History Main / NightmarishNursery

* One of the rooms of the eponymous mansion in ''Series/TheHauntingOfHillHouse'' is the Toy Room, where young Nelly can most commonly be found. In the flashbacks, it appears [[CrapsaccharineWorld perfectly innocent]], complete with rows of toys and a warm colour palette... but in the season finale, [[spoiler: it turns out that the Toy Room ''doesn't exist.'' It's just another facade worn by the [[EldritchLocation Red Room]] in order to lull the family members into submission while [[GeniusLoci the House]] digests them.]]

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' episode "A Streetcar Named Marge", Maggie is placed in a daycare that puts the kids in solitary confinement whenever they cause trouble, resulting in a homage to ''Film/TheGreatEscape'' as Maggie tries to get her pacifier back. Most of this is PlayedForLaughs... up until Marge and Homer arrive to pick up Maggie, and find all the babies are sitting around, suckling on their pacifiers in unison and staring at the adults in a creepy homage to the final scene of ''Film/TheBirds''.

A supertrope of AbandonedPlayground. Compare OrphanageOfFear and DaycareNightmare.

* ''Film/SawII'': The room with the Needle Pit appears to have been originally made as a bedroom for a baby or young child, given details like wall sketches of "ABC" and baby bottles, and a pair of dolls alongside a chair.

A popular abode for the CreepyChild, the EnfantTerrible, and the PsychopathicManchild. May be filled with evil toys such as the CreepyDoll, CreepyDollhouse, DemonicDummy, KillerTeddyBear, PerversePuppet, ScaryJackInTheBox, VengefulAbandonedToy, or [[FauxHorrific even worse]], FauxFurby. At least one of the toys will likely be a MonsterClown as well. Don't be surprised if you hear CreepyChildrenSinging and/or OminousMusicBoxTune.

Childhood settings often invoke a sense of innocence and safety, and in fiction, places like nurseries, playgrounds, and other obviously childish locations maintain a similar atmosphere. Surely nothing ''bad'' could happen here, right? ''Right?'' I-Is anyone else hearing children giggling or is that just us...

Childhood settings often invoke a sense of innocence and safety, and in fiction, places like nurseries, playgrounds, and other obviously childish locations maintain a similar atmosphere. Surely nothing ''bad'' could happen here, right? ''Right?'' Is anyone else hearing children giggling or is that just us...

Childhood settings often invoke a sense of innocence and safety, and in fiction, places like nurseries, playgrounds, and other obviously childish locations maintain a similar atmosphere. Surely nothing ''bad'' could happen here, right? ''Right?''

Childhood settings often invoke a sense of innocence and safety, and in fiction, places like nurseries, playgrounds, and other obviously childish locations maintain a similar atmosphere. Surely nothing ''bad'' could happen here, right?

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout4}}'': Trinity Church has an nursery in the basement; it's long since abandoned by human occupants, with filthy furniture, an empty crib, and a hole in the ceiling. Given the fact that there are no humans in sight, and the only living beings in the church are Supermutants, one can only speculate about [[ToServeMan what happened to whoever lived there]]. All of your companions will comment about the place being sad or grim, with the young father [=MacCready=] even shedding a tear.

* ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsI'': In [[WesternAnimation/TheNightmareBeforeChristmas Halloween Town]], the mischevious trick-or-treaters Lock, Shock, and Barrel have their own room in Oogie Boogie's Manor; the appropriately named Evil Playroom is a small round room full of weapons and machines, as well as a tube that leads down to Oogie's Torture Chamber.

* ''VideoGame/LuigisMansionDarkMoon'' has the Rumpus Room in Haunted Towers. It's a playroom containing a CreepyDoll that follows Luigi's gaze by [[ExorcistHead rotating its head to any angle]], some {{Scary Jack in the Box}}es that do an EvilLaugh, and a CreepyDollhouse that, when looked into, [[RecursiveReality gives the player another third person view of Luigi]] instead of the first person view you usually get when looking into things.

* Issue 7 of ''VideoGame/TheSecretWorld'' features a visit to the recently-abandoned "Nursery", an [[MegaCorp Orochi Group]] laboratory dedicated to testing the world's most dangerous supernatural phenomena [[WouldHurtAChild on children]]. Outside the bloody wreckage of the research wing, the test subjects are housed in brightly-coloured sleeping quarters and playrooms, complete with toys, blue sky wallpaper, and robotic "nannies" constantly playing "The Sleepless Lullaby" by Bright September to pacify the children. For added horror, one staff-member can be found stabbed to death in the middle of a huge circle of porcelain dolls.

* ''VideoGame/WeirdAndUnfortunateThingsAreHappening:'' The Playroom, aka the Best Place Ever, is a gigantic nursery-like pocket dimension in Vedim Space that Mayor Bryan Trautman created for his daughter Nancy, and Dottie winds up there when trying to escape his cult. It has giant disembodied doll heads, blocks that spell out LOVE and HATE, CreepyDoll [=NPCs=] who mindlessly repeat that this is the Best Place Ever and speak glowingly of it to the point of obsession (and are implied to have once been human beings transformed into dolls), and an unsettling soundtrack with an OminousMusicBoxTune. Also, it's tended to by a creepy FlyingFace called the Fun Eater who's idea of a fun game is [[ToServeMan "How crunchy are you"]].
* ''VideoGame/ZombiU:'' at one point, the player explores a zombie-infested nursery in search of medicine of Vikram's ill wife. As they investigate, they find an s.o.s. recorded by the manager, Gillian, about helping the children get to the basement in hopes of protecting them. [[spoiler: Unfortunately, a look at said basement reveals that Gilliam became a zombie and ate all the children.]]

* ''[[VideoGame/KingdomHearts1 Kingdom Hearts]]'': In [[WesternAnimation/TheNightmareBeforeChristmas Halloween Town]], the mischevious trick-or-treaters Lock, Shock, and Barrel have their own room in Oogie Boogie's Manor; the appropriately named Evil Playroom is a small round room full of weapons and machines, as well as a tube that leads down to Oogie's Torture Chamber.

* ''Series/TheAddamsFamily'' Played for laughs with Wednesday and Pugsley's play room, which features torture racks, guillotines, an electric chair, and other gruesome decorations. This being the Addamses, this is all seen as quite normal and the children have great fun with their macabre toys. Other people visiting the house not so much...

The horror genre and its imitators takes these notions of carefree childhood and [[SubvertedInnocence gleefully subverts them]]: here, the nursery and the playground are played for terror and suspense; they may even be outright evil, especially if there are overt supernatural elements involved. Expect the cutesy wallpaper, toys and other stereotypical features to deliberately contrast the horrific things going on.

More idyllic examples may serve as a CrapsaccharineWorld

* This is the visual aesthetic of the contest's [[IslandOfMystery isolated facility]] in ''Series/SquidGame''. Because the contest essentially consists of [[DeadlyGame deadly versions of childhood games]], most of the arenas mimic the kind of settings the games might have been played in, from parks to schoolyards. Even the bizarre, brightly-colored staircase between arenas looks like something out of a funhouse. The second game's area hews the closest to this, featuring an indoor playground with walls painted to look like the outside, and giant climbing frames and swingsets clearly meant to make the adult players feel like children.

* This is the visual aesthetic of the games' isolated facility in ''Series/SquidGame''. Because the contests are essentially [[DeadlyGame deadly versions of childhood games]], most of the arenas mimic the kind of settings the games might have been played in, from parks to schoolyards; even the bizarre, brightly-coloured staircase between arenas looks like something out of a funhouse. The second game hews the closest to this, featuring an indoor playground with walls painted to look like the outside, and giant climbing frames and swingsets clearly meant to make the adult players feel like children; one of the losers in this game is working at the top of the slide when he is eliminated via gunshot to the head - and tumbles all the way down, leaving a huge blood-trail across the slide.

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* Occurs throughout ''Series/SquidGame'': because the contests are essentially [[DeadlyGame deadly versions of childhood games]], most of the arenas mimic the kind of settings the games might have been played in, from parks to schoolyards; even the bizarre, brightly-coloured staircase between arenas looks like something out of a funhouse. The second game hews the closest to this, featuring an indoor playground with walls painted to look like the outside, and giant climbing frames and swingsets clearly meant to make the adult players feel like children; one of the losers in this game is working at the top of the slide when he is eliminated via gunshot to the head - and tumbles all the way down, leaving a huge blood-trail across the slide.

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* At the top of Mergo's Loft in ''VideoGame/{{Bloodborne}}'' is a circular open area styled like a nursery, complete with strollers, baby crying sounds, etc. This is because the place belongs to Mergo, a stillborn EldritchAbomination, whose whole theme is birth and babyhood, and the area serves as the FinalBoss arena of the game (luckily, you don't fight against a giant nightmare baby, but rather, against Mergo's Wet Nurse -- an EldritchAbomination in her own right).