Nightmare Fuel / [adult swim]

This sign-off bumper was created to prevent children, the main audience of Cartoon Network, from watching [adult swim]... certainly not to help them sleep better at night.

As the Darker and Edgier counterpart to Cartoon Network (itself a darker version of Nickelodeon and Disney Channel), [adult swim] takes full advantage of its watershed format with a penchant for Surreal Humor and Surreal Horror. It's designed to scare kids away from watching... and the adults can certainly vouch for its effectiveness.

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Also see:

• Toonami

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force
• Black Dynamite
• The Boondocks
• The Cry of Mann
• Final Space
• FLCL Progressive & Alternative
• The Heart, She Holler
• Home Movies
• Infomercials
  • Too Many Cooks
  • This House Has People in It
• May I Please Enter?
• Metalocalypse
• Mike Tyson Mysteries
• Mr. Pickles
• Moral Orel
• Off the Air
• Primal
• Rick and Morty
• Robot Chicken
• Samurai Jack
• The Shivering Truth
• Smiling Friends
• Space Ghost Coast to Coast
• Squidbillies
• Superjail!
• Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
• Tom Goes to the Mayor
• The Venture Bros.
• Xavier: Renegade Angel

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Bumpers

• The Dawn Is Your Enemy, a former [as] sign-off bump that aired from 2005 to 2010, designed specifically to scare away children. It has gained infamy for it not being outwardly scary, but incredibly creepy. It contains a static composite image devoid of color that focuses on an uncomfortably large pair of fearful, nervous eyes and a glowering sun in the background. What makes the bump especially creepy is the quiet, ominous background noises they use — resonating, rumbling, and scraping metal.
  • As if that wasn't scary enough, a creepypasta was eventually built around the bump (which was roughly remade here). In this story, the bump that we all know is actually an abridged version, and the full version contains what appears to be the audio of a mass murder, including a deafening cacophony of screams, slicing flesh, grinding bones, and gushing blood, topped off by the sun in the background winking at the viewer.
  • In May 2020, [as] unexpectedly brought the bump back as "The Dawn Is Your Frenemy", striving to make it less creepy by adding piano music, a red balloon, and making the sun wink (just like the creepypasta mentioned above). It is still creepy, though; the piano music combined with the original sound effects make the environment much scarier, the red balloon will remind those of It and the sun's wink could catch those by surprise. Hell, this version might be scarier than the original (though not as scary as the creepypasta), which is actually lampshaded at the very end.
    [not sure it's working]
  • From the 5th to 7th of September 2021, it returned as the sign-off bump in glorious HD. That's certainly the best way to celebrate your 20th anniversary, Adult Swim.
  • On November 14th, 2021, the Adult Swim Twitter account posted an HD rendition of the creepypasta version, effectively rendering it Ascended Fanon.
  • As of 13th of May 2022, despite sounding like something straight from a Nurse with Wound track, it turns out that the audio sample is taken from a hip-hop track titled "Violence is a Menace" by Bola Adekimi. While the full rendition's quite good, it still can invoke unease to listeners due to the ominous sample being present through the entire track.
• Before The Dawn, this was the sign-off, an assault of flashing, distorted images and odd sounds ending with a synthetic voice telling the audience "Good night, sweet dreams".
• This interstitial, where a child's voice narrates society going to ruin over a sauce that makes everything it is put on taste good. Everything.
• Their Fall 2014-2016 sign-off bumper can be pretty unnerving, but absolutely mesmerizing.
  • It was then replaced with a pixel art sign-off for only a year or so... then it was replaced with something a million times worse. WARNING: DO NOT WATCH IF YOU ARE PRONE TO EPILEPSY!
• And while we're on the topic of that, the 2020 sign-off, in question, features a giant swirling mess of colors morphing into various Adult Swim characters (and TOM 6) whilst a very distorted remix of the US national anthem plays in the background, ending with a Gross-Up Close-Up shot of the Adult Swim logo, now neon pink with neon blue veins. Not only is the music absolutely freaky, but the bumper itself feels like a drug-induced, seizure-inducing fever dream taken to the extreme, while the faces are downright terrifying. This new bumper was so much worse, in fact, that over halfway into the year they replaced it with a still somewhat surreal, yet much less freaky one.
  • For April Fools Day 2022, Adult Swim brought back this bumper, but now with the corrupted Star-Spangled Banner remix replaced by Pibby singing a Wrap-Up Song... which doesn't dilute the creepiness. The fact that this cute and calm good-bye song is playing over the grotesque and eye-piercing imagery of morphing Adult Swim characters heads makes the already disturbing Morph bumper even creepier, as the calm music can easily turn one off.
• So far, this obscure bumper has appeared very rarely aired on AS, and for good reason.
  • And then came this sequel bumper, in which "Clarke" gets A Taste Of His Own Medicine.^note  Fridge Horror hits hard when you remember that Clarke was huge enough to casually step over tall trees. Did it shrink down or was its room just as enormous? Because if it's the latter...
• Any bumper that Cyriak has made for the block has at least some form of horror in them.
• Some of the station IDs can be quite unsettling and can catch a lot of people off guard in the middle of the night, like this one.
• This bumper, which is centered around the Nightmare Face of a creepy Japanese robot.
• This odd variant on the typical [as] introductory message, as recorded by a freaked-out little kid. After the regular content warning is displayed, three buttons pop up ("ANSWER", "ANSWER WITH VIDEO", "DECLINE") and the Skype call sound starts playing on loop. Then the message gets menacing.
  Pick up
  We know you're home
• Watch Harder has similar energy to The Dawn Is Your Enemy, with a still close-up shot of a Creepy Doll while a nursery rhyme plays, eventually transitioning to an increasingly louder scream of anguish... and then cutting abruptly.
  • Look closely at the doll's eyes as the scream grows louder. Its pupils are growing.
• Franky Bartol 1 depicts an utterly terrifying scenario.
• Anyone remember the "This is fine" dog? Well, that very strip was animated as a bumper, and it's just as unnerving as you'd expect when put to motion. Are you still okay with the events that are unfolding currently?
• Any bumper made for the 2017 Heart and Brain Co. ARG. Not only the bumpers themselves are pretty creepy by all means (especially the music), but when you learn more about the context, it become worse.

Commercials

• Around 2013 they did teasers for The Heart, She Holler and the way they chose to do it was a series of jump scares that got louder as the month of August went on ending with this. They even put screamers in Cleveland Show and Family Guy commercials to promote the show. A lot of people were, needless to say, not pleased.

Programs

• The "Blooper Overdose" scene from Hot Package (an Entertainment Tonight spoof highlighting So Bad, It's Good film and TV clips) ends with real footage of a birth by C-section.
  • Many of the other clips on the show count as well, including a film clip of a man getting his head sliced in half by a ceiling fan and his brains splattering on the wall, and the infamous preventit.ca PSAs.
• King Star King is 11 minutes of concentrated Adult Swim nightmare fuel. Body Horror? Check. Sadistic gory violence? Check. Ugly, nonsensical animation that moves at a breathless pace? Check. To put this in perspective, Adult Swim originally released the series online because they considered the series too much for them to air. It made its television debut a month later.
• World Peace features a sketch in which a couple are at a wine party where the husband's brother starts passive-aggressively insulting his brother's wife. As the wife reaches for some more wine, the brother trips her and breaks a bottle over her head as she falls face-first into a glass table. The husband calmly asks why his brother did that as the brother insists she fell, all while the scene keeps cutting back to the wife's horrified face, which is realistically covered in blood and glass shards.
• Spooky Dreams is about a teen trapped in a nightmare. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of nightmare fuel. The pilot is filled with Nightmare Face and Jump Scare moments, and the whole thing has a dark atmosphere.
• OPAL is a psychological horror musical short about a girl fantasizing about having a perfect family while in reality she has Abusive Parents. What makes it nightmarish is the presentation: we open on the main character "Opal" having a meal with her doting parents and grandfather, only for the mood to be briefly spoiled by Opal catching a glimpse of the mysterious house across the street. Despite her parents telling her to pay no mind, she sneaks in after being put to bed and meets a trio of incredibly dysfunctional adults who all rely on someone named Claire to provide for their every need while providing nothing for her in return. With each new character, it becomes increasingly obvious that Opal's real name is Claire, and this is her actual family. The family from the beginning is a fantasy based on a billboard from across the street. The short ends with Opal/Claire hunched over, clutching her head, and retreating back into her fantasy to ignore her family's pounding on her bedroom door.
  • Right before Claire's narcissist father's mirror swivels around to take on her appearance, there's a split second shot of the father's real face. Going frame-by-frame reveals THIS is what he really looks like. It makes you wonder what happened to him.
• The pilot for Pibby starts off as a normal preschool show, but it takes a sudden dark turn when a glitchy void invades Pibby's world and turns her friends, as well as BunBun, into mindless zombies. It even managed to kill other cartoon characters as well, including iconic cartoons. George Jetson, Fred Flintsone, or Finn and Jake, and many more never looked so terrifying. Makes it even worse when Pibby is confronted by a possessed BunBun.
  BunBun: [in a demonic voice] Learning is so fun...
  • Adult Swim's April Fools prank for 2022 opens with an 'intro' for Learning with Pibby, and throughout the night shows Pibby unwillingly invading adult swim programming. This included the Rick and Morty episode "Total Rickall" which featured Morty glitching out. For anyone who had seen the episode before this moment could really come across as a shock. To top it off, the adult swim broadcast ended with a theoretical Leaning with Pibby ending theme over the 'sign off' bump.