Nightmare Fuel / Hamilton

"There's nothing like summer in the city...

Someone under stress meets someone lookin' pretty...

There's trouble in the air, you can smell it..."

— Aaron Burr, "Say No To This"

Hamilton certainly captures the awesomeness of America's history, but everyone knows that our history also has its fair share of horrors...

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

---

• The part in "Alexander Hamilton" where he moves in with his cousin, who commits suicide. Just imagine Hamilton going through that right after his mother's death. Not only was Hamilton twelve at the time, he was just as sick at the same time his mother was. Small wonder he refers to the incident wryly remarking he couldn't even seem to accomplish the simple act of dying.
• The implications of "You'll Be Back." King George III sees the colonies as an increasingly distant and ungrateful lover, and is willing to go to war and "send a fully-armed battalion" to get them to love him again. Also, this line:
  King George III: I will KILL YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY... to remind you of my love!
  • It doesn't help that the song is riddled with Domestic Abuse parallels. "You'll be back. Soon you'll see. You'll remember you belong to me..."
  • This line from "I Know Him" isn't much better:
    King George III: They will tear each other to pieces... Jesus Christ, this will be fun!
  • King George III's most terrifying trait however is how restrained he can appear until he lets his "enthusiasm" slip. The official recording adds some Nausea Fuel in the form of a torrent of saliva pouring from his mouth during a particularly heated moment of one of his numbers, as if he's moments from frothing at the mouth at the idea of the bloodshed.
  • To make all of the above worse, take in the obvious fact that this guy is the king.
  • All this subject matter being upbeat and cheery Beatles-esque music actually makes the song scarier because it shows just how deranged George is if he sees the war as fun.
• As much of a sleazeball as Hamilton is for cheating on Eliza with Maria, the situation he finds himself in during "Say No To This" is still absolutely terrifying; Imagine one stressful night while your wife's away, a pretty woman comes to your doorstep and tells you about the rough predicament she's in. You offer her some help, and then end up sharing her bed for the next several nights. You feel horrible about having an affair, but then along comes a letter from the woman's husband, in which he says he'll keep the affair on the down-low and even let you continue seeing his wife... as long as you give him a little payment for all this.
  • Not helping things is the implication that Maria was being forced by her abusive husband into seducing Hamilton so that he could extort money out of the poor schmuck. Even worse is that if this was the case she wouldn't have been in a position to say no to James' plan^note Considering she went on to divorce him, her claims he beats her are almost certainly true, not to mention she's the one who ultimately gets the brunt of the blame and most damage to her reputation.
• The instrumentals for "The Room Where it Happens" are fairly creepy.
  • The song itself, and that it's based on a wholly accurate historical event. The greatest fear of all Americans (and anyone living in a democracy, for that matter) is that the back-room deals and compromises are more important to deciding what actually happens than the votes cast by the people. The song is all about exactly that, that no one knows how the discussion went, what exactly was traded back and forth, who compromised how much of what they wanted to get the result they needed, who walked out of the room feeling like they'd won. . . and the American people had no say at all in how this went down.
• The beginning of "Your Obedient Servant", which has Burr extremely angry at Hamilton for endorsing Jefferson over him. The line "YOU'VE KEPT ME FROM THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS... for the last time..." is rather chilling.
  • Later in the song:
    Burr: Be careful how you proceed, good man
    Intemperate indeed, good man
    Answer for the accusations I lay at your feet or prepare to bleed, good man
• Alexander's dying monologue during "The World Was Wide Enough" is not only deeply heartbreaking, but chilling. It's arranged to sound like an impassioned slam poem, with only his panicking voice ("There is no beat, no melody") and the eerie sound of distant wind. And then there's the way he keeps repeating "rise up, rise up, rise up" over and over.
  • A lot of "The World Is Wide Enough," really; From Burr's rising panic as he realizes just how terrifyingly small his chances of surviving the duel with Hamilton are (Hamilton is a capable marksman, Burr is a terrible shot by both his own admission and his fellow soldiers', and to top it all off, Hamilton is wearing his glasses for good measure) to his final thoughts before the duel begins: "This man will not make an orphan of my daughter!" Just the way his voice breaks as he says those words...
    • Burr's horrified "WAIT!" when he sees, after he shot to kill, that Hamilton aimed his pistol at the sky. The only way Burr could justify this for himself is by seeing the situation as kill-or-be-killed, but Hamilton's refusal to fire on him rips that justification away.
• From the mixtape, "Valley Forge," which presumably got reworked into "Stay Alive." The sense of hopelessness and terror, mixed with the haunting background vocals, makes it one chilling number.
  • Although it's a little lighter in tone and has a couple funny lines, "Stay Alive" itself counts as well. It's instrumental, while more hopeful than "Valley Forge", evokes a sense of urgency and fear. It gets worse in the Reprise, where there is NO humor as Phillip is dying. Then you notice the beat is different from the original song, and you realize that it's Phillip's heartbeat, which stops when he dies.
• To a lesser extent, "Cabinet Battle #3," a demo of a Cut Song on the Mixtape. The distorted voices (necessary to tell who's speaking, since Miranda is playing all the characters in this version), very simple Background Music, and the constant bell and clocks ticking in the background make it quite unnerving to listen to. Made worse by how utterly resigned and hopeless everyone sounds, Washington in particular.
• Many fans have noted the similarities between "Hurricane" and a PTSD episode. It's immediately followed by "The Reynolds Pamphlet", which if anything is even more disturbing, between the distorted vocals and the mocking from Jefferson, Madison and Burr. It quite appropriately sounds like the soundtrack to someone's life falling apart.
• The April Hamildrop "First Burn" is a preliminary draft of Burn sang by five Elizas. The tone is much more angry than the actual Burn but the beginning has an ominous almost music box version of the beginning of Burn that's just kinda off...
• Near the beginning of "Right Hand Man", George Washington is bombastically introduced like a professional wrestler, the chorus shouting "HERE COMES THE GENERAL!", Burr enthusiastically hyping him up to the audience, and Hamilton referring to him as the one man who can lead the army. This is George Washington, the man seen as the symbolic "father" of the United States and who is held up as a hero by Americans to this day. When he arrives, what are the first words out of the mouth of this great man?
  Washington: We are outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned...
  • It becomes clearer throughout the first half of the song how much of an underdog the forces for independence were. Washington's forces keep retreating until eventually they outright have to abandon Manhattan.
  • Oh, it gets much worse. If you actually study the Revolutionary War, you learn that were it not for the timely arrival of both France and Spain, the fledgling United States would’ve assuredly lost and all the men we now know as Founders — including Hamilton himself — would’ve been hung, drawn and quartered.
• The Bullet: An omen of death who first appears as one of King George's slaves who gets killed for spying, then spends the rest of the show signifying the upcoming deaths of other characters (such as helping Laurens kill a British soldier just prior to his death, and telling Philip where he can find the man who will kill him in a duel). She is ultimately the ensemble member who catches the bullet fired from Burr's gun, bringing it closer to closer to Hamilton, just as she's been lingering in his life the whole time.