Your Unconventional Nightmare Fuel

We all know the regular scary stuff, things that would freak out anyone. But we also all have our own personal things that scare us, things that others may not be able to relate to. Let's share some of our own! (Note that I'm not talking about phobia, and more about things we happen to find scary in certain media)

I find there to be something weirdly chilling about disembodied quotes. As in, old bits of conversation that you only hear snippets of, and may not even know who spoke. I think it may be because it implies something bad happened, or maybe it's just a general fear of the unknown.

For another, there's one aspect of Doki Doki Literature Club! that not as many people discuss, but I find it very unsettling. It's the fact that Yuki's novel changes from a basic suspense story to... well, if you know you know. I think what's so unsettling to me is the fact that it was a change that didn't need to happen; it was a pretty incidental detail in the original loop, and IDK, I just find it both fascinating and scary that even minor details that had no reason to change got changed... to the point where I'm gonna be incorporating that sort of thing in my newest fic, which is a "Groundhog Day" Loop where things change and corrupt over time.

I find it a little unsettling — not to Nightmare Fuel levels — more a vague sense of unease, when a character tries to say their catchphrase but can't. Like in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Unification", when Sarek's like "Live long and... I'm sorry."

When I was a kid, I was afraid of the Mac startup sound. I would get away from the computer while covering my ears when booting it up, even. I'm not so scared nowadays though.

I've always, always, ALWAYS, had this weird fear of shitty compressed graphics on models in 3D games. You know, like the Redeads from Ocarina of Time, specifically that one because the fucking model just looks so off. Same with the first two silent hills. Even in non horror games like those WWE games on the N64, where they just have a screenshot of a face plastered onto the model, that always creeped me out for some god damn reason. Ughh.

Edited by ZuggaluggalocoroG on May 21st 2023 at 2:34:59 PM

That's classic Unintentional Uncanny Valley, I think. Being creeped out because the models are trying to look human but don't.

Yeah but it's like really fucking horrifying to me. Like sometimes I'll see one and I'll just have my heartbeat fasten by x200. Maybe even turn the game off or give it to my nephew at that point.

As I explained elsewhere, when I was young, I stopped watching the black screens at the end of VHS's after I saw the Barney Home Video logo appear unexpectedly at the end of a copy of Let's Pretend with Barney. Well, sometime after I stopped seeing Big Bird's "Toodle-oo!" closing bumper on TV, these two things combined in my subconscious to form childhood nightmares which were scary to me when I was having them, but which I nowadays find hilarious due to their Reference Overdosed nature. I think these nightmares started with an audio hallucination I had one night after waking up on the couch next to my mom, which had a voice saying "Toodle-oo!", then laughing with the accompaniment of a strange noise.

Anyways, later on, I became afraid to do Google image searches of Big Bird's Toodle-oo due to a picture of an obscure text-to-speech video. Said video has managed to become my new nightmare fuel, where dreams occasionally involve me thinking about the video and being much more scared than I am in real life. It took courage for me to watch the GoAnimate video "Dora's 3rd Nightmare", which features the video within it, and today I finally watched the full original video. Here, at the bottom of the post, is the video in question, if you dare.

UPDATE: The reuploaded video was removed by the uploader, so here’s my Internet Archive reupload. Mwa ha ha ha ha!

UPDATE 2: Red link.

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Feb 27th 2024 at 11:25:54 AM

I don't know why, but the sound of a heart beating freaks me out. When a Heartbeat Soundtrack plays in a video game to emphasize the protag's stress/fear, I have to turn off the sound. It's weird cause I heard heatbeats are comforting for most people.

This one is back from when I was really young. I got extremely nervous and fearful when anyone clipped my nails for me, and presumably still do (I haven't tested yet and won't, I'd rather clip my own nails). It's the fear of them messing up and accidentally hurting my fingers.

I don't know other people who had this fear when they were young.

Sounds a bit like being scared of a dentist or a barber, which I think is caused by a fear of being under the mercy of someone else.

Ever since I was little the sight of the uvula has been disconcerting for me. I can understand that this is most likely because a uvula would usually be visible in animation whenever a character is close to being eaten, which is a primal fear. Anyhow, I felt the same discomfort whenever the uvula was shown in non-eating contexts, like when characters scream or even merely laugh so hard that it would be seen. These days it doesn't bother me as much, now that I'm pushing 40, but the uvula looks kinda gross, so I don't need to see it in my entertainment.

Edited by Mara999 on Jun 1st 2023 at 11:35:04 AM

I have a slight fear of realistic baby dolls. Not dolls that are meant to be creepy (such as Chucky) since they're not realistic, but baby dolls that look a little too human.

Cosmic Retcon and Retgone. Reality can just... change and you have no way of knowing or remembering what it used to be.

Same. Regular baby dolls are fine, but the dolls that are designed to look just like a real baby are way creepy!

When I was a kid, I was scared of Raggedy Ann dolls. Their face just creeped me out for some reason.

Doesn't really help with that myth about them being cursed.. Yeesh.

The Martha Speaks episode "Patrol Dog Martha" ^Summary The local police dog is away, so Martha (a talking dog) subs for him. To practice, Martha watches a bunch of crime shows and Helen teaches her what smuggling is. The hypothetical example she gives is people smuggling produce into Wagstaff City, that turns out to have bugs, that cause mass destruction because the bugs aren't native and thus wreck the ecosystem. Martha becomes very fearful about this happening, but the policeman assures her smuggling doesn't happen in Wagstaff City, since no foreign transit happens there. However, at the docks Martha sees a rutabaga, which a boat skipper puts in his pocket. Martha gets fired, but then she smells the same smell from the docks, and it turns out that the guy was smuggling bug-infested produce. gives me the creeps in a way that no other Martha Speaks episode does. I think it's because:

1. While other episodes have dealt with crime, it's always been either minor crimes like theft or fraud, or unrealistic, cartoony crimes like when Weaselgraft and Pablum mind-controlled the local dogs in "Perfectly Martha".

2. Other episodes have put characters in danger, but A.) it's usually one individual character, not the whole town, and B.) the situations would never affect me. I'd never, for instance, leave Cassie in a hot car ("Martha's Steamed") and it doesn't snow where I live ("Skits on Ice", et al.)

3. Everyone insists that no smuggling happens in Wagstaff City, and Martha's nightmare seemed unrealistic, but it turns out she was right, which I see as Paranoia Fuel.

4. It scares me that the ecosystem could be that fragile.

5. It was extremely lucky that the bugs didn't run rampant, since it all relied on Martha noticing that smell.

Edited by Unicorndance on Aug 20th 2023 at 10:49:09 PM

When I first watched that episode as a kid, I remember jumping in my seat when the criminal mentioned smuggling (which is what he was doing and Martha overheard it).

alice inh wonderland was the disney movie that scared me the most as a kid, all the weird chracters just rubbed the wrong the wrong way, especially the cheshire cat and the queen of hearts, but now I love the movie.

The original or remake? Even if it was the original, it’s trippy enough to be feared.

Voldemort In Harry Potter; the pale skin and lack of a nose is unnatural. Being revealed on the back of someone’s head didn’t help.

the original, the remake had the red queen, not the queen of hearts.

i have a really severe phobia of error screens, mostly because very recently my copy of splatoon 3 stopped working and i panicked for the whole day until i could get another copy

i didnt take picture of the error screen, but this is pretty close

Hm, some from when I was a kid:

Banjo-Tooie, the Zombified King Jingaling scared the heck out of me. Also Gruntilda's laugh in the game over screen.

While perhaps not an entirely absurd phobia, I have a very strong aversion to glitch entities in video games.

Especially the Pokemon Ruby-Sapphire Missingno, to the point that seeing its sprite is probably a genuine trigger in the medical sense (though I've never bothered to get it diagnosed).

What's strange is that I only encountered it once while playing the game (Action Replay caused it to appear accidentally) and it wasn't a very traumatic memory.

I have a fear of TV static. Something about it gives me a Nothing Is Scarier vibe.

Error screens and similar media unnerve me, probably because they're usually very dark colored and have a flat formal message.

If I'm looking at a computer or TV screen turned off, and the room is dark, sometimes I get a weird fear that the screen is going to suddenly turn on and Jump Scare me. As in, intentionally display a scary image and play a loud scream or something.

This fear started when I was a kid, and although I know it's ridiculous now, sometimes it still lingers in me, just a little...

Edited by DrNoPuma on Aug 21st 2023 at 8:08:49 AM