Nightmare Fuel / Grand Theft Auto Online

All spoilers are unmarked per wiki policy. Read only at your own risk. You Have Been Warned.

• GTA Online itself can be this on Free Mode. There is no one to trust and most players just shoot on sight once they see you, out of protection or pure entertainment, and they may spend hours of their time killing you over and over and over until you run away or quit. Just imagine if there were 30 mute clones of Trevor scattered around San Andreas doing God-knows-what. That's exactly how scary it is.
  • Seeing a red blip on the map coming towards you at high speed can be this. Extra points if they suddenly vanish from the map because they used Lester's hide blip ability and even more extra points if the blip has the shape of a tank or a jet.
• The GTA Online protagonist themself is this, because unlike the three playable characters of the campaign, they play the archetype of the typical GTA (villain)hero dead straight (just think of them as the successor to III's Claude). Arguably, they are the deadliest, most Ax-Crazy protagonists in the entirety of GTA history, showing zero remorse for committing wanton murder, having access to military-tier tools of destruction — including a fucking Kill Sat — that not even the singleplayer protagonists can lay their hands on, and generally being an absolute nightmare for law enforcement to deal with once they decide to wreak some havoc for shits and giggles. They never utter a single word under any circumstance, something which other characters note and sometimes mock during interactions, and nothing seems to make them lose their cool or even display emotion; the only times they show glee on their faces is when you're talking about money or killing things. It says a lot that the GTA Online protagonist manages to unsettle Trevor of all people when meeting him for the first time.
  Trevor: WHY AREN'T YOU FUCKING SCARED OF ME!?
• Grand Theft Auto Online features The Professionals, an immensely powerful crime network that operates in San Andreas. In contrast with the other gangs, they are a conglomerate of professional criminals with military training.
• The Slasher game mode for GTA Online. You have only a flashlight, the whole place is dark and someone is out there, hunting you with a shotgun. You better hide alright.
  • Not only that, but it brings a new ambient score to the game that sounds like something straight out of Manhunt.
  • Slasher IV is the worst. You can't see anything and you're totally reliant on your flashlight only. See that light coming down the tunnel? Is it coming from a partner...or the slasher?
• The whole idea behind the Gunrunning update in GTA Online. You purchase a former military bunker from Agent 14 and convert it into an arms factory that manufactures military grade weapons, then sell them off to unknown buyers. Agent 14 strongly implies they are very shady people, as one would expect buyers of illegally manufactured weapons would be. And YOU are putting arms and ammunition in their hands.
  • One of the resupply missions for your bunker is straight up this. The moment you start it, the whole session's weather gets stormy incredibly fast and you're tasked with driving all the way to Fort Zancudo to get your supplies. As you get there, you will see this enormous crashed UFO emitting the same noises as the one that keeps flying above the base in Singleplayer, surrounded by multiple dead soldiers, scientists and military vehicles, with nothing else but the the alien egg itself right among all the chaos. As the player collects it, aliens begin to spawn all around you and, while they don't attack you, they certainly scare the hell out of you and make you want to get away from that place as fast as possible, because you possibly just pissed off a whole extraterrestrial race.
  • If you have completed the resupply mission and black out at your nightclub. There is a minute chance you can find yourself up on Mt Chiliad stripped of your clothing with a tattoo of the UFO symbol found throughout Blaine County plastered on your back. As you turn around however, you find a UFO floating right behind you in broad daylight. Any attempt to approach it and it flies away at an insane speed. Seems whatever extraterrestrial race that owns the UFO's is far from finished with your character yet.
    • The song that plays as you approach the crash site is incredibly eerie as well.
• When Avon betrays you in The Doomsday Heist and you have to deal with the fact that you just helped an insane billionaire essentially take control of the government with a sociopathic companion AI that wants to commit genocide on the human race. The sense of urgency to continue playing the Heist just to save the planet is real.
  • Immediately after betraying you, Avon unleashes his army on you. When you hear Lester mention "cyborg clone warriors", you'd think he was joking, but then you end up seeing for yourself that he isn't wrong at all.
  • The presence of Juggernauts that can go invisible during the "Rescue Agent 14" setup. Yes, fucking Juggernauts that can go invisible armed with mini-guns!
  • During the finale of Act lll, Cliffford quickly starts to become a rogue AI and turns against his creator. He quickly achieves independent sentience as you storm into the Mt Chiliad bunker control room in a hurry to stop the nuke from being launched and it is rather unsettling to hear that even Avon, his creator, has become scared and submissive to him.
• Getting hit by the Orbital Cannon. It comes out of nowhere, there is absolutely no warning to it happening to you and the only way to know if someone could be targeting you is by looking on the map and seeing if there's anyone in their facility. If they are, there is a chance they could be on their orbital cannon, picking a target and that target could be you.
  • There's only two known ways to hide from the orbital cannon. By going to the deepest depths of the ocean (yes, near crush depth and we all know how horrifying that place is) and by hiding under the first floor of a parking garage in Los Santos. But then again, how do you know that there is a giant satellite in space with its cannon pointing at you?
  • Besides those two ways, there's only two other known ways of surviving the orbital blast, and that's hiding in the back of your MOC or your Avenger. Both of them will be immediatelly destroyed upon direct impact, but instead of dying, you'll just spawn outside of their fiery wrecks.
• Whenever you enter the Facility's Heist planning room, you get this really ominous drone. It is probably the sound of the Heist planning computer screen turning itself on, but you can't help but feel like what you're about to do will certainly lead to... Doomsday.
• During the Diamond Casino Heist, nearing seemingly innocuous areas of the map will produce sound effects such as a slow heartbeat, unintelligible whispering and a man screaming in pain.
  • Even worse? Examining these areas closely will lead to the discovery of various clues as to what happened: a message reading "Can you find me?", a severed hand, a bloodstained machete, a bloody handprint and a van with bloody trashbags and machetes inside.
  • Worst of all? Finding all five clues will cause you to get a message from the Los Santos Slasher, the guy responsible for all this, telling you that you know too much and he's coming for you. After this you will have to wait for night, when the Slasher will come for you... Fortunately he's not much tougher than a regular NPC and can be killed for a $5000 reward.
• Juan Strickler, aka "El Rubio", the world's most notorious drug cartel boss and the Big Bad of The Cayo Perico Heist. While he presents himself to be quite friendly towards the party guests in the introduction (not without threatening the producer Scott Storch, however), some minutes later, the camera feed reveals his vicious and ruthless side as El Rubio feeds one of his employees, Gustavo, to a panther while he's alive for merely "embarrassing" him by not staying at the beach party. Then, when the player succeeds in robbing his compound for the first time, he drops his Faux Affably Evil side and has a drug-fuelled Villainous Breakdown while randomly killing off his guards whom he suspects as spies afterwards. Should you come back to the compound, he's reduced to a deranged, paranoid maniac, loudly berating and calmly threatening his guards and the player(s) over the loudspeakers. Think Tony Montana and Hoyt Volker but in the body of a middle-aged blonde Colombian. Not to mention Strickler's overall killcount, including the unnamed journalists, the past heist crew, and all the skeletons and wrapped female corpses you may come across when scoping out his island, and the fact that nothing will stop him from tracking you down to kill you if you leave ANY trace of your robbery...
  El Rubio: Do NOT fail me again. Do. Not. Please... I'm so fucking bored of executing employees!
• The 2021 "Halloween Surprise" event introduces random encounters from UFOs to slashers dressed as killer clowns that take quite a beating. Aside from that, one of them involves a red hard-top car which moves all by itself with no driver in the wheel while modified with unique red headlights. When approached or provoked, the said car will burst into flames and start chasing you down. If this killer car looks familiar to you, as it should, it's no one other than Christine herself in all but name.
  • In general things get very dangerous during Halloween. Los Santos sky becomes distorted and stormy, and there's always something trying to kill you, whether it's an impostor of you, a self-driving car, or even aliens. Even in Diamond Casino, the raining diamonds on the screens are replaced with white and black diamond skulls just to add a level of macabre to the Casino.
    • If you attempt to approach one of the UFOs with a flying vehicle, an EMP burst is heard as your vehicle eventually malfunctions while you plummet to your death (unless if you're lucky when using a helicopter as long it doesn't blow up when crash landing). And no, not even your precious Deluxo or Oppressor Mk. II will save you from that.
    • On top of that, when approaching, all radio stations (including Self Radio and Music Player) will start to suffer from interference coming from the said flying saucers.
• Remember the Juggernauts from the Doomsday Heist? Well, they make a return in the Criminal Enterprises update as part of ULP's final mission, "Cleanup". As you explore Avon Hertz's silo in complete darkness, with the only light sources being the flare and the flashlight attatchment of your gun, you'll suddenly start hearing breathing noises, which turn out to be from the Juggernauts. While they're thankfully immobile when you search for power fuses and only activate when you start hacking the servers, their breathing noises and their sudden appearance in the dark is startling, along with the fear that they could activate at any second.