Nightmare Fuel / Sweet Home (2017)

aka: Sweet Home

Sweet Home (2017) is more than 100 chapters of almost nonstop Nightmare Fuel, but even within all of that these moments stick out as the most terrifying parts of a terrifying story.

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

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The webcomic

• The comic is kicked off when Hyun's parents and sister are killed in a car accident and Hyun is left with barely enough money to support himself for a year. The sheer suddenness of it all is at its worst, and by the end of the first chapter Hyun is alone (since no other family would take him), isolated in a bare apartment, and ready to commit suicide.
• The intro to the monsters:
  • The girl next door starts making noise, so Hyun goes next door to find a package full of ramen noodles eaten through completely. The door is slightly ajar so Hyun looks inside... just in time to see a monsterised arm reaching for the bloody collar of the girl's pet cat and grabbing it away.
  • Hyun gets freaked out and goes back to his room, at which point the girl buzzes him and asks for food. Upon being denied, she starts cursing, screaming, stretching her face to terrifying proportions, until she hears noise upstairs, gets excited at the prospect of "food", and goes after it.
• The two groups receive a very hands on experience with the first monsters.
  • The blind monster is the first monster encountered by the upper floors. Emaciated with bark-like skin, as soon as it hears a noise it extends an arm, at which point the arm grows branches like trees to completely destroy any room they're in. Also, it's missing the top half of its head. Hyun is almost killed by this monster three times in rapid succession before it loses interest and leaves him alone.
    • Flashbacks reveal that Jayhun was the one to decapitate the man who would become the blind monster after realizing that the man intended to murder everyone in the building, only to be shocked upon realizing that the monster continued to walk around like nothing happened.
  • The tongue monster is the lower group's introduction to the monsters. Seok Kim opens the shutter to let the group out, at which point a monster, who is eight feet tall with a lightbulb shaped head, walks in. It then sprouts a tongue from its throat, which attacks a man and drains the blood from its body. It's only due to some quick thinking on Wook and Hyuk's part that only one person died.
• Hearing noise, Hyun opens his window and sees a man leaving his children behind to find supplies. Before Hyun or the man can react, a monster on the ground sees them and its head grows all the way to their room to stare at them, freaking the man out so much that he falls to his death, traumatizing his children. Hyun almost becomes the monster's next victim before Dusik Hahn shoots the monster in the neck, decapitating it. Hyun takes a deep breath, and then the monster continues to walk away as though nothing's wrong.
• While rescuing the kids, Hyun encounters Beefcake, the Logical Extreme of Dumb Muscle. Almost hitting the ceiling with muscles that would make The Incredible Hulk jealous, this monster is obsessed with getting "protein" by eating everyone it sees, including, as Hyun realizes while hiding from it, dead bodies. This monster's sheer refusal to take any slight against it and the fact that it actually is revealed to be smarter than expected means that Beefcake is a recurring enemy that the survivors are rightfully terrified of.
• The backstory behind the fast monster. Originally a tenant of the building, the man grew jealous of one of his competitors and murdered him out of a desire to be the fastest long before succumbing to his infection. While Hyun shows some sympathy for the monsters he encounters, considering his own infection, he curses the man just before tricking it to its death, disgusted with what people are capable of even without the infection.
• Daon Kim from Hyun Cha's past is truly a horrifying person despite being an ordinary human teenager compared to the monsters in the series. Throughout the series, we see hints of Hyun Cha's past; he was once a popular student and had a loving relationship with his family, which consisted of his father, mother, and sister. Something happened that traumatized him, made him an outcast, and destroyed his relationship with his family. Chapters 80 and 81 give the whole story, and it's horrifying; Daon Kim is the new transfer student, and Hyun Cha notices him just staring at a vending machine, wanting to be friendly, he offers to let him play a game of soccer with his friends and gives him change so he can have a snack from the vending machine. Daon Kim, however, for some reason, was insulted, and he and his friends beat him on the rooftop, later when Daon Kim tried to force Hyun Cha to drink toilet water from a shoe and threatened to have his father fired because Daon Kim's father owns the company Hyun Cha father worked for, Hyun Cha refused to drink the water, defend himself and demanded that Daon Kim leave his family alone. Daon Kim then revealed why he was bullying Hyun Cha; he said that when Hyun Cha gave him change, there wasn't a single cloud in the sky. Hyun Cha was shocked by the answer, and Daon Kim laughed and said did you really think that there was some special reason I paid any attention to you, revealing that he ruined his life at random and for kicks because Hyun Cha happened to approach him. Eventually, when Hyun Cha's parents talk to the school, Daon Kim stops bullying Hyun Cha but moves on to another fellow student as a victim and tries to get him to jump in front of a car by saying that he'll pay for the student's mothers treatment because she was really sick. Thankfully Hyun Cha stopped him and pushed Daon Kim in front of the car; while the car stopped before he was hit, Daon Kim was freaked out and peed his pants. Spoiled, cruel, and sociopathic, Daon Kim stands out as one of the cruelest and monsters characters despite appearing only in flashbacks and existing in the world of monsters.
• Every single thing about the tentacle monster is absolutely horrifying.
  • To start, it keeps shouting variants of the phrase "I will survive" or "I want to live", emphasizing the fact that as horrible as these monsters are, most of them used to be people who just wanted to go about their lives.
  • It's carried upside down by a mess of tentacles on its back, which it also uses to attack anyone it encounters and destroy dead bodies it comes across. Everywhere it goes, death and gore are the only things left in its wake.
  • At one point, Hyun gets trapped by it and gets a look at it upside down, only to realize that the monster is smiling. It's only thanks to Seop Ahn and Yuri's intervention that he doesn't get completely destroyed on the spot.
  • After multiple fights with it, Hyun finally gets close enough to it to stab with his electrified staff. Instead of killing it like it does to the other monsters, this monster instead evolves and gains both rock-like skin and more sturdy limbs, turning him into a spider looking hunk of rock that the survivors have absolutely no chance against.
• The union of the upper and lower floor groups should be a source of comfort, if it weren't for the fact that, as Hyuk reveals, Hyun is one of several monster infected trying to hide their symptoms, meaning there is no true safety in the building.
• The security guard. Dear god, the security guard.
  • For a start, the guard went insane long before he became infected, to the point that when he became infected his biggest desire was to murder all of the tenants of the apartment. How does he originally plan on going about this? He got in the elevator with a gas can, fully ready to burn the entire building down. If he wasn't so heavy that he had to leave it behind and if the power hadn't gone out, he very well could've murdered everyone in the building.
  • When he does return, it's revealed that he became a monster. He reveals this by quietly exiting the elevator, walking up to the nearest person, reminding her of the time she gave him rotten fish, and then cutting her in half with a saw. He's so inhumanly strong and his skin is so tough that he then proceeds to kill several people, ending his spree by smashing Jayhun's face to a bloody pulp. Luckily for that last part, it's a Gory Discretion Shot, but even the little bit that we do see is nauseating.
  • The guard actually puts up so much of a fight that the group has to trick him into getting fed to the tongue monster outside the building. The guard's life force is drained from his body slowly before he finally dies for good.
  • After his death, the survivors realize why he was so strong: he had already killed several people and absorbed their bodies into his own.
• When Yuri runs out of inhalers, the group decides to head to a nearby hospital. Dusik and Hyuk are able to prepare a car that should be able to survive outside, complete with armored panels and flamethrowers in the front. They clear out the parking garage and leave. All is well... for about three seconds, at which point Beefcake shows up and wrecks the car before it even makes it out of the parking lot.
  • The following fight is absolutely terrifying. The group has absolutely no chance against Beefcake in any way and they know it, so the fight is just a battle of attrition to try to weaken him enough to repair the car and burn him. Unfortunately, Seop Ahn pushes Hyun out of the way of an attack and gets completely pulverized in the process. It almost counts as a Gory Discretion Shot because so little of him is left after he's hit.
  • At one point, Hyun discovers the corpse of the father that fell to his death a few weeks prior. He discovers this because he's launched face first into the corpse's decomposing head, giving us a very nice closeup of the body.
  • After a while, Jisu decides to get serious about the fight and pulls out Jayhun's sword. Unfortunately, Beefcake recognizes it from the last time it was used against him, and all that happens instead is he flies into even more of an Unstoppable Rage than he was already in.
  • Then finally, out of nowhere, a bus appears and rams Beefcake until he stays down, at which point the group can finally burn the corpse. The group celebrates and goes to greet their rescuers... except for Wook, who finally reveals his past as a police officer and says that that's a prison bus, and he recognizes all of the people inside as criminals.

The miniseries (based on the webcomic)

Sweet Home (2020)

• Hyun opens his door to find his boxes of ramen have been torn open and scattered across the floor. Next a cat's head bounces out of his neighbour's open door. A blood-stained hand reaches out and grabs it while a voice wails about how hungry she is. Terrified, Hyun runs back into his apartment and locks the door. Seconds later a girl appears at the door, begging to be let in. She seems human... until Hyun asks her to show him her arms. Then blood pours from her mouth and nose as she screams and throws herself against the door.
• The monster behind the shutters. It has Creepy Long Fingers, opens its mouth impossibly wide, and has an incredibly prehensile tongue which it uses to break through glass and drain blood from its hapless victims.
  • After surviving that monster, Eun Hyeok looks out and sees dozens of other monsters crawling around outside the building. We don't get a good look at them. One of them appears to have its head split in two, possibly with teeth sprouting between the two halves of its head.
• When the televisions finally start working again the first thing the apartment's residents see is the president giving a speech. He seems calm and normal even as he warns everyone about the monsters. Then he starts to turn into a monster. His terrified guards try to restrain him then shoot him. All of this happens on live TV while the horrified survivors watch.
• A spider monster chases Yi-kyeong through the air-vents. Just when it looks like she's escaped, it throws its web around her neck and almost strangles her as she struggles desperately.
• The sheer amount of punishment Hyunsu takes over the course of the series. Special mention goes to him jumping down a stairwell and landing so hard his shin bones break through his skin.

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