Clock Tower (series)/Nightmare Fuel

Your hair's pretty long.

Clock Tower is pointed to by many as one of the scariest video game series ever, and these examples prove that point quite well.

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• Clock Tower on the SNES is absolutely disturbing. The constant fear of the Scissorman ambushing you eats at one's nerve. But worse finding your friends dead in the worst of places, like trapped in a suit of armour. Then there's the demonic fetus baby, which is on a level all its own. Throw in that all but a couple of endings result in you being killed later on anyway, and you've got a twisted game.
  • To elaborate on the bad endings:
  • You run into an elevator, and the doors close just as you find out that Bobby is in there too. Cue Jennifer screaming, that horrible sound of Bobby's scissors snapping, and a huge pool of Jennifer's blood oozing out under the door.
  • Also involving the elevator: It stops mid-transit, you hear Bobby's laughter, and he then drops down into the very small, very enclosed space with Jennifer, scissors at the ready...
  • It seems like Jennifer has survived the nightmare. However, the very end of the text epilogue reveals that she was mysteriously found dead in her bed very soon afterward.
  • You get in a car and escape. However, as Jennifer is driving, she glances up in the rear view mirror and notices two giant scissor blades rising from the backseat...
• Clock Tower 3 has more constant fear of ambushing, and surprise attacks to make you scream and jump out of your chair. Besides that, there's the extremely disturbing scenes of Sledgehammer killing a little girl, and Corroder giving a man and his mother an "acid bath".
• You thought Scissorman was scary? Believe me, you will shit bricks by the dozen when you finally meet the titular Ax Crazy psycho of Clock Tower: Ghost Head.
  • Imagine this: You're all alone in a room, trying to find a piece of a puzzle or your amulet that will let you switch personalities, and all of a sudden an Implacable Man in a bloody lab coat and Hannya mask dragging around a giant machete barges in. Cue chase sequence! It's a lot more startling than it sounds, especially since you have no idea when it'll happen; at least with the other stalkers you usually get a Musical Spoiler before having to deal with them. Then there's the scraping...
• And let's not forget the way the environment tries to kill you. You can walk into a room and suddenly have the floor fall out from under you, or have a porcelain doll rise from the floor and dash at you, or have a disembodied hand jump out through the mirror and strangle you.
• So many of the friend deaths in the first game. The pool drowning, shower, and throwing from the clock tower take the cake. Lotte's death is either the also-creepy sacrifice, or the Crowning Moment of Awesome that is saving Jennifer's life, which unfortunately isn't canon. And according to Word of God, Laura's death was due to her running to the phone to call 911. Somebody was waiting there.
  • Rolla's deaths can hit one notch higher than the others depending on who you ask. According to the comic her shower death was she was tied up on the shower head, already stabbed in the chest and/or stomach and bleeding out. Of course it differs from the game where she is hanging on the shower head, but has no signs of blood anywhere on her. Many fans speculated what caused her to die, including this one, and when you think about it it's not too hard to imagine Rolla may have been burned to death by scalding hot water and looking at her face will give you nightmares beyond nightmares. It also covers her other death in the armor, which is very much plausible as it is very easy to imagine her stuffed in there, slowly suffocated and crushed to death.
• Dan. Just Dan. Creepier when you realize that, according to the second game and Word of God, he's somewhat of a well-meaning, but still evil being. And the "fetus" form he took in the first game? Just a shell made of the corpses of the previous victims.
• What, no mention of the body you can find in the sealed room? It's actually the body of Jennifer's father, a doctor who was called to help with the boys' birth, only to get his right hand eaten. He was then sealed off in a room to die from suffocation because he knew too much.
• The trophy room in the first game. Not just the room itself, with the bizarre sounds coming from the walls. You also find a human heart in a jar, which is still beating. And do you want to know who that belongs to? The mummified corpse that you find in the locker in the same room. Which, in some versions of the game, opens it's horrible looking eyes, gets up and tries to kill you.
• The second game has numerous death scenes for some of the characters once you reach Barrows/Burroughs castle. One character, Beth, is found dismembered inside a wine barrel on Jennifer's route, and is yanked through the floor on Helen's route. Another character, Tim, is found stuffed inside the chimney on Jennifer's route, and has a death remarkably similar to Beth's on Helen's route. You can also find Harris's head in a pot in Helen's game, find Barton hung from a tree on Jennifer's route, and find Gotts trapped inside a torture gear in Jennifer's game. There's also the suggestion that if you fail to release Nolan from the coffin in Helen's route, or Helen from the box in Jennifer's route, they were left inside and suffocated in there.
• Also in the second game, any time you hide in a wardrobe. Usually it works. Usually. Scissorman stalks up to the wardrobe. SHING! SHING! SHING! You hold your breath. You, the player, hold your breath for fear he'll hear you. He turns towards the exit. You slowly exhale. He immediately spins around and runs you through, making you, a grown man, scream like a four-year-old ballerina in a Stephen King movie. It only happened to me once, but once was more than enough. --Black Wolfe
• According to an interview with the original creator (posted on the Remothered fanpage on 1/4/2010), the Scissormen were originally from some sort of Hell "that cannot be perceived by the limited human cognitive system". The Scissormen are officially Eldritch Abominations.
• Nobody mentioned Mary yet? At first, she seems like a sweet and maternal lady. That is, until you discover that she gave birth to Bobby and Dan. In one of the endings, you can find Mary upon returning to a room you've already been in. And she's just...standing there, with her hands pleasantly clasped behind her back. Then, all of a sudden, she pulls out a knife and starts walking very slowly toward Jennifer. It's easy enough to escape from, but...