Nightmare Fuel / Return of the Living Dead

• Tar Man from the first movie. The other zombies are no slouch in the nightmare fuel department either, especially the zombie in the mausoleum in II, and all of the zombies released from the Trioxin canisters in III.
• The idea that, no matter how much damage you inflict or what you do, the zombies will never die. Headshot? Nothing. Dismemberment? Just more pieces to come after you. Nuclear strike? Good job, now you've spread the infection even more. Extinction just seems inevitable.
• And these are smart zombies. They figure out how to ambush victims, and when they get at the paramedics and the cops responding to the crisis they get on the horn and tell the dispatchers to send more.
  • And when Tina hides in a closet to try to hide from Tar Man, he quickly uses a hook and pulley chain to yank the doors off the hinges to get at her!
• The whole reason zombies endlessly crave brains is as much nightmare fuel as it is Tear jerking. Being a decaying living corpse is painful beyond belief. The only relief is the chemicals found in a living brain. They aren't mindless monsters. They are people who have been driven mad and desperate by constant pain.
  • That also makes them possibly the most terrifying zombies in fiction. In most versions, becoming a zombie seems to be pretty much just death. Your body may get back up, but it's not you anymore. At worst, there's some animal part of you left that is hungry but that's all. To become this version of a zombie is to be in agony forever, and all zombies are driven to do something that dooms more people to suffer the same eternal agony in return for just a brief stop to their own agony. This is the one version of zombification that is disturbing and can have you cringing every time a protagonist is in danger of being infected.

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