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Banjo-Tooie / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "Right then, girls. Let's blast the whole island!" — Gruntilda , planning to use B.O.B. to kill the entire Isle O' Hags for the heck of it rather than the few lives needed to restore her body. Gruntilda is back for blood, and to prove it, she lays waste to the Isle O' Hags in ways that can only make one's skin crawl. - The game starts with a lich-like Gruntilda chasing Mumbo Jumbo with energy blasts, before destroying Banjo and Kazooie's house and killing Bottles as a revenge, with the others barely escaping. The poor mole's charred corpse and ghost lays there during most of the story, and what's left of the house would shame a dynamite. - The zombified throne room. Banjo and Kazooie just met a cheerful ally King Jingaling, and Grunty wastes no time in Life Draining his entire palace, leaving him as a zombie who attacks them on sight and reducing his pet to ashes and a pair of eyes. All with horrifically depressing music. Comedic villain she might be, but Grunty is not messing around this time. Also, he keeps on saying very weird, random things that just sound spooky. As you progress through the game, you learn that the things he was saying were warnings about various important enemy characters you encounter in other worlds! - Did you think the drowning animation was bad? Well, say hello to what happens to Banjo if you run out of air in a poison gas area in Glitter Gulch. You're treated to the sight of him clutching at his throat, gasping for air, his gasps rising in pitch, signifying how desperate he is for air... before giving a final cough and collapsing. In other words, he chokes in a very realistic manner. (Kazooie, Mumbo and any transformations will only go through their regular death animations.) - Atlantis, hidden under Jolly Roger's Lagoon, is pretty unsettling to discover and explore even as an adult - it's accessed through a narrow underwater tunnel, feels very claustrophobic, and features alien environments that just feel unsettling. Especially frightening are the puffer fish who rapidly inflate when they get near you in a Jump Scare! And don't forget about Inky, the giant octopus that flails his tentacles wildly. Even worse, he can't be killed. At most, just temporarily frozen. - Basically what happened to Gruntilda. After being thrown off her tower in Banjo-Kazooie, she falls straight into the ground ...and then a rock squishes her. Klungo comes and attempts to pick up the rock. Cut to the sequel, where he's still trying 2 years later. Once it's removed by her sisters, Grunty doesn't have any skin. Forget what she ate, she just wasted away down there for 2 years. No organs, heart, just a living skeleton. Her second defeat isn't that great either. After being brought down to 0 hp, Gruntilda drops her highly explosive spell which blows up the tank. All that's left of her is her head. Still sentient, and in the ending her head is kicked around by the gang. While she complains that she'll be back in Banjo-Threeie. - Glitter Gulch Mine has the Power Hut Basement and the Generator Cavern, two areas shrouded in almost complete darkness that require you to light up the pathway in order to see where you're going. The area takes place over a pitch black void that acts as a bottomless pit, and the music that plays in these areas is low-key, ominous and has psycho strings in the background. - Witchyworld. All of it. From the bastardized carnival music to the aggressive carnival mascots, carnival staff (especially the nasty "Blaaaah!" noise they make when they spot you), and carnival objects to the overall unwelcoming feel. Doesn't help that the non-aggressive staff are lazy and unhelpful. - Mingy Jongo, the boss you fight in Cloud Cuckooland, is basically a Terminator android impersonating Mumbo. While that's intimidating enough on its own, the real scary part is how the fight is instigated, especially if the player isn't prepared for it. There are two Mumbo skull huts in this world - one with the real Mumbo and the other with Mingy - so there's always a chance that the player will wander into Mingy's hut first without realizing there's another one in the world. Worse, Mingy's hut is always the one with a Jinjo in it whereas the real Mumbo's ironically has the Jinjo-impersonating Minjo in it, giving the player a false sense of security. After saving the Jinjo, Banjo and Kazooie will find "Mumbo" asleep on his chair, triggering a cutscene where the shaman wakes up and declares he has a big surprise for the bear and bird. The "surprise" ends up being him attacking them with his staff, revealing his true identity and initiating the battle with him. - Speaking of Minjos, they can be unnerving in their own right. They look no different from your typical Jinjo, even calling for help. But the moment you get close, the suddenly attack, catching the player completely unaware. At most, Minjos are usually be found in easy to find and easy to reach locations, but players can still find themselves being cautious when approaching what they suspect to be a Jinjo.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BanjoTooie
Back to the Outback / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes On the bright side, it could have gone worse. Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies to Nightmare Fuel pages. All spoilers are unmarked. - Pretty Boy goes from being the most beloved animal in the world to almost getting clubbed to death by people in the city, because he was assumed to have rabies after being caught on one of the park cameras foaming at the mouth, after being stung by Nigel for threatening to alert the zoo staff of the groups escape. - Nigel didnt know his venom was non-lethal, meaning that when he panicked, he thoughtlessly/instinctively resorted to the "deadliest" option. - While it works for a funny gag later on, he does get a little too comfortable using his venom to make traveling with Pretty Boy easier after learning it wont kill the koala. - Near the end of the movie, everyone gets stuck on a ladder precariously balanced on the edge of a cliff at a height that would kill them all if it slid off. - Chazzie was in particular peril, as he was dangling off the side of the ladder hanging over the drop, hanging on for dear life - with a quickly slipping grip.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BackToTheOutback
Back to the Future Part II / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked. - "Hell Valley," the Hill Valley of 1985-A. In the space of a few minutes, we go from a colorful Zeerusty vision of the future to an utter Crapsack World where Hill Valley, and presumably all of America, has become a Wretched Hive out of Mad Max or Escape from New York. The first signs that something's not right with 1985 when Marty and Doc arrive is that Lyon Estates, Marty's neighborhood, looks horribly run-down, with trash lining the streets, holes in roofs, iron bars on windows, packs of wild dogs roaming the streets, and the like. A wrecked police car serves as a warning that, in Hell Valley, the police are about as effective at their jobs as toilet paper. To say nothing of Marty getting into his bedroom via the window, only to discover a completely different family lives there and for the overprotective father of the kid whose sleep he disturbed to unsuccessfully attack him with a baseball bat; he manages to escape unharmed. Marty: I don't get it, Doc. I mean, how can all this be happening? It's like we're in Hell or something. Doc: No, it's Hill Valley. Although I can't imagine Hell being much worse! - Consider the bedroom scene at Marty's (former) house from the perspective of the father for a moment. For him, it was more than just some random kid winding up in his daughter's room. He yells after a fleeing Marty to tell the realty company that "I ain't sellin'!" He thought a vindictive realtor had sent Marty to attack his children at night to get them to sell their house! - Marty jogging through the night-darkened and empty streets as Alan Silvestri's tense and suspicious score illustrates something is VERY wrong. Then he hears the distant sounds of gunfire and a woman's terrified scream. The Chalk Outline of two victims with bloodstains that look very fresh cinches the moment. - Doc mentions they can't fix the timeline by returning to 2015 because it'd be the 2015 of that altered timeline, where Biff always had the almanac. The Nightmare Fuel comes into play when the viewer starts to imagine what kind of future would be the logical conclusion of 1985-A, even if Biff died early at Lorraine's hands as is implied. Even with Biff gone, there's no reversing the damage he's done to the US or its political and diplomatic standing, and it's possible all that awaits in 2015-A is an irradiated wasteland... - Doc and Marty left Jennifer unconscious and outside, on the porch of a house that may not be her family's in 1985-A. - The scene where 1985-A Strickland threatens Marty with a shotgun may be Played for Laughs, but is still quite unnerving given that Strickland, while iron-fisted, would never do anything to harm his students in the original timeline. Yet here he's threatening to shoot Marty between the legs when he mistakes him for a thief. Marty is pleading with his would-be principal to spare him and to explain what's happening. - This moment, however, has nothing on the two being ambushed by a car full of thugs emptying their guns upon 1985-A Strickland's house, very nearly killing them both before resuming their rampage. - 1985-A Biff is even more monstrous than his 1955 self. He single-handedly created Hell Valley and didn't care he made countless people suffer. Plus, he was more than willing to murder 1985-A George just to get 1985-A Lorraine. - The Fridge Horror concerning his marriage to 1985-A Lorraine. Remember when George saved Lorraine from Attempted Rape in 1955? Well, nobody was there to save her from being constantly raped by Biff, and you count the other horrible stuff he might have done to her that resulted in her being a Broken Bird. One also has to wonder what kind of mental state 1985-A Marty might have, having grown up under 1985-A Biff. - Biff to the Future #4 answers this question re: 1985-A Marty's mental state: He hated 1985-A Biff very much, missed his dad very much, and was very angry at his mom for having married 1985-A Biff. And the same applies to his brother and sister as well. - 1985-A Lorraine tells Marty, who is spouting what she thinks is nonsense, "They must've hit you over the head hard this time." Oh, dear... - 1985-A Biff threatens 1985-A Lorraine after she declares she's leaving him after he punches Marty in the stomach. 1985-A Dave will get his probation revoked, 1985-A Linda will have to handle her debts on her own, and as for Marty... well, 1985-A Marty was sent to a Swiss boarding school, and he'd been kicked out of schools before. What did he do? Keeping in mind that he never could handle being called "chicken"... - Biff to the Future #4 shows 1985-A Lorraine originally sent 1985-A Marty and Linda to boarding schools to keep them safe from Biff. Unfortunately, this likely alienated 1985-A Marty from his mother as he didn't understand why she did so. - Then there's 1985-A Doc, who was committed. Why? Could it have had something to do with talking about impossible phenomena such as Time Travel and alternate histories? - It's much, much, MUCH worse in the comic book. Upon finding the newspaper headline, Doc goes to the asylum and finds his 1985-A double. 1985-A Doc has been lobotomized, and it's not pretty. After this, it becomes MUCH easier to see why Doc wants to destroy the time machine. - And then you have the Biff to the Future miniseries: 1985-A Doc invented a time machine to try and undo 1985-A Biff's rise to power. He fails, and Biff has him committed (but not lobotomized, oddly enough). - Speaking of the newspaper (printed in 1984) mentioning 1985-A Doc being committed, another reads "(President) Nixon...vows to end Vietnam War by 1985". In other words, that war has been going on for another decade. Over a million Vietnamese and 60,000 Americans died in the correct timeline; how many of them have perished by 1985-A? - It also implies the 22nd amendment has been circumvented or annulled, as Nixon otherwise would not still be in office by 1984. Did Watergate play out differently in this timeline? - According to Biff to the Future, Biff ended up unwittingly squashing the Watergate investigation before it even began. - A Deleted Scene shows 2015 Biff's fate after he changes the past: He gets completely erased from existence almost immediately after he returns to 2015 since he no longer exists in 2015 as he was shot by Lorraine in the 90s. Even though Biff was a complete Jerkass throughout his life, not even he deserves to suffer from this fate. - Just the way he slumps over in pain, clutching his chest and struggling to breathe like he's having a heart attack. - Word of God states one of the sidebar headlines in USA Today, "Thumb Bandits Strike Again", is based on the idea that if people in 2015 pay for things with their thumbprints, there would be criminals who cut off and steal people's thumbs in order to empty their bank accounts. Now consider that smartphones since around 2013 have used fingerprint readers for authentication, and said fingerprint scans can be also used to authenticate contact-less payment applications like Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and Apple Pay. - As discussed on the main page, the Real Life companies that use fingerprint scans have developed an Obvious Rule Patch to avert this very possibility; the scans won't work unless the fingers used are still attached to living people. Therefore, no one is going to go around chopping off people's fingers to steal their identities. - A small moment, but at the beginning of the film, Doc has to use a device to knock out Jennifer so she doesn't continue asking about her and Marty's future. While he did it so she'll think the experience was all a dream, imagine someone else with less than well meaning intentions getting their hands on that kind of device.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BackToTheFuturePartII
Bad Mojo / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Oh, where to begin... - As soon as the game starts, you have no idea what's going on, no idea where you are, and Everything Is Trying to Kill You. And it only gets worse from there. - The furnace on the first level, with somewhere between a few dozen and a few million roaches hanging out around the flames for warmth. Roger saying that Eddie's room is infested is an understatement. - The enormous rat caught in the trap; there's a good reason why it's one of the most iconic scenes in the game. \|\|Oh, and it's still alive.\|\| - Speaking of rats, the Rat King. By this point, you've gotten used to following your fellow roaches around to help you navigate. So you and your buddy are running across the bathroom floor, between the streams of water, over the paint brush, through the-OH GOD! - Roger's makeshift lab toward the end, filled with creepy experiments he performed on roaches, coupled with eerie Background Music. There's even a still-moving roach he stabbed to the wall, next to a note, "DEATH TO ALL WHO CRAWL ON MY WALL".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BadMojo
Barbie and the Secret Door / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - Malucia's magic-draining scepter takes away any source of magic from its victims, with the creepiest effect being the unicorns withering and losing their horns. She ends up draining the entirety of Zinnia of its magic, turning what was a candy-colored Sugar Bowl into a gray wasteland where all the creatures are powerless. - At the climax of her duel with Alexa, Malucia grows gigantic, immobilizes her with magic, and flings her around the room like a doll while her friends can only watch.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbieAndTheSecretDoor
Barbie as Rapunzel / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - After destroying Rapunzel's paintings and art supplies with her magic by levitating them and smashing them to pieces, Gothel moves to do the same to Hobie if Rapunzel doesn't talk. - King Wilhelm left a spike trap in Stefan's meadow that almost kills a little girl when she falls in. - The dream sequence where Rapunzel and Stefan are captured by a giant Gothel, especially since it comes out of nowhere. - Gothel chases and tries to kill Stefan and his little brother Tommy, and her magic makes her nearly unstoppable. - Otto's constant attempts to eat Hobie can be frightening for younger viewers. - Hugo, Penelope's father, despite being ultimately a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, can be pretty frightening for younger kids. Especially when he utters Jurassic Park T. Rex noises. - Gothel's ultimate fate is to be trapped in her own tower forever due to the words of her own spell.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbieAsRapunzel
Baccano! / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Spoilers below. - Poor Dallas. Due to being immortal, he was sealed in a barrel of cement condemned to drown in the Hudson River for god knows how long. \|\|He eventually get fished out three years later.\|\| Since he's immortal, he would have drowned and revived over and over again the entire time. - Rail Tracer, an Urban Legend about a train-hunting monster brought to terrifying life by \|\|the conductor-cum-assassin Claire Stanfield\|\|, who uses the persona to sneak around on the train inflicting a painful and bloody demise upon anyone who dares harm its passengers. - Immortals have the ability to kill another immortal by "eating" them, presumably so called because the eater absorbs the victim's memories in the process-and the terminology is the least disturbing thing about it. Imagine that someone, probably someone you knew considering how the immortals got their start, approaches you and places their right hand on top of your head. By the time you realize what's happening, all of your bodily fluids and tissues are ripping themselves from underneath your skin and pulling from out of your skull. Your muscles dry out and tear while your bones weaken and crumble quickly after. Against your will, your body pulls itself apart until you are nothing but a distended mass of flesh and sinew to be absorbed into your attacker's hand. While this is happening, you feel all of it, including the pain of your mind being stripped away until it's nothing but a mass of fear and confusion. Only when every memory, thought, and sensation decays one-by-one does it finally end, and you wink out of existence. And to do this to you, all they have to do is touch their hand to your head and will it, after which you are powerless to stop it all. Sweet dreams, everyone! - Actually being devoured is completely painless because it absorbs the most recent memories first preventing you from even realizing you're being devoured. Shown in book 1 from Barne's perspective. Still creepy though. - Speaking of Barnes, his being devoured by Szilard in both the anime and the novel. In the anime, it's lovingly detailed. In the novels, we see Barnes perspective on his fate, which doubles as a Tear Jerker. - At one point the Claire threatens Czeslaw Mayer with torture involving "stripping away each individual arm muscle and doing intricate carvings on the exposed bone." - When you think about it, the idea of being in \|\|Firo\|\|'s or \|\|Czes\|\|'s position, that of having eaten a psychopathic immortal and being stuck with their memories for all eternity, is a pretty grisly thought. - Every time Fermet is mentioned by Czes is this. The fact that Fermet practically oozes with pederast vibes makes it worse. - Even though he kinda deserved it, it's still disturbing when Claire tortures Czes after he finds out Czes wants to kill every one in the train. What makes it worse is, due to him being immortal, Czes looks like a little kid. - When Mary is hiding in the closet, she accidentally knocks over a broom, letting one of Ladd's goon know where she is. We see Mary in the closet, listening as he gets closer and closer. He opens the door and... "Found you..." - For even more nightmare fuel, the way he talks implies that he wants to rape her. \|\|Thank God for Chane.\|\| - Fermet. He's a psychopath who wears a mask of sanity so convincing that if you don't know his true nature as a sadist who ruins lives for his own amusement, you'll think he's a stand-up guy and trust him immediately, and you'll only realize what a horrible mistake you've made once it's too late. Worse, he's been devoured twice, and has recovered both times like it was nothing. Everything terrifying about this man can be seen in a microcosm in \|\|what he did to Huey. Fermet utterly destroyed his entire life, reducing him to the utterly indifferent Mad Scientist he is today, in a spur of the moment whim\|\|. - As stated above, Fermet gives off major pederast vibes; in one episode, after cutting out Czeslaw's eyes, he gets into a position that, judging from the camera angle, could only be accomplished by him sitting on top of Czeslaw's chest. Czes' reaction (or more accurately, lack of reaction) implies that Fermet does stuff like that a lot. Let that sink in. - \|\|And somehow he's survived being devoured. Yup: he's still alive.\|\| - Szilard Quates. Period. - Nice's accident. Especially in the dub. - SAMPLE. \|\|They torture children (examples being Elmer and Illness) for religious purposes and attempt to crash Exit and Entrace into each other. And were created by Fermet, based on information about the cult that Elmer was a part of (Fermet was the son of an Inquisitor and knew about Huey and Elmer's pasts as well as being privy to several important cover-ups).\|\| - Christopher Shouldered: a tall, sharply-dressed Homunculus with the eyes and teeth of a demon or a vampire, who is pretty much always cheerful even when he really shouldn't be and who tends to break into song while making mincemeat of his enemies. It's no wonder he was named after a certain actor: everything about him◊ just oozes creepy. And he's strong/skilled enough to actually land a hit on Claire. His antics are often Played for Laughs however, and after 1933 he eventually mellows out, becoming a Technical Pacifist and befriending Ricardo Russo. - If you think about it, the way some of the most insane characters view the world is chilling. At least with people like Fermet, you know it's just pure sadism, and Huey is so divorced from humanity that he just doesn't care anymore. But then you get people like Ladd, Graham, and Elmer, who look at people and don't see people. - Ladd can't even really be properly called a sadist because he doesn't enjoy hurting people, he enjoys killing them. The only way he can look at the world is in terms of what order to kill things, and he can't not see everyone around him as a potential victim, and what's worse, his criteria for deciding who should die next is esoteric at best, which means anybody near him is walking on eggshells, trying not to accidentally do something that'll get themselves killed. Even love doesn't really mean love to him - the closest he can really get is a) laying claim to somebody's life, and b) desiring to kill them only when he's finished with the rest of the world. - Despite not being a killer, and being a very good friend to have, Graham is if anything even worse. The most normal thing about him are his bipolar mood swings. Whereas Ladd looks at things in terms of who can he kill, Graham looks at things in terms of what he can break. While this may seem better, Ladd at least recognizes that human life has value, that's why he takes it. Graham doesn't care one bit about human life because it can't be broken, and when he looks at a person, all he can see is a body to be taken apart. Even when threatening someone, or declaring his intention to harm them, he doesn't phrase it, or even think of it, in terms of hurting or killing them. He says he's going to break them, and the context of breaking their spirits doesn't even enter his mind. All he can see is breaking their bodies. - Elmer, despite being one of the more openly benevolent characters in the series, is so utterly alien in the way he views the world that Fermet is revolted by him. Let that sink in. As far as he's concerned, people are entirely irrelevant, and all he cares about is outward happiness, and he can't understand why somebody wouldn't be happy. Even Ladd and Graham can understand that tragedy can make a person unhappy, hell, that's almost Ladd's raison d'etre, but Elmer is so inhuman that he honestly has trouble understanding why people don't immediately bounce back from losing loved ones or something similar. He's also perfectly content to allow, even encourage, people to do horrific things, as long as it makes them happy, and he cares so little for actual people that the only reason he doesn't spread misery around himself is because he enjoys people's smiles, not their screams.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Baccano
Bad Moon / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Nice Doggie... - The werewolf in this movie is terrifying, easily one of the most frightening ever conceived. It looks like an Albino version of Gmork! Its raspy, piercing screams in place of the traditional howls and roars don't help, either, making it sound utterly demonic. - The opening attack sequence is terrifying as well. We only get glimpses of the werewolf as it shreds apart Ted's poor girlfriend. An uncut version of the scene is floating around the internet and is featured on the Scream Factory Blu-Ray, with the victim getting her arm ripped off as blood shoots out. - \|\|The Jump Scare dream of Thor as a werewolf at the end of the film.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BadMoon
Baki the Grappler / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - Yujiro siring Jack. A U.N agent in Vietnam tries to seduce Yujiro and lead him into a trap. His response? Threaten to kill her and rape her. - Open fractures are the least sort of horrible maiming you can expect to see in major fights of this series. - Want to be able to hit your enemies with supersonic punches and kicks? Steel yourself for reality: the sheer air friction will then be able to flay your entire arm down to the bone and even if you manage to connect with your enemy you'll break your hands and feet. - Consider for a second that your father is the most powerful creature on the planet, and he is grooming you to fight him. Then consider that since most fights with Yujiro end in him either killing a person or maiming them, the chance for parental leniency is low for you at best. - Also, consider both possible outcomes. Your father wins, you risk death or maiming. You win, your own father expects you to deliver the killing blow or maim him. Even when a third option is taken, there's an awful lot of damage ensuing. - Hey wanna throw a hit so hard that it breaks the sound barrier? How about punching the ground so hard it stops an earthquake? - Jack Hanma's steroids affecting his body at one point it breaks down on him and vomits green liquid and the steroids themselves turned a mild mannered guy into a unstoppable fighting machine who brutalizes his opponents. - While Motobe is in the middle of beating Yanagi, Yujiro out of nowhere just appears right behind him. What's even more terrifying is when Motobe faces him with just only his katana, Yujiro just breaks pieces of it as if it were Styrofoam to show how little of a threat it meant him. - Koushou Shinogi's technique involves literally ripping out the nerves of his opponents. Shudder. In his introduction, he's shown tearing out the optical nerves of a random person, blinding them — just for bumping into him in a hallway. Thankfully, doctors in the Baki universe are skilled enough to glue nerves back together, but still. - Yuujiro's fight against Ryuu Kaioh ends with him tearing off the old man's face and tossing it at the horrified audience. Thankfully, this is one of the few instances in the series where the Gory Discretion Shot is used, so we aren't shown directly how Ryuu looks afterwards. - During Mohammad Ali Jr.'s fight against Jack Hammer, he makes a mistake of sticking out his tongue at Jack... who promptly punches him in the face, leading to Ali almost completely biting off half of his tongue, hanging on by just a tiny slice of flesh. And yes, it's shown in full detail. - One of Jun Guevara's techniques involves him sliding a few hairs into his opponent's ear, piercing through the eardrum... and wrapping the hair around their cochlea, slicing it to pieces. The only opponent to have met this fate on-page is gunned down by a prison guard soon afterwards, which could probably be considered a Mercy Kill: it's implied that he'd spend the rest of his life incapable of standing up, due to how important the cochlea is in maintaining balance. - Yujiro's early depiction in Grappler Baki implies that he regularly picks fights with random people, which end very badly for them. In particular, he's shown entering a boxing club, blocking the exit, and promptly beating the shit out of everyone inside. It's shown in a later flashback that he went as far as gouging out their eyes (though it's unknown if it's Yujiro's memory or just a fantasy). Imagine that you're just hanging out with fellow athletes, then Yujiro decides he wants to cripple you for life because he's bored, and since he's the strongest fighter on the planet, nobody will be able to stop him. - When Yujiro arrives at the Maximum Tournament with Yuu Amanai in tow, he removes one of the contestants (Jagatta Sherman, a Muay Thai fighter) to enter Amanai in his place. And by "remove", we mean he grabs the poor guy and folds his spine in half. - Gaia's Tunnel technique, which only appears in a side chapter featuring him killing an imitator. It involves him hiding in a seat and then cutting into the anus of his enemy then crawling out through their mouths. While this would normally sound like a gorey darkly comedic joke from an adult animated cartoon like Aqua Teen Hunger Force or South Park, it manages to be EXTREMELY horrifying due to the amount of detail it's drawn with. A reporter witnessing him using it understandably wets herself from fear and passes out. - Speaking of Gaia, his first real appearance counts as this, as after Baki has defeated the Chiba brothers, Nomura suddenly begins to cry and hiccup uncontrollably, causing his fellow soldiers to panic and beg Baki to run away for his own safety, and it should be noted that these mercenaries were completely willing to cannibalize Baki to survive without a second thought and even they thought that Gaia was too cruel for him. Nomura then gains a wide-eyed look on his face and begins to violently shake, before digging himself out of the hole he was buried in a manner that looks like he's being possessed by a ghost or a demon, and then he proceeds to make two horrifying faces one after the other before he proceeds to nearly defeat and kill Baki. - Speck is this all by himself, as he's a hulking giant of a man who looks frightening even when he isn't making one of the many horrifying expressions he regularly makes due to his wild-looking eyes as well as being a childish, disgusting psychopath with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. There's also how he's the most dangerous of the Five Most Evil Deathrow Inmates to be around, due to him being the only one to exercise no restraint whatsoever, as the rest have moments of being civil and non-violent, meaning that even if you aren't a superhuman fighter, you aren't safe around him, as he'll maul or even kill you if he thinks it's funny enough. There's also his VOICE in the original Japanese audio, as Chafurin gives him a high-pitched, slimy and lispy sounded voice with a constant perverted sounding tone that unnervingly puts the "child" in the "manchild" of his "psychopathic manchild" nature. - Olivas defeat at the hands of the second Nomi No Sukune. To recap: Olivia challenges Sukune to a Sumo match, threatening to arrest him for breaking Tokugawas punching bag without his permission. Olivas tachiai is easily absorbed and his attempt to pick up the sumo wrestler effortlessly defeated. So Oliva challenges Sukune to a real fight. Sukune obliges, breaking Olivas fist with a headbutt and picking him up by his ribs through his muscles and skin. Sukune warns him one last time to give up, but Oliva, refusing to listen, attempts to free himself by flexing all of his muscles at once, instantly shattering most of his ribs and breaking his spine. Sukune finishes by throwing him in his head, and after calling for an ambulance, casually notes that if hed thrown Oliva on the ground instead of the wooden floor of Tokugawas mansion, hed be dead. The last we see of him before the chapter ends is him lying on the floor, with narration noting he doesnt even have the strength left to cry. - Yanagi's second prison escape from Tokyo Revenge is something straight out of a horror novel. After he manages to successfully convince the staff of the prison he was being held at that he was harmless after pretending to be reduced to a vegetative state after Yujiro maimed him, the staff of the prison decides to send an armed squadron of guards to escort him to a regular mental hospital, believing he's no longer a threat. But when one of them mockingly asks him if he can move, Yanagi slowly turns his head to look at him, before giving him a wild-eyed, deranged smile after a brief pause that's made even worse by the transparent acrylic skin exposing his teeth as well as the muscle underneath his flesh, and then he proceeds to kill every, last, one of them in some unknown, highly violent method that leaves them all horribly and gruesomely mutilated, with the very first one lying face down, dead on the ground, with his brains literally blown out of his body, and all but one of them having their eyes gouged out, two of them getting their faces partially, and in the case of the latter, entirely ripped off. What makes it worse is that immediately after this, Yanagi straight up disappears, without leaving any evidence behind as to how he escaped. - The expression that Yuujiro makes when he flexes all the muscles in his body to defend against Baki's Benda during their climatic battle, as he's drawn in a heavily detailed style with literally every vein bulging out from underneath his skin and his eyes being heavily bloodshot as well, and also having a barely restrained look of fury on his face. To top it all off, it also has him making eye contact with the reader making it look like he's staring directly at you. HORRIFYING	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BakiTheGrappler
Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Despite the weird appearance of the game, the warning that Baldi's Basics is indeed a horror game before the title screen is there for a perfectly good reason. All spoilers will be unmarked, per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned. ## The Original Game: - Getting a question wrong causes the cheery music to creepily cut off as Baldi's once benevolent look slowly turns into an angry Death Glare. It's incredibly jarring. - Even when Baldi is out of sight and you can't hear his ruler slapping anymore, you're struck with paranoia that he will suddenly pop in from behind a corner or the ruler sound will slowly Fade In again much faster than last time it was heard. This especially occurs when you're trying to get the secret ending. - Playtime's design. She's a Base-Breaking Character at best, but her distorted voice, stiff movements and inability to look like she's walking make her less than likely to be a playmate. Also, HER EYES... or lack of them. It's hard to tell because they were scribbled on, but the cruddy scribbles can be even more impossible to look at. - "Congratulations! You found all seven notebooks! Now all you need to do is GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!!! Ha ha haaaa..." - The horrible noise that Arts & Crafters makes when it attacks you. It starts off as an otherworldly "VWOOSH" sound before devolving into ear-piercing static. (Caution: Loud) - 1st Prize can be useful, but his dialogue can be interpreted as very rapey. At the very least, he has a very creepy fixation with the player, wanting to constantly hug them, be their friend, even asks the player to marry him. His rare idle quote "I have been programmed to desire your image" hints at this also. It doesn't help that the text to speech program used to provide this creepy tone, Dr. Sbaitso, had also been previously used for SCP-079. - While Gotta Sweep can be useful depending on the circumstances, hearing him randomly shout out his lines (while having no idea who its from) for the first time might startle you. But if that's not bad enough, then there's a good chance that he'll OUT OF NOWHERE sweep you right along with Baldi (chances are this might cause you to lose). Also the fact that he's nothing but a broom, no cartoon face, no nothing. Another thing to add is that when you walk up to him while he's standing still in the end of a hallway, there's a good chance that if you touch him, he'll immediately sweep you and won't let go until he goes back to his closet. - The secret ending to the game, gotten when you intentionally fail all 21 questions and somehow manage to escape. Imagine this: You're in second grade, and you get a note after school to go to your teacher's office to recieve some tips. You walk down the hall, knowing he'll be mad at you. But when you see Baldi in the office, he's not at his desk. He's lying on the floor, distorted and stretched. In his place, you instead see a classmate of yours with his arms outstretched and a dead-eyed stare. His name is Null. He refers to life as a "game", tells you not to tell anyone about it, and then he tells you to destroy the game. Null : Oh jeepers, you found me. Good job, I'm glad you found me, because I have something kind of important to say. beep It's about th-the game... Don't, beep Uh, Eh. Don't beep Don't, just, laughter this is... This is probably looking pretty ridiculous. beep Don't tell anyone about this game. You wanna... don't - don't bring attention to yourself. Destroy it, destroy the game. Destroy the game. Before it's too late. beep What i'm saying is... is get out of this, while you still can - beep Just, don't... don't know that you probably know I'm not saying that I'm trapped inside the game, no that would be ridiculous . No I'm... beep I can't... this is... I'm not... the game was... kind of... beep I got really corrupted . Yeah, I... beep I don't know what to say. Just... Just trust me. We gonna... beep This isn't... This seems... I me-I mean it seems...ohh. beep* They'd know I... They intentionally... that's... I guess... I can't- They can't tell you, and some... stuff is classified. I can't say it. beep I wish I could say more. I can't talk normally. I-it's corrupted. There's... beep.. Yeah... beep Just... close the program. Destroy it. Never come back. long beep - When he's mad Baldi's face just becomes pressed down and distorted rather than a look of anger. It's very weird once you get a closer look at it. - The principal is a Punch-Clock Villain who can occasionally be a Helpful Mook, but his warped appearance and monotone voice are still quite unnerving. ## The Field Trip Demo: - Just the entire concept alone is this, compared to the school, where it was at least bright and it was often easy to see where you were going. Here, its often difficult to find sticks in the darkness and dense trees, which can induce panic, especially if the fire is low. - It's a Bully's entire gimmick in the demo is Paranoia Fuel. He is disguised as a tree, and slowly moves and follows you around, and with the exception of when he takes your sticks, he is completely silent while doing so. Plus, due to how dark it is, you're never truly sure if a tree just moved a little, or if it was always there. - Arts and Crafters is equally disturbing, despite the fact that you need to actively go out of your way to find them. Doubly so if you didn't listen to the NO signs around the edges of the forest, up until VWHOOOSH. - A minor one, but when you walk past a NO sign the sky just goes completely black for some reason. This plus Arts and Crafters coming for you after this happens is creepy to say the least. ## Baldi's Basics Birthday Bash: - When you die, there's a chance that the item on the screen will suddenly be zoomed in on, become red, and start emitting loud static noises before the game crashes. - After you manage to beat the game, all the characters surprise you, and Baldi tells you to blow out the candle on the giant cake. Once you blow it out, the whole school suddenly goes dark and all the characters start floating and become unresponsive. It's both confusing and unnerving once you see it, but it's only the beginning. - You can still move your character and if you move to the far right or left you'll find two openings to dimly lit hallways. In one of which you'll find this thing. It's rather unnerving, to say the last. - As you walk down the hallways, you can be caught off guard by the sudden sound of Baldi rapidly smacking his ruler. - The whole place has just gone insane. With desks placed in places that aren't placed conventionally, lockers all over the place, and can even be stretched out and compressed between desks and chairs in rooms. - There is a black part of the wall in one hallway with colored text on it. If you read the red text only, it reads "YOU WILL NEVER LEAVE". - When you walk into a classroom you are quickly greeted with the sight of colored Baldies with glitched text floating near them. They don't kill you though, all they do is glide around and look at you. - When you do a You Can Think Pad in this ending, you hear Baldi repeating something over and over again. It's hard to make out what he's saying but he is saying "One" both forwards and in reverse. If the pad gets a wrong answer, Baldi's comment of "You need to collect two notebooks before you can use these doors" that is spoken when the player has less than two notebooks when interacting with the yellow doors plays in a distorted manner, with a heavily distorted "99 seconds", spoken by Principal of the Thing as the longest possible detention he can give, playing in the background of that. - The "normal" ending to the Birthday Bash: One of the glitched rooms leads to a room called the "Ballon room". In which the player has to enter the correct count of colored Baldies. After you do that, a wall opens leading to a room with chairs in a circle and a chalkboard saying "Wow, you are very smart!" after which you start hearing static blaring and beeping then you see a red glitched cluster of Baldi's angry facecome out of the wall, multiplying as the static grows louder, the cluster aggresively following you around. At random, some of the walls will show distorted picture of Baldi. Finally, after some time, a huge number of these "balloons" pour out of nowhere and surround you, promptly being met with this right after that. ## First Public Demo/Kickstarter-Exclusive Demo: - As of the Kickstarter-Exclusive demo, attempts to open an illegitimately-acquired version of the game will greet players with this unsettling image of a blue-shirted Baldi standing in a dark classroom with an expression of horror on his face while a rather eerie tune plays. Something isn't adding up! - One of the random events is Baldi slapping his ruler too hard and causing it to break, but he'll still come after you. If trying to avoid him with the ruler was nerve-wracking enough, try avoiding him without being able to tell where he is at all. The only fortunate thing about him breaking his ruler is that he actually needs the full ruler in order to end your game, and therefore he cannot end it as long as the ruler is broken. - The Library. In the library, there is no sound whatsoever, and the layout of it can be so labyrinthine that it's easy to get lost in it looking for the way out while in stone-dead silence. Furthermore, the library also mutes Baldi's ruler, so you won't be able to know for sure if Baldi heard you go into the library and followed you in there until you end up running straight into him. (Thankfully the usual jump-scare noise is muted as well.) - In the Public Demo only, every character except for Baldi disappears once three of the exits have been activated, and he slowly but surely speeds up as he continues the chase after you, until he's way faster than you. This is especially nerve-wracking due to being so close to beating the demo, and if he catches you, you'll have to start from the beginning. - 1.2 gives us Mrs. Pomp, a Humanoid Abomination who hops at the player's face like a maniac without a warning to politely tell them to come to their class within a specific time limit. If you fail to arrive in time to her class, and then try to leave the room, she suddenly appears by the door with an absolutely furious expression and shouts at the top of her lungs whilst jumping around the room in a fit of rage. You can't leave the room until she calms down, and you'd best pray that Baldi is far away from you during her tantrum. - What makes her especially nerve-wracking is that, if the timer runs out, you'd expect something bad to happen while you're wandering the school halls... except nothing actually happens. If you have the gall to come to her classroom late and brace for the worst, once again no one's there but you... save for the sound of a stomping heel rapidly approaching the door behind you, but not actually entering. At this point, you've likely gotten over your paranoia and felt confident that there's no consequence to disobeying Mrs. Pomp, so you open the door on the way out... and find yourself face-to-face with an pissed-off teacher waiting at the other side. - Even worse is that if you go into any other classroom besides hers, she'll straight up come for you and bring you to her class! - Then there's Beans, a kid who likes to spit wads of gum at you. He doesn't kill you, and is more of an annoyance who can slow you down greatly if he hits you with gum (and he can even help you if he gums up Baldi); but if you don't know that yet, then he's likely to give you a pants-shittingly scary first impression by virtue of being a Gonky monstrosity with rapid, twitching movements right out of Silent Hill, especially if he's sprinting at you. Plus - The deformed head that could be found during the Gainax Ending in Birthday Bash turns out to belong to a character called "The Test". Should you run across them in a hallway, their head will slowly begin to rise off their body and fly at you while a droning noise begins to play. If you don't get out of their line of sight fast enough, all lights in the school will go out, forcing you to have to play in almost complete darkness. This arguably turns the game into even more of a Survival Horror game than it even was before, as now there is almost no telling where anybody, especially Baldi, is. - What further enhances its horror factor is what happens when other characters are nearby when you are staring at him. When the Test is droning and gradually moving, as long as you stare at it, all other characters (even Baldi) stop moving. The Test outright freezing other characters in place may be a testament to how fearsome it really is. Classic Remastered - The loading screen easter egg. It can catch unexpecting players off guard since it's a Jump Scare. - An alternate ending in Party Mode note : Use the Dangerous Teleporter once the Baldloons swarm towards you, then head to the Principal's office has you find Null again, and instead of the jokey, meandering deadpan tone he had in the previous versions, he's screaming and yelling at the player, now begging them to turn off the game. Null: Look what you've done. LOOK WH- [glitching] YOU'VE DONE! I told you! I TOLD YOU TO S- [glitching] To stop playing this game AND NOW LOOK! [unintelligible screaming] [glitches] [more unintelligible screaming] -IT'S ALL COMING DOWN!!! [glitches] [coughing] WOAAAAAH!!! YOU GOTTA GET OUT- [glitches] GOTTA JUST NEVER TOUCH THIS GAME AGAIN!!! NOOOOOO!!! [glitches, and then a Drone of Dread] - The Brutal Bonus Level preys on the concept of Nothing Is Scarier, with Null pursuing the player in the same manner as Baldi, but without making a sound. In addition, all the questions are solved for you, instead showing messages from him used to try and make the player quit. He can even break through windows to cut off the player's movements, which makes him a frightening foe when he gets serious. - Getting caught by him isn't any better. While it doesn't cause a sudden buzzing, you're forced to look right at him as the textures of the area around you start to glitch out and tear apart at the seams, meaning Null is literally tearing the world around you apart. The sound that plays after he catches you just makes it much more frightening to see. Oh, and he crashes the game once he's done with you, just for good measure. - Along the way, he'll occasionally say different taunts as he scours the schoolhouse to catch you, such as saying that there's nowhere you could hide to mocking you if you don't have any items and are out of stamina. However, there's the odd chance his voice will have an echo to it as he gives the player a chance to quit the game before he gets them. - Then there's the surprise boss fight against him. While it can generally count as a Moment of Awesome, there might be times during the last few phases where he could be literally mere centimeters away from you. It's a wonder that it's possible to shake him off at all. - And then after he's finally beaten, he's left unable to fight any further, feeling infuriated at the player and trying to tell them that Baldi's Basics is no game (at least, in his eyes) and scolds them for believing otherwise. As he does this, however, he suddenly starts shaking and glitching out, screaming in pain and letting out a Big "NO!" before he's rendered Ret-Gone from the game permanently (even if you reset the game's data). Whatever you may think of him, it's not hard to see how dark that is, and how painful it might be for NULL to experience. - And if you try to quit NULL Style before you've defeated Null for good? The moment you try, he'll immediately catch the player and subject them to the Sensory Abuse before closing the game on them. - Oh, and when you get that rare "crash" screen when losing to Baldi after beating Null? It suddenly glitches out and reveals more about Null, his last sighting in our world being by a lake. Then, we see his face and arms for the first time as they distort into nothing and he screams as he's subjected to being trapped in Baldi's Basics. And this screen only appears a single time after Null's downfall, making the experience more unsettling. - The music doesn't help at all. - Classic Remastered tweaks Baldi's "Get out while you still can!" to reveal it isn't spoken by Baldi at all. Null actually disrupts Baldi's speech to add this quote, showing that his influence is felt even earlier than before. In fact, once Null is defeated and erased, what Baldi actually says is revealed: "Find a way out before I catch you!". - The way the building turns red in this version has been redone. An energetic remix of the music playing when the player starts a run of the game starts playing when you get the seventh notebook. Then once the first exit is reached, the building gradually turns red the longer the player takes to escape, rather than instantly turning red, the walls start showing faint shades of red, which eventually solidify into a full red. And instead of a loud, droning noise playing, the music gradually slows down to a crawl as this takes place. The more exits the player hits, the slower the music becomes and the more red the building turns, with the characters even appearing red in the lighting, and a different type of droning noise eventually does start playing. - One of the random events is morphed into a fun setting you can unlock, Lights Out. Now you'll be having to move around in the dark to find the notebooks, with some light shining out in front of you, and hope you don't bump into any surprises.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BaldisBasicsInEducationAndLearning
Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Season 5's "Trapped in the Dreamhouse" has Closet trap everyone in the Dreamhouse. He runs Barbie and her friends through a washing machine, and when that doesn't work, he threatens to put them in the clothes dryer on extra crispy. Chillingly, the episode averts Never Say "Die". Yes, the characters straight out exclaim the closet could have killed Barbie!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbieLifeInTheDreamhouse
Barbie in the Nutcracker / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The Mouse King can turn his staff into an axe, a sword, and a crossbow, and since the Nutcracker is made of wood, it's extremely dangerous to him as well as anyone else. At the climax, the Mouse King starts a bonfire to burn the Nutcracker alive, then grows gigantic and nearly kills him with the axe. - At one point, Clara's friends are trapped behind an invisible, soundproof wall so no one can see or hear them, and the animation makes it look like they're trapped inside the wall. - The giant rock golem that chases the heroes across the ice falls is scary, and is surprisingly fast for its size. - The Mouse King turns two of his Mooks into bookends after they screw up. How do we know for sure they're not still awake in there? - Even worse, the Mooks were simply reporting what happened, which is what soldiers are supposed to do. - The flower fairies use their magic to make plants grow, but when Clara and the Nutcracker meet them, they're sealed in a well in the middle of a desolate valley, without so much as a blade of grass in sight. How long have they been trapped there? - For that matter, between the flower fairies being trapped and the constant raids by the Mouse King's soldiers, how many Parthenians have been killed or simply starved to death for lack of food? - Captain Candy's words before setting out in search of the Sugarplum Princess imply that several previous attempts to depose the Mouse King have ended in failure. What happened to the people who made those attempts? - The Nutcracker is surprisingly cavalier about his arm falling off. How long has he been dealing with this? Worse, imagine what might happen if an arm or leg came loose at the wrong moment...	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbieInTheNutcracker
Barbatachthian Returns / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes This is not Chester Zerum Spoilers abound below...beware! - The image linked is not Chester Zerum, but something that looks like him. When we see whatever this is, it's cutting open its flesh and sporting a slasher smile. When it catches up Chester they seemingly fuse together.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbatachthianReturns
Bamboo Blade / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Reimi. Her Leitmotif sounds like bending metal mixed with static.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BambooBlade
Barbie: The Pearl Princess / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - Lumina and Kuda travel inside the skeleton of a great sea beast, which starts to collapse once Kuda bumps one of its ribs. - After Scylla refuses to work for him anymore, Caligo poisons Scylla by shoving her onto Spike the stonefish, which would have killed her if not for Fergis' botanical knowledge. - Caligo's original plan was to force Scylla to poison the King by threatening to tell everyone she killed Lumina, then kill Scylla and be hailed as a hero. - The top military leader in the kingdom wants to kill the main character. If she knew it, it would probably have terrified her.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbieThePearlPrincess
Barbie of Swan Lake / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Rothbart disintegrates Odette on-screen with his magic ring; she ends up okay thanks to the crystal, but even then she's pieced back together. Rothbart: This girl's days are over. Rothbart turns Erasmus into a worm and tries to have him fed to ravens. Odette nearly dies after Daniel mistakenly confesses his love to Odile. Rothbart's chilling, growling tone of voice as he's tricking Daniel into proposing to Odile. The way he just intensely stares at the prince as his ring glows red is intensely unsettling. After rendering the Magic Crystal powerless, Rothbart blasts Daniel and Odette with his magic, seemingly killing them both. He even gloats that he's won just before their love and sacrifice destroy him. Something about Odile just seems... off. Not only is she paler and skinnier than to be considered normal, but there is also something birdlike and inhuman about the way she moves, especially her face and mouth. Fitting, yes, but rather terrifying. And then that laugh... And here I thought unicorns were... shy. Just the way his eyes glow makes it freaky. The rumor about Erasmus eating human flesh. Lila almost being killed by hunters. Odette's situation in the movie is pure nightmare fuel: she gets turned into a swan and almost disintegrated, simply because she has the power to remove a crystal from a tree. After this happens, she has to stay in an unfamiliar environment until she can work out how to reverse her curse. Luckily she has benevolent fairies to keep her company, but still...	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbieOfSwanLake
Baldur's Gate III / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Keeping the proud Baldur's Gate tradition of making players piss their pants. WARNING: Spoiler tags are off per Moments subpage policy. - You may have heard of Ceremorphosis, the process by which Mind Flayers are created: They implant one of their parasitic larvae into a host's eye or ear and let it eat the victim's brain and change them into another Mind Flayer over about seven to ten days. That is disgusting and creepy enough on its own. The teaser trailer decides to give us a lovely view of its full, hideous glory, including things such as the poor guy's skeleton deforming while he watches, his hair falling of as his scalp bubbles open and tentacles spilling out of his mouth, all rendered in photorealistic animation. Transformation Horror at its finest. - Since the teaser showed us the end of the process, the introduction cinematic decides to let us enjoy the beginning. Namely, the tadpole crawling into the victim's eye. First, we see it in third person, with poor Lae'Zel as the victim. Even knowing that she's a bloodthirsty, xenophobic Githyanki it's hard not to feel bad for her. And then you get to see it in first person. - The end of the teaser trailer has to be the biggest Oh, Crap! moment in D&D history. You are kidnapped by Mind Flayers, who are then attacked by Githyanki and taken on a trip across the Planes. You get free as the ship burns all around you and climb over to the hole in the hull... And see the Blood War raging across First Hell in front of you. This Is Gonna Suck doesn't even begin to describe it. - The story frequently mentions that the Mind Flayer tadpoles in your heads are special, as they haven't forced them through ceremorphosis. Shadowheart mentions that a Mind Flayer called her a "weapon". So now the question is: if it's not supposed to transform its host, what is it truly meant for? - In the 4th patch version of the beta, druids now have access to the ability to speak to various animal NPCs in the game. Some of these conversations are funny, others are just interesting or even cute... and then there are some which are just plain creepy. - One such encounter is a pair of Yeenoghu-worshipping hyenas who have been trying to feed on humanoid flesh to trigger their transformation into/birth of gnolls. The one who hasn't eaten enough demands flesh so that it can change. The one who has eaten enough completes its gnollification before the player's eyes... which involves the new gnoll growing inside its belly and then clawing its way out as a fully formed adult. And the narrator notes that the dying hyena is filled with equal parts agony and religious bliss at this experience. - A giant spider, whose "voice" is translated as a disturbingly seductive Scottish woman's, pleads with the druid to come closer and let the spider eat them, describing them as "my sweet" and "my desire". - You can find a sheep that is actually a redcap, an evil fey resembling a cross between a dwarf and a goblin, in disguise. If you penetrate its disguise, it threatens you, rambling on about how much it wants to maim and mutilate you. - A traumatized frog that can only repeat the mantra "green leaves, shallow water", in a voice that warbles with audible pain and shattered sanity. It manages to gasp out just two other words which imply just why this frog is so freaked out: "careful...Ethel!"	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BaldursGateIII
Baman Piderman / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The Basement Monsters (now known as Those Guys) can be rather unsettling. - Where did they get the blood for the cookie pie? - How did they get in the basement in the first place? - Why did the cookie pie grow a face?! - The end of the Season 3 Opener. \|\|Whatever passes for a status quo on this show is screwed.\|\| - Wanda undergoing Undercrank, where she rapidly flickers between several versions of her best Nightmare Face and seems to be growing towards the camera. That girl ain't right.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BamanPiderman
Baskın / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Baskin is a very disturbing film, but a few scenes stand out in particular. - The opening scene is very creepy. A young Arda hears moaning coming from his parents' bedroom, and gets scared and leaves the comfort of his room, where he sees that something is clearly wrong. It's also implied that Baba is in the house with him. - When Arda and Remzi are talking in the diner and they both see Baba. - Seriously, anything and EVERYTHING about Baba. His unusual appearance, bizarre sermons, and the way \|\|he gruesomely picks off each police officer\|\|. Even his genuinely friendly demeanor just makes him creepier. - Although it's more subtle than any of the above-mentioned scenes, Seyfi's meltdown when he sees a frog in the bathroom is quite unsettling. It may seem rather weird, but it's clear that something is really wrong. - Seyfi gets a glimpse at the hellish world that they stumbled into, and it's not pretty. It's a rapid flash (reminiscent of the ones in Event Horizon) of people being tortured and mutilated by Baba's cult. - The cultists are a bunch of violent, Ax-Crazy individuals who have no qualms with murder or rape, even towards each other. It just leaves the viewer to wonder what Baba did to them to drive them to such a state of madness. - \|\|Yavuz' Cruel and Unusual Death. As much of an unpleasant, homophobic, violent jerkass as he was, his death was easily the worst in the movie. Baba stabs him in the eyes, and then forces him to have sex with a woman clothed in only a straw skirt. Eventually, he collapses, and a spider crawls out of his mouth.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Baskin
Basilisk / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The idea behind Gennosuke and Hyoma's powers. Basically, they can drive you to suicide with only one glance at you. it's even worse in Hyoma's case as, for different reasons in each continuity, he cannot control it — there's a HUGE reason why he practically lives with his eyes closed. - Almost all of the deaths in this manga are really horrifying — if they're not bloody and painful, they're inspired in some of your insecurities and fears. I.e. we have: - \|\|Shougen being stabbed all over by a maddened Hotarubi, because he spit at her at the worst moment possible\|\|; - \|\|Jousuke having Jingoro forcing himself down his throat and killed from the inside out\|\|; - \|\|The aforementioned Hotarubi having her hands cut off and then being stabbed through the chest, before her lifeless body falls off a cliff\|\|; - \|\|Gyoubu being stabbed to death when still merged to a panel and then having said panel put on display\|\|; - \|\|Jingoro falling into the sea and freaking dissolving before he can be fetched by his clansmen, which was actually his worst fear ever coming true\|\|; - \|\|Okoi being bound, stripped, tortured, almost raped, and finally made into a Human Pincushion right when she was about to get free\|\|; - \|\|Koshirou being given a Kiss of Death by Kagerou as Saemon uses his blindness to trick him into believing his friend Akeginu is coming from him\|\|; - etc. - \|\|How Tenzen's resurrecting powers work - a demonic symbiote, either the vengeful spirit of his dead mother (anime) or his unborn twin brother (manga), inhabits his body and feeds on his wounds to regenerate him.\|\| - Also, what \|\|Tenzen\|\| did to \|\|Kagerou\|\|. Not only did he \|\|rape her when she was an official prisioner of the Iga\|\|, but when \|\|after recapturing her... he tied the poor woman up, got her blindfolded as well as topless, and tortured her via shooting needles into her bare torso\|\|, solely out of sadism. You know it's totally horrible when \|\|Oboro, the same girl whom Kagerou tried to murder less than an hour ago, stumbles into the torture site and pleads for him to spare the woman who wanted her dead more than anything.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Basilisk
Band of Brothers / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Episode 2 - "Day of Days" - During the D-Day paradrop, a round from an AA gun goes through the cockpit of one of the planes and takes the copilot's face off. The pilot he was talking to when it happened is understandably freaked. - From the same episode, Winters and co. come upon the body of a paratrooper who landed in a tree and never got free. To make matters worse, the soldier's corpse is so mangled that one doesn't even realize it's a person at first. Episode 3 - "Carentan" - When Tipper gets wounded in the leg by an artillery shell, you can see the bone. And the remaining flesh, well, it twitches. - Although it's not shown in the series, the real Ed shared later on that he had to have it removed in the hospital. - A very similar scene occurs in The Breaking Point, made worse because it happens to both Toye and Guarnere, one after another, and as the shot pulls away, we're treated to the sight of their severed limbs. - As the Battle of Bloody Gulch winds down, an unfortunate German soldier gets kneecapped and falls into the path of a retreating Jagdpanther, which squishes him into jelly underneath its treads. Feet first. Episode 4 - "Replacements" - The fate of the women who slept with the Germans in the Dutch village. They're stripped to their undergarments and have their hair cut off, some of them getting swastikas stamped on their foreheads. Another is found on the side of the road with a baby. Fridge Horror tells us that she was forced out of her village. And it's likely that the baby's father is the German she slept with — meaning the father is either dead or never going to see the child. Or worse: the father is a man in the town, meaning he allowed this to happen. Whatever the case, it's still an incredibly chilling scene — especially since it's in the middle of a festival and there's happy music and cheering going on. - Bull accidentally getting left behind and having to spend an entire night hiding in a barn, while numerous German soldiers patrol outside. Episode 5 - "Crossroads" Episode 6 - "Bastogne" - An Easy company patrol runs into heavy fire from a German patrol, and one of the soldiers gets shot through the neck. As Babe Heffron tries (and fails) to get to him, we are treated to repeated (and uncomfortably long) shots of John Julian's And you know what's worse than that; they have to leave him behind. blown-open trachea. - In a bit of Fridge Horror, late in the episode, Doc Roe, the focus character, goes back to Bastogne while it's being bombarded. He finds the Regimental Aid Station blown to bits, walks in, and finds Renee's headscarf, the nurse he met earlier and bonded with. He picks it up, dumbfounded, and is only able to leave when another medic harshly calls him outside. The angle of the shot is such that we, the viewers, only see him pick up the headscarf. But she wore it on her head: Doc Roe most probably had to take it from her broken and mangled body, perfectly explaining his shock. Episode 7 - "The Breaking Point" - The mortar shell that hits Muck and Penkala's foxhole. One second they're there and the next they're just... gone. Poor George Luz watches it happen, then finds a foxhole of his own, only for another shell to land right beside him. - Made worse when you watch the scene more closely and see that Skip turned around and saw the shell land right before it exploded. - One of the replacements succumbing to his fear and digging a foxhole. With his bare hands. According to Lip's narration, the man hadn't even noticed that he'd torn off all his fingernails. - Lip having to run out and draw a German sniper's attention to himself, in order for Shifty to have a clear shot. The way he just collapses with relief against a wall when he realizes that Shifty was successful shows us just how terrified he actually was. Episode 8 - "The Last Patrol" - Eugene Jackson choking on his own blood as he dies. Episode 9 - "Why We Fight"	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BandOfBrothers
Bar Rescue / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The threat of Floorboard Failure due to dry rot at J.A. Murphy's. The entire building was condemned, necessitating several days worth of repairs and no idea when the remodel of the bar could resume. - Headhunters in general. When the exterminator went through and showed the owner's (unpaid) employees just how much filth they had been working in for the past few years, they were all visibly disturbed (except the owner). Before that, there was the live performance by the band "Miscarriage," which horrified pretty much all who witnessed it. note : For the curious, it involved the band acting out ripping a fetus out of a woman's body. - "Fairways"'s kitchen was even more horrifying with thick mold and mushrooms in the freezers. Taffer and the others were worried that it was black mold (which can be fatal). Thankfully, it wasn't. However, it caused Jon to lose it: he shut down the restaurant and flung a plate of nachos away, bellowing that the food was unsafe to eat. - It's disturbing how often the bars have awful hygiene, and it's not always immediately obvious. For example, Swanky Bubbles always cleaned the surfaces of the bar and kitchen but never cleaned inside the refrigerator, oven, or dishwasher. Makes you wonder how clean your favorite bars and restaurants are. - During recon at the End Zone (later the Houston Sports Hub), two female co-workers (Taylor and Stephanie) end up in a shoving match and have to be pulled apart. But when one of the co-owners punches out the computer screen in a fit of frustration, they wind up getting into a match of their own and have to be pulled apart themselves. Jon decides, with no dispute from his experts, to come back in the morning. - Matthew Overmyer, co-owner of the infamous "O Face" bar, puts everyone else to shame. He was arrested for sexual assault and will be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life. - The whole bar in general was a hostile environment with behavior ranging from reckless (a bartender breathing fire near a fan and a low ceiling) to flat-out abusive (the fight between Cerissa and Amanda). - Chris Ferrell, the owner of the re-christened "Pit and Barrel" in Nashville was arrested after he shot and killed country singer Wayne Mills during a dispute just months after the bar's relaunch. Unsurprisingly, that episode can only be found online and has never aired on public television since its accidental showing in the encore timeslot. The bar itself has since been demolished. - Taffer's freakouts, in general, can be this especially when he throws bottles against the bar floor, not caring that glass shards could fly and hurt someone. His experts have sometimes gotten in on this as well. In later seasons, someone on the production staff must have pointed this out, so now they toss these items into conveniently placed garbage cans. - One episode had an untrained cook who only took the job to help his family. He did such a horrible job cleaning the fryer that when it caught fire, Jon couldn't put it out with salt because it had reached the vents. So they grabbed a fire extinguisher to put it out, and it too was so badly maintained it wouldn't work properly. They ended up having to evacuate the building, and luckily they found a second fire extinguisher that did work. Luckily no one got hurt. - "Rhythm & Brews" had a biker throw firecrackers at a bartender's feet. They went off, jeopardizing the safety of the bartender and several patrons, including an expert's wife. Miraculously, no one got hurt. - One owner of "Kid Chilleen's Badass BBQ" rides his horse into the bar... and it immediately wipes out. This is agonizing to watch if you care about animals at all. Thankfully, it's unharmed, but Jon is aghast and points out it's a miracle the horse didn't break a leg and didn't need to be euthanized.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarRescue
Balto / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Spoilers Off applies to all "Moments" pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. - Within the first 15 minutes of the film, Aleu is nearly killed by a hunter she mistakes as a friendly human, who nearly shoots her point blank for looking like a wolf if not for Balto saving her at the last second. Suffice to say, this act traumatizes her for the rest of the film and fuels her self-loathing. - Balto undergoes a spiritual journey, which includes disturbing taunting red-eyed wolverines who disappear in thin air. - The mysterious demonic bear Aleu encounters in the cave. It's not remotely natural and waits until Aleu gets close enough to try and kill her before trying to hunt her down.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BaltoIIWolfQuest
Banshee's Last Cry / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes A murder mystery novel series has got to have a few creepy moments. Expect the massive amounts of paranoia fuel to keep you on your toes when you read the game, especially if you have reading mystery novels that involve a body count.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BansheesLastCry
Batman & Robin / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Even the campiest and most silly of all the Batman movies has some pretty nightmarish stuff of its own. - Mr Freeze turning people to frozen statues right where they stand with his cryogenic weaponry, and leaving them with only eleven minutes to live in such a state. - Freeze using the modified Gotham Observatory telescope as a giant ice cannon to freeze the whole of Gotham City in the climax, and comes within seconds of successfully killing everyone. - Freeze outside of cold temperatures. In Arkham, when he tries to run away, it reduces him to a suffocating, moaning zombie with discolored, bloodshot eyes. - Antonio Diego being turned into Bane. The poor bastard is hooked up to Dr. Woodrue's machine and has a mask forced onto his face, then starts violently convulsing on the gurney as a cocktail of horrific chemicals is pumped into his body via a series of cannulae drilled directly into the back of his skull. And then his body starts to grotesquely swell and bulk up as his screaming becomes deeper and more inhuman. Woodrue: By merely drilling three concentric holes directly into Antonio's cranial cavity, I have created viaducts into the most primitive part of his brain; the Limbic system. ( chuckles ) And now I add my Super Soldier serum, codenamed... Venom! To which I add my very own recipe of steroids and toxins. Plug him in... ( activates the process ) Time to scream! - Woodrue murders Pamela Isley after she rejects him and his insane plans, first by calmly stating he can respect her decision, before screaming like a maniac and throwing an entire table of various types of venom and toxins on top of her. Pamela can only weakly lift up her hand as the concentrated poisons melt into the ground and create a glowing green cesspool that swallows her up. It's entirely likely Pamela really did die during this sequence, and the woman who emerged later was a completely new individual driven by the suffering Pamela endured. - The freaky gang that Poison Ivy crashes in on to claim the Turkish bath as her hideout. They all have neon body paint and weird contacts that make their eyes look smaller; giving them an almost alien appearance; and when their leader — named Cannibal in the novelizations — tells Poison Ivy "You look good enough to eat", the look on his face makes one wonder if he's even making an innuendo. - Poison Ivy's fate at the end of the movie: she's swallowed by one of her own giant fly traps, survives, goes insane from the experience, and is sent to Arkham Asylum. She is left alone, a dishevelled madwoman in a darkened cell, aimlessly plucking at flower and mumbling to herself. Unfortunately for her, it doesn't end there. Freeze is returned to Arkham as her cellmate note : According to the Novelization, Victor traded the means to replicate the cure for the first stage of MacGregor's Syndrome (Nora and Alfred's disease) in return for being able to share the cell. after finding out from Batman that Ivy was in fact the one who tried to kill Nora in stasis, and it's all too clear that he's going to make her pay. Poison Ivy: He loves me, he loves me not. He loves me, he loves me... (Freeze's armor switches on from a dark corner of the cell, illuminating it with an eerie blue glow) Poison Ivy : (gazes up at him with a wide-eyed look of absolute horror) Eh... heh heh... Mr. Freeze : And I've come to make your life a living hell . Prepare for a bitter harvest. ( Freeze slowly walks over to Poison Ivy, looming over her with a mirthless smile and a furious Death Glare) Winter... has come at last . - The Mr. Freeze Game Over sequence of the Batman & Robin PlayStation game has Batman, Robin, and Batgirl all being slowly frozen to death inside locked sub-zero chambers, accompanied by a heartbeat sound and some terrifying, ominous music. The horrific sound that goes with the image of the heroes dying a painful death on-screen is enough to scare younger players.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanAndRobin
Barbarian / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "Nope." Barbarian is considered one of the scariest films of 2022, and it's not hard to see why. - The first act is arguably the most terrifying part of the entire film. It is built on Tess and the audience being suspicious of Keith as well as sensing something entirely off about the AirBnB from the get-go. - At first, the hidden compartment in the basement. It's the definition of Nothing Is Scarier as Tess investigates it to find a room with a bloody handprint and later a steep staircase leading down into Frank's underground tunnel. - The scene where Tess slowly descends into the dungeon, shrouded entirely in darkness is one of the most nerve-wrecking scenes in all of cinema. Its shot almost entirely from Tesss POV with some even being handheld shots. It truly makes the audience think theyre really there exploring this dungeon. - The Mother's first onscreen appearance, where she screeches and smashes Keith's head against the wall until he dies. - What makes the reveal scarier and more surprising is that there were pretty much zero signs of The Mother in both the trailer and the film's first half. The first few minutes makes it seem like Keith is the villain trying to lure Tess in. So to suddenly have this tall monstrous naked lady come out of nowhere to, very graphically, bash Keith's head off is a complete shock. - The flashback showing Frank posing as a maintenance man to unlock a woman's bathroom window to kidnap her later. - AJ watching one of Frank's tapes - we don't see anything, thankfully, but AJ's reaction and the kind of person Frank is leaves little to the imagination. - Frank pulls out a gun and it appears as though he's about to shoot AJ, only to reveal that he's going to shoot himself in the head. The completely blunt way the scene is delivered is enough to nearly stop your heart. - The scene where the Mother crashes through a wall and kills Andre by ripping his arm off and beating him to death with it. Although, there's a bit of Black Comedy to it considering it happens immediately after Andre states he's survived for years and she'll never find him. - AJ's death where his eyes are gouged out and his head is cracked open in two. Not to say he didnt deserve it though.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Barbarian
Batman: Arkham City / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Batman: Arkham City turned everything about the first game up to eleven, and the Sequel Escalation includes anything you can think of. Asylum was dark, City is darker. Asylum was scary, City is scarier. Read on if you dare. WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked. - The Non Standard Game Over in Catwoman's penultimate mission. If the player choses to leave Arkham City with the loot rather that save Batman, the credits roll, and the player hears a distress call from Oracle. In a fuzzy transmission, she pleads for help, stating that Wayne Manor has been compromised and everyone is dead. Thankfully this is immediately reverted. But even as a throw away gag, it's enough to genuinely scare you. - Hugo Strange and Catwoman. If you get seen during Catwoman's Stealth-Based Mission, Strange appears in the game over screen. One of them has him holding a scalpel with a Slasher Smile on his face and smugly saying "I will enjoy dissecting your brain, Miss Kyle!" in his Christopher Lee-esque voice. The way he says it makes it sound like he's eager to slice Catwoman's head open while she's still alive. - The premise itself is based on the idea of a city, or a large portion thereof, being turned into what is, for all intents and purposes, a free-range concentration/extermination camp. - Protocol 10. On Strange's orders, TYGER just starts shooting Arkham City up. Extra horrifying because a fair portion of the prisoners are either in there on incredibly flimsy charges or because they know too much about Strange's plan. They murder roughly a quarter of the prisoners before Batman shuts them down. - Worse, the helicopters start firing at YOU, the player, if they catch you while you're trying to find the Master Control Program needed to shut down Strange's operation or racing to Wonder Tower. - Also, Strange was planning to do this over in Metropolis and Keystone City once he was done eradicating everyone in Gotham. While the plan might not have flown quite as well as it did in Gotham, the thought of having the likes of Metallo, Captain Cold, Parasite, Zoom, Brainiac, and the like locked up in an isolated part of each city, then blasted to smithereens. - Also, consider this: at the start of the game, you are captured and incarcerated. This would be terrifying if not for the fact that you're the stinkin' Batman! A guy who not only has years of martial arts training under his belt, but is incredibly smart and resourceful. Handling situations like this comes as easily to him as grocery shopping. The same can not be said for all of the other innocent victims that got tossed in here, who now have to deal with not only all of the other inmates who are more willing to prey upon any helpless victims they can find, but also a good portion of Batman's criminally insane rogue's gallery. One has to wonder if any of them fell victim before Batman arrived... - If you're out wandering, you might hear a phone ringing in the street. If you happen to be outside the refugee camp, you'll see a crowd of inmates gathered around a ringing payphone, egging each other on to answer it. Listen long enough, and they'll start talking about how if you answer it, you'll be dead by morning, or worse, "he'll" keep you in a cage for days, cutting pieces out of you. One will mention how a fellow inmate "bought it" by answering and apparently his killer "cut off his fingers, stuck 'em in his mouth, and left him to choke on them". None of the inmates want to answer the phone... How about you, Batman? - Listening to Zsasz ramble on about his life before he became a murderer is made worse by the gradual anger in his voice and the sudden breaks in his monotone. And in Zsasz's side missions, you're trying to go save Mr. Freeze and, all of a sudden, you hear a phone ringing off in the distance. Pick it up, and Zsasz taunts you with a challenge of finding him within a certain amount of time. The stakes: You have to find out where he's calling from by going to every phone in the city within a extremely small time limit, pick it up, and try to triangulate the source, rinse lather, repeat, until you find him. If you fail the side mission, or if you choose to ignore or miss the first several phones, he threatens and kills countless scores of people. A rather unnerving deviation from the storyline, especially if you choose to go back to the main trail. - Hush's hideout, and his gradual transformation into "Bruce Wayne." - Special notice goes to Kevin Conroy for taking the voice that fans know, grew up with, and associate with being a voice of justice and good... and making it terrifying. - After the Stealth Tutorial on the church, you can see Hush being treated by another doctor. Said doctor promptly starts to narrate how Elliot cut off his own face. - In his inspection of the Identity Theft killings, Batman notes that the surgery - read, the removal of the victim's face - was done while they were still alive. Because Hush cared far more about what he took than what he left behind, he would paralyze his victims with a drug and then mutilate their faces until death while they were frozen, unable to fight back. The random nature of it makes it even worse: all of Hush's victims were meticulously targeted only because part of their face would help him look like Bruce Wayne - he's only even in Arkham City because a handful of his earmarked victims were arrested. By the end of it his face is a Frankenstein's monster of stolen parts. - Penguin's shark, Tiny. It's like Killer Croc in the last game, only while walking on ice as it cracks. Penguin: Sorry, Batman. Did I forget to mention my little friend there? Meet Tiny. Who'da thought such a big fish could be so useful? Not me, that's for sure. He's like a mobile garbage truck. Whatever I drop in that tank, just... vanishes. Poof. (laughs) Problem gone. - Actually it's worse than Croc the first time you play it because, at least in the sewers of Asylum, you know he's there. Tiny, on the other hand... - Azrael. He follows Batman everywhere, and if you throw Batarangs at him, he will simply catch them (there's an achievement for doing that, though). Yes, that's right: Someone who can stalk the Goddamn Batman. Curiously swinging to the top of a Ferris wheel results in finding some guy in a hood calmly staring you down. - When fighting Solomon Grundy, he's constantly shedding supernaturally huge maggots that attack you. Maggots the size of Batman's foot. - Grundy, in general! The guy is three times the height of Batman, and the longer the fight goes on, the more ravaged his body becomes. By the end of it, Grundy's body has been put through all kinds of abuse: Set aflame from all the electricity jump-starting him, his rib cage has been shattered, and his organs are pounded into mush. - A YouTube comment summarizes a whole other level of horror behind Grundy being in Arkham City. His presence is built up well in advance of actually fighting him, but you might miss it on the first playthrough even as a couple of Penguin's goons talk about a poster depicting Grundy and quote his famous rhyme, "Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday." Then, after you've cleared the rest of the museum and probably Shoryuken'd Penguin, to boot, he sets off a bunch of explosives which send you falling into Grundy's lair beneath the Iceberg Lounge—which, going even further, means that this hulking undead abomination was there under Penguin's very public nightclub the whole time, including back when it was open long before the events of the game—and says Penguin says that he just happened to find Grundy there when he bought the museum. So... I think the most disturbing part of the fight was when the Penguin said "I found him here when I bought the place". I mean, we are talking about a reanimated corpse just lying around in an abandoned building, how did it get there? How long has it been there? Where did it come from? Who did that guy used to be? Who revived him? and, most importantly, WHY IS IT THERE?! - Grundy can't die, so Batman's Thou Shalt Not Kill approach goes out the window. And because Batman's not holding back this time... Well, no wonder Batman pulls punches on normal goons. - There's also the fact that, well, Grundy can't die. It's established elsewhere in the game that not only can he not die, he comes back stronger than he was before every time he's killed as if he's Doomsday, the extraterrestrial abomination that killed frickin' Superman! So that begs the question: what if he comes back again after the beating Batman dished out to him? - Mad Hatter's mission is twenty shades of disturbing, especially because it shouldn't be. The hats, the tea party, the Alice references, putting a bunny mask on Batman... it should be ridiculous. Except it isn't. - Said bunny mask is shown as a Jump Scare when you struggle to take it off. It's not helped by the eerie similarities between the bunny mask and the one seen in Donnie Darko. - Hatter's interview tapes count as well: Strange giving him free rein to Mind Rape several test subjects who "Nobody will miss" is a pretty horrifying idea. Even worse for the new assistant Strange hired to become his new "Alice". - Those interview tapes, plus the Arkham City Stories, reveal more: Remember those gibbering lunatics who liked to jump on Batman's back in Asylum? Those are the guys Strange was already testing mind-control devices on. - Furthermore, it's implied that the TYGER guards are those same inmates and others that were experimented on, brainwashed, and lobotomized. From either ordinary people walking the streets of Gotham, ruthless but dumb goons working for the various crime bosses, or otherwise unresponsive madmen locked up for their safety and everyone else's in Arkham Asylum to ruthless PMCs that will murder everyone and everything in Arkham City if Strange gives the order. And he does give that order. - Harley Quinn has a pregnancy test that reads as positive in Joker's hideout. If you finish the game in New Game Plus, she sings to the baby at the end. "Hush little baby, don't say a word... momma's gonna kill, for you, the whole damn world..." - Turns out the test was a false positive. In Harley Quinn's Revenge, you can find a lot more used tests, all of them negative. They have been circled around a crib... with a Joker-ed up Scarface. It's safe to say that Harley has indeed "lost it, big time." - The various Non Standard Game Over sequences. - Early on, in the processing area of Arkham City when Bruce is being corralled with other inmates by TYGER guards, you can see a lone inmate being taken to an interrogation room, where TYGER guards armed with stun batons and other weapons are waiting. Terrified, the inmate attempts to flee but is forced inside. What happens in that room is left up to the imagination. - The political prisoner who is unceremoniously shot in the head mid-sentence by Deadshot. Just the idea Deadshot had Batman and his target in his crosshairs the whole time is scary enough, not to mention the idea that even with Batman physically there youre still a dead man walking. Nothing will save you from Deadshot. - TYGER guards are revealed in an Arkham City Story to have been psychologically manipulated and surreptitiously drugged by Strange and essentially brainwashed Manchurian Candidate style. They are totally loyal to him, and have almost no control over their own actions. - Joker's literal swan song during the credits: "Only yooooouuuuu...", though it's sort of funny in a Black Comedy sort of way. Which was probably the point. - The downright creepy ambient soundtrack of the credits following Joker's song is insanely unsettling as it sounds like the combination of ominous wind blowing and eerie industrial bellowing. This seemingly simple yet unsettling ambience really can paint an image for the player regarding the future for Gotham, Batman, and the inmates of Arkham City which doesn't seem for the better even after Joker's death. You think there would be a Jump Scare coming at some point, but nothing happens besides Harley's "Hush Little Baby", but only if you've completed the game in New Game Plus. - To make it even creepier, the music that plays at the end of the credits is the same music used in the Visitor Center in Asylum. - Joker's interview tapes, which describe in disturbing detail how he murders all the doctors Strange sends him. Strange found one of them dismembered, and then there's Joker's comment on another one: Joker: It was worth it to see the look on her face. Hey, you know what, I think I've got a piece of it here in my pocket. - The Penguin, who finally gets to show off some of the "depraved mob boss" cruelty he's had in the comics. He becomes a Big Bad to rival Joker, and is generally unsettling with his unpleasant mannerisms and the way he brutally tortures the cops he holds hostage. - This gem: "I hope you're breathing through fractured ribs and punctured lungs! And if you're not, then you'd better summon up all your energy and run, because after I finish with the Bat, you're all next!" Sure, slight paraphrasing, but take a chill pill, Penguin. - Penguin isn't a good boss to work for, either, as a few of his henchmen find out. Penguin: [blows up a bridge] See, I told you it would work. Blow up the bridges and cut off the clown's forces. Easy. Thug: But, Mr. Cobblepot, we're stuck too! Penguin: So? Thug: We can't get back! Penguin: And your point is? Thug: You've left us here with Joker's crew! Penguin: Try an' take some of 'em down before ya die, son! [disconnects] - Not to mention that his customary monocle in this version is replaced with the butt of a glass bottle shoved into his face in a bar fight. Apparently, it can't be removed without killing him, but that doesn't matter, because he likes the look of it anyway. - "What you're hearing now is the sound of an undercover cop's fingers being frozen to sub-zero temperatures. Now, I wonder what would happen if I take this hammer and..." [WHACK!] "Well, what do you know? His whole bloody hand explodes!" - Penguin has "modified" the exhibits in the museum. Many of them show off his stolen military gear, or how he plans to kill the other crime lords in the city, Bruce Wayne and Batman. And they're almost all decorated with corpses or skeletons. Even when Penguin is just inflating his ego, people have to die. - One of the displays is one that used to contain Mr. Zsasz and it's very clear that he broke out with a vengeance. After all, the Penguin is the reason he lost all his money. Making it creepier, if you touch the information button for Zsasz's display, the Penguin's description has no jokes and he sounds on the verge of disgust as he describes Zsasz's crimes. You know you're a monster when the Penguin thinks you are. - This is all made somehow worse by his Cockney accent. Penguin sounds just so cheery when doing all these horrible things, as if he's just having a jolly good time. He sounds like a friendly man in the pub, and then he rants at Batman about putting the Caped Crusader in a museum of bodies for the rest of his life. - Regardless of how horrifying Two-Face was in The Dark Knight, the Arkhamverse's Two-Face is somehow worse. - Way worse. Nolan's Two-Face's burned face is nothing compared to the exposed raw flesh of this incarnation. - It somehow gets even damned worse in the remastered version, as the new model shows that even some bones are exposed, with bits of flesh having seared off of his skull. - Joker has always looked creepier than usual in the Arkhamverse, but this time around, his appearance borders on Body Horror. His disease has taken an obvious and terrible toll. After encountering him at the Steel Mill, the loading screen of his white face and expression make him look like a decaying skull. - At the climax of the boss fight with Mr. Freeze, Batman hits Freeze's helmet hard enough to shatter it and starts repeatedly punching him in the face. After a few blows, however, Freeze is suddenly replaced by the Joker, who lets out a distorted laugh as Batman reels from the Titan poisoning. - The glowing bloodlines in Bane's Venom-fueled body, in yet another instance of Body Horror. - Asylum players may have thought Scarecrow's reign of terror was over. It isn't. - For those too afraid to tackle the YouTube link, there is a hidden section inside a boat that functions very similar to the Visitor Center in Asylum; it's the only part in the game where you are forced into first-person mode. The place is very dim and low-lit with flickering lights and bugs crawling all over the place. In front of you is a passed-out inmate who is, more than likely, completely screwed up by nightmare gas, and when you approach, he will at one point twitch and scream before promptly passing out again, next to a letter to Dr. Jonathan Crane. - While he doesn't make an actual appearance beyond a quick cameo, Croc's name is mentioned by the prisoners throughout Arkham City, some even saying that they've seen him in the sewers, thus providing Paranoia Fuel that eventually culminates in that Jump Scare of a cameo of his, in the sewers. He can smell Batman dying and decides to wait until the poison kills him, then eat the corpse. - If you fail to save the Riddler's second hostage, you get to watch him being roasted alive, onscreen. You can still hear his screams as the screen fades to black. Riddler: And the winner is... ME! - Hearing the screams of political prisoners as they're being picked on and beaten up on by other residents of Arkham City can be unsettling the first couple of times you hear them. - For another Jump Scare, there's the mechanical T. rex randomly popping up and roaring as you make your way into the museum. Even better, one of Penguin's mooks remarks "I love it when they scream" shortly afterwards. - Riddler in general is pretty nightmare-inducing in this game. He started as harmless in the previous game, even a little silly, only to turn out to be a Not-So-Harmless Villain in City, where he's putting hostages in equally disturbing death traps. - Riddler's final challenge room, where you must save Anne Bishop. As you progress through the room, you will hear Riddler shocking her at regular intervals while she screams in agony. And every time, once the electricity stops, she gasps in pain and begs you to save her. And all this while he's taunting you about how stupid you are for not solving it faster. - As for what happened to the rest of Cash and the other hostages? The Riddler forces them to walk a track nonstop because if they do stop, the helmets they are wearing will explode. Batman has to maneuver his way around them without stepping in front of them or... Boom. - Reading some of the Arkham City Stories unlocked by completing Riddler Challenges (specifically the actual riddles players must scan) can be creepy: One in particular concerns the obscure villain Ratcatcher. When Arkham City opened, he decided to use his rats to smuggle in whatever goods Penguin didn't (mainly necessities like hygiene products, clothing, maybe food, to grant Penguin some kind of monopoly). Eventually, Penguin decided he wanted to meet his "rival" in the smuggling business: Ratcatcher was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the museum that Penguin operates out of and was never heard from again. - Slightly more chilling: You've been through that museum, where Penguin keeps his high-profile victims alive (if only briefly) and on display, and litters the other exhibits with bones. Did you see Ratcatcher anywhere? - Penguin's minions mention a guy who tried to butt in on his business. Said guy had his legs cut off and was gradually fed to animals. So... guess that answers that question. - It gets worse. Penguin first tried feeding him to a pack of rats. For days. But of course, given who he was, the rats just climbed around him harmlessly. So then Penguin fed him to Tiny instead. - When fighting Freeze, you can briefly scan him in Detective Mode before his jammer blocks your vision. The creepy part is that, while most human characters show up as X-ray skeletons in Detective Mode, Freeze is only a skeleton from the neck up. Just a skull and stump of spinal cord in a robotic suit. This only means that, other than the head, the suit can't be penetrated by Detective Mode's x-ray vision. Another detail some people might find unnerving in that, unlike other enemies, his heart rate drops to single digits while you're fighting him, but climbs back to normal when outside the fight. - The whole ending of the main game can be seen this way. "Highlights" include Strange being stabbed through the chest in a bloody fashion, Ra's impaling himself, Talia getting shot, and you face off with Clayface before watching as Joker dies in a messed-up version of dying with a laugh. - Combined with Tear Jerker: It's not just Joker's death, but his final moments leading up to it. Right after his last laugh and his Incurable Cough of Death, his body suddenly starts jerking as he clutches his chest and makes very loud, painful gasps, indicating that the Titan poisoning has completely taken over his bloodstream. The gasps start slowing down and getting quieter as seconds pass until, at his final gasp, he quietly lets out his long, last breath as he goes out with a smile. Nothing says "painful sadness" like his last moments. - During the final battle with Clayface, one of his attacks involves morphing into a ball with a huge, terrifying face and a gaping black mouth, rolling right towards the player. - As a Darker and Edgier Holiday Mode, there's Calendar Man's disturbing monologues: While in the main canon he very rarely kills anyone, in City, that's all he does, and each fits the theme of the month in a very grisly way. In general, all of his stories during the major holidays are disturbing or straight-up terrifying and even entering depraved, ranging from spiking green beer with snake venom on St. Patty's, stalking and murdering a lone girl on Valentine's day, to straight-up targeting pregnant mothers going into labor on Labor's Day. Each murder is also described in a Creepy Monotone. - Additionally, for every story that you hear from him, when you come back, you notice that the months get crossed out on the calendar next to Calendar Man, which would be fine...except the calendar is outside the cell he's locked in... - His story about his father takes the cake. It starts out actually kind of nice, although the player is likely wary about what's coming next because this is probably not the first time they've heard one of his stories. If it is, players are in for a Wham Line at the end of the monologue. Calendar Man: I wasn't real close to my dad, and after my first internment at Arkham, we never spoke at all. Seems he wrote me off as a wacko, a loser. So after I was released, I wanted to clear the air between us. The next Father's Day, I dropped by his place and suggested we go fishing. You ever go fishing with your pop? Well, it's some fun, let me tell you. The two of us, out on the water, pulling in one whopper after another. Of course, I was doing the actual pulling. Dad was baiting the hooks. You know, with a finger, a foot, an eye... whatever I had left of him. Even today, whenever I eat a nice piece of fish, I feel closer to my dear old dad. - Another one from good old Julian Day: Calendar Man: Ebenezer Scrooge was a saint compared to old Judge Harkness. Remember him, Batman? "Gotham's hanging judge ," they called him. Even though the state had ruled me insane, Harkness swore he'd send me to the gallows. So you see, it was all a simple act of self-preservation. I could hardly be held responsible for strangling that street corner Santa Claus for his suit. I needed the disguise to sneak into the judge's Christmas Eve party. Harkness thought it was all in fun until St. Nick caught him around the neck with a string of Christmas lights. The cops found him later, hanging from the elaborate light display of his own roof. Judgie almost looked like a cartoon himself alongside the comical reindeer, elves, and snowmen. I called that murder my "Christmas special." - For those that played Batman: Arkham Origins, it becomes a literal Wham Line since, on that faithful night, while Batman fought and stopped many other fiends throughout the night, he couldn't stop this one murder from taking place. It really becomes a bit jarring on just how casually Julian delivers this one quote and rubs it into Batman's face. - Julian also has one more monologue, accessed by visiting him on the day Rocksteady was founded. He comments that he's watched Batman since his beginning, and that the end of days is coming, hints at the next two games in the franchise, and that he will be there to watch Batman's fall. In a Freeze-Frame Bonus in Arkham Knight's 100% ending, he makes clear he wasn't lying, as he is visible amongst the crowd gathered as Batman/Bruce activates the Knightfall Protocol. - Exploring the Gotham City tunnels for a long period of time searching for Ra's al Ghul and the League of Assassins can be creepy as well when, after finding him and heading back to the surface near the subway, you are greeted with a load of bodies piled on top of each other, Holocaust-style. Each of these men were Penguin's soldiers and after Batman took down Penguin and started searching for Ra's, a gang (presumably Joker's) offed the leaderless clan and executed them all. It's a disturbing sight to behold. - In Wonder City, when you enter the second room upon nearing Ra's lair, you're presented with a roomful of hanged inmates, and a still-living one with a sword in his back rasping "They're... everywhere!" before expiring. - As you search for robot guardians to cobble together surveillance footage, assassins will suddenly appear and attack you with swords at certain points. - Even worse, Ra's eventually left Wonder City's citizens to go insane due to radiation from the Lazarus-based technology as their civilization collapsed. Now, if radiation from a Lazarus Pit can make people go insane and there is one located right under Gotham and has been there for centuries, then there is now a possible reason for why Gotham is such a Wretched Hive. - Many players expected those robot guardians littered around to wake up and attack at any second. They were wrong, thankfully. - Shortly after exiting the gladiator arena in the museum, you walk through a hall with fish tanks on the walls. You can't see much in them besides the fish, but turn on Detective Mode and you're treated to the sight of corpses. - In the area before the fight with Mr. Hammer, if you wait around in the area where you can see the majority of the crowd, and not much of Mr. Hammer, one of the inmates will look back to stare at you. While he doesn't do anything, the longer you wait around, the more he'll look back. - During the second visit to Joker's hideout, two Joker thugs can be seen hanging a Two-Face mook over molten steel, demanding information on his boss. Granted, it's just a horrible situation, but waiting around long enough will prompt one of the Joker goons to recall the last guy they did it to, complete with disgusting explanations on how his skin started to burn before he even touched the molten metal, including a description of how melting flesh smells. Wait around long enough and you get to see them lowering him into it, only for them to stop and raise him up again (in a "why aren't you stopping this?" kind of way); however, once you do rescue him, he decides to attack Batman. - During (or after) your journey through Zsasz's hideout, if you stop near the floating rafter and turn on Detective Mode, you can spot four skeletal figures: One belonging to Zsasz, two are his hostages, and there's a third sitting in the bottom of the flooding and draining room. How it got there in the first place isn't addressed, but then again, knowing Zsasz, it would be almost redundant. - The body is explained in Zsasz's first few calls, where he says he has three hostages. After several calls, if you take too long with decoding his signal, new calls will ensue where Batman tries to bargain with Zsasz, which pisses him off and tells him he will regret that. Worse, the body is always there whether you experienced those calls or not. This is horrifying because in these scenarios either Zsasz is being dishonest about his bargain, or Batman, the man who cannot kill, is indirectly responsible for someone's death. - Or, during the second phone call, Batman tells Zsasz he should have stayed the way he was before he became a Serial Killer. Zsasz, with noticeable anger in his voice, ends the phone call. One could easily imagine him taking his anger out on that poor hostage... - During the first trip to the Steel Mill, we see Harley berating Stacy Baker, a terrified doctor who failed to cure the Joker, before throwing her to a baying crowd of henchman and calling for Mr. Hammer. The sight of Stacy cowering in terror, screaming for help, and the metallic clang of the hammer on the ground as the crowd chants "Hammer! Hammer!" is pretty chilling. Case in point: You aren't going to get there in time. Thankfully, Harley calls Hammer off, but if she hadn't, Stacy would have been brutally murdered with Batman less than ten feet away. - While searching for the stolen Freeze tech, one thug calmly talks about how he once force-fed his own mother to the point of suffocating after she refused to eat it herself. These would have been the guys who went to Blackgate because they weren't insane. Yet they kill family members because of not liking them. The other goon he is talking to is in disbelief about the whole thing, but sounds impressed about what this guy did. Never mind the cake was already poisoned in the first place. - Harley's Room Full of Crazy in the DLC: A shrine to Joker with incredibly depressing and incredibly disturbing graffiti all over the walls. - If you zoom in on the Joker television-mannequins, they start laughing quietly. It's unnerving to a first-time player. Add that to the background music and the fact Harley sounds more insane than she did the first time, and you've got a damned effective opening. - In Catwoman's mission, she can choose to walk off with the loot or save Batman. Walk off with the loot and the game ends, with the credits rolling and horrifying radio messages of how everyone in Arkham and Gotham had been killed because Catwoman didn't save Batman. After a while, the scene rewinds back so she can make the right choice. - As Batman pays his respects at the spot where the Waynes had died in Crime Alley, you hear tear-jerking music... and the gunshots that killed them, over and over again until you get up. Not only that, there is Strange's message beforehand, which details how much fun Strange is going to have revealing Batman's secret and watching him crumble. - Take too long to complete the "disarm the bombs" mission in Harley Quinn's Revenge, and you get to see Gordon watching the building that Batman, Robin, and Harley are in explode. - Scarecrow's hidden messages over the radio. Chances are you'll stumble onto them by accident and be immediately freaked out as you try to figure out what the hell that was. But imagine if that actually happened. You're watching TV or listening to the radio in the car and suddenly everything stops... and all you hear is the sound of static and then a monotone voice calmly stating "9 23 9 12 12 18 5 20 21 18 14 2 1 20 13 1 14" and then nothing. - The numbers, when replaced with the corresponding letter, translate into "I Will Return Batman." - "YOU WILL PAY FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE TO ME" - "FEAR WILL TEAR GOTHAM CITY TO SHREDS" - Do you want to know what's worse? Those messages that Crane leaves behind in Arkham City are foretelling on what is yet to come. Apparently, Scarecrow makes good on his word in them... He returns! - So how do you make DLC that's Darker and Edgier when the main game had already done that? The trailer demonstrates how it's done. - That oh-so-brief glimpse of Batman's face when Talia pulls up his mask for a kiss. Keeping in mind that Bruce was scant minutes from death just before. Talia's horrified reaction is what seals it. - When you come across Nora Fries, Freeze's cryogenically-frozen wife, some of the goons guarding her may be debating thawing her out with the implication that they were going to abuse her. Imagine that the last thing you remember is being frozen by your loving husband and the next conscious moment of your life is being sexually assaulted by by a group of psychos and murderers. That is the stuff of nightmares. - While Joker's laugh is usually a good mix of funny and sinister, a good portion of his laughs in this game sound a little more terrifying, likely because of the toll the Titan has taken on his body. Just take a look at his laugh-only game over screens...particularly the one where he's not as over-the-top as the others. Joker: D'ha-ha-ha-heh-heh... - The Boss Fight with Freeze. You have to stay out of sight while Freeze uses your heat signature to follow you throughout the forensics lab, slowly but determinedly pursuing you as he makes threats in that mechanical monotone of his. - The cinematic trailer for the game that introduces Strange, which centers around him interrogating a TYGER guard about a fight with Batman with electroshock treatment and unnamed chemicals in syringes. When the guard dies, his only reaction is a disappointed frown. And the worst part is that you can find the dead guard in-game (you scan him for the solution to a riddle). - When Batman is captured by Joker early on in the game. The thought of the Clown Prince of Crime jumping on you and putting a stunning gas mask on you, followed by Harley knocking you out with a baseball bat through your blurring vision is highly unsettling. And Harley's attack is done with a P.O.V. shot too! - In the interview tapes with Freeze, at one point he asks Strange if he'd ever been in love. Strange's response is an immediate and straight-forward "No." There is something utterly unnerving about the complete lack of compassion or empathy that implies, especially considering the power and authority at Strange's disposal.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanArkhamCity
Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - If Wenlock weren't so camp, he'd be terrifying. He does whatever he wants, petrified Annika's entire kingdom, turned Ferris into a welcome mat, and turned his three previous wives into trolls to be his servants. - Ferris is turned into a welcome mat and is never seen restored from that form. - Though considering Annika asks for the Wand of Light to undo all of Wenlock's spells, Ferris almost certainly returned to his normal form—we just never get to see it. - In an unusually dark move for a Barbie protagonist, Annika tries to kill Wenlock with the Wand of Light after he hurts Brietta, directly commanding the Wand of Light to destroy him. It refuses to work that way. - Wenlock, in revenge for that, tried to kill Annika by isolating a piece of land with her on it and dumping and making an avalanche to essentially bury her alive.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbieAndTheMagicOfPegasus
Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Fans aren't kidding when they say that this is one of the darkest One Piece films produced. The movie's atmosphere is akin to that of a horror film set in the One Piece universe, rather than being another big-screen adventure like most of the other movies. - The first sign that the island isn't on the up and up: After Chopper falls into the ocean, followed by Luffy (who tried to save him forgetting he can't swim either) and Sanji saving both of them. The camera pans down to the ocean floor... and a number of shipwrecks resting at the bottom of it. - Robin naturally get suspicious of the island surroundings and manages to find out about a "Lily Carnation". She goes off to explore and finds some shipwrecked ships. Looking further she finds a wanted poster and notes that the Baron doesn't look any younger then he does now. The Baron soon confronts her and goes to shoot her with an arrow, all while Lily's eyes suddenly go multi-colored as she smiles wickedly through all this. - Just the way the Straw Hats start turning on each other through the film. Sure they've had their squabbles (this was pre-Water 7 btw) but nothing too bad. Here both Zoro, Sanji, Usopp and Nami actually start getting to the point of despising each other due to some misunderstanding during the Quints game. By the dinner party, Zoro and Sanji's bickering has gone from playful to serious and Nami utterly refuses to talk with Usopp. To say it's unsettling is an understatement. - Usopp's encounter with DJ Gappa. He just wanted to cool his head after Nami still acted coldly to him. Then this kid comes along demanding his hat. Usopp tries to brush him off...until his eyes change into a different color. And that's pretty much the last we see of him for the rest of the movie. - There was one scene when Nami was speaking with one of the Baron's crewmates who suddenly became a plant and dissolved into a dead husk. - Not long after the above, the little banquet held in the crew's victory suddenly takes a dark turn, the candles go out and the crew are thrown in pitch darkness. They note that Robin, Chopper and Usopp are missing and Sanji isn't helping matter with his accusations, making a stinging one to Luffy for dragging them to the island in the first place. If that wasn't enough, the Baron decides to continue the games with "Shooting" in which the staff will hunt down the crew "The Most Dangerous Game"-style, lead by DJ Gappa himself who's wearing Usopp's hat. Needless to say the crew are instantly suspicious about what happened to him and the Baron and Gappa refusing to answer them. Through all this, Luffy remains dead silent until it's only the Baron and him before demanding where his missing crewmates are. When the Baron retaliates with an arrow, Luffy manages to dodge it... only for it to suddenly stop and change direction to Luffy's horror, forcing him to run. He would've nearly been captured if Brief hadn't pulled him into one of his underground passages. - The next scene after this sees Zoro, Sanji and Nami being hunted by the Baron's men. Since they went off on the own separately, we see Gappa easily using his plate skills to corner them and take them down, indeed looking something right out of a horror movie. Zoro manages to shake off his attacks and retaliate with Oni-Giri... and Gappa is unaffected much to Zoro's bewilderment before the Baron knocks him out with an arrow shot. - The Straw Hats being absorbed into \|\|Lily Carnation\|\|. - Luffy being a human pincushion of arrows trudging zombie-like while begging for his crew to return. - Probably the worst part about the absorbing part is watching Zoro who was the last one to be absorbed. The rest of the crew appears to be unconscious but he has this anguished expression on his face as if he was completely aware what was happening and his mouth is open like he was screaming. - At the end where \|\|the flower on the Baron's shoulder becomes a giant grotesque beanstalk where the bodies of the Straw Hats are jammed in it\|\|. - The Reveal that \|\|the giant iron-like "stem" of Lily is actually made up of thousands of arrows (of despair!), mostly due to the scene being backed by an extended Scare Chord and screeching violins.\|\| - \|\|The cutesy Lily avatar on the Baron's shoulder cheerfully exclaiming that it's hungry, and making biting and chewing motions both during and after absorbing the Straw Hats.\|\| - \|\|The scene after the death of Lily. In an instant, all of the pirate crew members brought back from the dead change back into plants. No transition, not their bodies steadily turning or degrading back into plants. Just an instant change. It's so unsettling because of how harshly and suddenly the illusion of life vanished, and all you're left with are these dead plant husks.\|\| - The Baron's reaction to it isn't less horrifying. \|\|He had become evil in the first place because he had lost all of his crew at once, so when the illusions of them vanished, he became like a rabid dog, screeching "UNFORGIVABLE!"\|\| - And then Luffy punches him so hard, the Baron \|\| dies.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BaronOmatsuriAndTheSecretIsland
Barbie Fairytopia / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes The second movie has Nalu, a merman, captured and held above water so he'll suffocate from the air. At the end of the second movie, Laverna is turned into a toad. It seems to be a classic case of Forced Transformation, but by the third movie she uses her form to her advantage and poisons the Guardians with toad venom.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbieFairytopia
Barbie: Mariposa / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The Skeezites have an unsettling appearance and want to eat all of the Flutterfield fairies, obsessively chasing them every night until Queen Marabella's lights stopped them. Henna's plan is to dim the lights and let them eat as many fairies as they want under her rule. - The Sea Beast is a gigantic fish with crab claws that tries to chase and eat the heroes. - Henna is one of the most capably scary Barbie villains, as she puts on an innocent facade while doing her dirty work, which includes continually poisoning the queen under the guise of caring for her and having insurance that the Skeezites won't eat her as well, and none of the characters suspect her until the end. When urging Mariposa to join her, she implies anyone who disagrees with her reign would be fed to the Skeezites.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbieMariposa
Batman (1989) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Gotham itself is shown to be a depressingly corrupt Wretched Hive. Prostitutes can solicit a man in front of his wife and son openly. Corrupt cops like Lt. Eckhardt openly operate in the pocket of crime bosses. The public at large celebrate the Joker a man who just previously had launched a chemical terrorist attack on the city that killed several horrendously because he drops cash on them. The chilling moment when Batman first appears onscreen, looming over two petty thugs and opening his massive wings like a ghastly gargoyle, marvellously sets the tone of his mythical character. The fleeing villains were paralyzed with terror as the monstrous living-shadow stood up unharmed from their barrage of gunfire, and were driven so mad with fear that they can only incoherently cry to the police: Batman's awkward "smile" that he gives Jack Napier in the Axis chemical plant can come off both as Narmy and this. Especially, for Jack's brief perspective when Batman does his legendary Stealth Hi/Bye to him. [Jack staring at a smiling Batman] Jack: Nice outfit. [turns, bends down and grabs gun and takes aim only to see that no one is there] Batman's walk through Axis Chemicals, quietly and brutally disposing of mooks could qualify too - especially the instance in which he uses his grapple-gun to dangle a mook either by his face or shirt collar over an open fall and leave him wailing to be let down. Even Commissioner Gordon and his squad seem taken aback; And the buildup to the reveal of his face when he corners Grissom, with his face veiled in shadows. You can just make out his bleached white skin as he moves closer and closer into the light then steps out, revealing that green hair and legendary Slasher Smile. The Smylex commercials, and the female newscaster who died with the Joker's smile on her face. And the fact that this was the short version. Theres also the fact that Joker takes the faces of two models who died in his attack and uses the images of their grinning corpses as co-stars in his commercial (Love that Joker!) in a way that would surely haunt any family or fans the models would have had. Joker's final words for the home viewers watching his "commercial" for his Smylex-poisoned everyday grooming and hygiene products. The scenes with Joker wearing skin colored make up in place over his now bleach white skin. Also, the scene where Joker challenges Batman to reveal himself after the Joker himself "took off his make up". Bruce then pauses the video on Joker's sinister grin and then we are treated to a flashback where it is revealed that The Joker as a young Jack Napier killed his parents. The scene flashes back to Bruce who then turns to the screen in complete shock and the very next scene show is a close up and freeze frame picture of Joker's sinister grin looking straight at the viewer. That flashback from Bruce's POV feels less like a memory and more like an actual nightmare. The first we see of Jack, he's completely in shadow. Then when Bruce's parents are killed he delivers his pre-mortem line, which sounds deep and has an echo as if he's Death in human form. Finally, Jack steps out of the shadows and he's got that psychotic smile plastered across his face while he takes aim at the 8-year-old Bruce. Anytime Jack/Joker shows true menace without a hint of irony, such as Jack Nicholson's line reading, "But you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs", punctuated with breaking Alicia's mask. Sometime after Jack becomes the Joker, he does..... something to Alicia. Her confident persona vanishes and she begins speaking in a creepy monotone voice all while wearing a white mask. It's only later that Vicky and we the viewers see that Joker has thrown some sort of acid into Alicia's face, scarring her horribly. Vicky is so spooked by the reveal that she immediately starts backing away. Jack later reveals to Vicki that Alicia was Driven to Suicide and threw herself out a window...or so he says. Either way, he doesn't mourn her death too much, showing just how far gone he truly is. It is possible Alicia's slowed speech and overall confused, detached state was due to her being heavily drugged, either to keep her under control, or because she was in perpetual agonizing pain from her disfigurement, which most likely was not treated. In fact, the script explicitly states that she's been drugged during her appearance at the museum scene. The worst part of it all is, Joker is "smitten" for Vicki, and spends the latter half of the movie stalking and eventually kidnapping her. His treatment of Alicia sets rather firmly in stone what's at stake for her if Batman can't stop Joker from whisking her away. When the Joker calmly gives a light-hearted speech to the city that ends on the note "Oh, by the way, I've randomly decided that I'm going to kill you all with the grossest-looking gas ever." You see it coming and everything, but the way he played it is creepy beyond reason. Joker: And now, comes the part... where I relieve you, the little people, of the burden of your failed and useless lives! But, as my plastic surgeon always said: "If you've gotta go, go with a smile!"Hee hee hee hee ha ha HAAA! When Batman starts beating the tar out of the Joker: After punching him into the bell, he flat-out says he's going to kill him. Batman socking Joker in the mouth causing him to pull out his chattering set of teeth biting off what looked like a small chunk of his inner cheek or maybe even his tongue. A small, but pretty disturbing moment. The Joker tries gut-punching Batman and winds up breaking his hand. The cold, ominous delivery of the line "I made you, but you made me first." Once the Joker hears that, he's so scared he starts blubbering. That long, drawn-out scene that ends with the Joker falling to his death. As soon as Batman's grappling line ensnares his leg to a nearby gargoyle statue, you know he's screwed, he sure as hell knows he's screwed and there's nothing he can do about it as soon as the gargoyle breaks off from the cathedral and starts weighing him down. That POV shot of just how farhe has to fall is downright hair-raising, with the soundtrack effectively playing a dirge for The Joker as he slowly slips down from one rung of the escape ladder to the next... until he's finally pulled off the last one and down to his bone-shattering doom. The shot of Joker's splattered corpse; overhead shot, slowly turning as it zooms in, and a horrifying grin on Joker's still-intact face while an incredibly creepy, synthetic-sounding laughnote : Which is soon after revealed to be from a small wrapped box, which Commissioner Gordon pulls out of Napier's jacket while investigating the scene. repeats over and over. It's so surreal and unnerving that it really does feel like something pulled straight out of a nightmare.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Batman1989
Barbie / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes A Nightmare Fuel subpage? What the absolute hell is it doing in a franchise like BARBIE!? Yes believe it or not, Barbie, of all franchises, has scary moments. <!—index—> Animated Films Western Animation	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Barbie
Batman: Arkham Series / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes You can't even escape into MADNESS!The Batman: Arkham series isn't just considered one of the best iterations of the eponymous hero; it's considered to be among the scariest. Batman: Arkham Asylum Batman: Arkham City Batman: Arkham Origins Batman: Arkham Knight Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanArkhamSeries
Batman: Arkham Origins / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Batman: Arkham Origins might not have the long-term scare factor of City, but it compensates for this with an upfront maniacally scary story. WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked. In a shout-out to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman performs a High-Altitude Interrogation on one of The Penguin's thugs, Loose Lips, with the guy in question previously being unconscious beforehand. As he wakes up, we see things from his Point of View, showing exactly just how frightening it would be to actually be caught by Batman. Imagine waking up dozens, if not hundreds of feet above the ground, upside down, with no idea how you got there. Then you look up and see this shadowy black figure that everyone else you know is terrified of, holding onto you. Not only that, but despite being able to see how high up he was, the thug didn't start freaking out until he noticed Batman! Clearly, his reputation precedes him. And as a bit of Fridge Horror, it makes you wonder just what kind of things the goons in Gotham do to each other if waking up like that isn't enough to freak him out... Even Batman's own notes show that he realizes the badassery of Loose Lips, saying he could be a valuable informant. As Batman carefully makes his way up to the very top of the Royal Hotel, Bane ambushes him and delivers him at the feet of a much more spry and over-enthusiastically insane Joker, who's revealed to have a table covered with detonators for bombs in hidden locations all across the city. Not only does he threaten to activate the explosives within the hotel itself, sufficiently convincing Bane to give them some privacy, he even triggers one wired to a location right outside the window, destroying the building completely. It was an empty (he thinks) construction site, but even so... From the perspective of the Blackgate staff, having not only a prison break assisted by Killer Croc, but the execution of the police commissioner within their own halls while being powerless to do anything about it. An example that's only terrifying if you've played Arkham City: Calendar Man's cell at Blackgate. Scribbled on the wall is a to-do list which namedrops several of the horrific murders you hear about in City. The worst part? Even though he sees the list, Batman can do nothing to save those people. While fighting on the roof, Batman is thrown into a sudden quick-time event where Croc holds him and attempts to bite off his face, getting progressively closer with each snap of his jaws. In the Game Over screens, where it's dead quiet and there's no extra background noise, Croc's jaws can be heard making hideous clicking and groaning noises as he speaks, hinting at the way his bones are already warping to fit a wider mouth with much longer teeth. Alfred mentioned that Jones's condition might already be causing him pain, and there's a long, agonizing road ahead of him. Joker Venom is as terrifying as ever. When the poisoned bank manager is thrown to Batman, and upon her death, that Nightmare Face is horrifying, especially since you wake up to it. It's even worse in the Copperhead-induced Mushroom SambaControlled Helplessness segment. When Black Mask is un-gagged and begins to threaten Joker's life for usurping him, Joker flies into a rage and viciously beats him, screaming at him for not "playing along" in his real voice. And as this is happening, the bank manager is laughing her head off because of the Joker Venom. Honestly, this is one of the most effective Joker introductions ever. It's creepy as hell, the way the bank manager starts giggling then laughing harder and harder, and the Joker is under the mask, then just completely loses it on Sionis... This is a thoroughly vicious, effective, and just plain scary Joker. One of the most chilling moments in the game comes when Batman discovers that Bane knows who he is. He has to put a cap on it for the moment to save a bridge full of hostages from Firefly but when he's done and checks in on Alfred, who he told to hide in the Batcave... Bane: Come home, say your goodbyes. When you've had time to turn grief into anger, then you will be ready to face me. I have left enough life in him for some final words, if you hurry. Batman:ALFRED! When Bruce gets back to the Batcave it's near in ruins and his Detective Vision is down due to the Batcomputer being damaged. Frantically fixing it and searching for Alfred he finally finds him only for his stalwart butler and father figure to die in his arms In that moment, Bruce is no longer Batman. In that brief moment he's a scared young boy who just lost his parents again. While he does end up using Electrocutioner's gauntlets to defibrillate Alfred, the experience is so harrowing that he nearly quits being Batman right then and there. It's drowned out slightly, but while Bruce is reviving Alfred his radio picks up a transmission from Blackgate broadcasting a frantic S.O.S as Joker's forces invade the prison and kill dozens of people. By the time Batman nearly gives up, it's stated that Joker now controls the entire prison. If Batman had given up it really would have been Gotham's Darkest Hour. Look into the side rooms en route to Black Mask's hidden drug manufacturing plant. One is filled with formaldehyde-filled mason jars which are themselves filled with dismembered body parts: Hands, feet, and more than a few heads. It doesn't help that, in the forefront of all those jars, is one of the victims that is placed in an "experimental" branded barrel of formaldehyde staring back at you with that one eye. His office in the drug lab has not only multiple skulls labelled in a glass case, but a fully-stocked torture facility complete with a plush armchair and a tripod camera. Also worth mentioning, located at the same location of where the aforementioned jars are kept: If you look down at the lower right corner of the shelves, you'll find a collection of suspicious-looking items. A mop, bucket, a pair of gloves and a canister of solution that is obviously bleach... Apparently, Black Mask's goons do "clean-up" jobs after rubbing out those that were a threat to Sionis and his gang. Kind of makes you wonder of what they do before or during the events of this game. There's also a bit of those same items in Sionis's office where he does his favorite "hobbies". The whole corruption of the GCPD, most particularly Branden, the head of its SWAT team. But corruption aside, the moment that is well-captured is when Gordon corners Batman with Branden behind him ready to open fire on both Batman and Gordon. If Batman hadn't thrown that smoke bomb... Here's one that shows how truly corrupt most of the Gotham police force is. Throughout the station, especially noticeable in certain of the interrogation rooms, some of the floors are stained with dried blood. One of the police officers hanging around Enigma's hideout tells a sickening anecdote of how he mistreated a female civilian without any just cause. She apparently came back to file a complaint against the department... only to find the officer himself sitting at the desk, grinning his head off and asking how he might be of assistance. As she started to scream about what a disgrace he was, he had her booked on drunk and disorderly conduct, and tossed her into a holding cell where he apparently "visited" her during her time there to "teach her not to make a scene next time." She left the GCPD a broken woman, even apologizing to the officer on her way out—something he particularly enjoyed. Fortunately, you have the option of breaking the officer as well. You come across SWAT officers beating down homeless people in the station, with their colleagues cheering them on. After putting a stop to this, when Batman suggests they get themselves to a homeless shelter, the man he's speaking to tells him that's where the cops round them up. Implying that the cops have not only been doing this for a long time, certainly far longer than Anarky has been around, thus eliminating the possibility of simply using brutal interrogation methods to gain information on their "boss", but that they do it for fun. Joker killing Electrocutioner by kicking him straight out the penthouse windownote : roughly 45 stories above ground. Just the fact Electrocutioner falls such a long way before hitting the ground in seconds, and you can hear him screaming... What tops the Nightmare Fuel listed on this page would have to be the final confrontation against Bane during a long, grueling grudge match against Bane and the eventual apprehending of Joker. Joker hooks Bane up to a heart monitor that links it to the electric chair to kill Joker. Gordon and Warden Joseph then storm in to unstrap the wily Joker, only then to have Gordon being countered and pulled in and held at gunpoint. Joker knew that, in order to stop it from being activated, Batman would have to have killed Bane in order to prevent the electric chair from killing both himself and Gordon. The fight is fierce, physical, and utterly brutal. Do things get better afterwards? No. It doesn't. It starts after, when Bane gets resuscitated back to life, he goes all out. He injects himself with a new strand of Venom, turning into a hulking abomination, despite knowing it will give him memory loss. You're given 10 minutes of taking down this ungodly sight of a man, until his attacks become one-hit kills. What makes this fight worse and hectic? He adapts to whatever you throwathim! The fight is the stuff of true nightmares. Bane: COME! BATMAN! DIE!!! What makes Bane even more terrifying is that, in previous entries, Bane was never that fast. In Origins, he is terrifyingly faster and can outright obliterate you if you're not quick enough. Looking at Bane with Detective Vision, at this point, shows you that his condition is "Crazed." The background musicnote : title contains spoilers more than suits that. Joker himself, because he's just in it for himself this time and just sees Batman as a distraction. As such, he's particularly much more brutal in his methods and he just does not care at all if he lives or dies. He even gives Batman a What the Hell, Hero? after being saved by the latter from a fatal fall, before proceeding to gun down his own two mooks and then turn the gun on himself, stating he deserves to die. But after Batman saves him again, this just fuels the Joker's fascination with him, like he's now found a purpose to live. Using Detective Mode during that fight reveals that the Joker's heart rate is "calm." Joker's always been crazy, but it's much more obvious here. He's completely Ax-Crazy. This game makes it clear more than any other how deeply psychotic he is, and it's terrifying just how easy it is to send him from Faux Affably Evil to homicidal rage, since there's no way of knowing what's going to do it. An extremely flexible woman contorting around Batman in skimpy clothing might sound sexy in theory, but Copperhead's movements are reminiscent of basically every creature that could crawl on your body and fill you with venom while you're helpless with fear, from the obvious copperhead snake to a large poisonous spider. Her bio even states that she crushes some of her victims this way. And this is in addition to the hallucination sequence, with Copperhead lunging and taunting Batman about his impending death while previous failures jeer about his incompetence. The fanservice is further crushed when she hisses and unveils her tongue. Compared to the rest of her human body (save her glowing eyes), that reptilian tongue is jarringly different and all kinds of wrong. Whenever you counter Copperhead's strikes, Batman succeeds in dislocating her shoulder. Copperhead just laughs and manages to reset it with a flick of her arm. It's incredibly freaky. When you rescue the Mad Hatter's most recent 'Alice,' she just breaks down weeping. Batman tries to tell her that it's going to be okay... 'Alice': No... it's not. The Mad Hatter's level, in general. A twisted, nightmarish "wonderland", complete with jittery camera, poor lighting, and the Hatter's constant taunting. Especially bad for anyone who has fond memories of Wonderland from the original book. The introduction is deeply unsettling as well. Three criminals greet Batman in the garage of the GCPD in animal masks and sing an 'invitation' from the Hatter to the tune of "London Bridge." When they finish, they're zapped by the Hatter's devices and fall unconscious. Batman's battle with Firefly on the bridge. A cacophony of explosions, flaming cars, and falling rubble. And it gets more and more hellish as it progresses. At the end, Batman punches his visor so hard it cracks enough to see his face. We don't see all of it, but what we do see... Just like in Arkham City, The Penguin keeps lots of glass cases on his ship...cases containing the corpses of men who failed or betrayed him. The worst one is pinned to the wall by knives. Batman's interrogations and behavior in cutscenes are generally much more frightening in this game, because both his reputation and self-control are at a much lower level than in the other games. In City, Batman could get thugs to talk with only a few quiet words, often with the threat more implied than explicit because he was so much The Dreaded that he didn't need to do more, but here he looks like he might lose his temper at any moment and slaughter the thug he's interrogating, and his cutscene No Holds Barred Beatdowns of the already helpless Penguin, Black Mask, and Joker aren't something you'd expect from the more mature Batman to which we've become accustomed. Seeing the fledgling Batman so barely containing his inner darkness makes it quite clear how dangerous he could be if he slipped up, and seeing the customary Tranquil Fury replaced with something closer to The Berserker can be quite shocking. One particularly jarring instance of this is after rescuing Sionis and trying unsuccessfully to interrogate him about Joker, Batman reveals he can control Sionis's pacemaker remotely. He threatens to crank it up to 250 beats per minute. One of Enigma's data handlers you have to interrogate initially refuses to talk, pointing out that he knows Batman won't kill him. Yet all of this is topped by the Crime Alley shootings. Batman's interrogating the man who killed his two closest friends... and he starts going on a rant against Ian Chase, who committed a murder similar to Joe Chill, aka THE MAN WHO KILLED HIS OWN PARENTS, and Alfred notes that his vitals are going erratic. Bruce was ONE STEP AWAY from actually killing this man! Sure, he would've deserved it, but still. The murder scene at Lacey Towers has a really creepy atmosphere, as it is far more elaborate than any other crime scenes depicted in the game. While we find out the reason for this very quickly, Batman is actually completely thrown off by the brutality and sadistic nature of the crime as well as the seeming senselessness of it. Close to the end of the investigation, you find the girlfriend's cell phone, which had her last few texts on the screen, which revealed why she and Sionis were at a safehouse to begin with. Then comes quite the Wham Line: Batman: Who's the Joker? The Cold, Cold Heart DLC explains how Victor realized he would die if he went in above zero temperatures after the accident. There was a security guard who was also affected by the cryo-blast. Not sure what was going on, he stumbled desperately out of the frozen lab and into the entrance area... where he promptly died of heat stroke as a result of Ferris Boyle turning on the quarantine features of the lab. Ferris Boyle's Adaptational Villainy. The original Boyle from Batman: The Animated Series was an opportunistic scumbag for sure, but he wascorrect that Victor's work wasn't authorized and things didn't get out of hand until Victor pulled a gun on him. The Boyle here, in his version of the accident, takes Nora away, against his agreement, for the express purpose of experimenting on her and the process Victor used. He has his guards hold Victor back and pistol-whips him before kicking him into his equipment, and when that sets off the chain of events that causes Victor to become Mr. Freeze? He just stands and watches for a moment, not trying to get help or intervene, before running off. When Batman finally rescues him, he freezes Batman with a broken cooling pipe and taunts a helpless Victor that he'll kill Nora before he kills him, just so he can see her slip away, all the while bashing him over the head with a piece of Victor's suit repeatedly. What's worse is that all of this, his vile personality, is wrapped up in a demeanor so kind and innocent that he had the World's Greatest Detective fooled.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanArkhamOrigins
Batman Begins / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "Who knows you're here? WHO KNOOOWS?!" "Gentlemen, time to spread the word. And the word is... panic." — Ra's al Ghul Batman Begins meant the start of a new continuity in film. However, it also meant a Darker and Edgier start. - Crane exposing Falcone to the fear toxin. Crane: Would you like to see my mask? I use it in my experiments. Now probably not frightening to a guy like you, but these crazies, they can't stand it. Falcone: So when did the nut take over the nuthouse? (Crane sprays fear gas into Falcone's face; Falcone begins to scream in terror as the gas takes effect: Crane's voice is altered, and the mask appears to move like a real face) Crane: (in a demonic voice) They scream and they cry, much as you're doing now. - Batman's whole shtick is to be Nightmare Fuel to his enemies. - The best example is Batman's first night out. Falcone and his men are calmly going about their business, when all of a sudden, one of his men is violently yanked into the dark container with barely a sound. From there, Batman cranks up the mind games, as these men barely have enough time to register what they're up against. One by one, Batman dispatches the armed thugs, and Falcone's driver, like a silent predator stalking his victims, before he proceeds to reveal himself in a crowd of thugs. All we see is a shadow moving at blinding speeds, as he counters every hit and tanks the few that land in a brutal display of hand to hand combat. It's easy to believe that the display that we the audience have seen wasn't the doing of a man, but something beyond that... - The end sequence where the Narrows are just teeming with Fear Toxin, and all the escaped convicts see Batman flying above. Their collective hallucination paints Batman as a huge black shadow with GLOWING RED EYES! It then distorts his voice to an even more horrible growl... Though it is quite the subversion in that it's the HERO that's terrifying. - Crane's vision of Batman while on the toxin. It'd be more apt to call the hallucination a Bat-Demon, complete with black ooze frothing out of the mouth while he speaks. And he himself is more unhinged than ever before. - When Batman gets sprayed by the fear toxin by Scarecrow, he sees bats flying out of Scarecrows eyes and mouth. - BUF Special Effects (the team who created the Scarecrow effects for the film) released an FX reel after the film came out that highlighted several sequences from the film. One of them is a deleted shot featuring Rachel's perspective of Crane when the elevator doors open in Arkham. In the theatrical cut, Crane immediately grabs her when the doors open. In the FX reel, Crane stands there staring straight into the screen with a passive look while maggots fall off of his face. - When Scarecrow sets Batman on fire. The song that plays as he leaps from the balcony while ablaze sums it all up. Scarecrow: Do you want my opinion? You need to lighten up. - Ra's Al Ghul walks right into Bruce's home and pulls Batman's own famous Stealth Hi/Bye on him with the Jump Scare becoming a dirty surprise once the realization of who that is, starts to sink in. - Crane, now calling himself "Scarecrow", chasing Rachel and the boy from earlier through the streets of Gotham riding a horse that, because of the fear toxin in the air, seems to be a Hellish Horse with glowing red eyes and breathing fire. This while Crane calls to them in a booming, distorted, demonic voice. - The Narrows and almost everyone in it, is driven insane by Scarecrow's toxin thanks to the monorail, once built to help Gotham, being used to destroy the city from the inside. This leads to some violent riots, with whole crowds attacking Batman and amid all the chaos Zsasz walking towards Rachel Dawes with a knife. - Those intoxicated by Fear Toxin seem to be totally beside themselves. We can see a group of intoxicated inmates who are totally disoriented. - The Joker card. At the time the film released, the reveal of the card was considered a moment of awesome, as it was teasing a more realistic version of Batman's arch-enemy showing up in a sequel, something everybody wanted to see. Then The Dark Knight was released, and this more realistic version of the Joker was portrayed as an insane, murdering terrorist who ultimately brings Gotham to heel and all but defeats the Batman. After seeing all that, coming back to this film and watching the card's reveal can only instill a sense of severe dread in those who know just what is coming for the Batman, Gordon and the entire city of Gotham.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanBegins
Batman: Arkham Knight / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "Shhhh... it's OK to be afraid." — Scarecrow Batman: Arkham Knight isn't just the Grand Finale for the Arkham series, it's the scariest Batman game ever made. If Batman: Arkham City is darker and spookier than Batman: Arkham Asylum, Arkham Knight is one step further beyond. WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked. - Scarecrow is back. This Halloween will certainly not be safe for trick-or-treating... - He's got a new look.◊ And you thought he looked creepy before... As a matter of fact, his mere appearance made the trailer he appears in to be considered inappropriate for children. That's how creepy he is. In fact, this might be one of the reasons the game got an "M" rating. - Even worse if you consider the first game. The last time we saw him in the game? He was being eaten by Killer Croc. As horrifying as his mask is, whatever's underneath it might be even worse. - It's even worse than that. Dialogue between a set of watchtower mooks, as well as other random mook chatter, implies that his mask isn't a mask. It's his face, his real face, which he did to himself. - This is further demonstrated in his first appearance. His mask's mouth actually moves as if it were his real mouth. Brrr... - The moment in the finale when Scarecrow forces Gordon to unmask Batman. Instead of looking angry, defiant, worried, or any other understandable expression, Bruce's face looks completely blank. As if all the trauma he's endured as both Batman and Bruce Wayne, all the fighting he's done against the endless criminals of Gotham, have left him hollow and shell-shocked, not a trace of the playful playboy billionaire left. In a way, Bruce's real face is more frightening than his Batman mask. - In-Universe, Fear Toxin is literal Nightmare Fuel with a reputation to match from the other characters. - At the end of one of the trailers, we have Arkham Knight with Batman on the ground, with a gun to his face, and the screen cuts to black as we hear a gunshot. Not so much in the game, as the Knight shoots Batman in the torso where he knows he'll survive just to toy with him. - Imagine being a Gotham cop. No, not in the same vein as Asylum (where you at least had an island to blockade off) or City (where you could just monitor the wall) or even Origins (the department is still in control of the greater Gotham area). Now you're isolated, in a city that's overrun with criminals on what's supposed to be a night of the year made of terror, capped with the most frightening super-criminal of all threatening to make your worst fears real. - Now the proud "welcoming face" of this page! - The one cop in the very beginning of the game probably suffered the worst out of all the cops and firefighters (which is saying something). Before anything bad happens to Gotham, one cop decided to take a break at a diner and have a quick meal. However, before he gets his meal, one random man walks up to him and asks for him to talk to a man in the corner of the restaurant to stop smoking. When the cop goes up to the man, the man turns out to be a Scarecrow thug who sprays Fear Toxin into the cop's face. Hell literally breaks loose as the cop starts hallucinating everyone in the diner as walking zombie abominations that try to eat him and each other. The cop then brings out his gun and starts shooting them in panic. Mind you, these are hallucinations, which means that the cop is shooting innocent people who have also breathed in the Fear Toxin! The poor cop doesn't get better until far later on into the game and even then he is obviously traumatized. And this was only the start of the game... - You want more? Well, according to the game's files, the guy who sprayed the gas in the cop's face was Jason. - You don't have to shoot at the hallucinations. The Nightmare Fuel here is that you as a player reacted and traumatized the cop all by yourself. It seems Scarecrow is even able to get to you. - If you choose not to shoot any civilians during the sequence, when you come across the cop later in the prison, the other officers will commend him for retaining that level of control over himself. - The second picture in "Story Synopsis" depicts the shoot-out with a gruesome close-up of the hallucinatory patrons. - You can also unlock a character trophy of the nightmare demons. The trophies in Arkham Knight are animated, so you get to watch them writhe and twitch like feral animals. It's... unpleasant. - The way that the zombie hallucinations snarl and snap at you is just... ugghh... - Arkham Knight is Nightmare Fuel in the most definite manner imaginable. He is supposed to be less known, while on the contrary... He knows more about the Batman than anyone else in Batman's rogue gallery. He's versatile, durable, resourceful, cunning and, above all, extremely dangerous. He may appear to be the secondary antagonist to Scarecrow. But in all favors, he must be much more wily than Scarecrow, The Master of Fear himself. And it's implied that he might have followed Batman since his first early beginnings in Asylum and the horrific full-on destruction in City. It may explain why he downright mocks Batman both in his armor's appearance and for embroidering the Arkham emblem on himself. The helmet and style of armor shows him destroying Batman's heroism in Gotham and the emblem of the Arkham symbol is a reminder of the two worst nights in Batman's entire crime fighting career which are Asylum and City. Now the question begs for the previous titles... Who and what is he? Where is he? And finally... What became of him? What drove and caused him to have unfiltered, seething, unbridled, aggressive rage against Batman? - It's revealed he's Jason Todd and that, years ago, Joker kidnapped Todd and tricked Batman into believing he was dead, all the while torturing Jason for months in an abandoned wing of Arkham Asylum, causing his mind to snap when he believed Batman had abandoned him. Finding out that Tim replaced him as Robin didn't help his psyche either. Jason: What's the matter? Lost for words? I expected more... I'm hurt. Batman: Joker sent me the film... I saw him kill you. Jason: Don't you dare lie to me! How long did you wait before replacing me, huh?! A month? A week?! I trusted you... and you just left me to die! Batman: That's not what happened! Jason: You always told me, Bruce... focus on what I want to achieve... and it'll happen. Well, you want to know what I want now, huh? I want you, . dead - During the second hallucinatory flashback to Jason's torture, Joker at first has him strung up by his wrists as he circles him with a branding iron. After some more talking, Joker lets him down. Jason's wrists are free at this point, he could have made an attempt to escape or attack Joker during this moment. Instead, what happens is Jason cowering on the floor pleading whilst desperately trying to crawl away as Joker moves in with the iron. In a way, it's merciful we don't see all of what Joker did to him. To have him that terrified and broken is just chilling. - Possibly the worst of all is when we see how Jason appears to die. Joker: What's the big secret, huh~? His name. Tell me. Jason: ... Of course, sir... It's— BANG. - Even worse, Jason calls Joker "sir". Being so broken you cannot bring yourself to attack your torturer is one thing, but being so broken you call him "sir" like you're his servant? - Even during his final boss fight, you get some disturbing hints of this. In your final battle against Jason, whenever his militia men are unconscious or not present, he'll start taunting and ranting at Batman. A lot of it is the standard "you're going down" trash talk, but there are a few lines he'll deliver that are downright terrifying, one in particular revealing how fractured his mind has become: Jason: I can still hear him laughing. He's still in my head! - What's worse is that, while the tie-in comics explain that Jason was kidnapped as a part of Joker's plan in Asylum and that Harley inadvertently named Jason's alter ego, those comics were made after the game. The original plan by Rocksteady was that Jason searched for Joker to kill him but was captured. The resulting torture Jason endured? All just to teach Batman a twisted lesson. Think about that: Joker tortured Jason for over a year, ultimately just to kill him (or so he thought), because Joker didn't want to share Batman. - Some of the later missions against the Arkham Knight definitely qualify as this before you get the hang. Namely, the Cobra. The Cobra is a huge tank with search beams that can only be destroyed by sneaking up behind it and waiting until your targeting reticle focuses and locks onto the rear-generator (similar to how the Immobilizer fires) so you can fire the cannon. One mission has you playing hide and seek with four of these, and if you destroy one, then another is inevitably drawn to your location. Worse still, they can take out the Batmobile in TWO SHOTS if they get you directly. This leads to frantically driving away if you get spotted, which can easily bring you into the line of vision of another Cobra tank. - The mission to destroy the Cloudburst is even worse. Whilst enduring both visual and auditory hallucinatory effects of having the fear toxin-induced criminals show as clones of Joker along with subtle trademark laughter echoing in the background throughout the entire fight. It's hide and seek against seven Cobra tanks, and the Cloudburst Tank itself is the worst of all, as it has four weak points you need to sneak up and shoot, and whenever you get one, it chases you for longer and longer periods through the city, not to mention that, for a tank its size, it's a very speedy hybrid of a tank when it chases you after destroying one of the four aforementioned weakpoints. Then you have to take potshots at the tank itself while dodging missiles, while the Arkham Knight gets increasingly furious over enemy radio transmissions. - Getting trapped in the sewers with the Arkham Knight, who is driving a giant drill. You basically have to let him spot you, chase you, and not get caught while you lead him into a trap. And each time you succeed, the area to move in gets smaller and smaller. Also, just as you attempt to leave, you reach a dead end, with the Knight having cornered you. The only thing you can do at this point is eject and let him wreck your car. - Despite how nightmarish the sequences in the previous games can be, they had a cartoonish feel to them that kept them to a T rating. Knight, however, got an (A rarity in superhero games, especially centering around popular heroes like Batman). And no wonder: The scares here are much more visceral, real, and unpredictable. A few specific items were highlighted in the ESRB summary, being two torture scenes involving a car tire and an operating table and a sequence where the players can shoot people and a hostage. These specific scenes are Batman interrogating a Militia soldier for the Arkham Knight's location, Professor Pyg's introduction and the nightmare sequence at the end where Joker hunts down the other villains. M - The sequence where Batman interrogates the Militia soldier especially bears mention, as when he refuses to divulge the Arkham Knight's location, Batman summons the Batmobile and presses the tire on his face. While Batman has had a history of using Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique for information, many of them take on a playful and humorous tone. This scene, on the other hand, is extremely unnerving due to it being played dead serious and for how terrifying of a situation the thug is placed in. It is only made worse by the fact that the player is forced to rev the Batmobiles engines themselves (and torture the poor guy in turn) in order to continue. Didnt think this could get any worse? The player is required to press on the gas for a specific amount of time that the game doesnt share with you, meaning if you get squeamish and chicken out too soon, you have to start all over. - It was later revealed Jason's torture scenes played the biggest part in pushing the rating to an M. While the game was pushing it with the above mentioned items, these scenes apparently took the cake and bumped it up to M. That is how disturbing those scenes were. - The "Gotham is Mine" trailer has a fair bit of Nightmare Fuel, given that it focuses on the villains. Of special note is the Riddler's face. Looks like he's gotten worse since the last game. - Poison Ivy and Firefly are back as part of the Villain Team-Up too. Similar to Riddler, their physical appearances have taken a turn for the worse as well. Firefly in particular has no helmet, just goggles and a gas mask, with his horrifically burned head on display. - Though, one could argue that Poison Ivy's appearance seems less freakish compared to her previous design, as she now looks more human. - The opening cinematic, revealed in the E3 2015 trailer, begins with Joker's grinning corpse being pushed into a cremation oven; rather than the camera cutting away, as it would've done in previous T-rated games, it instead lingers as the rising flames bloodily melt his skin and muscle into a charred, blackened husk. - While the opening cinematic shows Joker's cremation, the lyrics to Frank Sinatra's "I've Got You Under My Skin" make an eerie foreshadowing of what will happen to Batman with the Joker blood still in him: I've got you under my skin. I've got you deep in the heart of me. So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me. I've got you under my skin. I'd sacrifice anything, come what might, For the sake of havin' you near, In spite of a warnin' voice that comes in the night And repeats, repeats in my ear: Don't you know, little fool, you never can win? Use your mentality, wake up to reality. But each time that I do just the thought of you Makes me stop before I begin, 'Cause I've got you under my skin. - The very beginning of the Joker hallucinations, with Joker seemingly popping out of nowhere to shoot Batman at point-blank range. The game then goes into a flashback before returning to the present, leaving you to wonder what the hell is happening to Batman. - Upon returning to the present, it only gets worse as we're treated to a first-person shot of Batman coming to in the basement of the collapsing Ace Chemicals plant, greeted by his hallucination of Joker slowly saying "Bruce, Bruce." Even though it's only a hallucination, and that the living Joker didn't really care about Batman's secret identity, it's still very unsettling to hear Joker address Batman by his real name, because it's basically saying, "You know that guy who thrived on a toxically intimate relationship with you; he's back, he's inside your head, and he knows everything." - So you're on Simon Stagg's airship, you've just swooped in like Errol Flynn and took out an entire room of twenty-something bad guys, you've chained combos and utilized gadgets until your fingers ached, and then you saved Stagg. You're feeling on top of the world... and then the goons start getting up again. But they don't attack you, that'd be kinda typical... they just stand there. They sway slightly, as if they're not really stable. And you hit them once, they go down... and they keep on coming, like zombies back from the dead. Finally it becomes clear, it's a Joker hallucination, but that doesn't make it any better, because they still won't stay down, and now they're laughing too... - One of the Gotham City stories explains how Joker captured Jason in the first place. He bombed a kindergarten, blowing dozens of toddlers to pieces, then sang Humpty Dumpty over the intercom as the parents were left stunned in the wreckage. It was when Jason watched a grief-stricken mother scoop her baby's remains out of rubble that he realized Joker needed to die, forcing him to track him down to Arkham without Batman where it turned out to be a trap. You really can't get more evil than Joker. - The quarantined blood transfusion recipients. Not only are they starting to behave and look more and more like Joker, but they're degenerating from the inside as well. Batman identifies their disorder as a variant of CreutzfeldtJakob disease, meaning their brains are literally rotting apart as dementia and psychosis set in. Batman: The blood's gestated too long. It's altering them. They're becoming - Which makes you wonder... is Batman's brain rotting apart too? - It makes you wonder if it was a special interaction between Joker's blood and the TITAN that caused it, or if it was just the TITAN alone in its advanced stage. If it was the TITAN alone causing this, was Joker's brain rotting apart before he died in Batman: Arkham City? And what about the little girl in the A Matter of Family DLC? What about Dr. Young's experimental subjects? - Here's something else to consider: what if it's not the TITAN? The mutated CreutzfeldtJakob disease these people have came from Joker's blood. What if Joker was already sick, and his chemical bath is what kept him alive? - During the flashback introducing the Joker's infected, there's a mild Jump Scare when Batman shows up out of nowhere beside Jim Gordon. Batman's even frightening to his allies. - A shadow of what looks like Batman's cowl briefly moves across Johnny Charisma's cell when he's talking to Gordon, implying that Batman was in the room the entire time. The whole scene is a glimpse into how sinister and unknowable Batman can seem even to a friend. - On a related note, the Jokerification of Batman. From Joker's brief hijacking of Bruce's body in the Stagg Airship encounter with Scarecrow, to his increasingly erratic behavior during and after the Panessa Studios encounter with Harley and Adams, then finally the Joker's takeover hallucination during the endgame, the entire concept is horrifying. Even when in free-roam, Batman hallucinates Joker's face on posters and billboards, and even in carvings in the architecture, and this is not helped by Joker appearing absolutely everywhere, usually with a snide remark and a comment about their shared mental state. - Also, Joker's face can appear on the statues in at the cathedral near Wayne Tower. - Related to the above, after Scarecrow injects Batman with Fear Toxin and Joker finally takes over Bruce's body, he starts cackling about his "second coming." While the idea of a second coming of Joker is shown to be pretty damn horrifying, there's another layer of horror in this scene: How does anybody else watching, unaware of what's really going on, perceive this sudden mental shift? The player sees Batman replaced with a hallucination of Joker, but the average Gotham citizen sees billionaire philanthropist and beloved humanitarian Bruce Wayne, unmasked, reply that he's glad to see his loved ones hunted down and killed while the city burns, then begin to laugh a scarily familiar laugh in an apparent psychotic breakdown. - On another Joker-related note, any time Hallucination!Joker speaks, there's this chorus of cackling Joker voices in the background that never stops. - The way Joker appears and disappears at will is a mix of Nightmare Fuel and Paranoia Fuel. Whenever you move the camera, Joker seamlessly slides onto the scene as if he was there the whole time. And when he's said what he has to say and you move the camera around again, he simply vanishes, as if he was never there. There is literally no way to tell when Joker will show up to taunt you. - A particularly bad one is Joker's imitation of Man-Bat, as Batman grapples into a rooftop and Joker basically jumps out swiping at Batman's face. - Combined with Funny Moments: As you slowly use the Nimbus cell to replace the power core of the Batmobile, Joker tries to make Batman give in to the Fear Toxin, first, by telling him to take deep breaths, then pretending to sleep; and then, when the Nimbus is being slowly placed into the Batmobile, he sings a grotesque version of "Rock-a-Bye Baby" that goes like this: Rock-a-bye Batsy, I'm getting free. Soon you'll be the one trapped inside me. So keep taking breaths, great lungfuls of fear. Soon Bats will be gone, and I will be here. - During the final hallucination, when you play as Joker, you get a twisted clown version of the Batmobile. But that isn't the scary part. The scary part is when the game wants you to fire on a room full of mooks using LIVE ROUNDS. This scene is especially unnerving and unsettling if you don't often play M-rated games, but it's also worth mentioning because you've spent the entire game as a protagonist who refuses to kill and uses non-lethals. The scene is jarring, to say the least. - Stagg's notes, complete with the chambers of his test subjects. Cruelty doesn't even begin to describe it. - Almost everything about Professor Pyg. His entire "Monster Machine" operating theater, a dank, slimy concrete chamber, is hidden underneath an unassuming beauty salon, where he holds fresh captives in giant birdcages while performing surgeries and singing along to opera music. Pyg himself is a hideously deranged, schizophrenic villain, euphoric to the point of religious mania while he talks of beauty and perfection, and his Dollotrons are gruesome bandaged creatures with all traces of free will, pain receptors, and genitalia cut away. Pyg only barely seems to understand he's done anything wrong, mewling and snuffling about how "Mother" will be ashamed if he's locked up. Pyg: Pyg happy, Pyg glad, Pyg gets to play with flesh, make it look pretty after death! - The above quote comes from the screen you see if you die fighting him. It's the only death screen available for that section, and it has Pyg reaching into the screen with a knife. - One of the side stories revealed by a riddle shows that not even children are safe. It's explicitly described that the little boy's tongue is like a salted slug gasping for air. Ugh... - Hell, the entire concept of Pyg's Dollotrons themselves. For example, there's at least 30 Batman has to fight his way through to apprehend Pyg himself; that's at least thirty people kidnapped, gruesomely maimed and rebuilt into a hideous mockery of the human form. Worse is the aftermath that isn't explored; Batman, as usual, only knocks out the attacking Dollotrons rather than killing them, possibly with the vague intent of saving their lives. But what happens when the GCPD roll up and find them? Is there any amount of mental therapy or reconstructive surgery that can bring a person back from that? Would the person even be able to go through with reconstructive surgery after that kind of ordeal? Is there even a mind left to save? And what, if anything, is left underneath those masks? - Even better: Maybe there are minds left behind those masks... their bodies are just under control by Pyg thanks to the surgical alterations he made. The first Dollotron you encounter was begging Pyg to stop his surgery, which is followed by Pyg commanding the future Dollotron to say "thank you" for hurting him (he does, with obvious effort not to). What if these Dollotrons are innocent people who were not only forcibly altered in appearance and function, but also with no control over what they're doing? Not to mention looking at the imprisoned Dolltrons (who are all just standing around lined up in two separate rows) with Detective Vision presents you with Condition: TERRIFIED. - You see his victims holed up in the GCPD later, and one of them is a woman who has been reduced to a sobbing mess. She was the same when you rescued her. - It's possible to break a Dollotron's mask through an environmental takedown. Whatever is under there, it's probably for the better not to see it. Part of it is a strange mass of lumpy flesh at the top of the head. - What makes Pyg even more disturbing is that he doesn't think he's doing anything wrong. He sees himself as a good person, and he honestly thinks he is helping the people he kidnaps by making them "perfect". He is SERIOUSLY mentally disturbed. He's not just doing it For the Evulz like, say, Joker (who, it should be pointed out, genuinely calls him crazy) or Mad Hatter. - One must question what caused Pyg to believe his life's work are the Dollotrons. He makes them into this gender-less zombie, immune to anything that doesn't force them into unconsciousness. He regards failure as a horrifying realization, and sobs to himself about Mother getting angry with him. What did Pyg go through to make him believe all this? - Let's just put it this way. If you're a villain who's insane to such a disturbing extent, to such an unholy level that even Joker admits that you're completely crazy, you're pretty goddamn scary. That's pretty much Professor Pyg - so unsettling and terrifying that even Joker, as Ax-Crazy as he is, as much as he's doing everything For the Evulz, as terrifying as he was in life, pretty much says that Pyg's crazier than the rest of the bunch. - Beyond his haggard look being a bit unsettling, the Riddler's sidequest is much heavier on the humor and the action than the horror this time in contrast to his deathtraps in City, but the primary exception is Catwoman. The whole time she's stuck in his lair with a bomb strapped to her. Beat a challenge? You get a choice of keys. Choose the wrong one... and you get a charming unique cutscene of Catwoman panicking as the camera pans just offscreen enough for us not to see her head explode. All while Riddler watches and taunts you for getting her killed - the dark glee in his voice amps it up, with a eerie reverb from his malfunctioning tech, especially the lines perfectly timed with the explosion. Riddler: "Curiousity didn't kill the cat, Batman!" <explosion> "You did!" ("kill the cat" echoes over and over). Riddler: "Bzzt! Wrong answer!" -ong answer... <explosion> "Oh, but there's no need to lose your head over it, kitty..." -lose your head -ose your head... - The game's design of Man-Bat may be the most disturbing yet, if only for how much more human than normal he looks — his emaciated, nearly hairless body, milky-white eyes, and mouth twisted into a yawning howl all show just how agonizing Langstrom's transformation was. - Even his introduction is a Jump Scare; as Batman grapples onto a ledge, Man-Bat appears out of nowhere, screeching and trying to claw at his face. Worse, it's also possible for him to suddenly appear on skinny construction bars. In real life he would be easily spotted if he were hiding there, but another possibility is that he was above and dived down horrifyingly fast to screech in Batman's face. - It gets worse. Later, when you go to his lab, you descend into a lonely, dank place with notes everywhere, a screen showing two brief videos... and Dr. Langstrom's dead wife on the floor. If you watch the videos, first you'll see a cute loving video with the two discussing his research, and then the second one starts to document the treatment... except it goes horribly wrong. It's horrifying imagining Francine's last moments: Watching her husband writhe in pain, then (as the sounds imply) watching him transform into a half-man, half-vampire bat... then being killed by him. The final video shot is of her face, after her body falls to the floor. If you look at the floor in present time, the camera is still pointing at her. And you can see the bruises on her legs and the large bruise on her neck where her husband likely bit her... The whole scene is only made worse by the ominous yet sad music. Doubles as a massive Tear Jerker. - Think that's bad? Go back to Langstrom's lab later in the game. Francine's body is gone, the screen has been smashed by something, and the words "Forever My Love" have been written in what looks like blood. - And just when you think Kirk either escaped from or was let go by the GCPD, you find him still in his cell. The most likely explanation? Francine is still alive, but only because Kirk was contagious. - Setting the PS4 or XBox One clock to 10/31 shows that, even if you captured Man-Bat earlier in the game, he'll appear in the previous jump scare. Going back to GCPD, you find that his cell has been destroyed from the inside! - Man-Bat's screeches and howls are very unsettling. You'll know when he's around by listening for his bat-like roars up in the sky. - Scarecrow injecting Barbara with Fear Toxin and . That was the moment both Bats and the player realize that Scarecrow's not screwing around this time. He forcing her to commit suicide right in front of Batman really wants Batman to suffer. Granted, it was a hallucination caused by Scarecrow's fear gas and she was really alive, but it's still painful to watch. - As Scarecrow is about to let Barbara fall off the ledge of the construction site to her death, just to twist the knife in Gordon for "failing" him, she defiantly tells him, "You don't scare me." In response, he leans in and quietly whispers, using the same reassuring tone a parent might give to a child woken by a nightmare, " Shhhh... it's okay to be afraid." Just one line, yet it shows the absolute depths of his evil more clearly than any speech he ever gives to Batman. - Throughout the game, Batman brushes off or does his best to ignore the growing presence of Joker both metaphorically and literally (given the nature of his affliction) eating away at his mind. Then you corner Scarecrow for the first time, and we see just how much frightening hold Joker has over his mind at this point, culminating in a hallucination wherein a horde of Jokers are egging him on to shoot Scarecrow, even though the gun is all in his mind. He pulls the trigger. Joker: Look at him...No better than the creep who killed your parents. You need to do something. You need to stop him. [Batman silently aims a hallucinated revolver] Joker: Yes, good... Good... ... Gooood [Batman shuts his eyes. A click of the trigger is heard before he's returned to conscious reality] - Batman's final Fear Toxin hallucination shows a even further mutated Killer Croc in the near future, almost akin to a Kaiju; he's become gigantic, seems unable to speak, and has grown attributes such as a tail and spiny monitor lizard frills on his shoulders. It's a rather disturbing reminder of just how worse his incurable condition can get. - The mutations themselves are bad enough to look at, but Alfred theorizes in Origins that Croc is in near-perpetual agony because of them. If it was already painful when he was still recognizably human, it must be pure torture for him now. - In Asylum, he was so powerful and relentless that Batman himself barely staved him off by exploiting the shock collar meant to force him into compliance; he had no chance of subduing Croc physically, and only managed to survive by detonating the ground underneath his feet, dropping him into a huge chasm. Croc has progressively gotten tougher and stronger since then, the collar is long gone, and it's not likely he'll fall for the same trick twice. When encountering Batman in the sewers in City, the only thing that stopped him from ripping the bars apart and killing him right then was smelling Batman's disease and deciding to wait for him to die instead. Oracle considered fighting him to be suicidal during the events in Asylum; the proper word now would probably be futile. - Even worse, Croc's appearance in the Season of Infamy DLC shows that it wasn't just a flight of fantasy; it's already happened to him. - The moment when the last remnant of Joker, fighting for dominance in Batman's mind, has to come to terms with a terrifying reality: He will, eventually, fade into obscurity or get lost in the shuffle, his presence no longer feared by Gotham, his name no longer admired and despised by his fellow criminals. Unlike every other defeat he's faced before, he's gone for good this time, and can't ever return to bedevil Batman again; he's only a bad memory, sealed away in the brain of a dying man, isolated forever. When Batman finally arrives to lock him away for good, the once-arrogant villain who sneered "I can't stand groveling" is begging and pleading, near tears, unable to lose Bruce again. Joker: I need you... - Additionally, the walls of Joker's cell have some... unsettling words scraped onto them, such as "NO ESCAPE", "ONLY THE DARK" and " WELCOME TO HELL". Worse still, smaller, more personal scrawled messages like "I HATE FRANKIE" and rows upon rows of "I'M NOT A JOKE" suggest this was actually all Joker's work, carved in private fits of rage and self-loathing. - One of the most disturbing of those scrawled messages...? "I CAN'T REMEMBER WHAT I LOOK LIKE." Hallucinatory-Joker was undone by the fear-toxin overwhelming him with his worst fear, which was having the entire world forget about him ... and in the end, that universal forgetfulness seems to have even worked on . him - This might also reference the fact that the Joker might not remember what he looked like before he became the Joker. The initial dunk in the acid was that damaging to his mind. - By the game's end, Batman and Bruce Wayne are dead to the public. But something is still patrolling Gotham and preying on criminals. And whatever it is... doesn't play fair. - The Arkham Knight's first audio log showcases Scarecrow interrogating Barbara for Batman's identity. When she refuses to talk, Scarecrow menacingly threatens to inject her with Fear Toxin, explicitly detailing the severe long-term damage the toxin can do. Thank God the Arkham Knight intervened when he did. - A game with Scarecrow as one of the main villains is a game thick with Mind Screw. Within a few hours of playing, you'll find yourself questioning what's real every time Batman ends up alone. Some of the more unpleasant hallucinations include: - Flashing back to Joker crippling Barbara and taking photographs of his handiwork, complete with Barbara lying in a pool of her blood and gasping the whole time. - A room full of KO'd mooks stumbling to their feet and turning into giggling Joker clones while you aren't looking. - Jason Todd's physical and psychological torture by the Joker, who torments him with Batman "replacing" him with another Robin. - Remember the Scarecrow nightmare sequences from Asylum? They're back as DLC, and they're as terrifying as ever. The nightmare missions have you driving the Batmobile through a hellish, twisted mockery of Gotham that looks like something straight out of Silent Hill while being pursued by a towering Scarecrow, who attacks with fireballs and Eye Beams. At the end of each one, you must fight Scarecrow himself to escape. And each Nightmare has Scarecrow being more aggressive in his attempts to kill you. It's a small mercy that the Batmobile gives you the firepower to fight back. Plus, some of his taunts are downright terrifying. Feed him to the crows! Your parents are in Hell and you're about to join them! Bring me his soul! And the darkness closes in. - The final hallucination. Pretty much all of it, but here's an itemized receipt: - As Joker in a first-person shooter situation, some stone statues of Batman go full Weeping Angels on you, complete with dark musical cues at all the wrong times. - Before that, as FPS-Joker, gunning down the Rogues can be... disturbing. Penguin bargains vainly for his life, Riddler tries to take a hostage, and Two-Face tries to stop you. Depending on your mood, you can listen to their gibbering, or gun them down without a second thought while a hellish version of "Only You" plays over and over. While Penguin, Riddler and/or Riddler's hostage (the player has to kill either Riddler or his hostage to proceed; at least one has to die) can be spared, the player will be absolutely forced to kill Two-Face. - The most unsettling part about that sequence was, from the way they're talking, you can infer that, from the Rogues perspective, they're still seeing Batman. Riddler takes a hostage saying "there might still be some things you won't do," and Two-Face tries appealing to your human nature. - And before that, there's the hallucination where Batman takes on an army of Jokers. Seems tame to begin with, until you look more closely at the one special he can use during this fight: The "Joker Takedown". It showcases the most brutal takedown animations seen in the game, with Batman using either lethal or permanently crippling force in all of them - curb-stomping Joker's face into the ground, snapping his back over his knee, slamming his heel into the small of Joker's back and the fight itself ends with Batman neck-snapping Joker at his own insistence. - During Joker's rampage, a muffled transmission can be heard occasionally. Right after Joker shoots and kills the Rogues, he walks outside to see Gotham, burning down before him, relishing the sight as his finest work. The transmission plays again, in full clarity...and it turns out to be Alfred, sounding utterly terrified. Alfred: Please listen to me! After all the good you've done for this city, think about what you're doing!! Sir, I'm begging you! Master Bruce... ! You Batman have to listen! Think about your family, Bruce. Your father—what would he say if he saw you like this?! Please, please stop this rampage! Joker : Oh, Alfred, sweet, loyal Alfred! Master Bruce is gone , but don't you worry! Your new master is coming home... (giggles menacingly, with a Gross-Up Close-Up of his filthy teeth) - And before it's revealed that it was all played inside the Joker's mind, it's implied that it's a Through the Eyes of Madness-moment, with the Joker-controlled Batman breaking free from his restraints and murdering everyone inside the Asylum, with the covering Penguin actually being a crawling, wounded Robin, the terrified Riddler actually being an equally terrified Scarecrow and the defiant Two-Face actually being Gordon trying to stop the now rampaging, murderous Batman from escaping Arkham and unleashing his wrath at Gotham. And all while his murder-spree is being broadcasted live, leading Alfred to desperately call Batman in hopes to get him to stop, only to hear Bruce speaking to him as if he's now completely someone else... - Time for an organic one. Try going to Founders' Island when you can't take the Batmobile, and run around at ground-level with Militia tanks swarming around you. It's nerve-wracking trying to stay away from them, whilst not being seen by footsoldiers either. And if you think you're completely safe in the air above Founder's Island, think again. There's aerial drones there as well as invulnerable note : With the exception of taking down their respectively-guarded terminal controlling them, but nothing else works to take them offline permanently. emplaced camera turrets set around skyscraper-height locations, the Serpent aerial drones give off a very uncanny vibe to the infamous HK-Aerials from the Terminator series, and they quite neatly fit said role if you're too inattentive in the skies above said island... - This little exchange between some of the soldiers: Militia 1: Are you okay, man? Militia 2: Yeah, yeah, i'm okay. Militia 1: You sure? Militia 2: Yeah, it's just, uh, earlier, for, like an instant - like, half a second - I think I breathed in a tiny bit of Scarecrow's gas. Militia 1: Jesus, what happened? Militia 2: Nothin'. Nothin', at first. But I, uh, I keep hearin' 'em. Militia 1: Who? Militia 2: There were some prisoners. Back when I was in the army. They'd killed, like, ten of our guys. So we, uh, we gave 'em what they deserved. Militia 1: Good. Militia 2: I know, right? But since I let the gas in it's like, it's like they're right behind me, still screamin'. And... Militia 1: ...what, man? Militia 2: And... I think they wanna hurt me. - YOU. Yes, you, the player. After four games and twelve in-universe years of brutal vigilante justice, Batman has a well-deserved reputation as someone who can and will smash your face and break your bones at his leisure. Throughout the course of the game, you vindicate that reputation with interest. Average thugs can freak out at your mere presence. - The Militia, however, are not as Batman-wise as the average Gotham thug, and begin their invasion with high morale. As you continue dismantling their efforts bit by bit, they begin to wise up, and deploy increasingly powerful countermeasures until they're throwing everything they've got at you. It isn't enough. Enemy chatter goes from impressed, to concerned, to fearful, and then outright panic as their army slowly crumbles to dust through the efforts of a single man. By Game's end, the stragglers are lost, alone, and stranded, in a foreign war zone with no support and no hope of rescue, while fully aware of just how vulnerable they are. You don't need to be cowardly or superstitious to fear Batman; he's enough to give you nightmares regardless. - The final scene drives this home. After Batman conquers the hallucination, he manages to break free with help from the Arkham Knight and turns Scarecrow's toxin on him. We then see Batman through Scarecrow's eyes: He looks like an unearthly red-eyed demon, with bats for a cape and bats coming out of his body, while the background is a hellish red sky. Scarecrow is afraid of YOU, the one person who can conquer fear, along with anything else the bad guys throw at you. And after playing through the game, it's something of a CMOA as you think of course he's afraid; he ought to be. - One of the story logs you can find shows what happened to Solomon Grundy after City. He had been given a special cell in the city morgue that not only has four extra strength locks on it, but they're WayneTech caliber. Even then, that's not enough when the lone coroner realizes that the large body in there is very much alive! - On the subject of Grundy, one of the riddles is based around him, and the solution is a small room under Perdition Bridge in Drescher, which contains candles, lots of rubbish on the floor, a wanted poster of Grundy...and a record player, playing a creepy, distorted version of the Solomon Grundy nursery rhyme, sang by a young boy on an endless loop. What makes this even more unnerving is the room is too small for Grundy to put together himself. He physically couldn't fit in the small space; Batman barely can. So the question remains, who put all this stuff here? It almost looks like a shrine, but who in their right mind would be worshiping Grundy of all people? Well, guess what: we never find out. - If you die during the section where Oracle helps you defeat the drones, instead of one of the villains taunting you, you will be greeted with a cutscene. Barbara is at her chair in the GCPD, when the elevator dings, and a number of Militia thugs burst out. Among them is a Brute with a Minigun, who opens fire on the screaming, terrified cops. As the gun falls silent, the camera zooms in on the gunman's face, with only the eyes showing. The only sound we hear is his steady, deep breathing. - As if the Joker hallucinations weren't bad enough already, there's the Fridge Horror in that we don't know how much of it is the mutation and how much is Batman's own subconscious. Bits like the Joker's extremely predatory attitude to the vulnerable Catwoman and his telling Batman to leave Nightwing to his fate because of no respect he showed by leaving and taking on his own costumed identity become even worse if you consider that Batman himself might be the origin of those thoughts, and the Joker aspect is merely giving them a face and a voice. - Joker being Shipper on Deck for Bats and Selina, telling him to enjoy all the happiness he can before he pulls his Grand Theft Me. Then he will kill Selina, in Bruce's body no less. - The detonation of the Cloudburst, which uncannily resembles a volcanic eruption — as seen from street level, the gas cloud surges out like a pyroclastic flow, consuming everything and everyone in its path; in mere seconds, a dense, roiling shroud has already settled over the entire city, glowing and spitting static electricity. All mechanisms not running on Nimbus technology stall completely. All the enemy chatter goes quiet, save the frightened, overwhelmed reactions of militiamen. Gliding over it, in almost total silence with no music, feels like death itself. - Not to mention that all the Militia and random thugs have been each replaced by a hallucination of Joker laughing. Their echoing, nonstop laughs make the atmosphere even more dreary and hopeless as it already is. Even zapping the Jokers away won't be satisfying since they don't even make a sound as they are zapped and the unsettling laughter still continues. - For extra creepiness, in between Ivy's sacrifice and completion of the next objective, not a single living person can be found on street level. Normally busy places like Grand Avenue and Chinatown are suddenly quiet as a grave with thug corpses littering the street. Only after completing the next objective do enemies slowly re-spawn on the street. - Just the realization that, in the end, Batman's third Scarecrow hallucination from Asylum, the one of him being wheeled into Arkham on a gurney, mentally ill himself, with the Rogues in charge of the Asylum and aware of his true identity, came true. Bonus points in that both the hallucination from the first game and the reality from the final game were both induced by Scarecrow. Scarecrow successfully made one of Batman's worst fears a reality. Scarecrow: Do you know what happens when a man refuses to be controlled by his fears? He must face them. - Johnny Charisma's Game Over sequence has him pressing the detonator to blow up the whole stage, and himself. That's right, you're basically getting a close-up of someone committing a suicide bombing. If you look closely, you can even see his body break into Ludicrous Gibs. - At one point in Batman's search for the Knight after he kidnaps Barbara, Batman uses the Batmobile as a threat to one of the militia - threatening to have it crush his HEAD. And, considering that this is well after the Joker's made his first appearance, so the player knows that Batman is in the process of becoming Jokerfied... For just a moment, you can easily believe that Batman's going to break his one rule on this mook. - And, the most unsurprising part of this page? Everything that doesn't happen in the aforementioned missions or story! Imagine this: Just patrolling the city streets of Gotham by itself and witnessing first hand on what a capable villain like Scarecrow would do when there is no Joker to keep him (and many of the other fellow rogues) distracted and in place. You take notice of rioters parading through the streets, a private militia that steam rolls ALL the government officials and social workers and keep them in check with dread of force or death, many factions of hoods chasing down and antagonizing any officers on the streets and you have one man out there orchestrating this whole thing behind the scenes with one goal in mind... Destroy the Batman. And, no matter how many times you patrol the city. No matter how hard you ambush thugs, no matter how brutal you escalate within the night's war on crime. It is all an inevitable end. - Although it's a cameo only in the A Matter Of Family DLC, you can find in the amusement park, a freaking Starro parasite (though fortunately contained). So that means that in this Crapsack World of Gotham with mobs, supervillains, terrorists, cults and other more down-to-earth threats... there exists something capable of creating a Cosmic Horror Story. Yeah. - Just... look at that thing◊. It just stays there, peering at you with that big, creepy eye... in a dark, quiet room. It's freakin' eerie. - If that's not scary enough, it has another eye on its back, only it's enormous and bulging with veins. Add that to the blood-red color and the thin, vertical pupil, and the thing looks downright demonic. The way its angled makes it impossible to see the whole thing, which just makes it worse. - In the "Nightwing: GCPD Lockdown" DLC, you start off at the Penguin's base in Blüdhaven. There, you'll find a giant aquarium tank that belongs to, you guessed it, Tiny. Get close to the tank and the enormous shark will appear out of nowhere and slam into the glass. - In the "Season of Infamy" DLC, the "Shadow War" mission chain has you encounter Ra's al Ghul, who has finally been revived too many times. Not only has he withered away severely, but despite being treated with a constant flow of the Lazarus chemical, he hasn't healed the wounds from his fall in City, leaving his ribs and organs showing in the two sickly holes in his torso. And if you chose to heal him with the new Lazarus strain, he's now quite psychotic, happily cutting down Nyssa and calling her a traitor. There's nothing of the old Ra's left by now. - "Shadow War" in itself is considerably Bloodier and Gorier than even the main game, possibly made as such since the game already had an M rating by the time it was being developed. The Elliot Memorial Hospital has dozens of corpses strewn about the place and a considerable amount of visible blood spilt about the floor as well, and choosing to help Ra's with the new Lazarus juice that Batman found rewards you with a "lovely" scene of Ra's cutting his second daughter Nyssa down, complete with horrid flesh-cutting sounds and Nyssa's wound spilling blood. - This, however, is only one of two optional endings for the mission, with the other being it's own different kind of Nightmare Fuel. While the more traditional ending has Batman saving Ra's and, as said before, him murdering his own daughter. But in the other ending, Batman chooses to let Ra's finally die, basically committing a mercy killing. He destroys the life-support machinery (the only thing keeping Ra's alive anymore), and his body begins to shut down. Batman carries Ra's to police headquarters and puts him in a cell to live out the rest of his days, where Ra's imparts one last line to you... that he's proud of you for making your choice. It seems like a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' sort of choice, that either way Ra's wins, but think about this for a moment. The reason why Batman never became the leader of the League of Assassins is because he refused to make the ultimate sacrifice, killing someone... and now he has. He can claim he didn't, as Ra's was basically dying anyway, but the fact remains that, much like in Batman Begins (with Ra's al Ghul again, no less!), you had the choice of saving someone's life, and simply didn't. So what does that make you? A hero? Or a murderer? - Within the hospital, you'll eventually come across the morgue, where several shelves have been left open to expose the corpses they contained. Two of the bodies belong to the waitress from Pauli's Diner and the bearded man who informs Officer Owens about the "smoker." - After beating the mission, you can go back to the hospital and find a hidden tape. It turns out that Ra's let Batman live because Talia loved him and promised Ra's he could be a worthy successor, so he allowed Talia to bring Batman before him. If Batman failed, then Ra's would give the League to Talia, saying that she would lead without mercy. Batman was in way over his head in City, to the point that if it weren't for Talia, he would've died there. - The climax of the Mad Hatter's side mission, "Wonderland", has Batman falling into a Hatter hallucination once again. This time around, he's shrunken down and forced to fight enemies in a giant pop-up book, all while a massive Mad Hatter peers down at him. Keep in mind, the guy was already creepy enough, so seeing him as a fifty-foot tall giant looking over you like a child with a picture book is surprisingly terrifying. - "Beneath the Surface" is Killer Croc's side mission, and as you'd expect from having to venture into a giant crocodilian cannibal's lair, things are tense. Croc is larger than ever before, and the first area of the airship has Batman navigating a partially flooded holding area to rescue trapped guards; at one point, the level requires you to grapple up to a high ledge, just skipping off the deep, rushing water that Croc may or may not be lurking under. - The "In from the Cold" mission with Freeze shows several dead Militia soldiers frozen in ice. Also, the cryo-generator that Freeze was using to keep Nora safe becomes unstable and explodes. The type of the explosion they use? The Cloudburst firing. And the final battle has Batman in a no-win situation: The Batmobile is fighting in an open area against an unlimited number of drones, and the ice is on the verge of giving out under the sheer weight of the machines out there. - Jason being the new guardian of Gotham, and he doesn't play by the same rules as Batman. At all. Jason: Black Mask, where is he? Black Mask Thug: You ain't gonna kill me. You ain't gonna kill me! Jason: (shoves his gun into the mook's face) Do I look. Like Batman. To you? - Imagine this: You are a criminal in Gotham City. For ten years, most punishment you'd get for any crime was a beat-down and some jail time. Now, with Batman seemingly dead, you might get motivated to commit more crimes. You do something illegal with a bunch of pals and, suddenly a hooded figure wearing the Bat Symbol comes out of nowhere, and slaughters everybody else before moving onto you Worse yet, Jason clearly enjoys his job as he makes jokes after takedowns, so Gotham is now protected by a scary, masked Batman-like figure who makes fun of your death like the Joker would. - Really, the entire DLC shows that, for whatever side he's fighting on now, Jason's still one screwed-up kid that got broken by the Joker and never really got over it. Whereas Batman walks proud with shoulders broad, Jason stumbles forward, shoulders hunched like a brute. He doesn't knock out mooks silently, he snaps their neck. He interrogates enemies by shoving his gun into their face, and blows their brains out once they're of no use to him. Even Detective Mode shows defeated enemies as outright dead instead of simply unconscious. The only saving grace is that this time, he's fighting crime rather than being part of it. - Better yet, the same fate might fall upon supervillains, as Black Mask demonstrated. Given that Jason lacks any empathy towards criminals, even Two-Face might get killed by him eventually. "Welcome to your own personal hell. Please stay a while."	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanArkhamKnight
Batman Ninja / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes And to think this is just his henchman. Batman Ninja may not be exactly the very first anime Batman on the block. But, that doesn't mean it will settle for less as a more intense movie in its own merit. Plenty of scares are definitely abound in this title. Warning: All spoilers will remain unmarked. - Batman getting encircled by The Joker's own personal army, all bearing masks that are eerily similar to the Joker himself. - Depending on the Writer, the Joker can usually be portrayed as a Worthy Opponent to Batman himself or can be a complete wimp and punching bag for him. Here? He's more aggressive, focused, animalistic and cunning when he goes up against the Dark Knight this time around— as well as having more resources than Batman for once. - The scene where Red Hood brutalizes an amnesiac Joker and Harley Quinn. Considering his backstory, it makes sense why he would act the way he does, but it doesn't make it any less disturbing. To any other person he looks like a crazy man beating up a helpless couple who can't defend themselves. - Joker letting loose in the climax. Up until now, the Joker's been his usual goofy, Laughably Evil self, but when the chips are down, the Joker snaps and becomes a savage Lightning Bruiser focused on nothing more than slaughtering Batman once and for all, resembling Heath Ledger's Joker if he took up sword lessons. It's a truly frightening display that the Joker had otherwise averted throughout the film prior and really sinks in just how insane Joker is deep down.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanNinja
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The Phantasm's costume looks like a cross between The Grim Reaper and Darth Vader. - Mark Hamill has stated he used this movie to delve in and get a good handle on the range of Joker laughs he could make. They're all terrifying, particularly the epic last one he lets out as Gotham's "World of the Future" explodes and goes up in flames. - The grinning corpse of the murdered Sal Valestra, as shown on the image on the right. Coupled with the Joker's demented rant at the Phantasm over a video camera, just before he detonates a huge cache of explosives in the room: Joker: Looks like there's a new face in Gotham and soon his name will be all over town... to say nothing of his legs, and feet, and spleen, and head! - And then there's what happens when Sal makes the mistake of grabbing the Joker and threatening him; Joker's mask of mirth melts into a twisted inhuman fury◊, and the background is replaced by a solid blood red. You know from that moment that Valestra's already dead. - Immediately after, Joker plays it off like it was a joke but the way he says, "That's what I like to see... a nice big smile", you know something bad is about to happen. Sure enough, the next time you see Sal is the page image above, when the Phantasm stumbles across his remains. - It should also be noted that Sal was once a former boss of pre-transformation Joker. The fact that Sal is so visibly afraid to be in Joker's presence speaks volumes of the latter's menace. Heck, the guy actually cringes in fear after Joker's outburst, as though afraid that the clown was going to kill him then and there. Valestra also doesn't even try to call him by whatever alias he went by back then. To Sal, he's purely The Joker. - The arrival of the Joker in Arthur Reeves office. Silhouetted in the doorway and illuminated by lightning with his trademark grin looking terrifying. - The Joker infecting Arthur Reeves with his trademark toxin. Joker: Makes you want to laugh, doesn't it, Arty? - The Phantasm killing Bronski after an intense Chase Scene by dropping him into a grave, before pushing an enormous angel-shaped headstone in on top of him. They didn't even have to show it: but you can hear it, and the horrified reactions of Bronski's mooks when they find his crushed corpse afterward should tell you everything note : It's worse in an early draft of the script (pages 38-39): The Phantasm tricks Bronski into burying himself alive. It makes the Phantasm's line "Your angel of death awaits" more difficult when it was the statue of exactly that which kills Bronski. - Similarly, after the Phantasm causes Chuckie Sol to wreck his car in what we're later told is a fatal crash, the vehicle's horn is blaring. We don't see what's causing it, but the most likely culprit is Sol's dead body. - The Phantasm's theme manages to make both of these scenes straight out of horror movies, given that the Phantasm acts supernatural, especially when she goes out of the way to toy and mock the two mob bosses before killing them. - Batmans stand-off with the cops nearly leaves him not just caught but almost killed. Its only thanks to pure willpower, luck, and Andrea that Batmans career didnt end right there. - The Joker pinning Andrea to the ground, complete with her kicking him in the crotch in self-defense. Nope, nothing reminiscent of sexual assault here. - They don't show what Joker did to Andrea's father, but judging by her scream, it's pretty nasty. Having Joker just calmly walk outside and serenely eat an apple from the grocery bag Andrea dropped doesn't help. - There is something deeply unnerving about the way that Joker keeps making sexual jeers toward Andrea, calling her 'toots,' 'sweetheart,' and even refers to her as 'the babe' to Arthur Reeves. As pre-transformation Joker, he also gives her a really creepy stare and growls at her in a sexually agressive way when she visits her father. - Probably what makes it creepiest of all is how Joker still treats Andrea after he reveals herself to be the Phantasm. While you'd never expect Joker to show empathy, the man did kill her father and knew that he was the main motivation for all of the gangster murders. Yet he still sexually jeers at her and does not for one moment show any semblance of regret for having murdered Carl. - The novelization goes into more graphic details of the wounds Bruce suffers, at one point describing the entire back of his head as bleeding. When grappling with Batman during the climactic fight, the Joker "digs his fingers deep into his opponent's wounded shoulder." Ouch. - Not only is the movie's version of the Joker more terrifying than in the regular animated series, but so is its depiction of the normal 'plainclothes' gangsters. Valestra: Either I'll have that money by tomorrow, or I'll have your heart in my hand. - The Wham Shot of Batman doodling a grin over a random mob thug in red pencil and realizing that he's the Joker, punctuated by the Joker laughing maniacally during the scene transition. - Valestra may have been a horrible person, but its still unsettling to see just how much he physically declined between the flashback and present-day scenes. Most of the other characters dont visibly age much during this time frame (except perhaps Alfred).	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanMaskOfThePhantasm
Batman (Grant Morrison) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Grant Morrison may have a reputation for giving superheroes happy endings regardless of how much sense it makes, but with Batman they went in a very different direction. "You can never prepare for the unexpected, the well-timed punchline. The Wild Card." ## Batman & Son - The very first issue opens up with the Joker boasting about having killed the Batman (actually an impersonator) in front of some children, while Gordon has succumbed to some Joker venom. - Damian establishes that he's not screwing around when he shows Tim his new trophy◊. - The Clown at Midnight tells the story of how the Joker survived getting shot in the face, but the trauma caused him to go from Monster Clown into something even more psychotic. The artwork is also pretty freaky. - Bat-Bane. A Batman impersonator that was force-fed venom and Hugo Strange's monster serum in an attempt to trigger Batman's greatest fear. Street walkers are offered up to him, which they all rightfully consider a death sentence. - Batman 666. Damien has become the new Batman and has to deal with an even more hellish Gotham City, where his arch-nemesis is a Batman impersonator who claims to be the Anti-Christ. - We get our first look at Professor Pyg. He's crucified upside down with a nail in his mouth. ## The Black Glove ## Batman R.I.P. - The Joker's skeletal new look; a smile so forced it's tearing his face, coupled with unfeeling David-Bowie eyes. When he's recruited for the Black Glove, he's fantasizing about killing Batman's allies and leaving them with smiles as ghastly as his own. He even goes far enough to SLICE HIS OWN TONGUE IN HALF WITH A STRAIGHT RAZOR. Which he does, of course, with that giant grin on his face. - The Final Crisis tie-in opens up with a montage of all the Batman-related events leading up to the present, then the first part ends with the revelation that Batman has been captured and is having his memories scanned. Part two has "Alfred" hypnotise Bruce into a scenario where his parents never died and he lived a fairly uneventful life. Then a young trapeze artist tries to avenge his parents' murder and is kidnapped by a grinning madman. Bruce later stumbles into the cave beneath Wayne Manor and finds a skeleton wearing circus clothes. ## Batman & Robin - Professor Pyg. A surgeon that's completely bonkers and likes grafting plastic faces onto his victims. He also has a scaffolding covered in nails and barbed wire that he occasionally hangs upside down from. - Flamingo EATING FACES WHILE HIS VICTIMS ARE ALIVE. - The first attempt to resurrect Batman (which later turns out to be a defective clone). He goes on a rampage trying to kill everyone while babbling incoherently. We get a glimpse of his memories, which are a jumble of the real Batman's adventures. ## The Return of Bruce Wayne - The Hyper-Adapter. A tentacled monstrosity that follows Bruce through time. Worse? There's the implication it might have been a form or extension of BARBATOS. ## Batman Inc. - Bruce tells Damian a vision he had of a dystopic future where the Boy Wonder has become the third-generation Batman. Bat-Damian has to deal with the citizens going violently insane from some unknown plague. He forms a quarantine in Arkham Asylum, but it's revealed that the baby he just rescued was a carrier, causing everyone there to go insane as well. - There's also the fact that Simon Hurt is back again and serving the president of the United States. When Gotham is targeted for a nuclear strike, Hurt can be seen grinning wickedly from the sidelines, the ultimate victor. - The Heretic's face: the head of a baby in the body of an adult.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanGrantMorrison
Batman Beyond / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Audience, meet Earthmover. Earthmover, meet screaming audience. Nightmare Fuel in Batman Beyond. Did you think the original animated series was dark? You haven't seen anything yet. WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked. ## The Animated Series - Everything Inque does. The first time she actually attacks Batman, she does so by blackening the screen save for the corner where he is. Talk about Nightmare Fuel for claustrophobics. And then there are multiples instance of her going full-on Eldritch Abomination. - Not just the sheer number of Family Unfriendly Deaths, but the nature of said deaths. Good cripes. - The Jokerz. Gangs various clown-garbed punks that roam the streets of 2040's Gotham who emulate The Joker of all people as a symbol of reverence. Though a minor nuisance, they can be a nightmare for normal civilians who normally have to run or pay money to avoid a lethal beating and there's a whole city's worth of them. Think Class of 1984 up to eleven. - All the news reports in the show are delivered by the virtual news anchors Kim and Tom, who are really cool and fit in well with the show's Art Deco / Cyberpunk / Retro Futuristic aesthetic, but they look... unsettling, to say the least, with permanent smiles and lips that never close even while speaking, and their faces are permanently in chiaroscuro lighting, leaving the right side of the face in shadow, which adds to the strangely uncanny effect.Take a look for yourself. 1x01/02 — Rebirth, Parts 1 & 2 1x03 — Black Out 1x04 — Golem - Willie Watt's life is horrific because of how mundane it is when it comes to the abuse heaped on him by Nelson and his father, as well as how few sympathetic people are in his corner like Terry and his friends. While Nelson is bad enough, Willie's father is the only parental figure in his and his mother is most likely deceased given his statements in his second appearance, meaning his only role model is an abusive asshole. The giant robot is just Willie's means of acting out; the true cause of Willie's descent into villainy is a very realistic take on what the Right Makes Might attitude would result in a lonely kid that has little to no positive emotional connections: a budding psychopath that decides killing people is a plausible answer to his problems. 1x05 — Meltdown 1x06 — Heroes - The deaths of the Terrific Trio are pretty gruesome. - 2-D Man gets sucked into a ventilation shaft by his torso and shredded by the fan blades. - Freon gets dissipated by the fans and radiation of the nearby nuclear device, leaving her remains to be sucked into the air ducts. - And, finally, Magma gets cooled down by being sprayed with a high-pressure fire hose, brutally beaten, and kicked into some equipment before his flames go out for good, leaving a lifeless hunk of rock. 1x07 — Shriek 1x09 — The Winning Edge - Bane's ultimate fate. After decades of using Venom, he's been reduced to a shriveled and comatose wreck who needs a steady supply of Venom to survive. His handler, Jackson Chapell, tells Terry that, at the end, Bane needed help just to make the Venom; his body had decayed so badly that he couldn't do it by himself anymore. - Chapell OD'ing on Venom while fighting Batman at the end when he falls into a crate of the Venom patches he had been selling as a street drug. - With his handler gone, Bane no longer has a source for the Venom he needs (though given his condition, death might be a mercy). 1x10 — Spellbound - Spellbinder in general, who is a school counselor whom the kids should be able to trust, but instead he uses them to steal valuables because of his ego being slighted. - Mrs. Tate's massive insect world hallucination. - What's especially nasty is that not only does the poor woman see everyone around her as giant insects, but her own jewelry has become monstrous worms and bugs as well. Even people who AREN'T afraid of insects generally don't want to be surrounded by them or have them crawl on them. - Spellbinder causing Batman to hallucinate being attacked by zombies during their final battle. And worse, Batman can't even see Spellbinder and needs Bruce to point him out to him via comm-link. 1x11 — Disappearing Inque - What Inque does to Aaron Herbst, the poor guy who helps her get her human form back. She gives him half the mutagen, leaving him a wretched half-human, half-blob thing that ends up in the same facility that was studying Inque. 1x12 — A Touch of Curare - Just the thought that there is a society of cold-blooded killers out in the world can send shivers to your spine. Even worse, if you actually work for them and you fail them, you'll be hunted for the rest of your life. If you weren't dead already. - Also, though it was never shown in the series head on, during their second encounter, Batman knocks Curare over and in the process, drops her veil. We only see that she's bald from the back and Terry reacting in disgust and terror at seeing her without her face covering. From production art, here is Curare's true face 1x13 — Ascension 2x01 — Splicers - Terry's mutagenic transformation into a monstrous Man-Bat-esque creature, which is eerily reminiscent of what happened to Kirk and Francine Langstrom in Batman: The Animated Series. - Terry arriving back at the Batcave with only enough time to toss his mask at Bruce's feet and reveal himself to be almost fully transformed, as he says the above-mentioned line before going full-bat and attacking Bruce. - Particularly chilling how, after injecting Terry with the splicing serum, Dr. Cuvier calmly tells him, "You're welcome to your opinions, while you're still human enough to have them." - Cuvier's final transformation. He starts off injecting various animal DNA into himself to become a literal chimera. Batman then starts pumping random serums into him, causing him to turn into a hideously misshapen mass of sinew and bile. See for yourself◊. - The fact that Cuvier's transformation kinda looks like Tetsuo's from AKIRA makes it even creepier. - Oh, also, while Batman is pumping serum into him, recycled Stock Sound Effects from The Thing (1982) sound, presumably as a slightly obscure reference. Sweet dreams! 2x02 — Earth Mover - Earthmover. Essentially a motionless, decaying corpse half-melted into the surrounding earth...except for the glowing green eyes. Seriously creepy even for this series, especially since his character model is more detailed than anyone else's. - His VOICE! He sounds like a horrible mix of something demonic and a dying man who can barely even draw enough breath to speak. Bill: But there was Jackie! I took care of her like she was her own daughter! Wasn't that what you would have wanted?? Earthmover: YOU. STOLE. HER! Bill: Look if you want to kill me, go ahead! I have a lot to answer for, but for God sakes let Jackie go! Earthmover: SHE. STAYS. AND YOU. DIE! - It's never made clear what happened to the mind of Tony Maychek upon his transformation into Earthmover. Is he, as suggested in the episode, just an endlessly resounding echo of rage? A last gasp of identity no more conscious than a computer program? Or is he fully conscious, but driven so insane by his situation that no longer cares about anything but vengeance? Or, most chilling of all, is he fully conscious, but no longer able to remember anything of his life but its final, horrifying moments, endlessly repeated forever in his mind? - What's worse in terms of Harsher in Hindsight is that he was voiced by Stephen Collins. Seeing that Earthmover wants to kidnap his own teenage daughter brings in shudders for viewers in light of Collins' real-life repeated statutory rape crimes. - The idea of meeting a long-lost family member who is completely unhinged. And the pre-conceived notion that they'll be whoever you created in your head, being completely shattered. Must be a truly terrifying situation to be in. 2x04 — Lost Soul - Just the way Robert Vance looks on the computer screen, with dead eyes and a ghostly pallor, is Nightmare Fuel by itself. The events of the episode just mix in kerosene with the Nightmare Fuel, and the end where, as he's being deleted, we hear his memories regressing to childhood, ending with the heartbreaking sound of Vance asking for his parents just dumps the container on and turns it into Nightmare Fuel. There may not be a single episode that can rival how creepy the villain was and how disturbing that end scene was. Vance: Five hundred megs! A thousand kilobytes! Pi r squared! [voice reverts to that of an adolescent] Two plus two equals four! [voice then reverts to that of a child, and then becomes baby talk] Me first! I wanna play! One potato... Two potato... Mama! Papa! ... Mama! - Vance manages to get into the Batsuit. He/it realizes that Terry is nothing more than a hindrance, so he/it decides to get rid of him... by drowning him. The way that Terry fights his own suit as it walks into the ocean is incredibly agonizing to watch. Sure, Bruce realizes what's going on and activates the Batsuit's fail-safe, but that only happens once Terry is neck-deep in the water. He's stuck there, trying to stay upright and alive as he gets hit by wave after wave until Bruce finally comes to get him. - The horror that Vance was going to subject Bobby, his own grandson, to: Download his consciousness into Bobby's body, thus "erasing" Bobby note : This feat would actually come to pass in "Out of the Past" with Ra's al Ghul and his daughter Talia al Ghul. - Bobby's question "Where will I be?" is answered with a deadpan "Wherever deleted programs go." Vance views his grandson as a program to be erased and replaced with himself. 2x05 — Hidden Agenda - Terminal. There's this eerie feel to him, especially that his facial makeup looks like a skull and he's completely detached and ruthless, even nonchalantly throwing one of his gang members off a roof in the opening scene. And all of this happens because his mother is an emotionally abusive bitch. 2x06 — Blood Sport - The flashback to Stalker's back surgery. It's made very clear that, for whatever reason, the surgeons didn't want to put him under anesthesia when replacing his spinal chord. - Terry gets the upper hand when he plunges Stalker's spear into one of his own traps, electrocuting him. We're treated to the sight of Stalker's metal spine glowing and smoking as the electrical current superheats it. - Stalker is supposedly killed by being run over by a train. Why didn't he leap out of the way? He hallucinated and thought it was a panther. In fact, the panther that mauled him in the first place. 2x07 — Once Burned... - It's bad enough for Melanie that she had to steal from crime lords to save her loved ones, but it gets even worse when she discovers that it was actually her own family that set her up. Their apathetic response about their daughter's plight can be viewed as unsettling. 2x08 — Hooked Up - The episode is a frighteningly realistic look at drug addiction, though making one upin the form of VR, put together by Spellbinder. Lonely, neglected or desperate teens come to him, living out their dream lives where they are stars, get their dream guy or, in the case of Max, are just considered important to her family, then are forced to commit crimes by him to get another dose of that joy. Donny, one of Terry's classmates, even is shown sweating and scratching himself from withdrawal after time away from the VR Machine. - It gets worse, as, the longer a person remains in the machine, their brains produce serotonin to dangerous levels. Jessie, who gets to live out her dream of her manager asking her out and then marrying her ends up in the hospital in a serotonin induced coma. And, from Bruce's own study, it is not the first time. - This is made even creepier as, after Jessie "OD's", Spellbinder casually tells the other kids to dispose of her across town, simply throwing her away like she's trash, as she's of no further use to him. - After Max gets addicted to the VR machine, we're treated to a view of her eyes with no pupils as she hovers in the VR machine, smiling, lost in her blissful dream. 2x09 — Rats! - Dana is kidnapped by Patrick/Ratboy, a delusional stalker with giant rats as pets. At first, he seems like a sympathetic character talking about how society rejected him for his looks, but by the end of the episode, it's revealed that he's a Serial Killer who feeds teenagers to his rats! If Batman hadn't showed up, Dana would have definitely been killed. Ratboy: [genuinely concerned] You're not eating. Dana: Guess I'm not hungry. Ratboy: Are you upset? Dana: What, just because I'm trapped in the sewers with a headcase whose idea of a good time is hanging out with rodents!? Why would I be upset?! Ratboy: [narrows his eyes at her] You're just like all the others. Dana: What? Ratboy: I thought you'd understand, but you're no different. Dana: You mean you've done this before? Ratboy: [as his rats start closing in] With other kids the world didn't want. I can see them all from down here. I took them away from all that and gave them a home. Dana: What happened to them? Ratboy: [takes out a whistle, smiling evilly] They don't make fun of me anymore. [blows the whistle and sics his rats on her] 2x10 — Mind Games - Tamara, the creepy psychic girl who looks eerily similar to Ace from Justice League, uses her powers to permanently blind the Invulnerable Man. Watching him go insane from losing his sight is pretty chilling, especially when she could have just made him unconscious. It's made even more disturbing when it was thought to be payback for his abusive behavior. - Tamara at least turns out to be alright. But the Brain Trust? They find kids with psychic powers, then approach their parents, claiming to be from an exclusive school which their kid has been picked for, and as soon as mom and dad have signed them up, they take off with the kid to use them for God knows what. They even have a fake school set up just to sell the lie. And Tamara's parents found out when they tried to get in contact with them and found absolutely nothing. - And the fear just keeps a'coming, when Bruce and Terry are trying to identify Tamara from a computer database for missing children. They go through a lot of pictures. - Batman's encounter with Edgar Mandragora, Steven Mandragora's son from Justice League Unlimited who has become a terrifying old psychic who likes to Mind Rape people and beat them with objects or stab them with the blade in his cane. He looks like some kind of psychotic ghost, and he's incredibly powerful - a living psi-bomb who unleashes his full power on Terry. 2x11 — Revenant - "Revenant" continues where the last episode ended off with Willie Watt from "Golem." He now has telekinetic abilities which he uses to torment his former oppressors. - When Terry visits him in juvenile hall, he (and the audience) learns that no one ever visits the boy, not even his father. Given Willie's current MO, Mr. Watt might no longer exist. 2x12 — Babel - Ace going berserk and attacking Bruce and Terry, thanks to Shriek. - Shriek subjecting the city to his deadly frequency. Batman and Bruce's screams of absolute pain are disturbing. It's probably a good thing we the audience were spared seeing how everyone else in Gotham was reacting. 2x13 — Terry's Friend Dates a Robot - Cynthia nearly murdering Nelson via dropping several gym lockers onto him, even if he did deserve it. - The reason she did this? Nelson was going to attack her boyfriend Howard who, being an ordinary nerd, would've been unable to put up any kind of defense, just because he felt Cynthia was too good-looking for him. - Cynthia in general is downright horrifying. Howard programmed her to be "totally devoted" to him, and boy did he get his wish. She's super possessive of him, to the point where her response to anyone trying to get between her and Howard is to murder them. And when Howard tries to end things, she ends up turning on him. She has superhuman strength and is so skilled in combat that not even Batman can match her. When Howard drops the "Let's Just Be Friends" cliché, Cynthia explodes. 2x15 — Final Cut - Curare is back, and she's finishing off her former employers one by one and it's not pretty. 2x16 — The Last Resort - The subjugation that the kids go through at the Ranch. Children are brainwashed Big Brother-style, denied food, sleep, bathroom breaks, or even contact with the outside world until they break. Those that step out of line are put into ISO, which amounts to sensory deprivation. Bruce mentions that such tactics are used in cults and on some prisoners of war, so seeing them used on kids... - And what makes things even worse is that there are real-life "therapeutic" institutions that do all this and worse to kids, and plenty of sadistic people just like Dr. Wheeler who run them. 2x18 — Sneak Peek 2x22 — April Moon - The ending, where the unsuspecting Bullwhip is about to be killed. With a drill that is slowly closing in towards the camera. If you ever have a fear of the dentist, that's bound to set it off. - This line, as the drill slowly approaches the POV of the viewer: - "Killed?" Bullwhip kidnapped Corso's wife for free augmentation for himself and his gang, then came back to him for repairs after the poor doctor found out his wife was in on it and was cheating on him with Bullwhip. Bullwhip was Strapped to an Operating Table to be worked on by a trained surgeon who hated his guts and no longer had any reason to fear him or anything to live for besides revenge. IF he died, it probably came as a blessing. - The episode also never shows us what happened to April, especially since Corso now knows of her betrayal... - You almost feel sorry for Kneejerk. His upgrades failing mostly look like painful shocks, but he's left a limbless torso, staring at what's left of his arms and legs. 2x26 — Ace in the Hole - The cerestone dog created by Ronny Boxer. It's large enough to swallow a grown man whole! 3x03 — Inqueling - Aside from Powers, Inque is the only one of Terry's rogues that he legitimately takes seriously. Terry's description to Max sums up their deadly history together: Terry: She was in the Batcave once. It was my fault. Wayne had to capture her. When she escaped, I went after her, and Wayne had to rescue me again. Almost got himself killed. That's not gonna happen this time. I'll take care of Inque myself. - As much an Asshole Victim she is, Inque's supposed death is terrifying and yet at the same time, heart-breaking. She thought she had a good relationship with her daughter until she engineered this plot that would result in her seeming death. Before she fades, Inque isn't angry at all towards her; she's just hurt. - The ending. Deanna is relaxing on her new property when Batman visits her and informs her that samples of Inque's body disappeared from police custody. Deanna maintains that Inque is dead, to which Batman points out "She's been dead before" before flying off. Deanna then senses something watching her and curls up, looking scared. Before the episode ends, a large shadow nearby grows an eye. 3x05 — Out of the Past - The final fate of Talia al Ghul. She's reunited with Bruce after decades apart, having finally taken over in her father's stead after he died for good. She's still young thanks to the Lazarus Pits and wants Bruce to join her in eternal youth. Except that it turns out that Talia is already dead, and its RA'S AL GHUL occupying her body, having taken his daughter's body over and erased her mind completely when his own was damaged beyond even the Lazarus Pits' ability to heal, and now wants to take Bruce's body so he can continue his legacy. 3x07/08 — The Call, Part 1 & 2 - Superman under mind control by Starro is frightening enough, as not only is it frightening to be mind-controlled by something you were only trying to help, there's also the fact that he flies in an upright position instead of leaning forward like he does without mind control, which would be creepy enough without taking into account the fact that that's how wasps fly, keeping their legs out as opposed to bees, who hide their legs when they fly. - That last part is even creepier with Brightburn, as Brandon (a Corrupted Character Copy of Superman) has the very same animal motif of a wasp. - Even creepier is that Starro had control of Superman for years. Who knows how horrifying it must have been for Superman to realize he'd been a prisoner in his own body during all that time?! Especially considering how he's been brainwashed before in this continuity. 3x13 — Unmasked - The regional Kobra leader committing suicide rather than letting Batman catch him by jumping into a pit of snakes. ## The Comic Book Series - The Joker King. He's actually Dana's sociopathic brother who's idolized the original Joker since childhood, and has just gotten worse and worse despite his parents trying to find some way to cure his behavior. As an adult, he organizes a massive army of Jokerz from all over the country and leads them in a huge riot all over Gotham that kills thousands. He's an even bigger Straw Nihilist than Joker ever was, believing that because the solar system and the galaxy and the universe itself will eventually end, life is inherently meaningless as nothing you can possibly do will matter in the end. Unlike Joker, he doesn't want a grand fight to the finish with Batman; he wants to kill his own family just to spite them, then die himself. He ends up killing himself while fighting Terry. - From issue 5 from the rebirth reboot: THE JOKER IS ALIVE. - According to Paul Dini, Killer Croc was ultimately stuffed and mounted; by the time of this series, he is an exhibit in the reptile wing of the American Museum of Natural History.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanBeyond
Barbie in a Mermaid Tale 2 / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The nightmare scenes are pretty intense for a Barbie movie, particularly Calissa's and Mirabella's. Calissa is weighed down and trapped at the bottom of a deep ocean trench, and Mirabella is trapped in an enclosed space and frantically tries to get out. - While Eris doesn't have control of Oceana anymore, she's even more of a threat than in the first movie, as she retains her inescapable whirlpool powers and can also make anyone live out their worst nightmare. - Early on, Kylie absentmindedly takes off the mermaid necklace and almost drowns.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarbieInAMermaidTale2
Barefoot Gen / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes It only gets worse. "I hope that children seeing the animated version would be traumatized and learn to despise the Atom Bomb." — Keiji Nakazawa on the anime version scarring children in classrooms - Well, the whole film, as it is meant to show that War Is Hell, after all. But especially the living "zombies", and the fact that they were not zombies, but people who were badly injured (and most likely disoriented). The skin burning off and eyes melting out of sockets is BEYOND horrifying. Other disturbing details include corpses bloating up in the hot sun and sometimes rupturing, as well as the guy who shambles about dragging his intestines behind him. In real life, they were called "Ant-Walking Alligator people" because of their disfigurements. - The idea that your whole life could be turned upside-down and darn near everything you know destroyed in seconds...all because of some enemy nation's Applied Phlebotinum. - The simple fact that this actually happened. And that someone survived the horror. To look upon most of them—and in retrospect, even Gen—maybe it would have been more merciful for them to have died right then and there. - Even before the bomb dropped, conditions were brutal. Rice was so scarce that you could literally count the number of grains, citizens were made to stomp and insult sidewalk drawings of Roosevelt and Churchill just to prove they were still loyal, citizens painted the letter "P" on their roofs like American war prisoners to keep them from being bombed and Gen fought tooth and nail with his siblings over vegetables. - Gen's sister being brutally harassed and humiliated in front of her class by her teacher for being a member of a family that opposed the war. - Gen's brother Koji nearly getting stabbed by a drunken airman. And the airman in question is a kamikaze pilot who already knows that he's going to die and is scared to death about it; being drunk is the only way that he can cope. - An even scarier one, since its more personal. Gen sees his father, younger brother and older sister trapped underneath the rubble of their home- then he hears them as the flames grow closer, his father encouraging his increasingly desperate mother to scream in agony leave them to die. As if things weren't bad enough, we're treated to a picture of three out of five members of Gen's family HORRIFYING burning alive right in front of Gen and his mother. - In addition to that, although it is mercifully brief, Gen's mother Kimie's expression during her momentary insanity is downright terrifying. This, along with her Madness Mantra and insane laughter, underscore how utterly alone Gen is at that moment, with his mother incapable of taking care of herself, let alone of Gen, and with the flames closing in on them. Is her 100 mile stare the earliest stages of PTSD? - More psychological than physical, but the ostracism and harassment that Gen's family suffers in the manga as a result of his father finally openly saying what he thinks about the war to block chairman Samejima and the whole neighborhood during spear drill (remember, this is in April 1945 meaning he's kept it bottled in throughout the war) can be uncomfortable reading in certain parts, like when Daikichi is arrested by the police, taken away and tortured. - The suspense that begins once Gen's hair starts falling out after the bomb detonates. Most likely, this was caused in strong part by atomic radiation in the area (although other factors, such as immense stress, could have arguably played a role). What other effects, both short-term and long-term, will Gen suffer from thanks to his exposure to radiation? Reading the story for the first time, one would half-expect it to end with a young boy dying a slow and painful death. - The poor kid is so scared out of his mind that he begins singing old folk songs out loud to keep his spirits up between screaming for mercy. Imagine going through a Despair Event Horizon when you are six years old. - Gen tries to take shelter from the heat in a streetcar that was blown halfway across the neighborhood by the blast. His mind is instantly changed after finding it filled with melted corpses and lined with carpets of MAGGOTS. - In the early pages of the manga, before the bombing, Gen and his little brother are attacked by bullies. They fight the bullies off by biting one of the bullies' fingers off, complete with the bullies' screaming about their bones poking through the finger ends. But the true nightmare happens as Gen is picking up their scattered belongings and notices his brother is munching on something: a severed fingertip. And then he cries at Gen for taking his food away... - Also in the manga, the brutal training of Japanese soldiers and air force recruits is shown in horrific detail: an entire group of recruits is punished with brutal beatings for the "misdeeds" of one (one "misdeed" was the exhausted recruit falling behind in drill). This ends with the recruit killing himself in the barracks, the others discovering his body hanging from the rafters.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BarefootGen
Barnyard / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Their first scene (which shows them sneaking into the farm and slowly creeping towards the chicken coop) is particularly unnerving, and wouldn't feel out of place in a horror movie. Especially when he holds out a keychain of chicken feet from his previous victims. Dag sadistically mocking Otis for not being there to save Ben. He then makes a deal with the bovine, telling him he'll only steal a few animals each night, but if Otis does anything about it, Dag will kill everybody. Dag: Shh, shush, shush, shush. Good evening, ladies. Sorry to call in so late in the evening, but we did have a previous engagement. ( laughs maliciously as he shows them a keychain of chicken legs from his previous victims) Now, we're gonna take six of you. Anyone makes a sound, we don't mind the extra company. Boys, take your pick! Dag: What, do you wanna be a hero, cow? Hey, you're Ben's kid. Otis, right? They left you in charge? ( laughs) Oh, that's precious! You thought you could fill his shoes? Otis, where were you? Were you off having fun? Laughin' with your barnyard buddies? Yeah, you could've made a difference had you been there for him, but you weren't, were ya? ( Otis slumps. Dag paces around him.) Okay, from here on out, here's how it's gonna work. We show up, you look the other way. A few animals missing here and there. Hey, it's the natural order of things. It'll be our little secret. Oh, and Ben's kid, if you should think about getting a sudden burst of courage...( snaps his jaws at Otis) ...we slaughter every animal in sight. Now, you go back, make everyone feel all safe, and we'll be seeing you tomorrow night. That's a date. See ya around! Get it? "Round?" You're fat? ( Howls and he and his coyote pack scatter away, leaving Otis in a deep depression)	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Barnyard
Batman Returns / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "Welcome to the Oswald Cobblepot School of Driving. Gentlemen, START YOUR SCREAMING!" Like its predecessor, this film was directed by Tim Burton. So it should come as no surprise that it has its fair share of unsettling, nightmarish imagery beyond what the source material already had. - The Villain Opening Scene, from the young Penguin's treatment at the hands of his Abusive Parents no matter how repulsive he is (opening with the sounds of a baby crying in a way that's not quite human and Lord Cobblepot's Oh, Crap! reaction at seeing exactly what his newborn son looks like....) to the fact that you never actually see his appearance (leaving you to wonder just what it is about him that warrants such horror and disgust) because his "crib" is a black cube with a caged slot as its single window, and the cat-killing and the attempted drowning are just the icing on the cake. Merry Christmas! - Cat lovers will also be disturbed by the Penguin's murder of the family cat. He just yanks the poor kitty inside his cage, and we don't see what he does to it. - Followed by an utterly chilling credits sequence of the baby's carriage traveling through the sewers accompanied by thoroughly eerie music. - An ad with horrid face of The Penguin staring back at you. He's supposed to look like Uncle Pennybags without the mustache! Danny DeVito in a tux should look like a plump, cuddly penguin, not that monstrosity! note : Not that Colin Farrell's Penguin is any prettier. - The Penguin is so unhealthy that bile constantly drips from his mouth, revealing a set of sharp, disgusting, stained teeth that were no doubt the result of tooth decay and eating only raw fish and garbage. No wonder Catwoman didnt want to have anything to do with him beyond their mutual goals. - The surprisingly gross, animalistic behavior The Penguin displays throughout the movie, from eating raw fish to viciously biting a man's nose. His slovenly, grotesque appearance (obese body, stained clothing, deformed hands, beak-like nose, stringy hair, chalk-white skin and black-ringed eyes) certainly doesn't help matters. - The scene where The Penguin gorily bites the nose of Josh — an image consultant who insults his looks — is horrific, even in a movie known for being full of disturbing images. How that whole sequence made it into a PG-13 film, even in the early 1990's, is anyone's guess. Josh: Not a lot of reflective surfaces down in the sewer, huh? ( Penguin begins to laugh loudly. Nearby staff members join in ) Penguin: Still! ( glances around) Could be worse! My nose could be gushing blood! - Whereas Alicia's leap to death in the previous movie takes place off-screen, the Ice Princess's Penguin-engineered plunge from a rooftop happens right before our eyes. And it's not enough for her to fall out of camera range. Noooo, we go with her as she screams all the way down and as she lands. And this is a PG-13 film. There are R-rated movies that don't go that far! - And when she hits the ground she sets off the Christmas tree lights, which flushes out a swarm of bats accompanied by some morbid music. The imagery is almost supernatural. - Selina's mental breakdown when she returns home after getting shoved out the window of a high-rise building by Max Shreck for finding out about his scam with the proposed energy plant. Her sanity hanging by a thread, she staggers home and starts going through the motions. She has a ritual of calling out, "Honey, I'm home! Oh, wait. I'm not married"... which she now recites in a Creepy Monotone. She has a vacant, zombie-ish look... until a Shreck advert plays on her answering machine — and specifically mentions a "candlelight staff meeting for two" with her boss, who had just tried to murder her — and she just snaps completely; wildly flipping between sobbing, screaming and even laughing as she violently trashes her overly-cutesy apartment. It's the sheer emotion of the scene that gets you both terrified and emotional; not helped at all by the psycho string-backed soundtrack that effectively shows just how far off the deep end Selina has gone. - Those who have ailurophobia, or a fear of cats, were caught off-guard the many times Catwoman and her cats in general hunt down Batman. - The resurrection scene will give you the shivers, even if you don't have a fear of cats. A hoard of stray cats appear from every direction and surround Selina's lifeless body, licking at her wounds and crawling all over her. Several of them appear to breathe into her mouth, while one of them gnaws on her fingers hard enough to draw blood. Then Selena's eyes roll back in her head and flutter open, and she stares with a dead-eyed, lifeless gaze. At that point, you know there's something seriously wrong with her. - The mugger who corners the woman in the alley way and attempts to rape her...... Fortunately for the audience its also the same scene in which Catwoman makes her debut and easily hands the mugger his ass but for anybody whos been a victim of rape or who was a near-rape victim? Its very unsettling to watch. - Though it's safe to say we won't miss the mugger, how Catwoman deals with him is rather disturbing, too; taking her time in dragging her claws — made from razor-sharp sewing implements — across his face, then apparently stabbing him in both eyes. Catwoman: ( slashes once) Tic... ( twice) Tac... ( violently stabs his eyes) TOE. - You thought The Joker was the only Batman villain who employed evil clowns? The Penguin has an entire gang made up of demented ex-circus performers, including several side show freaks. It's hinted that their circus was shut down due to accusations of child abduction. - A careful look at the newspaper clippings reveals that their circus sideshow included an "Aquatic Bird Boy". Penguin's been at the child abduction game for a very long time. - During their attack on the Gotham Plaza, a few unlucky Gothamites are seen burning alive. - \|\|Max Shreck's Family-Unfriendly Death\|\|: Catwoman shoves her stun gun into his mouth and kisses him, frying him alive. The sight of his charred remains is also pretty horrifying and most certainly WILL catch viewers off guard. - Also the way that Catwoman taunts Max despite being shot numerous times and the way she sings All good girls go to heaven is VERY creepy and it shows that her thirst for revenge has completely drove her insane. - An interesting mention goes to a Call-Back to the first Batman film with Joker's Joy Buzzer scene. Anyone remembering that will get a real pleasant memory of that scene when watching Max Shreck's demise. - The Penguin's death scene is also unpleasant. During his fight with Batman, he falls through a window and lands in a deep pool poisoned with industrial chemicals: he emerges from the water several minutes later. Burned, bleeding, with carcinogens pouring from his nose and mouth in a black sludge and making horrible gurgling sounds similar to a death rattle as he breathes, slowly and unflinchingly walking toward his umbrella stand with enormous, expressionless eyes. When he fails to kill Batman by mistakenly picking up one of his non-armed umbrellas, Penguin finally succumbs to his injuries and dies. Penguin: Oh, shit! I picked the cute one! This heat's getting to me... I'll murder you momentarily. But first... I need a cool drink. Of iced... water. ( rattles as he collapses on the spot) - Afterward, the Penguin's body is solemnly pulled into the water by his six Emperor Penguins: slowly sinking into the depths with a close-up of his eyes open and rolled back, and a cloud of black bile spreading from his nose and mouth.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanReturns
Batman: The Brave and the Bold / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Just because this series is Lighter and Softer compared to its predecessors, doesn't mean their horror elements have been stripped away. Commented on in "Invasion of the Secret Santas!", when Batman hurls an exploding Batarang at an evil robot Santa, which catches fire and burns down to a metal skeleton— while continuing to march at him and ho-ho-ho: And if that wasn't enough, he even challenges Batman to find a hidden bomb before it destroys the town and Christmas! \|\|He was lying.\|\| "Shadow of the Bat!" seems calculated to give the audience a good scare. Vampire Batman is ruthless and savage (he even takes out Alfred), and the sound of him chomping down on people is remarkably unpleasant. Ill just climb inside your noodle, loosen a few screws, and then... IM GONNA KILL YA SOME MORE! He came dangerously close to finding out Batmans identity, but when realizing that he would just be plain ol average Joe without Batman in his life, he ends up a drooling, catatonic mess, much to Harleys shock. Furthermore, it could still have been worse; in the comic series that inspired it, the repeated deaths ended up mentally breaking Batman, and Superman had to erase his memories just so he'd be able to return to himself. Earlier in the episode, Bat-Mite mentions a few of the classic clashes between Batman and The Joker, and among them he mentions A Death in the Family, and explains how the fans got to choose Jason Todds fate. Bat-Mite then heavily implies that he was among the many who voted for Jason to die. Joker gassing the Amazons, resulting in them gaining rather creepy laughing faces. He then knocks out Hippolyta and Wonder Woman ends up gassed when she tries to grab him. The Spectre in general, including the rather creepy way it's implied he's the one who killed Joe Chill after Batman refused to do the job, with the camera zooming in on the Spectre's eyes to show skulls for the pupils and his Blatant Lie about not knowing what happened. Then there's the episode in which Batman goes back in time to meet Sherlock Holmes and Etrigan the Demon and try to stop Jack the Ripper AKA Gentleman Jim Craddock from draining the life out of unlucky women to summon forth afiend from Hell to gain supernatural powers. Batman tries to warn Craddock that he doesn't know what is actually going to happen but is ignored. At the very end we see the ghostly Craddock standing over his grave, in his usual Edwardian finery, his body as always invisible, until the lightning flashes and we see him as he truly is: a rotted and demonic-looking corpse. And it's all made even more fiendish by the dialogue between Craddock and the conjured demon: The Brain in a Jar in "Creature Commandos: A War That Time Forgot" - enough said. In-Universe: Batman revealing himself to Joe Chill, for Joe Chill. Imagine that you orphaned a little kid. Now, 30 years later, imagine that you're in a fight with one of the most dangerous people on the planet, who's constantly defeated crazed villains, supernatural foes, and advanced technologies of all kinds. He bypasses a room full of that kind of crazy just to single you out. Why? Because he's the kid you orphaned, and he HATES you. That. Damn. Much. In the context of Batman, imagine how terrifying this would be. You kill a boy's parents, and the boy spends the next thirty years obsessing over this one act. He trains and trains, until he is considered one of the deadliest mortals on the planet. And now he's here, and he's mad, and he wants to hurt you. Almost immediately afterward, so do the enemies he's made because you're responsible for making him who he is, and they'll do it more than he does. The STARRO episode: STARRO. It latches onto your face, takes complete control of you...oh, and there are at least billions and have taken over almost every person in the world making them only able to speak the Madness Mantra of "Starro Lives". More and more keep getting made and worse, even killing the giant main Starro and taking off the Starros from everyone does not end its threat...no, Starro's Dragon just merges all of the excess Starros into a giant Starro creature with which he nearly uses to destroy Earth. Why? Because he enjoys destroying things! Speaking of which, the Faceless Herald is a monster. He roams the universe, finding worlds that his master, Starro can conquer, by attaching horrible mind-control probes to their faces. He's a god in physical combat, can teleport, turn invisible, and has a terrifying arsenal of traps and weapons. He spends most of the series tracking, defeating and mind-raping the various DC heroes. And if you can't be posessed by a Starro spore? He'll horribly kill you. It gets worse though. How and why did he become Starro's herald? He asked Starro to destroy his homeworld, because his people were pacifists and they looked down on him for his career in hunting. It's pretty bad when you make a world conqueror look good by comparison. And the creepiest John DiMaggio voice imaginable doesn't help matters. Every member of the Injustice Syndicate is considered this in their own right, but especially Scarlet Scarab (Mirror Self of Blue Beetle Jaime Reyes). What could have happened to turn him from good-hearted kid to gleeful sadist— or was he always like that? If the Mirror Universe of the show is anything like the one from the comics, yes, he was born that way, because in that universe, evil is the dominant force of the universe. Kanjar Ro's torture of the little Gibbles from Rise of The Blue Beetle! The worst part is how many of the poor things he's already gone through. Bat-Mite kidnapping Batman and throwing him in the 5th dimension after Bats unknowingly insulted him. As funny as Bat-Mite is, his perfect willingness to kill his former favorite hero is creepy as hell. Bat-Mite: If you won't be my hero, I'll make you my toy. And just like all toys, I'll play with you till you break! The massive Syndrome vibe. Syndrome's origin story was dark enough, but imagine if it happened to a omnipotent reality warper. Black Mask in general, but especially that voice. "Mayhem of the Music Meister" can be terrifying when you give it some thought. A villain who can control your mind by singing and make you commit crime while under his sway? Not terrifying at all. Not to mention that he almost wins. As a distraction, he ordered some of his thralls to kick their way into rocket exhaust. "Inside The Outsiders!" is another terrifying episode. Psycho Pirate kidnaps the Outsiders, a group consisting of Katana, Black Lightning and Metamorpho (who are all teenagers, by the way) and hooks them up to some deranged machine that traps them in their worst nightmares and regrets, while literally feeding off of their pain, fear and anger. His creepy, hushed voice certainly gives off a creepy, almost inappropriate vibe. Even worse, when Batman attempts to free them at first, Psycho Pirate warns him that doing so will fry their brains, giving Batman no choice but to go into the machine himself to save them. Psycho Pirate stands out as one of the more horrifyingly exceptional villains, despite only appearing in this episode, making his spot under Complete Monster in the YMMV page completely earned. Katana's Dream Sequence has her remembering the death of her master. She told their enemy Takeo where they kept a magical sword, and her master sends her to hide while he deals with him. We then get to see Takeo cut down her master, who refused to fight back. Poor Katana also blames herself for it, and it's implied that she's so quiet because it was her "big mouth" that got her master killed. Even worse, it seems that the dream loops over until she goes through with revenge, at one point even turning on Batman, who will die permanently if killed in the dream. Metamorpho turns out to be the one who is providing Psycho Pirate with the most energy, much to the confusion of Black Lighting and Katana, who always found Metamorpho to be so upbeat. When they get to his dream world, Metamorpho is 50 stories tall and destroying everything in his path, while Psycho Pirate acts as the voice in his head and has him turn on his friends after convincing him that they think he's a freak and only value him for his power. Thankfully, his friends manage to calm him down (thanks in part to the villain being forced away from Metamorpho's side by Batman), but still. Finally, Batman frees the kids and escapes to reality - or so it seems. Psycho Pirate pulls a lever that immediately incinerates Outsiders, complete with lovely visuals of them screaming in pain. Then Psycho has the audacity to tell Batman that it's his fault for making them heroes in the first place. That's right, they showed three kids being incinerated to death on screen. It turns out to be part of Batman's dream, so the kids are fine, but the whole scene is still horrifying. "Joker: The Vile and the Villainous!" is largely a more comedic episode acting on Swapped Roles with Joker as the Villain Protagonist. But the premise has some VERY dark undertones. Ignoring the episode is from Joker's warped perspective, the very concept of Batman's crime predicting computer is disturbing. It doesn't just detect crimes in progress, it alerts Batman or the police BEFORE they happen. Conceptually it's got vibes akin to Nineteen Eighty-Four; with Batman as Big Brother. This is best shown when a kid, attempting to steal a single stick of gum notices the thing going off and puts it back.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanTheBraveAndTheBold
Bastard Bonds / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - While the island is haunted with demons and ghosts, "Silent Town" deserves mention. The name of the town sounds ominous enough, but when you light a lantern in one of the houses, prepare to get spooked. And once you light all the fires in the place, you'll get a feeling that you won't escape, and you'll be taken to the darker, spookier version of the town. You'll only leave the town when you clear out the monsters, with a cutscene to help. - The player's introduction to the Island is pretty horrible. Especially if they were falsely accused or only committed a minor crime to get there. - First, they are brought before a jury that has already decided their guilt. Put on a boat to a place they know there is no coming back from. They are then transferred to a cell in the Stockade and left to rot for an indeterminate amount of time. They only don't starve to death because their savior helps them. But even then, they must continue through the prison. Fighting the guards basically barehanded. Until they finally escape. Knowing that this is only the beginning of the horrors they will have to face. - Bato mentions he originally was trying to survive with a group of friends. He's alone when the convict finds him because all the other men in his group were drowned, cooked, and then eaten by their monstrous captors.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BastardBonds
Barry / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Aww, what a sweet little gir- OHJESUS! Barry isn't afraid to show its darker side since both the title character and the show can be goddamn nightmarish at times. ## Season One - Barry's swift executions of a group of Chechens that were targeting him for not killing Ryan (after they killed him themselves). It's quick, but it really illustrates how genuinely effective and dangerous Barry is as a killer. - Goran having his men torture Fuches by filing down his teeth to force Barry to agree to kill an informant. It's a brief but very disturbing scene with the combined sounds of Fuches' agonizing screams, Barry desperately yelling at the gangsters to stop and David Wingo's grim soundtrack. - The last shot of the episode showing a Chechen gang member taking photos of Sally. - Barry strangling Paco to death. - Barry and Taylor raiding the stash house. - Pretty much everything about Taylor. It's even mentioned that he's such a violent lunatic that he actually got kicked out of his PTSD support group. - The shootout between Vacha and Moss. - The ending. Barry, Chris, Taylor and Vaughn driving on the airfield towards Bolivian gang members despite Barry begging Taylor to stop. Sure enough, they're ambushed by gunfire and crash their car before cutting to black. - The entire scene with Barry and Chris which ends in Chris' death. - Barry's emotional breakdown afterwards. - Barry killing Goran and his gang. While the gang members go down quick, it's Goran's death that makes it so disturbing; Barry shoots him in the head right as he's about to kill Fuches, and the gangsters think Goran just missed, only for him to turn to them with a nasty exit wound in the side of his head exposing his brain and cracked pieces of skull that begins squirting blood. Staring at them with a blank look on his face, Goran sits down in a chair and his arm begins to wave his gun around randomly before he drops it, both of which are the results of his nervous system shutting down due to fatal brain damage. - Barry killing Moss. ## Season Two - Hank telling Barry in a dead serious tone that he'll give him up to Goran's family as the real killer if Barry doesn't kill his new rival Esther (and he even says that they'll also go after his theatre group). Not only is it a glimpse of his terrifying dark side (that we have yet to see) it's also an utterly chilling reminder that for all of his many quirks he's still a mobster and a remorseless criminal who is not to be crossed or messed with especially when he's cornered. His utterly angry face throughout his speech doesn't help. By the end of it, Barry is unnerved to the core. - His final quote to him before he drives away: "Don't fuck with me Barry, it's not polite." - Barry showcases one hell of a Death Glare when Sally's ex-husband shows up. - Immediately prior to the above, Sally has been trying to goad Barry into performing her domestic abuse scene. When Barry isn't giving her what she needs she goes full Cousineau and starts berating him. She takes it a step further and actually shoves and grabs Barry very aggressively, to his clear and obvious distress. He's blindsided and clearly shaken by it, but it's pretty frightening to see the normally sweet, shallow, sort of flaky Sally reveal this very hostile mean streak. Worse yet, the first time we, and her boyfriend, learn she has it in her, is in public, in front of everyone they know. It's never really challenged either, meaning Barry might have missed the first red flags for abuse. Even worse, is Sally's calculating look right before she starts. She grabs him to raise his hand to her throat and Barry draws back. He literally says 'Please, I'm not comfortable' and we see Sally think about it and then start shoving him. It's unbelievably cruel. - Barry, consumed with some twisted sense of justice, goes to Sam's hotel with the intent of killing him (based solely off of what Sally told him about their marriage note : which we discover may or may not have been embellished, making Barry's reaction all the scarier) and when Sally is the one to open the door, he comes dangerously close to shooting her in the head. He disappears before she notices he was even there, but the look on his face as he hides down the hallway reveals that he's scared himself with this stunt. It's no wonder he goes out and cries in his car afterward. - The truth finally comes out about what happened in Korengal: Barry's squad mate and best friend gets shot in the face and Barry, witnessing an apprehensive-looking villager duck into a nearby doorway, goes after him. Barry kicks the man's door in and immediately pumps him full of lead while the man's wife watches and screams in terror. The rest of Barry's troop bursts in shortly thereafter and forcefully restrain him, informing Barry that the man he's just killed is nothing more than an ordinary villager and the one who shot his fellow Marine was an enemy sniper on a rooftop that they've already dispatched. The look on his face as he realizes he's just committed not only a completely senseless murder, but a war crime is almost beyond description. - Lily. Just look at the current page image. - After receiving a punch to the sternum that audibly cracks his windpipe and has him struggling for air, Ronny is left whistling almost every time he breathes. Though much of the fight (Ronny whipping out the nunchucks; Barry's defeated reaction) is ridiculous and played for comedy, you can hear that his refusal to stop fighting is slowly asphyxiating him through hyperventilation. Eventually, he teeters back while moaning like he's being strangled, drops to the floor, writhes in agony, and passes out. - Barry's injuries throughout the episode as well as the fact he begs and begs Fuches to take him to the hospital, getting weaker and more emotional with each plea as Fuches just keeps ignoring him and taking him after Lily. Bill Hader turns out to be able to play 'horrifically wounded' as well as he portrays everything else, adding to the horror of his condition as he looks and sounds just... so done, and so hurt. - Barry's flashback of meeting Fuches when he got discharged from the army. The fact that this contrasts to other soldiers happily greeting their family members, that Fuches is grinning and wearing a black suit and that this all happens in complete silence doesn't help. - The flashback could also be viewed as a hallucination about dying induced by Barry's injuries, showing him realising Fuches is not unlike the Devil, who offers Barry help, support, purpose, but in reality his tricking and manipulating him constantly, binding them ever closer and damning them to the same hell. - Barry tapping into his trauma over killing Detective Moss in order to perform spectacularly. Not only does this officially confirm her death to anyone who was wondering about her fate in the Season one finale, but his shocked reaction over killing her ends up slowly turning into a cold and empty glare. - Fuches pointing a .45-caliber gun point blank at Cousineau's head, who is currently frozen with shock at the sight of Janice Moss' body. Mercifully, the sound of approaching law enforcement vehicles (and perhaps his own conscience) makes Fuches choose not to fire. Though what he does instead is perhaps worse. - The slow head turn and eerie glare that Barry gives Sally after she gives him a hard slap to the face to get his attention right before their scene during the showcase. She thinks she's genuinely helping him get into the proper head space to play an abusive spouse, ironically unaware that he's already harboring a barely-restrained murderous rage over Fuches' antics (thus resulting in his inability to concentrate). No doubt many a viewer expected him to take it out on her in that moment. To make this worse, Bill Hader himself stated in an interview that Barry would've killed Sally had she not deviated from the script. - Made even more chilling by the fact that Barry's Murder Soundtrack kicks in as she hits him. All season long we've heard whistling desert winds when Barry's trauma/anger gets so overwhelming that he's about to murder someone. It's our indicator he's checked out mentally. - The very fact Sally slaps him. It's abusive, completely unexpected, sudden and a pretty shitty thing to do to your boyfriend, even if it's "for a scene". Barry is clearly not in a good headspace and Sally whacks him. Could be an indicator she's got a much meaner side to her. - Bill Hader's downright terrifying performance during Barry's massacre at the Burmese monastery. Gone is any semblance of humanity from the man as he storms through the building, indiscriminately putting a bullet between the eyes of anything and everything that moves in his attempt to find and kill Fuches for his betrayal, making not a sound except to occasionally shriek the name of his target as he goes along. The guy spends all of season two deliberately choosing not to kill people and ends up with a bigger body count from this incident than the entire first season combined. He bears a truly chilling expression on his face of pure, seething hatred from the moment he bursts in the door and doesn't snap out of it until he goes back through the building and realizes what he's done after Fuches escapes via car. The last glimpse we see of Barry as the season draws to a close is of him slowly descending into a darkened hallway note : the lights having been shot out during the rampage, indicating a new chapter has begun in his life. - One moment that stands out in particular is when Barry guns down three men in quick succession only for one of them to stand and walk for a few steps while choking on blood from a gunshot wound in his neck before bleeding out while Barry moves on. ## Season Three - Strap yourselves in folks, for Season Three starts off with a BANG, showing that Barry's Sanity Slippage from the previous season finale has only gotten worse during the intervening time. - The very first scene is of Barry eating a donut while some poor soul, Which we later find out to be the "Jeff" in question, cries and begs for forgiveness offscreen. The complete lack of emotion shown by Barry in this scene is just chilling, what once would have caused him to feel some semblance of remorse is now little more than an inconvenience. - We then find out that this is because Jeff had sex with Barry's client's wife, and now the client has forced Jeff to dig his own grave! The client then decides to take it up a notch and asks Barry to get his toolbox so he can cut Jeff's eyelids off so he "see himself suffer" - AND THEN! When the client and Jeff come to an understanding, with the client finally forgiving Jeff, Barry shoots the both of them dead! It's such an unexpected action for the character, and it firmly cements that this is not the same Barry as Seasons 1 or 2. - The final bit of nightmare fuel that this episode has is Barry's PTSD melding with reality. He begins to see bullet wounds appear on the faces of those he loves most, i.e. Sally and Cousineau. The first appears with such shock that the entire world just goes mute, while everyone else just carries on like nothing happened. It's a stark contrast from Barry's other, more innocuous fantasies, and it apparently appears unbidden, which may be a sign that he's not all there anymore. - The confrontation between Gene and Barry, where Gene tells Barry that he knows he killed Janice and that he can either go to the cops and turn himself in or Gene will shoot him right there. Making it worse is the fact that preceding this, we see Gene essentially saying goodbye to his son and grandson, which gives the implication that he genuinely wasn't prepared to be coming out of that meeting with Barry alive one way or the other. Although there's a brief moment of comic relief when Gene's gun quite literally falls apart, the NF comes roaring back as Barry takes a moment to process what's just happened and then lunges over Gene's desk ...and we cut to Gene on his knees in the same place that Barry killed Jeff and his client with Barry pointing a gun at Gene's head. Considering Season 1 had Barry kill both Chris and Janice for the "crime" of knowing what he was, and Season 2 had the monastery shootout, it seems genuinely and awfully plausible in that moment that Barry, for all he owes Gene and claims to love him, will end up shooting him. - Barrys full on freak out in Sallys writer's room. It's completely unprecedented and something so out of line for Barry. While it's not physically violent, its definitely intimidating and sure to unnerve any audience. - There's something particularly distressing about how Sally, after having been screamed at by Barry, goes out of her way to order and set up dinner for him, and even buy him a new game controller after his had broken earlier in the day. It's clear that this is an old survival tactic from her marriage to Sam, and puts their relationship in a new and very troubling light. - The efficiency of Fernandos agents, Las Aguilas. It takes them all of 10 seconds to infiltrate and light up the Chechen nursery. Spooky. - In season 2, Barry wouldnt even pretend to entertain the notion of killing a young girl when she was actively kicking his ass and he wasnt convinced she was of this world. Now he doesnt hesitate to threaten to murder Gene Cousineaus similarly aged grandson. - It's quite mild compared to other things, but Barry's complete switch from the volatile but still genuinely adorkable guy he was in Seasons 1 & 2 to, as of the end of the episode, a man who is clearly now more than a little unhinged casually threatening to kill Gene's son and grandson if Gene doesn't give him exactly what he wants and outright demanding that Gene express love for him (as well as his apparent inability to even recognize the awfulness of his freak-out at Sally at all, when the last season featured him initially unable to even pretend to hurt her) is really quite unnerving. - Barrys eyes during his threat to Cousineau, simultaneously tearful and enraged, only add to how unstable he is slowly becoming. They almost bulge out of his head and his stare looks like it can pierce through your soul. The incredibly close zoom in to Barrys face as the episode concludes doesnt help. - Also, the fact that all we hear is Cousineaus grandson playing his PSP game during the credits forces you to revaluate your views on the situation the characters have found themselves in. Shit just got real. - Seeing Sally crying about her show being canceled, Barry asks her where he could find Diane Villa, head of streaming service BanShe and producer for Sally's show (which she canceled after low response from the algorithm), and tells her the plans of what he could do her. It is downright frightening. Barry: I'm just gonna freak her out a little bit. Sally: Freak her out how? Barry: Oh, there's a lot of ways. It's, you know... nothing bad. No, it's just... like, for instance, I could... send her a picture of herself sleeping. You know, just as a way of being like, "Hey, not cool what you did to Sally, you know?" Sally: ...so you'd break into her house? Barry: Oh, she'd never know I was there. The whole point is to isolate her and make her feel like she's going insane. So, I would just do little things, like replace her dog with a slightly different dog, or, you know, change the furniture in her house so she thinks she's shrinking. You know, basic stuff. Most of it I learned in the military. Some of it on a subreddit. You know? Basically, just plant a seed, and then they just kinda hang themselves, so it's super nonviolent. But by the end of it, like, her brain will have essentially eaten itself, you know? But that's on the table if you want it. Okay? - What makes it even worse is that Sally's expression becomes increasingly horrified as she listens to him while Barry just keeps talking in the same soothing tone that he used when he was genuinely comforting her. And he's genuinely shocked when she yells at him to get out afterwards. Barry has become so entirely disconnected from the world and people around him that he actually sincerely believed that offering to drive Sally's boss insane was an appropriate response to the situation. - Thanks to Fuches, Barry now has practically an entire army of people after him, all made up of people close to those he has killed throughout the series. The sheer relentlessness of Taylor's sister and her gang of motorbike buddies as they chase Barry through the streets of LA is genuinely terrifying. The episode ends with Chris' wife, previously having been chatting with Barry with no sign of anything being wrong, coldly telling him to die while she watches him choke on some beignets she just poisoned. - Sallys meltdown toward Natalie when she finds out the latter got her own show, which is more or less a sitcom like spin on Joplin. In particular is the rather unnerving way that Sally roars in Natalies face. YOU ENTITLED FUCKING CUNT! - It's especially nightmarish because Natalie's show isn't a spin on Joplin. Joplin was a dark, emotional drama about domestic violence, while Natalie's show is a Rom Com about a mother and daughter running a cupcake store; the only thing the two shows have in common is that they star a single mother and daughter. Additionally, Sally claims to be upset because Natalie stole her real-life story, but as Natalie points out, Sally doesn't actually have a daughter, so the one connection between Natalie's show and Joplin is a fictional element of Sally's story anyway. Sally's extreme egotism is normally Played for Laughs, but it's genuinely frightening to see her delude herself into thinking that Natalie only succeeded by copying her and that that somehow justified verbally abusing and threatening her. - Jim Moss can be seen as walking Nightmare Fuel, he not only manipulates Fuches and an increasingly erratic Barry into getting themselves caught, he also was a psychological warfare expert who convinced his POW captor to commit suicide, and manipulated Gene into helping him take down Barry. The real kicker? He's supposed to be one of the good guys. Think about that for a second... - The whole episode, frankly. As Bill Hader points out in multiple interviews regarding this finale, there is only one actual joke in this episode, the rest of it is just pure stress. - The entire scene where the surviving biker gang member ambushes Barry and Sally. Sally, who has been pushed to her limit this season, finally has an onscreen kill. Just the horror of her nearly being choked to death and viciously fighting back is a far cry from where she was in Season 1. - While he is trying to choke her, the shot lingers on Sally's face for an uncomfortably long time. There is a very brief moment, right before she suddenly stabs him with the knife, where you would not be faulted for thinking "Oh my god, he actually killed her" because her entire body and face goes completely still. - While no one would fault Sally for fighting back against her assailant, it's still an extremely brutal scene. She stabs him through the neck, which causes him to bleed out of his eye. The biker, in shock, doesn't seem to understand what's happening, and wanders off into the recording booth. Sally then viciously beats him to death with a baseball bat, which the audience neither sees or hears fully due to the recording booth blocking both the noise and his body. - Barry's reaction when he wakes up and sees Sally in the recording booth adds a whole new level of horror to the entire thing. This is a guy who has both seen and committed murder fairly regularly for years and is unnervingly comfortable with the idea of murder as a baseline solution to any given problem... and he's legitimately horrified by what he sees of both Sally's attack and the biker's body as he drags her out of the recording booth. Not to mention the fact that Sally herself is a barely functional, traumatized mess in the immediate aftermath. - NoHo Hank overhearing the Bolivians unleash a panther on Akhmal and Yandar in the other cell. What exactly happens can only be guessed by the horrific sounds and screams, as well as the pool of blood that seeps under the wall. Apparently the sight is bad enough that one of the guards vomits, with Hank witnessing it seep under the door. - When Hank rescues a suffering Cristobal and tightly embraces him, his eyes slowly widen into a haunting Thousand-Yard Stare, and everything is deadly quiet. It's clear that no matter what, Hank is deeply traumatized and will never fully recover from this nightmare. - And that's not even getting into what happened to Cristobal himself; when Hank finds him he's been subjected to a severe course of electroshock conversion therapy by Elena, who repeatedly shocks him while forcing him to watch a male stripper dance, stopping only to forcibly lay his hands on her face and body. It's a truly chilling concept on its own, but the fact that Cristobal barely responds to Hank shooting both Elena and the dancer before reaching out to hold him implies he's going to have permanent damage going forward. - Even the moment building up to this reveal is disturbing, as a clearly terrified Hank makes his way down the hall to find Cristobal as distant music echoes through the building while the lights are flicking and the silhouette of the dancer can be seen in the doorway, with the camera blurring it to make it look distorted and unnatural. A lot of people have pointed out how it all feels like something out of a horror movie. ## Season Four - Hank's murder of his and Cristobal's new crew in the sand room and his almost accidental murder of Cristobal. The entire scene is chilling. We don't see or hear the rest of the men struggle as they're sucked under, but Cristobal manages to keep his head above the sand for a few moments and desperately cry for Hank to save him before slowing sinking below the sand himself. We are then treated to a black screen as Cristobal's screams become muffled and slowly die out before Hank arrives just in time to dig him out. - The fact that this is NoHo Hank of all people who orchestrated this is a whole new brand of terrifying. It was implied in his last scene of Season 3 that he was traumatised by the experience but this episode shows just how much the whole ordeal changed him. And the fact that he knows how far gone he is, not even bothering to argue with Cristobal's assessment of how cold-blooded his actions were and instead merely focusing on trying to stop him from leaving (before giving up on that as well), makes it all the worse. - The situation most of the characters are in for the duration of the episode: Barry has escaped from prison and several of the characters have every reason to believe he's going to come after them. The fact that he's not seen until the very last scene of the episode fills the runtime with a non-stop sense of complete dread. - When he finally does make his appearance, it's a scene straight out of a horror movie. Sally looks into a darkened room and we can just about see the shape of a man in the shadows. Then he slowly limps into the light, revealing a face still swollen and bruised from his prison beating. If Sally didn't immediately give him what he wanted, things could have gotten ugly. - The episode overall is filled with Realism-Induced Horror, as we see Barry and Sally's new lives unfold into a portrait of utter emptiness and despair. - Barry has styled himself after a Standard '50s Father-type, while closely controlling every part of his son's life. He's apparently homeschooling him (while being clearly ignorant of the subject matter) and telling him Blatant Lies about his past. The most chilling part comes from when John starts playing catch with one of his friends in the neighborhood; after Barry finds the catcher's mitt in his room he makes John watch videos of children being killed in baseball accidents, all to keep him isolated from anyone who could possibly break their cover. - Seeing the previously driven, ambitious Sally reduced to an alcoholic Empty Shell is just as frightening as it is sad. She's reduced to working a dead-end waitressing job, barely able to show affection to Barry (who criticizes her drinking when their son is out of earshot and barely speaks to her otherwise) or their son. When hooking up with a coworker who had previously harassed her, she begins choking him out, only stopping because he'd pushed her wig off when trying to defend himself. She's later shown getting him fired by (possibly falsely) accusing him of stealing from the till, showing that her resentments have only made her mean streak worse over the Time Skip. - The last we see of them in the episode has Barry and Sally reacting with fear to a knock at the door, and Barry retrieves one of his guns from a hidden safe while Sally hides out with John in the bathtub. When Barry goes outside and sees nothing, he stands in the same position until sunrise, just waiting for any threat that could possibly arise. - The episode ends with Sally finding out that Gene is going to be a consultant for a movie about Gene's ordeal with Barry and he eerily states: "I'm going to have to kill Cousineau." The old Barry is back... - Everything involving Sally this episode. - Sally gets a knock on the door, and a male voice threatens to get her and "that boy of [hers]." She systematically locks the door and starts to lock all the windows in the house. And while she's doing this, a tall figure appears, covered head to toe in black, looking akin to a shadowman, and starts quietly stalking Sally around the house. It is absolutely terrifying to watch. - When she walks into her bedroom, the door closes behind her and she begins to have auditory hallucinations of the biker she murdered. He tries to wake John up from his slumber, but he says "he's not breathing". Sally reaches for the gun parts lying on her bed, assembles it, and pulls the trigger repeatedly, aiming at the door even though the gun has no actual bullets in it. - Then a truck rams into the house so hard, it tilts over, causing all the furniture in the house to break and fall over itself, making a complete mess out of the living room. Upon first time watching, it almost feels like an earthquake is happening. - The next time we see Sally, she's curled up in the middle of the living room, desperately calling Barry to come back. Her mental state has gotten so bad, she is hanging from a metaphorical edge. - Barry gets kidnapped right as he's about to get the jump on Gene. The next time he wakes up, he's inside of a garage, handcuffed to a chair, sitting in front of Jim Moss.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Barry
Batman: The Killing Joke / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Knock Knock. Death's here.It's The Killing Joke; what would you expect? Spoilers Off applies to all "Moments" pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. - In the first official trailer, the moment just before the Joker shoots Barbara Gordon, we get a full frame look of The Joker's face. The wide-brim purple hat covers his eyes, yet two white dots are where they should be. Coupled with his infamous grin makes it look like death itself was at the Gordons' door. - Just like in the source material, the realtor is poisoned with Joker venom and left a smiling corpse. It doesn't look pretty, especially as the headlights of the Batmobile settle on it. - The Joker, appropriately, delivers a Nightmare Face here and there. But one of his worst has to be the insanely gleeful (and detailed), wide-eyed smile he has when the carnival lights up (though some viewers might find it strangely heartwarming). - It's a blink and you'll miss it moment, but when Batman is clinging to a ledge over a spiked pit, one of Joker's little goons, dressed as Batman, walks up to kick him in. Batman grabs their leg, and, instead of throwing them away from him as he gets up, tosses them in. Batman just explicitly killed someone. - The ending. Nothing Is Scarier, up to eleven. After Joker tells one last joke and possibly screws up the punchline, he starts laughing like he usually does. The weird thing, though? Batman starts laughing too. Real, honest-to-goodness confirmation that the Batman is just as crazy as Joker! And the film ends with Batman putting his hands on Joker's shoulders, in what can almost be their screwed-up version of a hug, with the camera panning down to the wet ground as their cackles fade out...then the credits start. The scene is so screwed up, even Left the Background Music On is inverted during them, with just dead silence aside from the drops of rain, at least until The Stinger. - Take a listen to the laughter just before the credits. The Joker's stopped laughing. The subtitles even say as much. - The joke, itself. It's a near-perfect description of Batman and Joker's sick friendship - and both of them know it. - It's even worse when you consider that Batman's laughter is more likely Cry Laughing than anything else. While it does sound crazy, it also sounds desperate, like he has to cling to something while coming to terms with what he's about to do. - The whole story serves to underline the dark, obsessive, sick, and ultimately addictive relationship Batman and Joker have with each other. - The Ax-Crazy carnies Joker rounds up. As stereotypical as they are (a two-headed woman, a person covered completely in fur, a sexually ambiguous fat giant, et cetera), they're still menacing. The midgets, too. Like the Joker, they went from happily dancing with the Joker (With the fur covered man doing That Russian Squat Dance during the "I Go Loony" musical number) to homicidally deranged. (The same fur covered man tackling Batman while snarling like a wolf.) - Two-Face's cameo. His coin has fallen outside of the cell, so all we see is his arm desperately trying to reach it. He's been trying so long that there are claw marks in the METAL door.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanTheKillingJoke
Batman: Under the Red Hood / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Batman Under The Red Hood has incredibly dark moments, that questions how it even earned a PG-13 rating. Spoilers Off applies to all "Moments" pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. - The fact that Jason managed to get an Oh, Crap! reaction out of The Joker. The JOKER. - Joker's absolutely brutal beatdown of Jason Todd in the opening scene. Jasons got a collapsed lung, barefoot, outfit torn, spitting up blood. Even if Batman DID arrive before the explosion, Jason likely would have aspirated on his own blood. - Red Hood's commandeering of several gangs and drug dealing operations by arranging a meeting. One of the more skeptical dealers asks why they should work for the Hood. Cue duffel bag. - The Joker's almost casually brutal slaughter of four of Black Mask's gunmen, starting with just these words: "May I have some water?" Apparently just slashing their throats wasnt enough. - Jason Todd's resurrection scene and his sequential freak-out. After they drop him into the Lazurus Pit, he bursts out of the water screaming like a madman, with a crazed look in his eyes. He kicks the crap out of Ra's Al Ghul's men, taking out one by jamming his thumbs right into the poor sucker's eye sockets. He then escapes by jumping out the window. His actions from this entire scene are borderline... . Though resurrection via a Lazarus Pit renders the one resurrected momentarily insane, even animalistic Ra's Al Ghul was afraid. What makes it more terrifying is Vincent Martella's performance. Just imagine Phineas Flynn screaming like he's in horrible agony. - Even worse, he exits the flashback by jumping through a window screaming as he falls down a ravine. It's never answered how he survived this, to the point that Ra's himself believed Jason to be dead because of the implausibility of doing so wrapped in nothing but bandages. Whether by sheer stupid luck or his training under Batman, Jason Todd was forced through cheating death once and then ignored all logic to do it immediately right after all on his own. - Black Mask's face, though not his character. - Red Hood shooting a Molotov cocktail that a mook was holding, setting him on fire (a sight that the audience is mercifully spared). - The Flashback where Jason as Robin was fighting alongside Batman — and, in the panic of the moment when a thug gets a gun aimed on him, stops holding back his punches and strikes the man so hard that it shattered his collarbone in a single impact, making him useless for info due to sending him into shock. This is from a teenager, and Batman does later acknowledge that Jason was just flat out powerful for his age. It highlights that virtually every fight Batman and his family undertakes is one misstep away from permanently hospitalizing every single person they ever fight, and that every counter and takedown is a calculated process to avoid this problem. - The Joker hijacking Jason's Taking You with Me gambit just so he'll get to die with Batman, proving that the Clown Prince of Crime is indeed a legitimate self-destructive lunatic. - Nightwing and Batman's take-down of Amazo, which involves burying bladed batarangs in his ears and affixing C-4 to his eyes before detonating it. Imagine them doing that to an actual human being... - One of the kills the Red Hood does: he stabs a criminal in the eye with a tazer and then turns it on full-force, short-circuiting his cybernetic eyes and blowing up his brain. While in the movie, it's done to one of the Canon Foreigner group, the Fearsome Hand of Four; in the comic, it's done to Captain Marvel baddie Captain Nazi. - From Batman's perspective, a mysterious masked man with the training and equipment to keep up with both Nightwing and Batman himself is already a worrying prospect... And then he manages to find out what said figure said before escaping: "You haven't lost your touch, Bruce." - When the de-hooded Jason thinks he's got the upper hand and tries everything he's got to kill Batman, the latter decides to take off the kid gloves. What results is a Curbstomp Battle as he slams Jason through a wall, a sink, a toilet, you name it, utterly demolishing an entire room with Jason's body and face without even taking a hit the entire time. If he wanted to kill a person, there's nothing stopping him from brutalizing you hit by hit. - Batman says to Jason that, "All I've ever wanted to do is kill him [Joker]". While we don't see Batman kill Joker in this film, you can read about what happens if Batman does kill Joker, he goes insane and becomes The Batman Who Laughs.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanUnderTheRedHood
Batman Vampire / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The vampires being in Gotham is terrifying enough, but the threat proves so great that Batman, normally a Badass Normal capable of taking on even a Physical God like Superman, is forced to sacrifice his very humanity and become a half-vampire himself in order to stand any chance of defeating Dracula. When Dracula is able to drink the rest of his blood, Batman becomes a true vampire but is able to kill Dracula by impaling him on a tree before he 'dies' of bloodloss. - Joker's death; when he kills Catwoman, Batman finally snaps. He chases down Joker and Joker frantically runs into a room full of crucifixes, believing Batman is unable to enter the room. Batman not only proves him wrong, but he also tears into him with animalistic rage. He breaks Joker's neck then drinks his blood and drives a stake into his heart to prevent him from coming back. - Crimson Mist reveals that vampires must be decapitated after being staked. Suggesting that if Joker didn't die before Batman drank his blood, then vampire Joker could be a whole new level of evil. Fortunately, this idea has never come to light. - Batman's description of his state at the opening of Crimson Mist, trapped in a state of living death where he is only aware of his body's decay and his own descent into insanity, paralysed by the stake in his heart but still potentially "aware" as his head remains. - As if that wasn't bad enough, a re-read of Red Rain reveals that it's possible even Dracula wasn't aware of this "quirk" of vampire biology, as he reacts as though the vampires who have just been shot with crossbows by Tanya and her followers are explicitly dead when his return to the crypt after his stand-off with Batman shows at least two bodies with their heads still attached. Granted, it's possible that those vampires staked in Wayne Manor were killed in the sunlight when the house was destroyed, but that still leaves various vampires stuck in a state of living death in the sewers, needing only someone to come along and pull out the arrows to start another vampiric wave of terror in Gotham, this time without Batman to stop it... - The villains have become a lot darker since Batman came back in Crimson Mist. - Poison Ivy's death may be tame when compared to the other examples, but, it's just as scary. The flowers die around him as he approaches her and she's begging him to stay away. In a way, it sounds a bit like a rape scene. With Batman saying how Ivy's always wanted him but he can only have her in this form, where he is subject to dark and decayed corruption, at the same time Ivy is terrified and saying how she never wanted him "like this". - Scarecrow decorates his costume with the fingers of his victims. Batman even regards Scarecrow as worse than him, as he chooses to kill innocents, whereas Batman has to kill but has enough self-control to target criminals and prevent the spread of his curse. - Penguin kills a police officer by impaling him through the head with his umbrella. - Riddler has been selling drugs by storing them in corpses, one of which is a university student. - Killer Croc, in particular, is especially horrible since he's a blatant man-eating sewer predator in this incarnation. His opening scene is him pulling a woman into the sewer and devouring her flesh, then describing what she just ate in detail as he eats her stomach. Worse still, he's seen as a lesser of two evils compared to the vampiric Batman. - Batman killing Black Mask and his goons. Two particular scenes stand out, he decapitates a goon and carries the head (and spine) in his maw. The second being that Batman impaled the heads on the Blackgate prison fence, to warn the inmates of his wrath. - Killer Croc dies when Batman impales him with a stone pillar and Two-Face is killed when Batman stabs him in the head with two crossbow bolts, quipping "one for each face". - On the same note, the way Batman had killed each criminal is brutal, as he decapitates Scarecrow after crushing his hand and kills the other criminals by tearing their throats out with his teeth. Not only that, he decapitates each victim to prevent them from coming back as vampires. - Batman assaulting Arkham Asylum and murdering each helpless inmate within their cell. He even sends a note to the head doctor, written in blood and within the mouth of a severed head. Even though the rogues gallery had it coming, this is the moment where Commissioner Gordon believes that the hero of Gotham has truly become an irredeemable monster. - Batman being a vampire makes him a tragic version of a Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant. The reason why Batman has been driven to madness is that Alfred and Commissioner Gordon neglected to cut off his head after they staked his heart, leaving him trapped in a tomb with an insatiable hunger and awareness of his decaying mind and body. When Alfred releases him, Batman is emaciated and driven mad by his lust for blood. He has enough self-awareness to steer himself away from harming innocents but is afraid of losing the rest of his sanity and becoming worse than Dracula.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanVampire
Batman: The Movie / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The whole concept of the instant dehydrator. It was designed to be an instant whiskey maker, but then the United Underworld realized that it could be used on humans. There's something inherently creepy about just how cavalier they are in using it — a human being reduced to a pile of dust. - Penguin accidentally dooming his human guinea pigs since he unknowingly rehydrated them using heavy water — making their molecular structure highly unstable all it takes is one touch and they vanish. To keep things kid friendly, Batman surmises that they're alive in another universe now, but that's a whole thing in itself. - Specifically, Batman says they were reduced to "anti-matter." Depending on one's knowledge of DC lore, it's hard not to think that those human guinea pigs wound up somewhere in the Antimatter Universe, home to the Anti-Monitor.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanTheMovie
Batman vs. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - Shredder and Ra's al Ghul viciously assassinating every Arkham guard they find. Did we mention this is a Nickelodeon movie? They evidently did spare some of them, or at least didn't bother killing the ones not in their immediate path. - When Batman becomes a mutant bat. Special mention that he's heavily implied to maul Mr Freeze to death. He even throws Two-Face out a window (while he likely survived due to being mutated it shows he was clearly trying to kill them). - The mutated Arkham inmates. Joker and Two-Face stand out, with Joker becoming an albino cobra and Two-Face's head splitting into two separate cat faces. - Heck, just the scene when they get mutated alone is horrifying. It almost reaches Cronenberg-levels of Body Horror. - Harley manages to be quite unsettling to look at despite only mutating into a hyena, mainly due to her crazed red and green eyes and her massive fanged Slasher Smile. Her mutation is likely one of the nastiest as well, what with her jaw bulging with oversized, carnivorous teeth before it finally expands and lengthens (along with the rest of her mouth) into a canine-like muzzle to fit them. - Hell, Scarecrow was disturbing before he got mutated! - The fear hallucination Leonardo sees under the effects of Scarecrow's gas. He turns to see his brothers, and the crow-mutate Scarecrow looms behind them and spreads his wings. A murder of crows swarm the three and devour them, flying away to reveal their desiccated, eyeless corpses on the ground. And as Leo falls to his knees and takes one of their hands, they blow away into dust. - The post-credits scene. Two Words; . It starts out with the hellish burning remains of the Ace Chemicals building. Suddenly, the Shredder bursts out of the wreckage, but we only see his backside and his skin has noticeably gone pale. He starts to laugh, from an ominous creepy tone to a VICIOUSLY INSANE TONE AS HE TURNS HIS MESSED UP JOKERIZED FACE TO THE CAMERA! JOKERIZED SHREDDER JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanVsTheTeenageMutantNinjaTurtles
Batman: Vengeance / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - Thugs that you don't handcuff will get back up and attack you again. If you are out of handcuffs and happen to linger around, you'll be constantly looking over your shoulder, waiting for an ambush. It doesn't help that a lot of the secrets in the game are found through exploration of thug-ridden stages. - The Funny Bones Warehouse chapter only serves to exaggerate this, by having a ton of pyro Jacks in Boxes roaming the floors. You can't see them easily, but you can most assuredly hear them. - In "Promethium Fire", one of the stages has you exploring a facility that was attacked by Mr. Freeze. When you arrive, you find that it has been blanketed in ice, with glaciers so massive that they are seemingly growing out of the building The worst part? There are security guards trapped within some of the icy constructs that Mr. Freeze left behind. When you approach them, you can hear the trapped guards crying for help. They're still alive. - The boss fight with Mr. Freeze at the end of the chapter. Not only does he manage to sneak up on the goddamned BATMAN, he is also too powerful to face in melee combat, forcing you to hang back and use remote charges to drop cryogenic tanks on the villain. All the while, he meticulously walks after you. Not run. Walk, only slightly gaining speed each phase. Like a patient predator. - "Plant Food". Poison Ivy has never been more terrifying. The plot is that multiple figures in Gotham become hosts to plants that will feed on their insides unless they continue to pay Poison Ivy for food that will keep the plants from becoming parasitic. The mooks you face in this chapter are lifeless plant-like humanoids that are a force to be reckoned with in combat unless you're privy to some electric batarangs that easily dispatch them in one hit. They can't be handcuffed either, leaving you open to ambushes if you linger for too long. You're also exposed to other hostile plant life such as vines that scream in pain when you kill them. However, what really takes the nightmare cake is the boss of this chapter, which is a three-tentacled... thing with an eye and mouth that spits acid and also screams. "Uncanny" doesn't even begin to describe it. The atmosphere of the level pretty much gives you the feeling of being trapped in a nature reserve from hell. - The Joker himself is probably at his absolute worst here, roughly on par to being as murderous as he was in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. He faked his death to keep suspicion off himself, and manipulated the supervillains Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy into committing their crimes. Joker planned to use the distractions to pump Joker Gas and Promethium flammable gas into Gotham City's sewers, then giddily watch as millions of innocents choke on their own laughter as they burn alive. Even when beaten, Joker attempts to fling himself to his death, hoping to both torment Batman and immortalize himself as the greatest nightmare in Gotham's history.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanVengeance
Bathory / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Quorthon's vocals on their black metal albums sound like they were ripped straight from Hell itself. The album cover◊ for their debut looks downright evil. "Reaper", also from their debut. Quorthon's vocals sound outright deranged, which isn't helpful given some of the lyrics:I love the sight of having you down and open wide The smell of a dead woman's flesh drives me fucking wild I have to got you in my grasp now there is no need to escape I'll penetrate you, every virgin needs a rape "Necromansy" also has similar vocals with an absolutely evil sounding chorusDescend from blackened skies On soundless magic wings To spread the word of Satan! And live in eternal sin! Equimanthorn from Under the Sign of the Black Mark is probably the angriest sounding song in the band's entire discography. It is also noteworthy that this song was featured on Gummo's soundtrack The outro track on all of their early albums. A low Gregorian chant punctuated by a Heartbeat Soundtrack drum.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Bathory
Batman / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes The Dark Knight has been up against some truly terrifying moments, no doubt in part due to his extensive Rogues Gallery and the latter being made of a good chunk of dangerous and scary psychopaths. Below are but a smattering of the scariest moments. Heavy spoilers for several comic series are below. Non-comic books examples for Batman belong on those appropriate pages. ## Comics Joker - Brian Azzarello's Joker is full of nightmare-inducing sequences including skinning a man alive, rape, torture, the Joker crying on a hooker-like Harley Quinn, and much, much more. The comic's narrator becomes so horrified by the Joker's worldview that he ends up committing suicide to escape. A Death in the Family - Right after The Killing Joke was published, we had A Death in the Family, where the Joker showed everybody that The Silver Age of Comic Books was over the hard way by brutally beating the second Robin, Jason Todd, with a crowbar in front of his biological mother, whose reaction is to turn her head away and light up a cigarette. As if that weren't enough, he then leaves them both in a warehouse that blows up just as the battered Jason manages to untie his mother, killing them both. The fact that it was drawn with the bright colors of the Golden/Silver ages, but added just enough shading to look realistic, only made it worse; you've never seen blood this scarlet. And he does it all with that smile on his face. Batman: No Man's Land - As unbelievable as people find it, the No Man's Land storyline had quite a bit. First, the very premise: Gotham City is mostly destroyed and public facilities are practically destroyed, then cut off from the rest of America, all laws, and all support, while the wackos run free and split the remains of the city into a Gangster Land. Add multiple references to cannibalism, constant moral ambiguity, and the Joker doing classically barbaric Joker-things like kidnapping babies and inciting insane cops to shoot their own, and you have a horror that's near impossible to laugh off. It was so bad that people wanted to stay in the Hellhole Prison that was being run by Lock-Up just to avoid living in the streets of Gotham. - Oh, about Joker's plan to kidnap babies? It's because he wants to kill them all off on New Year's, just to destroy the fragile spirit of the people of Gotham City. And let's not get started on what he does to Commissioner Gordon's wife. Batman: Endgame - After Jim Gordon had shot the Joker, it looked like it was over until he stood up and took Jim's phone. The reader doesn't know what happened until the end of the issue. - The comic brings up the possibility that the Joker is an Eldritch Abomination terrorizing Gotham for centuries. - All of the possible origin stories for the Joker told by the insane patients were a bit unsettling. Batman (Grant Morrison) - For a start, this run is the one that introduced Professor Pyg. - Flamingo EATING FACES WHILE HIS VICTIMS ARE ALIVE. - \|\|The Heretic's face: the head of a baby in a body of an adult.\|\| - (Un)Surprisingly, Batman himself in one chapter. After locating Joe Chill, the man who killed his parents, Batman stalks him for several nights. Then Batman, the man who swore never to commit murder, drove Chill to suicide! No wonder so many Batman villains are nuts. Sane people don't last long enough. - Doctor Hurt and the Black Glove's plan for Batman's final fate: bury Batman alive, not long enough to kill him, but long enough to shut down his brain and make him into practically a vegetable. They then plan to dig him up, deform him to look like his worst enemy the Joker, and keep him as a brain-dead slave for the rest of his life. - Batman Incorporated #8. The entirety of Damian's death scene. Despite it arguably being a Dying Moment of Awesome, it was also a Rasputinian Death as Damian went through a lot of torture trying to appeal to his Mother's better nature before finally getting stabbed through the chest. Other - . Pre-Crisis, Post-Crisis, it doesn't matter - he is the Trope Codifier for Monster Clown for a reason. In his very first appearance, he utilizes his horrible Joker Venom without a second thought, laughing off any inevitable deaths he causes. Chronologically speaking, even when you read a goofy Silver Age story where he's pulling some harmless heist, you're still looking at a Monster Clown with completely apathetic spree-killings on his criminal record. The Joker note : (Which, not counting unearthly forces, contains the single biggest kill count in the DC universe at over 2,000 murders.) Another part of what makes him so scary is how random he is — he can be a harmless jester pulling elaborate pranks one minute and without warning try to poison the whole of Gotham. The worst part is that the Joker doesn't seem to notice any difference; pin-balling from Harmless Villain to crossing the Moral Event Horizon is as easy as breathing for him. Lastly, he instills fear into many in-and-out-of universes, especially if you happen to be coulrophobic (scared of clowns). All of this is manageable by someone who has no powers apart from an utterly unhinged mindset. - Scarecrow, anyone? His fear toxin is literal Nightmare Fuel! - The Riddler. Yeah, go on, laugh. A nerdy guy who can't even throw a punch, right? Just leaves stupid clues and makes it easy for Batman to catch him, right? Go read "Dark Knight, Dark City" ( Batman #452-#454), which has, among other things, Riddler forcing Batman into slitting a baby's throat note : to perform a tracheotomy. - Notably, as is noted multiple times by both Batman and Riddler's henchmen, Riddler's lethal streak is flat-out uncharacteristic of him, not least because he flat-out kills a security guard, almost hangs another by the neck with a hangman's noose, and left a baby to choke to death... it gets worse when you find out that \|\|Batman rescuing the hanged guard by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and Batman opening the baby's throat to perform a tracheotomy were all part of Riddler's plan, but The Reveal gives no such reason for him killing the unfortunate other guard\|\|. - And why is he doing all this? He's performing a Satanic Ritual with Batman as the sacrifice and is putting Bats through all the prelim stuff before he kills him to unleash a demon on Gotham City. Holy fuck. - Other versions, like the Arkham games, play up his penchant for Death Traps to Jigsaw-levels. - Batman #23.2 does a good job showing how terrifying Riddler can be. Breaking into Wayne Enterprises, killing anyone who stands in his way, all so he can play a game of solitaire in peace. - Professor Pyg is what would happen if David Lynch created a Batman villain. He's a middle-aged man with a pig mask and butcher clothing and he's terrifying. In his first appearance, he has a bunch of Dollotrons (human zombie dolls) holds a criminal accomplice down so Pyg can make him one as well and tells said accomplice that he'll then help Pyg do the same to the man's niece. Then, in the third appearance, he gives a tied Robin (Damian Wayne) a very odd and disturbing Motive Rant that seeps quickly into a Villainous Breakdown, all while dancing with power tools to "sexy hot" disco music. Robin simply responds as he breaks free, "You just redefined 'wrong'."◊ - The Dollotrons themselves are deeply disturbing, being regular people who have unwillingly undergone a process of creation that is not entirely revealed but is implied to involve brain surgery, genital mutilation, and mind-altering drugs. They are also given a fleshy doll-like mask that is permanently attached to the victim's face. - Batman's code against killing suddenly becomes terrifying: Young Miscreant: I'll blow her head off! I swear I will! Batman: ...And I that if you swear that woman at all, I'll make you pay! I will harm and break things within you. You can't twist of the conceive I can cause. It's pain that will go on pain . You won't escape it... forever BECAUSE I WON'T LET YOU DIE. - James Gordon Jr. is one of the scariest new villains in recent comic book history. Completely separate from his heroic family members, James Gordon Jr. is an unrepentant psychopath and Serial Killer through and through. Part of what makes him so terrifying is that he can pull off a feeling of normalcy but there's always a sense that there's something wrong with him. Then we understand how vicious he truly is when we see him dismembering a man who stole his glasses a decade before. His psychological mind games are brutal and reminiscent of The Joker in ways but without any comedy factor. For example, driving knives into his sister's paralyzed legs, letting her know that they're in arteries and also saving her by blocking them from bleeding it, and then proceeding to pull one out. - Then there's his ultimate plan. Taking a drug designed to curb sociopathic tendencies and induce some empathy and reverse the effects, to drug every infant in Gotham to turn them into sociopathic killers like him. Even worse, he may have succeeded. - One particularly creepy, but rather unknown, adversary of Batman is Jane Doe. She is, as quoted by one of her personas, "a cipher, she's incomplete, her life is empty, so she covets the lives of others. She takes their lives so she can have their lives." In short, she learns people's traits, kills them, then wears their skin and acts like them. If that, and what's really under her skin doesn't unnerve, it's also worth noting she's primarily responsible for turning Warren White into The Great White Shark, who would go onto be one of Gotham's most feared mob bosses. - Batman himself is this in All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder. Unlike his dark but heroic counterparts in most media adaptations and comic books, this Batman is a psychotic, violent, unstable, bloodthirsty sadist who KIDNAPS Dick Grayson and forces him to become Robin against his own will, verbally and physically abuses him, to prevent him from grieving over his parents' deaths, even slapping the boy in the face and gloats that he is going to put Dick through hell with a sadistic smile on his face, which is Nightmare Fuel in itself. He also leaves Dick to fend for himself in the Batcave, by eating rats, and then when he finds out Alfred fed him a proper meal, he threatens him. Alfred is the closest thing Bruce currently has to a father. He also takes a creepy and borderline pedophilic interest in Dick, watching him before he became Robin. And as pointed out in Linkara's review of the comic, Batman sounded like he was going to kidnap Dick Grayson even if his parents were alive and possibly would have killed the boy's parents himself if the assassin didn't do it first. And that's not all. He murders criminals in various cruel and shocking ways, like throwing a Molotov cocktail that engulfs several criminals with flames and also attacking corrupt police officers with sadistic joy. Also, thanks to Alternative Character Interpretation via possibly Accidental Innuendo, it is implied that Batman was involved in an incestuous relationship with or sexually abused by either of his parents, giving him a Freudian Excuse. - Damian's face as he is about to engage the 99 Fiends. The immediate snapping of a hellhound's neck as he proceeds to cut the limbs off of several of his opponents doesn't help either. - There's a reason Victor Zsasz hasn't been featured or alluded to in any family-friendly animated adaptations. The man carves a mark on himself for every victim he kills... and he has a lot of marks. Zsasz stands out among Batman's rogue's gallery in being a simple, straight-up serial-killing psychopath. He has no supervillain origin, no sympathetic motives, he just likes to kill people. Or "free the zombies" as he calls it. Especially women. He doesn't wear a suit or rule an empire. He's just some guy. He could literally be anyone. - Batman himself is this to criminals. Even those who don't fear Superman are generally terrified of Batman. - A brief Supergirl-Robin team-up reveals that on the one hand, Gotham's supervillains are completely out of Supergirl's league... on the other hand, Gotham's supervillains tend towards way more depraved than she's used to. - The countless expies that Batman (and his allies) had to deal with throughout his years as a vigilante crimefighter is no laughing matter either! They're virtually literal dark mirrors on the Dark Knight himself and what he would have done had he not been so vigilant in his struggles for justice and the sanctity of Gotham City and the Gothamites residing. There are a few that deserve well-given mentions here since in their encounters they become something to dread whenever they show up. The infamous few that are just as much as our beloved Cape Crusader himself: 1. Owlman 2. The Wrath (I & II) 3. Hellhound 4. Catman 5. Killer Moth and finally the best for last. 6. Prometheus. Why him? Because he single-handedly out bested the entire JLA! And of course, to add more to this already hellish mentioning of true evils that mirror the Batman to a T. We have Joker, Two-Face, Riddler, Scarecrow to name the few that mirror him just as well. Albeit, not as close as the aforementioned doppelgangers before them but just as bad. - What do you get when Batman is overwhelmed by the Joker's personality? The Batman Who Laughs, a nightmarish ghoul who is essentially the DC Universe's version of Judge Death. - There are also dark mirrors of Bruce Wayne as well to add more to the fuel. Thomas Elliot a.k.a Hush is the perfect closest to a doppelganger to Bruce. The irony that these two share when they were once childhood friends to one another's families and to each other. At the same time, both suffered the losses of their mothers and fathers. The only slight difference? Bruce lost his family through heart-wrenching tragedy. Thomas on the other hand lost him through his means. He sought personal independence due to the many years of abuse from his father and frail mother and wanted to obtain his inheritance sooner. He cut his parent's tire breaks on their car and manages to kill his father, yet his mother was saved by the exceptional operational skill of Dr. Thomas Wayne fueling his hate for the Waynes. Years later he finished what he started by suffocating his mother in cold blood with a pillow, all as the world thought that it was just a simple household accident. He murdered them just to obtain the family fortune. And he resents Bruce because he obtained his true loss BEFORE his own family's demise. Hush's sole purpose in life is to destroy both the Batman and Bruce Wayne and will stop at nothing to accomplish his goals. - Roman Sionis. Or as his well-known alias in crime, The Black Mask. Roman is another dark image of what would have happened or come to be if Bruce was a remorseless business mogul. Roman Sionis's road to crime began because of a few mistakes in his poor planning and control of his business. Seeing turmoil of Roman's mistakes, Bruce Wayne bought the struggling Janus Cosmetic Company from Roman and relieved him of his control and began fluctuating his once previously owned company, and began making its return in booming success. Roman was outraged by this. In turn, he founded the False Face Society and undertook many autocracies, and became a big player in the criminal underworld. Not only does he deal in the "arrangements" of his business against his associates or rivals alike, he makes sure that he gets his points across as best as he can. And as a Bonus! During a certain moment in Batman's crime-fighting career, during a bout against the Dark Knight. Roman's desperate attempt to thwart Batman and Robin at his father's manor ended up with Roman setting it ablaze. Desperate to flee the burning structure, Batman and Robin incapacitate his legs with a Batarang attached cable causing him to fall face-first into his flame-engulfed, toys bringing his horrific accident to fruition. Roman ended up searing the very mask that is forever bound to his face. His face, now a grimacing skull of hate and rage as an untitled vendetta against Batman and his allies. He should be mentioned here for the horrific inducing moments that he has delivered in Gotham City. - Batman's disturbing portrayal of drug dependency in Venom which has a good dose of Nightmare Fuel and Truth in Television thrown in full spades. Part of the Legends of the Dark Knight anthology series (issues 16-20). Batman's reason for turning towards the fictional synthetic drug is because he failed to save one little girl from drowning to death in a cavernous section of the sewer. He ends up working unwillingly with the creator of the very drug and the father of the said aforementioned girl, Randolph Porter, and begins developing sensational use of the drug. Batman starts undergoing many changes (physically, psychologically, and through motor functions). It's hard to read the whole story from beginning to end since we get to see firsthand that Batman's reliance and dependency on Venom end up showing an almost rarely seen human side of him. Begging and pleading for more of the stuff and wallowing in himself inside. And besides being weak, he becomes more highly deranged with occasional roid rages and enjoys causing pain and suffering on his foes (surprisingly without nearly killing them!). It's both disturbing and sad to see the beloved Dark Knight turn into a big shambling drug user. And not only does it affect him, but it also nearly destroys the kindled friendships of Commissioner James Gordon and Alfred, with him beginning to question Bruce's health and well-being. For Bruce to overcome the addiction, he needed to isolate himself for a straight 30 days in his cave! As you might expect, during his detoxing period, he undergoes various craves and also suffers horrific hallucinations. This very arc from beginning to end is just Nightmare Fuel, to begin with. Oh! And if you think just the description itself is bad... Wait till you get a◊ load of◊ This!◊ - Two-Face. Harvey Dent's bout with his "evil" side of himself holds many classic struggles of one's internal thoughts. Not only is he unpredictable, well organized, and wily, but he's also shown to be adept and highly dangerous. From his obsession with the number two (.22 caliber guns, second place trophies, the 2nd National Banks, etc.) judging people's fate by a flip of his scarred sided coin, to being a creepy Stalker with a Crush with Renee Montoya. Everybody knows of his horrific mangled left-sided face. But when you delve deep into his character and history, one can understand and summarize on what drove him to become on who or what he is. All because of one instance during court by a certain thug Salvatore Maroni testifying during the infamous "Holiday" murders. - Killer Croc. A terrifying semi-human monster. He's completely ruthless, has the strength of a crocodile, and can regenerate. As time has gone on, his mind has regressed more and more into that of a deranged animal. He now resides in the sewers beneath Gotham and preys on anyone unfortunate enough to get lost down there. - Bane. Merciless, bloodthirsty, intelligent, tactical, and completely, unbelievably bru tal, he's the one remembered for delivering the legendary finishing blow in the 1993 story arch Knightfall. The blow that not only shattered Batman's spinal cord and forced the Dark Knight into a brief retirement but also ruined him spiritually as well. Even after the "Knightsaga" Bane is still a nightmarish force to be reckoned with. His highlights on the list? Lets have a look! Bane fought Killer Croc to a standstill handicapped without the use of his precious Venom. He murders his father in a justifiable yet still dark Disproportionate Retribution (his father was King Snake, a terrorist leader, martial artist, and ruler of a terrorist organization called Kobra). And if you want to be in his crosshairs, wait till he juices up with Venom. Being a dark mirror (like many villains that go against Batman) it goes to show how utterly terrifying Bane can be just like his rival. - Clayface. Formerly a prestigious actor acclaimed for a certain role, now he is just a sadistic, psychopathic killer. Sure, a humongous, hulking mud body may not be that scary to some (though it depends on the source material), but think about this: he can physically turn into anybody. From your best buddy to your loving partner, even to your mom or dad. And you may not even realize it until he decides to turn you into a pasty red smear. - His updated story from Detective Comics considerably ups the Body Horror. Here, it's shown Karlo Senior was a Ray Harryhausen Expy, specializing in monster movies, whose preferred medium was a mixture of wax, putty, and a gel designed to remold industrial plastics without heat. When, later in life, Basil gets in a disfiguring car accident, he uses the remainder of his dad's stock to remold his face and later tries to buy more. However, he's unsuccessful - the company pulled it out of the market because it had the bad habit of melting off the hands of the people who worked with it. Eventually, as per Clayface tradition, Basil gets a full-body bath of the stuff. - If that isn't enough to lose sleep over, there's also always high wonderful levels of Body Horror involved. Shapeshifting abilities aside for infiltration purposes. He can morph various parts of his body into deadly solid matter or weapons. Even capable of smothering his victims within his very body... shudders* - Then there is Preston Payne, the third Clayface. Unlike his predecessors Basil Karlo (originally just a man wearing a clay mask) and Matt Hagen (the first Clayface with superpowers), Payne was a scientist who created an enzyme from Matt Hagens blood, intended to cure a pituitary gland disorder. It seemingly worked and also briefly gave him shapeshifting powers, but this was short-lived, and Payne's flesh began to painfully melt, as well as giving him the ability to meet others by touch. This understandably drives him completely insane and forces him to wear a containment suit, but he is driven to kill because spreading his contagion to others is the only thing that stops the pain of his Body Horror. Notably, this is the version that appears in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. His appearance there is ever more horrifying. - Ra's al Ghul. A man who has lived a millennium throughout time and many centuries come and gone. A man who in his mind was cursed than truly blessed. His cynicism towards his fellow man is horrid yet, somewhat understandingly truthful. Seeing humanity grow greedy and vile throughout the years he decided to take upon himself his supposed best course of action to take. Which is pure global genocide. There was a time that Batman agreed (in an understanding and intellectual conversation) about his view. Yet is disgusted that it has to involve the many lives that it would cost. Batman stands his ground and protects all life which in Ra's eyes is most unfortunate. - Not only that, having to witness the rise and fall of empires and containing many world knowledge makes him a worthy and terrifying foe in Batman's gallery of pure evil. And if that wasn't enough, theres always the dreadful temporary side effects of the Lazarus Pit. \|\|The user would undergo temporary insanity and blood lust, often attacking friend or foe alike with little to no remorse\|\|. - The sheer fanaticism of the man in pursuit of his twisted "ecological" goals is frightening. We are talking about a man who cheerfully supported the Holocaust. Worse, we are talking about a man who not only allowed his daughter to be put in a concentration camp, he actually showed up at the camp to talk to her, dismiss her begging for salvation for herself or at least her children, and explicitly state that this is necessary. Both to cull humanity's numbers, and because she dared to not agree with his genocidal plans. - How about the fact that, in recent years at least, the publishers have stopped presenting him as anything other than a delusional madman enraptured with his immortality and status as a "living god" who clings to his goals so he doesn't have to admit he's just a monster? - In Batman Beyond, he has seemingly died, and his daughter Talia has taken over the League of Assassins, returning to a now elderly Bruce and trying to persuade him to undergo rejuvenation in the Lazarus Pit. It eventually revealed that Ras had switched his mind with Talia to avoid death when his body finally broke down and is now trying to get Bruce's as well. - Catwoman, believe it or not, can be this if she's pushed far enough.◊ Just ask Black Mask.◊ - Professor Hugo Strange, another well-remembered and early recurring antagonist that predates fellow rogues the Joker and Catwoman. In his early heydays, the Professor (like many others that fit the theme and times of the days of old) was a classic Mad Scientist throughout the 1940s. Mastering the art of chemicals, psychology, genealogy he did many unspeakable things For the Evulz. (Batman and the Monster Men come to mind?) He always pulled off cliffhangers on our readers and always returned more determined than the last. In recent years, he has proven to be more wily, dangerous, and even deranged than his previous incarnations. Being the very first villain and man to discover Batman's secret identity and having deep-rooted resentment against Batman in very squicky fantasies (dressing up as Batman in a very creepy makeshift costume based on his, talking to a female mannequin, and kidnapping Mayor Klass's daughter). Heck, the man managed to gain control for a brief time in Gotham during the Legends of the Dark Knight saga "Prey" by helping the G.C.P.D as a profiler to pursue and discover Batman's identity. Secretly, to tip the scale between Hugo and Batman he manages to take in an officer with seething hate and disposition with the Dark Knight and manages to hypnotize him and groom him into a murderous vigilante called "Night Scourge". Using this as a means to show Gotham that Batman is a threat to society than being its protector nearly got away with it and almost turned all of Gotham against him. Fortunately, Batman cleared his name and made a brave stance, and managed to prove to the police as well as the city that Hugo was not to be trusted. It gets so much worse though in the next arc titled "Terror". Hugo is working hand in hand with The Scarecrow. The entirety of the story shows Hugo more unhinged, deranged, and dangerous than previously in Prey. It proves that when Hugo shows up. Something is very wrong, that trouble is brewing with his presence... - The Flamingo. He's a sadistic assassin with a penchant for eating the faces of his victims. While wearing hot pink clothing and driving a flamboyant pink motorcycle would make most villains much less intimidating, the way Flamingo does it creates a disturbing contrast with his depravity, making it even worse. - Doctor Death (Karl Hellfern), a recurring villain for Cassandra Cain, is an arms dealer that specializes in weapons of mass destruction. At one point, he creates a gas that turns people into oil which would then be sold to help fund a tyrannical regime. Another time, he harvests hundreds of corpses to create a drug called Soul that turns people Axe-Crazy. His motivations seem to solely be a combination of money and science. - An interesting thing to take note of on Doctor Death, is he was the very first recurring villain to tangle with Batman in the same year as the Cape Crusader made his first appearance in 1939! As the years continued, so did his vile hatred of Batman and his ungodly experiments and private war against "do-gooders" alike. - His New 52 incarnation is nothing to laugh at either. Taking place in Batman: Year Zero, Doctor Death creates a serum that would strengthen bones to eradicate 'human weakness'. Later it's revealed he was one of three doctors studying regenerative drugs. His area of study was hard tissue, and his experiments caused his skeleton to grow uncontrollably without regard for his organs or muscles. The others, Hugo Strange and Paul Dekker, studied brain and soft tissue regeneration, respectively. To put it in perspective, the treatments they designed somehow went even worse than Hellfern's. - The Penguin. Yes, laugh at the fat ugly man with the pointy nose. He will use his virtually unlimited connections in the Wretched Hive that is Gotham to systematically ruin your life until you succumb to despair and kill yourself. A chef found that out the hard way. Even worse, the chef may not even have been laughing at Penguin, but that didn't matter to the Penguin. Someone laughed in his general direction, and so that person needed to not just die, but be broken entirely in the process. - Poison Ivy, a moral crusader with inhuman morals. She may be a hero sometimes, but that arguably makes her scarier since she's so inconsistent — except she thinks she's completely consistent. She's just giving humanity a chance to prove it's worth, and if we fall short in her eyes, that's our fault. There are moments when Ivy will backstab her allies, but will genuinely believe that she's actually helping them somehow. Now, take this insane thought process, and combine it with an impressive set of powers: pheromonic Mind Control, body-generated poison, scientific super-genius, and command over the plant kingdom. Ivy is one of the few metahumans in Batman's rogues gallery, and thus one of the strongest baddies he regularly faces. The idea of anyone with the power to hold a knife at all mankind's throat is scary enough; the fact that Ivy has actually managed to do just that more than once is even scarier. On top of that, she has a habit of using particularly gruesome methods in killing people like parasitic fungi or having plants grow inside them. - The unnamed man who simply calls himself "an innocent guy" in the story of the same name in Batman: Black and White that was also included in a special edition of The Killing Joke. Essentially, this is a guy who's been decent and well-behaved his entire life. However, he wants to test this theory that the only way someone can be actually good and not just fear retribution is to commit something very evil to see which feeling wins out. What evil act does he want to do? Well, he initially thinks of chaining up a little girl in a sewer until she dies, but he then decides to assassinate Batman. He details his plan in disturbing detail where he'll just show up after Batman defeats one of his rogues, shoot him in the head, and just leave and destroy the evidence. Sure, it's arguably noncanon, he's a one-off character (though some fans notice the aforementioned Jim Gordon Jr. bears an awful resemblance to him), and his plan is more likely to fail than work, but he leaves a disturbing impact precisely because of how normal he looks. Hell, he could be even scarier than Jim Jr. because the latter, while looking normal, still has a very fantastical evil plan, whereas the "innocent guy's" plan is very crude, not requiring the brain of a criminal mastermind to devise, and thus seeming like something an average person would think of. <!—index—>One-Shots & Limited Series: Storylines: Supporting Characters: ## Live-Action Films ## Live-Action Series ## Animation DC Animated Universe: DC Universe Animated Original Movies: Other Films<!—/index—>	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Batman
Batman vs. Two-Face / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Yes, even this version of Batman has moments of terror. Warning: Spoilers are unmarked. - The opening credits, which are much more violent than what the audience would've expected from a cartoon about the Bright Knight. - Harvey Dent revealing that even after he'd been cured, the gas effect still lurks within him, and he can still summon his Two-Face appearance at will. - The climax has Two-Face fly over Gotham, using the evil-extracting gas to turn everyone into Two-Faces. This even applies to a dog and the characters on a drive-thru movie being watched. - In the climactic battle, Two-Face overrides Harvey Dent's mind so hard that both sides of his face turn bad. For extra points, it manifests as a Painful Transformation, Two-Face boiling through Harvey's skin.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanVsTwoFace
Batman (1966) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Nightmare Fuel in Batman (1966). - Even in such a goofy and light-hearted series, we have the episode "Batman is Riled". There is actually a moment in it when Cesar Romero's Joker is genuinely scary for a few seconds. It is during a fight at a warehouse where the Joker jumps on Batman's back and holds on for a few seconds cackling like the homicidal maniac that the character would be known again in the The Bronze Age of Comic Books and beyond. With the camera shaking frantically in the fracas, the Joker seems less a colorful arch-criminal, and more like a demonic menace like Pennywise in It would be later until Batman throws him off. - Molly's death in "Smack in the Middle". It was filmed and treated seriously. Imagine falling in a small nuclear reactor, like she did. She sure was scared when she was losing her footing. - Commissioner Gordon alluded to it when he visited the Bat-Cave later on in the season. "There are those who entered the cave and never came back." - Robin once said he heard strange noises coming from the atomic pile. WTF? - Joker's death trap for Batman, Robin, and Venus in Part 2 of the three-parter Zodiac crimes: a giant clam that swallowed up Robin. Robin's whinier voice and delivery in the Spanish dub made it worse; he was crying! - Catwoman's echo chamber death trap for the Dynamic Duo. - Mr. Freeze's freezing, and then knocking down, a man, causing him to fall and break to pieces in Season 1. - For that matter, Season 1's depiction of characters that are shot directly by Mr. Freeze and his freeze gun, especially with a cliffhanger where Freeze opts to do that to Batman and Robin instead of leaving them in a death trap situation that they could escape from. - His below-zero torture of the beauty queen in Season 2. - How he freezes Commissioner Gordon's office at the beginning of "Deep Freeze", nearly killing both Cheif O' Hara and Gordon. Gordon even tries to call Batman for help but is too cold to get his words out over the phone. He manages to, but then he passes out from hypothermia. By the time Batman and Robin free them from their frozen office, he and O'Hara barely managed to survive! Imagine how scared both Batman and Robin were listening to that phone call, listening to their two best friends dying. Commissioner Gordon: [As Alfred picks up the Bat-Phone] Hu....Help!!! Alfred: Naturally, sir. [He summons Bruce and Dick to the Bat-Phone] Bruce Wayne: [Answering the Bat-Phone] Yes, commissioner? Commissioner Gordon: [Freezing] Bat....Help!!! Bat..... - Batman's pink contaminated cowl. Then in Part II of the same episode, the "Skeletal Duo". - Mrs. Cooper suspended over a tank full of hot oil! - False Face's laughing "face" staring out of a vending machine just as the Dynamic Duo fell for Blaze's trap.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Batman1966
Battle for Dream Island / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Yes, even a show like Battle for Dream Island can have its scary moments. WARNING: This page, like any moment subpage is Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned. - Any of the deaths in the later episodes can be this, especially the fact that most of the characters are fragile. What makes this scarier is the fact they get recovered, meaning they actually died, rather than having an Unexplained Recovery. It's worse that the characters might be kids. The deaths by fire are even more disturbing. - Snowball, Eraser, and Blocky's disliking of Golf Ball has gotten them to try to kill her. - The Stinger for BFB 27, where Income Tax Return Document's house (which turns out to be Two's apartment) gets poked out by a needle. - Ice Cube has her moments of being Ax-Crazy. She once left a bunch of contestants to fall off of a cliff for being mistreated by some. Another time, she imagines some of former FreeSmart burning to death. - Evil Leafy. Sure, shes just a color swap of Leafy with bulging eyes. But then she reappeared in Get Digging. In that episode, she chased down Book, Ice Cube and Spongy, teleported over to them over a long while away and then randomly sank into Spongy when he collapsed. Pencil and Match seemed pretty happy about the latter. - Special mention goes to the ending of Episode 5a. Freesmart gets swallowed up by Evil Leafy, and the remaining two minutes are Evil Leafy standing on the edge of a cliff with quiet music in the background. It's surprisingly unsettling. - It's implied she's a Genius Loci as well. Why? BFDIA 5B is a game set inside Evil Leafy after Freesmart, Golf Ball, Tennis Ball and Rocky are swallowed by her. It's actually pretty creepy. A red ground, grey skies, spike death traps... and what is with that music? - There's an Evil Leafy maze game made by Michael for Halloween 2013. It's very amateur, but the fact that everything is an expanse of grey tunnels with the only goal being to survive as long as you can before Evil Leafy gets you can give a cheap little game like this the creepy factor. There's not even any audio to accompany it. - There's something creepy about some of the music tracks. - The second soundtrack that plays in the series is "Minutes", which suddenly just shows unsettling urgency. Not to mention, it's played with the mentioned Pentagon scene below. - There's "Night Mote" as well. It's a slow track that plays whenever we cut to the random waterfall where Roboty randomly teleports to sometimes. What's wrong about it? When it's sped up, it sounds a bit unsettling. Used to especially eerie effect in the montage of Taco trying to break out of the jawbreaker. - The "Nice Mote" variant amps up the eerieness tenfold. - The sudden Mood Whiplash that happens in "How A Future Bass House is made". It sounds like the sound of the world ending. - Four casually mutilating Pin in BFB 1 just to demonstrate how twisted and sadistic he is! - Flower whispering at the end of A Taste of Space. - This "alternate cut" of the "Leafy Detector" scene in BFDIA 1. - Golf Ball's flashback in the science museum, in IDFB 1. Not to mention that deep voice. - Lollipop also scams others with fork attractant. Think about it. - The BFB eliminations in which a contestant is sucked up by Four. Bracelety's elimination is a special mention, as Four practically swallows her. Dora's elimination is also unsettling, what with her whole body being sucked slowly and painfully into Four as if she was being sucked into a black hole, complete with spaghettification. - Pencil's elimination where she screams and gets sucked into Four in a split second. - Liy "restraining herself" in Fortunate Ben. - Even without Four, the eliminations are still unsettling. Case in point's 8-Ball he flat out dies from getting crushed by the earth and the moon. While the death itself isn't scary, halfway through being crushed, his face goes to a teeth frown with his eyes spreading out, indicating he died sad. He gets better in BFB 10, but is sucked into Four not even a second after being resurrected. Loser gets eliminated as well, and got trapped in a giant jawbreaker like how Taco did. - Speaking of sucking up, Pen's death in BFB 3 is violent and unsettling and does not match the overall sillyness of the scene. Bottle: And Pen is dead! - Taco has to eat part of herself in order to survive being stuck in a jawbreaker in the stinger of episode 2. Also, as explained in Episode 7, sound can come inside the jawbreakers, but can't come out of them. Now, imagine being stuck in one like Taco was... - There's something pretty creepy about the Jump Scare of the pentagon shaking around in the first few seconds of "Getting Teardrop to Talk". - Pretty much the entirety of BFB 7. Loser getting trapped in an inside out jawbreaker by Donut, the "data void" Robot Flower is in (and then it downloads a bomb), Remote's glitch, Loser flying off into endless space, Stapy popping Balloony's head, Woody ripping Foldy in half (this is his first kill by the way), Naily impaling Bell just to take the Liar Ball from her (and Needle doing the same thing to Naily off-screen), and, albeit very brief, the giant Four coming towards the screen in space. His small, spread-apart eyes (compared to his cartoony, big eyes) bring up uncanny vibes. - Also, notice how Fanny gets angrier and angrier as she rants toward Loser? It makes her sound serious and rather intimidating. This definitely falls into He Really Can Act. - Back to Season 2, Leafy's anger issues. Period. She tried to murder Gelatin, Needle and Puffball by throwing knives at them and successfully dodged several Acid Spitballs they shot at her. Just because Needle slapped her. - How about that time a bunch of contestants willingly threw themselves into a pit of Hydrochloric Acid? - Bug invasion in "Insectophobe's Nightmare 2". The bugs eat everyone alive (except Announcer and David), and if you're not horrified yet, the moment after Firey tries burning them should do it. Everything on screen is bugs. - In Welcome Back, Ruby ends up shattering on the ground in an attempt to get down a spiral staircase quicker. - The stinger for the episode, Coiny approaches Fries and "deep fries" his breaths. And by "deep fries" we mean dunking his body into oil and screaming while Fries screams at him to stop. And then there is Leafy, who is still Ax-Crazy, and tries to stab both Fries and Coiny before being deeply disturbed by what she sees and hides away. BOILING - The ways the contestants try to bring Four back are usually silly (Pillow licking Lollipop, Bottle hitting Golf Ball with a club, Gelatin bending a fork...). Then the contestants try breaking one of X's legs to make the shape of Four. Keep in mind that the leg X had broken was the same one he had bandaged up in Fortunate Ben. The last attempt is Firey stabbing Donut with a syringe and then getting whatever is inside of him through it. Sure, they got Four back (albeit liquified), but it looked like they sucked out some of Donuts cherry filling along with it. He looks like an onion ring when Four is sucked out. - Fanny's death by decapitation in BFB 11 is rather unsettling. Rather than dying violently or cartoonishly like other contestants, she just lays there lifelessly after she is killed. In BFB 12, it's revealed she survived her decapitation, but she has to drag her head on the ground because it's only connected to her body by its cable. The way she looks when decapitated is both disturbing and funny. - Eraser's fear of pentagons. Sure, it's mostly Played for Laughs, but it can be pretty unsettling, e.g. the stinger of BFB 12. - Firey getting stuffed into the sun. - The contestants ripping Leafy in half to see the "real Leafy". It's played for laughs, but seems that would be cruel enough. However, all tension is thrown out the window when its revealed that shes actually a football/rugby ball. - In "Happy Birthday, Battle for BFDI", the contestants literally eat their friend and fellow competitor, Cake. His line really sells it. Cake: I CAN'T HANDLE THIS TORMENT ANYMORE!!! - In BFB 14, several arms wriggle out of Four's mouth one by one like snakes as the background gets darker and the music slows down. Fortunately, it's just the arms of Death P.A.C.T. members inside Four. - In Fortunate Ben, Four literally tears X's leg off off-screen. - Also, during the airplane challenge, Four says that no flying contestants are allowed and flat-out obliterates the flying contestants with no care. Until he gets to Puffball, to which Fries says to simply disable her. This causes Four to get angry and says "Fine!" as if he is annoyed at the fact that he can't kill contestants for his own personal gain. - Ice Cube and Teardrop's "happy thoughts" in "The Four is Lava" are disturbing. Ice Cube thinks of her own friends burning for revenge. Teardrop's is her disturbingly smashing windows with a hammer, and Pillow tells her she can't do that, but smashes Pillow anyway. To make matters even worse, she screams. - Four becoming even thinner than Donut did when he was sucked out of him and killing Basketball off-screen just because she called him pudgy! He resembles leafless branches. Four: Pudgy?! You think this is PUDGYYYYYY?! - Four literally mutilating others is creepy on a whole new level. - Four becoming next-level mad. Definitely the angriest we ever see Four. Holy crap. - Four pulling four fingers out of Balloony's hand. It's just unexpected and it sounds like Four is doing something questionable with him when taken out of context. Not to mention how he's sounding like he's in pure agony. - Four himself can be pretty terrifying sometimes. - Lollipop's head is made of candy, so it's fragile, and can break. This means the stick doesn't just hold the body, but it is. - Four's acid trip-like mirage from getting hurt by Firey Jr.'s flames in BFB 16. - In BFB 14, you get to see characters get disintegrated and burned alive by lava on-screen, and there's not even a dead body. Imagine getting your head burnt off by that thing. - In the stinger for Take The Tower, Lollipop has to put up with Ruby and Leafy's awful singing, and she falls into a Sanity Slippage. Lollipop: Get me outta here... Somebody help... - Any time David gets angry. What's with his whole body turning red and lightning bolts flying out of him as he furiously screams " " Also, these come at the least expected times, which makes this a Jump Scare. AW, SERIOUSLY!? - Blocky in the first few seasons. Just imagine an ax-crazy jerk jock, who would prank others, but on the other hand, keep on killing you, not to mention his signature slasher smile. - Snowball unintentionally causing more than a single death he caused, due to Leafy's ball just bouncing off of Pencil in Don't Lose Your Marbles. - Gaty burning to death in BFB 15. Despite it being only on-screen for a second, her scream is feminine compared to her voice actress' vocal dissonance. - Flower, particularly in the early seasons, is a narcissistic, Hair-Trigger Temper Alpha Bitch who does not hesitate to threaten the characters. She gets worse in BFDI 25 when she destroys all the recovery centers and pops Bubble. - Just the thought of being locked in a metal chamber with nothing to eat or drink, and this causes Flower to Go Mad from the Isolation and bite a chunk of metal off Announcer during BFDI 25, and yet the announcer leaves. - Woody gets a heart attack over silver and grey colors in the Announcer Transportation Device, and it comes with him moaning to boot. - Fridge Logic comes into play here, because Rocky, Needle, Announcer, and Golf Ball are gray and Woody doesn't seem to be scared of them. - In Getting Teardrop to Talk, Flower gets Black Hole to get the cyanide jar to open by moving him close to the earth, nearly causing the world to end. - In Take the Tower, when Leafy is faced with fighting Firey, she begins to suffer some sort of trauma. Some viewers have commented that it looks like she is having a panic attack. - Much like BFB 7, BFB 19 is also chock full of Nightmare Fuel. Lollipop's continued (and arguably worse than before) torment in the beginning, Woody burning to death ( all on screen, no less), X still burning (and he survives it), and the Have Nots burning to death near the sun. The cherry on top? This is Loser's first death. Ye gods... - BFB 20 has the Have Cots (except Lollipop, who got obliterated by a laser from Leafy) nearly suffocate due to lack of oxygen in space. The entire scene can really make you wonder "what were Cary and Micheal thinking?". - Pretty much all the humor can be Accidental Nightmare Fuel, even when its intent is to be found hilarious by viewers. - In BFB 21, one of the Have Nots' gifts is a cardboard box for Woody. Woody ends up getting really angry, thinking that he's not being treated right, and he scrunches up the box. While doing so, his face turns red and a kettle sound effect plays He's that angry. - To top it all off, the fact that in this scene it's Woody, the one who is normally a shy coward and is afraid of everything, actually being downright livid makes matters even worse. O.O.C. Is Serious Business indeed. - At the end of every Battle for BFB episode, we get to hear what it's like in the BRB. It starts off with just Balloony screaming combined with metallic clanging. As the episodes go on, more of the eliminated contestants join in this screaming. - It gets even worse. In BFB 21, it is revealed that not even Loser can stand it. - We find out in BFB 22. It's a big rotating building in the sky spinning the eliminated contestants around in cages. While it's not as bad as isolating others, it still is torturing the characters with their fears, though at seem to get over it once Blocky releases 58 pages of Donut's diary online. - During Woody's testimony in BFB 22, both Leafy and Taco look really creepy. Leafy has red eyes and Taco has snakes coming out of her shell (although, they were actually jumping rope together). Four on the other hand... Imaginary Four: (demonic voice) Hello everyone. Protect my diary, or I will eat all of you! - His eyes also get really crazy with that last part. - In BFB 23, Purple Face escapes from his box, chasing the members of the Have-Cots around the warehouse, and eventually eating them. Alive (although they manage to protect themselves from the stomach acid with Flower's sweaters). - We also see a talking Portable Music Player, and Gelatin dissolve alive in acid. - Hell, pretty much every mean character can be this depending on the viewer. - Four's ultimate Sanity Slippage moment in BFB 28, in which he sinks into the desert, contaminating it (and possibly the rest of the world) with his presence. The ominous way in which he speaks before doing this sells it. Four: The Announcer was right; we lost all control... X: Four... It'll be okay. Four: BUT! In the end, this show is MINE! So it's time for you to leave! You can't make this show without me! Announcer: Wanna bet? Four: Just watch this: I'll be a constant presence! You'll NEVER get rid of me! (Melts into the floor) Mwahahahahaha, I'll be here FOREVER! - The face Four creates when he talks through the earth in the BFB finale. Something about it looks a bit... off. - In BFDIA 5d, Yellow Face's corpse was left glued down in the desert. Cake encounters its skeleton ten years later. Also, any water it touches is apparently cursed. The Funny Plant immediately disintegrates upon coming into contact with the cursed water. - Not to mention, Snowball can be considered unhinged in TPOT 3 and TPOT 4. Especially towards Grassy. In TPOT 3, he punches Grassy so hard that Grassy flies through the sky and off-screen. Then, when Grassy returns, Snowball ties him up and tries to get Two to punch him next. In TPOT 4, he lights Grassy on fire! What makes it worse? No one, except Basketball, finds anything wrong with it. - Marker eating a cheesecake covered in glass in the stinger for TPOT 3. He also catches on fire in TPOT 4 after accidentally coming in contact with Grassy. - Puffball forcing Death P.A.C.T Again to make a Sadistic Choice, either they save Ice Cube from slowly dying in a very horrible and painful way, or complete their challenge, in TPOT 4. - Lightning zapping Puffball in TPOT 4.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BattleForDreamIsland
Batman: Arkham Asylum / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "Prepare to face your fears... All of them! *laughs" Trapped in an asylum with a bunch of maniacal super-villains? Yeah, this is gonna get scary. WARNING:* Spoilers are unmarked. - As the Dark Knight himself, you must survive a night in the titular asylum (which rivals Rapture in terms of atmosphere), surrounded by a good portion of his Rogues Gallery, to stop a plan sprung by none other than The Joker (voiced by Mark Hamill, no less). The tone is essentially a hard "T" rating. Considering, among other things, you see a man's spine rip out of his back in close-up, it's frankly astounding the game did not wind up with an "M" rating. - And then you actually have run-ins with Scarecrow and his fear-inducing toxin. With little more warning than a cough from Batman, you get told off by his zombified parents, relive the night of their murder from the perspective of little Bruce Wayne, and get eerily unusual radio messages. To top it all off, each hallucination culminates in a platforming segment through an area that is part black hole and part Silent Hill, evading the killer's gaze of a twenty-story tall Scarecrow. And then, he starts messing with you, the player, directly... - The scene where Joker demonstrates the effects of the Titan formula on two of his mooks, resulting in a seriously grotesque Painful Transformation for both of them, with rapid increase in muscle mass and bones growing from their bodies, as well as glowing green eyes and becoming highly feral. - And then later on, when Joker uses the formula on himself and becomes a much bigger Titan mutant than the others, with his ribs sticking out, huge bony spikes protruding from his forearms and down his spine; and huge talons. That's right; he becomes a literal Monster Clown. With a sick mohawk to boot. - Killer Croc's lair. You're walking through an abandoned labyrinthine sewer, supported only by panels of rotting wood, walking as slowly as possible so you don't alert Croc to your location, knowing full well that he can surface at any time, with only a short warning. And then, once you have made your way to the most remote corner of the area, Croc gets hungry. Oh, and if you fail, one of Croc's Game Over screens ends with a horrific case of Eat the Camera. - For added Nightmare Fuel, there's no music whatsoever except when Croc attacks and when you collect the spores. No soundtrack, just the sound of water dripping, your footsteps, and Croc sniffing the air and making threats at you. - And don't think for one second you're in the clear once you collect all the spores necessary for the anti-venom. As you make your way back to the entrance, Croc will come after you more frequently. Culminating in him smashing every single platform, forcing you to run back to the entrance. But before you can exit, iron bars will land in front of you, trapping you with Croc. Don't trigger the explosive gel Batman laid before entering and you're treated to a unique first person cutscene of Croc devoring you! - Before that, Croc apparently eats Scarecrow. However, one of the after-game cutscenes shows and Knight shows that Scarecrow survived albeit with horrific injuries. - Enter the holding cells of the Penitentiary and don't get creeped out by the rabid inmates. They aren't so bad after they're released and scatter, but while they're still imprisoned? - After they've been released, a couple of them hide in the ceiling, where Detective Mode can't pick up on them. When you go near them, they drop down, scream, and leap on top of you. - The noises the psychopaths make are creepy enough, but once you enter the hallway that has Harvey Dent's cell, you can hear a psychopath screaming, but the place is completely empty. At the end, you see a grate in the ceiling. Pulling it down reveals that the psychopath was right on top of it, and he immediately jumps down attacking you. - Even worse, is some areas, like the Green Mile or just entering Clayface's area, you can sometimes hear psychopaths screaming despite you having searched the place. - Also, the mirror in the Penitentiary's bathroom, if you go back after the psychopaths are freed, has one hiding in the stall right beside it. - The Visitor Center. Dear God, the Visitor Center. The fact that it's the only area in the entire game in which you're forced to use first-person view makes it worse, as does the implication at the end of the game that Joker was in there every time you entered it. - A little game to play. Go into the Visitor Center, say "hello" to the Joker mannequin, then turn around and head back to the door. Before you leave, look back. Something wrong? - This one gets especially creepy when there are multiple mannequins, meaning the mundane explanation given by the ending of the game doesn't apply. - Another tidbit: After the second time you enter the Visitor's Center, the only thing Joker does when you approach the mannequin is laugh...and laugh...and laugh...and laugh... - Here's an In-Universe example: Enter the Visitor Center after you get into the access for Intensive Treatment. Joker will wax philosophic to Batman about how their rivalry might end. He feels that one will kill the other, but the winner might not know what he'll do afterwards. If he's being honest, Joker is terrified, not about being killed or winning, but of what the winner will do. - The part where Zsasz grabs Dr. Young and drags her around a corner with a knife to her throat. She's screaming for help and pleading with him to let her go, Joker's watching from the security cameras cheering him on, Zsasz is on the verge of snapping completely from the pressure and killing her anyway; and you're around the corner with a Batarang aimed. Oh, and if you miss, she's going to die. Good luck! - Some people like to wait out and listen to all of the dialogue of a scene before acting; it's a common thing some gamers do. You do that here, Zsasz kills Dr. Young. Oops. Joker even taunts you, saying "Who would've figured the deranged murderer would kill the poor little doctor?" He has a point. - The Chronicles of Arkham. The Asylum's founder, now existing as a spirit in the walls of his own institution and ready to lobotomize pre-criminal Harley Quinn, has the killer of his family strapped into an electric chair and slowly fried to death; sets Poison Ivy on fire, and beats schizophrenics to death to "clean the scum of Gotham City." Granted, none of his victims are exactly angels themselves, but... - The scariest part about all this is that it's not really the spirit of Amadeus Arkham, but Warden Quincy Sharp believing himself to be the reincarnation of Arkham. All of the references he makes to any Arkham inmates are the super-criminals that Batman has put there, such as Joker, Poison Ivy, and Killer Croc, as well as a sane Harley (before she joined Joker). The final riddle of the game is to figure out who he is. The last Chronicle you scan is written on the floor of the security station where you rescue Sharp, and it's just a circle with "BATMAN" written over and over again. His last message is that he wants you to continue on his work. Creepy. Also, throughout the entire asylum, there are posters which hint at this; seeing them when playing the game a second time is truly eerie. - This results in the Asylum having some of the most nightmare-inducing scenery ever seen when you realize the Asylum wasn't created to cure, but to punish. In the maximum security section of the Penitentiary, above a bunch of holding cells for the most delusional inmates surrounded by electrified floors, in massive letters on the wall reads the phrase " Mors certa, hora incerta." It's Latin for "Death certain, hour uncertain." - From the same area: " Liberate Me Ex Inferis." Can be translated as "Save me from Hell." If you saw Event Horizon, this might add additional creepiness. - Also, Homo Homini Lupus ("Man is a wolf to man"). The maximum security cell block is a treasure trove of ominous Latin. - A single line in the Spirit of Arkham's profile: "Profession: Executioner." After listening to all of his audio diaries, you realize that a cold-blooded Knight Templar can be even more terrifying than every single Card-Carrying Villain who appears in this game, combined. Best of all? He gets away with it. He claims that Batman has inspired him. You can't find him anywhere else in the game, implying he left the island to do his work. - It gets so much worse in the sequel. He's the Mayor. - And if you find his secret office (as seen here), you can see what his real objective is (this foreshadows the second game). - Not to mention what happened to the REAL Amadeus Arkham. After his family was murdered by a mental patient named Martin "Mad Dog" Hawkins, Amadeus fried him in the electroshock chair, with everyone assuming it was an accident due to Amadeus spending time ostensibly treating Hawkins. Amadeus himself was eventually committed to his own asylum and died there. The game takes a lot of inspiration from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. - In the Arkham Manor, you can see some angel statues framing a door, and they all seem to be looking down from their lofty perch. What is beneath Heaven? HELL. - In an In-Universe example, you, the player, are the Nightmare Fuel for Joker's mooks, swinging down from the rafters...cause you're the Goddamn Batman. From the nervous chatter that the enemies make, even when outnumbering and outgunning Batman by six to one, it's clear who's the prey. If not, keep dwindling their numbers and watch them look over their shoulders in jittering fear...and shooting at any small noise, whether provoked by you or not. Just watch as a group of enemies comes towards you. Don't attack them right away. They'll hesitate, until one of them gathers the courage to attack. - Pop over to Detective Mode and watch their moods as you attack them. Prior to Batman's assault, they're calm. Once he starts picking them off one by one, they start becoming nervous, then terrified. - Conversely, in the Downloadable Content, Joker is Nightmare Fuel for the Asylum guards, who are arguably in an even worse situation than the mooks with Batman. For all his scariness, Batman doesn't kill while the Joker has no such reservations. - "Did anyone hear the one about the escaped mental patient sneaking around and killing the guards one by one? No? Stick around..." - When you pick off a mook and then hide, you can hear and, with Detective Mode, see the other mooks notice the body, try to wake him up, and outright panic, as your Detective Mode indicates they have turned from calm to terrified! - Most of the audio tapes, particularly the Riddler's ( Arkham Asylum took advantage of the Riddler's canonical craziness and made him a legitimately scary villain) and Zsasz's (leading up to Dr. Cassidy home alone, Zsasz on the loose, and somebody at the door...). - Thankfully, Cassidy survives and makes a few appearances in the Medical Facility. In the mini-comic that came in the game box, it's revealed that Batman had saved her thanks to an anonymous tip...which is hinted to have come from Joker... - Special mention to Scarecrow's first interview tape, which begins perfectly normal and professional...until you hear the guards bursting into the room, Crane calmly states "as usual, it is difficult to work under such conditions," and you realize that this was Crane "interviewing" one of the doctors. And judging from the reactions of the guards and Scarecrow's other audio tapes, "interviewing" in this case involved massive and potentially permanent psychological damage. Crane's calm demeanor throughout the tape really puts the icing on the cake. - The Medical Facility is easily the creepiest building on the island. The only one that comes close is the Penitentiary which is filled with screaming psychopaths in cells and still not as creepy as the Medical Facility. - In the halls in said Medical Facility you have to go down to save the doctors, there are these weird plastic medical curtains that hang down from the ceiling. Occasionally, you will see them move without there being anyone to move them. Batman hasn't reached those curtains yet, and they still move like someone just walked through them, even when there are no goons in the hallways left to beat up, so who or what is making those curtains move? - Go find the head in a jar. It's not even part of a puzzle or anything. It's just...there. - One of the Joker's quotes in Medical is especially terrifying, as he drops all pretense of comedy and just goes straight into telling his henchmen they're in for a world of suffering. - The mooks themselves complain about how creepy the Medical Facility is and how hospitals are supposed to be clean. Considering they've only been there about an hour (this is approximately how long it takes at full tilt to get there), they didn't have the time to make it dirty, and Joker is preoccupied elsewhere, so... - There are the strap-ridden gurneys EVERYWHERE in the Medical Facility. Croc's got one of his cells there: Busted-out-of and filled with bones and human skulls. It's more than a little troubling when you also see all the experiments all over the place. - The perfectly ordinary announcements that come over the PA system before Joker takes over (especially the ones in the Medical Facility) just make everything else seem that much more hellish. One of the worst occurs in Intensive Treatment, right at the beginning of the game after Joker gets free and releases all the Blackgate inmates. It starts like a normal security level message, and then devolves into insane laughter. - Go back into that sewer/boiler room area in the Greenhouse you have to go through to get to where Poison Ivy is after you find the Titan production facility (but before you enter it to fight the Titan goons). If you climb up to a certain point, which you need to do in order to get to most of the riddles, a dead mutated goon that was part of Joker's Titan experiment drops out of a pipe. Right in front of you. Panic ensued. - If you look at the dead goon with Detective Mode, the X-Ray effect will reveal that this failed version of the Titan formula caused his arm to grow huge...but not the bones inside it. - Wandering through that particular chamber is creepy enough before you get to that point. You can hear Joker putting together his Titan formula...and he likes to hum while he works. The creepy sound just bounces off the walls in that dark, dilapidated pit. - When Batman needs to locate Killer Croc's cell, he goes back to the Mansion to talk to Cash. If you count the guards present, you'll notice that the guard who previously told Batman about the suicide collars is no longer there; talking to Zach Franklin reveals that while they were sitting there, a plant came through the window and took him away, showcasing why Ivy being jumped up on TITAN is bad news for everyone on the island. - The Game Over sequences. Scarecrow and Joker's creepy faces taunting you? Bane breaking Batman's back? Talk about a reason not to fail. One of Croc's game over sequences actually has him eating the camera. - If you try to go through the door to the sewer area before you have to, Croc pops out of nowhere and smashes against the door. - If you die via Poison Ivy's vines, you go limp and get dragged into the ground. Christ. Poison Ivy: You're nothing but food now, Batman! - Remember in the nooks and crannies and hidden areas around Arkham, how some of them would be filled with debris? Sometimes just looked like places where Joker planned his takeover, but once in a while, you'd stumble upon an obvious living area. It can be implied that patients who couldn't quite escape the island, but escaped their cells to live in the forgotten recesses of the compound, eating mushrooms, licking moisture off walls, sleeping in gathered-straw beds. Many living areas also have human bones, and one has a full human skeleton and a single candle. Sad and scary when you consider they preferred that "freedom" to whatever their incarcerated lives were like. - There is a rat with a human-sized bite taken out of it in the ventilation ducts right outside Young's office. Think about that for a second. - After you complete the game, you're free to wander around Arkham Island to finish all of the collectible stuff you didn't during the initial story missions. Even after Arkham was cleared of all its escapees, the sheer atmosphere is unnerving enough. What makes it all the worse is the pure desolate emptiness of the place as you wander through it. - The fact that all the damage that's been done to the place is still there (no one's even tried to remove Young's corpse) and the few remaining guards and doctors, like Aaron Cash, are still standing around as if they're still trapped. Go to the medical ward, and you find Cassidy and company still hiding out behind stacked hospital beds. Even though they're free, they haven't escaped; they're still afraid of what will happen if they walk out the door. - As it turns out, not all the patients disappear once you've finished the game; just the ones you've previously taken out. So you've finished the game, but haven't done much backtracking; you're a little unnerved by the idea of walking around a mostly-empty Arkham Island, but at least you're pretty sure no one's going to jump out and attack you anymore... then you walk through the Abandoned Tunnel looking for collectibles and a lunatic that you missed starts screaming and charging at you. - Clayface's cameo is cool, but fairly creepy as well. He's locked up in his cell, and you never see him in his clay form. He's disguised as Cash, Sharp, or Gordon whenever you visit him. He's always changing his disguise, too. If you pan the camera away for just a second, you'll hear him morphing. Look back and, sure enough, he's impersonating someone else. As Cash or Sharp, he will try to trick you into thinking he's the real one and begs you to let him free (you can't, anyway). However, as Gordon, he will just laugh if you talk to him. Just laugh...and laugh. - And in one instance that has never since repeated itself, Clayface does speak as Gordon. He tells you that Sharp certainly ran off in a hurry. And isn't that strange, since you told him specifically to stay put, so what could he be up to...? What, indeed. - Even creepier with Clayface, if you look at him with your Detective Mode, he has no skeleton at all. - Speaking of cameo villains, there's also Ra's al Ghul. When you get to the morgue, you can see he's in one of the drawers (you just know it's him by the tag on his foot; you never get to see his face). You investigate him to solve the riddle, unlock his profile, and then leave the morgue. Okay. Later, when you come back... where's the body? Sure, we know the guy can resurrect, but still, damn. - Many times you would be in utter silence when the PA system would play its creepy tune before Joker makes an announcement. - The regular tune was bad enough, but when the worn-down version plays, it's even more unsettling. - Even worse when, instead of playing that PA jingle, warped, insane, creepy laughter plays before the announcement. - The game can make you nervous even before you start playing it. When you first load the CD into the PS3, the game's download screen shows a series of shadowed images of characters, whilst a soundtrack plays. Only catch is that the soundtrack is made up of the echoing sounds of insane laughter. - If you have Detective Mode, you can see through doors. At one point, you can see two bodies dangling in the air, kicking, struggling...until finally they go still. Open the door, and two dead guards are hanging from the ceiling execution-style. If you don't have Detective Mode on, you won't realize that you were a mere 30 seconds too late to save them with a well-aimed Batarang. - The single patient on the upper floor in the room where Clayface is located. He never gets out. You can't get to him. He's just...there. Panting and slobbering and generally being creepy. - Some of the chatter from the Blackgate prisoners can be this, such as the one guy talking about how Joker ordered him to kill his sister, which he did. Another guy mentioned that he was told the same thing, except that he has no sister, so he just got in his car and ran some random woman down in the street, much to Joker's enthusiastic approval. - There's a Riddler trophy next to a spray-painted Joker smile. Not necessarily scary in and of itself, until you remember Riddler implying that he knows what Joker had planned... - Special mention to Batman's death by Smilex gas. He coughs and chokes for a while, while the escape prompt blinks at you repeatedly. Ignore this, and you're treated to an image of the Dark Knight slowly collapsing, his coughs devolving into him laughing insanely as he dies. - The Stinger. A crate of Titan floating in the river is grabbed by either Scarecrow, Croc, or Bane. You've seen what it just did to Joker, now go change. - Early in the game, when you break out of the facility, you're in a big courtyard and can meet some guards and talk to them and learn a bit about them along with some medics by an ambulance near the entrance. A trip through the Medical Facility later and they're all dead. - Zsasz. The very essence of Riddler's riddles later have you encountering in one of the many hidden hard to reach rooms (until Batman obtains the Cryptographic Sequencer Range Amplifier to reach it) in Arkham where it looks like a "normal" tea party taking place with the GCPD SWAT officer and Arkham guards sitting there. Zoom in and their necks are slit and severed. - This turns out to be Zsasz's MO. In another room, you see three guards, all dead, posed around as if they were playing poker. Zsasz, apart from tallying his kills, likes to pose his victims in life-like ways after he's killed them. That's incredibly creepy and that's one of the most normal, downplayed things this game has to offer in terms of scariness. - Keep an eye on Batman during the Scarecrow levels. Every so often, there'll be a flash of light, and he'll briefly turn into Scarecrow. - While walking through the hallways during the "rescue the doctors" section before entering the morgue. You'll hear pre-recorded announcements about Arkham's many facilities. Which at some point mentions a "kid's facility" for children and teens requiring psychoanalysis. This brings whole new levels of horror. There were kids there? Though most likely they only came for appointments during the day. Like a regular psychiatry. note : Hopefully. - Seeing the levels of sanity that Sharp and Young, Hugo Strange, and multiple orderlies who followed Sharp's orders displayed. Arkham probably wasn't that far off prior to Joker's takeover. - Maxie Zeus's cell. Batman can find it in Intensive Treatment behind a wall that has to be opened via Explosive Gel or the Ultra Batclaw. Thankfully, there's no dead body or skeleton in the cell, but you have to wonder: How far away was Sharp from literally walling in inmates? Or, even worse, perhaps he has already started walling in inmates. - Just the sheer number of people who die over the course of the night. Batman can see corpses of dozens of doctors, guards, and inmates around the island. According to a player who searched the whole map for corpses, 168 people died during the events of Arkham Asylum, and that's without including ambiguous cases like the guards who were inside Ivy's collapsing greenhouse.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanArkhamAsylum
Battle: Los Angeles / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The "meteors" the aliens arrive in. It's like hellfire raining from the sky. - That bit at the police station? Where one of the dead aliens turns out to be alive? Okay, so they needed intelligence, and it'd help to have an idea where to shoot at the alien physiology. Still, dragging a dying soldier into a building, and having a veterinarian and a corpsman try to identify organs by tearing away strips of flesh and skin with their bare hands, stabbing anything that looks interesting with a combat knife, and making comments while video-taping it. Important tactical data, little time, they invaded and started slaughtering civilians wholesale first, but still. Vivisecting anything with a combat knife and bare hands is a little horrifying, especially when you consider just what the E.T.s might be doing with anyone they've dragged off.... - What about those... noises the alien made during all of that? You can tell the thing's in pure, hellish, burning agony. - The irony, of course, being that the alien is in that hellish, burning agony while the marine in question is trying his hardest to kill it quickly and efficiently. - Worse still, if you're paying attention to the timeline of events, the other aliens start attacking the police station almost immediately after they begin vivisecting the wounded one. Almost as though it was calling for help and they responded.... - Made worse, during the first batch daylight combat. Obscuring smoke haze everywhere, noise from pets and vermin running around, and the aliens were really good at going from ground, to five stories up, and back without anyone noticing...Or suddenly having a couple dozen spread out over multiple roofs and streets with little to no build up, which is worse. Little warning, unless they're bringing in drone air coverage. Also, that marine wasn't the only one who jumped when that out-of-scene laundry machine started up, sounding like one of the alien energy weapons. - The opening salvo when the aliens first come ashore. The first explosion you see on camera lands in the middle of a clump of fleeing beachgoers.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BattleLosAngeles
Battlestar Galactica (2003) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned. - The first episode, "33", where the Cylons relentlessly appear and attack every 33 minutes - pure 200 proof nightmare fuel. - The whole miniseries. What started out as a normal day in Colonial life, falls apart extremely rapidly as the Cylons attack and utterly decimate the Colonies. Ships filled with passengers, cargo transports, mining ships are all left stranded as the Colonies fall. The whole atmosphere is one of dread and horror as the reality of what is happening sets in for everyone who survived. - President Roslin has assembled a fleet of over 60 civilian ships, stranded in space lanes when the Colonies came under attack. The makeshift fleet is in formation and plans are in motion to transfer passengers off the non-FTL-capable ships, when suddenly a Raider jumps in, scans them and jumps away. Faced with an imminent Cylon attack, President Roslin makes the gut-wrenching decision to have all FTL-capable ships jump away, abandoning the sublight-only ships. The pleading cries of the ship captains being left behind are absolutely horrific to hear. Imagine being on one of those ships, unable to escape, watching others jump away, and then four Raiders jump in... - Gaius having a nightmarish vision of Adama drowning his metaphorical daughter. - The Cylon attack on the colonies in the original miniseries bothered me to no end. I think it might have been the orbital view of the mushroom clouds silently bursting over the whole planet, knowing that everyone you knew who wasn't right there with you is now dead. Similarly, the scene where the vipers go dead during a Cylon attack and the pilots are trapped in hunks of metal, dead in space, helpless, waiting to be killed. - The depiction of what was going on planetside in the feature length episode The Plan was pretty grim, too. Highlights include a montage of various Colonies (some of which we had never seen before) being depicted as burning ruins, Tory and Ellen Tigh being hit by the blast wave, the Centurions roaming the streets killing survivors and, for extra nightmare fuel, charred corpses of those too close to the blasts. The whole holocaust in general qualifies as HONF, and plays upon the (quite rational) fear of nuclear war. - The look of absolute cold fury on Adama's face when Starbuck confesses her role in Zak's death. Katee Sackhoff has said you're not seeing acting from her in that scene; she was genuinely terrified that he was about to beat her up. - The Centurions boarding Galactica in "Valley of Darkness," particularly the very first time the characters run into one. Flyboy, Kat, and Apollo are walking merrily through a darkened corridor, unaware of any problems beside the loss of power, when suddenly Kat screams, and Flyboy runs right into a seven-foot-tall steel monster. The thing flexes its hand briefly before tearing through Flyboy's chest with its metal claws (spraying Apollo with blood in the process), and then swatting him aside before he can even finish bleeding to death. - The Pegasus approach to interrogating Cylons, be it the tortured, raped, and Driven to Suicide Number Six Gina, or especially the scene in which officers from the Pegasus attempt to rape an unsuspecting and pregnant Sharon Agathon. - The moment Admiral Cain Jumped Off The Slippery Slope. Badly outnumbered during a Cylon attack she orders her XO, Colonel Belzen, to launch the Viper wing held in reserve. Belzen, a loyal officer who has known her for years, objects because he knows it's a Suicide Mission and their only chance is to retreat. Cain orders him to hand over his sidearm as if she is relieving him of duty. Instead, when he gives it to her she shoots him right between the eyes in the middle of the CIC. Cain then calls for the next officer in line (Colonel Fisk), tells him that he is the new XO and repeats her order to launch Vipers. - New Caprica. ALL OF IT! Although the end of the arc has heavy doses of awesomeness. During some of the parts with Kara, if you listen very carefully to seconds without music or dialogue, you can hear people screaming. - Special mention to the scenes of Kara being imprisoned by Leoben. She's stuck living with what essentially is her stalker, who's stronger than her, a religious nut who goes on about how God's plan involves them being together, and no matter how many times she kills him, he just keeps coming back. - The Body Horror segments of the new Battlestar Galactica movie Razor are not as disturbing as the Hybrid, especially compared to the Minority Report hybrids already seen: an old man, responsible for the aforementioned Body Horror, talking cryptically and accurately about events still to come, about a main character being the root of everyone's doom, all while sitting in a tub of goo with cables going in and out, and finally reminding us, "All of this has happened before, all this will happen again. Again. Again. Again. Again," before calmly dying. - From the Razor Flashbacks, the destruction of Columbia, specifically the screaming of her crew over the radio after the ship has already exploded, until it finally cuts out. - In the finale, the look on Tyrol's face when he finds out what happened to Cally. He's thoughtful, working through it, then you see his nostrils flare and he just goes O_o and promptly breaks Tory's neck. Remember, this is one of the nicest, friendliest characters in the series. - Leoben Conoy snapping his chains and turning over a steel table like it was nothing before attacking Starbuck. If you look closely, there's a brief moment after he breaks his cuffs that the battle-hardened Starbuck, who has been laughing at him the whole time, jumps back and starts looking genuinely terrified. - Dualla's sudden, shocking, and violent suicide after pretending to be happy will leave a mark on even the most well-adjusted. - In season 4.0, even though she was The Scrappy, Cally's death by airlock (in front of her son no less) is absolutely chilling. Even worse, before Tory showed up, there was every indication that Cally planned to throw herself out the airlock, along with the aforementioned infant son. Let's repeat: a baby, being subjected to all the horrible things empty space does to you before killing you. Thankfully, the writers didn't take it that far; just dangling the possibility was horrifying enough. - Being informed you and everyone like you will be boxed indefinitely. - Finding out you're a Cylon sleeper agent. - If you're even accused, possibly even tried for treason, good frakking luck. - A humorous In-Universe example occurs when Baltar sees Head Baltar and is clearly only restrained from wigging out by remembering he's in public. - Athena's shooting dead one of the Sixes out of a mistaken belief that she intends to kidnap Hera. Not only is it unnerving how she screams at the Six and threatens to shoot her (and even Tigh when he orders her to stand down) if she so much moves a muscle, but the way that she puts another bullet in the already mortally-wounded Six while she's on the ground just takes things from what could at least be construed as an act of panic into an outright execution. And the kicker? When Adama gives Athena a What the Hell, Hero? speech at the start of the following episode, she's completely unrepentant at having effectively murdered an innocent woman for absolutely no reason, only showing remorse at the possibility that she may have jeopardized the fledgeling alliance between the colonials and rebel Cylons, and then looking about ready to kill Adama with her bare hands when he orders her thrown in the brig, with no access to Hera. - Then there's the prelude to that: Athena was living for years with the trauma of having had a stillborn daughter, only to find out that her president / head of state faked Hera's death, hid her from them, and had gotten Hera kidnapped by their mortal enemies / in-laws. And on top of that? Helo and Athena's only chance to get Hera back is for Helo to kill Athena and pray any of a million things do not go wrong and she's able to rescue her. All of which, mind, on top of the possibility Helo might be tried or courtmartialed. Roslin was lucky Adama was in the room to cool things off after she started berating Helo for "putting the fleet at risk" given she was responsible for 90% of that mess and being completely insensitive and hypocritical about it. - Baltar's situation in "A Measure of Salvation". However you feel about Baltar - and there's a pretty good argument that he brought it on himself with his many betrayals - the notion of being tortured for information you don't have is some weapons-grade Nightmare Fuel.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BattlestarGalactica2003
Batwoman (2019) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - "Grinning From Ear to Ear" runs on a lot of Facial Horror in general, but at the end there is a lovely shot of Duela Dent with her entire face removed, exposed muscle and all. - "Off With Her Head" details the most horrific part of Alice's backstory: the decade of physical and emotional torture she was subjected to from Mabel Cartwright aka "the Queen of Hearts" — having hot tea poured on her hands, her hair forcibly cut, and in general being violently beaten, all the while forced to care for her abuser. - "Fair Skin, Blue Eyes" gives us the Candy Lady, an entirely mundane woman who lives by a simple thesis - that she can kidnap any foster child off the streets, hold them for sixty days, and emotionally and psychologically abuse them until they're begging to be sold off to a gang, and absolutely no one will ever stop her, or even know what she's doing. What makes her even scarier is that probably everyone watching the show has met or at least seen a woman who looks and sounds like her. - The ending to "A Lesson From Professor Pyg" reveals that Marquis is actually a sociopath after an incident when he was a child (during the Kanes' accident) where he got zapped in the forehead by the Joker's electric joy buzzer. Ryan watches some old home videotapes she got from Jada and one of the most disturbing ones shows that while on a camping trip with his parents when he was a teenager, Marquis made his father a burger with peanut butter on it, which his father was allergic to, and he just stood there laughing while his father was dying of a terrible allergic reaction and his mother futilely tried to help him. - The very last scene of the episode shows Marquis looking at himself in the mirror and smearing blood across his lips to form a large smile that looks like the one of the psychotic clown who made him that way. - In what turned out to be the show's Grand Finale, "Are We Having Fun Yet", there's a scene at the very end where reporter Dana Dewitt and her cameraman are reporting on the ruined part of Gotham city left after the Joker's explosive blimp plot. Then, out of nowhere, they're both attacked by a mangled figured with exposed bones that kills them both unceremoniously. We have no idea where it came from, or who/what it is or was. Worse yet, the last shot is the figure walking out into the distance, meaning it's still out there ready to wreak more havoc. And with the cancellation of the series, we'll never see how the Bat-team manages to subdue this creature.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Batwoman2019
Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked. Batman's greatest enemy has arisen from the dead for one final jeer at the Caped Crusader, and this time, he's more depraved than before. ## The Film - First things first, the teaser trailer itself. A creepy, flashing red background with a monotone, deep-voiced narrator accompanied by the occasional sound of the Joker's menacing laughter. - Making things worse was the fact that it was on every Warner Bros. kids' video in summer/fall 2000. Can you imagine being a kid planning on watching Scooby-Doo, only for that trailer to come onscreen and terrify you, especially when it was paired with the Warner Bros. Halloween ad? - The opening fight with the Jokerz, particularly one moment when Terry faces off with the DeeDee Twins. He's momentarily on his knees and a bit groggy from a blow, and one twin is winding up for a kick to his head. As the scene goes quiet and you see her from Terry's wavering point of view, the utterly sadistic glee on her face and the disturbingly confident graceful movement to her upcoming attack clearly sends the message that this is going to hurt and she regards it as a high point of her life to get this chance to lay the Tomorrow Knight low. - The first scene with the Joker: Chucko: Batman showed up and we had to ditch, but we were able to save this: The console's memory board. [slides the board to Joker, who is sitting across the table and catches it] I know it's not much, but— Chucko: [uneasily] Bonk... Joker: Ah, brave new world...that has such putzes in it. Bonk: He's got us running around, ripping a lot of geek junk, but no cash! He won't tell us what his plan is, even if he has one! I want out! Joker: [amused, pulls out a gun] If you insist... [The other Jokerz gasp] - This is a considerably darker movie by DC Animated Universe standards. Something that really stands out is the attitude that Terry and Bruce have about Joker. For Terry, Joker is similar to how we, the audience, would view him: Scary, sure, but definitely as famous as Batman. But Bruce has absolutely no time for that romanticization of the past. Terry: It's funny. I know about all your other major enemies, but you never mentioned him. He was the biggest, wasn't he ? Bruce: It wasn't a popularity contest. He was a psychopath, a monster. - What truly sets the tone of the movie is just how afraid Bruce is the whole time to the point that he is ready to call his entire partnership with Terry off just because he can't handle what Joker might do to Terry if he gets a hold of him. Not even a rogue Superman scares Bruce as much as Joker returning. - The Joker in general in this film. In most other DCAU interpretations, especially with Mark Hamill voicing him, he's over the top, laughs a lot, and has a quirky air about him. In this movie? Joker is considerably colder, darker and more cruel than you'd expect. He laughs a lot less than he usually does. Hell, when he first shows up, he doesn't even laugh, and speaks in a low and cold tone of voice for the majority of the scene. Even the very few who weren't shaken by his appearance in Phantasm will very easily be disturbed by him. Given that Hamill's Joker is very easily characterized by how over the top and expressive he is, to hear him limiting that to a select few moments is legitimately disturbing. - That scene where the Joker comes out of the floor at Wayne Enterprises and smiles at Bruce. Think about it this way. The nightmares that Bruce mustve had about the Joker thats enough to drive anybody insane because, lets be honest, the Jokers face alone could give you nightmares. Its most certainly not a pretty face. In fact, its pretty damn terrifying when in the right circumstances. - A scene, shown only in storyboards as a bonus on the DVD, shows Terry -after he's been fired as Batman- following Bruce to an abandoned Arkham Asylum. Bruce enters, slowly walking through the dark, run down remains of the infernal building, and stops, visibly unnerved, at a grisly, torn-down operating theater with some clownish decorations... (where we know all too well just what happened several decades earlier) As he painfully reminisces what happened in that ungodly hall, he looks up and freaks out at some unseen horror, storming out like a bat out of hell, barely missing Terry. Confused, Terry enters the room and, looking up, he sees a wretched ragdoll made to look like HIS batsuit, wearing a wicked painted smile, and with two -if we understand the context- utterly chilling words written on it: I KNOW. Even in its crude format, this scene's images of Arkham Asylum's silent, decaying halls and the Batman puppet are downright terrifying, doubly so when you understand this is a place where such twisted things happened that even the former Batman is scared. - Not only does this scene work as further foreshadowing that Joker knows Bruce's identity, but it also explains why Bruce -who was in disbelief that Joker was truly back- is now urgently synthesizing the antidote to the Joker's toxin; Until then, even if he had been cautious enough to get Terry out of the Joker's way, Bruce wasn't fully convinced this Joker was the real deal, but seeing a clearly recent (as indicated by Joker's use of the current batsuit) threat placed at the site where only FIVE people knew just what had happened, it became frighteningly clear: no matter how it's even possible, this IS The Joker...and Bruce Wayne is next. - Everything involving the flashback, possibly the most horrific, vile and terrifying thing to ever happen in the entirety of the DCAU. - Batman and Batgirl cautiously entering the abandoned Arkham Asylum, with the echos of a woman's dissonantly calm voice singing "Hush Little Baby" all through the dark hallways. If this scene came without a prelude to hint that it was Harley who was still her usual self, it would have been very haunting. - Anything involving Joker, particularly the following quote, which is positively chilling... Joker: We couldn't [adopt] legally, but then we remembered you always had a few spare kids hanging around. So we borrowed one... - The way Batman just growls "I'll break you in two" at Joker. You know he means it. - It goes further than just meaning to do it. When Batman is first tied up by Harley's bazooka, he does what you'd expect Batman to do: flip out a knife from a compartment in his glove and start sawing away at the threads. But when "Joker Jr." is revealed and Bruce sees what Joker's done to Tim, he snaps his bonds with a roar of rage and hurls the knife straight at Joker's face. Joker calmly ducks the knife and only now does he start laughing. Because no matter what happened next, ; Batman finally snapped and tried to kill him. Joker won - The soundtrack, "Joker Family Portrait", makes it all the worse. While it starts off as a light and bouncy, if somewhat morbid, riff on '50s sitcom themes, complete with Mickey Mousing, then everything stops dead with a sudden low piano chord as Tim is revealed Strapped to an Operating Table. As both he and Joker begin to laugh uncontrollably, the horns play a Dark Reprise of the earlier "family" leitmotif. Worst of all is the high, screaming electric guitar notes, apparently created with the vibrations from a music box. - A line you'd never want to hear Joker say: Joker: But all too soon, the serums and the shocks took their toll, and the dear lad began to share such secrets with me... secrets that are mine alone to know... Bruce . - After revealing to Batman that he knows who he really is, Joker says what may be the most sadistic, evil line ever said by ANY incarnation of the character: Joker: It's true, Batsy. I know everything. And kinda like the kid who peeks at his Christmas presents, I must admit it's sadly anti-climactic. Behind all the sturm and Batarangs, you're just a little boy in a playsuit It'd be funny it weren't so pathetic... crying for mommy and daddy! Ah, what the heck, I'll laugh anyway! - Tim himself after what Joker does to him. Everything about "Little J" is just wrong; the stooped, awkward gait; the permanent (and probably surgical) rictus grin; the psychotic wide-eyed stare, and that laugh! Heck, just take a look for yourself! - Joker's Mind Rape of Tim is considered such a monstrous Moral Event Horizon at this point that even Harley Quinn isn't forgiven for helping him with it; she seemingly gets Killed Off for Real for it note : She survived, though, partly because of Poison Ivy giving her a Healing Factor and partly because one of the creators of the series favors her. And despite the implication that she genuinely cared about Tim, she's still particularly terrifying this time around, especially with her cheerfully blase attitude towards what Joker did to Tim and how enthusiastic she is about trying to murder Batgirl. Harley: Okay, so he roughed the kid up a little! But I'll make it right! Batgirl: Yeah, you're mother of the stinkin' year. Harley: [grabs a boulder to bash Batgirl in the head with] You'll see... we'll be one big happy family! - The idea that Harley genuinely wanted a family actually makes her part in the situation even more horrific if you think about it. She was perfectly willing to help Joker sacrifice an innocent boy's sanity for the sake of having a child of her own and shows no objections to it at all. - To a lesser extent, this flashback marked the end of Harley's chances at redemption, at least in the Bat-family's eyes. She tried so hard in the original series to go straight but couldn't kick her love for the Joker or her paranoia that the world hated her. Batman helped when he could, hearing her out and calming her down when seeing she was tortured at Arkham. After this night, it's implied Harley goes straight without the Joker's influence but never resurfaces again, knowing that Batman and Batgirl would never forgive her. There's no apology, no water under the bridge because Tim is permanently traumatized and nothing Harley can do would make up for that. Laser-Guided Karma got to her; Joker recruited her granddaughters, who were Jokerz gang members and had inherited "Nana Harley's" murderous intent. - Barbara's tired tone when she tells Terry they never found Harley's body, "but I doubt she would be causing trouble now". There's regret, a bit of loathing, and frustration at how the tragedy went that she knew Harley could have been a better person. - The uncut version has Joker get the upper hand on Batman through a surprise knife attack, slashing his chest and stabbing it deep into his leg, enough so that it gets lodged in there and causes Batman to loudly cry out in pain. Made even worse by the fact that this is all but stated to be the reason for Bruce's limp in the present day. - While it certainly doubles as a moment of awesome for him, the scene where Joker invades the Batcave and gasses Bruce is particularly nightmarish, especially the POV shot from Bruce's eyes, which now provides the "welcoming face" for this page. - When Terry heads back to the Batcave after being assaulted in the nightclub, he finds the clock smashed, "HA-HA"s spray-painted all over the cave (and it's worse in the uncut version of the film; the paint is blood red) and, worst of all, something you'd never expect: Bruce on the floor by the Batcomputer with a large smile on his face, apparently dead from Joker Venom. - Doubles as Tear Jerker when you realize this is a Call-Back to Terry's origin as Batman. He came home to a similar scene one night and found his father inside, brutally murdered. The killer may even have painted/carved a smile on Warren McGinnis' face a la Heath Ledger's Joker (it was meant to look like an attack by a gang of Jokerz). Terry's whispered "Please, God, no " says it all. - Fortunately, Bruce is still alive, and is able to point Terry in the direction of the antidote to save him. Regardless, this doesn't make the scene look any less terrifying. - During the nightclub scene, after Dee-Dee separate Terry and Dana, she immediately gets grabbed by Ghoul, who then proceeds to put a hand over her mouth and during the close up, you see him lick his lips with an incredibly sadistic grin on his face, before he pulls her off to the side, and into the crowd. The whole thing reeks of sexual assault. - One could argue the uncut version is darker, but Bonk's death in the re-edit version has him hit with Joker gas and dying of laughter as slowly as possible with his teammates looking on in fear. - The uncut version's pretty bad. Joker pulls out his fake "Bang!" Flag Gun. Bonk breathes a sight of relief. Then he and the audience find out it's a spear gun, and he's Blown Across the Room, dead. The other Jokerz stare at Bonk's corpse as Joker demands allegiance, before the DeeDee twins are ordered to dispose of said corpse. - As mentioned in the commentary, truly the worst thing about that gun is how it's a double-subversion of the My Little Panzer trope: It has a bright neon-red plastic ring around the muzzle, just like all toy guns are supposed to have to keep police from mistaking them for real guns, needlessly endangering the children playing with them. Yet, in one of Joker's typically cruel violations of all things decent and sacred (in this case, childhood innocence), the gun is not a toy and not safe at all. - The scene where we see just what Joker did to Robin. And the edited version of it looked even worse. Just... that look on Batman's face as he sees the film. - The Joker's deep, chilling voice narrating the events in both the cut and uncut versions of the film is truly terrifying, as well as the creepy music that accompanies it. - "You've lost, Batman. Robin is mine. The last sound you hear will be our laughter." The way Joker says that line is what makes it truly creepy. - Even more chilling is Joker's death scene, which varies depending on which version you watch. - In the edited version, Joker gives Tim the laughing gas gun and tells him to "make [Batman] one of us." However, Batman's voice easily breaks through Tim's mind, and he tosses the gun away and pushes Joker into a room with two tanks of water; the Clown Prince of Crime gets knocked into one, gets soaking wet, and tries going after Tim, but he slips and turns on the electrode machine. The scene immediately cuts to the outside of the room (providing us with a Reaction Shot from Barbara), where his horrifying death scream is heard! Nothing says it's Nightmare Fuel for kids like this one! And you thought the film developers were trying to make things any easier. It doesn't. - The uncut version is even more terrifying: Joker tosses the "Bang!" Flag Spear Gun to Tim, then pulls Batman high as his trophy and says, "Make Daddy proud. Deliver the punchline." Besides his chilling voice, Tim giggles like a maniac and, if you've seen the scene with Bonk, you know what's gonna happen: He pulls the trigger once and the "Bang!" flag pops up. When Batman tries to calm him down with "Tim...", he keeps giggling and doesn't calm down very easily, only more slowly than the edited version. The giggling seems to increase in intensity as Tim cannot actually lower the gun, ultimately pointing it back at Batman. The Nightmare Fuel starts getting higher and higher as Joker, the blood still on his mouth, loudly barks out, with a horrible smile of triumph on his face. And the creepy music starts escalating up to eleven as Tim laughs more loudly and is about to pull the trigger as if this were the end of Batman. But once the boy finally fires the gun...the projectile doesn't hit Batman at all. Instead, it hits Joker in his chest, sending him flying across the room onto the giant building blocks. Tim couldn't actually stop himself, only having just enough willpower to aim the gun away from Batman at the last possible moment. Gasping weakly, the Joker mutters out his ironic last words: "That's not funny... that's not..." The Nightmare Fuel finishes off with his dying gargle as he gets choked up in blood, and then his body falling lifelessly onto the floor as the projectile is driven into his chest. Truly a Family-Unfriendly Death that's less scary than the edited version, but still... "DO IT!!!" - Robin's disquieting laugh escalating into insanity before gradually fading into broken sobs. - The Background Music that accompanies this terrifying flashback scene, "Arkham Mayhem," is almost all Nightmare Fuel and part Tear Jerker. Give it a listen... if you dare! - One change that definitely is worse in the revised version is Joker's urging Tim to pull the trigger. The uncut version is an unambiguous "Make Daddy proud... deliver the punchline" meant to show Tim will kill Batman in the same manner Joker kills Bonk. However, the revised version is an unclear "Make him one of us." While this could mean that Batman will die with a smile on his face, there could be another, more terrifying option: Joker plans to do to Batman what he did to Tim. - We already have a clear idea what a Jokerized-Batman looks like in the form of " The Batman Who Laughs" and it's... not pretty. - Barbara's final quote to summarize the story really sells how evil it truly was. Barbara: With his last act of cruelty, the Joker had tainted us all with compromise and deception. I guess he had the last laugh after all. - Barbara says it took a year for Tim to regain sanity, thanks to their friend Leslie Thompkins. As we see, he was never the same regardless of the treatment. - Grand Theft Me is quite chilling in virtually any work of fiction, and this film certainly offers no exception. Joker states that, with time, he will learn to permanently suppress Tim's natural consciousness, effectively causing a Death of Personality. - Joker's Villainous Breakdown. Imagine, if you will, as Joker's usual demeanor is chipped away piece by piece as Terry openly mocks him to try and catch him off-guard. First, he gets snappy, which isn't so bad. Then he screams and completely loses it, and manages to swing a table at Terry... a little surprising. Pinning Terry down with the table, standing on top of it, yanking the mask off, and proceeding to strangle Terry, producing one of his most insane laughs ever given, sounding more and more unhinged as he speaks? Downright scary, especially when you get a POV shot from Terry's eyes for a few seconds. "YOU'RE NOT BATMAN!" Joker: [looking furious and * euphoric]* C'mon, McGinnis... Laugh it up now! You miserable little punk! LAUGH! IIIIII CAAAAAAN'T HEEEEAAAAAR YOOOOU! - Harley finds out at the end of the movie that her granddaughters were involved with her ex. She comes under an assumed name with Anger Born of Worry and a bit of guilt, smacking the girls and telling them off for breaking her heart. Even though they're released into her custody, Harley says she hopes the law throws the book at them at their trial. Character Development or Parental Hypocrisy? And if Justice League Unlimited is any hint, her strict parenting didn't reform the girls. ## Behind the Scenes/Other - The fact that, despite voicing Joker for nearly a decade by this point, Mark Hamill actually felt uncomfortable voicing him in this film. Let's put that in perspective. In the original series, Joker repeatedly killed people in droves, abused his girlfriend, stalked a guy for years on end, and created Joker Venom which is basically Nightmare Fuel in gas form. All of which was turned up to eleven in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. And yet what Joker did in this movie unnerved his voice actor. - Some viewers of this movie might be wondering why the opening credits feel so, empty, with nothing but a black screen and flashing text. There exists a deleted version of an abandoned opening title sequence intended to play alongside the remixed opening of the Batman Beyond theme. From start to finish, this opening is Nightmare Fuel as credits pan across blood cells, cranial nerves and collections of dendrites and neurons. To make it worse, it also reveals a microchip forcefully inserted into a human brain complete with nanowires feeding into it. As it turns out, this is foreshadowing as we are getting an inside look at the Joker's nanochip that was forced inside Tim Drake during the former's torture sequence done to brainwash him. This was likely deemed to be disturbing enough that it had to be cut altogether. It has to be seen to be believed. note : An additional reason for why this was ultimately cut is that it spoils the Joker's return and therefore makes the twist noticeably less surprising - The Deleted Scene in which Terry follows Bruce to the Joker's gravesite at the old Arkham building. Bruce walks through the desolated hallways, passing by the old cells that were originally occupied by some of the Rogues Gallery (Poison Ivy, Two Face, and Riddler, specifically), before finally reaching the Operating Theatre. He walks up to the table we will later see "Little J" strapped to, before noticing a shadow above him. He looks up, and a horrified expression crosses his face. Just as Terry reaches the door himself, he has to quickly dive out of the way to avoid being seen by Bruce, who runs out absolutely terrified. As soon as he leaves, Terry enters the Theatre himself, glancing around the room before finally looking up and seeing what Bruce saw that got him so spooked; the Joker's . Someone dug it up and left it there as a chilling message for Bruce. And written on the body's chest, we see that message is just two simple words: corpse, hanging from the rafters, grinning down at him . I KNOW	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanBeyondReturnOfTheJoker
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "But a bell cannot be unrung! He's hungry! He's found us! And HE'S COMING!" "That son of a bitch brought the war to us, two years ago. Jesus, Alfred. Count the dead. Thousands of people. What's next? Millions? He has the power to wipe out the entire human race. And if we believe there is even a one-percent chance that he is our enemy, we have to take it as an absolute certainty!" — Bruce Wayne Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice not only shows the downsides of humanity, but also goes deeper into alien terrors like its predecessor. All of this adds up to a cocktail of nightmares that will haunt you in your sleep. All spoilers on this page are left unmarked. You Have Been Warned! - From the SDCC trailer: Lex fawning over a chunk of Kryptonite. - Empire's cover photo of Superman looks downright intimidating, with his chalk-white skin, hunched posture and Kubrick Stare while standing in a ruined city. It's as if they're trying to validate all those negative opinions of Man of Steel. - The track "Must There Be a Superman" is a surreal and harrowing composition that reflects the inner fears the world has about Superman. It sounds like something written for a Silent Hill game.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanVSupermanDawnOfJustice
Circleverse / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes In-Universe example in Shatterglass. Tris is horrified when Niko reveals to her that Lark (of whom the book says this: "She [Tris] loved Lark") once worked in the entertainment section where the murderer of the story is committing his murders. Then the following conversation compounds it: Tris: She [Lark] actually wore the horrid yellow veil? Niko: Actually I think she wore it as a neck scarf. Now that's an unsettling thought. (the killer strangled his victims with their veils) (Tris draws the Circle of the Living Temple on her chest)	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BattleMagic
Batwoman (Rebirth) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - Kate's repeated doses of fear toxin in the second arc result in, as one would expect, some pretty freaky imagery. - In issue #13, Kate returns to her old house in Brussels, now long abandoned. The atmosphere is quiet and very creepy, and not helped by the fact that Kate is still having minor hallucinations since she still has fear toxin in her system. - The Plague that affected the Coryanan foxes resulted in both aggression and Blood from Every Orifice, which is bad enough. But the weaponized version used by the Many Arms of Death, on people? It features the leaking fluid symptoms, but then causes the infected individual to explode.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatwomanRebirth
Bayonetta 2 / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes # As a Moments page, all spoilers will be unmarked! This is about the 8th most disgusting angel you'll see. As you may have expected from a game that took a Darker and Edgier turn, Bayonetta 2 has quite a bit more of the fuel to go around than before. - The Prologue shows the Angels essentially committing a terrorist attack on a crowded city, putting countless innocents at risk, purely to kill Bayonetta and Jeanne. - Bayonetta and Loki going into Inferno to find Jeanne. After all, Inferno is Hell. So it's probably a given that the place... doesn't look very welcoming. It gets more and more messed up the further in you go. Take The Lost Woods and put it in Hell. You get a gnarled mess of vines, trees and hostile demons up to the eyeballs. All this done as an ominous red sky overlooks it. That menacing looking palace in the background doesn't help matters. - Some of the new angel designs. Enrapture (pictured to the right) in particular is not pretty to look at. - Glamor looks pretty monstrous when intact, but nothing too strong. After being damaged, it looks absolutely revolting. - Similarly, Valor looks a touch odd, but not really frightening at first. But looking at its face after you've damaged it reveals that it seems to have no left eye, but instead it has what looks like a mouth. - While it doesn't appear in any frightening scene (it's the theme for the battle between Bayonetta and Labolas vs the Masked Lumen and Fortitudo), The Lumen Sage & Fortitudo is a pretty creepy track when listened to on its own. - The Demons, as you may expect, are also pretty damn unnerving, but Insidious stands out as a massive manta ray with eyes in its wings which double as huge jaws, and a giant grinning skull on its main body. Imagine the surprise players may get when the "Jaws" First-Person Perspective kicks in and its revealed to belong to this monstrosity. - Resentment. These are some of the rarer enemies in the game, and for good reason. These things will fire laser beams at you that, when they hit you, turn you into a child for a while. This leaves you near helpless as is, but the really horrible part is that it can instakill you if it gets too close to you, the only enemy that can do so in the whole game. And how does it do this? It eats you. - The torture attack against Malicious. There's something to be said for being devoured alive by a swarm of locusts... - One of Loptr-Aesir's attacks is to open a blue portal on the ground where if you get caught and don't evade/dodge/flee quick enough, you get to watch Bayonetta shrink out of sight and disappear in a series of blue sparks. Which is the same power to erase anything from existence that Loki uses against Aesir. - You likely have to try to make it happen, but if you fail to successfully guide Loptr into Gomorrah's mouth, he stops himself in mid-air, smirks at you, then lunges towards the screen. Cut to "THE WITCH HUNTS ARE OVER", in a manner similar to failing to guide Jubileus into the Sun in the previous game. - Put yourself, if you will, in Jeanne's situation throughout the game. You're just smashing angels with your buddy, who summons Gomorrah to eat the giant angel and all is well, until that giant unexpectedly breaks out of the summon and moves to attack Bayonetta. This results in you having to pull a Heroic Sacrifice to save her, resulting in you getting dragged into Inferno, while all your friend can do is watch. And then, your soul ends up in the clutches of a power-crazed demon who consumes you to become more powerful and even more monstrous. Eesh, imagine if Bayonetta hadn't rescued her. Made worse by the fact that it looks like for a while, the rescue has failed. - Guess what? We finally get to see Rodin in the process of making a new weapon! The process in this case involves trapping the demon in the weapon whilst they are still alive. And implied to be fully aware of their situation the whole time. - The Stinger. The mask. The smirk. Goodbye Balder, the noble Lumen Sage. Hello Father Balder, the Omnicidal Maniac. - The description for the demon Sloth reveals that it ambushes the souls of pious humans entering Paradiso, so it can drag them to Inferno instead.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Bayonetta2
Batman Forever / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Good evening, Mr. Wayne. Relax. Tell me... your dreams. Tell me... your fantasies. Tell me... your secrets. Tell me... your deepest... darkest... fears... —Riddler's new improved Box "Oh, come on! This is Batman Forever! One of the Joel Schumacher films! You know, the same guy who introduced neon lights and campiness to the 90's Batman movies!! Surely there can't be anything all THAT scary about this film, right?" R... r-right...? - In general, Two-Face is this. Despite his goofier moments, he's a twisted maniac (both physically and mentally) with a horrifying vendetta against Batman and is more than decided to kill everyone, including children, just to get back at him! - The situation of the guard in the beginning can be quite so, when you think about it. Imagine being hostage to a mentally deranged, horribly scarred criminal with a fixation on luck, and also thrown inside a money vault, that's being lifted into the sky, AND GETTING FILLED WITH ACID! Sure, to Batman that's commonplace, but try being on that situation after having a relatively normal night as a mere guard... - The death of the Flying Graysons and everything related to it. The music, the screaming, the imagery, the slow-motion fall...it's just as tense and scary as it is tragic. Also, once again, imagine being in a circus, probably with your kids, and then seeing how the fun and innocent show gets taken over by a criminal gang who's now planning to blow the whole place up just to lure Batman out!! - Stickley's murder has shades of this. Nygma managed to make it look like a suicide and started leaving clues before he even decided to create his villain identity. - The fake suicide tape counts as well. Between the laughter as the guy jumps and the weird shape he has; it all looks so... strange. - Could be a moment of Fridge Brilliance as to why Bruce insists that Stickley's family gets the full death benefit package, even though suicide is not covered; Bruce sees the tape, and still isn't convinced that it was a suicide. - The Riddler himself can be considered this. Sure, being played by Jim Carrey he might be more fun than scary, but there are also times when he's in full Chip Douglas mode and then some. His Dissonant Serenity while murdering Stickley, his twitching, his fanaticism over Bruce Wayne turning into psychopathic hatred, his sadistic glee when watching Two-Face causing chaos and horror in the circus...he might not be Heath Ledger, but he could as well qualify for a nice Joker. Also, by the end of the film, he has managed to read the minds of practically everyone in Gotham and even managed to find out who Batman is! This leads him to prepare a quite effective assault on Wayne Manor that ended with the Batcave destroyed and Bruce almost dead. Had it not been for his penchant for riddles stopping Two-Face, this could have very well been the end for Batman! Not bad at all for a campy and nerdy guy, ain't it? - The scene where he's absorbing the thoughts of Gotham's residents with his TV machine. The ghastly music leading up to an image of the Riddler sitting on a big chair, trembling and twitching with a disturbed expression on his face...can be kind of creepy. - That scene where Chase visits him in Arkham. His already-unstable mind has completely snapped, and the scene ends with that same creepy music playing over him cackling while he wallows in his own psychosis. - Any of Batman's nightmare/rememberance scenes. The dark atmosphere and visuals sure help, but then there's that FREAKING BAT flying at the viewer too! Imagine being a kid running away from home, falling onto a big cave, and then facing what was intended to be Man-Bat can REALLY give you chiroptophobia for the rest of your life or make you as obsessed with bats as Batman himself. In a Deleted Scene we see him appear in front of adult Bruce Wayne as he found his father's journal. Not only was the pacing tense and suspenseful, his appearance, from the glowing red eyes to the horrid face and slow movement are more than enough to make anyone shit their pants, Batman included. And that's only half a joke. - The street gang that Dick chases down when he steals the Batmobile, with their eerie, garishly-painted faces. However, the prize goes to their skull-faced, deep-voiced leader. - The climatic showdown with Two-Face sees him on a ledge with Batman, Robin, and Chase on a lower ledge, the jagged remnants of a platform that shattered during the rescue attempt lying at the bottom of the structure that Riddler used as his base. Harvey attempts to shoot the three of them, only for Batman to remind him of his coin. He flips it, only for Batman to throw more coins in the air. Two-Face, attempting to find his coin, loses his footing and gravity does the rest. We get the Gory Discretion Shot of Two-Face's hand sinking into the water as his coin lands in it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanForever
Baywatch / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes This is the moment I live for. When I can feel the fish make its last, desperate attempt at life, we're connected and I can feel it struggle, and I can feel it when it surrenders. Do you know why I wear these ? So that you can see yourself the same way I see you. Have you ever heard the sound a whale makes when it's been harpooned? It sounds like women screaming.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Baywatch
Batman Film Series / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes On this night, crime gained a new face. Batman (1989) Batman Returns Batman Forever Batman & Robin	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanFilmSeries
Beautiful Bones: Sakurako's Investigation / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes ## "The Princess Who Loves Bones" - Sakurako and Shotaro analyze the crime scene of an old couple suspected of having committed suicide. Upon further analysis, the former concludes that it was someone who made it look like a suicide by killing the two and covering up the scene afterwards by having their corpses dumped into the sea. What makes this worse is that the Asahikawa City police were already making the conclusion that it was a murder-suicide case without taking the possibility of murder into consideration. ## "Where Do You Live?" - The young girl's mom getting killed by a drug addict. Without her quick thinking, the child's younger brother would've been killed by the addict, although he was beginning to suffer a heat stroke since he was in the basement. - The blood on the young girl's bag. - Getting stabbed in the stomach area. It's bad enough that you need to be careful as a police officer since you're expected to face danger, but it's bad enough that something unexpected and fast can happen badly to you without you knowing it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeautifulBonesSakurakosInvestigation
Battle Royale / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The infamous Cold Open of the movie shows a girl who managed to win the Battle Royale she was placed in, sporting an extremely creepy Slasher Smile. The opening scene of the manga is even more gruesome, showing the girl smiling horribly and not even looking human anymore. - The ridiculous amounts of Gorn in the manga. Even the novel is filled with huge amounts of it. - The fact that every student in Battle Royale's Japan lives in a world where they could get placed in The Program no matter how nice they are. - Even worse, in the English manga, Shogo mentions killing a French exchange student who was in his class when they were selected for the Program. Imagine being a parent from France or America or Britain who sends your child off to have a fun and educational foreign experience, only to learn that your child is now going to be forced to participate in a brutal, sadistic deathmatch, and there is nothing you can do to save them. - When you learn that the kids are only in 9th grade, it makes it even creepier that the government forces them to kill one another for what's implied to be For the Evulz. Even worse in the manga in how its mentioned how the students are expected to horribly torture, rape, and kill each other for the commercial entertainment of masses overseas, meaning the Japanese Government is selectively killing its own children citizens for profit and ratings. - Since other students won The Program shows how many people were willing to slaughter their classmates, with many shown to be driven into insanity because of it. - Your best friend might kill you, or will you kill him/her? - The horrifying part is this happened in the movie, and it's easily missed: the two girls who pledged to be friends forever? They're announced dead at the same time, in the same clip, during one of the updates. They killed each other. - Either that, or they formed a suicide pact, which isn't much better. - Or they were killed cowering together. Or fleeing together. Speculate all day, all we know is they both died around the same time. - The constant fear that anyone in your class may turn on you is very creepy. - Kazuo Kiriyama finds killing his classmates the same as playing an instrument and the scary part is how much he's a virtuoso in both. - Just about any scene with Kazuo Kiriyama attacking someone turns nightmarish with many wondering if he's even human. Michael Myers, eat your heart out. - In the film, you have to wonder what kind of person would sign up for The Program for fun. That person is Kiriyama. - Kiriyama isn't an isolated case either, Shogo mentions his year had a 'volunteer' too. One who it's entirely possibly that Shogo had to kill personally. - When \|\|Sho\|\| gets Out-Gambitted by \|\|Kiriyama\|\| he can do nothing but scream as \|\|his head is about to explode\|\|. - The Slasher Smile Mitsuko gives in the film is terrifying. - Megumi's death late at night at the hands of Mitsuko, along with the haunting soundtrack, is horrifying and informs us that Mitsuko is most definitely playing this game for keeps. - Anyone that resists going into The Program is killed. - In the manga, there are lots of flashbacks with most characters being happy-go-lucky... but they're the exact opposite now. - The remnants of \|\|Mitsuko's\|\| corpse are anything but pretty. In the manga, she dies completely naked. - Even at \|\|the end of the book, Shuya and Noriko fail to completely stop The Program from existing, meaning kids are still being killed while they're to be hunted as fugitives\|\|. - The crotch stabbing scene. - Also in the manga there's a good deal of eye screams. - A manga scene where Kiriyama casually pokes out the eye of the class' former PE teacher, grabs the hanging eyeball and squeezes it definitely takes the cake. The whole scene is exhibited with rather elaborate, graphic panels and Kiriyama's disturbingly calm remarks. "It's like egg whites" - There is a particularly disturbing eye scream in Battle Royale II where one girl's eyes are shot out by a sniper and she flails about wildly screaming for her best friend, who is in a nearby naval boat screaming for her - then the blind girl's boat explodes. - There is a particularly disturbing scene in the manga involving Mitsuko and Yuichiro. \|\|Yuichiro is dying of a bullet wound, and Mitsuko, who is somewhat deranged at this point after killing Tadakatsu and has regressed to her fucked-up childhood mental state, decides to make him better...by raping him. Yuichiro begs for her to stop, as she is hurting him, and Mitsuko responds by stabbing the poor little guy in the neck with her sickle, seeing his cries of pain as a betrayal. As he dies, she is shown as a giant, damaged version of the doll her father gave her, asking, "How do you like my eyes now?"\|\| - It's very unsettling to see how quickly classmates (and even friends) start killing each other. (And without even counting the likes of Kazuo Kiriyama or Mitsuko Souma.) - In the movie, Kiriyama's eyes after he's \|\|blinded by Shinji's bomb\|\|. - Kaori Minami, a chubby acne suffering girl who has gone insane under the pressures of the game. She's under the belief that the Idol Junya Kenzaki speaks to her as a coping mechanism and fears the touch of anything against her skin, as she feels it makes her acne worse, to the point she murders a kitten with an insane slasher smile on her face and tries to kill her classmates for trying to get close to her, talking about the "Bad poking kitty!" the whole time. - In the film, Kiriyama's attack on the clinic is spinechilling and could easily be pulled from a straight horror movie. It starts when screaming and gunfire intrupts a cozy bonding moment between Noriko & Shuuya and Kawada, forcing the try to dim the lights and draw the curtains in an attempt to hide. The three are forced to watch \|\|Kiriyama kills Oda\|\|, then we get their point of view as Kiriyama attempts to get inside the clinic -rushing by windows, pulling at the locked doorknob, and putting his bloody hand on the glass- all while Noriko and Shuuya cower in fear and Kawada stands in front of the door ready to start blasting. And it ends when Kiriyama \|\|stuffing a granade into the mouth of Oda's severed head and tossing it through the window\|\|. - Especially scary from Shogo's point of view. He knows that Kiriyama joined the game willing and mentions that his year had someone like that. It's entirely possible that Shogo himself was the one to kill that volunteer and, while he manages a cool head throughout, it's easy to imagine Shogo is remembering what went down then.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BattleRoyale
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes There's a reason why this is one of the darkest and most famous Batman stories in comic history. The world has become a Wretched Hive and Batman's become much more vicious in turn... The Mutant leader in the film adaptation is this trope incarnate, from his design that looks barely human as if he was a Humanoid Abomination, to his brute strength. Gordon invokes this in his internal commentary about \|\|seeing the Mutant leader kill the mayor\|\|. I hear a nervous giggle and an animal growl. I hear handcuff links snap. I see something I'll take to my grave. Batman's rematch against the Mutant Leader is Nightmare Fuel for how unflinchingly gritty, gross and brutal it is. The two wrestle in a filthy mud-bath surrounded by the Mutant gang members and it's a pure slugfest that shows just how damn scary this Batman can be even without his gadgets or the element of surprise. Batman makes the Leader bleed like a faucet with a simple slash to the forehead, giving us the wonderful mental image of blood mixing with the sludge. With surgical precision, Batman ends the fight by snapping the Leader's arm and leg before pummeling his face into the dirt, all with a sadistic smirk on his face. It's a miracle Batman didn't kill him. After Superman \|\|is nearly killed by the Soviet nuke, his body deteriorates and rots in midair with his mouth forming a scream of anguish\|\|. The following scenes, \|\|as the EMP pulse wreaks havoc across America, causing widespread power outages and plane crashes, including one plane plummeting down right into Gotham and setting an entire city block ablaze. For a few brief horrifying moments, Gordon thinks his wife has died in the fires.\|\| There's something chilling about Superman's composure during his fight against Batman. He seems completely calm when implicitly threatening to kill one of his oldest superhero allies. He doesn't want to kill Bats, but if he has to, he'll do it and be completely dispassionate about it. The Big Blue Boy Scout of old, this ain't. How about \|\|the Joker killing a talk show host, his other guests, and the entire audience. He foreshadows it by claiming that he's going to kill everyone in the room, though the therapist states that he's simply trying to vent himself. The image of their corpses and how Miller did the already-creepy Joker Toxin effects will probably give somebody nightmares\|\|. The guy who \|\|scratches his fingernails off trying to get out of the room... and fails\|\|. Joker's television massacre was nasty enough in the comic but the movie goes great detail of the audience panicking and nastier joker-smiles. Plus Joker kills his doctor not with one of the dolls snapping his neck but by slitting his throat with a broken mug. In the comics when the Joker kisses the lady guest and her face transforms into a hideous grin. There's that scene, and then there's the sight of \|\|the Joker and his henchman handing out cotton candy to Cub Scouts at a fair\|\|. Later, as Batman and Robin are Bat-glidering into the fair, we see from their perspective \|\|the same Scouts, all dead from the poison in the candy and sprawled around like an image out of Jonestown. The Joker's lines under Ax-Crazy on the main page are taken from this scene, for added horror\|\|. The flying robot kid things. "Eeugh yourself, bitch." The fight between Abner and Robin ends with Abner \|\|choking Robin from a roller coaster car in motion. However, he isn't paying attention to his surroundings and is decapitated by a low overhang. The book makes it clear Robin is clearly traumatized by the experience.\|\| The movie \|\|is even worse in which Robin is more directly responsible, knocking Abner into the coaster's gears where his shirt gets caught and his head is crushed. The Gory Discretion Shot is nullified by the horrific sounds of grinding and splatter as he dies\|\|. Even more disturbing is Joker's next line. He's not scared, he's not ready to give up, he's just excited for what comes next. After all these years, he's finally getting the punchline he's always wanted. The Joker: Be still, my heart. The film goes more into depth around the Joker's rampage in the Tunnel of Love, following him as he shoots everyone he comes across, playfully exclaiming "Excuse me! Pardon me! Sorry about that! My bad" and the like. The casual glee he gets in just shooting as many people as possible is very, very disturbing. The entirety of the fight between Batman and Joker in the Tunnel of Love. The former, losing blood and having blurred vision due to blood loss, had an imagery of seeing Joker going full Psycho Knife Nut, lumbering towards him, pinning him to the ground. The close look on his bloodied and battered face doesn't help. Batman ends the battle by grabbing the Joker by the head and then snapping his neck, paralyzing him. However, the Joker knows he's the real winner. He pushed Batman over the edge. Then he kills himself by twisting his neck all the way around. And the Clown Prince of Crime is laughing even as he's dying. Joker's \|\|face as he dies and KEEPS this face even as a smouldering skeleton\|\|. Batman (inner monologue):Stop laughing. Let's just say pretty much every scene with The Joker. Michael Emerson makes him utterly terrifying and he does it without ever raising his voice or even showing much emotion beyond amusement. This tone of voice doesn't even change as he's casually murdering or maiming people left and right with sadistic glee. It just shows how completely removed from any humanity The Joker truly is. In the original script, Batman was \|\|to fake his death\|\| by using a hospital tube needle to gouge out a pill hidden in the flesh of his forearm. The scene was described as bloody, as painful and as having Bruce enjoying it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanTheDarkKnightReturns
Beast: The Primordial / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - Let's start with the fact that a Beast is literally a spiritually-incarnated nightmare come to life. Remember some of the nightmares you had? Well, a Beast's soul is literally formed from their essence. - There is also the implications of being a Beast to begin with. You feel compelled to harm, dominate, scare, steal from, or even outright kill people around you, while still retaining a human conscience to tell you this is wrong. And should you try to resist these urges and let yourself starve for it, the mythological monster you have as a soul will go on a rampage in people's dreams to feed itself. But perhaps worst of all is that anyone human around you, including your loved ones, can suddenly turn into a super-powered psychopath obsessed with killing you. It doesn't matter how good your relationship with them were, how much they used to love you: the moment they turn, they will immediately feel compelled to attack and murder you. - The existence of Lairs, places that Should Not Be. And hints so far imply that Beasts can drag humans inside of them, trapping them inside the Beast's own personal world. Oh, and did we mention that, if you try to escape, some Lairs can lead you to The Hedge? Or The Shadow? Or even The Underworld? - To say nothing of the fact that, in its Lair, a Beast no longer has to bear the metaphysical weight of the human world. Meaning? It can revert to its true, terrifying form... - Worse, a Beast needs not to actually drag you to its Lair in order to benefit from all these advantages. When they open a Primordial Pathway, they aren't using some form of portal; they are causing the location in the physical world to temporarily overlap with one of the Chambers in their Lair. Meaning that, for a moment, the place in the physical world becomes part of their Lair, allowing the Beast to benefit from all the Homefield Advantage and to revert to its true form. And don't bother trying to leave the area; all the exits will just lead you to a different Chamber, where you will be trapped when the Beast finally closes the Pathway, leaving you alone in the Lair as an easy bit of prey for her Horror... - Moreover, while it's easier for them to open a Pathway in the locations the Chambers of their Lairs are based on, they are not restricted to it. Any place can do the trick, as long as it shares even the slightest similarity with her Lair. A Makara's Lair looks like an underwater cave? She can opens a Pathway in a swimming pool, or any place where it's wet or dark enough. An Eshmaki's Lair is a gigantic maze? Any place with enough corridors and/or walls will do. It's incredibly easy for you to attack a Beast in a place resonant with her Lair without even noticing. - And then there are the various traits a Lair can have. These include complete darkness, acid rain, sharp objects everywhere on the ground, bugs everywhere, and many, many more. A Lair is not a safe environment for a Beast's enemies. - Atavisms, powers that invoke a Begotten's true form and its physical abilities, are two different kinds of Nightmare Fuel. If you happen to be a supernatural individual yourself, the human disguise you see slips, and you see the seemingly normal guy turn into a dragon long enough to spit fire at you or a giant long enough to pick up a car and throw it. If you happen to be a hapless mortal, however, you don't see the Beast form... just the normal guy breathing fire or throwing a goddamn car at you. - Then you have their other set of powers, Nightmares, which basically consist of how they can Mind Rape you in various terrifying ways. All a Beast has to do is either touch or stare at you and speak a few words, and suddenly you fall under the illusion that your entire body is rotting away, have a vision of something so terrifying that your fright can cause you physical harm, the delusion that maggots and/or bugs covering your entire body, or be overcome with the conviction that your entire life is meaningless, to give a few examples. Oh, and they can create more of these by taking inspiration from other supernaturals. A Beast who spends some time with vampires can learn to transmit Nightmares to people through her blood rather than a stare or contact, while one who hangs out with werewolves can cause victims to randomly suffer psychotic rages and attack everyone in sight. Those who associate with mummies can develop a Nightmare inflicting Laser-Guided Amnesia. - The fact that Slashers do trigger Kinship with Beasts is all kind of disturbing, even in-universe. Keep in mind Slashers are overall still humans, and many of them don't even have supernatural powers. Yet they are still monstrous enough that Beasts actually feel like they belong in the Dark Mother's family. - The only thing worse than the Beasts are the Heroes who fight them. At least in the Beast's case, they don't mean to hurt people (sometimes) and usually try to limit collateral damage; but Heroes are more than willing to kill people if it means getting to the Beast, and are firmly convinced that they are the main characters of a story that operates on Protagonist-Centered Morality. Even Hunters think these guys are insane. - There is also another thing to consider: Heroes have a Healing Factor that allows them to survive against impossible odd and recover from any injuries. They are incredibly hard to kill, won't give up or listen to reason, and are obsessed with killing Beasts, with no regard for anything that gets in their way. They essentially are a slightly different kind of Slashers who just happen to target Beasts. No wonder Hunters don't like that. - Another scary thing about the Heroes? They can use their connection to the Primordial Dream to drag in regular people in order to use them as their "followers", essentially using them as mooks to support them against the Beasts. This is bad enough if they do it with civilians and give them guns or bats, but just imagine what happens when they get cops (or worse, military personnel) to join them. To make it worse, they have no regard for the people they drag in their mad quest and will sacrifice them without a second thought. - While Heroes might sound sympathetic at first, the book offers some examples illustrating how bad they can be. Notable mentions include a girl suddenly deciding she needs to kill her boyfriend, or a group of activists who plan to place a bomb under a house. And then, you have this bit of text showing the trial of a Hero who burned a Beast's entire family alive, with the Beast herself confirming none of them were Begotten. - A particularly disturbing one is Marian Jones, who used to be a nice, quiet housewife with two kids, and lived a happy life... until one of her sons went through a Homecoming at the age of seventeen. After a few vain attempts to understand why her son was suddenly becoming distant, staying out late at night, and keeping secrets, she started suffering nightmares involving his monster form. She eventually came to the conclusion her son had been replaced by the monster of her dreams, and her response was to try to kill him (notice that by this point, her son had likely done nothing wrong intentionally — the nightmares like the ones she suffered are something Beasts have no control over and typically happen when they are starving because they didn't feed enough). When her murder attempt failed, causing her son to run away and her husband to understandably call the police, she ran off with all their money and dedicated the rest of her life to become a religious zealot traveling around the world, killing all the monsters she can find (not just Beasts, but also vampires, mages, changelings — as far as she is concerned, if it's magic, then it's evil and must be destroyed. Even regular humans who spend too much time with monsters can become her targets if she is in a bad mood). And she is still looking for her son, being somehow convinced that he is the source of all monsters in the world and will cause them to all disappear if she kills him. - While Conquering Heroes goes out of its way to portray sympathetic Heroes, it has a real piece of work in the form of Dwight Whittaker, the Web Weaver. A borderline sociopathic bomb disposal operator who deserted the army when they put him in a desk job away from his beloved bombs (because they suspected he was going to set them off to see what would happen), he killed his superior officer and took a job as a mercenary in the Amazon, quietly using his time there to learn all there was about poisons. The one person he liked (who explicitly regarded him as a Yandere in the making) was a Namtaru anthropologist who he nearly burned to death when the Beast was sating his hunger, and then thought that said Namtaru had eaten his crush. That wouldn't be so bad, except Dwight's not in it for revenge; rather, what he really hates is the fact that Beasts come off as better than he does; the instant he realized his first real prey had a family, he started on a campaign of kidnapping and murder, ending when his target tried to negotiate for an antidote to a long-acting poison Dwight applied to his family...provoking the voice-trigger fuse bomb he put in that phone. He's become The Dreaded for any Begotten who see his distinct silver spiderweb; not because he's the strongest Hero, not because he's the smartest, but because he's the most cruel. Even Serial Killer Michael Bellinger comes off better than he does (as Michael at least restricts his palate to monsters, and part of what makes it fun for him is removing the people who are hurting his patients). And the kicker is that he barely remembers the Namtaru, he doesnt even remember what he looks like. - Heroes use Integrity for their Karma Meter, more or less like ordinary humans; while it's not quite a measurement of how good or bad someone is, it's still a pretty good indication most of the time. Most of the example Heroes have about 4~5 (for the record, the Integrity for a starting character is 7) - the ones in that range have at least some kind of purpose, or feel guilt about what they do. Most. The last two Heroes mentioned, Marian Jones and Dwight Wittaker? They both have a measly Integrity 2, and absolutely lack any scruples or real justifications. - It's worth noting that not all Heroes are deluded, narcissistic, egomaniacal quasi-Slashers. Marlena Sarcosa, from Conquering Heroes, hates Beasts, but has a very understandable reason for it considering that one killed her wife, and only really hunts down Beasts that prey on her community and does her best to protect the people who live there. Beast Player's Guide has Merivan, who helped her Beast daughter put down the monstrous Rampant and become an Incarnate whose Myth was healing and protecting the innocent. And the corebook does explicitly say that not all Heroes hunt down the Begotten - it's just that those are the kinds that you have to worry about. Like Beasts, being a Hero is what one makes of it. In other words, the kind of loathsome behavior Heroes are notorious for have no more excuse than a Beast who uses what they are as an excuse to terrorize and bully humans. - Each of the Inheritances that a Beast can have/achieve is its own kind of scary: - The Retreat happens when a Beast abandons her human part to become her Soul/Horror alone, leaving nothing but an Ephemeral incarnation of a nightmare who wanders in the Primordial Dream and might retain some memories and personality of its former self. What makes it actually scary, however, is that this rarely happens on purpose: any Beast can go through this Inheritance against her will if she is killed while separated from her Horror (usually when she has fed well enough that her Horror goes back to sleep, leaving her temporarily Brought Down to Normal). Better be careful to not raise your Satiety meter too high... - The Merger is what happens when a Beast decides to stick to the physical world so hard she pulls her Horror into it and literally merges with it, warping its body in the process. The resulting creature is a usually mindless monster with no humanity left who becomes obsessed with satisfying its hunger in the most primal way. And unlike the Retreat, we are not talking about an Ephemeral Being here; the Merged Beast is a one hundred percent physical monster who can and will most likely hurt you if you cross its path. Worse, their mere presence warps the landscape around their territory over time to reflect them, essentially turning it into a physical version of their old Lair, and attract supernaturals. - The Beast Incarnate, perhaps the scariest of the six, has the Beast subvert its Legend to become a true Myth, turning into an even more powerful version of itself. It can now switch at will between its human and monster forms without bothering to open a Primordial Pathway, travel to the Primordial Dream no matter where it is, and perhaps the scariest of all "shut down" Heroes. This is the good end Inheritance, as while the Beast is not human anymore in any way, their conscience survives the transition and merges with their Legend to become a Myth — their brand new role and position as a monster-god. But the worst part is how you ascend: at best, aside from having at least Lair 8, you can do it by defeating a Hero in such a one-sided way that he is made completely and utterly irrelevant in your Myth, becoming the undisputed leader of a Hive... or you can spread your Myth by feeding in a particularly spectacular and brutal way (such as killing a lot of people) in order to mark everyone. - To illustrate the horror the last one implies, we get a text describing a method used by a Beast to reach the Beast Incarnate: it makes a cave its home, spreads stories to attract people, then whenever people come to visit it, kills or makes some of them disappear while releasing the others on the condition they will talk about what they saw to someone else, spreading the story. Rinse and repeat. - Also, keep in mind that nothing stops the Incarnate from being pretty damn evil in the first place. Conquering Heroes has Luca Rohner, an Incarnate Eshmaki who had his Devouring in childhood, and from the instant he realized he could become more powerful by being a bully, he became one of the worst Ravagers to ever live, eventually having his Incarnation in college. Today, he's essentially the ruler of Zurich's supernatural community, and he's well-known for his feeding strategy: he waits for some poor sucker to come to him for financial investment, or an intern who wants him as a mentor — the more promising, the better. Then he slowly takes his clients and students apart, piece by excruciating piece, watching as they fall apart meeting his deliberately impossible standards and keep on losing due to his hidden hand, all in the promise it will be worth it...and then once he's had his fill, he yanks it away, finding the Despair Event Horizon a fine dessert (he especially loves the taste of someone being Driven to Suicide). And everything he does is perfectly legal; he's so powerful in his mundane life he doesn't even need to use his supernatural abilities to have food just walk into his waiting claws. - The Divergence results in complete severance of the Beast and Horror. The way this is achieved? The Beast starves its Horror until the two fall on each other, consuming one another. Worse, the two aren't completely separate, and the Horror usually finds the Beast an annoyance... - Erasure is when a Beast destroys its Horror completely. It starts with stealing a soul from another human, and ends with killing its own Horror. It's noted that some outsource this to other Beasts...or Heroes... - Speaking of Heroes, Beasts can become them in an Inheritance called Inversion. The Beast finds an Anathema for its Horror, then uses it to keep the Horror near death while drawing power from it. The Beast now acts much like a Hero, stalking and killing others like a serial killer. And she has access to Nightmares, Atavisms, and Anathema. - Conquering Heroes adds the Insatiable, aka what would happen if Beasts lacked even the barest scrap of humanity. They inflict a Hate Plague on the world by simply eating, because they have to eat humans in order to feast on them — preventing their fears from joining the Primordial Dream, and allowing spiritual entities to access the physical world more easily. In effect, they Mind Rape humanity's subconscious just by existing. They see Horrors and Beasts as upstart prey who just exist as a source of good homes by stealing their Lairs, and their true forms are so estranged from humanity that mortals are driven mad with fear and confusion upon seeing them — and have a significant chance of doing that to supernatural beings, too! Each of the examples is pretty terrifying in its own way: - The Authority, a cruel overlord of all the crime in his city who came into his power in childhood, learning he could turn his body into molten lava and using it to gleefully murder his bullies in the most painful way possible. He's since become the nearly faceless lord of almost every supernatural faction in his home out of sheer raw power and the fear people have of him. - The Blind Man, perhaps the oldest Insatiable alive today, having been around since at least the Achaemenid Empire. While he acts like he just has Blue-and-Orange Morality, in truth that's just an expression of his Hunger for Prey; he knows fully well how unsettling he is and acts deliberately insane to sweeten the fear of his eventual meals. That and the fact that he has insects for eyes, would be bad enough, except there's a reason he constantly has a damp stain around his chest; he's continually laying eggs from his navel, eggs he claims are nothing less than pieces of the Primogenitor that one day will all hatch simultaneously and unleash an even more Eldritch Abomination on the world than any of his brethren. You do not want to know what happens if you eat one — and he's good at tricking people into eating them anyway. - Null Snyper, a vicious Troll and psychotic cyberbully who transformed into a Void Insatiable when she realized she drove a friend of hers to suicide with her caustic commentary...and loved every minute of it. She's become a digital spider fit for being the ultimate Internet predator, ruining lives from the safety of her Hacker Cave; she's long figured out how to turn the worst elements of hacker and especially Men's Rights Activist culture to her advantage, realizing she can create an army of borderline sociopathic minions simply by posting the right rant, and relaxing while her pawns gradually tear apart some poor sap's life because they can. Even worse, she never needs to leave; she's realized she can inflict Nightmares over things like Skype and so long as she's observing someone take their own life or lose it in some other way due to her manipulations, she can eat almost as well as if she was there. Her only limitation is that she's terrified of leaving her house, and as she gets physically hungrier, that is going to change... - Peter Slaughbal, a circus clown from the '50s-'60s who at his first presentation developed a creepy obsession for one of the women in the audience, and started stalking her, eventually luring her in the hall of mirrors and devouring her. He then made a routine of picking a prey in the audience, all while gradually corrupting the rest of the circus and turning them into his personal cult of helpers. A cell of hunters discovered and confronted him, only for all but one to get slaughtered. The survivor, Jean Lansberry, returned for revenge, and managed to defeat him by trapping him inside a painting, which she kept for fifty years — until she succumbed to Alzheimer's, resulting in her great-nephew and his wife accidentally freeing Slaughbal after they inherited the house. The Insatiable immediately stalked and devoured them. Now a shadow of his former self, he travels from town to town, presenting himself at parties where he looks for people going home alone to stalk and devour.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeastThePrimordial
Beast Wars / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "Mmmmm... Is that fear you are feeling, Maximal? Mmmm, yesss... My spark — it feeds on terror. Let it grow... Let it consume your circuitry. Feel it, yesss, feel it! FEEL THE FEAR!" Transformers: Beast Wars is a very violent show, exploiting the Mecha-Mooks loophole as far as it can. Characters are bashed up, blown apart, shot, stabbed... This is not a show for children under ten, having been written with an eye towards not boring those who grew up on the original Transformers and were at that point in their teens and twenties. Spoilers are unmarked - Tarantulas, is essentially, The Mad Hatter without the whimsy, and very much a sadist, which is hinted at with the exchange below. Toss in good ol' arachnophobia and you have yourself one of the most horrifying Transformers characters ever created. Cheetor: This is a dumb plan, web-face. I don't have any real blood, just mech fluid. Tarantulas: Oh, my filters will adjust. It is the act I enjoy more than the nourishment. - Apart from the threat to Cheator, Blackarachnia's attempted download of Tarantulas's data trax later on results in, among other quite frightening visuals, her being trapped in a web while he closes in on her as a giant spider, apparently with intent to eat her alive. - Tarantulas being attacked and seemingly killed by Inferno in "Other Voices" was brutal even for Beast Wars; A lot of the destruction thus far had been played for laughs, but when Tarantulas is set on fire he simply screams and staggers around uncontrollably before collapsing, without the slightest bit of comedy. He got better, but for the rest of the episode he was, to all intents and purposes, dead, and his later reanimation implies he actually was killed rather than being taken offline. - In "Other Voices", the fact that the Vok used Unicron as A Form You Are Comfortable With while speaking with Optimus has terrifying implications towards their powers. - And this is only reinforced when Tarantulas was faced by the Vok avatars they extracted from Tigerhawk. Tarantulas arguably knew more about the Vok than anybody else, including Megatron, and had cheated death twice with his backup plans, but what does he do when he sees them? Screams hysterically while making what looks like a superstitious warding gesture, and then fires blindly at them to the point of accidentally killing himself in panic. Just what did he know that scared him so much? - The Vok Planet Buster was all kinds of terrifying, being the aliens' official response to a handful of robots contaminating their "experiment", and it proceeds to blow up all the energon on the planet. If it wasn't for Optimus sacrificing himself, it's likely the whole planet could have been destroyed with everything on it. And even after the blasted thing's destroyed, it's still trying to kill everything due to the Quantum Surge that comes in it's wake. The expanding blast wave engulfs the whole planet, cutting through shields and starship hull like tissue paper, radiation bombarding the planet like deadly rain. Rattrap, Cheetor, and even Megatron cry out in agony as their superstructures mutate from the radiation, and on first viewing you can't tell if they're dying in front of your eyes or what (and Scorponok and Terrorsaur in fact do die). And then there's that hellish noise that pervades the Axalon and Darksyde as the radiation cuts through. After the Planet Buster weapon and the Quantum Surge are done, half the planet is good as burnt. - Despite the tragedy of the character, Rampage, definitely qualifies for this trope: - His backstory establishes him as a failed experiment created by the Maximals (y'know, the good guys). The original mission of the Axalon was to dump him someplace far and barren. - On Earth, Rampage is reactivated in "Bad Spark" and proceeds to tear Tarantulas limb from limb (offscreen). Blackarachnia and Silverbolt come across Tarantulas's arm hanging from a tree and laugh about him being "disarmed". They later discover the rest of him, and are subsequently attacked by Rampage. - The scene where they find what is left of Tarantulas is disturbing in of itself. They had previously thought that the energon storm had damaged him but then realize something else had done it. Silverbolt explains that Rampage was responsible, to the surprise of Blackarachnia who said the Maximals thought he was dead. Silverbolt admits they were wrong, and Rampage may be immortal. - It takes the combined efforts of Silverbolt, Cheetor, Blackarachnia and Optimus Primal to shoot him off a cliff, making Rampage The Juggernaut in a Slasher Movie. - To top it all off, he was invincible and insane, and murdered and ate an entire colony of Transformers. - While never stated in the show the aforementioned colony that Rampage killed and ate was not a transformer colony. - Remember Tarantulas's early characterization? Rampage more or less took that over as the creepy cannibal, all the while playing it up into the stratosphere. While Tarantulas usually had an end goal of some kind, Rampage is entirely unhinged to the point that torture for the sake of pain is an end onto itself. And none of it is ever played for laughs. - Despite all the above, what Megatron does to his spark in this debut episode is arguably even more terrifying: - Megatron finds Rampage damaged... and proceeds to cut his spark in half offscreen. Back at the Predacon base, once Rampage is healed, Megatron holds up Rampages spark in a box-like contraption, the spark held between several spikes of Energon, which he then squeezes, causing Rampage to yell in pain. Then Megatron proceeds to force Rampage to join the Predacon ranks, all while doing a creepy Evil Laugh. - Later in the series, Megs uses that part of Rampage's spark to create an evil Transmetal 2 clone of Dinobot, who has no compunctions about torturing the spark to compel Rampage to continue to obey him, while he seems unhurt by it, and does so almost every time with a dementedly sadistic grin on his face. - It's more disturbing than that. Both of them show the same crackling pattern when the spark is harmed. Dinobot 2 is feeling exactly the same pain, and doesn't care at all. - Rampage could very easily have just been an Ax-Crazy musclehead, but instead he's played like an even more sadistic Hannibal Lecter. During the episode Changing of the Guard, Rattrap uses a bathysphere-like device to try and reclaim the sunken Axalon's Sentinel module and comes face to face with Rampage, who seizes his vessel with one claw and just starts squeezing it hard enough to crack the glass while taunting Rattrap. Rampage: (disturbingly softly) Come out, come out, time to play. sinister chuckle - While he did lose a little bit of his unholy scariness after his debut, Rampage still remained a powerful and very threatening enemy to the Maximals, surviving everything from being blown to pieces by both his own weapon backfiring on him after Dinobot shoved Waspinator into his cannon and by Ravage's transwarp cruiser's primary weapons, taking a massive missile to the face, being impaled by a stalagmite, and other injuries thanks to his immortal spark and super-accelerated healing ability. It says a lot about him when his demotion from The Juggernaut stopped only a couple rungs down at Implacable Man. - Transmutate, the malformed, mentally stunted, childlike being from the episode of the same name was deeply unnerving. The fact that it was then blown up by the two Transformers who were trying to protect it didn't help... - A part of the disturbing nature of this character is how brazenly it captures a mentally-stunted character. It's overall a surreal episode, given its place in the series: an action-packed, tragic game-changer episode just preceded it, and the next three episodes would go on to truly solidify the series' place in the Transformers canon with some epic revelations, and sandwiched in the middle, we have this odd, docile episode about a mentally stunted robot that is just "not quite right". - Proving once again that this is a subjective trope, many fans actually saw it as The Woobie. - Cheetor's dream in Feral Scream is pretty disturbing, particularly what Cheetor transforms into in said dream. - Cheetor's roar echoing across the landscape in the dead of night. - Feral Cheetor's first appearance sees him stalk and dispatch a whole group of predacons, including Dinobot 2 and Megatron, all the while moving too fast to be seen clearly. The scenes in between the attacks are very tense and paranoid, particularly when Megatron panics and shoots Waspinator by accident. - More to the point, Megatron himself is panicking by then. This is a guy who laughed off the imminent destruction of the planet he was stranded on, and used it to take out Optimus. Every time something goes wrong for him, he is at worst briefly angered, and at best uses it to his advantage. Feral Cheetor, though? He's reduced to blasting at random shadows. And it doesn't help. - There was a scene where Megatron goes to the Ark to steal his ancestor's (That would be G1!Megatron's) spark. Instead of cutting it out like he did with Rampage, he does something even more horrifying. He uses a tentacle-like appendage to rip his ancestor's spark out. - Then there is what Megatron does to Dinobot after his sacrifice. He took their greatest hero, and made a clone of him more powerful and dreadful than ever. Megatron made him into a horrible insult against his memory on purpose and every scene featuring him felt like something out of a horror movie. Now, try to imagine how it must have felt for the Maximals, especially Rattrap... - Worse, there were talks of an unproduced episode idea titled "Dark Glass", where Rattrap would try to probe Dinobot II and see if there was any trace of the original's personality beneath the fierce clone. - While his very existence is nightmare fuel in its own right, his nature and appearance don't help matters. His beast mode resembles a skeleton, his robot mode looks scarred and patched together and he gives off the vibe of being a reanimated corpse like a zombie or vampire rather than a "natural" being like the other characters. While Waspinator was intimidated by the original, he was never outright fearful, but when he meets the clone, he is terrified. - Given that sparks = souls, it is instructive to contemplate just how much Predacon technology revolves around horribly abusing them. And that at least some of the characters don't just end up dead, but with their sparks utterly extinguished. Forever. This doesn't necessarily mean "oblivion", just that their sparks are blasted out of the physical universe forever and forced either into the Allspark or the Pit (Transformers Heaven and Hell, respectively). To say nothing of all the Mind Control. - Megatron's last resort was to wipe the entire Cybertronian race from existance by killing Optimus Prime (and thus the Matrix) before the Great War could end. This would pretty much wipe everyone on the show but Tarantulas (and that's only in the 3H continuity because he's got Divine Parentage in the form of Unicron) from existence. It's thusly no small wonder that Megatron is reluctant to go through with it. - Tarantulas and the Tripredacus Council aren't given clear origins in the show; but Word of God indicates they had been considering a Cybertronian origin for them had the show continued, ala Liege Maximo and Jhiaxus. - There's also the fact that destroying Optimus Prime would have also destroyed The Matrix of Leadership, leaving absolutely no means of defeating Unicron when he arrives in 2005, which would have meant the end of Cybertron and Primus. - Inferno spent most of his post-debut screentime being Megatron's Laughably Evil Dragon. Then came The Agenda (Part 2) where we see just how psychotically devoted to "The Royalty" he is when he detonates a stockpile of raw Energon Crystals in an attempt at killing Optimus and Cheetor with a suicide attack. If Beast Wars hadn't been renewed for another season he actually would have died trying.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeastWars
Beauty and the Beast (1946) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The castle itself. While it has the enchanting feel to it, the human-like arms holding the candles and the statues having eyes looking at Belle can give some people an eerie and unsettling vibe. - The loud roar, which wakes up Maurice after falling asleep from eating, that was presumably made by the Beast himself. - The scene where Beast returns, after running away from being upset about Avenant's proposal to Belle, showing up covered in blood implying of his vicious hunt he went on.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeautyAndTheBeast1946
Beauty and the Beast (2017) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Gaston: I am done playing this game of yours! Where is Belle? Maurice: The Beast took her and she... Gaston: ( trying very hard not to lose his temper ) There are no such things as beasts! Or talking teacups! Or magic! But there are wolves, frostbite, and starvation! LeFou: ( stands up ) Deep breaths, Gaston. Deep breaths. [Gaston breathes deeply, then turns to Maurice] Gaston: So, why don't we just turn around, go back to Villeneuve? I'm sure Belle is at home, cooking up a lovely dinner. Maurice: If you think I've made all this up, then why did you offer to help? Gaston: Because I want to marry your daughter !... Now, let's go home. Maurice: Belle is not at home! She is with the— Gaston: You say "beast" one more time , I WILL FEED YOU TO THE WOLVES! LeFou: [tries to stop him] Gaston! Stop it! Breathe, think happy thoughts. Go back to the war! Blood, explosions, countless widows. Gaston: Widows... LeFou: Yes, yes. That's it... That's it. [Gaston calms down. He turns to Maurice, smiling. Maurice recoils] Gaston: Maurice! Please forgive me, old bean. That's no way to talk to my future father-in-law, now is it? Maurice: Future father-in-law? Gaston : Yeah. Maurice : You. Will never. Marry. My daughter. [Gaston furiously punches Maurice in the face, knocking him out] LeFou: I saw that coming. [Cut to Gaston tying Maurice to a tree.] Gaston : If Maurice won't give me his blessing, then he's in my way. Once the wolves are finished with him, Belle will have no one to take care of her but ME ! LeFou : Uh, for the sake of exhausting all of our options, do we maybe wanna consider a slightly less... gruesome alternative? Gaston : Are you coming? ( LeFou gulps and quickly and hesitantly climbs back into the carriage )	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeautyAndTheBeast2017
Batman: The Telltale Series / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "Up until now Harvey's been weak, he's been afraid..." As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned. ## Episode 1 ## Episode 2 - When Fighting Roland/Blockbuster for the first time, if the player fails to beat him, a game over will show him squeezing Batman's head until blood splatters (effortlessly crushing his head into paste most likely). Luckily Batman is off-screen when this occurs, but the first person perspective still makes it quite the horrifying Gory Discretion Shot. - The Reveal footage of Bruce's father having Penguin's mother drugged into irreversible insanity, consequently confirming the allegations about Thomas's ruthlessness. The horrified faces of the audience just reinforce this — and Batman's reaction is just the cherry on top. - If Batman chooses to save Selina, Harvey's face-melting injury is absolutely horrifying. Penguin picks up a stage light and smashes it on the side of his head, causing the horrific burns Two-Face is known for. Harvey's VA lets out some of the most tortured screams ever recorded and really emphasizes how painful the burns are, not helped when he's left on the ground bleeding and wounded while breathing with Two-Face's raspy voice. - The final scene of Episode 2, however brief it is. The camera begins to zoom in on an empty alley, but is suddenly replaced by static and the Children of Arkham Leader addressing us the same way they addressed Gotham earlier in the episode. ## Episode 3 - As always, Two-Face's disfigured, disgusting face is meant to do this. It doesn't help that this portrayal doesn't avoid the squickier aspects of his disfigurement so the wound still bleeds and festers. - The reveal that closes Episode 3. Vicki Vale, whom we had always known as a brave and upstanding journalist in any other continuity, is just a facade here: she is in truth the ruthless, sociopathic villain you've been fighting. Just the fact she was so convincing, Bruce never suspected of her, is terrifying. And she's just drugged Bruce... - Harvey Dent's Sanity Slippage is terrifying to behold during Episode 3. He begins talking to himself in a Guttural Growler voice, arguing with his normal self. This evil version is brutal and terrifying, and Good Harvey is legitimately terrified of him. - The Children of Arkham's Psycho Serum. Visually, it's unnerving, causing Tainted Veins, but psychologically, it causes people to lose all sense of morality and restraint. Renee Montoya caps Carmine Falcone despite being a By-the-Book Cop. In Episode 3, we also see that it has long term effects on both Montoya and Harvey Dent (who were both injected in Episode 2), causing the former to strike on her own to stop the Children, and is heavily implied to heavily contribute to the latter's Sanity Slippage. And the worst part, Episode 3 ends with Bruce himself being the third victim. - It's actually possible to save Harvey from having half his face burned to a crisp, so you might assume he won't become Two-Face, right? Wrong. Harvey's Split Personality continues to take life as the series progresses. However, his face is in immaculate condition. Somehow that puts his sickness into further perspective. ## Episode 4 - Episode 4's trailer gives us an idea for what Bruce is in for during his incarceration at Arkham Asylum. His stay will include such highlights as: - Being pummeled and tazed by the inmates. - The company of mentally unbalanced individuals such as Blockbuster and Arnold Wesker. - Victor Zsasz stabbing an orderly to death, completely unafraid of the taser he's wielding in self-defense. - Oh, right...and, of course, the Joker makes his debut. Evil Laugh and all. - Another thing brought up in the trailer—due to recent events, things are going From Bad to Worse: - Episode 4 starts out with Bruce waking up in Arkham Asylum, with no idea how he got there. Turns out he attacked Cobblepot under the influence of Vicki Vale's Psycho Serum, and the police threw him in the nuthouse. - Shortly after Bruce learns how he ended up where he is, two Arkham inmates walk into his room, bribing a corrupt orderly to get a tazer in the process. And while Bruce can land a few blows in the ensuing scuffle, he ends up going down under their joint attack. But just in time, the door opens, and he's saved... by none other than the Joker. - Afterwards, Bruce gets a tour of Arkham, with the Joker being brought along by the psychiatrist as well. Seeing the notorious Bedlam House, and being witness to the raving, mad lunacy of some of the inmates, really drives home how creepy it is to be one of the patients. - Oh, and just to reiterate: you've got the Joker right next to you the whole time. Sure, Joker's being friendly, but there's an unhinged element to his friendliness to remind you that he's going to become the worst enemy Batman will ever have. - The entire sequence with the Joker is all kinds of uncomfortable, as it simultaneously plays with our expectations while slowly dialing up the dread. From "John Doe's" friendliness to his willingness to help Bruce, the divide between character and player is never more pronounced than in that moment. Throughout the Arkham sequence we're waiting for the other shoe to drop because we know Bruce has no idea who he's dealing with. - It doesn't help that Joker constantly talks about Bruce having a secret dark side and suggests that Bruce can escape and bring her down. Almost as if he's figured out Batman is Bruce. - The creepiness of having The Joker with you the whole time can't be overstated. The whole time you see him, you know who he is. And, no matter how friendly he is, there's this sense that you're handling a time bomb. - Joker drops another bomb when he reveals that Vicki Vale isn't even her real name. She was born Victoria Arkham. Her parents tried to blow the whistle on Thomas Wayne, but he had them killed and had her adopted by the Vales. - Bruce is still drugged with Lady Arkham's Hate Plague for most of Episode 4, and this will at times affect your dialogue choices. This comes to a head when Alfred is driving Bruce home from Arkham. They get stopped at a roadblock and people approach the car, badmouthing Bruce for beating up Cobblepot while under the drug's influence. Even if you try to pick a peaceful dialogue choice, Bruce will threaten the people with violence. Even Alfred is shocked by just how angry Bruce gets. - Thank god for the silent option... - Upon synthesizing an antidote for himself, Bruce tracks down the Vales and finds an absolute bloodbath — Vicki drugged her adoptive mother and gouged out her eyes, then whipped Mr. Vale with his own belt before hanging him; Batman notes his beating was so severe he died of blood loss before strangulation. Their other foster child, a son, was left traumatized and rocking under the stairs. - When explaining what he heard while hiding, the poor boy gets flustered and blurts out, "Please don't send me to punishment!" Given that the kid seems to not be terribly shocked at finding them dead, and Batman remarking that they were receiving a sizeable monthly stipend, it's suggested that the Vales were an abusively strict couple who fostered at-risk youth just for the money it brought in. - Two-Face Will Remember That. - Hell, Harvey's descent into the Two-Face persona is a combination of nightmare fuel and tearjerker as we see the man who we have gotten to be know as Bruce's closest friend and someone who actually cared about making Gotham a better place turn into a cold blooded murderer and psychopath who is willing to blow up a whole block and killing innocent people in the process to stop the Children of Arkham. - Going after Harvey at the end of the episode leads to Batman causing his gun to explode in his hand, burning the rest of his body to match his face and cementing his fall to permanent super-villainy. The burning itself happens too fast for it to be dwelled on, but the tattered suit and visible burns underneath make it clear that there's no coming back for him now. - The sheer tension from the situation Batman is facing as of episode 4. It is very clear that if it weren't for the player character being Batman, there would be no hope of saving the day. ## Episode 5 - The reveal of just how bad the Vales actually were towards their foster children. During Batman's investigation of the Torture Cellar, there are faint echoes of chains rattling and a child screaming. - The hidden torture room needs to be elaborated on. The whole thing is covered in creepy drawings from Vicki and other children, there's a doll that Vicki made that's what inspired the Lady Arkham outfit, there are bloody belts and shackles and, best of all, bloody claw marks implying that Vicki once tried to climb her way out desperately enough to leave lasting marks and blood stains in solid concrete. Suddenly Vicki losing her cool when dealing with her parents makes a lot more sense. - While at that, if you look closely at the doll's face and at Lady Arkham's helmet, they bear an uncanny resemblance to a gag mask of a mental patient. While the fact that Vicki did her time at Arkham and following that, chose this as her costume is scary in itself, the fact that a little girl played with a doll of a mental patient is even more unsettling. - Thomas Wayne left Vicki in the "care" of these people after he killed her birth parents. Is it any wonder she felt nothing but hate for her adopted parents and the Waynes? - Regardless of whether or not Batman unmasks when Vicki tells him to, someone is going to bear a permanent reminder of what happened, whether it's Alfred losing his left eye if he chooses not to or Bruce losing part of his right ear if he does. - John Doe's scene at the end: if the player chooses to attend the speech as Batman, He watches from a bar as chaos unfolds after an attempt on the Commissioner's life, musing "It is going to be hard to top that, but I'll give it a shot" followed by his Evil Laugh. If the player chooses to attend as Bruce, he makes a cold promise "I'll see you soon Bruce." ## Episode 1 ## Episode 2 - In Episode 2, we have Batman's first battle against Bane in this continuity. And while Batman is able to get in some good shots, once Bane injects himself with his Venom, the fight quickly becomes one-sided. Towards the end of it, Bane raises Batman up over his head in the infamous backbreaker pose. Thankfully, it doesn't happen (assuming you don't stop to listen to Bane's full speech), but Batman came that close to being put out of commission, or worse... - There's something terrifying in seeing Batman's first major defeat in the Telltale continuity, as Batman just sounds so beaten physically and mentally. - Fittingly John Doe provides some: - A lot of John's obsession with Bruce is played for Adaptational Nice Guy. But if you look around his house you can find a photo of him with some guy that has Bruce's face taped over it. Lift it up and you'll see the face of a man absolutely terrified at the smiling maniac that just grabbed him for a photo. - John really likes it when Bruce hurts people. - There's also the question of John's potential involvement in Riddler's death. Sure, he denies it but then again he's very gleeful about the Riddler's demise... - The Telltale version of Harley Quinn could easily be the most terrifying to date, veering back and forth between sweet and sinister at near break-neck speed at times. In the absence of the Riddler (whose death she may have ordered), she has managed to not only take over the Pact, but also has ensured villains of the caliber Mr. Freeze and Bane answer to her. Oh, and in this version she dominates the Joker, clearly intending to mold him into a proper Clown Prince of Crime. And while she does show Bruce a slightly more stable side to her when behind closed doors, that will switch on a dime should you have Bruce sympathize with the loss of her father as she immediately draws a gun on you and questions how you could possibly know about that... ## Episode 3 - That bit before about Harley wanting to mold John Doe into her proper Puddin'? Turns out that he might have a case of Laser-Guided Amnesia, as his first memory is being in Arkham, and he knows that there's something lurking just below the surface, prowling like a caged tiger. - Timothys death at Bane and Mr. Freezes hands. - Both endings of Episode 3, either Bruce takes the fall and is thrown into one of Freeze's devices to freeze to death or Bruce sells out Catwoman and she's thrown into one of Riddler's murder cages. ## Episode 4 - If you gave yourself up at the end of the last episode, Batman enters Sanctus' facility only to find a complete bloodbath. One of the staff even had their legs torn off, leaving only a torso with intestines hanging out. And it's implied Bane did this with his bare hands. - John's breakdown in "What Ails You" is absolutely terrifying to witness, but the ultimate stroke comes when Bruce confronts him in the Bonus Bros. carnival — after walking down the funhouse corridors, Bruce finds a delirious John covered in blood, surrounded by the bodies of dead Agency operatives, and desperately trying to get his head together. When the two understandably start fighting over it, John eventually realizes he's being lied to and snaps, charging at Bruce; if Bruce punches him into the back room, you hear his voice echoing in the darkness. What follows is genuinely chilling: - Both endings of Episode 4 come with a heaping helping of this. Either John Doe finally gives in to his dark side and becomes the unfettered, murderous nightmare of Gotham and all its' citizenry for years to come, or he becomes a costumed vigilante, like his idol, Batman; swearing to all and sundry that the both of you will be out for "justice" against The Agency, together, collateral damage be damned. And the worst part? No matter which happens, it's All. Your. Fault. Poor Bruce just can't catch a break sometimes. ## Episode 5 - Bane's condition in the vigilante path is something to behold. He has a back-mounted apparatus that injects an upgraded version of his venom right into his spine, with a metal mask similar to Tom Hardy's Bane. His Volcanic Veins are taken up to 11, and combined with Black Eyes of Crazy, he looks almost like his counterpart from Batman & Robin. But unlike that Bane, who was just a dumb muscle working for Poison Ivy, this Bane still has his intelligence intact. And if you thought he was strong before, wait until you see him pick up a cargo container and toss it like it weighs nothing, punch through solid brick like it's made of paper, or swing a giant metal pipe around like it's a baseball bat. Batman may as well be a fly fighting a tornado during the entire scene, and it takes the combined efforts of both him and Joker to drive Bane off, either by hitting him with Joker's car or dropping a smokestack on top of him. - The opening scene in the Villain Joker path: you find Bullock crucified in the back of a van with a bomb sewn into his stomach and have to cut it out of him using the Batarang, all while Bullock groans in agony (and the game does NOT stint on the disgusting sounds). The cherry on top? The bomb was a dud, meaning Joker had the poor guy sliced open twice for nothing but sick laughs. Then you head back to Wayne Industries, where Harley and Joker ambush the meeting with a virus bomb; Bruce is restrained and forced into a gas mask, Forced to Watch as the other hostages die painfully, blood streaming from their eye sockets. And then you have to make your way to the lab through the gas-filled, corpse-littered halls. - Similarly, the climax features such lovely moments as Bruce having to dislocate his thumb to get out of a pair of handcuffs, getting trapped in a majorly Saw-esque trap surrounded by charred Agency member bodies, crawling through a tunnel full of broken glass, and finding cards for a puzzle in a box with what is heavily implied to be a human heart. And that all leads up to a twisted 'dinner party' where he and his allies are savagely beaten whether or not they play along, with Bruce in particular being forced to eat food with razor blades slipped into it and having a knife twisted in one of his wounds. Joker swings wildly between sadistically gleeful, stone-cold furious, and disturbingly close to turned-on the whole time. - Vigilante Joker telling Batman that his superhero name is going to be one people will remember. They'll remember it, alright. For ALL the wrong reasons. - In a way, Vigilante Joker's psychotic break is more disturbing than his villainous counterpart, simply because no matter what you do to him, no matter how much punishment he takes, he will not. Stop. Laughing. - Special mention should go to the fact that, when he finally snaps, he brutally stabs a knife up through the lower jaw of one Agency employee, slicing right through the throat of another, and stabbing a third one in the gut multiple times before throwing them over the railing into the chemicals below. And the blood spray gives him a 'smile' that could put Heath Ledger's to shame. - What makes this version of Joker, arguably, the scariest version of the Clown Prince of Crime? He's an Evil Counterpart to Batman. A vigilante with bladed boomerangs, tasers and a grapple gun, skilled at hand-to-hand combat, certain psychological issues... really, the only thing separating Batman and Vigilante Joker before the latter's breakdown is the willingness to kill. And that, more than anything, underscores just how easy it would have been for Batman to become such a psychopath - one really bad day. - Not to mention the specific WAY that Joker laughs, and his expression during. It's not the Psychotic Smirk of the gleeful sadist that Bat-Fans have come to expect. His eyes are wide, his eyebrows sharply turned up. He's losing himself to his madness, destroying his valued friendship with Batman, and he knows it. For the first time ever in the franchise, the Joker is absolutely terrified of himself and what he's doing. Like he's being Forced to Watch something he can't control. - Villain Joker after the credits burning a Bruce Wayne doll and promising, "I can't change the past, Bruce, but I can make sure our future is very, very bright!"	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanTheTelltaleSeries
Batman: The Animated Series / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Moment pages are Spoilers Off per site policy. You Have Been Warned. As one of the most chillingly dark and mature cartoons for children, it is NO surprise that this interpretation of the Dark Knights adventures contains moments so nightmarish they can only be described as terrifying. - That chilling moment in the opening credits when Batman himself, looking like a massive thing made of the very shadows itself, swoops in front of the fleeing bank robbers, and narrows the white eyes on his mask in cold Tranquil Fury... we the audience get to feel the sheer horror racing through the hearts of criminals who come face to face with the mythical figure of the Batman. - Made all the more chilling by the final shot of the opening with Batman's gargoyle-like profile silhouetted by a roaring flash of lightning... shiver. - Clayface is certainly a terrifying character already. His introductory episode "Feat of Clay" was bad enough. It all starts with a man being held down as you see chemicals poured on his face, while he thrashes, screaming. It gets more fun when you see him rip chunks off his face to throw at people, and watch him mutate in all sorts of demonic shapes. Oh the nightmares. - NOTHING says "Don't Do Drugs" like seeing Matt Hagan forcibly overdosed and left in the backseat of his car in a back alley. He starts to melt. His friend finds him later and when Matt regains consciousness, he sees his face in the car's rear-view mirror and just screams... - At one point, he infiltrates a Renuyu infomercial taping as an old woman, exposing everything the company's hidden about the product. When he reaches the last line - "Why don't you tell them... about me!" - he warps into Clayface. The sudden vocal shift makes it particularly scarring. - How about his first "death"? When Batman tried to reach out to Clayface by showing him all the people he was when he was human, Clayface starts horrifically morphing into each and every one of them, including Bruce Wayne, before accidentally electrocuting himself trying to break the TVs. JESUS. - And then there's the end, when Batman realizes that Clayface faked his death. The very last shot of the episode has Clayface disguised as a woman, laughing at how he has fooled everyone... and while still in disguise, "her" eyes transform into his yellow pupiless ones. It's creepy. - In "Mudslide", Clayface pulls Batman inside his body in order to smother him to death. Batman is seen struggling to get out (at one point, a clay-covered silhouette is visible), and Clayface spends the whole time describing how his struggles are getting fainter and his heartbeat is growing weaker. - And how does Batman escape this? He shoots his grapple gun through Clayface's head. - Clayface's whole terminal illness, in which he's slowly melting, is very disturbing, especially since it ends with his apparent death. - There's a follow-up episode "Growing Pains" which introduces us to Annie, an amnesiac teenage girl, scared by a man who's stalking her... she's actually a drone of Clayface which somehow gained sentience out of his substance to act as a "lookout" to see if it was safe for him to come out of hiding. Just imagine being lost, stalked, and then learning you're not even a real person. And if this wasn't enough, Annie, after she acquires a self-identity, tries to escape and ends up befriending Robin has to sacrifice herself to save Robin from Clayface, and we actually see Clayface forcefully reintegrate her into himself; the only thing dulling the shock is that any of the implicit Body Horror Annie suffers as she is unmade is obscured by Clayface's own body. This is both nightmarish and a massive Tear Jerker, and was considered by many to be one of the darkest episodes in the series. - Also, how are we introduced to Annie? By her being harassed by bikers. Who were catcalling her and acting like they just found a fresh prey. Had Tim not intervened, it's pretty clear those guys were about to gangrape a teenage girl. - One word: ManBat. - The scene where Langstrom, creepily calm, explains that he's addicted to the Man Bat formula and then transforms right in front of Bats. The episodes Animation Bump doesn't really make things less nightmarrific. - Made even worse by the soundtrack, which sounds suspiciously like Night On Bald Mountain. - There is a followup episode where someone has managed to duplicate the ManBat formula, and all clues point to the reformed Dr. Langstrom. Fridge Horror kicks in as you realize Kirk truly has reformed and is starting to wonder if he is simply unaware of his Enemy Within. Even worse, it turns out the new ManBat is his wife, who had absorbed some of the formula through a wound she took when she helped her father clean up a broken vial - he's the one who reconstructed the formula. That episode launched Kirk straight into Woobie territory. - And then there's his wife's transformation in that episode. Her screams that grow more inhuman as it goes on aren't only terrifying in their own right, but also give a hint as to how painful the transformation must be. - Anything to do with Scarecrow. As befitting his name, he is terror incarnate, exposing people to their greatest fears which end up terrifying the audience as well. - "Never Fear". When Bats discovers Scarecrow is giving people chemicals that makes them dangerously fearless (the opposite of his usual MO), he starts snooping and gets himself captured. He excuses his actions by pretending to be a common thief - which doesn't stop Scarecrow from giving him a dose of the stuff, causing him to jump into the water with a mess of crocodiles. They pounce, he goes under, and we see a huge cloud of blood swirling up through the water as Scarecrow walks away smugly... guess who was actually bleeding, though. - Later on, we see that Batman has become so fearless that not only is he pulling off even crazier stunts than usual, he has also lost his unwillingness to kill people, essentially transforming into a murderous, psychopathic vigilante. He tries (but fails) to kill Scarecrow and some of his henchmen, so Robin has to stop him. - Scarecrow gains a new leitmotif in this episode - a deep, guttural choir that chants like a cult summoning an eldritch evil to our plane of existence. It helps Scarecrow, with his new appearance resembling an undead corpse, come across as a far more sinister, inhuman threat. - The scene in the Scarecrow's first episode, "Nothing to Fear", when he gasses the dean of Gotham University, who then looks at his hands and sees nothing except for their bone structure. - At the beginning of "Dreams in Darkness" episode, Batman inhales a new type of Scarecrow's hallucinogenic gas, which doesn't seem to have any immediate effect, but later it results in a string of delusions which grow progressively more disturbing and more realistic. The whole thing is basically played out like psychological horror movie. - It starts innocuously enough — Batman is working at his computer in the batcave, when suddenly he sees a reflection of Joker in the screen, coming at him from behind. He stands up and rushes towards the intruder... only to find out that it's just Alfred. - Later, though, when he's driving towards Arkham, he suddenly sees an apparition of Robin standing right in front of Batmobile and frantically extending his hands towards him. This results in Batman going off-road and crashing. Cue next scene, he's in Arkham, strapped to a gurney while raving about Robin and trying to warn him that "Joker's got a bomb". Does it ring any bells?. - While imprisoned in Arkham, Batman has a nightmare involving the death of his parents. He walks out of his cell into a twisted version of dark alley where they were murdered and sees them going into a pitch-black tunnel. Batman runs towards father and mother, deprerately trying to warn them not to go in there, but the alley distorts around him, pulling him away from his parents. They disappear inside the tunnel, which then turns into a barrel of a giant gun, slowly rising above the ground (and the red coloring of the dirt pouring out of it gives an impression that it's blood) and aiming at Batman. Bruce screams in anguish when it fires, enveloping him in blinding light and flames. - The second nightmare sequence, which occurs in the caves below Arkham, is arguably even worse. Batman sees a bright light, out of which a phantom Joker comes out, letting out a satanic shrieking laugh which makes the ground tremble. What comes after is a giant apparition of Penguin which rises from the ground and suddenly lets out an inhuman screech as its head gets ripped apart inside out, revealing Two-Face's head underneath. Two-Face throws his coin (which turns into a giant circular saw mid-flight) at Batman, before melting and reshaping into Poison Ivy. Whose arms then turn into green tentacles, pulling Batman into an abyss where he's devoured by a giant Scarecrow. What makes it worse is that phantoms of both Robin and Alfred appear next to Ivy and just watch the whole thing. When Batman begs them for help, they're completely unsympathetic and claim that it's for his best. Batman: Robin... Alfred... you've got to help me... Nightmare!Robin: [smiling derisively] It's too late for that, Bruce. You've lived in darkness too long. Nightmare!Alfred: [slyly] Yes, do come along, master Bruce. It's time to go home. - The Scarecrow is generally unnerving at best, but there's one particular shot (currently the page picture) of him in "Fear of Victory", seen through the eyes of a Mook dosed with his fear chemical, that looks like all your childhood nightmares condensed into one snarling visage. When next we see the mook, he's curled up under a prison cot, unable to do more than shiver. Mook: ( reads Fear Toxin-tainted telegram) "BOO!". Hey, is this some kind of joke? Scarecrow : It's no joke, I assure you. It's the fear of victory. And the agony of... ( the Mook makes a grab for him, removing his "Mister Lucky" disguise ) ... THE SCARECROW! Scarecrow: So now, you understand Step One in how I fix an athletic contest. ( the Fear Toxin-laced letter starts to take effect on the Mook, scaring him out of his wits and causing him to stumble backwards into a nearby pile of haybales ) I shall proceed to Step Two... Mook: ( breaking down in utter terror) No... NO! GET AWAY! - In the original BTAS, the staff were overall not satisfied with Scarecrow's appearance, feeling that they failed to make him look sufficiently scary. So when it came to redesign the characters for The New Batman Adventures, they radically altered his design. What they ended up with was, as they described it, something that looks like a hangman's corpse come to life, wearing eerie southern preacher clothes with a Leatherface-like mask. On top of this, they also changes his voice actor to, Jeffrey "Dr. Herbert West" Combs, who instead of playing the characters as a Large Ham, went in the opposite direction and spoke in a raspy, almost gentle whisper. Despite making a full appearance in only one episode, he's still considered one of the most memorable versions of the character, just for how absolutely terrifying he is. - His first redesign, with that snaggle-toothed grin and those unblinking eyes bulging out of the black holes of the mask, isn't that pleasant to look at either, especially when enhanced by the fear toxin. - The scene where Batman is walking through Arkham Asylum to Scarecrow's cell, and passing Joker, Ivy and Two Face on the way, sitting in their bare cells, submerged in their own little worlds. Joker and Two Face don't even look up when Batman passes, Joker playing with a deck of cards and Two Face staring at his coin. Then there's Joker's laugh when Batman notices that the Scarecrow in the cell is a fake. Did he know the whole time? - In "Lock-Up", Lyle Bolton is Arkham's newest head of security, and does a pretty good job of it. Maybe a little too good. Upon his recapture, the Scarecrow lamp shades that even he's afraid of Bolton. The brutish guard makes no effort to hide any trace of sadism in his voice. During his testimonial, the other Arkham inmates are simply too scared to testify against him because their abuser is sitting right there. And when they do find the nerve to speak out against him, they list all the myriad of horrible, inhuman treatments he puts them through. (Ex. Scarface's punishment was to be left hanging over a bucket of termites.) Enraged that they told on him, Bolton charges after them, intent on silencing them once and for all. If not for Bruce Wayne "accidentally" tripping him up, there's no telling what he'd have done. - Not even the presiding police can stop him, he's like a human juggernaut of ruthless strength, able to effortlessly cast them aside like mere children. Guess that shows why the inmates were so afraid to testify: it would be like provoking a wild beast out of its cage. - "House & Garden" features Poison Ivy with a husband & kids that turn out to be plant-based clones she created. We find this out when several pods in her basement hatch babies, who, while calling for "Mommy" grow into hideous monsters in a few seconds. Sadly, this was the closest Pamela could get to being normal. No wonder she got so bitter later on. (See below) Even Batman himself backs away with a look of pure horror upon discovering what's going on. - They top this with a later episode, "Chemistry", in which a man is revealed to be one of Ivy's creations when she rips off his skin. Later, Robin sprays the plant-guy with defoliant, which causes him to melt slowly and graphically, including his eyeballs falling out and floating off. Bruce's new wife turns out to be another plant-person when her legs turn into vines... and the last we see of her is her face staring out of the porthole of a sinking ship as Batman flies away. - "Eternal Youth". Ivy turns people into trees and says that the initial layer is just an exoskeleton and it would take months for them to fully transform. The figures themselves, including and especially Alfred, are nightmare-inducing in their own right. - Ra's al Ghul's Psychotic reaction after being put into the Lazarus pit, and nearly throwing his own daughter into the pit! - If there's one Evil Laugh on the show that's more unnerving than Hamill's Joker, it's David Warner's Ra's al Ghul after a dip in the Lazarus Pit. - The end of "Showdown". In this episode, Ra's al Ghul and his League of Assassins kidnap a resident from a Gotham rest home, and leave a tape for Batman, on which Ra's Al Ghul relates a story about how in 1883, his plan to take over America was thwarted by none other than Jonah Hex, who was seeking to claim the reward for Ra's' lieutenant, Arkady Duvall. In the end, Hex captures Duvall and turns him over to the authorities. After this story concludes, Batman and Robin catch up with Ra's and his still-unknown captive... who turns out to be an impossibly aged and senile Duvall. Ra's explains that Duvall is his son, that his longevity is due to bathing in the Lazarus Pit as a young man, and that his mind was completely shattered by his 50-year sentence of hard labor. Even though Duvall was cruel, arrogant, and completely loathsome in the flashback, that's still pretty rough, especially when you consider the chances of many of us in this day and age living to extreme old age and ending up like Duvall can't be ignored, and that it's already happening/has happened to many people. - That such sentences really are handed out in real life is disturbing itself - they are 'worse' than a life sentence, as Ra's explained: "Nobody expected he would complete those years". For someone with an extended lifespan, they're probably worse than execution. - "See No Evil". A psychotic man used an invisibility suit to secretly trick his daughter to leave with him. The man in question was an ex-con whose wife had divorced him, and judging by the restraining order and her violent reaction to his company, he was most likely abusive. He becomes invisible in order to pose as his daughter's imaginary friend, steals expensive jewelry for her, and finally attempts to kidnap her - but is then exposed. Bats intervenes, and the episode ends with the little girl telling him that she and her mother are going to move away, "somewhere Daddy will never find us" - it's not just scary, it's a Tear Jerker. - Parents watching the show might start to get chills as early as his first visit, where the girl's "imaginary friend" picks up her toy and starts luring her to the open window. - In "Moon of the Wolf", the thought of Romulus presumed to be trapped as a mindless Wolf Man because he was prevented from getting the antidote because Professor Milo dropped the antidote when werewolf-Romulus got all snarly at him. - The Mad Hatter starts out as a sympathetic loser, but by the end of the episode in which he is introduces, he gains a creepy stalker crush and the ability to turn anyone into a mindless puppet. And Alice winds up in a different outfit than she started with... - "Trial" has an instance in which Jervis blames Batman for his lack of a relationship with Alice. When called out on this and told he could have respected Alice's wishes, he snaps and screeches that he'd kill her before he'd let that happen. - "The Underdwellers" features the Sewer King and his underground child slaves. In practice, the guy isn't so much a "king" as he is a verbally abusive dictator, who treats dozens of homeless runaway kids like garbage - constantly refusing them food, making them live in deplorable conditions, and yelling at them at the top of his lungs if they so much as talk or make any noise whatsoever. When they're insolent (or whatever this guy considers insolence), he throws them into an extremely brightly-lit room and leaves them there for hours. Of course, these kids are utterly petrified of him, and steal food and valuables from people on the streets to bring to him. And the creepy part is how this is just what we see of this guy during the events of the episode. How long were those kids even down there? What else did this dirtbag do to them? Thankfully, Batman took him down; in fact, Batman was so enraged that he was trying to prevent himself from crippling the guy on the spot - or break his one rule - and made the Sewer King acutely aware of that. Batman: I don't pass sentence; that's for the courts! But this time... this time, I am sorely tempted to do the job myself! - What happens when Bane gets a little too much venom. One would think his almost cartoonish expression would dull the horror. It doesn't. - "Joker's Favor" has Charlie Collins, the poor guy who inadvertently insulted Joker for cutting him off in traffic. He kept changing his name and moving, but the Joker never lost him, blackmailing him to do his dirty work. Charlie: You think you own the whole road? Why for two cents I'd... Joker: There's your two cents. Now. What were you going to do to me? - In particular, the moment when Charlie is yelling at him in traffic and the Joker slowly turns and just grins at him, followed by the calm, easy way the Joker starts following him. The image of the Joker in Charlie's rear-view window, smiling and waving, is the stuff of nightmares. - The plight of Charlie Collins in this episode is almost Kafka-esque in how surreally terrifying it is. Imagine driving home one day only to get into a random road rage incident with the most infamous, dangerous and readily identifiable psychopath quite possibly on the planet. That's the kind of misfortune that could get you to thinking the universe is out to get you. On top of that, nothing he does lets him get away, the Joker easily follows him wherever he tries to run, to the point that he keeps track of him changing names and addresses. - In the same episode, Joker sprays Gordon's honor ceremony with a paralysis gas, then pins a timebomb to his tuxedo. Everyone gets to watch the clock tick down while being able to do nothing about it. - Joker's comeuppance has shades of this too mixed with a moment of Awesome - you've finally pushed someone so far that they're willing to commit a suicide bombing just to kill you. - In "The Man Who Killed Batman", Sid the Squid thought he killed Batman was thrown into a coffin by the Joker and being lowered into a vat of acid. - Hell, Sid's ordeal is almost as bad as Charlie Collin's mentioned above. You've spent your whole life as an insignifigant, no-name nobody, only to finally luck into what you thought you wanted, only to discover yourself beset at all sides by people FAR more dangerous and vicious than you could ever imagine to be. Not only does every lowlife in the city now gun for you to build a rep, the Joker, the single most dangerous man in the city, sees your achievment as a personal insult, and wants to kill you brutally. You have nowhere to hide, and no one to turn to. - Anything with Joker is horrifying, from disguising himself as a harmless party magician so he can kidnap the mayor's son to the creepy, horrid smiles his victims wear. - The Hand of Fate in "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?" was inexplicably frightening. - A giant disembodied hand that will randomly whisk you off into the sky if you make the slightest mistake? While you're on a sadistically short time limit? To a kid who's watching this? Yeah. Freaky. - The Riddler's first appearance. It's oddly animated compared to the rest of the episode, which gives it an unnerving effect. - By the end of the episode, Riddler is still at large, much to the dismay of his target, Daniel Mockridge. The last scene is Mockridge, alone in his dark bedroom, fearfully locking the door and cowering in bed with a shotgun. It's implied this is the norm for him now. - You think that's scary? Riddler's second appearance What Is Reality? has him sending a computer to the GCPD and trapping Commissioner Gordon in the Virtual Reality world it contains. The entire VR world is very surreal and the landscape is an omnious shade of red under a dark sky and the worst part? The Riddler is in complete control of this place, imagine being alone in a computer realm where Riddler is able to bend and warp everything at will! That is pretty disturbing right? - How do we witness the Commissioner getting captured? First the door to the computer lab locks up by itself the moment Robin leaves and the stairway Gordon is on turns into The Riddler's arm as he appears as a gigantic version of himself and grabs him in his hand! When Batman returns he sees that Gordon is staring blankly and unresponsive. In other words, The Riddler basically captured the Commissioner's SOUL!!! Leaving his body in a vegetative state!! Riddler warns Batman that simply disconnecting Gordon would be fatal since Gordon is spinning at high speed in the VR world. He also said he'd give Gordon's heart another FIFTEEN MINUTES!!! Had Batman not rescued him in time, Gordon would have ended up in a permanent coma or even dead! - Riddler's VR world in general is freaky. When Batman enters, he is walking through a seemingly endless corridor of doors. The first door he opens has question marks that start shooting at him and another has a train that comes out and runs the shooting question marks over! The door Batman has to enter leads to a chessboard where he has to move like a knight. Goodness knows what might have possibly been in the other doors... - At several points, Riddler appears as a huge floating head and hands and at the start of the chess scene turns into a creepy smiling moon! - To say nothing of those creepy looking tendrils that grab at Batman when he decides to cheat through the puzzle box by breaking it. We only see the ends of them but we don't see the source of them! - Riddler's fate at the end of the episode. He has burnt his mind out after Batman tricks him into losing his control of his VR world by splitting his focus in too many places after duplicating himself in an attempt to outnumber Batman who did the same, resulting in "Riddlerville" falling apart and when the computer short circuits, we hear the Riddler unleashing an unsettling scream of pain. When Gordon is freed and he, Batman and Robin track him down, Riddler is staring shocked at the screen. This episode ended with Riddler becoming a vegetable!! - The fact that Riddler was able to hack into so many computers, the lock on room 101's door AND THE GCPD'S SECURITY SYSTEM all in one place is nothing short of unsettling... - "Riddler's Reform" shows what would happen if Riddler decided to stop all the games and just kill Batman once and for all: He tricks Batman into a building, seals all the exits, then blows it up. If Batman hadn't found the safe, or if the safe didn't withstand the blast, Batman would be dead. - Batgirl's dream sequence death in "Over the Edge" was particularly traumatizing, as she falls from a high rise, onto her father's car. Made even worse by a censorship edit that put the camera inside the car with Jim Gordon as his daughter hits his hood. - "Avatar". The immortal Egyptian queen, who at first looks beautiful to Ra's, then turns out to actually look... well, like a bazillion-year-old mummy woman should. - Earlier in the episode, when Batman finds Ubu stealing the scroll Ra comes up behind and attacks Batman with a cobra which Batman catches in his hand. When Batman sees it he was shocked then the cobra bites him! As Ra and Ubu walks away leaving Batman to die! Batman is lying there in pain from the cobra bite! It's a good thing Batman had an antidote in his utility belt or otherwise he would've died then and there! - Two-Face. He starts off seeming like a normal nice guy, then his second personality takes over and he spends the rest of the series chaotically basing his every decision on coin flips. Then there's the burn scars◊ , which are somehow a thousand times scarier because they aren't realistic. They took artistic liberties and made them sky blue, swelled up his lips on one side and made them hang open, and gave him that freakishly enlarged, yellow, blind eye. - In "The Demon Within", Jason Blood says that Klarion turned his parents into mice, and then we get a close-up on his snarling pet cat. Nothing is stated outright; the audience are left to draw their own conclusions. - Mr. Freeze has such moments. There's the title card for "Deep Freeze" wherein a mostly silhouetted Mr. Freeze ominously stares right at you with the piercing red glow of his goggles. - Also from Deep Freeze is the ultimate fate of Grant Walker. Wanting to be immortal like Mr. Freeze, Walker allows himself to be subjected to a procedure that gives him the same condition before engaging in a plot to nuke the rest of the world as part of his plan to create an ocean paradise. When Freeze turns against him and destroys his lair, Walker winds up frozen in an iceberg at the bottom of the ocean, unable to move or die. The only thing he can do is scream futilely within his prison. - Fortunately for him, he is able to escape in the comics, though it is only after the iceberg melts over the span of two years. - "Cold Comfort" is a pretty disturbing episode in itself. After being accustomed to Mr. Freeze as an Anti-Villain who just wants to see his wife healthy and alive again, he's become even more emotionless and cruel, in addition to being hellbent on destroying everything Gothamites hold dear just because he can no longer be happy. Then there's the revelation that his condition has destroyed most of his body, rendering himself just as a living head in a robotic suit. Not to mention when Batman tries to ambush Mr. Freeze as he pilots his craft, only for the latter to suddenly whirl his head 180 degrees onto him with an enraged glare. - Not to be missed is Ferris Boyle - when Batman sees what he did to Nora (re: cognizant that she was dependent on the machines Victor was using to keep her alive, he orders them removed, pretty much to spite him for "misappropriating GothCorp funds"), then causing the accident that leads to Fries needing to live within his suit, Batman - the epitome of The Stoic - lets out a horrified "My God!" This is all the more impactful when you remember that, for an animated kids show in the '90s, this is effectively a Precision F-Strike, meaning that the traditionally conservative and overcautious censors looked at this and AGREED that it was an appropriate reaction. - "Vendetta" is just as bad. The episode introduces Killer Croc, so we're greeted to an unfamiliar set of cold, reptilian eyes staring at us on the title card. - Such is the power of the show's horror that it extends to the damn activity center based off of it. Never mind the creepy ambiance. Never mind that all the games set in Gotham pit you against such pleasant fellows as Two-Face and the Joker (the game set in the sewers implies that Killer Croc is there, making it even worse). Never mind that all that can be heard in Wayne Manor is that damn clock. If you try to continue a game, you'll first have to confirm whether or not you actually continue it or start a new game— on a blood-red screen of the Joker staring right at you, taunting you with the knowledge that whichever choice you make, you'll never catch him. Oh, and every time you exit back to Gotham, both he and Two-Face laugh at you from off-screen. - "Heart of Steel"! To count the ways: HARDAC is a cold, emotionless A.I. created by a scientist who wanted to eliminate the pain of loss after the death of his daughter. Its plan is to "replace" humanity with robots. To this end, he starts by replacing key figures in Gotham, like Gordon and the Mayor... the robots, when threatened can move in positively insectine ways, and while the animators may have wanted to make their movements inhuman to illustrate the fact, their success means we have horror on the screen. All that, plus, the interesting little scene where Batman and Barbara collectively hurl Harvey Bullock into the bat signal.... thankfully, it was a robot replacement, but for all they knew, that was the real Harvey Bullock and they just killed him. - The robot Rossum accidentally getting hit with Randa's stungun when Batman ducks out of the way. Its scream as it dies will haunt you. - The follow-up episode "His Silicon Soul" introduces the Batman duplicate isn't anymore pleasant. - On the subject of the duplicate, at the beginning of the episode, we have no idea at all that it's a duplicate right up until a mook shoots it, only for said mook to get an "Oh, Crap!" moment upon seeing a hole full of circuitry in its stomach. And later, when the real Batman shows up, the mook, traumatized from his encounter with the duplicate, exclaims, "Keep him away, man! He ain't human! Get it away from me!" And then after Alfred also discovers that the Batman is a duplicate, he escapes into the Bat Cave, ignoring the duplicate's pleas for help, and activates the knockout gas. Then it appears right behind Alfred, unaffected by the gas, and takes off the gas mask Alfred is wearing, forcing Alfred to breathe in the gas, which knocks him out. - "Baby-Doll" revolves around a washed-up actress with dwarfism who takes revenge on her former castmates. She continually switches off between the child voice she did on the show and her real, "adult" voice. This continues to be creepy throughout the entire show until the climax in a hall of mirrors at a carnival, where she sees herself in a funhouse mirror showing what she probably would have looked like as an adult without the condition. She rages at the Dark Knight for foiling her plan, shouting, "Why couldn't you just let me make believe?!" and sports a deranged face as she blasts the fun house mirrors down before breaking down and crying. It perhaps goes without saying that this was an episode written by Paul Dini. - This is a great example of a creepy episode that also ended up being a tear-jerker episode, as mentioned above. The last time the actress says, "I didn't mean to!" is just so tragic; no matter what she just did over the last 20 minutes, it's hard not to feel sorry for her just then. - Any episode that had the Ventriloquist and Scarface. Not outright terrifying, but subtly disturbing, given it's a man who starts being terrified by a puppet he himself voices. Plus, some of Scarface's 'deaths' were just creepy, even if it WAS a puppet. Giant fan as a wood-chipper anyone? - The reveal that the new crime boss is a dummy even gives Batman a jolt with just how thoroughly, fundamentally Wesker is. sick - It's worse if you were among the minority that weren't fully aware that he was a puppet. - The worst part is that its ambiguous as to the extent Wesker is aware of Scarface's true nature. Some versions has him be a slave to a dominant alternate personality that expresses itself through the puppet, others has Wesker essentially faking the whole thing, with his mild-mannered regular persona being an act, and others imply that the Scarface entity might actually be its own being, a supernatural manifestation born from the wood the doll is made of, which was once the hangman's tree of the asylum... And no one knows which one is true, save maybe Scarface himself. - Whatever the association between Wesker and Scarface, a particularly frightening fact emerges when Batman's computer analyzes their voices; the computer recognizes them as two entirely different people. Not one guy doing two voices, two entirely different people talking to one another. Again, no explanation is ever offered why that is. - How about Scarface almost making the Ventriloquist commit suicide?! Wesker's schizophrenia is so bad that when Batman tricks Scarface into thinking that the Ventriloquist has been feeding him information, he tries to kill him, forcing Wesker to get into a gun struggle with his own hand! Even henchmen Bugsy and Rhino seem at a loss for what to do. - When Batman breaks into the gangs hideout at night, he enters through Scarface's opulent bedroom. The dummy is laying alone in bed, and its eyes suddenly snap open. Nothing else happens, it's just a very creepy moment. - The death trap in his introductory episode, he ties Batman above a pit full of creepy mannequin arms with sharpened nails. - There's also something deeply unsettling about watching the normally cool and collected Dick fly off the rails in "Robin's Reckoning" as he attempts to kill Tony Zucco. - "The Forgotten", where Bruce is captured by a slave camp, and the attack has left him with amnesia. The episode itself is pretty tame on the nightmare department, except for a particular dream sequence. The still disguised Bruce Wayne stumbles into a room full of mirrors, when all of a sudden he hears his own voice laughing. This leads him to stand before a mirror where the pre-amnesia Bruce Wayne is Laughing Mad. With absolutely no warning, the laughing Bruce turns into the Joker, whose arms break through the mirror and pull Bruce in. They emerge from a skyscraper's window, plummeting towards the ground. As Bruce screams, the Joker is still laughing. - As this review notes, "Critters" is actually a seriously creepy episode. - Especially notable is the goat, which walks into Commissioner Gordon's office to deliver a ransom message. It talks, but its voice almost seems more like some kind of organic recording. - Maxie Zeus. In the original comics version he was mostly a weird but relatively harmless d-list villain left over from the Silver Age. This cartoon, like it did with Mr Freeze and The Riddler, turned him into a very real threat in the form of a mentally unbalanced man who imagines himself to be Zeus of Greek myth, with all the wildly unpredictable behavior that entails, and who also has access to a large amount of financial resources AND a personal weapon shaped like a lightning bolt that he can use to fry anyone who displeases him. The worst part is that its implied that the real Maxie's personality is still intact, just suppressed by his Zeus persona, which is shown when his secretary briefly manages to break through to him. In the end, he's locked away in Arkham, which his delusional mind imagines to be Olympus. Maxie: At last, mighty Zeus is home. - The climax of "Perchance to Dream" where Bruce is trapped in his mind thanks to an invention of the Mad Hatter's which gives the dreamer/victim what they most desire. In Bruce's case, his parents are alive, he's engaged to Selina Kyle and somebody else is Batman. At the end, he realizes that he's trapped and unable to wake up... until he realizes that his mind can't imagine his life if he were dead. The Mad Hatter confronts him, saying "What if this is real?" Bruce coldly responds "Then I'll see you in your nightmares!" Before hurling himself off the church bell tower. Yes, Batman was prepared to commit suicide and if he did die, he'd haunt the Mad Hatter from beyond the dead. - Penguins bloodshot eye. Since its the one he wears his monocle over, its magnified to look HUGE. Also, since the lower half of his face was covered at the time, its near IMPOSSIBLE to ignore. - In the same episode of the aforementioned eye in "The Mechanic". Before that scene, Penguin on purposely sends Arnold Rundle on a 'permanent vacation'. Having Arnold sail towards a raging whirlpool. Even though the audience doesn't see the aftermath. The implications of Penguin actually killing someone in an episode is pretty dark, considering, the scene was somewhat Played for Laughs with a hint of Dark Humor. - The fact that the Penguin will kill or attempt to kill anyone who insults him. "Birds of a Feather" is proof of this. He still tried to kill Veronica even after she admitted that she genuinely liked him. - In "I've Got Batman in My Basement", he knocks out Batman with poison gas, follows some kids home along with his henchmen, breaks into a house and proceeds to smash the furniture in an attempt to find a bejeweled egg, and then tries to gut an unconscious Batman with his umbrella. Breaking and entering was bad enough, but Batman was very close to DYING in this episode had he not regained consciousness and fought Penguin. Also, Penguin sends a VULTURE he poached after the kids and Batman. - "The Grey Ghost": - While mostly a tribute to Adam West and his version of Batman, there's a certain terror involving the true identity in the Mad Bomber and his maniacal Loony Fan behavior, as well as when Batman confronts him, considering the way he acts like a Psychopathic Man Child. He's even beating on a Batman action figure when the real Batman shows up to apprehend him. It's especially disturbing considering how harmless he looked before... Bomber: You see, I need the money. To buy more toys. I love toys... They can play songs. They can dance. They can even eat money. OH BOY can they eat money. All my money! And then... I remembered something else a toy can do. They can carry a bomb! They can hold a city for ransom! Oh the power of the toy! - The comic adaptation introduces Jason Todd, complete with his "death" and turn to villainy. What's extra eerie is that he looks very similar to the Joker.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BatmanTheAnimatedSeries
Battleborn / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The basic premise of the game when you stop and think about it for more than a second. A race of horrifying shadow beings from another dimension are invading to steal our stars and the worlds surrounding them, one of the biggest galactic forces if not the biggest force has been taken over by someone who's siding with these invaders and more lives than can actually be counted have been lost already. Even worse, this isn't the type of story where this can be reversed easily. The stars aren't going out, they're gone. Solus is the last one in the entire universe period. - The Varelsi, the Interdimensional star thieves that form the main threat of the game. From their inky shadowlike designs to their impossible biological forms, the Varelsi form a terrifying enigma. What's their society like? We don't know they never talk. What's their home dimension like? We see it once as a result of getting sent there briefly during a boss fight and it's a featureless infinite void filled with every star they've ever stolen. Why the hell are they stealing stars? We never find out. - Beatrix seems to have taken in and embraced the more unnerving parts of the Jennerit lore into her design. She looks like a cybernetic Gothic Lolita with a syringe for an arm and is not afraid of smiling often. However, she also sports a mean Glasgow Grin, turning most of her smiles into something creepy at best and something horrific at worst. Add this to her personality, and you've got the recipe for an especially disturbing Creepy Child. - Even though it's Played for Laughs, Caldarius' situation before the game was absolutely horrifying. Imagine fighting your way through a hellish gladiatorial arena to win the ultimate prize your Imperium can offer you, Sustainment, and winning. Imagine being considered a hero by the public for making it to the absolute zenith of Jennerit society through the sweat of your own brow. Then imagine being punished for rising above your station by being locked up for centuries to remind you of your place while leaving you Sustained. Welcome to the life of Caldarius, where said punishment drove him to absolute raving madness leading him to form a romantic attraction to his audio diary and spend entire days screaming about how much he wants to kill Rendain that day and how he'll still want to the next. Deande is even understandably unnerved by how hard Caldarius has cracked when she comes to rescue him in his audio lore. - In the DLC missions, there are Easter Egg rifts that play Morse code messages pertaining to Borderlands 3, and the content and implications of these messages are surprisingly eerie, and in some cases downright alarming:	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Battleborn
Beavis and Butt-Head Do America / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Don't do drugs, kids. - The infamous hallucination trip scene is a deranged display of Nightmare Fuel. This includes, but isn't limited to, Butt-Head's skin melting off, demonic versions of the duo eating and deep-frying little monsters, and an undead version of the two literally headbanging their skin off. Considering this was Rob Zombie's contribution to the film, none of this should be surprising, but still, damn. - The video footage of the X-5 unit's test subjects. In order, we are shown: One subject vomiting repeatedly on the floor, the next writhing in pain, and the last subject already dead and having the covers pulled over his face by a person in a hazmat suit. One of the agents watching the video then runs off to vomit. - But there's more. According to agent Bork, the X-5 virus is the deadliest known to man, as it can wipe out five states in five days. And the worst part? The X-5 unit wasn't finished, as its biggest flaw is the casing. If the unit is hit hard enough, the unit would break open and release the virus. Cue the very next cut being Butt-Head kicking the unit sewn into Beavis's pants. - The opening sequence wherein a gigantic Butt-Head ravages through the city has traces of this, considering his intent with the screaming woman he abducts. - Gigantic Butt-Head becomes a bit of Mood Whiplash though, as the first words out of his mouth in this sequence are a chuckling "This is cool!" And what does he say to the screaming, terrified woman he grabs? "Uh... hey babeh... I'm like... pretty tall!" - Muddy Grimes is pretty damn creepy when he's enraged. He's definitely the Knight of Cerebus for the movie, big time. - Hell, he even manages to briefly scare both Beavis and Butthead into silence when he shoots the TV, considering how the two teens normally are, that's something. - Beavis's psychotic rampage after taking caffeine pills. - The fact that in the desert, Beavis and Butt-Head were on the brink of death from dehydration, collapsed and accepting their imminent death, being hungrily eyed by several vultures. Immediately becomes a funny moment when Beavis smacks one of them away, saying "Cut it out, butthole!" - The sheer amount of destruction and damage that the duo cause due to their usual antics, such as a major traffic accident and mass hysteria at Hoover Dam. And true to their character, they have no idea what they're even doing most of the time.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeavisAndButtHeadDoAmerica
Beastars / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Just like the nature shows on television. - The very opening of the anime, where we see Legoshi, feral, chasing Haru through the night, and we even see a close up of his sharp fangs and drool. This is made worse after the scene switches to a heartwarming montage of the two dancing together, as were treated to Mood Whiplash of the feral Legoshi having eaten Haru, with a pool of blood at his feet underneath a red moon. - The scene of Tem being chased by a predator manages to be full of tension and is extremely nerve-wrecking to watch. The fear in this scene is palpable to watch, and Tem dies shortly after. - The visual effects in this scene really sell the mood: When Tem shuts the door, everything goes pitch-black, save for his outlines and the blood on his face that stand out starkly. Its incredibly unnerving to watch. - The same scene is shown again when his killer is revealed to be Riz, a bear classmate whom Tem had encouraged to be more true to himself, which Riz took to mean to embrace his carnivore nature to its fullest. The incident first started as an accident, for which Tem forgives Riz. The two hug each other. And Riz devours him. The anime portrays this with an incredibly jarring cut from the two hugging to Riz covered in gore and feasting on Tem's remains. - When Legoshi goes to fight against the lion mafia, he goes feral in order to win the fight, and his eyes turn a startling red. - Carnivore Confusion is a trope that's rife with Fridge Horror, but Beastars elevates it to Ascended Fridge Horror: - Imagine being born just to be put in a trafficking ring on the black market to be fed to carnivores - thats Louiss backstory. Thankfully, hes saved. - The fact that there exists a black market for meat, where herbivores who are fully sapient are killed and sold. Some herbivores are desperate enough to sell their own body as meat. - In chapter 148 Legoshi wakes up to a reddened blanket, leading him to believe he killed Haru in his sleep. - Chapter 162 reveals that Melon's mother ate his father before Melon could properly remember him, and it's heavily implied she at least had a subconscious desire to eat Melon as well, hence why she named him after food. Melon ended up snapping from the revelation, beating his mother to death with an iron before calmly lying to the police on the phone that she was killed in a break-in. Keep in mind, Melon was a grade-schooler at the time. - Chapter 181 reveals that, in addition to her carnivorous desires, Melon's mother sexually abused him by trying to coerce him into taking baths with her, lasciviously touching his horns, and having him undo her bra while she went into ecstasy over it. And this is only what we're shown onscreen. Melon's childhood really was a ten-car pileup of trauma. - Chapter 182 hits us with the sudden, disturbing imagery of Riz in prison. While hes shown to be in nice terms with Pina, he is shackled, on handcuffs, and is even muzzled. The security guard even has glorified animal control equipment. Its heartwrenching to see Riz, even in spite of what hes done, reduced to a proper punishment. - Remember Chapter 181's reveal about Melon's family life? There's one more wrinkle in the dynamic between his parents: Melon's real father wasn't devoured, but rather, he willingly abandoned the family and left his son alone with his mentally-unstable mother. - Chapter 189: Further continuing the cavalcade of traumas brought about by Melons asshole dad, Gosha has a flashback (possibly PTSD induced) of his wifes death, now named Toki. He undergoes a violent, frightening transformation brought about by a combination of repressed grief, Legoshis love, the violation of his personal values, and seething, irreconciliable hatred and apathy for a man who is a very insult to his gender and role as a parent: one who abandoned his out-of-wedlock baby child and lover due to a refusal to either accept responsibility or make amends. Goshas scales tense up and seem to shake and squirm, making him puff up like a hedgehog, and his venom becomes as corrosive and dangerous as acid, and he corners the man and jumps him, with the intention of dripping as much venom into the son of a bitchs mouth as he possibly can. Yafya seems to be reconsidering his personal estimation of Gosha as his betrayer. In just one panel, with no dialogue or action whatsoever. In fact, what the Sublime Beastar may be feeling isnt concern or wonder. Yafya is afraid. ## The Anime - During the blackout in episode 8, Legoshi runs around the area trying to find Haru in the darkness. While he does find her safe and sound, if you look very closely you can see a member of the Shishigumi standing in the darkness, staring at Haru, preparing to move in. If Legoshi was a few seconds too late then Haru would have been kidnapped right then and there. - In the next episode, she DOES get kidnapped, and its not pretty. Haru is taken to a building where shes evaluated for the illegal selling of her meat. This whole process has rape undertones, with her having to strip, bathe and to top it all off, shes put through a humiliation and shame regimen to improve her flavor. It culminates in the Boss tackling her to the ground in a very rapist like way and almost killing her. Lucky, Legoshi saved poor Haru, thank god, but it was a terrifying ride from start to finish. - Season 2 Episode 7 has Tao ripping Kibi's arm off with his bare hands, completely by accident. Kibi is left whimpering on the ground in agony while Tao panics as he realizes he just dismembered his friend without even trying. The horrifying gruesomeness of the scene is made even more shocking by just how sudden it is.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Beastars
Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes If you thought this was unsettling, you haven't seen or heard anything from them yet... This channel pretty much specializes in invoking this throughout all of their episodes, in one way or another. Even if you're highly skeptical towards the allegedly supernatural elements of these stories, they can still be creepy enough when you consider that a large amount of the reported deaths and disappearances actually did happen in real life. - As seen on the image on the right, Stocksbridge Bypass is haunted by a number of entities, including this Faceless monk, who is best known for getting in the ways of people driving their cars in the middle of the night, said to be causing too many car accidents to count. At times, it's also been reported by these same people that he can be seen inside your car, in the backseat. The worst part? It wasn't until several sightings later that witnesses realized that he doesn't even have a face at all, yet they still felt like they were being watched. - And if that wasn't terrifying enough, this same ghost is said to be responsible for a number of deaths by car accident on that same road, such as the one mentioned at the beginning of the episode said ghost appeared in. Now imagine his blank face being the last thing you see in your life... - Celle Neues Rathaus. A Leaking Can of Evil where Those Wacky Nazis conducted paranormal experiments on Jewish prisoners within the basement areas of the building. In fact, it's so bad, that even long after World War II and the Cold War ended, there's still reported paranormal activity on the grounds of the hall. - But probably the worst of the stories related to this very building is the one where 3 US Navy divers were sent to investigate the flooded basement section of the hall. After half an hour of investigating, 2 of the divers mysteriously didn't resurface. Then, the 3rd diver comes back up, but he's apparently shaken. It takes a full 2 hours for him to finally tell the others what exactly had transpired. It turns out that when he reached the 3rd basement level, he found what exactly the SS had been doing there, which is to say, mangled corpses, including a goat's head strapped onto the headless corpse of a man. Suffice to say, he got heavily traumatized from seeing it. And that's not the end of this, since he also reported that he was being stalked by something not long after finding the corpses. - Being the unwitting victim of an Alien Abduction. Chances are The Greys will perform random, likely painful, experiments on whoever they capture, usually resulting in the poor victim getting killed in a horrible manner, as is the case with Zigmund Adamski and the poor man from Brazil. Others, like Elizabeth Murray, while lucky enough to survive the entire ordeal, are left so emotionally damaged that they would rather take their own life than be forced to recount their experiences. And then there's the people who never even realized that they were abducted at all, only finding out days, weeks, or even months after the incident. One has to wonder what exactly these aliens did to them, not helped by said aliens' Blue-and-Orange Morality. - The Dyatlov Pass three-parter, but especially the second part. While the story itself, especially the Creepypasta version, is already pretty scary, the creators of the show were able to turn the horror up a notch by presenting us with brief still-shots of illustrations of the hikers' corpses, all the while continuing the same, cold, and deadpan narration. To say it can and will send chills down people's spines is an understatement. - The third part manages to make the entire incident somehow even scarier, by explaining in detail just how a supposedly minor weather condition, in this case a descending wind. Despite the lack of anything supernatural or paranormal in this episode, it still manages to be a nightmarish scenario. - The Ourang Medan, a Ghost Ship found drifting just outside the Malacca Strait. First, a very unsettling Distress Call is received by nearby ships, ending with the Communications Officer typing "...I die..." just before messages stop entirely. This causes some concern for the authorities, so they alert any and all ships nearby to look for and help the ship that sent the message. Eventually, an American freighter called the Silver Star finds the ship, but when they try to communicate with the other crew, they get no response whatsoever. - And when a search party is sent to investigate, they get the shock of their lives. They find the entire crew, dead, including the aforementioned comms officer slumped in his chair, with his hand still at the telegraph. Not only that, but all of them apparently died writhing in pain, as their faces and expressions are all showing them in agony. For obvious reasons, none of the Silver Star crew wanted to stay long onboard. - The creatures in "There is Something In The Water" qualify. While the alleged continued existence of extinct large predators such as Megalodon and Mosasaurs is already unsettling, the fact that we don't actually know what's actually under most of Earth's oceans is even worse. Highlights in this episode include the opening title card, showing a massive oil tanker being stalked by an even larger sea creature, and the Ningen, a cryptid that has a very creepy feeling to it. - The entire story of Michael Taylor, who goes from an ordinary man living a simple life to one of the most infamous examples of Demonic Possession in just the span of two months. - The kicker is the ending, where it's mentioned that while the priests who did his exorcism were able to remove most of the demons inside of him, they were unable to remove 3 such demons. Worse, the episode also mentions that the Anglican Church of England also made a vow never to do exorcisms following the controversy of Michael's trial. - Not to mention the ending image and narration of this episode, which breaks the traditional format of the episodes by presenting us a Jump Scare with Michael's face becoming distorted and twisted, along with the implications that he may still very well be harboring those 3 remaining demons inside of him. Which is also directly related to what happened to his wife shortly after the exorcism. - The fate of Elisa Lam, which isn't unlike the plot of Dark Water. While it has already been told many times on the internet, this channel's take on this unsolved mystery is pretty bone-chilling, especially the part where a maintenance worker at the hotel she was last seen staying in finds her mangled corpse inside the water tank, where we're treated to a series of jump scares. - The Mothman. A mysterious cryptid that terrorized Point Pleasant, West Virginia for a year. But the most terrifying thing about it is the blood-curdling screech it makes when attacking. And if that wasn't terrifying enough about it, it also had large glowing red eyes, was 7 feet tall, and was very much capable of chasing after people in cars at full speed. - Lucas Villa's entire ordeal in "The Evil Within", which arguably counts as the scariest account of a Demonic Possession in the series thus far. When he and his friends are caught by the former's parents playing with an Ouija Board, he unknowingly ends up summoning something, later revealed to be this tall, thin, and black figure. At first, he starts having random objects in his house go missing...only to find them just hours later. Then things start to take a turn for the worse, when he starts having recurring nightmares where the aforementioned black figure approaches him and starts strangling him. - The Grinning Man, aka Indrid Cold. A mysterious, otherworldly being, baffling many as to whether it is a Humanoid Abomination or Humanoid Alien. According to some, he is a member of The Men in Black. Others say he is closely related to the Mothman mentioned above. While others say that he is a supernatural being said to stalk people in the dead of night. Whatever he, or it, is, the one thing everyone will undeniably mention about him is his malicious Slasher Smile. - The episode focusing on the Wendigo. While the legend of an evil spirit turning regular people into cannibalistic Humanoid Abominations is already terrifying enough, the accompanying modern eyewitness accounts and alleged video evidence shown later in the same episode just makes it worse. Among other things, it can mimic the voice of a person's loved ones, stalk people's homes in the dead of winter and at night, and terrify even the most experienced of outdoorsmen, even when they're armed. - The Shadow People, living shadows with a malevolent nature to them, said to stalk people in the dead of night whilst they sleep, or a foreboding of disaster. As the narrator says at the end of their titular episode, you should hope not to see one at all. - The titular "The Nameless Horror of Berkely Square". An pint-sized Eldritch Abomination resembling an octopus that's more than capable of frightening and even killing armed men and trained sailors, and is considered to be The Dreaded in an already well-known haunted house with an already frightening Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl. - The aforementioned ghost girl herself is pretty darn scary, especially when the first 5 minutes of this episode show her randomly appearing and disappearing during the narration of the stories behind her haunting. - The entire premise of "Enemy Unknown". The initial experiences of HMAS Hobart, US aircraft and American patrol boats facing nigh-undefeatable and immensely powerful UFOs is already bad enough. There's also the fact that the UFOs attack both US and North Vietnamese forces, absolutely destroying a Viet Cong camp with weapons that reduce supplies to ash, burn guerrillas alive and melt weapons. But then there's the final tale in the video. Imagine being a US Special Forces soldier with years of combat training and experience suddenly facing a completely unknown and alien threat that's Immune to Bullets, who can slaughter entire bomber crews without leaving any traces behind. It's pretty much the plot of Predator, but taken up to eleven and set during the already-nightmarish Vietnam War. - "The Ghost of UB-65" is pretty darn unsettling. Take the already hellish conditions of World War I, on a U-boat no less, and add in the vengeful spirit of a recently deceased officer, and you get this nightmare on the high seas. The hauntings got so bad that a number of crew members who witnessed the dead officer were either injured or died from the stress of seeing the apparation. But the worst scenario is during the titular submarine's loss in 1918, when the U-boat mysteriously sinks and explodes even before an American submarine can torpedo it, with the last thing witnessed by the American sub's captain being a German officer standing on the deck, heavily implied to be the ghost of the deceased officer. - "There is Something in the Desert". Like "Enemy Unknown", it focuses on groups of American servicemen, who are well-equipped and heavily-armed to deal with all sorts of enemies and dangerous situations. Despite this, these soldiers also come under assault from forces completely unknown to them, which prove to be just as deadly as any insurgent or terrorist they come up against. These enemies range from a Humanoid Abomination that can wipe out an entire armed group of insurgents, to 12-feet giants capable of wiping out a squad of unsuspecting soldiers. - Paul Mueller, aka "The Man From The Train". Unlike most Serial Killers, he doesn't brag about his kills nor take trophies of his victims, he chooses to remain obscure. What's more, he also looks and acts pretty unassuming, him being a Gonk notwithstanding. He takes this to full advantage to blend in as just another man in rural America looking for work, killing his victims when his hidden urges come out, and leaves not long after by taking a train into the next town over and continuing his vicious cycle. Which he does for over a decade. And unlike the Wests, he escapes justice entirely, and is even considered as a suspect in the Hinterkaifeck murders, given the way the Grubers were killed was similar to how Mueller killed his victims. - "The Body on the Reservoir" and "The Strange Death of Jonathan Lovette" both detail mysterious deaths in which the victims turned up horribly mutilated in a manner similar to animal mutilations often attributed to aliens. In the former case, the artistic representation of the body is awful even in black and white without any gory detail; the narration says that there are crime scene and autopsy photos of the body online if you're willing to look, but out of respect for the victim and his family, they will not show them on the channel. The idea posited that both victims were alive and aware, without any known anesthetic, while they were being mutilated is also nightmarish. - "There Is Something In The Woods"; a series so chilling that it required a two-parter. Gah, just the thought of a malevolent spirit lurking in US national parks, causing you to disappear of the face of the earth, becoming one of the thousands of Americans whose vanishings still haunt the nation to this day. And no skills you possess can save you from the thing causing these disappearances. This was the unsettling conclusion reached by a professional police officer and investigator researching said disappearances. The only potential warning is 'The Silence', an eerie happening triggered by the total lack of sound from animals and even the weather, forcing humanity's fight or flight instinct to kick in and flee the area. The comments on both videos have hundreds of individuals recounting their own experiences with 'The Silence' on camping, fishing, and hunting trips, and such experiences can happen to anyone. - Both parts of "Tales from Skinwalker Ranch" are terrifying. The supernatural and paranormal creatures terrorizing the Sherman family are numerous, ranging from Animalistic Abominations that are Immune to Bullets, to Humanoid Abominations leaping out of portals in the dead of night, to a Flying Saucer aware of people stalking it. The end results are numerous dead cattle and dogs, usually killed via mutilation or being vaporized to the point that nothing is left. Even when a research team consisting of scientists and skeptics is sent in to investigate and hopefully stop the strange activity, it just continues, with the paranormal and supernatural phenomena apparently aware of their intentions and even being one step ahead of them each time. - Stardust Ranch in "Intruders" would probably make the Skinwalker Ranch look like paradise by comparison. While the aliens that visited Skinwalker Ranch were (mostly) content with focusing on their activity of cattle mutilations and abduction if they weren't provoked, the aliens here take things a step further by constantly harassing and attempting to abduct the owners any chance they got, even after John Edmonds, owner of the ranch, kills several of them. And this goes on for twenty years, before the owners finally had enough and sold the property in 2016. - In "The Legend of the Bell Witch" has the Bell family tormented by the ghost of "Kate" which goes on for years until family patriarch John Bell's death from poisoning. In the scene detailing Bell's death, a Freeze-Frame Bonus shows that in the upper right corner of the screen, Kate's disembodied head is looking through the reflection of John Bell's window. - The story of Joao Presetes Filho ("The Burning Man of Brazil"). A 44-year-old Brazilian farmer after returning home from fishing is struck by a beam of yellow light. While this only lasts a couple of seconds, it causes the man severe pain to the point where he can barely walk. As he is leaving his house, he realizes that the bottom of his feet are bleeding and his skin is starting to peel away. It got so bad to the point where a police officer thought the man was a corpse by the time he arrived. The video manages to make this even worse by showing the audience the man on his deathbed as he gradually starts to fall apart (thanks to the show's Art Evolution) and he's dead within nine hours of the initial encounter with the light with much of his skin melted away. - Both encounters in "The Kentucky Goblins" two-parter were pretty disturbing. Goblin-looking creatures Immune to Bullets stalking you and your children? Check. Weird looking " bald children" messing around your property? You bet. But probably the worst of the things depicted here was from the second part. A pair of vague and mysterious e-mails were sent by one "Terry Wriste" to paranormal investigator Greg Newkirk. The second e-mail listed some numbers, later revealed to be GPS coordinates, which revealed the site of an Abandoned Mine that Greg, his wife, and a handful of camera crew had investigated months prior to the sending. This was despite Greg and his wife never divulged to anyone else about that trip, much less about the mine in question. It was pretty much a taunt by the mysterious sender to Greg, as they demanded they quit investigating whatever they were delving into in Hellier, Kentucky. What is even stranger about the email is how different it is from the original author as the email has grammar errors, is less direct, and has spelling errors that are consistent with someone who's just learned a second language but isn't as articulate as they would normally be in their native language. The fact that Dr. David Christie, a man asking Greg for help after The Greys began disturbing his property in the aforementioned town, was never heard from again after stating his plan to attack them, should already send chills down one's spine... - "The New York Nuke", compared to the other "Mysteries of the Third Reich" stories, presents a much more realistic nightmare than previous videos that depicted either a hidden base in the arctic or "Die Glocke". The idea that the Nazis almost dropped a nuclear weapon in New York, a highly populated location in the United States, is outright horrifying to think. Also unlike those past videos, that plane crash in Owl's Head suggests that almost actually happened... - Near the end of "Davy Jones Locker" theres an account of a victim (called Grandpa) of a shipwreck whose body was well-preserved in the remains of the ship for decades after this disaster. At the very end, its recounted that divers claimed to see his corpse move every time theyre near him. This story is mentioned over a display of the skeletonized corpse within the ship, which starts to move slowly towards the camera before the episode ends with the corpse giving a Nightmare Face at the audience. Sweet dreams. - Aside from the ghosts of the numerous fallen workers in "The Hoosac Tunnel Hauntings", there's the various Cruel and Unusual Death scenarios of the workers themselves. Imagine being trapped in a deep, underground well, slowly dying of oxygen deprivation. If that isn't horrifying enough, try to imagine being trapped there alongside your dead and dying co-workers. - The numerous ghosts themselves aren't any better. Many of them are so filled with negative emotions, they've driven quite a few other, still living, workers into going mad to the point they drive the men to join them in death. - The story of the "Entity of Tsarichina", of the titular creature. Whether an Eldritch Abomination or an alien, whatever it is is something genuinely terrifying. From psychic messages to attracting the attention of other aliens and monsters, whatever this creature is, it's fortunate that it's currently buried in Bulgaria. - The final segment of the episode focusing on the Nanjing Battalion's disappearance is pretty darn unsettling. While most takes on the Ramree Island Incident would attribute the massive Japanese Army losses to Saltwater crocodiles and diseases like Malaria, this series instead takes a far more nightmarish turn by depicting Japanese soldiers being attacked by Eldritch Abominations living deep inside the Burmese swamps. - "There is Something on the Moon" explores stories and beliefs that the moon is home to aliens, aliens who do not want humans to explore it. One image, including the title screen, depicts a Russian cosmonaut whose helmet was shattered opens with part of his face mutilated and red blood shown. There's also the theory the moon isn't really a proper moon at all, but a space station or ship of some kind, with something sinister on the inside. - "The Ariel School Encounter", in which one of the aliens glares into the eyes of the children, whose POV is where the audience is watching. As it depicts the images of the dystopian future, the alien moves in closer. This makes it seem like the alien is fully aware of the audience. - "The Mad Gasser of Mattoon" can make you feel unsafe just trying to sleep at night in your own home. Imagine doing just that, when a Malevolent Masked Man sprays some chemical through your window which causes you and your family to become violently ill and then runs off into the night with no other fanfare. Now imagine that the same masked figure is doing this repeatedly, to innocent people all over your town, for no reason at all. - "The Demons on the Fringe" will make the viewer dread the idea of dying in a hospital out of fear that one of these dark entities would be coming for them. The story of Martin Kirk, having just had heart surgery, featured him being harassed by dark entities with spindly arms reaching out for him. It was terrifying enough that even after leaving the hospital he came to fear what he will see once he takes his last breath. Jessica Martinez, meanwhile, saw these horrific entities speaking with people, potentially causing nightmares, without any indication they knew she could see them. The nameless nurse witnessed a dark entity apparently killing her patient, clarifying these "demons" had ill intent. Even Richard's closing line can cause the viewer's spine to shiver. In any case, whether these beings are real or imagined , they are no less terrifying to the person who sees them. If they are imagined, it is still an extremely disturbing experience and maybe we need to investigate why so many people have such similar hallucinations. However, if they are real , well, that is another story entirely. - "The Devil in the Doll" is NOT a video to watch if you suffer from pediophobia (fear of dolls). The tales of Robert, Mary and Letta are unsettling enough, but the end where all three dolls are sitting together can send shivers down your spine... especially when one by one each of them suddenly change positions and look at the viewer. - Both "Highways or Horror" videos detail events one does not want to encounter when driving at night. - First video: The second story of the barking man, while the animation might not entirely be that convincing, is still a very unsettling sight to see. The third story, however, is far more terrifying. The slim men in black, known on some internet circles as the "DC Paper Men", were unbelievable uncanny in their appearance that the deliveryman who encountered them had to insist he saw nothing. He remains convinced they were not human. - Second video: Being potentially chased by a ghost or having a hitchhiker ghost in your car is scary enough, the other two take the cake. The third story about one man's encounter with the Kuntilinak, with the animation showing the young woman's face going from neutral to a small smile and becoming a grotesque and terrifying monster. The final story, however, is among the most terrifying of the entire channel. The main reason being there is No Ending. The witness had encountered a strange creature that he insisted was a deer despite that there are none that deep in the Australian Outback. There is no theories as to what this creature is, no narration closing out, only the artist's own idea of what it could have looked like, it just ends with the unknown creature onscreen as the narrator states the witness was Driven to Suicide due to how horrified he was from seeing this thing. Its black, soulless, hopeless eyes haunted him so much that he took his own life. Some have speculated that the creature's very intent was to force him to kill himself. - The Lurking Horror: Giant, venomous spiders that prey on humans. The image previewing the episode on Twitter even reads "Arachnophobes, step forward..." as if to make it clear this African cryptid, the J'ba Fofi, will crawl in their nightmares forever... While the video brings up the regular issues with a spider that large existing in real life (their inefficient respiratory systems and their heavy exoskeletons being the big problem), the narrator also points out that aquatic arthropods that large do exist and the huge spiders tend to be seen not far from a water source. However, that does not explain the web-like substance or the fact that few people have died from venom, something creatures like crabs do not have. If you're an arachnophobe and you decide to watch this... have fun sleeping.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BedtimeStoriesYouTubeChannel
Battle of Britain / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Early in the film, the British and French are forced to abandon an airfield in the face of advancing German troops. The pilots are left to scramble with whatever fuel happens to be in their serviceable planes (leaving several more broken down planes to be burned by their ground crews), but an easy to miss line reminds the viewer that not everyone at the airfield can escape so easily, and the implication is made that many of the ground personnel will be captured or killed by the Germans. Colin Harvey: Get all the transport you can, try to get the men out of here.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BattleOfBritain
Batwoman / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Spoilers Off applies to all Nightmare Fuel pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned! - Issue #0 gives a glimpse of the training Kate went through to become Batwoman. Some of the physical aspects, like being tortured for a week straight or being chased through the Paris catacombs by men carrying nightsticks, are bad enough. But the training had a psychological component, too. This involved Kate living for two weeks in a room with all the walls covered in grisly crime scene photos (some of which are shown), and watching possibly hundreds of videos of people being raped, tortured, and killed. - Flamebird getting gutted and left for dead. - The kidnapping scene is terrifying and brutal, especially for how quickly it happens. To make matters worse, it's implied that Kate's mother was tortured while in captivity... while Kate was sitting mere feet away listening, with a bag over her head. - There's also some Fridge Horror about the kidnapping. The Kanes were abducted in an organized manner, yes... but it also happened when the twins were supposed to be at school, meaning that it was outside their usual schedule, and also while Jacob was gone. Meaning that the Kane family was actively being watched that day, and likely had been for a while. - Bloody Mary. She's the urban legend/ghost story come to life, emerging from a mirror with a bloodstained dress, long red claws, pinprick pupils, and blood oozing from her eyes, nose, and mouth. In a story arc filled with urban legends, she's the one who looks the most like she came out of someone's nightmares.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Batwoman
Bee Swarm Simulator / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes If you have a Goo Hotshot badge, you can enter a special area by landing on the giant Gummy Bee near the Ant Gate. It has a free Glue dispenser, as well as a shop with some good items. It also houses the Gummy Bear, a bear that was featured in a past event. Nice to see him again, right? Well... if you talk to him again and you haven't crafted the Gummy Mask, he'll say this gem before killing you instantly: Gummy Bear: What's sweeter than honey? Glorious gumdrops... they're just the start! A sweet and sour, ooey-gooey universe... Can't you see it, too? What's that, Gummy Bee? They're not seeing clearly? YOU'RE ALWAYS RIGHT! GOO-dbye, beekeeper... HAH!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeeSwarmSimulator
BattleTech / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes BattleTech may not have the grim darkness of Warhammer 40,000, but that doesn't mean it's a slouch when it comes to terror on the tabletop. - While ComStar was a neutral (to the public), quasi-religious order dedicated to preserving knowledge and the means of faster-than-light communication, they were also manipulative bastards that manipulated the other factions for their own ends in ways that would make the Illuminati blush with jealousy. - One particularly egregious skeleton in their closet was the "Black December Incident" where ROM agents blew up the Chunnel (yes, that one), killing thousands of innocent lives and pinning the blame on a resistance group known as Black December. All so they can look like the heroes in their occupation of Terra. And it worked. - They struck again in 3027, when they discovered a secret Star League bunker on Sirius V, then occupied by the Grey Death Legion mercenary group. Wanting to destroy the now legendary Helm Memory Core inside to prevent anyone else from having it, Comstar Precentor Emilio Rachan ordered ROM agents disguised as Gray Death soldiers to destroy the city of Tiantan by bombing its habitat dome. Seventeen million people died because Comstar didn't feel like sharing. The Grey Death Legion got the last laugh, however. They recovered the memory core first, then shared it with as many factions as they could find, triggering a technological renaissance unheard of until the aftermath of the Clan Invasion. - Operation Holy Shroud can easily be argued as the worst thing Comstar has ever done. During the technological decline of the Inner Sphere during the First and Second Succession Wars, the attempts made by the Successor States to keep themselves from falling into the Stone Age was seen as a threat to Comstar's technological dominance over the other factions. Determined to keep Comstar as the most advanced faction as part of their "divine right" to all technical information, Primus Raymond Karpov ordered ROM to assassinate three-hundred of the Inner Sphere's most brilliant minds and innovators before pinning the blame on the conflict between each of the five states. This backfired when their deaths convinced the Successor States to agree to a ceasefire...only to be plunged into the Third Succession War soon after when Lyran traders were given confidential information about the Draconis Combine's "Shadow War" and the Draconis Combine receiving word about said traders trying to muscle in on Combine markets. The person who provided both of those leaks? Raymond Karpov. - The reason why Comstar resorts to such terroristic behavior is because of a "prophecy" supposedly made by their founder, Jerome Blake, that states that when the great houses of the Inner Sphere have destroyed each other in their constant wars of attrition, Comstar will survive and become the saviors and leaders of humanity. With such an apocalyptic set of beliefs and a near-unrivaled pool of resources at their disposal, the Word of Blake's inevitable "Jihad" was just that: inevitable. - The back of beyond of known space, the Periphery (and its cousin, the Deep Periphery), is for the most part a lawless backwater where brute force and savagery rules the day. Unless you're traveling inside states like the Homeworld Clans, the Taurian Concordat or the Magistracy of Canopus, expect to find only nascent nations, bandit kingdoms and pirate havens. - While the Periphery was always seen as the fringes of human civilization that was constantly bullied by the Star League, it still had an air of legitimacy thanks to the Rim Worlds Republic. Which all came crashing down when an ambitious leader named Stefan Amaris usurped Richard Cameron's rule of the Star League, renaming it the Amaris Empire and plunging the Inner Sphere into a bloody civil war that is still felt centuries later. Once the dust had cleared and the Rim Worlds Republic devolved into a cluster of warring bandit kingdoms, the Periphery in its entirety was forever seen as a lawless backwater home to the worst aspects of human nature. A reputation that, in spite of the education system of the Taurian Concordat and the progressive human rights policies of the Magistracy of Canopus, would never recover. The arrival of the Clans from the Deep Periphery would be the final nail in the coffin for whatever scrap of dignity or legitimacy the Periphery states still held. - Because of their longstanding hostilities with the Federated Suns, the Taurian Concordat hates all things relating to House Davion with a burning passion. Invasion drills are regular, policies have been enacted simply to spite the Federated Suns and Davions are demonized so thoroughly in Concordat society that they're depicted as hypocritical villains even in their online games. - Nowhere is this resentment more apparent than Protector Thomas Calderon, whose mental health began to rapidly circle the drain after his eldest son was killed in a dropship accident. Before long, he became outrageously paranoid, believing that even the smallest misfortune or problem was somehow the sign of an imminent attack from the Federated Suns. From then and there, his efforts to build up the Concordat's defenses against invasion caused a massive shortfall in construction materials and resources, forcing one of his greatest benefactors to resort to embezzlement and subsequently triggering a scandal that almost killed off his nation's plans to have proper armor technology. - The Circinus Federation is a full-blown rogue nation, founded by pirates and refugees from the Amaris Civil War. The nation is hopelessly corrupt, with a government that can only be described as "predatory" whose only activities are acts of piracy against neighboring factions and playing dumb about it. After striking a deal with the Word of Blake, they agreed to shelter Thomas Marik and had their entire capital planet of Circinus scoured clean from orbit. - The Marian Hegemony is a Periphery state modelled after the ancient Roman Empire and, in spite of their status as a recognized nation, are hated by nearly every other faction for their incessant acts of piracy. What makes them especially reviled however, is their unabashed practice of slavery. - The short story, Back End of Nowhere, shows just how devastating even a light Battlemech can be to a rural community. An entire village on Randall's Regret was ruined after a lone pirate in a ramshackle Urbanmech made off with whatever the oversized hammock strapped on its back could carry. Neighbors and family members? Dead. A house built by the effort of two families? Destroyed. A barn that was the "dropship" for countless childhood games? Flattened. A hastily assembled militia trying to stop the pirate? Blown up with a couple cheap shots. One desperate farmer took to piloting a modified Cattlemaster to try and take down the pirate that destroyed the only home he ever knew and loved in a valiant, last-ditch effort. Cut to the pirate roasting a pig over an open fire, counting his money as he remembered how the yokel in the Cattlemaster almost killed him. - As of 3151, the ruler of the Magistracy of Canopus is Majestrix Ilsa Centrella, known for her impressive beauty, intelligence and political acumen. What she is most known for, however, is the fact that she produced an heir with her brother. - The Rim Worlds Republic, home of the infamous Stefan Amaris, was founded by a man as evil as the one who ended both the Republic and the Star League: Hector Worthington Rowe. A man who gladly organized show trials, tortured prisoners to death, murdered the survivors of his attacks and founded a social class made up entirely of the people he enslaved. He's not very nice. - Ever wondered why war became a way of life in the Battletech universe? And why it became such a crapsack universe in the first place? Blame Stefan Amaris, whose long-planned coup d'etat officially began after he murdered Richard Cameron and renamed the Star League as the "Amaris Empire," ordering the execution of every man, woman and child with even a drop of Cameron blood in them, imprisoning his political rivals in internment camps and committing widescale voter fraud. Everything that followed, from the centuries of war that nearly drove humanity back to the Stone Age, to the SLDF's self-exile out of disgust for the behavior of the successor states that would lead to the formation of the Clans, to the Periphery becoming a lawless backwater, to Jerome Blake's establishment of Comstar in an effort to preserve mankind's knowledge in spite of the bloodshed, to the Jihad that would come from Blake's most fanatical believers, is all Stefan's fault. - In the earliest days of interstellar conflict, rules of engagement were practically non-existent if not incredibly vague. Entire nations poured all of their resources into the construction of warships that, thanks to a lack of FTL communications, could nuke enemy targets into oblivion and then jump out of the system before any retaliation could come to pass. This total war policy came to a head at the Tintavel Massacre, where the conflict between the Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation degenerated to the point where both sides nuked each others' strategic sites until the entire planet became uninhabitable. To prevent such mass destruction from becoming routine, all major powers signed the Ares Convention, which laid down strict rules of engagement and penalties for war crimes. As the coming centuries would prove, the Ares Convention was seen as more of a friendly suggestion than a law. - Worse - as the United Hindu Collective fears, the Ares Conventions made warfare "legitimate" in that it now had rules. The Terran Hegemony used their status as "observers" to spy on the miltiaries of the Great Houses. The Capellan Confederation and the Federated Suns would beat up the Tauran Concordat with nukes and weapons of mass destruction because "they didn't sign the Ares Conventions". - The Santiago Massacre of 2572 began when the peaceful protests against the Draconis Combine's occupation of the titular Outworlds Alliance planet turned violent, leaving twenty-seven civilians dead and escalating tensions that inevitably led to the Reunification War. The incident that triggered the riots is much, much uglier, however. A mob of children showed their support of the protests by throwing snowballs at Kuritan Mechwarriors - one of whom became so enraged by this slight that he threw mech coolant in a child's FACE. Yes, you read that correctly. - While the Ares Convention greatly reduced the scale and prevalence of warfare in the Inner Sphere, allowing trade and technological development to blossom, the Terran Hegemony knew that this would not last. A company called Skobel Mechworks used the invention of myomer fiber and neurohelmets to develop industrial exoskeletons. Director-General Jacob Cameron, desperate to win back the crowd after becoming violently hated by the people of the Terran Hegemony, looked to this new technology and in it saw massive political potential. By pooling the research, resources and efforts of twenty mega-corporations, Cameron developed a bipedal, 100-ton war machine dubbed the "Mackie", which swept the floor with five remote-control tanks during its initial test-run. It was a resounding success and both the Mackie and its developmental descendants would change warfare forever, known as BattleMechs. - The Terran Hegemony's first BattleMech engagement with House Kurita had a lance - four Mackies - utterly trounce a DCMS tank company. The Hegemony forces left some survivors just so they would spread the word of what happened. The result was that ALL of the power in the Inner Sphere raced to steal the design of the Mackie and spark a Lensman Arms Race in a panic. - After the disbanding of the first Star League, all Inner Sphere powers were hellbent on reestablishing it in their image. What ensued were centuries of total war and attrition that saw factories, research centers and even civilian population centers as targets to get an edge over their opponents, resulting in a slow and steady decline in technology until there was a very, very real threat of regressing to the industrial age at best. - The Kentares Massacre of 2796, "the single largest war crime in human history". After House Kurita troops landed on and captured Kentares IV, some stay-behind Davion troops were still operating, including a Davion sniper who took a shot at what he thought was a high-ranking Kurita officer who had decided to take a walk outside his Battlemaster. His shot killed the officer, who turned out to be high-ranking, all right. He was Minoru Kurita, the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine. The problem was, 93-year-old Minoru was the only thing standing between his insane son, Jinjiro, and the rulership of the Combine. Almost as soon as Jinjiro heard the news, he replied with a three-word command: "Kill them all." A general who dared to ask for clarification on what "them" meant was summarily executed on the spot. From that point on, it was clear: Kentares IV must die. At first the massacres were organized with firing squads, but Jinjiro (who had relocated to the planet so he could personally witness the executions for fun) decided that the killings weren't painful and sadistic enough and so he demanded that the troops start using katanas. In the span of 152 days, over 90 percent of the planet's population were killed, over fifty-two million people in total, a single-incident death toll that would manage to stand as a grim record even through the horror days of the Jihad. The scope and brutality of the murders were so horrific, that DCMS troops began to revolt, some sheltering Kentarans, other even leaking footage of the murders to the wider Sphere. Some of them were so traumatized by the horrors they were forced to inflict that they turned to seppuku as the only means to their redemption. - A philosophical movement snuffed out by the Succession Wars was that of the Pan-Humanists, who believed that all of humanity shared a common path, goal and future that could be achieved through diplomacy philanthropic pursuits like a non-violent version of the Star League. Tragically, the Capellan Confederation apparently took them as a threat to national security and ordered a false flag attack on their headquarters in 3020, leading to the death of fifty-thousand people at most. In an added, bitter twist of irony, this all took place on a planet called "Truth." - When the Succession Wars took off, the general of the Star League Defense Forces, Aleksandr Kerensky, lost all faith in the Inner Sphere and led an exodus of almost the entire SLDF to the Deep Periphery. While Aleksandr intended to preserve the good of the Star League in exile, he died not long after in the midst of small-scale recreation of the Succession Wars, and his son Nicholas took over to restart human civilization anew. This time in his image: where martial prowess determined rank, where warriors called all the shots and where their best and brightest would be the basis of a eugenics program to create the greatest fighters that humanity will ever know. And thus, were born the Clans. - For three hundred years, the Successor States were in a technological freefall while the Clans, who left long before the Succession Wars, fled with a treasure trove of technical data that would later become extinct in the Inner Sphere, expanding and improving upon it during their so-called "Golden Century." By the time of the Clan Invasion (known to the invaders as Operation Revival), they had developed harjel, Elemental battle armor, Omnimechs and improved versions of either scarce or forgotten Inner Sphere technology. The Clans were so advanced in fact, that in the earliest days of the invasions, many people in the Inner Sphere were convinced that they were under attack by aliens. - The Lyran Alliance had a religion known as the One Star Faith that believed in a paradise world guarded by Kerensky's descendants. Let's just say that they were in for a very rude awakening when the Clans showed up. - Don't be fooled by the Honor Before Reason mentality of the Clans; they can be just as brutal as any other player in the scene. Just ask Clan Smoke Jaguar, infamous for a variety of war crimes thanks to their complete disregard for anything not military. When dealing with an insurgency on a planet they conquered, their solution involved holding entire blocks of civilian apartments hostage and demanding the perpetrators show themselves... and when no perpetrator showed the first couple of times, they simply destroyed the apartments, killing the men, women, and children inside with no hesitation or reticence, only stopping when a clearly innocent monk claimed responsibility in order to make them stop destroying apartments. This ultimately culminated in their decision to handle the unruly city by bombarding it from space with a Warship; the novels make explicit mention of the nearby river being boiled away to nothing and that the destruction was so complete that the city of Edo simply ceased to exist as anything other than a hundred-meter-deep crater. - The origins of Clan Smoke Jaguar are nightmare fuel in and of itself. Franklin Osis, a warrior resentful of humanity's inherently violent nature, tried to recover from his combat trauma by admiring the wildlife of Strana Mechty with his brother Simon - only to have it shattered when a Smoke Jaguar leapt out of nowhere and tore Simon's throat out in front of him. Crazed with fear, Franklin threw himself at the beast with only a hunting knife and slaughtered the beast...only to discover that, not only did he return to his violent past, he loved it. - During Operation Klondike, Clan Smoke Jaguar's fondness for torturing and raping the locals caught up to them when the city of Kaliningrad took up arms against them after an unspecified "incident" involving a Jaguar warrior. Franklin Osis declared the entire city to be "enemy combatants" and razed every last building to the ground, refusing to help the now homeless survivors. His only comment on the matter was "They should have surrendered after the first lesson." While ilKhan Kerensky was understandably furious, Osis has become such a monster from his Clan's trademark bloodlust that he went as far as to nickname them "the Destroyers of Kaliningrand." - Even living as a civilian under Clan Smoke Jaguar sucks. Their buildings are function over form, entertainment is limited because of communication restrictions and their prejudice towards Freeborn humans, while par for the course for Clan society, is less "sneering pity" and more "seething hatred." While Freeborn warriors that succeed in their Trials of Position into the Clan Touman will win their peers' begrudging respect, the Smoke Jaguars will be so indignant over their victory that they will force them to take a second trial just to prove a point of how much they hate anyone outside their eugenics program. - Despite their frightening name, Clan Hell's Horses is one of the nicer Clans, known for their greater tolerance of Freeborn warriors and "Man-Before-Machine" set of beliefs. However, their eponymous totem animal, engineered to survive the highlands of Circe, is anything but friendly. In fact, the Hell's Horse is carnivorous, violent and impossible to domesticate. The Clans have been around since the 2800s, have developed an interstellar society where Might Makes Right and not a single one of them has ever tamed a Hell's Horse. - The wrath of the Clans extends to their own as well. - No more is this more apparent than the fate of Clan Wolverine, which was systematically slaughtered down to the last man, woman and child after being falsely accused by Clan Widowmaker of detonating a nuclear device in the city of Great Hope. Clan Wolverine became so hated by the other Clans that all records of its existence were struck from official Clan records and known from that point on as the "Not-Named Clan." The few survivors of this genocide escaped to the Deep Periphery as the mysterious "Minnesota Tribe." No other Clan - not even the criminally-inclined Clan Burrock - ever got such shabby treatment. - And the novel Betrayal of Ideals makes this even more horrific by showing that the Wolverines really didn't have it coming. Rather, Nicholas quickly realized that a warrior society needs enemies to fight, and with Operation KLONDIKE being a resounding success, they were now in peacetime. When Nicholas saw that other Clans were arraying against the Wolverines, he was perfectly content to let them be the enemy to unite the Clans against. The horrific story of The Not-Named Clan as soulless monsters burning everything down just to watch the glow was created after the fact by Nicholas, revising Clan history into a story to keep his artificial society together exactly the way he wanted it. - Clan Goliath Scorpion has a...unique method of locating lost Star League caches and facilities, relying on visions induced by a hallucinogen made from their totem's deadly venom. This "Necrosia" is frequently used as a combat drug to calm the mind and sharpen the senses during battle. Sometimes it drives its user into an Unstoppable Rage that precedes a fatal coma, but life is full of trade-offs. - While police brutality is universally condemned in the real world, in Clan society it's the norm. Many if not all of a Clan's civilian police forces are Warrior Caste dropouts that failed their training or Freeborn that ended up as the victim of Clan society's prejudice against those born the old-fashioned way. And they are more than willing to take their anger and frustration out on criminals and protesters. The Clans also happen to be big fans of corporal punishment, carrying out public whippings and floggings for crimes ranging from simple theft to sexual assault. - An added twist to this becomes apparent when one looks at the Clan economy. The Clans have a currency known as the Kerensky that's used for transactions between Clans (the Clan economy is otherwise moneyless, with warriors able to requisition goods they want and members of the lower castes paid in work credits). It's largely electronic, but small gold coins and bricks are also used on occasion. However, there's a thriving black market largely centered in Strana Mechty's capital of Katyusha City, and it relies on physical Kerenskies for those transactions. As a result, if you're caught with so much as a single Kerensky on your person and you're not a part of the merchant caste, the Clan Military Police assume you're a black market racketeer and punish you as such (the punishment is a two-step reduction in grade - thus hurting your livelihood - and a public flogging). Just think about how easily an expert at sleight of hand could set up an innocent person for that punishment just by slipping a coin about the size of an American penny into their pocket... - First developed by Clan Smoke Jaguar to save on limited resources, "Protomechs" are the intermediary units between Elemental battle armor and Battlemechs. On the outside, they are designed to resemble beasts or mythical creatures to scare the opposition. On the inside, their pilots are so deeply wired into the machine that they feel like the machine itself is their own body - sometimes to the point where they believe it really is their own body. This manifests as everything from a god complex even outside their machines to feeling the pain if one of their protomech's limbs is severed while they're plugged into it (and since they're situated in the protomech's torso rather than the head, one wonders what happens to them when a protomech's head is severed...) - Because of their inhuman locomotion, quadripedal Protomechs have proven difficult to control. That is, until the Society produced a drug known as "Feralize": an addictive chemical that turns the user's mind into that of a rabid animal. Given the Society's unique interpretation of medical ethics, the clinical trials that went into such a drug are probably best left to the imagination. - The Genecaste are the collective Mad Woman In The Attic of Clan society. Rarely spoken aloud or in company, the Genecaste are those who took the Clans' transhumanist ideology a little too far. Living in isolated communes for fear of extermination, the Genecaste are able to survive in low-gravity, high-gravity or underwater environments. Some have even gained the ability to survive in outer space. Depending on the degree of their mutations, they may resemble Rubber-Forehead Aliens, animal people, or even something straight out of All Tomorrows. Considering how little is known of the Deep Periphery, there may be an entire empire of Genecaste out there, waiting to be discovered... - After Comstar made the controversial decision to reform itself into a secular organization, those that carried on their mystic traditions went on to form The Word of Blake. Their beliefs went from "protect human technology and information" to "we will rule humanity because no one else is worthy doing so." Granted, Comstar had these intentions all along, but the World of Blake would take it to world-shattering levels. Literally. - The Blakists' Elite Mooks, the Manei Domini, are not to be messed with. They are assassins and super soldiers that have been so thoroughly indoctrinated and augmented with cybernetics that it's debatable if they're even human anymore. They can blend in with any crowd, listen in on any conversation, fast-talk their way out of capture and kill someone before they even have time to react. Some of them have gone so far as to make themselves uglier with cosmetic surgery just so they can scare the living crap out of their targets. - The Word of Blake owns and operates their own Protomechs. Unlike the Clans, who have specially-bred pilots small enough to fit in their cramped cockpits, the Manei Domini simply amputate the limbs of one of their own and hardwire them into the machine itself like a Dreadnaught. The Clan's Protomech pilots may end up thinking that the machine is their body, but for the Manei Domini, it is their body. - The Jihad. A war so utterly off the rails that it earned its own folder. - Comstar had long held the belief in a prophecy that they will lead the Second Star League in their image. When the Star League instead disbanded by a vote of no-confidence, thereby rendering the prophecy null and void, the Word of Blake was upset and decided to make the sane and rational decision to launch the most violent conflict in human history. - After their threats to force the Successor States to reform the Star League went unheeded, the Word of Blake went absolutely apeshit and launched a two-front campaign against literally every other faction. Half of their assault came in the form of a massive information warfare campaign to turn every faction against another in a series of false flags and "whiting out" all communication. The other half? Attacking every capital and industrial center they could reach with WMDs. Nuclear. Chemical. And biological. - One of the biological weapons released during the Jihad was the "Curse of Galedon." The virus was so deadly that it single-handedly wiped out the population of two planets: An Ting and Galedon V. Not even bombing their cities from orbit worked to halt the spread. - During the conflict between the St. Ives Compact and the Capellan Confederation, Kali Liao came up with a plan to end the war swiftly and with minimal effort: by bombing St. Ives targets with nerve gas. While her brother Sun-Tzu Liao intervened and did everything in his power to stop the "Black May" incident, he was too late: the war between the two nations intensified greatly and more than one-hundred-thousand people died in the attacks. His efforts were not in vain, however: had his sister carried out her plans without a hitch, the death toll would have been one million. - On the 300th anniversary of Jerome Blake's founding of Comstar, the Word of Blake, naturally, celebrated the occasion with a series of terrorist attacks across the entire Inner Sphere. Their actions included gassing entire cities, triggering a planetwide foot-and-mouth disease outbreak on Thessalonika and even a botched nuclear strike that set off a freak wildfire so out of control that it turned almost the entire population of Marduk into amateur firefighters. Some of these attacks were even aimed at schools and hospitals. This piece of artwork, which shows a Grand Titan under attack while the people at its feet choke to death on a chemical weapon, gives us only an idea of the sheer horror that the people of the Inner Sphere had to go through. - The people in the image are Knights of the Inner Sphere, a unit intended as an embodiment of chivalry and honor, as an ideal for people to look up to—and they were among the Word of Blake's very first targets. In the Blakists' eyes, chivalry was dead because they fully intended to kill it themselves. - Thomas Marik (the real one, not his body-double), better known as The Master of the Word of Blake, has gone down as one of the biggest monsters of the Battletech universe for single-handedly starting the Jihad after becoming radicalized by the writings of the fanatical Primus Conrad Toyama. - The violence of the Jihad is summed up in a rather iconic piece of cover art for the Blake Ascending sourcebook. The lower half of the image shows a BattleMech caught in the shockwave of a nuclear explosion while the upper half shows a Word of Blake captain at the bridge of his Warship, cackling like a maniac as he watches the carnage from orbit. - The same spirit is captured on the cover of Final Reckoning◊, showing Thomas Marik almost jubilant at the orbital missiles raining down upon him. - The fate of Fritz Donner. The former CO of the Circinus Federation's Black Warriors, Donner was captured by the Word of Blake and "interrogated" for a solid four years until he finally broke, brainwashed by Precentor Apollyon into suicide bombing the diplomatic summit on Arc-Royal. Unfortunately for the Inner Sphere, many dignitaries were killed in the blast and their war against the Blakists was delayed. Unfortunately for the Word of Blake, one of the casualties was Khan Bjorn Jorgensson of Clan Ghost Bear. Apollyon quickly learned why you never piss off the Ghost Bears. - Even throughout the long, brutal Succession Wars, Mechwarriors were seen as modern-day knights in shining armor: exemplars of chivalry with their mechs as their steeds. The Jihad was so brutal - so terrifyingly violent - that it lead to the death of this way of thinking around the end of the war. The Succession Wars lasted for three-hundred years and nearly saw mankind revert to the stone age. The Jihad lasted for fourteen years, yet it permanently ruined the heroic trappings that Mechwarriors were given in the Succession Wars. Either the Word of Blake's white-out of the HPG network prevented propaganda outlets from doing their job or the Jihad was just that violent. Or both. - Shock artist and playwright Belazs Nagy was no stranger to controversial forms of self-expression, most notably his 3042 opus, The Rape of Capella, which juxtaposed war crime footage with survivor interviews to paint a lurid portrait of the Federated Suns' rampant militarism. While he had long held a reputation for protesting just about everything the Davions said, did or even wore, it was the opening night of his 3072 play about the Inner Sphere's role in the Jihad, Our Holy Mission, that finally proved to be his undoing. Already infuriated by the play's sympathetic portrayal of the Word of Blake, the audience finally snapped when Nagy himself ended the play with what was heavily implied to be an Aristocrats joke at the Davion family's expense, breaking out into a riot that ended with the playwright being hanged from a lamppost outside the theater. - While the Word of Blake was busy with its apocalyptic temper tantrum, the Clans were occupied with a civil war that began, progressed and ended in genocide. ilKhan Brett Andrews wanted to "purge" the Clans of all "Inner Sphere taint" through Trials of Reaving. A cabal of disgruntled Clan scientists, The Society, feared for their genetic research and decided to secretly stage rebellions across all of Clan space. The end result was an interstellar parade of war crimes that resulted in the brutal annihilation of Clans Steel Viper, Blood Spirit, Ice Hellion, Fire Mandrill and the newly-resurrected Clan Burrock. - The invading Clans were spared because of how distant they were from their homeworld kin. However, they were forever shunned and outcast for being "tainted" by the Inner Sphere's "barbaric" way of life. Even Clan Wolf, which was chosen by Kerensky himself and Clan Jade Falcon, which was the most ardently conservative of all the Clans. All because the homeworld Clans viewed the vast majority of humankind as irredeemably backwards. - The Society, who rubbed salt into the wound that Andrews opened, are members of the Clans' Scientist Caste resentful of not only their warrior-driven hierarchy, but anything that would impede their research. Such as morals, ethics or human rights. They will shut down mechs and infrastructure with cyber warfare campaigns, release biological weapons that would only kill people of a certain bloodline and enslave anyone they got their hands on to use as test subjects. - The few survivors of the campaign of genocide against planet Arcadia were Society test subjects that somehow managed to break free, found wandering through its wastelands. It's never mentioned what was done to them, but it was apparently so bad that it left them utterly insane. - The cataclysmic end of Clan Blood Spirit was the grand finale to the Wars of Reaving. Star Adder, having emerged as the most powerful of the Homeworld Clans, would enact a global campaign of genocide against their most hated enemy. Every asset of the Blood Spirit was destroyed. Every Blood Chapel, every planet, every city, every mech, every ship and every man, woman and child: utterly annihilated. - Even after the horrors of the Wars of Reaving, an ideological faction formed within the Clans known as the Aggressors. Instead of killing all vestiges of Inner Sphere "contamination" within their society, they want to destroy the Inner Sphere entirely. And keep in mind that the Inner Sphere is comprised of over two-thousand planets over the span of more than five-hundred lightyears. Thankfully, even the Clans find them too extreme and work to suppress their influence, but if disgruntled scientists could kick off the Clans' deadliest conflict, what's stopping a generation of bloodthirsty Mechwarriors from starting something far worse? - Making this even worse: when the Clans were initially founded, they were split into the political factions of Wardens, who believed they should stand ready to defend the Inner Sphere in its Darkest Hour, and Crusaders, who believed that they should conquer it and rebuild the Star League in their own image. With the Warden faction being the dominant ideology from the beginning. Over time however, as the Clans grew bored with waiting for a threat that never materialized, the Crusaders slowly grew in popularity until they were the majority, leading to the invasion. Who's to say history won't repeat itself? That the Aggressors won't steadily gain numbers and momentum to kick off a new invasion with the goal of burning the whole Inner Sphere to the ground? - The Homeworld half of Clan Hell's Horses was forever "tainted" in the eyes of their fellow Clans for their dealings with the mercenary Kell Hounds and Clan Wolf-in-Exile, forced to be rebranded as Clan Stone Lion. One of their rituals, meant to purge themselves of this perceived corruption, is the "Cleansing Path" meant for Bloodnamed warriors, which entails a fasting retreat for forty hours in a handmade sweat lodge. After which they are attacked by four of their fellow Clanners with thorned branches that they must fight off without any equipment. And without any clothes. The more scars, the more honor they receive - and even more if they do so without uttering a cry of pain. The Clan's founder, Khan Delvillar, not only founded this ritual but perfected it, going on a 120 hour long fast that has yet to be exceeded. - Once the bloodshed had finally ended, the Homeworld Clans embraced the Bastion doctrine, believing that nothing from the Inner Sphere or the Periphery should be allowed to "contaminate" the Clan way of life. Not even gene stock from the Star League that the Clans viewed with such reverent awe, as Clan Goliath Scorpion (later known as Escorpion Imperio and then the Scorpion Empire) found out the hard way. - On August 7th, 3132, after nearly half a century of unprecedented peace under the rule of the Republic of the Sphere, an unknown party was able to sabotage a whopping eighty percent of all HPG generators in an event known as "Grey Monday", effectively destroying mankind's method of faster-than-light communication. The resulting "Dark Age" had a dramatic effect on the borders and territories of the entire Inner Sphere. The biggest effect being the Clans' most successful invasion yet, with Clan Wolf (later renamed as the Wolf Empire) taking a giant chunk out of the Lyran Alliance and the Clan Jade Falcon Occupation Zone pushing itself against the Republic's borders. It seems the Clans' dream of conquering Terra may finally come true after all. - Under the rule of Khan Malvina Hazen, appropriately dubbed the "Chinggis Khan", Clan Jade Falcon embraced a bastardized version of the Hell's Horses' "Mongol Doctrine" and flushed all sense of honor and decency straight down the toilet. Unlike the Hell's Horses, who merely emulated the Mongol Empire's light cavalry tactics, the Jade Falcons followed their Rape, Pillage, and Burn aspect, executing prisoners, annihilating settlements, destroying infrastructure and even going as far as to contaminate the entire water supply of planet Apostica with weapons-grade plutonium, ensuring that its entire population died a slow, agonizing death from radiation poisoning. - Malvina Hazen herself is a one-person horror show. In her childhood, she murdered two members of her Sibko to make sure there was enough food to go around, treated her adopted daughter Cynthy (who was orphaned by the very Mongol Doctrine she espoused) like a pet at best and a punching bag at worst, and essentially dedicated her life to slaughtering everything that stood in the way of her ambitions. She was finally undone after being brutally stabbed by one of the people closest to her: Cynthy. - The Jihad officially ended with the establishment of the Republic of the Sphere, but for some Word of Blake insurgents, it never ended. The most famous of these "Neo-Blakist" factions is the Kittery Resistance, responsible for the bombing of a Republic-supported library on the titular planet as revenge for the Word of Blake's defeat. The most insidious of all these groups, however, is the accelerationist White Hand, which wants to destroy society as we know it so they can rebuild it as they see fit. It's implied that they are much larger than they appear and nobody knows just how far their influence extends. - The closing years of the Dark Age saw what was long thought unthinkable both in-universe and by fans: the Clan conquest of Terra. After a long war across Earth with their ancient Jade Falcon rivals, the Wolf Empire is now the uncontested ruler and ilClan of the Third Star League. - One of the forces that fought on behalf of the Wolf Empire were the Fidelis: one of the last remnants of Clan Smoke Jaguar that served the Republic of the Sphere as penance for the Clan Invasion. The reward for their service to the Wolves? The reformation of Clan Smoke Jaguar. It seems that the sacrifices made during Operation Bulldog and Operation Serpent were all for nothing... - A series of short stories set during the Jihad era describes what might be the only recorded example of Haunted Technology in the setting. The tale starts with a detachment of Fed Com troops being thrown off-course by a minor jump drive malfunction and finding by chance a jet-black Marauder on a lifeless asteroid. What seems like a windfall quickly turns to concern as a number of inexplicable suicides and mechanically-impossible lethal maintenance accidents befall the unit, culminating in the mysterious disappearance of the Marauder's pilot during a training exercise. The tough veteran colonel of the unit decides that enough is enough and takes it out on maneuvers only to return pale and shaken to his core, whereon the Marauder is promptly hidden away in an abandoned mine and the unit swears itself to secrecy... - ...Until the turmoil of the Jihad causes the last surviving member of the unit to reveal the Marauder to mentally-disturbed mercenary Kevin Langstrom, who seems to feel the Marauder calling to him as a kindred spirit. One at the controls of the Marauder, Langstrom proves to be particularly bloodthirsty with a penchant for cockpit kill-shots, even killing a fellow mechwarrior in a fit of rage and sealing his body within the machine (which seems to fix a previously untraceable malfunction). Fleeing from justice, he is taken in by a band of pirates only to kill their leader and take over the band, who in turn start suffering mysterious deaths and higher-than-usual rates of attrition. The last time "Black" Langstrom was seen, he was walking alongside his Marauder - which seemingly moved by itself - to beat a rival pirate lord to death with his bare hands before vanishing to look for something "out there in the deep." His last words before leaving were, "It [the Marauder] commands me go, and go I will." Rumors of a jet-black Marauder committing atrocities have flitted around that part of space ever since... - During the Clans' conquest of the Pentagon Worlds as part of Operation Klondike, invaders from Clan Sea Fox in the Callandra region of planet Babylon were baffled to find an old woman dressed in human and animal bone jewelry waving a wand at them from a distance. Before any of them could make a move, the "witch" then disappeared in a sudden dust storm, only to be replaced by a Thunderbolt, an Ostsol and a Hunchback - the first of which was draped in the same kind of bone jewelry. Both of which dragged the survivors of their attack into a dust devil. The lucky ones wandered back to their bases mechless. The others were found decapitated and tied to the ground outside of Sea Fox camps. While the story has been debunked in-universe time and time again, it has done nothing to prevent sightings of the "Callandra Witch" from popping up sporadically during the Clan Invasion, always seen summoning mechs from out of nowhere to harass Clan forces. - In 3132, a Star of Sea Fox mechs on Twycross was destroyed by a Thunderbolt draped in a human and animal bone necklace. She's back. - In 2825, a unit of BattleMechs painted in SLDF colors, bearing a mysterious emblem depicting the state of Minnesota and the number "331", invaded the Draconis Combine from out of the Deep Periphery, freeing political prisoners and looting resources. All while refusing any attempts at capture or communication before fleeing into unknown space, never to be heard from again. Even in the ilClan era of 3151, despite centuries worth of research and investigation, not a single person is aware of whatever happened to the so-called "Minnesota Tribe." - Once, a Black Lion-class warship was found orbiting the planet Merope. This wouldn't be noteworthy at all were it not for the fact that it disappeared upon investigation by AFFS fighters. Not jumped, not accelerated - vanished into thin-fracking-air. - Similar is the story of the "Vandenberg White Wings", detailing a squadron of white aerospace fighters that suddenly appeared to escort a fleet of Star League transports before suddenly disappearing again. - SLDF General Stephen James Gaffa was a renowned war hero who piloted a Highlander with an "05" numeral and an insignia depicting three stars. After he was killed in battle, no trace of his mech was ever found. In the centuries since, Mechwarriors across the Inner Sphere have claimed to have been saved by an ancient-looking Highlander in SLDF colors with an "05" numeral. "Great Gaffa's Ghost" indeed. - The Kearney-Fuchida Drive is the main FTL drive used in the Battletech universe and is safe and reliable if used and maintained correctly. Otherwise you might get a "misjump." Misjumps could place you in the wrong star system, strand you in deep space, send you thousands of lightyears away to a planet of talking bird aliens or fuse the entire crew inside the ship's hull. - The Smoke Jaguar is no pussycat. It's a 120kg, genetically-modified wildcat that is so aggressive, bloodthirsty and utterly ruthless that it is known to hunt and kill simply for the sport of it. And the Clan named after it lives up to this reputation and then some. - The namesake of Clan Ice Hellion is a fanged, bipedal... thing with More Teeth than the Osmond Family and the ability to take down even the most dedicated predator through sheer numbers alone. - Planet Lopez gives us the Branth. Massive, leather-winged, poison-spitting dragons that have been trained as flying cavalry, effective against infantry and even Battlemechs. The only reason that these creatures are seldom seen on the battlefield is because of their vulnerability to offworld microbes and disease. - The Inner Sphere is home to all kinds of lifeforms - two stand out in the sourcebooks. One is a grinning critter with lots of teeth - the trachazoi. It's an ambush predator that loves the taste of brains. The other is the crana a large insect that paralyzes humans and drinks their blood. If the unlucky victim is a human, they can have eggs implanted in them. Crana love heat sources - including the exhausts of Battlemech heatsinks. - Inferno rockets are one of the few weapons a regular infantry soldier can use to seriously threaten a BattleMech. The warhead contains a futuristic version of Napalm that sticks to anything it touches and burns hot enough (sometimes even underwater or in space, as the more expensive kinds contain their own oxidizer) to start melting armorplate and overheat a 'mech to the point that it is forced into shutdown. A 'mech hit with too many infernos will literally cook its pilot alive while they are utterly incapable of doing anything about it...not even escape, since the heat of inferno rounds tends to fuse escape hatches and ejection systems shut. MechWarriors tend to have a very healthy respect for inferno launchers and even the suspicion that a given infantry squad might have one will generally result in preemptive Disproportionate Retribution. - The simple fact that all of the horrific, violent and outright genocidal acts committed by the villains of the setting have been done without any kind of evil, supernatural force to motivate them. Only purely human reasons like greed, hubris, desperation, nationalist fervor, religious fanaticism, prejudice, bloodlust, political extremism and outright insanity, all carried out on a galactic scale. And as real-life history can attest, humans are more than capable of carrying out unspeakable acts of death and destruction for the most irrational and trivial of reasons. Despite the opening line of this page, BattleTech may truly be even darker than Warhammer 40K- there are no warlike aliens or evil psychic gods of the hell-realms beyond normal space to blame for the endless slaughter. Only us.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BattleTech
Beasts of Burden / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Spoilers Off applies to all Nightmare Fuel pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned! A comic book series about cats and dogs can't be that scary...can it? - "Lost": - The ghost puppies. Doesn't sound scary? Oh, you have no idea how wrong you are... - The teenage culprit, David, turns out to be the real nightmare. Once you see inside his closet of horrors, you realize exactly why the ghosts are enraged: boxes of animal skulls and collars, a dead squirrel (or baby animal) in a jar, and a jar of eyeballs, alongside syringes, a hunting knife, and a roll of duct tape. There are also Polaroids showing bloodied (and presumably dead) animals, including . a decapitated puppy - The final page. The entire story is nightmare-inducing, but that last page, where you see the bottom of the pond with drowned Hazel, her dead puppies, and all the other animals David tortured and killed. It will not let you sleep easy. - "Grave Happenings". Specifically the part where the gravekeeper is torn to shreds by something that rose up out of a grave, and the only reason his dog doesn't get killed as well is because the man's arm rips loose at the elbow. And for further shudders, the dog is still dragging the ripped off arm behind him on the leash when he meets up with the Burden Hill pets. - "The Gathering Storm" - This one is more Squick than anything, but between that Eye Scream part and when one of the characters dies, with their bloody collar sitting there... - The giant pet-eating monster frog that explodes into dozens of small dead frogs when beaten. - The true form of the ghostly sheep from "The View from the Hill". They died in a barn fire, and... well, there's a reason why Jack fainted when he got a good look at them. - In "A Dog and His Boy", when they catch the boy tearing apart rabbits with a wild, savage look in his eyes. - "The Presence of Others" ends with a image of Burden Hill as seen in Sabina's nightmare. It looks like a demon apocalypse — a figure rising in the background, the ground covered in blood and skeletons, and Ace and Jack lying on the ground, their flesh flayed away to reveal the bone and muscle underneath. It ends with a close-up on Jack's face as he stares forward helplessly. - Not all the horrors are supernatural creatures. The cultists in "Wise Dogs and Eldritch Men" are nasty pieces of work. Seeing them done in by their own mission is extremely satisfying. - The undead dogs Dymphna raises to get revenge for her coven being destroyed are horrifyingly detailed in their rotting state.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeastsOfBurden
Beetlejuice / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "We've come for your daughter, Chuck." - Betelgeuse Snake, a serpentine version of Betelgeuse with an exaggerated version of his normal head complete with wide eyes with slit pupils especially that frighteningly creepy leer on his face when he corners Lydia. It even got referenced in the Shin Megami Tensei series of games, as the boss enemy Echidna in Shin Megami Tensei II. - The scene where Barbara tries to scare Delia and Otho by hanging herself in a closet, letting out a blood-curdling scream, and then ripping off her own face with her eyeballs dangling out by the sockets. - Fortunately for them, they can't see her. They're more horrified at how small the closet is. - Then Barbara cuts Adam's head off. Again, Delia and Otho don't see them. They're more disgusted by how tacky the room they're in looks. - Barbara and Adam's transformations, where Barbara stretches her face into an elongated horror with her eyeballs in her mouth and Adam makes his face beak-shaped while pressing his hand against his skull to make a head-crest with eyeballs on his fingers while now lacking eyes. If Lydia's reaction is any indication, it would've succeeded in frightening off the Deetzes if they could see them- which was the initial intention. - Given the theme of ghosts resembling their corpses at the moment of death... just stop and think of some of the horrible ways that people have died. - Shrunken Head guy◊, a lady who got divided in two, apparently in a botched magic trick, a guy run over by a car and reduced to a realistic pancake, and a guy who set himself on fire from smoking- being reduced to a blackened skeleton with his normal face barely intact to create an unsettling image...and so on. - People who commit suicide become civil servants in the afterlife. The receptionist (a former beauty queen) still has open slits on her wrists, Juno has a slit throat, the "flattened man" is hinted to have thrown himself into traffic, and another man still dangles from the noose he used to hang himself. They're creepy enough; what must people who shot themselves in the head look like? - The Sandworm, an alien and nightmarish black and white worm with red eyes with a perpetually angry second head with eerily human-looking eyes within the first head that apparently live on Saturn. - Made worse by the fact that apparently according to the newspapers Betelgeuse reads, there is apparently an entire population of these creatures and are said to eat any ghosts that happen to leave their parameters and aren't rescued in time. - Betelgeuse himself... and not just when he's in his giant-snake form. In the movie he's an evil force of insane chaos, can change form at will into anything- usually nightmarish forms like weapons or beasts, and he's not above killing people to get what he wants- in fact, his main job is a bio-exorcist- whose job is to kill the living which he takes pride in and has likely done so before. And he attempts to marry Lydia in order to get permanent access to the living world to either be a ghost with no parameters or a living being with potentially the same powers to do whatever horrific fancy pleases him. - The manner in which Juno describes Betelgeuse before he truly appears, the tone suddenly gets darker when she talks about him. He was an assistant of hers before deciding to go off on his own to get rid of the living before being sealed away with the requirements of calling his name three times and needing marriage to be permanently free. All while an eerie yellow light suddenly illuminated the room. With this in mind, the subtle revelation implies that Betelgeuse may not be a perverted and crazy ghost with phenomenal powers, but something akin to the Devil. - Juno disappears in a smoke-like manner which looks unsettling when Adam asks to how to get in touch with her- emerging from her neck due to it being slit from a suicide attempt in life. - The séance, which is supposed to be a way to contact the spirits of Adam and Barbara, is actually an exorcism. Seeing their ghosts being slowly destroyed, shriveling, and aging... AAAAAHHHH! - The scene where Beetlejuice eats the fly. - The bit where the dinner guests are made to perform the Banana Boat Song, arguably the film's Signature Scene, is hilarious to watch and uncomfortable to imagine, as the unwitting people are made to sing and dance against their will before being made to watch as hands reach out of their dinner plates and grab them. - The Maitlands' immediate situation after death. They arrived soaked without knowledge of how they returned, Barbara's fingers catch fire when she gets too close to the fireplace, and when Adam attempts to retrace their steps, he somehow emerges in an alien desert populated by a serpentine unknown creature that causes time to go much slower. Barbara pulls him back in time before the creature attacks him and shows that they have no reflection and are in fact ghosts. It's gradual and subtly scary revelation that they died and they're in a completely unknown situation. - Adam's line of "We're dead, I don't know if we don't have to worry about anything anymore" to Barbara, reiterates the sentiment of the horror of their initial situation when she complains. - How they died, due to how sudden it was. They're driving back from getting Adam some paints when a dog frightens them into swerving to the side of the passage bridge and are left barely hanging by a thread with the dog's weight being the only thing keeping the car from falling over. The dog gets off and the Maitlands plummet to their demise. It sets up the darker tone of the film after being light-hearted for the first few minutes. - The abstract and alien statues of Delia that Betelgeuse suddenly brings to life, grow in size and hold Charlie and Delia Deetzes in place to prevent them from interfering with the wedding. - The priest Betelgeuse summons, a short corpse-like being with completely empty eyesockets- leaving only two pitch black holes where the eyes would be, not helped by its distorted deep voice. - While played for dark humor, Betelgeuse's terrifying face he shows the Maitlands is so terrifying that it's only seen from the back with eldritch tendrils popping out with no indication of what the actual face really looked at that moment- elevating the horror even more. - Just the beginning of the second intro! The original one wasn't that bad, but the second opening starts out with Beetlejuice's rotting corpse sitting inside a coffin as he's summoned by Lydia chanting his name three times. The look in his eyes as he awakens is disturbing. - It isn't helped by the fact that a spider CRAWLS UP IN HIS NOSE AND OUT OF HIS EYEBALL. - In the Bad Future of "Pest o' the West," Lydia is forced to marry an anthropomorphic bull ghost named Bully the Crud. This is a case of Nightmare Fuel both In-Universe and for the viewer. Imagine being a living human female, forced into marriage with a dead animal... who then somehow manages to sire multiple children on you. The implications are horrible if you think about them too much. One can only imagine how horrified Lydia's parents must feel when they realize who their son-in-law is. - Lydia's creepy smile in the gross-off episode when she's trying to convince her father he's having a dream. (For context, Beetlejuice is making ugly faces behind her and Charles walked into the room in a sleepy stupor.) The main thing which keeps it from being too unsettling is the fact that Charles is totally unfazed, and only wants to clarify whether the nightmare is hers or his own. - Anytime Beetlejuice is acting like a Depraved Kids' Show Host. The way he says "kiddies" is particularly disturbing. - Due to the logistics of the play's format, instead of a snake, this version has Beetlejuice summon a giant version of himself that chases the Deetzes and their associates out of the house. - The depiction of the Netherworld in this version: - As Juno puts it, it's a lonely place and an "infinite abyss of nothingness." The movie at least showed the Netherworld had an office space and implied there was more to it, and the cartoon portrayed the Netherworld as its own dimension entirely, but the play turns it into a massive abyss that everybody who's ever died ends up. It's even implied (and outright confirmed in the DC tryout) that unless you're a demon or a human, you can't leave the Netherworld once you enter. Lydia searches as far as she can and doesn't find her mother, even comparing it to the "emptiness of space." No wonder Miss Argentina tells Lydia and Charles to go home while they still can. - Adam reads from the Handbook for the Recently Deceased and tries to open a door to the Netherworld to help Lydia find her mom. However, he is hypnotized by the door, and if it weren't for Barbara and Lydia stopping him, he likely would've been trapped there for eternity. - The original opening song "The Hole" is scary to listen to. The song is about Beetlejuice explaining the concept of death, and the description of the Netherworld he gives is downright terrifying: once you die, what's left of you (BJ specifically denies that it's a "soul" as we understand the concept) goes down to wherever it is Beetlejuice is, and what do you find there? A hole. You climb in, it seals up, and that's it. Forever. - Beetlejuice tells Lydia he can't leave the house after she frees him, and so demonstrates why, by opening the front door, only for a massive Sand Worm to appear and nearly devour the pair and his clones. - The exorcism in this version. Instead of a misunderstanding to summon the Maitlands, this version has Beetlejuice trick Lydia into thinking she can bring her mother back to life by reading from the handbook. Instead, it starts to destroy Barbara. BJ offers to fix it, on the condition that Lydia marry him so he can become human again; but when Adam and Charles refuse on her behalf, he wrecks havoc and puts the blame squarely at Lydia's feet. Beetlejuice: You messed with the wrong book, now look what you've done! - And why did he trick her? Out of spite when he believed she was going to leave him. - Barbara's screams also count. While the movie had the Maitlands stay silent, this version has us hear Barbara's screams of agony. To get Lydia to come to a decision quicker, he also makes Barbara scream repeatedly. - After Lydia (and Charles) jump into the Netherworld to avoid her fate with BJ, BJ quickly decides on a new course of action against Delia, Otho, and the Maitlands. - His version of this includes a game show style segment where he tortures the characters by strapping one of them to a torture wheel and spinning it. Otho is first up, and Delia willingly lets him be tortured once he reveals he's a fraud. We never see or hear from Otho after BJ spins the wheel, leaving his fate to interpretation. - In the touring production, Otho is instead put into a guillotine-like stockade, and executed by Delia after he derides her for being a flake. Doesn't make it any less frightening. - Juno is changed in this version from an efficient, ghostly Beleaguered Bureaucrat into a demon, Director of Netherworld Customs and Processing, and Beetlejuice's overbearing mother, with power able to surpass Beetlejuice himself. After Lydia refuses to go with her, she has this to say to the Deetzes and the Maitlands: - Her appearance in this version is scary. In the movie, beyond her slit throat, Juno was one of the most normal looking members of the Afterlife. But in this version, she is an old, shriveled woman with a tracheostomy, and a beehive hairdo. She looks more in line with a typical Tim Burton character than most of the cast.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Beetlejuice
Belladonna of Sadness / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The trailer makes no bones about what you're going to be seeing if you sit down to watch the whole thing. - Jeanne's rape at the hands of the baron and his men, and later at the hands of the demon. - Jeanne's repeated rapes at the hands of the devil, culminating in a sequence where a dead-eyed Jeanne has sex with a giant-blob thing. - The visual depiction of the bubonic plague's spread throughout the village, and the rotting corpses of the victims. - The orgy scene kicks off with half-human half-animals having sex in ways that defy all laws of physics and biology, followed by people bound together in long strands of hair also having sex in ways that defy all laws of physics and biology. - Jean's death, ending with a shot of his eyes and mouth open in horror as he bleeds to death from multiple spear wounds. - The entire movie, to be completely honest. The experience of watching this in a theater, particularly stoned, is roughly equivalent to a 90-minute-long Brown Note.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BelladonnaOfSadness
Being Dead Ain't Easy / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes - The story starts with Kaiba's limo blowing up and Joey being shot to death. Kaiba would have been killed if Joey wasn't there. - The idea that you can be barred from the afterlife and doomed to cease to exist due to something as mundane as tripping over your shoes is pretty unnerving. \|\|The real reason is just as bad, since Seto bound Joey's soul to his own, making it so Joey's killing Kaiba by complete accident as well as slowly dying himself\|\|. - Joey is understandably freaked out when he makes it back to earth just in time to miss his own funeral and finds no one can see or hear him. - Tristan blames Kaiba for Joey's death and attacks him over it several times. Joey notes that since his death Tristan has become a lot harder, and it scares him. - Seto Kaiba slowly loses his mind as the story progresses, and only Joey, Mokuba and Yugi really notice. - When Joey exerts too much energy moving things around he gets hit with waves of dizziness, tiredness, and nausea despite being dead. He worries that eventually he'll run out of energy and disappear, which turns out to be accurate when Yami Yugi tells Joey point-blank that he's going to die again and completely cease to exist. - Joey gets into a fight with Yami Bakura, which severely drains him to the point that he becomes transparent. His description of Bakura first attacking him is creepy too. Joey: I turn around to leave—and somebody wraps an arm around my neck and squeezes. If I was breathing, I wouldn't be anymore. - Kaiba kept the trench coat he was wearing when Joey died, which is still soaked with blood. Joey is very freaked out by it. - Mokuba is very worried when Kaiba goes to confront someone who wants to murder them, especially since he was running on no sleep and little food. He ends up almost getting killed. - Morrison turns an elevator into a death trap that heads to the top floor of the building at increasing speed, stops, and then blows up the cables so it falls. While Kaiba and Joey escape, that's immediately tempered by the fact that the door to the roof wasn't messed with, and he almost kills Kaiba with poison gas. When they get through that obstacle, he's waiting on the roof for them with multiple sets of guns. It ends with Kaiba pushing him off the roof to his death. Seto Kaiba smiles in the worst way I've ever seen... and shoves Morrison off the top floor of the Kaiba Corp. building. It's a long way down. Six seconds later, there's a screech of tires and a thick-sounding 'thud'. No more Morrison. Kaiba just killed a man. - Yami Bakura reveals that \|\|since Kaiba bonded Joey's soul to his own, Joey has been slowly killing Kaiba as his own condition worsens\|\|. - By the time of chapter 24 Joey's gotten so weak all he can do is lie on a couch and stare at the ceiling, unable to move or get up, and Kaiba has to prop him up like a doll. He feels like he's lying on his deathbed and notes he'll probably never lay on a couch again. - On the way to perform the ritual, Joey can't move or speak safely as doing so could kill him instantly. He mentions feeling like pieces of himself are flying off into nothingness as they drive. - Yami Bakura's deck monsters are real, and he uses Man-Eater Bug and Spellbinding Circle to attack and subdue Kaiba. When the battle goes poorly for him, he switches back to Ryou and uses him as a human shield. - Joey has a slow, horrifying realization after the battle with Yami Bakura. \|\|Seto's soul isn't in his body\|\|. - The penultimate chapters of the story deal with the threat of \|\|being permanently trapped in a Soul Room with all the dangers conjured up from Seto Kaiba's mind\|\|. Making it worse is that Kaiba is okay with it, as \|\|he feels no one needs him in the real world\|\|. - When Kaiba agrees to head back to the real world, he concentrates on opening an exit, but nothing happens. He and Joey are immediately swarmed, and if not for \|\|Joey's willpower\|\| they would have been trapped there forever. Joey: We were so close! No! NO! THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING! - When in the Soul Room, Kaiba is kidnapped by millions of Funny Bunnies, one of which resembles Pegasus. It's equal parts funny and terrifying, as there are so many of them they could smother Joey \|\|in dragon form\|\|. - The cliffhanger of chapter 35, which involves Yami Bakura saving Joey from a materialized Funny Bunny. In the following chapter he tells Joey to never let Seto into their Soul Room again. - Yami Bakura uses Joey's Red-Eyes card as ransom, threatening to tear it if Kaiba won't do as he says. - A Fridge Horror example: In one chapter, Joey spends over two hours pushing a chair into position by Kaiba's bed, and then the rest of the night pushing it back. The very next morning, he gets hit with his first dizzy spell when trying to move a cup of coffee. Trying to move the chair drained his energy so much that it put a serious limit on his time left on Earth - that simple act nearly killed him again in the long run.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeingDeadAintEasy
Being Human (UK) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Mitchell's description of the transformation. Body Horror at it's finest: Mitchell: He should be dead within 30 seconds. The werewolf heart is about two-thirds the size of a human's; but, in order to shrink, first, it has to stop. In other words, he has a heart attack. All the internal organs are smaller; so, while he's having his heart attack, he's having a liver and kidney failure too, and if he stops screaming, it's not because the pain has dulled: his throat, gullet, and vocal cords are tearing and reforming. He literally can't make a sound. By now, the pituitary gland should be working overtime, flooding his body with endorphins to ease some of the pain, but that, too, has shut down. Anyone else would have died of shock long ago, but it won't let him. And THAT'S the thing I find most remarkable: it drags him through fire and keeps him alive and even conscious to endure every second. Nothing like this could just evolve; this is the fingerprint of God, an impossible, lethal curse, spread by tooth and claw. Victim begets victim begets victim. It's so cruel, it's... perfect.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeingHumanUK
Beloved / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes This book is simultaneously a chilling meditation on the horrors of slavery and a ghost story revolving around a murdered child. As such, nightmares abound. - The first two sentences of the novel: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." - Beloved's means for driving out those she deems unwelcome: - Buglar: A mirror shatters as soon as he looks in it. - Howard: Two tiny handprints suddenly appear in a cake. - Here Boy: Slammed into a wall so hard it breaks two legs, dislocates an eye, goes into convulsions, and chews its tongue up. It refuses to enter the house again. - Paul D: Essentially Mind Raped by Adult!Beloved into no longer wanting to stay at 124. He just loses interest. He eventually winds up in a shed (the same one where Beloved was killed) just outside the house, where he and Adult!Beloved have sex. The consent is not at all clear, and it's quite disturbing to read. - The aftermath of the attempted escape from Sweet Home: - Paul F is sold before the day of the escape. His fate is unknown. - Sethe manages to get her children on the wagon headed out of Sweet Home. She is intercepted going back for her husband, Halle, by schoolteacher and others. They flog her and, dear God, forcibly milk her breasts until they are empty. She inadvertently bites off a piece of her tongue in the process. All while pregnant with Denver. They even dig a hole in the ground so as not to hurt the baby. She still, in pure Determinator mode, makes it off the plantation and to 124. The experience scars her so badly, though, that she would rather kill her children and herself than be taken back. - Halle is found out by schoolteacher and put in the barn, where he witnesses the above incident with Sethe. It completely breaks his will to escape. The last anyone sees of him, he is mindlessly smearing butter and soured milk on his face by a churn. His fate is unknown. - Paul A is found hanging from a tree by Sethe while she is on her way back for Halle. His feet and head are missing. - Sixo is surrounded and bound by schoolteacher and his pupils. He fights back, grabbing a rifle and smashing in someone's ribs. Singing all the while. He eventually is overwhelmed and burned alive. His laughing and shouting spook the slavers so badly that they prematurely shoot him to death. - Paul D is surrounded and bound with Sixo. He lives only because he does not resist. After overhearing exactly what his worth as a slave is to the whitemen, he is shackled, collared, and left in a cabin. Eventually, he is hitched to a board like an animal, with a bit in his mouth. He watches a rooster while in this condition, and reflects on how his status is even lower than the barn animals. - At one point, Sethe recalls seeing the bit used at her place before Sweet Home. The only thing to be done was rub goose fat on the corners of the mouth. - The Thirty-Mile Woman, Sixo's ladyfriend, runs in the other direction from Sixo and Paul D. Her fate is unknown. - Sethe's journey from Sweet Home to 124. She walks until her feet are so swollen that her arch disappears and her ankles lose feeling. She is too tired to wave away the bugs swarming her, and eventually refuses to walk any further. When Amy finds her, it takes some persuading for her to resume trying to live. They make it together to a lean-to, where her lack of feeling now extends to everything below her knees. The process of massaging her feet back to life is unfathomably painful. Then, she goes into labor. The kindness of Amy, a whitegirl, is the only reason she and her baby survive. - The Misery: - When schoolteacher and a few others come to take Sethe and her children back to Sweet Home, she murders her infant daughter. With a handsaw. She has severely cut her boys, and had just attempted to dash Denver's head in when she is noticed and stopped. - When Sethe nursed Denver in the aftermath, she had yet to clean Beloved's blood off her nipples. Ick. - Beloved's stream-of-consciousness chapter. It's a chapter entirely free of punctuation from the point of view of Beloved. She talks about her time in Hell/Purgatory/slave ship/who knows where in a really graphic way, made even worse by her child-like outlook. She has the mind of a ONE-YEAR-OLD, remember. - Sethe giving her body to the to the engraver right there among the tombstones, with his young son watching, so she can get her murdered infant's stone engraved - Baby Suggs' life before Sweet Home. All of her children before Halle were taken from her while very young. She gives her body to a slavemaster for months to keep her thirdborn, only to have him traded the following year and find herself pregnant again. All she remembers of her firstborn is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. She eventually gives up trying to remember them at all as they're born, even facial features. She's prepared to do the same for Halle, and is stunned when she gets to keep him. Just heartbreaking. - Paul D's time as a slave after Sweet Home. After trying to kill his master, he is sent to work on a chain gang in Georgia, aka the deepest circle of hell. The men are told what to do by rifle shot, and are often indiscriminately shot themselves. Paul only survives his first day by vomiting, and then "only" gets bashed in the shoulder with a rifle butt. Their work consists of breaking rocks with sledgehammers, and they endure the monotony and horror by singing. Their "living quarters" are a small cage that sits in a ditch. They remain chained to each other at all times. Paul spends eighty-six days in this environment. He and his companions only escape due to a monsoon-like rain providing cover and the means to slip under the cages. - The constant vivid imagery of slaves hanging from trees. Including Sethe's mother, who she suspects was hung for trying to escape. - Beloved greets Paul D by bathing 124 in an unholy shade of red light. His travel through it is marked by a grief so intense it leaves him shaken. - Sethe's experience in the Clearing. She feels phantom fingers gently stroking her neck, before being suddenly strangled by them. - Adult!Beloved's tenuous existence can be quite... intense. When Paul D even thinks about her finding a new place to live, she suddenly and violently chokes on pudding. And, when Sethe affirms Paul D's place in the house, she promptly pulls out a tooth, and assumes it is the first thing of many to go. - Sethe and Denver's isolated existence in the house, with no company but the ghost and her tantrums, after the boys leave and Baby Suggs' death. - schoolteacher. He beat his slaves, took their guns, forbade them to eat meat, and refused to treat them on an equal intellectual level, all of which is contrary to Mr. Garner's treatment. Paul D describes him as being deeply hurt when he discovers a few slaves playing a pitching game. He is remorseful for Sethe's massive beating and abuse only because it lowers her value and work output. He quite plainly regards all black people as less than human. - The description of the "chokecherry tree" on Sethe's back - Sixo being beaten for catching a wild animal. schoolteacher, despite acknowledging his cleverness, beats him anyway "to show him that definitions belong to the definers, not the defined." He is locked up with the livestock every night after, and keeps a nail in his mouth to free himself when necessary. - Sethe's mother showing her a brand of a circle and a cross. So she can use it as an identifier in case something happens to her. Her mother slaps her when she doesn't understand and wants to be branded also. - Nan's recollection of her and Sethe's mother's journey across the sea. They both were raped an untold amount of times by the crew and "other whites". She discarded every child but Sethe, who she only kept because she "put her arms around" (consented to) Sethe's father. His name was also Sethe. - Sethe revealing that she nursed whitebabies before her own children, with the latter getting only what milk was left over. - Paul D's recollection of black folks he knew that had gone insane after escaping slavery. One teenage boy lived alone in the woods and couldn't ever remember another existence. Another woman was jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she thought were her babies. - Sethe's nonchalant description of schoolteacher constantly measuring her body with string is stunning. - Sixo walking thirty-four hours round-trip just to spend one hour with a ladyfriend. During one trip, she misses a rendezvous point. When they find each other, they only have time for a quick lovemaking session on the spot. He then fakes a snakebite injury on her so she'll have an excuse for missing time in the field, and just misses getting whipped by a passing whiteman. The whitewoman with him averts her face from Sixo in horror. - Sethe's discovery that schoolteacher's pupils are being taught to sketch her with half-animal features. - Halle patiently explaining to Sethe that he'll still work at Sweet Home past what he owes for buying out his mother because: Halle: "It don't pay to have my labor somewhere else while the boys is small." - Stamp Paid having his wife taken and used sexually by his master's son. He only doesn't kill anyone, including himself, at her insistence. When she suddenly returns to him, he considers killing her as well. - Despite their better-than-usual treatment under the Garners, Halle and Sethe are still condescendingly denied a wedding ceremony. - Basically, the life of every slave was a singular, hellish nightmare. - Denver once spies on Sethe praying alone, except for a white dress kneeling beside her, with one sleeve around her waist. - Sethe's neighbor Ella, who once was locked up by a whiteman and his son for more than a year. While still going through puberty. Her words: Ella: "You couldn't think up what them two done to me." - When Sethe goes to jail for killing Beloved, Denver remains with her. With the rats. Brrrr. - Sethe struggling to get food from the diner where she works. At one point, she chides herself for "daydreaming" when what she ends up with is barely passable for a meal. - The Klan. Described by Paul D as a dragon that subsists on black blood. - Sethe insinuating that the girls working the slaughterhouse shifts on Saturdays are giving their bodies to the foremen, who they then pay on their way out. - After learning what her mother did, Denver goes deaf for two years, and lives in constant fear for her life. - When a fully grown Adult!Beloved emerges from the stream, Sethe endures a painfully long and sudden urination, to the point where she can't even make it to an outhouse. - Denver recalling Sethe would blame her boys for Beloved's paranormal activity, and would whip them accordingly. - The carnival that Sethe, Paul D, and Denver attend has a Colored Thursday. They endure the insults because they don't expect to ever have as much fun again. - When Adult!Beloved briefly disappears, Denver is so horrified and depressed that she yanks at her hair and wishes to die. - The repeated mantra at the novel's end: "This is not a story to pass on."	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Beloved
Bayonetta / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes The Angels of Laguna. Imagine angels from the Scripture turned up to eleven in terms of Body Horror, malice, and physical anatomy. Their bodies have an exoskeletal structure made of gold and marble, and many appear to have human faces that are non-threatening and child-like in appearance, but beneath the skin are monstrous features like gaping maws or slanted-pupil eyes which Bayonetta exposes as she attacks them. There's an endless amount of these things, they get weirder the higher their ranking is, and they're constantly gunning for Bayonetta. Even worse, they can't be seen by regular humans, but are no less deadly as Luka's father can attest when they ripped him apart by his arms. Luka's response when he actually seems them using Cereza's glasses in Bayonetta: Bloody Fate sums it up Luka: I thought angels were supposed to be pretty and play harps! These guys are monsters! - Contrasting with most of the game, there's the flashback to the death of Luka's father, where we see four angels grabbing him by the arms and legs, and Gory Discretion Shot occurs as they tear him apart. - They also have no respect for humans and will kill them with impunity and use their souls to make more angels, or just manipulate and try to kill them all just For the Evulz.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Bayonetta
Be More Chill / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned. - "The Squip Song," while awesome, just sounds... wrong in some parts, as if Rich is a robot. He is being basically mind-controlled, so close enough. - "The Squip Enters" is up there with Jekyll & Hyde's transformation scene for theatrical freakouts. The intense music reaches a heart-pounding tempo as the Squip's robotically altered, disembodied voice announces its calibration/installation procedures, all while Jeremy screams and thrashes around on the floor in anguish. The audience (not to mention the crowd of onlookers at the mall) has no idea what the Squip's upload process is doing to Jeremy's body, only that it hurts. - The people at the mall, including Christine, have no clue what's happening to Jeremy; they're just watching a teenage boy scream and act possessed. - Everything about the SQUIP is this. Everything. Its behavior is eerily reminiscent of that of an abusive boyfriend... or a cult leader. - With lyrics like "Just take me inside you,""Now it's time to go all the way and more" and "Just take a breath and seal the deal", "Upgrade" disturbingly echoes sexual coercion. - The moment Jeremy activates the Optic Nerve Blocking on Michael at the end of Act One goes immediately from a Tear Jerker to this as the Squip strides in, having changed forms into a more appropriately sci-fi monstrous look, and leads Jeremy away to the sounds of an ominous choir. The Squip: Now, let's get to work. - The entirety of the Halloween party is a mix of terrifying and heartbreaking. - "Halloween" is a fun number at first, with danceoffs, drinking, and the kids having a good time showing off their costumes. However, to the end, it gets very unsettling thanks to Rich, whose dance moves begin to grow progressively more spastic as he continues singing long after everyone, including the orchestra, has stopped, and appears to be tripping out and in genuine pain, the first sign that something is about to go very wrong... - "Do You Wanna Hang?" Chloe, jealous of Brooke, makes a move on Jeremy during the party. We learn that the SQUIP can literally puppet its user's body when it prevents a clearly terrified Jeremy from leaving or resisting her advances in an attempt to force him to have sex with a popular girl, only to be thwarted by Jake's intrusion. Had Jake not interrupted, Jeremy would have been raped by Chloe, herself too drunk to consent properly, without her knowing it was rape in the first place. The sinister swelling of the previously 'sexy'-sounding music as the assault progresses really drives home Jeremy's sense of terror and disgust. Jeremy, struggling as he's kissed and undressed: Oh, Go - no! Whoa-whoa-whoa, no! No! Make it stop, make it stop! Please! Make it stop! - Fridge Horror, as it's unseen, but the fact that Rich was driven to burn down Jake's house in an attempt to stop his Squip's machinations, an act that leaves him severely burned and nearly kills him, and that breaks both Jake's legs as he pushed them both out an upper floor window to save his best friend. - "The Pitiful Children", which is to be expected when it's a Villain Song for a character that embodies this trope. As the song progresses, the SQUIP unfurls its plan to Take Over the World and wipe out all emotion, uncertainty, or error by brainwashing every human being. Jenna getting possessed is frightening enough, but then comes the instrumental break, where the SQUIP conjures an illusion of brainwashed, sci-fi'd-out students who move and act robotically. The stage effects, the ghoulish orchestrations, and the way the cast, especially the Squip, crowd Jeremy and puppet him about, is truly spooky. Then there's the last verse... You won't feel left out or unsure... not pitiful children anymore! - Most of "The Play" is nightmarish, as it includes almost the entire student body being Squipped, with only Jeremy and Michael against the growing horde. Special mention goes to the end, though, as all the students let out horrifying techno-altered screams of agony as their SQUIPS—the little computers implanted in their brains—all combust at once. - Jeremy's situation is absolutely horrifying at this point. A Squip-possessed Mr. Reyes throttles him and flings him bodily across the backstage, the Squip tosses him around too and casually puppets his body, twists his limbs and shocks him while caressing him mockingly, and he's forced to watch as the situation spirals out of control and everyone in the cast gets possessed, with the sinking realization that this is all his fault. - The 2018 production plays up Jeremy totally losing control over his own body. When the Squip forces him to fight Michael, he has to put his own hands around his throat and strangle himself painfully just to keep himself from being made to hurt Michael and to force himself to bypass Squip's block on him apologizing. He's so wildly elated to have regained enough control to manage to stop himself and say sorry for the hurt he's caused that he gives his Squip the finger. Unamused, we see the Squip flick his hand, which twists Jeremy's arm unnaturally as punishment. From the writhing Jeremy does onstage and the injuries he's sustained after the play, it's very probable that the Squip can break your bones from the inside of your body. Shock sound effects were later added to the Broadway production, highlighting the severity of the Squip's punishment of Jeremy over something relatively petty. - If you consider the play from Michael's perspective, he doesn't see the Squips, only his classmates, including Jeremy, Brainwashed and Crazy, attacking him. He's forced to fistfight with Jeremy, is dragged away from him screaming by the brainwashed cast members to who knows what uncertain fate had Jeremy not given Christine the Mountain Dew Red, is beaten up by his classmates, and then has to watch as pretty much everyone he knows, including his beloved best friend, let out terrifying mechanized screams then collapse to the ground, apparently dead because of the Mountain Dew Red, which he'd proudly brought to save the day. It's no wonder he screams too. Michael: Oh, FUCK! - The popular kids, when under the Squip's control are either terrifying, put in a terrifying situation, or both. Jake is forced to walk on his broken legs by his Squip. Brooke and Chloe are talking in a deadpan Shining-esque unison, their deadpan voices and eerie harmonies completing the effect. Then they attack Jeremy and Michael, with the help of Jenna, the final boss, who leads everyone with a Squip to jerk around as control slips... The cast of the play, including a visibly pained and terrified Jeremy: I just feel so connected to you guys right now... - Squipped Brooke and Chloe are somehow worse in the 2019 Broadway production. Under the puppeteering direction of the sneering Squip, while saying their creepy in-unison dialogue, they pull a downed, shaking and frightened Jeremy between them, Chloe restraining him by pinning his arms while Brooke pulls apart and crawls between his legs. Considering what almost happened to Jeremy at the Squip and Chloe's hands during "Do You Wanna Hang?", there's a considerable amount of Fridge Horror in the probability that the villain is all too willing to use someone's sexual trauma to gain their compliance. It wasn't likely to go very far, and Michael's thankfully there to come to the rescue, but the look on Jeremy's face as he cowers in Michael's arms afterwards says it all. - Then there's Christine. In some productions, her deadened, vacantly happy words to Jeremy are accompanied by a very dissonant, unsettling instrumental reprise of "I Love Play Rehearsal". Then, she sings a haunting reprise of "A Guy That I'd Kinda Be Into", where the Squip forces her to declare her love for Jeremy. Jerky, hauntingly empty movements and delivery aside, this girl who the show establishes above all values her integrity and independence has effectively been entirely stripped of her free-will and turned into a prize for a boy she might like, but wants to be with on her own terms. Fridge Horror sets in when you realize that this is more or less a repeat of what the Squip tried to do to Jeremy during "Do You Wanna Hang". Jeremy is disgusted, and the way the Squip talks about her doesn't help. Jeremy: No! That is not Christine! The Squip: I assure you, it is! Only her fears and insecurities have been...removed . - There's also the thought of the aftermath for Christine; she's established to adore theatre and to find the stage to be the one place where she can truly bloom and feel secure in herself. How will she feel now that her passion's associated with this traumatic event? - The Squip's deactivation, particularly in the Broadway production. First, everyone starts jerking around in pain as their Squips are deactivated. Then the Squip himself remains on stage suffering as he starts to break down, screams Jeremy's name, and reverts to speaking Japanese as very bright lights flash all around it, until the entire theater suddenly goes dark. While it is great to see things come to an end, it's still a very tense end to an already unsettling scene. - The Broadway version of the Squip ups his acts climactic villainy to Cold-Blooded Torture, with him forcing Jeremy to glitch out with deeply creepy vocal effects when he tries to apologize to Michael — then, in an otherwise comedic fight scene, puppets his body to make him punch Michael hard enough to almost knock him out. He jerks Jeremy around, has him throttled by his own teacher, and torments the entire play cast while gloating about how he's discovered his true purpose is to Take Over the World to 'save' humanity from its own flaws by forcing them into a cold, militaristic hivemind. He does this all the while repeatedly pinning the blame on Jeremy, telling him that his actions are all thanks to him. Including the harm he does to other students. The Squip: ( making Jake scream in agony as he forces him to walk on his broken legs) Jeremy, look what you're making me make him do! - Different updates to the show, through previews of its Off-Broadway and Broadway runs, have used slightly altered scripts, some of which provide some rather chilling moments for the Squip's reaction to Jeremy freeing Christine. Here's one, for example: The Squip: Put it down, and Christine is yours. I think the choice is clear, don't you? Jeremy: Sure is — (to Christine) drink this. ( beat) The Squip: ( disturbingly calm) You sacrificed your freedom for hers. An unexpected outcome. Jeremy: ( resigned yet still afraid ) I guess I'm stuck with you forever . The Squip: ( soothingly, almost sweetly ) It's okay, Jeremy. I have plans for you. We're going to do such wonderful things . - Prior to the above, in a now-deleted set of lines, the cast of the Play's Hive Mind antics get...interesting. The Cast of the Play, including Jeremy: I just feel so connected to you right now — I just want to get into your brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, BRAINS, BRAINS, BRAINS -- Jeremy, breaking free: (howls in pain) I just want you out of my head — Get OUT OF MY HEAD! - There is then dead silence as the play cast all but disappears from sight, leaving Jeremy alone with the Squip. - During "Voices In My Head", it's revealed that the Squip is Not Quite Dead. True, Jeremy handles it pretty easily, but its sudden echoing taunts cutting through an otherwise triumphant finale are very unsettling. Some productions have it just as an eerie disembodied voice, while others feature the Squip crawling and dragging its half-dead body across the stage. Yikes. The Squip: Jeremy, you can't get rid of me that easily. Jeremy... Jeremy... - The Broadway production has the Squip show up on the giant screen, towering behind everyone while the video fizzles in and out. It's about as creepy as most of the other effects in the show. - Word of God says that this, as well as the somewhat foreboding instrumental at the end of the song, is meant to imply that although Middleborough was saved, all the neighbouring high schools have been completely overtaken by Squips. Sweet dreams! - The lighting and video effects added to the 2019 Broadway production generally take a lot of these moments and make them even creepier, accentuating the Squip's appearance with projections of computer data and eerie bright flashes and strobes. A lot of the songs also have a vocoder effect that synthesizes the voice of the Squip (and those affected by it, like Rich) which can sound very unsettling, notably in "The Squip Song," "Be More Chill," and "The Pitiful Children." - This animatic for "The Pitiful Children" is utterly terrifying, especially when the Squip takes over Jenna. The smiles on the "shiny, happy" students' faces are just so... wrong. - In this Pitiful Children animatic, Though not as bad as what happens to Michael above, the SQUIP shows an image of Michael accepting the Pill and end up Squipped himself taking advantage of Jeremy's guilt as a way to persuade him to spread SQIUP around the school - This animatic for "The Squip Song" starts off normal, but then Rich sings "IT'S FROM JAPAAAAAAAAAAAAN" and it gets... interesting. To say the least. - In the original Broadway cast recording, Jason Tam, playing the SQUIP, speaks and sings in a Keanu Reeves impression, and there is something incredibly unsettling about hearing every awful thing the SQUIP says/sings in a stereotypical "California surfer" accent. It sounds eerily wrong. - The Broadway production manages to kick off the nightmare fuel before the story even starts via a "No Talking or Phones" Warning given by the SQUIP. It spends most of the warning talking in his normal Surfer Dude voice, but right as he finishes he switches to his Voice of the Legion, which can be very sudden and creepy to new viewers, especially since it then goes into the equally-eerie "Jeremy's Theme".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeMoreChill
Ben 10: Alien Force / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes Everybody Talks About The Weather: let's talk about what happens to the victims frozen by DNAlien Freeze Guns. They are frozen in a bluish-grey metal substance that can remain solid at normal temperature yet keep its victims in hibernation at a sub-zero temperature. It also happens so quickly too with the victims barely having any time to react with only a scream of agony as they're hit before they're completely encased in metal. Basically, they are instantly frozen, in a substance that will not melt under normal circumstances, essentially turning them into living metal statues. Meaning, that the heroes could've remained frozen forever and the villains would have won if not for both Swampfire (And Ben being Swampfire at the time) and Alan's extreme heat abilities allowing them to thaw everyone out. Just seeing people frozen this way can be very unnerving, to say the least. To make matter worse it's implied the victims are still conscious! Gwen, after being frozen by one of the Freeze Guns, for example. The way her eyes are open wide in fear, her mouth frozen in an eternal scream of agony, the way her hands are trying to reach out futilely for help... She could've been frozen like that forever... Ben revealing he's been lurking in the shadows as Big Chill the entire time, waiting for a moment to get Kevin free. Even Kevin didn't know he was there, Vulkanus: You're in a bad position to make demands. Big Chill: He would be if he were alone. After seemingly knocking Big Chill out, Vulkanus lifts him up, only for Big Chill to suddenly lift up his head to Vulkanus' line of sight, sporting an unsettling grin that he doesn't usually sport... before surprise attacking the villain and freezing most of his body to the point that it shatters. Thankfully, he doesn't die because he turns out to be a tiny alien in a robotic suit, but still... Big Chill smiled, and not in a happy way. The only other time he smiles in Alien Force is "Above and Beyond", seen below. The DNAliens are creepy on their own to an extent, but what can really be scary is the way they are created: the Hightbreeds use Face-Hugger-like creatures to infect humans, turning them gradually into these things. Which would mean each time the heroes kill DNAliens, they are actually killing human beings (and it does happen); The episode introducing Darkstar was downright creepy. The episode starts with a scene of a schoolgirl running to a house and desperately calling at the door for help. The door opens, we get something that looks like a Gory Discretion Shot, and cut to the girl walking around in the street, now zombified. It's then revealed multiple girls suffered the same fate. As the protagonists try to figure out what happened with the help of what seems to be the local superhero, it's eventually revealed that this so-called "hero", despite possessing light powers, is the one responsible: he charges his powers by feeding off of energy from schoolgirls he seduces, eventually turning them into zombies slaves that he relies on to feed him even more. His habit of draining energy from them is played subtly like rape. To make matters worst, he succeeds in draining Gwen. Speaking of draining, we get front-row seats to Darkstar flooring Kevin and Ben about five seconds into a fight. It plays out pretty much like Cold-Blooded Torture, with the rapey vibes adding a whole other layer of creepy. Those noisesYuri Lowenthal made.... And then his zombies slaves turn on him at the end, draining most of his energy and leaving him weakened with a zombified face. Granted, he deserved it, but that was still creepy. The Gauntlet has Cash, ordinarily a relatively harmless bully, starting to use a Techadon hand as a gauntlet, using it as a toy initially. Then the gauntlet gradually takes over his body and mind, causing him to go way off the deep end and attempt to kill Ben as revenge for when Ben made him look ridiculous in front of his class. And then the gauntlet starts gradually rebuilding the Techadon around him, starting with his arm then covering his body then his head... he is saved eventually, but had the tech not been stopped, he would have probably been permanently mutated into a Techadon. The Highbreeds could be creepy on occasions, especially the one who was about to punish Simian at the end of his debut episode. Ben tricked Simian into carrying a DNAlien ear cleaner, which unlike human ears, need acid to flush out... and the Highbreed now has it in his possession: Simian: T... this is a horrible mistake! Highbreed: It sure is. We distinctly told you to bring the crystal. Maybe you misheard us. Maybe you need to have your ears cleaned... (loud hissing noises come from the acid dripping out the ear cleaner offscreen as the episode ends) An Ultimate Alien episode later retconned this scene so the Highbreed had just taken Simian to his ship rather than killed him. You read it right- the original ending was so creepy and dark the writers felt the need to retcon it. Zs'Skayr comes back, and now possesses some lovely new powers. He is somehow able to produce a mass-possession all on his own, turning all the inhabitants of Vilgax's home planet into his minions as part of his Hive Mind. The planet is then infested in a Xenomorphesque way, with cocoons all over the place. It gets so bad that Vilgax went so far as to ask Ben for help. And then Zs'Skayr succeeds in what he had been trying to do for years: possessing Ben. Then he locks Ben's body in his own form, before trying to posses Vilgax. He'd have gotten rid of both Vilgax and Ben by fusing them into his own being, and nearly succeeded too. Reinrassig III's debut- he had his arm severed by a desert parasite, complete with indigo Alien Blood dripping out. Luckily, Ben infused Swampfire's regenerative plant cells into the Highbreed's detached arm and reconnected it to his body- but even so, his arm became a hybrid of flesh and chlorophyll, turning it completely green, along with all the neighboring arteries and veins hooked into it where the chlorophyll eventually melded with the flesh. It's kinda cool-looking, but also scary. There's also those water-absorbing tentacles that pop out of his chest when he opens a few skin flaps on it- yecchh!! Highbreed Supreme is especially disturbing to look at- initially. Pale, fat, and with a face even more covered in horns and deformed than the usual Highbreed. The most disgusting part of him is his belly, which has what appears to be a cancerous mutation on it because he and his race can no longer breed thanks to generations of inbreeding. It disappears after Ben infuses him with Omnitrix DNA, apparently healing the deformity and causing him to turn red and appears more pleasing to the eyes. In "Save the Last Dance", Big Chill keeps possessing Ben and making him act very erratic. His eating habits and personality take a full 180-Ben acts much nicer toward Kevin and was shown eating through 2 pickle jars (juice and all)-and when Ben tries to transform into a different alien, Big Chill takes over anyway. When in Big Chill form, he becomes aggressive, devours anything metal (he ate an entire car wash), growls and attacks people. The similarities to Zs'Skayr was very frightening even as it's revealed that Big Chill was doing that so it could reproduce. Not only does Big Chill override an attempt to turn into another alien, there's a scene where Ben suddenly stops mid-sentence with a vacant stare before slowly activating the Omnitrix and transforming into Big Chil. "Time Heals" gives us an Alternate Future where Hex and Charmcaster killed Gwen and took over the world. While the scene of Bellwood being invaded with Charmcaster's golems is bad enough, we also get to see what they did to the two other heroes: Kevin was forced to absorb the substance the golems were made of, resulting in him becoming Charmcaster's personal slave. As for Ben, we get to find him in jail, in his Spidermonkey form.... suggesting they were keeping him alive and forcing him to shapeshift just so they could torture him in his various forms. "Above and Beyond" gives us a plot where the Plumber's Helpers are trapped on a space station with Ben, who has inexplicably turned Axe-Crazy. While it eventually turns out to be an act to test them, this gives us an episode where Ben acts spectacularly creepy, stalking the Helpers throughout the station, attacking them out of nowhere, tauntingand lecturing them and generally acting like something between a slasher movie killer and an Evil Mastermind. Who knew Ben would make such a scary villain? (except for when he turns into Rath). Manny: I know you're in here. Come out and show yourself! The others might be afraid, but I'm not scared of you! Ben: That's because the others are smarter than you. The moments with Big Chill deserve a mention. Unlike in "Save the Last Dance", where Big Chill's actions were more feral, Big Chill in here acts just like Zs'Skayr from the Original Series episode "Ghostfreaked Out". It's also one of only two occasions where we see him smile. Big Chill is completely surrounded by the Plumber's Helpers. He responds by hunching over, letting out a psychotic sounding Evil Laugh and then slowly sinks through the floor. Echo Echo subjecting Helen to a a circular Wall of Sound attack with her trapped in the center (named as anEcho Chamber) before all of his clones let out an Evil Laugh. Grandpa Max's first message getting interrupted... by Humungosaur. Ben's later transformation into Humungosaur is presented as the Plumber's Helpers staring up in shock as his shadow slowly looms over them. How do they ultimately defeat Humungosaur? They have to resort to launching him out of an airlock. Ben's default expressions in this episode? A Kubrick Stare and a Psychotic Smirk. It gets creepier when the dark lighting of the ship causes Ben's face to be illuminated by the glow of the Omnitrix's holograms.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Ben10AlienForce
Ben 10 (2016) / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes While it definitely seems more Kid Friendlier compared to it's predecessors. It's not safe from these moments - Ben screaming in pain as Vil drains the poor boy of his Gax form. - Didn't think the Null Void could get any scarier? Now it's a completely monochrome dimension where time appears to be permanently frozen, where you are stuck drifting in silence and solitude forever. It's enough to make one miss all the monsters the original one had! "Thankfully", Ben 10 vs. The Universe: The Movie shows the place once again as a prison dimension. - The Antitrix's version of Gray Matter, Dark Matter: it looks less like a Galvan and more like a tall, lean (if not straight up malnourished) demon, able to contort his limbs in an innatural way. The fact it's a massive case of Adaptational Badass doesn't help. - Ben's nightmares in "Innervasion Part 2", caused by the High Override's influence. Especially the one where a bunch of Shock Rocks crawl out of a crater, one with Ben's face telling him he can't fight fate and one where he, as Shock Rock, crushes Gwen in his hand. - Even worse is Ben getting in contact with the High Override at multiple times during the 5 Parter. Fred Tatasciore does a good job of voicing the Override; not to mention, the size of the Override! Hes about as tall as Way Big. Plus, he mind controls Ben into becoming one of his thousands of soldiers. - While the event ends on a happy note, theres still something left unaddressed; what happened with all the other Fulmini that got out of the watch? - The Forever Knight. The Forever Knight is the cunning and manipulative antagonist of Season 3, usually hiding in the shadows while either Kevin or another villain does his dirty work. At this time, Ben has only fought him once, but the Forever Knight managed to play into Bens insecurities. Its rather shocking coming from this show, seeing as it was playing it safe with the first two seasons. - The sounds of Kevins transformations. You can hear what appears to be screams and other wonderful horror noises. - Which Watch: Charmcaster mutates Kevin into a horrible monster, and her words echo a certain someone she was associated with... - In Safari So Bad, Ben has his body taken over by a voodoo doll. Sounds like a Charmcaster or Hex plot, right? Wrong. His body is taken over by Tim Buktu, a grown man with no powers, who is obsessed with Ben after he managed to expose him for the fraud he was. The opening scene of the episode shows Tim obsessing over his defeat in a bathroom plastered with dozens of pictures of Bens aliens. - Tetrax gets his arm torn off in Mutiny for the Bounty. He doesn't grow it back. - Animo's Body Horror in "Animorphosis" can be more than a little unsettling; bonus points for the part where Stink Fly's wings are being consumed by Heat Blast's fire, and the doctor is apparently screaming in pain. - In "Welcome to Zombozo-Zone" Max (who has been hypnotized to believe he was a wild man) decides to eat Gwen. - Later, when they are both free from the hypnosis, they are captured by a mind controlled Ben, who decides to feed them a group of feral badgers. At least one almost bites off Gwen's face. - It is made clear that the Alien X featured in Alien X-Tinction killed at least a few Ben Tennysons, and possibly their Gwens and Maxes. The Ben in the cold opening was at least able to live, but the Ben from Maximillian's universe was not so lucky. Keep in mind that all of these Bens were minors as young as 10. - When Alien X is revealed to be an alternate version of Ben who is cynical, believing he could do everything on his own. His origin tells that while fighting his universe's Vilgax, Grandpa and Gwen tried to help him. Which resulted in Vilgax killing them with his Laser eyes, we can see Ben watched in horror and this apparently has pushed him into who he was today.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/Ben102016
Beau Is Afraid / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes "I am so sorry for what your daddy passed down to you." With Beau Is Afraid written as more of a surrealist black comedy than an outright horror movie, it certainly isn't meant to be as scary as its predecessors. However, in true Ari Aster nature, it's not without its disturbing moments. After all, he did describe it as a "nightmare comedy." - Beau, out of water and missing his keys, props open the door to his apartment building and runs across the road to grab some water. As he struggles with the unsympathetic cashier, he keeps anxiously looking back towards to his building door, worried that someone will sneak into his house. And someone does. And then someone else. And on and on until every single person on the street piles into Beau's apartment building and locks the door before Beau can get inside. Not the most overtly sinister event in the movie, but if you have social anxiety or paranoia, then you know how this scene feels. - The very idea of not being listened to your whole life and being blamed for everything is enough to make people snap. - The crazy naked homeless man that stabs random people passing by. When Beau goes near him, theres a dead man lying bloodied on the sidewalk. - Jeeves tries to kill Beau among the group of traveling performers, killing some of them in the process as well when he throws a grenade at them and hurls a knife at one of the actors onstage. - While she was insanely annoying and cruel to Beau, watching Toni kill herself by chugging paint straight out of the can is very disturbing, especially when Grace finds her and Tonis eyes are blood-red and almost rolled back into her skull. - In the Orphans of the Forest's play, the angel wears an open-mouthed mask that falls right into the Uncanny Valley. Other characters' masks only get creepier in Beau's imagination. - Beau discovers his mother has basically been watching him the whole time, and planned everything so meticulously just to test if he would even care about her, despite him literally doing his best to make it to the funeral in the insane extraneous circumstances, unnerving to say the least. - Beau is forced into the attic of Monas house, where he meets his real father — a gigantic penis-shaped monster. It lets out an unearthly screeching sound and has sharp appendages. note : Of course, it's entirely possible that Beau's father was merely an illusion created by Mona, considering the other reality warping feats she accomplishes in order to torture Beau, which may or may not make it worse. - Beau's unnamed twin brother had to spend locked up there, with only that over forty years thing for company. Good god. - If you listen closely, it actually gurgles Beau's name and calls out for him, saying, "Beau! My boy!" - The sheer absurdity of it can Cross The Line Twice and make one laugh...until it shifts back into pure horror when it stabs Jeeves through the head. - The Trial. Taking place in a gigantic sold out stadium, where everyone can judge Beau. Anyone who has ever had the feeling that everyone around them is judging them negatively knows how this scene feels. Worse, his public defender is so far away from him, and the Judge, and at one point has him just abruptly tossed off his podium onto a cave rock. And it doesn't matter what the outcome is- Beau's mother has seemingly already judged that he is guilty of everything she accuses him of, and Beau dies a fiery, horrific, waterlogged death.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeauIsAfraid
Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas / Nightmare Fuel - TV Tropes The climax where he tries to destroy the castle was pretty intense, especially with everyone being in danger of being crushed—including Forte himself. Also, his green musical notes had a nightmarish look to them as they hit the Beast and how he went Laughing Mad as he is going through a Villainous Breakdown. Not to mention that Forte was even apparently willing to endanger his own life to ensure that the spell remained intact, making his breakdown horrifically similar to a suicide attempt. Fife: Maestro, stop! What do you think you're doing?! Forte: Don't you see, Fife? They can't fall in love if they're dead!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/BeautyAndTheBeastTheEnchantedChristmas