Nightmare Fuel / The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

• Benjamin is born in the shape of a baby but with all the physical features and ailments of an 84-year-old man.
  • In the short story, new-born Benjamin is described as "partly crammed" into the hospital crib— in other words, he was born a full-grown 70-year-old man. And somehow his mother survived the pregnancy!
• How about when he's a kid with Alzheimers? Imagine if YOUR children began forgetting who they or you are? Alzheimers itself is Nightmare Fuel enough without the image of a young boy suffering from it.
• The end of the story, where Benjamin's identity and memory slowly fade away as he becomes younger and younger, until he finally becomes a baby.
  "The past-— the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather—all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been.
  He did not remember. He did not remember clearly whether the milk was warm or cool at his last feeding or how the days passed—there was only his crib and Nana's familiar presence. And then he remembered nothing. When he was hungry he cried—that was all. Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness.
  Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind."
• The framing device: the arrival of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. As the movie ends, the sirens are going off throughout the city, floodwater begins pouring into the station - and the ancient clock once more starts running backwards..

---