Nightmare Fuel / EC Comics

And this was a toned down version of the original idea for the cover!

EC made their marks on comic book history with such wholesome, family friendly fare like Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt Of Fear and The Vault Of Horror, with all that ensues.

Because William Gaines essentially gave the writers and artists Carte Blanche on what could be put in the comics (even encouraging new workers to make their work as morbid as possible in the company's help wanted ads), plenty of brutal violence, gore, body horror, gruesome imagery, sadism, and so on are prominent in the stories—even the tongue in cheek tone set by the series narrators does little to soften the impact. In contrast to the competition and their early, lighter works, EC made some of the scariest comics of their time, and even today, these stories can still freeze your blood. Even issues that don't feature on-screen horrors can still take you by surprise, and their non-horror comics tend to have scary elements as well.

The Tales From The Crypt TV series has its own nightmare fuel page.

Examples:

Tales From the Crypt / The Crypt of Terror

• The horror comics absolutely adored using situations where a victim is helplessly trapped for scares, even if it's not the centerpiece of the story. "Lower Berth" ("Tales" #33) has one of the central characters, a mummy named Myranah—her backstory is that she was a servant girl to the Pharaoh's queen, but when she refuses the Pharaoh's advances on her, he severely punishes her by having her wrapped up as a mummy and buried alive.
• "Only Skin Deep" (Tales From The Crypt #38) features a young man who goes to New Orleans and at a costume party meets a woman with a beautiful body, but an old lady's face. The two come and see each other at Mardi Gras every year for five years and fall in love. Eventually the man asks the woman to marry him and they do, with their masks still on. After getting married he keeps trying to get her to take off the mask, but she refuses. He has a dream about being in bed with her and she still has the mask on. He takes the mask off, only to find out that she has the identical face under the mask. He wakes up from the dream and finds that she's still wearing the mask! He starts grabbing at her face, trying to take it off and she screams at him not to- but he does anyway. It turns out she never wore a mask, and he ends up tearing her whole face off!◊
• You don't even have to open the comics to get a taste of what's inside — "Tales of the Crypt #41" has a cover depicting a man buried alive six feet underground inside a coffin, and he's absolutely terrified at what's going on.
• The story "Collection Completed" from the original Tales From The Crypt. The husband, bored by his retirement and his annoyance at his wife's habit of caring for every stray in the neighborhood takes up a new hobby: taxidermy. When he kills and mounts his wife's pet kitten and seems to take enjoyment in hurting his wife, she kills and stuffs him.

The Vault of Horror

• "The Vault of Horror #27" had a "Grim Fairy Tale" where a tiny kingdom is overrun by rats and the people get fed up and kill most all the rats. The rulers are a pompous King and Queen, who live in a castle whose moat the rats couldn't cross over. The Queen has pet white mice that she loves, and when she learns the townspeople nearly killed all the rats (which were related to her mice), she made it a crime to kill any rat! Furious, the townspeople invaded the castle, captured the royal couple, shoved starving rats straight down their throats and sewed their mouths shut, and then watched as the rats ate their way out!
• "Escape!" ("Vault of Horror #16") features a convict using a nearby coffin to try and escape prison. The first part of his plan goes off without a hitch, but unfortunately for him, the coffin's original occupant was due for a cremation service. Two guards dump the nailed up coffin inside a blazing hot crematorium, causing the convict to helplessly burn alive inside!
  "The heavy iron door slammed shut! The roar of the flames muffled Luger's frenzied cries...
• "Let The Punishment Fit the Crime (The Vault Of Horror #33)" by far is the scariest because it could theoretically happen in real life: some parents note their kids holding a funeral, seemingly a game of pretend. They find it weird but not too weird, and they recount or learn how the kids asked about electricity, sentences, judgment, and crimes from the so-called town experts like the undertaker, the electrician and the judge. Then the Wham Line comes: a mother comes rushing to them, frantically asking where her son is. It's revealed in reverse that he stole a doll from one of the girls and refused to return it; the kids considered it kidnapping, put him on trial and executed him by pushing him into a live wire. All thanks to the advice that they received from the adults. As the parents watch in horror, the kids calmly recite a funeral hymn over the coffin. What's worse is that they originally asked their teacher if robbery was a capital offence, and the judge later clarified you would only get the death penalty for kidnapping; the kids wanted the "kidnapper" dead.

The Haunt of Fear

• "The Coffin" ("The Haunt of Fear #16"). The climax of the story features a man helplessly stuck inside an automated coffin that was made especially for him. Just barely when he starts calling for help, he gets stabbed with the coffin's needle that completely paralyzes his body, another needle that drains all of the blood away from his body, then yet another needle pumps him full of formaldehyde. And then the mechanical coffin proceeds to bury itself and its occupant...
• "Horror We? How's Bayou?" (Haunt of Fear #17) already has an unsettling premise, plus two truly loathsome sociopaths as villains, but it also features a lot of Body Horror by the climax and ending. When one of the villains, Sidney, is horribly transformed into an unrecognizable monstrosity by Everett's resurrected victims, even Everett is openly horrified at what his brother has become.
  "Sidney, or what was ONCE Sidney but is now nothing, more than a confused reorganization of Sidney's dismembered body, stands before him... The upside-down head hanging from the left hip, sobbing...the left leg, sewn to the left shoulder, crooked awkwardly around a make shift crutch... The right leg swaying from the right shoulder... The left arm, erupting from the neck, gesticulating... And the right arm supporting the entire grisly sight..."
• "The Haunt of Fear" #19 features "Foul Play!", one of the most gory and controversial stories EC ever published. It's centered around an evil baseball player who is murdered by the members of the opposing team, and they play a game where they use his head for the ball, his leg as the bat, his intestines to mark the base liner and his own organs to mark the bases. They even use his scalp to dust off home plate! Even the artist for the story, Jack Davis, felt that it went way too far with its gore. Needless to say, bring a barf bag when you read this one.
• EC published many terrifying stories in their time, but few could equal the one that opened "The Haunt of Fear #22", "Wish You Were Here", in sheer, bone-tingling horror. The story features a loving, middle-aged couple on the verge of bankruptcy, who turn to an old jade statuette in their antiques collection said to have the power to grant three wishes. The wife wishes for lots of money, and obtains it shortly thereafter via her husband's life insurance as he dies in a car accident. Devastated, she uses her second wish to bring him back as he was before the accident- only to find that he was already dead at the time due to a heart attack! Finally, she uses her final wish to bring him back to life fully... Only to find her returned husband writhing in pain, as he's already been embalmed and feels formeldahyde burning through his veins. She tries to mercy-kill him, first with a gun and then a kitchen knife, but the pure power of the statue keeps him helplessly trapped in neverending pain! It doesn't stop there. In the most nightmare-inducing endings to any of EC Comics' stories, she is later found by the side of his coffin, having reduced her husband into a bloody mass of flesh in her mad, futile attempts to free him from his sad torment... Cutting... cutting...
  "And Mr. Shiner... and the others... the men in the white coats that came to take Enid away... never noticed the tiny severed sections pulsating...
• "The Haunt of Fear" had it's own slot reserved for a series of morbid takes on classic fairy tales called "The Crypt-Keeper's Grim Fairy Tale!" Among their stories include a twisted take on the Hansel and Gretel tale (issue #23), in which the little old lady they encounter was never planning to roast them alive— But Hansel and Gretel still ended up shoving the lady into her hot oven, which even shows her painfully burning alive on-panel.
• "Television Terror" from Issue 17 is full to the brim with Nothing Is Scarier. We follow through the lens of a camera as our host slowly goes insane with terror as he ventures further into a haunted house before losing all nerve and hanging himself on live TV. We never see exactly what is terrifying him so much, nor do we see what happened to his companion, but it most certainly is not pretty.

Shock Suspenstories

• The series comes right out of the gate with "The Neat Job!" in issue #1. A woman is slowly driven mad by her husband constantly berating her over not being able to keep up with his obsessive organization habits. After she finally snaps and kills him, she carefully dissects and stores every last piece and drop of blood in little labeled jars, just like he'd always demanded.
• "Beauty and the Beach!" (Shock Suspenstories #7); Two husbands grow bitter at how vain their attractive wives are, so one of them decides to freeze her body inside a giant block of plastic, while the other husband straps his wife onto a table in her swimsuit, which then burns her to a crisp using 40 blazing hot sun lamps! No discretion here—you get to see her charred corpse in full view.
• "The October Game" (Shock Suspenstories #9, an adaptation of a short story by Ray Bradbury) has no on-screen gore or violence, but it revels in Nothing Is Scarier. The story is centered around Mitch Wilder, a sociopathic father who hates his own wife and daughter for not giving him a son in his own image, and finds the most horrible way to get even with her! It turns out on Halloween night, his daughter Marion invited her friends over for a party, and after some fun and games, Mitch invites them all to his cellar (called "The Tomb of the Witch") bringing Marion down there first, and then inviting the rest of the kids down. They proceed to play a game in a dark basement where he reveals the witch is dead, but he has the remains of the witch's body to pass around (still played today, though usually called "The Dead Man"; the remains are harmless fakes like peeled-grape "eyes" or noodle "guts"). The mother calls for the daughter and doesn't hear her. "And then...some idiot turned out the lights!" For once, the body parts weren't fake...
• In "The Space Suitors" (Shock Suspenstories #11), a woman and her lover lure the woman's husband to a mining asteroid so that they can kill him and run off together, but in his dying moments, the husband strands them on the asteroid with a remote-control device that sends their spaceship back to earth. Which is why his post-Explosive Decompression face looks disturbingly smug in this nauseating closeup.

Crime Suspenstories

• The cover of "Crime Suspenstories #22" (pictured above) has a mad man carrying a bloodied axe with a decapitated woman's head!