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This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Following

Nightmare Fuel / Webcomics

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/hs.png
"'Let'S bE TAngLe ''bUdDiES

With no ratings system, no Moral Guardians, no restrictions, and nothing but your skills holding you back, the next update of your favorite Webcomic might just be the one to be burned into your mind forever.

NOTE: As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned. Tropers are naturally curious. Having them stumble into links which scar them for life is not to everyone's tastes. Merely adding a link without a description is not enough for an example. Remember, even description of what's behind the link is still scary on its own.

Sub-pages:

Other examples:

  • Whomp comic: This comic (25/4/2012) deals with what happens when your flesh falls off. Urgh.
  • Achewood gives us Cartilage Head.
    • The "Fast Times At Achewood High" arc (starting here) begins normally enough, but then it veers headlong into some pretty unnerving territory. To make this worse, this is coming off the heels of a pretty bittersweet arc with Philippe and his family. Thanks a fucking lot Onstad
  • On this page of Aikonia, we are given a startling look at the demon possessing Ariel and her very special student club. No pupils? No problem!
  • The Bongcheon-Dong Ghost in its entirety. Not in the least because of the unexpected animated jump-scares accompanied by sound!
  • In Concession Joel/Miranda usually "infect" people by tentacle mind raping them as shown here. (NSFW)
  • Dead of Summer, being a Zombie Apocalypse scenario, runs on this. An example? This.
    • There's also Bug Bites, where Commander is swarmed and bitten by insects so much that his movements are slowed. On a later page, he screams that they're eating him alive.
  • The thoroughly disturbing Gorn of the Dolcett Archives. It's a series of webcomics about Gynophagia, that is cooking and eating women, sometimes alive. NSFW link: http://www.necrobabes.org/dolcett/
  • The horse....thing from early in the run of Girl Genius, seen through the next five pages.
    • The "Jars" in Beetlesburg that criminals are put into for a very slow and public execution by starvation and sun exposure and then left to rot.
    • The Slaver Wasps. Every thing revealed about them just makes them worse. The novels reveal they fuse to the nerves of their victims. And the reason they initially didn't work on Sparks? It's not because the Other couldn't make them like that, it just made a promise to the Knights of Jove.
    • The fate of Passholdt, and its inhabitants who were unwillingly turned into the most monstrous version of revenants seen yet.
    • The Bad Future from Othar's Twitter adventures.
    • Prince Aaronev's experiment when he's first introduced. The novel manages to take it up to eleven by mentioning twitching, and a small, strangled scream...
    • The various tools Agatha's forebears left in the medical lab she and Gil try to cure Tarvek in are all designed for horrifying uses, except the scream generator which was just for ambiance without it actually having to injure someone to make the noise, including replacing blood with molten brass and eight different types of electrocution.
    • Zola's Psycho Serum - fueled rampage, culminating in panel 5 of this strip
    • In a lovely combination with Paranoia Fuel following the time skip between stealth!Revenants, the apparent destruction of the wasp eaters and Lucrezia's liberal use of mind-downloads, you never quite know who you're actually talking to.
    • The fate of the inhabitants of Hraggel's Point, as recounted by two Wulfenbach agents who had horrifying front row seats:
      Woger: Hraggel's Point. The whole town's been wasped$and we were there. [...] We were supposed to sniff out [Herr Drumblebekk's] storehouses and trace his buyers. We tracked him to the second basement of a roadside inn. There was a hidden door in the floor, and when he went to open it it opened from the other side. I don't think he was expecting revenants. Yes, and these weren't just nice people mind-controlled by the Other... these were old style shamblers. They had masters. It was an invasion. Quiet. In the dead of night. They came up all over town through basements and tunnels. Once the town was infected they left the same way. Then everyone went back to sleep, like nothing had ever happened. It was really creepy.
  • Hedone High: "The Smote's Lullaby" is a fan song for an A Uish animation. The basic story is that it's the singer warning their child about "The Smote" (Izm). They tell them various things that The Smote will do to them, including sewing their mouth shut, blinding them, and then killing them. It gets even worse when you apply some of the lyrics. "Please be good, my dear sweet child, or The Smote will get you too." Why is this scary? This implies the singer has been/knows someone who has been killed already. Now think of the character in Hedone High that cares for children, was killed, and knew The Smote personally...
  • Inhuman:
    • Grey's occasional backstory flashbacks occasionally show his body being torn apart/altered in various ways. That and the fact that whenever someone gets shot with the special Rulerist ammo, it's always in the face, and part of their head basically goes all 'splodey depending on where the bullet enters the face. It's happened twice. So far. Oh, and let's not forget Grey tearing that one guys organs out with a kitchen knife with a bit of a gut hook in the blade, and the one whose throat he slashed open, and the one he blasted with static electricity that he had built up over the day, the fact that Grey's a 'certified schizophrenic' (in his own words), the fact that his shadow LITERALLY talks to him (He's a telepath, interestingly enough. Other people see it too.) and the freaking headworms that sometimes sprout from various parts of his body and start trying to eat him alive. In fact, anyone who reads that comic and doesn't agree that it's some form of Nightmare Fuel should get their head checked.
    • The second flashback of Soshiko and Kyo's parents being murdered. Especially when it turns out that it was done by Hekshanians.
  • Kaspall has the Veritarc. The Veritarc is an entity born out of a children's scare story about lying, and we all know how terrifying those can be. He appears as a man in robes, carrying a walking stick, with his head covered with some manner of sack. The Veritarc comes for those who make a promise and break it... any promise, broken for any reason whatsoever. The Veritarc sends his children after you, living shadows that can appear from any dark place as though it were a door, and they collect you and send you to the Veritarc's home, a cold hall at the edge of the world. You can either sit there and wait for him, or run and make him chase you, but it's all the same, The Veritarc will slowly, relentlessly follow you, it's walking stick tapping in pace with every step he takes, until you can run no longer, and then he will catch you, and then... well, the next morning, they find you dead in your bed, with your little finger cut off.
  • The fate of the four jerk jocks in The Wotch tries to be Karmic Transformation, but only manages to be utterly disturbing with the fact that 1) they're STUCK and 2) their memories of their former selves are erased, leading to a disturbing case of Not Himself. And Jo? It's the WORST. They were going for funny, it ends up even more disturbing than the above. Also, what happened to Scott, his girlfriend and Ivan.
  • The entirety of The Good Witch can be seen this way, seen it's essentially a deconstruction of The Wotch. The whole premise is giving Reality Warper powers to a sociopathic Designated Hero, who proceeds to start randomly transforming people into various things For the Evulz. Some of the highlights include randomly abducting children and turning them into clothes for her mother's store — whilst leaving them still sentient and able to comprehend their misery.
  • Almost all of Lego Robotcomics, [1] and the next four pages are truly horrifying.
  • Phe's death from The Meek. Made even more nightmarish from the fact that her poisoning is VERY realistic. The tracheotomy is just icing on the cake.
    • Followed shortly by the horrific way the ambassador is killed in retribution.
    • Dagre says hel lo.
  • Mindmistress - specifically, what MM does to Anansi Webb. For those who don't get it, she's not really turning Anansi into a spider - but making her think she is works just as well...
  • Some of the things seen in Nature of Nature's Art are... disturbing (the fact that the characters are animals may or may not make it worse). For starters, the first arc, 10%+, involves sapient animals being stripped of their human-level intelligence and left as mindless base animals. Now think about the effects that would have on a human being...
    • Meanwhile, Secretary has the incomplete Malice Style, which can have such wonderful effects as having your body fall apart with pieces of corn coming out and punching the bones [[http://www.nofna.com/?T=1-1-12-218 out of your arm. And the complete version of it... well, there's something to be said about ripping open a female jerboa's innards... which turn out to be inner demons in the form of jerboa fetuses... and to top it all off, as SV is dying, he has a hallucination of himself melting away into a skeleton]]. Secretary is just plain charming, isn't it?
  • No Rest for the Wicked: The witch sequence starts with the knowledge that they are looking for a serial killer of children. Starting here, it piles on from there.
  • Penny and Aggie: You and I, we have a lot to talk about...and so little time. Unlike most of the examples on this page, one can see this scenario playing out in Real Life. Which just makes it so much worse.
  • Slashed, an Industrial Nightmare seems to exist for this purpose alone.
  • VG Cats made FROSTY THE GODDAMN SNOWMAN horrifying.
  • Wapsi Square has had many moments, such as this lovely little bit of Eye Scream.
    • Tina's Revelation that she was the girl that was in the car that collided with the back of the bus that almost killed Monica.
  • The Zombie Hunters. They're zombies. They outnumber you 100-to-1. They all want to eat you. But some of them retain just enough humanity that you feel sorry for them... which makes them far, far scarier than the shuffle-and-groan variety
  • From late in the Problem Sleuth archives comes (spoilers) the most horrifying fractal ever. Just keep hitting "next", BTW.
  • Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name: Lee. Especially when he possesses {...}
  • Vampire Phantasm & Vampire Phantasm Excrucio. VP starts off with Orlock murdering the Jack's wife and baby daughter by ripping them to pieces, turning Jack into a vampire, and spending the next century torturing him into insanity. Excrucio is worse.
  • Charlie and Jamie's respective backstories from Khaos Komix. Charlie gets attacked by a classmate, Natalie Geln, for being a male-to-female transsexual. Natalie gives her a choice; either she subjects herself to a seriously Traumatic Haircut, or Tom, her FtM transsexual best friend, gets raped by Natalie's posse of bullies. After cutting Charlie's hair, Natalie reveals that she knows where she lives and if she doesn't leave town she will attack her again, possibly fatally this time, in her own home. Poor Charlie and Tom both had no other choice but to run. Jamie, meanwhile, was not only raped by someone that he might have known quite well (his rapist being drawn in a seriously creepy Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book way doesn't help at all) but he also had a brutally abusive Heteronormative Crusader of a mom. When she catches Jamie Playing Doctor with Alex, her immediate response is to "clean him". She does this by dousing him in scalding hot water until he admits that what he did was "wrong". Dear god.
  • The alt-text that goes with this xkcd strip, particularly because we're on that path:
    The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
  • This strip from Penny Arcade is both creepy and funny at the same time.
  • In Moon Crest 24, Morchego's (AKA: Pain Brain) ability allows her to transfer the pain she feels onto her opponent, and since Dwayne drilled her head, yeah...
  • This strip of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Especially when you read the Alt Text...
    • hi billy
  • This woman giving a near Slasher Smile-like grin in this Last Kiss comic [2].
  • Dragon Ball Multiverse:
    • Pages 342 through 351.
    • U13 Kakarotto...just see this page◊ and Chapter 27... Made even more horrifying by the single fact that, had the Goku we know and love not hit his head as a child when his ship landed on earth, that's what Goku would be today... Oh, it gets worse. Turns out Kakarotto and Krillin were good friends, and for one panel, we see Kakarotto being as innocent as his U18 counterpart.
    • The Kaioshin's rather direct way of dealing with upcoming dangers, like killing Frieza and Cooler when they were children and Broly when he was an infant, in the Universe 1/10 Special was noted to be too violent by fans.
  • Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures is a shining example of a Crapsaccharine World, with some seriously dark stuff behind the bright, colorful artstyle.
    • Let's start with the fact that there is effectively an ongoing cold war between Beings and Creatures, as Beings actually have schools dedicated to training their kind to become adventurers, who are then set free to go out and kill Creatures. Except that this Fantastic Racism is actually double-sided, and the adventurers are trained because Creatures feel they have every right to assault, kill and even eat Beings.
      • How bad is it? Because the basic government means that every criminal has a right to be tried by a "jury of their peers", criminals are judged and sentenced by judges of their own race. Therefore, Creatures often get away with a slap on the wrist for their crimes — we are shown Kria Soulstealer being made to pay an easily affordable fine for the crime of killing a dozen Beings. It's no wonder that adventurers are trained, if this is the case.
      • Although it's hard to say whether or not the fact that this same legal system means Beings who murder Creatures can get off with the same ease makes it better.
    • Demons. Perhaps the primary cause for Being hostility towards Creatures, they're an entire race whose Blue-and-Orange Morality revolves around Might Makes Right. To Demons, if they want to rob someone, fight someone, or even eat someone, they can, and if that person was too weak to stop them, then they deserved what they got. If another Demon dies, they deserve no sympathy or pity, as they deserved to die for being weak. Fighting and sex are closely intertwined with each other, to the point they regard a death vendetta as something akin to a passionate romance.
    • The Soulstealer family are the most dangerous demons we've seen in the comic series.
      • Aliph Soulstealer, aka "Dark Pegasus" created the idea of Necromancy and attempted to unleash a Zombie Apocalypse on the world, and keeps coming back from the dead in his attempts to conquer the world.
      • Kria Soulstealer is a mass-murdering, cannibalistic, Chaotic Evil monster and cheerfully upfront about it, to the point she just assumes by default everyone she meets is probably going to want to kill her because she's hurt them at some point in the past and she just doesn't consider it important enough to remember.
      • Even Lorenda Soulstealer, the nice one of the family, is incredibly dangerous. She supposedly doesn't like the idea of eating people... but, in the early comics, she's almost as voracious as her mother: her first reaction to hearing she was evicted was to plan to eat her landlord, she got evicted for eating every other tenant in the apartment building, Jyrras predominantly offered to let her come and live with him because he knew it wasn't a good idea to let a predator twice his size be unhappy around him... really, even though the comic has tried to gloss it over since, Jyrras is basically living with a short-tempered cannibalistic serial killer.
    • The Fae seem harmless, compared to the Demons. But think of the implications an entire race of Cloud Cuckoolander Reality Warpers and try not to let a chill run down your spine.
    • How dangerous is this verse? Vampires went extinct because they couldn't compete with the other Creatures running around preying on Beings.
    • The comic openly acknowledges that the Cubi are an entire race of Emotion Eaters with different affinities for certain emotions by clan. When it's an affinity for something like joy or gratitude, that's not so bad. When it's something like pain or fear... well then. Clan Kish'Ta calls themselves "The Nightmare Clan", and fittingly enough, their leader has an Eyeless Nightmare Face and More Teeth than the Osmond Family. Just to make things even more creepy, that isn't her natural species, either—close examination reveals that the fox body is stitched on, turning Kish'Ta into a horrific combination of the Fur Is Clothing and Genuine Human Hide tropes.
  • Kevin & Kell has a similar creepy factor to DAMFA above, in that it's a world of cutesy cartoon anthros... where the culture casually accepts murder and cannibalism as the facts of life, treating the fact people are running around eating each other as being totally normal. Add in the fact that attempts to break these events are actively opposed by the government, and you have one hell of a Crapsaccharine World.
  • Ronin Press Comics posted a terrifying comic adaption of a two-sentence horror story about checking under the bed for monsters.
  • Everyday Heroes goes into Jane's past, when she was a henchwoman to a villain ... only to discover that he was a serial killer who preyed on women. During their crimes, Jane and her friend Goldie were there to be his next victim if there were no other women present. Goldie found out the hard way.
  • In Skela And The Oddstrange the tale of the Oddstrange is shared by rhyme from an elder to a group of children. It is revealed to be a Horror that screeches at its victims, inducing an unusual illness. Whatever it may be, it seems that the unaffected are forced into a position where they have to slay the ill for their own protection.
  • In Fans!, Marcworld, a fractual world consisting of an infinite number of Marcs of varying sizes, which has been going for at least 614 years. Brought with an extra dose of Squick. Really, unless you have a strong stomach, it's best to just skip it.
  • The main character of Bethellium is the daughter of a famous assassin, and he often brought toys back from work for her. When she found out, she started having nightmares about a horde of zombie cubs trying to get their stuff back.
  • In I Love You, Little One, More Than Anything, the parent rabbit tells the child rabbit that it loves them. A pink heart appears on the child rabbit's chest, and it asks, "Even this part of me?"
    Parent rabbit: Oh, darling... (transforms into a massive wolf with a red outline) I love you. That isn't part of you. Not really. (closes its jaws around the child rabbit) IN FACT, I'M QUITE CERTAIN YOU'D BE HAPPIER WITHOUT IT. (the next panel shows the child rabbit lying on the ground with a Slashed Throat and the pink heart next to it, broken in half)
    • When the child rabbit runs to a safer and more colorful place, its heart begins to heal. But this is immediately followed by a creepy panel of the parent rabbit weeping and with blank white eyes, guilt-tripping them from far away and asking them to leave the safe place and come back home. The last panel says, "I miss my kid." in white text, but behind it in massive red letters is, "I MISS WHO YOU PRETENDED TO BE TO PLEASE ME."

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