urban legends, usually about various types of ghost or Yōkai women such as the fabled Kuchisake Onna (Slit Mouthed Woman) in Episode 23 or the Hone Onna (Skeleton Woman) in Episode Episode 75. They also cover urban legends, myths and folklore from other places too, though much less commonly.
• Yōkai: Mostly seen in the ongoing Japanese urban legends series, though plenty of specters and creatures from other mythology and folklore are commonly used as well.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The three part "Marine of the Undead" episodes focus on a WWII soldier who finds himself stranded on a strange island overrun with zombies. It also provides a chilling origin story for Dan Blacker, one of the most powerful and enigmatic characters in the series.