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It appears that many Nightmare Fuel pages have problems, including:
1. Listing non-scary things that made the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable at worst.
2. Having spoiler tags on them (which is against the page's guidelines).
3. Listing Fridge Horror and fan theories.
And much more!
On a few occasions, people from outside the site's community have pointed out our overly lax usage of Nightmare Fuel to make fun of us, meaning that it can legitimately harm our reputation to let this go unchecked.
The TRS thread
meant for redefining Nightmare Fuel started to become a place for cleaning up Nightmare Fuel pages in general, so we may as well move these discussions to Long Term Projects where they belong.
Here are the guidelines to determine whether something is Nightmare Fuel or not.
- This is a page whose name is intended to be taken more literally than most. It's not enough for material to be scary; to truly qualify, it has to be frightening enough to legitimately unnerve/disturb the viewer, with actually being nightmare-inducing as the ultimate endpoint.
- Good signs that something IS Nightmare Fuel include if:
- It left you feeling shaken even after the credits had rolled, you turned the last page, or are otherwise done with the work.
- You have a hard time falling asleep if you think about it at night, or have a literal nightmare about it.
- You dread that episode, scene, level, chapter, or song during re-watches, and consider skipping it.
- With that said, don't add something just because it happens to be your personal phobia. For example, spiders can be scary and many people have arachnophobia, but just because a spider happens to be in the work, it does not make a Nightmare Fuel entry. It needs to reasonably be scary to someone without the phobia.
- Don't confuse tension with fear. If the hero is in trouble, but you know he'll make it out okay at the end, it's probably not Nightmare Fuel unless the threat is especially disturbing.
- Good signs that something IS Nightmare Fuel include if:
- Explain WHY the entry scared you. Try to convey your sense of fear to your readers. Avoid putting up Zero-Context Examples.
- Remember that Weblinks Are Not Examples, and neither are quotes on their own. You should explain the horror in your own words, rather than rely on others to do so.
- Don't add things that might have scared someone. If it didn't scare you, and you don't personally know anyone else who was scared, you shouldn't be adding it to Nightmare Fuel.
- Nightmare Fuel should stick to you even after you're done with the work.
- If something is initially presented as scary but turns out to be harmless, it's most likely not Nightmare Fuel since The Reveal makes the scariness vanish.
- Jump Scares are a good source of Nightmare Fuel, but not all of them automatically qualify: being startled is not the same as being scared.
- Hypotheticals are not Nightmare Fuel:
- Remember that Trailers Always Lie: a scene that is presented as scary in the trailer could very well turn out to be inoffensive in the finished work. Only add examples from unreleased works if they were especially terrifying in the previews.
- Fan theories do not belong on the Nightmare Fuel page under any circumstance. No matter how much evidence they have to support them, don't add them until they've been officially confirmed. In the meanwhile, take them to Wild Mass Guessing.
- Fridge Horror goes on the Fridge page, not Nightmare Fuel. Don't add it unless it's Ascended Fridge Horror.
- Keep in mind the work's intended audience when considering whether or not something is Nightmare Fuel.
- If something is normal or expected in the genre, it does not automatically qualify. Violence in a Fighting Series or gore in a horror movie must be especially disturbing or gruesome by the work's standards to be Nightmare Fuel.
- Remember that Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films. If a work is rated PG-13 or higher but would only be scary to young children, it's not Nightmare Fuel.
- The standards on what qualifies as Nightmare Fuel are especially stringent on works aimed at children and pre-teens: kids have hyperactive imaginations, so even something benign can give them nightmares.
- Spoiler tags do not belong on Nightmare Fuel pages. Much of what scares us comes from inherently spoilery stuff such as death and the unknown, so finding spoilers on these pages should be expected.
- Nightmare Fuel is an Audience Reaction, so it needs to be scary for the audience. Describing how the characters react to something scary isn't needed. Just because something scares them, that doesn't mean it scares us as well.
- Nightmare Fuel is a No Real Life Examples, Please! page. Meta-examples involving the actors, production, or behind-the-scenes incidents are not allowed.
Guidelines when proposing cleanup of a page:
- Some rules are pretty objective. If you see a Zero-Context Example, Fridge Horror, Real Life example, speculation, In-Universe reaction that isn't scary to the viewers, examples that explicitly describe themselves as not being very scary (including "mildly creepy", "somewhat unnerving", and other synonymous phrases), or examples that are just scene summaries without going into detail about why it's so scary, you can (and should) remove them immediately without coming here to ask.
- You should also strip all spoiler tags from the page. Itty Bitty Wiki Tools has a tool for that, but it can cause problems, so if you use it be sure to preview the page and thoroughly look it over.
- Once you've fixed the objective issues with the page, bring it here so we can look at the more subjective problems, such as examples that may not be scary enough to qualify. If a consensus is reached that a certain entry does not qualify, it can be removed.
Edited by Zuxtron on Aug 1st 2020 at 9:40:30 AM
I think you're safe. The entry is effectively written as "someone, somewhere, might find this disturbing". That's one of the "don't do" guidelines for NF. Tropers are supposed to put down audience reactions we know have definitely occurred, we're not supposed to speculate that someone, somewhere, might have had a relevant reaction at some point.
Edited by Wyldchyld on Mar 26th 2023 at 2:17:46 PM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.YMMV.Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2012 S 1 E 23 Parasitica has this example:
- Nightmare Fuel: In real life, most parasitic wasp species don't just brainwash their victims to guard their eggs, they actually paralyze their victims, lay their eggs inside them, and the host for the incubating eggs is eaten from the inside out when the larvae hatch.
This explains nothing about what's terrifying about the episode, and just explains that the episode is inaccurate to real life.
Join the Object Show Cleanup Thread! (they/them)are documentary example problematic?
i was thinking about the 2020 documentary the reason i jump which contains a look into the lives of five autistic people around the world and their perspective, but then i realized that even though it was a movie, troping certain scenes would be troping real life.
there are examples about real life incidents being shown and described in documentaries. i don't know a lot of the movies on there, but i did see that there are examples about real life footage of 9/11 and the lebanon massacre.
I was removing dead links from the image gallery
for Accidental Nightmare Fuel, and I found a few examples which I think are inappropriate. Here they are, with my commentary added:
- Jocelyn Wildenstein. There are so many creepy pictures of her ugly face, I just decided to give you a big gallery. Enjoy!
Calling a real person ugly and creepy feels wrong to me. Plus it's written in the first person.
- Here's the San Diego Weekly Reader's cover photo for April 7, 2010
.. This is the Accidental Nightmare Fuel page-keyword, ACCIDENTAL. The article that this cover was made for is about a cartel kidnapping, and the headline is "Want to be sent home in pieces?" The nightmare fuel here is very much intentional.
- The end of childhood innocence..(or more fuel after the end...)
◊ (A photo of a creepy boy with a creepy grin appearing to be between ten and thirteen at Christmas holding a Hentai DVD) It's the same picture on the What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids? page, with the boy grinning because he got hentai for Christmas. I guess the grin is unintentionally creepy, but I think the main source of nightmare fuel here is the idea that the kid is going to lose his innocence watching anime porn, which is indeed very scary imo.
- Carrot Top.
◊ The more recent version. Those...eyes... I know Carrot Top's odd appearance is a big part of his act, and it's less mean than the Wildenstein one, but it still feels weird to me that we're calling a real person nightmare fuel.
Destroy that and burn it to the ground... lol.
EDIT: I take it back, we need consensus to do that to the entire page. The examples brought here can be destroyed and burned to the ground lol.
Edited by AegisP on Mar 27th 2023 at 6:16:07 AM
As long as this flower is in my heart. My Strength will flow without end.I found these on NightmareFuel.Hayao Miyazaki under a section for Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (which, I should add, has it's own page):
- Anyone watching this who has experiences with little kids capturing wild animals will be consumed with anxious certainty that Sousuke is going to kill that fish. Seeing him yanking her stomach around, hammering a rock over her head, carrying her suffocated body away from water in his bare hands, then sticking her in the bushes is not a good way to build the audience's trust in a stupid little kid, Miyazaki!
- The very end. Oh, sure, it's supposed to be cute: Sosuke and Ponyo the fish kiss, and Ponyo turns into a human girl, presumably permanently. But she's over the edge of a cliff when the movie ends. Think about that.
- It's unlikely that her wizard father or her sea-goddess mother would let her fall into the sea.
Edited by fragglelover on Mar 29th 2023 at 8:43:57 AM
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
The first example looks bad, but the second one is 100% Fridge Horror with a Repair, Don't Respond piece of Natter attached.
Should we cutlist the Accidental Nightmare Fuel Image Links page?
The nightmare fuel subpage for Teletubbies only has one example, which is the following:
- The original sketch of “The Lion and the Bear”. The Lion and The Bear is one of the things that caused Teletubbies to be very controversial. It has been considered too scary for its target audience (children aged 1-7). Parents have made numerous complaints on the theatrical based sketch for the age-inaccurate music, scary voices, dark tone, dialogue and the horrifying chase sequence at the end of the sketch. Due to the age-inappropriateness of the sketch, many younger children are so frightened of the two characters so much that they suffer from anxiety. Instead, it was appropriate enough for people aged 10 and older, more-so teenagers.
Not only is one example not enough for a page, but it also exaggerates the scariness of the segment (in a way I’ve also seen on this show’s wiki).

Yeah you can cut it.
Guys how cool would it be if Super Megaforce had a green ranger...