"We didn't cut their faces off!"
Often considered one of the creepiest Sit Coms ever made, The League of Gentlemen is rife with examples. Spoilers below.- Papa Lazarou. Everything about him. Especially in the Christmas Special. He didn't wind up as the page image for the Nightmare Fuel Live-Action TV page for nothing.
- During the iconic Hello Dave scene, while Papa goes upstairs, leaving Mary and Mama alone, Mama removes her veil and pleas to Mary to help her by playing along she is terrified and convincing to Marynote it's her last line that seals the deal:
Mama Lazarou: Don't make him angry, [beat] he can do things.- His alter ego Keith is also deeply, deeply unsettling.Mark Gatiss: People are always banging on about how dark it is and we always say, "Oh, come on..." And then we watch it again and sometimes I'm quite taken aback by all that's going on. The thing that I always think is really something is Papa Lazarou kidnapping Bernice's mother in the Christmas Special. That's absolutely terrifying.
- The Christmas Special also manages to turn Herr Lipp (normally a mid case of Paranoia Fuel) into a full-on terror, mostly through excellent camera work.
- Plus there was the creepy, masked cult who used voodoo dolls and made one-sided deals.
- And last but not least the Victorian curse. Who ever thought shadow puppets of a monkey screwing an elephant could be so scary?
- Harvey "Toadface" Denton becomes increasingly sinister and monstrous over the series, and yet he's got nothing on his twin daughters, Chloe and Radclyffe. Their Establishing Character Moment - involving a man trapped inside a scarecrow - is particularly well-remembered, as is their alarming pleasure at killing their father's beloved toads.
- As well as locking their parents in a room in the basement. It's implied that they never let them out again as they don't appear in the show afterwards.
- Edward and Tubbs, a pair of incredibly hideous, incestuous redneck Serial Killers, as well as the implied metamorphosis of their son from a normal human being into a monstrous ogre-like creature that lives in the attic. Not something you expect to see on a Sitcom.
- "You heard the man/woman, Tubbs. Get undressed!"
- Hilary Briss is mildly creepy all by himself, but the mysterious meats he sells (and the bizarre, dreamlike scene of him purchasing them from a dealer) are absolutely horrific.
- The creators were asked if his meat was human flesh... Their answer? No. It's so much worse than that.
- The Nosebleed Plague. Even Papa Lazarou was creeped out by that.
- The scene in the second series where Pauline and Ross wrestle features a moment where Pauline forces Ross onto a table and tries to stab him with a pen, all with a terrifyingly feral look on her face. This was immediately followed by Ross biting down on her breast hard with a sickening crunch!
- In the final scene of Episode One of Series 3, Mickey is painting a picture of him and Pauline getting married when the phone rings it's Ross calling Mickey about the fact that he and Pauline just had sex, however before he can answer the glass of water's spills over the picture and with an ear piercing sound affect a large patch red covers Pauline (à la Don't Look Now) Mickey takes this as a warning and runs to find Pauline rather than answer the phone.
- Lance Longthorne's story in series 3. He receives a new arm that's still inhabited by the spirit of the nun it belonged to. Said spirit forces Lance to act more like the arms former owner and even after being mostly torn off it still has enough control over him to force him into a Heroic Sacrifice.
- While it's played for laughs the deaths of Alvin Steele's wife and her guests with the Medusa (a machine for group auto-erotic asphyxiation), is quite a terrible way to go, the guy in charge called Daddy has a fatal heart attack and he tries to switch it back on. They know the safe word, but because they are trapped in the rubber suits, they are muted and can't take off the masks. Also they can't move far, so Alvin returns to a pile of rubber bodies.
- According to the movie, if at any point you stop writing about a fictional world, it is destroyed by a fiery hail of meteors—so, essentially, any time a series ends you're dooming not just your leads but dozens of incidental characters and extras, to say nothing of the countless people who implicitly populate the work's world, all of whom actually exist on another plane.
- "We didn't cut their faces off!"
- The photobooth from the 2017 series. Everyone who goes in there vanishes down some sort of shaft once they have their picture taken. It's in the last episode that we finally learn what it is:Papa Lazarou: It's a wife mine now!
- Pop is probably the most unnerving character in the whole series. A violent, perverted Greek drunkard who abuses his two sons, sexually harrassess the girlfriend of his older son Al, goes out of his way to frighten the two tennants he has staying in a flat he owns and even films the people in that flat without their knowledge. He returns in the 2017 series after being away for over a decade to find that Al and his wife have told their two daughters that Pop died. He's back to his old creepy ways with his own granddaughters, giving them skimpy underwear as "gifts" while Al can only standby and do nothing out of fear for his father. This makes it hard to feel sorry for Pop when his other son Richie murders him when the two finally meet again.
- The local veterinary surgeon Matthew Chinnery, a kind-hearted animal lover cursed to accidentally kill any innocent creature he interacts with, usually in shockingly brutal or explosive fashions. For the sheer amount of no-limits Black Comedy on display, he has been an enduring favourite since the very first episode, but for both casual viewers and even hardened fans, many of his sketches are extremely tense and cringeworthy to sit through in the worst possible ways. Examples of Chinnery's unintentional cruelty throughout the franchise include euthanizing a farmer's perfectly healthy dog via lethal injection while the farmer is fetching the dog he actually wants put down, oxygenating a tortoise until it erupts like a rocket out of its own shell, and gorily exploding an over-bloated hedgehog. So for many, Chinnery has become the true The Dreaded of the series, even above the likes of Papa Lazarou.
