Now with a sandbox!
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
No-lifer
Hello people. I did delete the "Abandoned Locations" folder in NightmareFuel.Other, as part of an effort to remove NRLEP-evading examples from that page. What about the rest of the folders?
Limpin' with the bizkit.
he/him | Image Pickin' regular
No discussion of NightmareFuel.Dragon Ball Z yet? There's no way that can be right!
Keet cleanup
he/him | Image Pickin' regular
Regarding NightmareFuel.Portal, I feel like both games should be held to the same standard, since the only reason the first game was rated T is because of the blood, which was a carry-over from using Half-Life 2's engine and Valve didn't want to take out at the last minute for fear of breaking anything. Also, the page image is terrible; maybe this concept art of the core transfer
◊ could work better?
Came across this from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
- Nightmare Fuel: The few glimpses we get of Charles Manson and his "Family" are creepy as shit.
- The second trailer shows a shot of three Manson cultists walking down Cielo Drive at night, knives in hand. It's incredibly unsettling, especially in contrast to the bright and cheerful "peppy Hollywood" mood from the rest of the trailer. Even worse is that Paul Revere and the Raiders' upbeat song "Good Thing" never stops playing over the scene. Trailers Always Lie. That is not how the scene plays in the actual movie.
- Everything involving Spahn Ranch is just off in a very ominous way, even though we never actually see Charlie there. Probably the most unsettling is the way everybody clears out of George's shack as Cliff approaches it, then just stands there in the middle of the "street" sullenly watching him go up the steps. Creepy, but not Nightmare Fuel. And the fact George Spahn is alive and well like they said would make it Nightmare Retardant.
- The cinematography surrounding Squeaky is even more ominous. Until the scene at the shack she never has her face shown onscreen; when it is the camera lingers on her Death Glare, which she never takes off Cliff, while her identity is advertised by a live rat in a glue trap, squeaking futilely. The notoriously scary Screen Gems "S From Hell" logo can also be heard on her TV. Again, creepy, but simply being creepy atmosphere is not Nightmare Fuel
- So you're an innocent tourist who loves horses and old Hollywood Westerns. What could be more fun and relaxing than a trail ride through an oft-used location — guided by the Manson Family. Truth in Television, incidentally.... Fridge Horror if anything, and unless you know the history of the Manson Family beforehand, the film doesn't reveal they're the Manson Family just yet.
- The gruesome deaths of Tex, Susan and Patricia. Getting mauled by a dog is already horrific enough, but so is having your face smashed in on every nearby surface all across the room—apart from having a can of dog food embedded into your face, getting cut up by shards of glass as you crash through a glass back door, nearly drowning in a pool, and finally getting set ablaze. Spoiler violation, and particularly brutal deaths aren't Nightmare Fuel.
Unsettling is not Nightmare Fuel. I think it's safe to cut all of it.
Edited by maxwellsilver on Aug 20th 2019 at 6:37:46 AM
Looking at Other, a lot of it is mildly creepy and Paranoia Fuel gets potholed all over, one folder is just "creepy noises", another is "weird shit your computer might do". I think it's safe to cut the whole page.
Also The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is full of very weak entries.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Maybe I'm just easily scared, but I think some of the entries on the Other page are valid. But maybe some of them aren't so scary
No-lifer
It's not the scariness. But all the examples that seem to circumvent NRLEP.
EDIT: Sorry, not really getting what you're talking about. Though we should address both problems.
Edited by FridgeGuy2016 on Aug 21st 2019 at 9:28:42 AM
Limpin' with the bizkit.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
It says it isn't a real life subpage, but then the computer folder's entry for OpenSSL's Heartbleed vulnerability heads into real life territory by discussing the NSA. The folder for sounds heads further into real life territory, then adds natter and potholes to Paranoia Fuel and Nightmare Retardant.
To be honest, I can see why there's discussion in favor of cutting the whole page.
Edit: Parts of the toys section and the entry on animated GIFs in the unsorted section actually made me laugh. Yeah, totally nightmarish. (Edited to clarify: I did say parts of the toys section. The parts that reference third-party anecodes aren't as bad.)
Edit: I'm tired, so I previously zoned out without noticing the TV Tropes section immediately following the animated GIF example. I can't tell if those examples are overthinking things or were put there as parodies.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 22nd 2019 at 7:13:44 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Thinking of adding this entry to the YMMV page of Skullmonkeys:
- Nightmare Fuel: Joe-Head-Joe is extremely unsettling. Between being a realistic human head in a cartoony game, being fought in a stage that's made of entrails, and one of his attacks involving him firing eyeballs that make slimy sounds at the player, it's as if he was designed to be as creepy and nauseating as possible.
Conflicted because he's more Squicky than outright nightmareish, but the game was advertised towards younger audiences and I was very disturbed by him back in the day.
No-lifer
I mean, the example about the SIT tone seems scary to me. Although since it may be a real life example, we should probably remove it.
Limpin' with the bizkit.
No-lifer
Although I gotta say I am all for cutting NightmareFuel.Other. It is chock full of stealth real life examples, natter, and weblinks.
Limpin' with the bizkit.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
My issue with that folder wasn't related to the subjects of the examples, but rather the violations of wiki policies (mainly No Real Life Examples, Please! and Repair, Don't Respond).
Regarding what I previously said about Nightmare Retardant, of the page's wicks to it, only one is on a first-level bullet point.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 22nd 2019 at 10:35:39 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Speaking of that page, here's an example from it!
- TV Tropes in of itself can be nightmare fuel in some ways.
- Clicking through the Nightmare Fuel pages can actually be quite terrifying at times, as many of the NF pages feature an especially scary image on them that appear right at the top of the page. This means that when you open up a certain NF page, said scary image will suddenly be displayed on your screen, hitting you straight in the face, and there is absolutely no way to be prepared to what you'll see if you've never been to the page before. In a way, they're basically like silent jump scares.
True. I'm gonna say "keep".
- And it's not just the NF pages. Even the regular TV Tropes pages can open up with a rather unpleasant image. And there's still no warning for which one it'll be.
I mean, Body Horror terrified me.
- When you load the front page, sometimes, if your computer is running a bit slow, you can see a subliminal message planted in the top-left corner of the screen just before the main page covers it up. Just one word... "follow"
I don't see what's scary about that.
- If you put a page that you are editing into preview mode, the page image is shown in the preview, which can result in some self-induced nightmare fuel on pages with scary images, especially you're a serial tweaker.
Same thing as Example #1.
- Even certain trope names could sound wrong to some people. Go Mad from the Revelation in particular sounds like a demented advertising slogan.
"Sound[s] wrong" sounds wrong. Also, personal example[?]. Delete.
Any thoughts on my Skullmonkeys entry?
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
Sounds fine to me.
No-lifer
Think we could get a crowner hooked for what to do with NightmareFuel.Other?
Limpin' with the bizkit.
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
We could if crowners weren't borked...
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
he/him | Image Pickin' regular
Looks like they're fixed now.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
Crowner hooked.
Pokémon Reborn has way too many spoiler tags and once Lin starts being brought up, the page gets very unprofessional, with way too much italics, bold and all caps and combinations of those. We get it, Lin is scary, but the mass-bolded text just seems silly
—signature not found—
don't ask me about my niche
@Playing_with_boy: There is absolutely nothing scary about this site. I guess it is okay to cut it, maybe.
On the subject of NF, do people seriously NEEDS to shove NF on everything they come across?
Now we're so young, but we're probably gonna die
NightmareFuel.Twitch Plays Pokemon... oh boy. I came here wondering "how could you get nightmares from a Twitch stream?" And I found no answer, because nothing here or in its million subpages would make anyone lose sleep.
The things in my dreams wish they could chase me!
Industrious Incisors
While we’re on this theme, I question how Pokemon GO has even one example, never mind a full page worth.
SoundCloud
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]")
That song always did make me feel uneasy as a kid, now that I know which one exactly. The part that always gets me is the ending. So yeah, I'd say to keep it.
The things in my dreams wish they could chase me!