Nightmare Fuel / Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction

True Beauty Is on the Inside, indeed.

If they're not Glurge or Narm, some episodes can fall under this. Major offenders include the stories "Red-Eyed Creature" and "The Mirror of Truth". To elaborate:

• The reveals. Seeing FACT or FICTION stamped over the creepiest screenshots of each segment and holding it for a few seconds was rather nightmare-inducing. Especially the ones that were revealed as FACT.
• In “The Landlady”, an elderly woman is terrorized by a mysterious prowler. Scary enough on its own even if the woman in question is as friendly as a hornet’s nest. But what sells the dread is at the end when on the next night she goes to confront the prowler, only to see phantom boot prints indenting in the mud…and they’re heading towards her.
• In "Red-Eyed Creature", a couple, their young son, and their nanny purchase a new home. On the night they move in, the young son goes downstairs, and in the dark kitchen, witnesses a pair of ominous red eyes floating towards him, accompanied by a disturbingly loud whooshing sound. The parents think the frightened son just imagined the whole thing, until the same thing happens to the wife some time later. When the father inspects the house, he notices that the panel of the family's thermostat on the wall has two red lights that could easily be mistaken for glowing red eyes in the dark, and postulates that the whooshing sound was just the heater kicking in. The parents are relieved by this rational explanation, but the son remains unconvinced. When the son is in bed that night, the nanny goes to tuck him in and reassures him that there's nothing to be afraid of. As she leaves the son's room, she pauses, faces the audience, and her eyes glow red and emit a whooshing sound, implying that she's some sort of supernatural entity intent on terrorizing the family. Of course, she might be a supernatural creature who looks scary but is otherwise a nice person. Jonathan Frakes even brings up the possibility that the woman/creature is protecting the family, not terrorizing it, as no bad incidents happened to them while they were in the house even though bad things always happened to past owners.
• "The Kid In The Closet". A young boy believes there's a monster living in his bedroom closet. His mother and sister insist that he has an overactive imagination, but his older brother teases and bullies him over it. One day, the older brother and his friends gang up on the boy and drag him upstairs, intending to throw him into the closet to scare him. The boy dares his brother to prove that there's no monster by going into the closet and shutting the door. As soon as the closet door closes, the older brother begins banging on it and screaming for help; everyone (except his younger brother) assumes he's faking it, and doesn't help him. Suddenly, the boys' mother arrives home, and the screaming abruptly stops; the boys' mother inspects the closet, and finds that her son has vanished without a trace, leaving only his clothing and shoes crumpled on the closet floor. The police are called and search the closet, but find no trace of the boy, and no clues as to what might have happened to him. What's worse, this story is based in Fact.
  • Fans of the series later discovered that the author of the story had failed to research it properly: while it was indeed based on actual events, the missing boy had actually run away from home after climbing through a hidden ceiling panel in the closet. He was missing for two weeks before he was discovered living at a friend's house and returned home. Even with this in mind, the story is still rife with horror: imagine your firstborn child vanishing without a trace from your own home, in broad daylight, mere seconds before you arrive home, after one of your other children has been insisting for weeks that there's a "monster" lurking around the house; makes your mind go to some terrible places, doesn't it?
• In "Mirror of Truth", a vain, self-absorbed woman visits a beauty parlor for a makeover, anticipating that her boyfriend is about to propose. Dissatisfied with the results of the makeover, she treats the beautician with rude indignation; in response, the beautician curses her. The woman's boyfriend breaks up with her soon after, and though we never see her face, she believes that her good looks are rapidly fading, and soon finds herself grotesquely ugly. In desperation, she calls the beauty parlor to try to get the curse lifted, only to find that they're closed for the summer. In The Reveal, we finally get a look at her reflection, showing a hideously deformed, animalistic face with sallow skin and bulging eyes. However, when we see the woman's actual face, her youthful, photogenic appearance remains; the curse only caused her to perceive herself as ugly by showing her firsthand the ugliness that was in her heart. The deformed face (as seen above) is Nightmare Fuel at its finest for anybody that isn't expecting it. What's worse, the story is said to be based on actual events.
• "The Land" is about a farmer who is about to lose his land because of a long drought and makes a deal with someone (and to the writers' credit, it's not implied to be The Devil or some demonic entity, just some guy who lives in town) for the land to be fertile for the next twenty years. The next day his family wakes up to find that it is indeed fertile, and the man is heavily implied to have become the land itself. The imagery in this story is creepy.
• "The Stalker" is a truly terrifying segment. Revolving around an escapee from jail, he torments a lady and her daughter by hiding in their home. It is one story that can seriously leave viewers scared and paranoid, especially if they had an experience with stalking before.
• "The Cake" is about a kind baker ordered by his Jerkass boss to bake a truly gigantic cake as a reward to a man he had done a favor for. The baker begins hearing groaning from inside the oven and sees a spectral entity inside the oven. The baker informs his boss, and is promptly fired since he wisely refuses to bake the cake. The boss decides to bake the cake himself. At home, the baker discovers the entity was the ghost of a crime boss that the boss had assassinated and his wife informs him that smoke was filling the bakery. The baker goes to check on the boss, and finds his boss baked into the cake, something that looks surprisingly horrifying.
• "Damsel" has a lonely young woman named Sandy looking for love through a matchmaking program. The purveyor of the program, a middle-aged woman, tried to set her up with her son Steve and said that he would find her (as she was an aggressive pursuer of love instead of just letting it find her), but she's skeptical about the scenario and declines. One day, while out on a drive, she pulls over and helps an attractive man who's having car trouble and when the woman starts to feel uneasy about him, especially after catching him looking through her purse, he shows his true colors by deciding to rape and murder her. After initially running away and failing to evade him, he overpowers her ready to put his plan into action when the son materializes out of nowhere and fights him off. The most shocking thing about the story is that it's Fact, and if the story sounds familiar, it's because it was loosely based on one of the worst serial killers in American history.
• "The Sleepwalker" at first starts with something more annoying than terrifying. Leon Woodward is dealing with sleepwalking and it's driving his wife crazy. They turn to a spiritualist, who says he's been hit with a terrible curse and will one day leave during his sleepwalk and never return, and there's nothing she can do to lift it. Then one night, it happens and he disappears. As his wife panics once she files a missing person's report with the police, their daughter states she knows what happened to him. She takes her to her dollhouse... where a doll that resembles her father, complete with clothes and the bell he wore to help his wife find him, is laying there. It would seem the curse has trapped his very soul in a doll. Even more creepy? Not only was this marked as Truth, Frakes reveals that author Robert Tralins was even shown a doll resembling the real life person who disappeared.
• "The Ring" features a social-climbing actress working as a hairstylist for wealthy Beverly Hills clientele. She ends up having an affair with a client's husband, a well-connected lawyer who eventually gifts her an extravagant engagement ring. Wanting him all to herself, she and a repairman who's sweet on her rig up an old hair dryer to "accidentally" electrocute the wife while she's trapped underneath. When she does set the plan into motion however, she winds up being electrocuted herself as the client screams and safely flees. Turns out, the ring, in addition to the metal conducting the electricity itself, was cursed to whomever receives it. Even though she deserved it, her shocked facial expression while being killed doesn't make it easier to watch, and the repairman ends up charged with her murder.
• "The Burial" follows the story of Governor Henry Lee of Virginia, who loses his loving wife, Anne to a sudden mysterious illness. After the funeral, he spends a minute by the casket to say his goodbyes. He turns to leave when he hears scratching and Anne calling out to him. He tries to ignore it and continues to walk away, but the scratches and Anne's voice gets louder. Horrified, he rips the coffin lid right off to see a bewildered, weakened and frightened Anne. She had very nearly been Buried Alive! For extra fuel? This was such a common enough probability (given the state of medicine at the time) that people had elaborate methods to ensure that they wouldn't be accidentally buried alive or if they were, they'd have some way to warn the people above.
• "The Merry Go Round" has a woman and her boyfriend trying to get people riding her late father's merry go round again, despite the rumors that it's cursed. The year before the father's death, there was a mysterious incident where the merry go round lost control, leading him to dismantle it and store it deep in the Florida Everglades. The boyfriend suggests a world record attempt to get people to start coming. Despite the former worker warning them about the curse, they succeed and the world record attempt starts...then the boyfriend complains that the horse bit him. The woman (knowing the boyfriend's reputation as a practical jokester) doesn't take him seriously. That's when he slumps over dead. As they try to figure out what happened, a snake crawls from out of the horse's mouth and up the neck. Hope you like snakes!

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