< Film

Film/Nightmare Fuel

What an excellent day for an Exorcism.


"Do not watch this movie on drugs unless you've got a mean hankering for PTSD."
—D. McCallum, Cracked.com, on Shutter Island [1]

Do you remember as a kid, you couldn't wait until you were 17 so you could watch R-rated movies without your parents' permission? Well, the scariness of these movies may make it feel like it wasn't worth the wait. So, to all the kids out there... try not to grow up too fast.

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Other Films: Part 1

  • Osmosis Jones: Compare Ebola to dandruff. For the sake of the argument Ebola is X times worse. Now imagine something X times worse than Ebola and a man dying of it and you have the Red Death.
  • Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West has to be one of the most terrifying performances ever committed to film. Everything about her, from the acid-green skin, to the not-quite-human face, to the eery shrill voice seems programmed to give kids nightmares. And with all the scenes of her flying through the sky on a broomstick, teleporting instantly in a ball of fire, and watching the heroes through her crystal ball, there's the implication that she can find you and hunt you down wherever you are! If anything, the fact that it's a family film makes her scarier: she's obviously a sadist with vast magical powers, but we never see her doing anything that violent...our imaginations get to fill in the details.
    • However, if you've seen Wicked, this gets a bit Nightmare Retardant - it can be hard not to imagine the Wicked Witch suddenly singing about defying gravity.
  • Evilspeak. The plot centered around a student living on the dorm of an academy who became interested in the occult and started to converse with the spirit of a long-dead warlock via computer (don't ask). The plot included pigs being possessed and eating people (including a scene where said pigs break into a woman's bathroom and eat her while she's in her bath), messy decapitations aplenty, and blood and gore all over the place with ominous chanting in the background. And as if that wasn't nightmarish enough already, the movie ends with the aforementioned computer screen flashing a message saying "I will return."
  • Cujo. The three most particularly terrifying scenes post-rabies infection, are: when the titular dog mauls his owner and the neighbor; when he takes a bite out of the mom while she and her son are trapped in the car; and the penultimate scene when, having gotten back up from a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown inflicted by the mom with a baseball bat moments earlier, he shows up unexpectedly just before he dies via gunshot inflicted to the head. Yep, Paranoia Fuel aplenty.
    • Becomes even scarier if you watch it after learning about the symptoms and prognosis of rabies. Can also be Fridge Horror when you consider the possibility that post-bite vaccination can fail in rare cases, and balance that with the fact that the mom had been bitten by Cujo. The book is even worse, what with it's significantly more dramatic ending.
  • The library scene from Ghostbusters isn't exactly the scariest scene in a movie, but it can really catch you off guard if you haven't seen it before. It may be Nightmare Retardant for some people.
  • The Incredible Shrinking Man: The fight between the now very tiny Scott Carey and the spider. Yes, it was made over fifty years ago and on a shoestring budget. However, the whole appearance of the spider was very, very creepy. From when it first appeared crawling out of the crate to when after the basement floods, it tramples on top of the matchbox that Scott now lives in. Finally, the battle when the spider crawls over him is chilling, and when Scott stabs it, it's enough to give one nightmares. Then you see that red hour glass shape on the bottom of the spider, you realize what type of spider it was leading to a Fridge Horror.
  • Smokin Aces: Specifically the scene when one of the Tremor brothers falls on a chainsaw. Seriously, the director of Hostel would be impressed.
  • The 1963 Italian horror film "Black Sabbath" (yes, the one a certain band was named after) has three segments. The first two (or last two, if you see the dubbed AIP version) are your typical, run of the mill horror stories. The finale, "Drop of Water", however, is possibly the scariest thing ever filmed. If you've seen the film, that THING's face has haunted your dreams. If you haven't seen it, look it up on Google Video (unless you want to sleep within the next few days).
  • Nosferatu. You don't even need to see the movie, and still have nightmares about that creature.
  • Dawn of the Dead remake. A zombified baby's birth scream and scene cut to show the baby itself.
    • The subsequent line is even worse if you're a dad, or would like to be.
    • the early scene where Ana and Luis wake up to be attacked by a zombified little girl, Not specifically for fear of zombies, but it made him realize that whenever you go to sleep you never really know what the world might be like when you wake up.
  • The Trial (1993 version). The labyrinth of dilapidated corridors as a metaphor for a heartless bureaucracy awakens some childhood fears in some peoplw. A rare case of creating a really unsettling effect without using any horror-associated elements.
  • The opening scene of The Unborn. So you're out jogging, and you run into a stray glove in the road. Not so bad...until you turn around and see the owner of the matching one standing right behind you, just...staring. An odd cut, and you're suddenly faced with a pit bull wearing a papier-mâché human mask. He waddles off into the woods, and for no real reason, you decide to follow him. You come across the mask lying on the ground, and dig down into the dirt to find the strings attached to a disturbing-looking fetus in a jar. Zoom in slowly on its little swollen face...and THE EYES BURST OPEN.
  • In RoboCop, during the final shootout between the titular cyborg and Clarence Boddicker's gang in an abandoned chemical plant, one of the gang members crashes a van into a vat of toxic waste...and survives. The effect of the waste on him is both nauseating and terrifying, he is visibly melting and dissolving, while alive, staggering around and moaning desperately for help. It is almost a relief when, later in the sequence, he is accidentally run over by Boddicker and promptly explodes from the impact, showering the windscreen in what appears to be brown water, rather than blood.
    • Also from RoboCop, early in the film, before his resurrection as a cyborg, Murphy is captured by Boddicker's gang, who proceed to graphically dismember him with shotguns, blowing his arm off and blasting endless rounds into his torso from a distance, before finally killing him with a close range shot through the head. Murphy is conscious and screaming horrifically throughout, up until the final headshot.
  • Dying Breed. Another Australian film, twice as disturbing as wolf creek (which in itself is based on a true story). A group of cannibals grab a few hiker girls and rape them to get more children or else die from inbreeding, and eat the men. What makes this so scary, you ask? Based on a true story. The actual man was a convict who broke free and was found years later. He was a known cannibal, and he had a family in the Australian Outback that practiced cannibalism. In Australia.
    • As an Australian resident I'd like to point out that the cannibal and prisoner part of Dying Breed are the only provable facts, originally Alexander Pearce escaped and cannibalized other escapees due to starvation. Tasmania is not a forgiving place. Though apparently he did grow to like human flesh. There's not evidence he ever spawned a family though or that he was ever out long enough to raise them as cannibals. Also he was hung on 19th of July 1894.
    • Seconded. I'm a Tasmanian, and the story is overblown incredibly. Alexander Pearce didn't raise a family, nor is Wolf Creek a true story. It's inspired (read: the writers have made speculative fiction) by the disappearance of several backpackers. Furthermore, Tasmania is about as opposite to the Outback as you can get.
  • Drag Me to Hell is filled to the brim with Nightmare Fuel, but the scene that really stands out is the ending, in which the final shot is of the female protagonist being Dragged Off to Hell, as demonic hands grab her and slowly bring her down to Hell as her piercing scream reverberates throughout the whole scene.
    • The early sequence where Christine has the seer Ram Jas read her fortune. As she holds out her hand for him to try and see into her future the tension starts to build up and the music turns ominous. Then *BAM* out of nowhere a quick flash of the Lamia's face appears, with burning yellow eyes and razor-sharp teeth against a background of flames and accompanied by a high-pitched screech. So many sleepless nights because of that one shot.
  • There's a creepy scene in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Devil Doll, where Demonic Dummy Hugo is sitting motionless in his cage. After a long lingering shot in dead silence, his eyes make a slight movement (reminding us that he is indeed, alive) and the camera pans across the room. Not even Mike and the bots' excellent riffing can diffuse the terror of that horrifyingly subtle little moment.
    • Speaking of Mystery Science Theater 3000, "Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders" isn't an episode to watch alone late at night. It's a terrible film and not scary during the day, but disturbing enough--in part because it's so badly made--to be rather spooky at the time of night/morning when everything is spooky.
  • Pink Floyd:
  • The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, also a brilliant example of Paranoia Fuel. Contains the most messed-up set design in anything ever, as well as a psychotic sleepwalking Conrad Veidt.
    • The Man Who Laughs has more Veidt, this time as the most unbelievably disturbing-looking protagonist in all of film. See the page on Slasher Smile, and you too will understand.
  • The intro to Eraserhead. That's not to say that the rest of the movie isn't nightmarish as well, but the simple sight of The Man In The Planet crouched motionless by the window, wrapped in shadows, and then twitching slightly, is probably the single most disconcerting thing in the universe.
    • The artificial chickens served for dinner by Mary's parents. "Just cut them up like regular chickens..."
    • Scarier still are the mysteries surrounding the special effects. The rumor that the baby puppet is a modified cow fetus seems mostly debunked, but the opposite is true for another facet--it's been confirmed that the umbilical cords used in the film are not only real, but human. A crew member relates here how one landed on another crewman's shoe and he was so Squicked that they had to cease filming for several days.
  • The scene in the movie '*Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, when Midshipman Hollom commits suicide by jumping off the side of the ship while holding a cannonball. The sight of his upturned face slowly fading out of sight as he sank downwards into the water haunted her for years.
    • Also another scene, during a huge storm where the Surprise looses a mast, and the sailors have to cut it loose fast or the ship will turn sideways to the waves and be rolled over. And there's one man still clinging to the ropes, watching his shipmates cut him loose, screaming for them to just wait for him...
  • The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate includes a graphic depiction of a murder by asphyxiation with plastic wrap. The victim gags and vomits while his eyes bulge and he claws desperately at his assailant, all to no avail. This editor still can visualise it with disturbing clarity despite not having touched the film since two years back.
    • "Do you remember me?" "No." * cheerful grin* "Good! Come with me." My eyes are watering just typing that. Don't even get started on Compelling Voice + Art Shift;
    • Oh, and while we're on the subject of gruesome movie deaths (and near deaths) from asphyxiation: Anyone remember the scene in Total Recall where Arnold Schwarzenegger and two other characters are trapped on an airless Mars? Their gagging, eye-bulging antics are so over the top that the scene almost Crosses the Line Twice into Nightmare Retardant. Almost. Admittedly, the scene's scariness and plausibility are slightly reduced by the fact that two of the three characters somehow survive. Not only do they survive, but they are perfectly fine.
  • When a Stranger Calls Back, (The made-for-TV sequel to the original When a Stranger Calls.), has an innocent schoolgirl stalked by William Landis, a psychopathic ventriloquist who, in the film's climax, paints himself to look like the wall behind him, so if the lights are off, he's practically invisible. It sounds cartoony, but when you see him do it, and realize that it could actually be done in real life, it's utterly creepy.
  • If the part of 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL deactivates the crewmembers' life support systems doesn't creep you out, you are a freak. A freak, sir!
  • Humma Kavula is a semi-insane missionary living amongst the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI, and a former space pirate. (It was presumably during his time as a pirate that he lost his legs and had them replaced with telescoping mechanical spider appendages). He wears thick glasses, which make his eyes appear normal when worn; however, when he removes the glasses, he appears to have shrunken black pits where his eyes should be.
  • The 2007 Beowulf's portrayal of Grendel. Crispin Hellion Glover is a scary man.
  • While El Orfanato was a pretty scary film all around, three things in particular merit this list: 1) the bit with the medium and the screaming, invisible children, 2) the car-crash, 3) Tomas.
  • The Asphyx (UK, 1973)
  • The original The Last House on the Left.
  • Suspiria ; Pat's Murder. The wire scene.
  • The truck pull scene in the original The Hitcher. It makes you look away from the screen before a cut to black. Take that, Hack Wade Wall.
  • Terry Gilliam's surreal movie Brazil (1985)

"This is a professional relationship"

  • Science gone horribly wrong! The original movie The Fly was creepy and psychologically horrible (imagine you were the poor wife), and the 1986 reimagining was just plain Squicktastic Body Horror descent into madness and horror.
  • The Russian movie Nochnoy dozor (2004) (aka Night Watch).
    • Having seen the movie numerous times...which part or parts did you consider Nightmare Fuel?
    • The freaky doll with the spider's legs and the sequence in the beginning with the frying pan. This editor is still creeped out by those two.


Other Films: Part 2

  • The Death Note film spinoff L: Change the World pulls this off with the symptoms of the killer virus at the centre of the plot. The various sores with the severe bleeding and the tears of blood make its victims look disturbing, not to ignore their moans and screams of pain. The named character who uses a syringe of infected blood to commit suicide and deny the villains use of him continues screaming even when the camera isn't focused on him, and when he is "neutralised" the last shot the audience (and his preteen daughter) gets of him is his wholly bloodshot eyes along with his severely charred face. L describes his impending death by heart attack as peaceful, and this editor is inclined to agree if the alternative is so much worse. There is, also, the after-the-film consideration of how horrible such a virus, described as a mix of influenza and Ebola but "100 times" as infectious, would be. Sometimes thinking too hard is bad...
    • Think harder. If it's that deadly, it kills its hosts too fast to spread, and the symptoms are obvious enough to prevent accidental infection.
  • The poster alone for Zombi 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters/Zombie. The menacing tagline doesn't help at all either.
  • Recorded Live, a student film by S.S. Wilson, the man behind the Tremors series. A man goes to a job interview, only to find there's nothing in the office but a film reel with "do not erase" written on it. Suddenly the film comes to life and advances on the man, who runs for his life. He discovers the film can be driven off with a magnet, but eventually it outsmarts him by moving under the carpet and springing up from beneath him, enveloping the poor bastard and leaving nothing behind when it moves away. Then it sends out another letter to a job applicant, and returns to its reel. And the film makes a "fast forwarding" noise every time it moves. You'll never hear that sound the same way again. And you can watch it here...
  • The exact fate of Marlena in Cloverfield.
    • For those who get motion sickness easily and didn't watch it: While the main characters are walking through a Sinister Subway tunnel, a scene which is pretty creepy in its own right , Marlena gets bitten by one of the parasites that fall off of the giant monster-thing. A few minutes later, when they end up at a first-aid center set up by the Military, her eyes start bleeding uncontrollably. Everyone starts freaking out, they drag her behind a curtain and we see a huge splatter of blood against it. They never explain exactly what happened behind the curtain, but it's set in stone that it's either: A, her stomach exploded, or B, they shot her so she wouldn't give birth to another parasite or something along those lines.
      • We explicitly see her body rapidly blow up like a balloon and explode. There's no speculating what happened to that poor girl.
  • The movie Barefoot Gen shows graphic animated depictions of people's eyeballs and skin melting in the 1945 Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings. Graphic. It even has a dog trying to escape the blast but melting along with the others. What's even worse, however, is that some of the people with their skin and eyes melted off actually survived, at least temporarily. They are shown walking through the rubble, holding out their half-melted arms like zombies... Scenes from the movie exist on Youtube, but will not be linked to here.
    • The manga is just as bad. * whimper*
  • If the dead baby in the movie Trainspotting didn't creep you out, Renton's withdrawal hallucination of it crawling on the ceiling will.
    • The withdrawal scene.
  • Batman (1989) -
    • 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 Naiper 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.
    • When the Joker calmly gives a lighthearted 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.
  • Batman Returns
    • An ad with horrid face of The Penguin staring back at you. He's supposed to look like Uncle Pennybags! Danny DeVito in a tux should look like a plump, cuddly penguin. Not that monstrosity!
  • The twitchy, headshaking ghosts in the House on Haunted Hill remake, especially the scene where Melissa finds herself videotaping a ghostly vivisection (in an empty room), and then senses something behind her. She turns, sees a shadowy figure peer around a corner wayyyyyy down the hallway, and in an eyeblink it's RIGHT THERE IN HER FACE OH MY GOD HEADSHAKING TEETH BLOOD ARGH ARGH ARGH...
    • The whole film. The tank full of blood. The bizarre nightmarish images from the "Saturation Chamber" made even more horrifying as it's suggested these were real things that prowled the Asylum and still lurk somewhere down there. Melissa's remains. Steven Price's wife rotting to nothing by "the Evil". And the final shot at the end of the credits, showing the characters devoured by the "Evil" in a nightmarish scene right out of Vanacuts depraved "Home movies", suggesting they're still trapped in an endless hell within the Asylum. Even the opening credits are creepy.
    • The original has a fantastic Jump Scare.
  • The Spanish horror film REC. Locked into an apartment complex with a mysterious and creepy infection rampaging, risking death if you try to leave the building, and a frightening once-a-girl monster corpse in the attic.
    • It may be the single scariest thing ever committed to celluloid.
      • This scene in the remake is frame for frame identical and just as terrifying.
    • The American version, Quarantine, has some traumatic scares of its own, specifically, the freaking Thin Man.
      • Man-in-the-Suit legend Doug Jones, actually, playing by far the most disturbing carrier (short of the Undead Child, that is) in the film.
  • Donnie Darko. Frank.
    • The website is an interactive nightmare. Even worse is finding it months prior to the movie's release, thus thinking it's a game that will be explained, thus being left confused and nervous when it seems to abruptly terminate with a sinister last page. For maximum fun, click on one of the links in any of the pop-up "websites". It will tell you the link is broken, and offer a link to contact the webmaster about the problem. Click on that, and... yeah, you may be afraid of your computer for a while.
  • The "Once there was a pretty fly" montage from The Night of the Hunter.
  • Rosemarys Baby. The scariest part is the nightmare sequence, where Rosemary dreams (correctly) that she is raped by a demon.
  • The Body Horror happy Thinner, based on a Stephen King story.
    • Muppets themselves have massive horror potential.
  • 1408: "Five. This is five. Ignore the sirens. Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room..."
    • Scary on its own, but the false ending gives way to a worse piece: the evil room trots out Kusack's dead daughter, lets him hold her as she begs him not to let "them" take her away, then she crumbles to ash in his arms.
  • Videodrome.
  • Speaking of David Cronenberg, Shivers is easily one of the most messed-up things ever put onto film. However, the part when one of the penis monsters comes out of the guy's mouth easily takes the cake as the squickiest part. And that's really, REALLY saying something.
  • The last scene of The Black Dahlia, where Josh Hartnett's character is talking with Scarlett Johansson's character, then looks back to see the Dahlia's corpse spread out on the lawn just like it was when she was found. The sharp violin music really makes it a O_o moment.
  • The 2007 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is riddled with Nightmare Fuel, and Nightmare Retardant. When Mrs. Lovett meets her Karmic Death. Most of the blood effects are over-the-top, but watching someone being burned alive in an oven...
    • Beadle Bamford. Where to even begin? When we learn that Judge Turpin raped Benjamin Barker's/Sweeney Todd's wife, and while he raped her the Beadle was looking on with too much interest. Later, he praises Turpin for sentencing a nine-year-old boy to death for stealing... A pretty small, insignificant something. Then there's the beating he gave Anthony, and we more than believed Beadle when he said, "Next time, I'll beat out your pretty little brain." Plus, throughout the movie it's implied that he's a pedophile. Who knew a mere sidekick could end up almost more monstrous and terrifying than the Big Bad himself? (Considering that almost everyone in this movie is either a Complete Monster or repeatedly crosses the Moral Event Horizon.)
  • The Godfather has Sonny Corlene's death and the famous horsehead in the bed scene. Marlon Brando's portrayal of the Godfather could also qualify.
  • Peter Lorre in M.
  • Peter Lorre in Mad Love. It came out in 1935, but that neckbrace/metal glove costume remains FREAKY, and Lorre was never freakier. "Yes, they cut off my head. But that Gogol, he put it back . . . HERE!"
  • The complete Squick-fest that was Hollow Man, particularly the invisible rape scene in the neighbor's apartment.
  • The traps in Resident Evil, in particular, the lasers that cut off one commando's limbs, decapitate another and finally cut up Colin Salmon into square chunks using a laser grid - milliseconds before they're shut off - after he dodges the first two. The close angle on his eye as he fell apart did not help.
  • Titus: the exquisitely shot but horrific scene where Lavinia is found on a stump, having been raped and with her hands and tongue cut off. Twigs have been stuck in the stumps, and when she opens her mouth, blood streams out.
  • In Pumpkinhead, after Lance Henriksen's character has called up the demon to avenge his young son's death, he's driving with the boy's body wrapped up on the front seat of his truck. A bump causes the body to roll off, unraveling, and ask in a soft, scared, little-boy voice, "What'd you do, daddy?"
    • Unusual for a low-budget horror film, Pumpkinhead had a few subtle moments. Every scene the monster's in, it has a slightly different face... until, at last, it has Henriksen's. More terrifying for me, though, is that it subverts usual horror movie fare as the monster stalks the reckless teens. The child's killer is one of the first to die.
  • The Changeling (1980) has two blood-freezing scenes, neither with a single drop of blood in them. In the first, listening to the audio tape recording made of a spirit-writer's attempt to contact the ghost haunting George C. Scott's house, the murdered boy's voice can be heard desperately whispering ... something that was completely inaudible during the scene in which the tape was made. When the hero figures out where the body has been buried, he goes there and finds that a house has been built on the spot with a mother and her little girl living there. The girl asks him if he's come about "the boy under the floor". Brrrr.
  • Gomer Pyle's suicide in Full Metal Jacket.
    • The actual suicide itself is quick, but EXTREMELY concentrated in HONF. Seeing somebody's (squib) brains splattered all over the wall directly behind them will do that.
    • Made worse by the Creepy Monotone leading up to it.

Gomer Pyle: Seven-six-two millimeter, full...metal...jacket.

    • The end, where Joker marches across what can be only described as a hellscape while many other soldiers marching with him sing the Mickey Mouse Club theme and then fade to black...and the opening bars of Paint It Black...*shiver*
  • The Zuni fetish doll in Trilogy of Terror. Pure, uncut, nightmare fuel.
  • The opening of The Fearless Vampire Killers. The MGM lion roars twice and... well, see for yourself: original version American version.
  • Several things about the movie Fright Night especially the transformation scenes such as when "Evil Ed" changes from wolf to human and the particularly freaky scene where Amy (the main character's girlfriend) turns into a freakishly cartoonish vampire with More Teeth Than the Osmond Family.
  • The Descent. The crawlers are creepy enough to start off with, but when you realize they might be figments of Sarah's imagination as she kills all her friends down there in the cave... For that matter, Sarah herself. She's like Carrie gone Action Girl, for God's sake.
  • Minority Report did it for me. Have a nice trip to containment. Saw it once, judged it to be a good movie, and never saw it again because of that scene.
  • In the Blaxploitation flick Blacula: one of Blacula's female victims reanimates in the local morgue, and the viewer gets treated to a POV shot of a luckless morgue attendant, as said victim comes charging down a hallway towards him in slow-motion, all fangs and crazed staring eyes...
  • Having laughed through 28 Days Later, you'd think that its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, would be more of the same. The first non-flashback infection scene in which a woman in full-body restraints is kissed by her husband who subsequently contracts the virus, puts out her eyes, and beats her to death in a series of extreme close-up shots puts that notion to rest.
    • Private Mailer looking in through the window.
    • 28 Days Later as a whole. Most zombie films are set in America, on the other side of the Atlantic, and the zombies are comically slow and realistically wouldn't have a chance against the US military. 28 Days is set in Britain, far, far closer to home, and features a massively lethal Hate Plague that rolls over the country in 28 days flat. That, coupled with the shots of an empty London, is terrifying to contemplate.
    • A lot of discussion about 28 Days Later talks about the Infected. And they certainly are pretty terrifying. But probably the most effective nightmare fuel is the first ten minutes, when the main character wakes up and wanders around London -- and it's completely empty. Not even that trashed or destroyed or ruined, compared to most post-apocalyptic visions of the world, just... empty. Like the main character woke up one day and found that the world had just disappeared -- and he was the only one left, isolated and alone in this massive, empty city...
  • Kevin from Sin City, full stop.
    • Ladies and gentlemen, Frodo has left the building....
  • The lobotomy in From Hell. Tied down and she can see it coming and it doesn't even kill her.
    • The monolauge at the end Where Jack is going insane as he cuts up the last woman. Informative, though...
  • Martyrs, not the least because it's made of It Got Worse.
  • The Innocents based on the novella The Turn of the Screw is completely bloodless and devoid of violence but it is extremely scary because of the stark black and white scheme and the atmosphere.
    • Also, the ending, the full implications of which (necrophiliac pedophilia) are...more than a little disturbing.
  • The Mothman Prophecies:
    • The sound of Indrid Cold's voice on the phone.
    • The voice coming out of the motel sink's drain.
    • The closet.
    • The beginning when they're driving down the street, and the mothman CRASHES INTO THEIR WINDSHIELD. It was just so unexpected!
  • Dead Silence. Plot and Narm aside, every single closeup of that ventriloquist's dummy and its GIANT EYES THAT SLOWLY START TO MOVE ON THEIR OWN AND... BRRRRRRRRRR.
  • Despite its age, the The Thing from Another World manages a couple of moments; in one scene, the Thing is doused with gasoline and set ablaze in a dark and claustrophobic room, and continues to rampage around unimpeded, spreading flames everywhere. At another point, the heroes know the Thing is lurking somewhere nearby. They come up with a plan, yank the door of their refuge open, and the towering Thing is standing right there in the doorway.
  • How about Manhunter? Tom Noonan's performance as the Tooth Fairy has to be one of the most disturbing bits of acting ever committed to film.
  • Saturn 3 had the most terrifying robot in history. It's introduced to us from the feet up (around 1:40 in this trailer), looking for all the world like a skinned, metallic corpse with tubes for veins and metal plates where its muscles would be. Slowly, more of it is revealed, until we come to its head... or lack of one. All it has on top are two insectile, twitching, glowing eyes on an arm. It doesn't talk -- it merely flicks its eyes around to stare at you. When you combine those attributes with its measured tread, its deliberately inhuman movements and the fact that it's learning directly from the thoughts of the murderous, psychotic handler who has a stalkercrush on Farrah Fawcett, it invokes the eeriest elements of the Uncanny Valley, essentially recreating Frankenstein's Monster in space. But scarier. What happens near the end of the film isn't pretty either: the handler places his own brain inside the robot, which wears the front of his face like a mask.


Other Films: Part 3

  • Coma. Unconscious victims go from the OR to the Jefferson Institute, where you think is a nice care home for the terminally ill, but in reality keeps them naked and tube-fed hanging on wires from the ceiling, and the people in charge steal their organs to sell on the black market. If you're in any way afraid of hospitals or medical paraphernalia, don't watch this movie.
  • The Howling movies, all except the third one which was more Nightmare Retardant than anything.
    • The transformation scene in Howling 4 where the woman's husband slowly melts into a puddle of blood (completely conscious at least most of the time) before being reformed as a werewolf. All the goofy-looking townspeople chanting "Satan call you" as it happens does add enough unintentional silliness to somewhat curb the effects, though.
  • The very end of Session 9, when the baby stops crying. Alright, so it's not really a horror movie. That doesn't make it any better.
  • The original Black Christmas.
    • Even the ads -- featuring the body of a woman, suffocated by plastic wrap, propped up in a rocking chair and surrounded by Christmas lights and mistletoe.
    • The killer's voice on the phone
  • Reservoir Dogs. When Mr. Blonde is through, you'll never listen to "Stuck in the Middle With You" quite the same way. And that dance...
  • The Poughkeepsie Tapes. There's no part of the movie that doesn't qualify as Nightmare Fuel, actually. It makes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre look like a Care Bears Movie sequel.
    • An online ad for the film made to resemble a disturbing news item.
  • The Beyond, by Lucio Fulci. Even with the heavy Executive Meddling, there are still plenty of scenes full of squick. A small sample includes: Tarantulas eating out a guy's tongue, a girl seeing her mother's face getting melted off, oh, and This. Do not watch it in the dark and do not watch it alone.
  • Turistas, a 2006 thriller about a group of American tourists in Brazil, after a mishap with a bus, decide to head to a local bar for some drinks. Only it goes downhill from there as they are drugged, have all their possessions stolen, and are lured into a house where a mad doctor guts them for organs to sell on the black market. Brazil wasn't too happy about this movie.
  • Johnny 5's near-death beatdown in Short Circuit 2. It wasn't as much the fact that the director and writers had the gall to try and kill off the lovable, innocent star of the show in such a brutal manner, nor was it as much how they emphasized that he was being killed by his impassioned, pained cries of agony and his mech fluid splattering on his assaulters like blood, but the fact that, for the better part of 10 minutes, we're forced to watch him get up, take his severed arm, limp a good ways to a parked car, steal the battery from it to hook it up to himself as a backup life support system, write out in broken English on a dirty brick wall in an alleyway a plea to his friend to help fix him, and then use a computer to instruct the guy on how to perform the robotic equivalent to trauma center surgery fast enough so he won't die from power loss. In essence, they took your standard, horrific near-fatal movie beating, and instead of merely skipping to the hospital scene, they show you, in every gruesome detail, all of the horrible fight for survival the character had to endure to get to that hospital scene. That isn't just dramatic or sad, that is downright sadistic.
  • In Danny Boyle's film Sunshine, several characters die by simply being roasted by the sun, due to having no atmosphere or objects blocking the sun from them. While for one, it was something akin to a religious experience, the crew got to listen to the other screaming in pain for about a minute while the sun's rays coming through his visor destroyed his face and head, and the rest of his body simply superheated and boiled.
  • Independence Day. "Release me..."
    • "I know there is much we can learn from each other, if we can negotiate a truce. We can find a way to coexist." "Peace... no peace." "What is it you want us to do?" "Die..." (There is also a great song by Infected Mushroom aptly called Release Me which uses sound clips from that scene.)
  • Watchmen: The saw bit during the prison riot, oh my God. Also, a fair chunk of the flashback Rorshach tells.
    • Doctor Manhattan's origin story, in which he's ripped apart into what is essentially nothing, then slowly reassembles himself.
    • It started off pretty scary with the floating nervous system, but the kicker was when he reassembled himself without skin on accident, screamed bloody murder and disappeared. Third time's a charm though.
  • Mulholland Drive isn't nearly as nightmarish as Eraserhead or even Blue Velvet. But it's still one of David Lynch's most disturbing films. Some examples:
    • The infamous scene featuring two guys, a diner, and something resembling a zombie hobo out back.
    • Sierra Boniokayta. This is when the film takes a much darker turn, as Betty and Rita investigate the apartment of Diane Selwyn, looking for answers regarding Rita's true identity. Do they find anything? Yes... Diane's decaying corpse in a bed. The neighbor's knocking on the door somehow makes it worse.
    • The ending. It could have been completely ridiculous, but the way it's done...
      • The old couple with the ghastly grins
  • Inland Empire - David Lynch apparently can't get enough of creepy faces OR suffocating suspense and so, being David Lynch, distilled this to an even worse extreme in this film. You'll know the scene when you see it. And then you will never...EVER...forget it. The scene in question.
  • (Spoilers inserted to hide triggers) The gang rape scene in The Accused is just horrible. The rape on its own is bad enough, but it's the cheering of the men watching and the ringleader picking out who gets to go next all while Sarah is screaming and crying that pushes it into true Nightmare Fuel territory. That, and the fact that the premise of the movie was based on a true story.
    • That scene was apparently serious Nightmare Fuel for the actors who were playing the rapists; Jodie Foster had to repeatedly reassure them.
      • Tim Roth was pretty disturbed after filming the scene in Rob Roy where Archibald rapes Mary and was pretty nervous around Jessica Lange for a while. It serves as a bit of Nightmare Retardant to know that while they play Complete Monsters in the movies, the actors themselves are decent guys, at least when it comes to certain scenes.
      • Lawrence Fishburne only had a couple takes in him for the rape scene in What's Love Got to Do With It. Afterwards, the crew kept a wide berth. More disturbingly, Fishburne was approached in a restaurant by Ike Turner, who complimented him on the performance.
  • The 1988 Czech version of Alice In Wonderland features reanimated skeletons of small animals and a scene of pure madness at the tea party. Makes it even more eerie that there is no music whatsoever in the movie except for the squeeks and clinks of old clothing, footsteps, and winding-gears. This is a Jan Švankmajer film. The same guy made a film where a dude eats his own dick with mustard. Yeah, Nightmare Fuel is a given for his films.
  • The original Day of the Dead. The only Romero zombie flick to be personally bothersome with the scene of the solider's head getting ripped off and he's still screaming. Yes, it's just special effects. It does not help.
  • The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is pure nightmare fuel. In particular:
    • Most of Michael Gambon's monologues alone are nightmarish: particularly when he lectures his wife, loudly enough so that everyone in the restaurant can hear, that she's not allowed to masturbate because as her husband, only he gets to decide when she gets touched.
      • And it is a massive testament to Gambon's talent that anybody who watched this movie could also watch him as Albus freakin Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies, without having nightmare flashbacks.
    • Helen Mirren (the wife) and her lover concealing their affair from said abusive husband by stowing away, naked, in a truck full of slaughtered pig parts.
    • The murder of her lover.
    • The ending, which becomes high-octane Nausea Fuel as well.
  • The 1989 movie Leviathan.
    • The scene where the creature (in the form of an arm-sized leech-eel, clamps onto a character's chest and he can't pull it off. A combination of sheer revulsion and sympathetic terror.
  • The Australian creature-feature Rogue, which features a boatload of tourists getting attacked by a MASSIVE crocodile. It's more terrifying than Lake Placid, if only for the fact that the people in that film could simply call for a helicopter to get them out of there. In Rogue, the tourists make it to "safety" by swimming to a small island in the middle of the river. At least, until they realise they're standing on a tidal island that will eventually disappear as the water rises. They can't call for help either, they're in the middle of the outback with no reception. They've got no chance but to try and swim for it. It Gets Worse from here. As an aside, on the special features the director mentions that even bigger crocodiles are on record as having been around in living memory in Australia. And tourists still go swimming in northern Australia.
  • In The Philadelphia Experiment, from 1984, a man and a destroyer are sent forward through time as a result of the experiments, which were meant to make the ship temporarily invisible. Time travel certainly isn't all that scary, but that way that the movie pointed out the mechanics of molecularizing the objects moving through time and putting them back together.......Let's just say the crew of that destroyer has a rather permanent tour, and that they've never felt closer to their ship.


Other Films: Part 4

  • The horror movie Frayed draws its nightmare fuel from several sources: slasher movies, birthday clowns, mental hospitals and child molestation. The worst is a prolonged and extremely graphic sequence near the beginning of the movie where a person gets their head beaten to a pulp. The sound effects alone ensure that the viewer will have a tough time getting to sleep that night.
  • In the 1970s there was the Its Alive horror trilogy about an experimental fertility drug causing babies to be born as monsters that would kill when scared.
    • A commercial for it in the early afternoon, the one where the camera revolves around an innocent-looking basinette, and then suddenly you see the lizard arm hanging out of it and that awful whining scream sounds...
  • The "cookout" scene in Doomsday. The worst part is that it doesn't bother with discretion, it really just keeps on going and going.
  • Eastern Promises has a lot of other violence, but it's the throat-slitting that takes the cake. Coupled with the amount of rape in that movie... agh. Also, the very first scene, with a heavily pregnant 14 year old girl stumbling into a shop and asking for help, then collapsing into the blood that's been dripping down from between her legs, is crazy squicky. A sexually abused 14 year old girl miscarrying is bad enough. The fact that she dies, worse still. The fact that the person who'd been doing the abusing was Semyon...
  • The movie The Ruins. Because not only do you not know WHY they're being forced to stay on top of the ruins you then DO find out and it leads to an hour of VINES inside people. And the one girl character trying to CUT the vines out of herself.
    • When The Plant had mimicked the sound of a cell phone ringing, because that meant it knew humans would come to that sound. Knowing that It Can Think made everything that followed so much worse.
  • The film Mirrors. Especially the part where the MC's sister's reflection RIPS HER OWN JAW OFF. Also the woman in the mirror on fire that jumped out screaming.
    • When the MC looks in his rearview mirror and sees his dead sister there with her jaw ripped off.
  • Speaking of mirrors - Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Sleep tight.
  • "Hello daddy, I want to play! First I played with mommy, then I played with Judd...now I want to play with you!"
  • John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood is notable for its disturbing realism. Especially Ricky's murder.
  • The horrible, horrible scene in the Gorillas in The Mist movie that depicts the murder of Dian Fossey's favorite gorilla Digit at the hands of poachers. But the worst is when they find his corpse propped up against a tree in a sitting position, with bloody stumps where his head and hands used to be. Also a Tear Jerker and Truth in Television.
  • The nightmare scene from One Hour Photo, in which Robin Williams's character's eyes explode with blood. Made all the more disturbing for coming in what is otherwise a fairly conventional thriller film and therefore being completely out of context.
  • The Messengers: the scene with the little kid reaching for the corpse on the ceiling. And the noise. Oh god, the noise.
  • Men Behind the Sun (1988). A dramatization of the medical experiments of the Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731 during the Second World War, this film was known for its very graphic depictions of surgical procedures, including human vivisection. Most of it can be found on Youtube; if you feel particularly brave you may do a search. There's a single scene where a child is vivisected. Unit 731 was real.
  • Exorcist the Beginning, while being otherwise a lame, horrid excuse for a movie, had one horrific scene. In it, we see a young boy being killed and torn to pieces by hyenas. It takes a few moments, too, not a few seconds.
    • The scene in which a native woman gives birth to a dead, rotten, maggot-ridden .
    • Another genuinely frightening scene involves an extremely stressed English commander trying to calm his nerves by arranging his butterfly collection, only to find that his latest butterfly has transformed into a dead crow. Slowly, his collection begins fluttering to life... and falls silent. Then a newborn butterfly begins forcing its way out of the commander's mouth.
  • Angels & Demons has Eye Scream, branding, drowning, choking to death on dirt... oh, yeah, and immolation. Self-immolation, too. Freaky beyond measure. Also, the Pope after his impromptu exhumation is really, really disturbing-looking. In another vein, Vittoria attempts CPR on one of the four kidnapped Cardinals, only for it to come to her attention (and the viewer's) that the man's lungs are punctured-- because blood squirts out of the open wound in his chest to hit Robert in the face. Gahhhhh.
  • The opening sequence in the film version of The Twilight Zone: "Wanna see something really scary?"
  • The French film Irreversible has several scenes with extremely graphic violence. Within the first few minutes, a man's arm is broken and the film's protagonist bashes the face of another man into pulp with a fire extinguisher. The camera stays on the violence for long, nauseating, unflinching shots. Later in the film, a woman is cornered in an under-street tunnel and brutally raped and beaten. The sequence lasts for over ten minutes, again without a single cut.
  • The last five minutes of the film One Point Zero. Full stop.
  • There's something about the acting in The Red Skulls that makes for a film that actually could disturb even a dedicated B-flick horror fan too much to continue watching it all the way through - it's easy to forget it's supposed to be a "Gang War of the Quasi-Zombies" movie because even though the special effects are bottom-line cheesy, some of the actors actually seem to be demented in a way that's not fake...which either means they're better actors than this film deserved, or that they really ARE that messed-up in the mind.
  • While the film itself looks promising enough, this freaky poster for the upcoming Sci-Fi/Horror feature Pandorum deserves a mention for looking utterly terrifying.
  • One of the most disturbing examples of Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You comes at the climax of another Hitchcock film Spellbound. Dr. Murchison threatens to kill Dr. Peterson, but with a few choice words on Peterson's part her life is spared. The camera switches to Murchison's point of view as the aim of his gun follows her out of the room. She shuts the door, and the hand holding his gun turns, as though he's pondering his next action. Then, slowly, the hand turns some more: at himself you. That's right; you're experiencing a first-person suicide. It also doesn't help that the hand and the gun are highly detailed models, so their movement is highly unnatural.
  • What happens to Edmond Delhurst in Food of the Gods 2. Although the movie is ostensibly about the giant rats, the deaths they cause are shown in quick cuts, whereas Delhurst's death by turning into a bubbling puddle of "super cancer" is drawn out to ludicrous lengths (almost a full two minutes) with many loving closeups of his swollen, pus-oozing, tumor-covered face. It's frankly a relief when he finally keels over and dies.
  • Re-Animator: Dr. Hill's reanimated severed head raping Dan's sweet, innocent girlfriend. And for some reason the fact that in the final scenes all the reanimated cadavers are stark naked makes it much less narmy and much more cringeworthily freaky.
  • In The Last King of Scotland, there's the scene where Garrigar finds Kay's mutilated body. It's utterly horrific.
    • Garrigan being suspened from the ceiling by hooks through his chest
  • Something Wicked This Way Comes
  • Shaun of the Dead. You'd expect it to be a simple Affectionate Parody of a zombie movie, not a full-fledged Zombie Apocalypse with zombies as scary as Romero ones (that even tear apart and eat a character with their bare hands at a certain point).
  • "I'm singin' in the rain, just singin' in the rain! What a wonderful feeling..."
    • That face ... Nightmare Central.
    • Alex's voice as he tells his story; it's just as creepy as any of the acts of ultraviolence he commits.
  • Coraline. Yeah it's supposed to be creepy, not like that makes it any less scary. "Kids' fairytale" + "horror story" == sleeping with the light on.
    • Button.Eyes. Yes, this is a family movie.
      • What was more upsetting, perhaps, was stapled smile Wybie gets later.
  • Blindness was quite impressive in this regard. S The uncomfortably extended group rape scene was VERY difficult to sit through. It was so amazingly vulgar, while showing surprisingly little (in comparison). A list was quickly compiled of people who would be warned to NEVER see this film.
    • The pained cries of the victims that pushed this into nightmare territory.
  • Have you ever noticed how today's horror flicks and thrillers have that "greenish dark icky look"? Watch Se7en or any episode of CSI or even some Sci-Fi type shows. Washed-out colors, greenish-yellowish....blecchiness! It truly adds to the "Creepy yuck factor". Apparently, good ol' Technicolor went out with the dinosaurs and 8-track tapes. Even the surroundings of the reconned Battlestar Galactica seem darker.
  • Testament, which takes place in a single town and focused on the effects a nuclear war has on a small group of people. The intimacy was what did it for me, especially when it came to the main character nursing her children through radiation sickness and watching them die one by one.
  • Michael Haneke's films, especially:
    • Funny Games (see above for more details)
    • The Piano Teacher, based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek. It features Isabella Huppert as the most screwed up woman ever, named Erika. Notable scenes: the opening scene in which Erika and her mother fight about the fact that Erika came home late (and she's 40-plus years old!) and the fight turns physical, Erika's seduction of her student could count as Squick, the scene in the uncut version in which Erika cuts between her legs and a trail of blood streams down the bathtub's side, when Erika appears to be attempting to rape her own mother the next-to-last scene in which Erika forces her young male student to rape her (while her mother is within earshot!) and Erika looks like a corpse. The thing comes together to conclude: This protagonist is a very, very screwed up human being.
    • The White Ribbon is not like many other horror films. There are no monsters, no killers, no jump scares. It is all the people. Imagine this: you live in a small Austrian village in the months leading up to World War I. Strange events begin to happen to citizens. Someone strings a wire to trip the doctor as he rides his horse, a worker falls through a weak floor and dies, two children go missing at separate times and are found severely beaten, one of which is nearly blinded. What can you do about this? Absolutely nothing. You can't find out who is behind these crimes, and if you pursue suspicions, your reputation is likely to be ruined. That is what happens to the protagonist and narrator of this film. The cinematography and atmosphere of the film are so cold, it's like you are watching a serious version of Village of the Damned, where the children don't have psychic powers, but are still creepy and are clearly hiding something. And there isn't a single thing you can do about it, so you better just leave.

Other Films: Part 5

  • Munich: The movie in general was quite disturbing, but nowhere moreso than in the scenes depicting the actual Munich hostage crisis. Especially in the scene where one of the athletes is shot in the mouth at point-blank range. And survives. Thanks to Spielberg's brilliant and powerful execution, the intensity and brutality of those scenes will be haunting your nightmares for quite some time, no matter how jaded you are. It's scary enough as it is, but on top of that, everything depicted in those scenes actually happened. And the guy who got shot in the face? He was played in the movie by the son of the real guy. That had to have taken a lot of courage.
  • There Will Be Blood is nightmare fuel before anything nightmarish even happens, thanks to the ruthlessly foreboding soundtrack. The shockingly gruesome finale is just the icing on the cake.
  • The Mrs. Bathory scene in Hostel Part 2. Lorna's screaming makes it even more terrifying.
  • The beginning of Ghost Ship, where a crowd of partygoers are sliced in one fell swoop by a snapped wire. The lack of reaction is especially eerie - there's a few moments of stunned silence, then everything begins to fall apart. See it here.
  • 30 Days of Night. For once, there was a vampire child, which is always extra-creepy. But mostly, the situation the inhabitants were in was utterly chilling because there was just no way out and more importantly: Those vampires were the scariest, meanest I've seen in a dozen years of being hooked on vampires. Quick, strong, silent, predatory, sadistic, cold. The worst and most lasting bit of nightmare fuel might be that characters one really cared for got changed into vampires. Nightmare & Heartbreak all in one.
  • The brain bug from Starship Troopers... not just what it did to people, but what the humans did to it once it was captured. Allegedly, the sequels expanded on the theme, especially how it controlled its human victims.
  • The original Japanese version of Pulse (Kairo.) Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (no relation) ghosts are indescribably frightening, not because of what they do, but merely for their presence. As the movie progresses, and mankind steadily dies off or vanishes, the ghosts become much more visible, more obvious, and more common. The Lady In Red in the sealed room, with her dreamlike, stumbling gait, creeps up on a hapless protagonist slowly, ever so relentlessly slowly...
    • Death itself showing up in human form to claim the main male lead, coming closer and closer to the screen (slowly, naturally) until his eyes fill the audience's field of vision.
    • The fate of those touched by the ghosts' nihilism. They don't die, they don't even scream or writhe in pain. They just... fade, becoming a dark stain on the wall. All they leave behind is a faint "Help me... help me..." barely on the edge of hearing. It doesn't help that, in the director's view, humanity is hopelessly isolated and every person is utterly alone, even in death.
  • Nine has two examples in particular: First, the talisman that sucks out your soul (or at least a part of it), causing you to become nothing more than a body and second, OHGOD BABYSNAKE WHAT THE F- * is hypnotized*
    • The Seamstress is probably the most frightening film character ever seen. Not only does it hypnotize its enemies into submission via strobe lights, but to lure its prey closer it will sew a corpse of a character (in this case 2) to the end of its tail as bait. And once the poor stitchpunk is unconscious, it draws it into its belly, using a variety of spools and sewing needles to sew its mouth shut and restrain it. And, to top it all off, it has a human skull for a head, but wears the shattered face of a china doll over it. Children who attended the movie were inconsolable after seeing that thing.
    • When 7 and 9 are escaping the factory, there's this very brief shot of a spider-machine running over 8's dead body. It's only brief, but yet is somehow one of the creepiest things ever seen.
    • There is a song that chances are everyone knows. It's a sort of melancholy song, but even though it talks about how good things are hard to reach, the singer still seems hopeful. YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO LISTEN TO THIS SONG THE SAME WAY AGAIN!!! Remember folks, it's not the Soundtrack Dissonance that scares us, but when the music comes to a screeching halt that really clinches it. If happy little blue birds fly beyond the rainbow... Why, oh why can't I? *shudder*
  • Phantoms, based on the book by Dean Koontz. While much of the movie is largely B-grade, it has some genuinely unsettling imagery. all the people in the vaguely astronaut-like Hazmat suits appearing out of the shadows, their faceplates completely black; the single shot of the empty army command center with a few papers blowing in the wind; and the bit at the end where all the people who were the Phantom-creature's snack food are standing still assembled in the middle of town. Gah.
  • In Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince, when Katie Bell puts on the cursed necklace and ... oh, god.
  • In Dreams: the final scene.
  • Covenant Rider, a Christian Western by Willie George Ministries and Kenneth Copeland Minstries. A flashback scene had a young Wichita Slim tied to a post and ##branded for misbehavior. The combination of a little boy screaming and the burn on his shirt ensured that Covenant Rider would never, ever be watched after the first time.


Other Films: Part 6

  • Specific to the movie version of Battle Royale is the death of Kazuo Kiriyama. He fights with Mimura and friends, killing them, and Mimura ends the battle by blowing up a massive propane tank bomb. The three heroes arrive on the scene after the explosion, and it seems as if everyone died, but then the creepy godawful theme music starts up again, and he walks out of the fire, blinded, with Tears of Blood running from his eyes. His actual death is anticlimactic, but everything leading up to it is straight up Nightmare Fuel.
  • Anacondas in the Water. Just the preview can give you nightmares.
  • Waltz With Bashir, an animated Israeli documentary, is HONF from start (a full-on shot of a nightmarish, wild pack of dogs running at the camera) to finish ( actual footage of the immediate aftermath of the massacre in Lebanon in the 80s). If it's almost bedtime for you, please, for God's sakes, don't click!!
  • Memento is full of an esoteric kind of existential horror. Specifically, the scene where he is casually talking on the phone in his hotel while he removes the bandage from his new tattoo only to find that it reads "Never answer the phone." He asks who it is on the other line and gets no answer, followed by the photo of him bloody after a killing being slid under the door to his hotel.
  • Little Shop of Horrors. It's not the plant. It's not Seymour's gradual fall into insanity. You wanna know what it is? The dentist's REAL demise. Sure, he had it coming with his sadism, and you're setting yourself up for trouble if you insist on getting high from wearing an insanely complicated laughing-gas-pumping mask, but when that release dial breaks...OhCrap. And then the gas causes him to laugh as he slowly realizes that instead of finishing his routine day, he's gonna die just because a valve broke in his hand. He. Laughs.
    • Steve Martin's performance in the film version isn't terribly scary thanks to the fact that Steve Martin can make anything funny. Except for Bringin' Down the House.
  • Junior. The Arnie baby...
  • A lot of the movie Heathers.
  • Death Becomes Her. Living forever, even after you've already died, having to maintain that corpse even if it's broken into a zillion pieces. Ernest was right to refuse Lisle's potion.
  • Max's flashbacks in the movie adaptation to Freak the Mighty. At first you don't really know what's happening, but at the end it's revealed that his father murdered his mother right in front of him and told him he was dreaming. and the flashback? It's his dad going "shhhhhh..."
  • In the movie Strange Days, set in a near future, there's a technology that allows to encode and record on disc someone's sensorial experience, allowing another person to experience it later on playing the disc as if watching a movie, re-living everything like if he made it himself. The serial killer in the movie, the main villain, uses it to record his experience while he rapes and kills women, and in the meantime he puts another sensorial machine onto her victims so that they can feel his excitement while he rapes-kills them, enhancing their fear, which would be disturbing enough by itself, BUT the feedback works both way, therefore the assassin himself feels the victim's feelings as if he's being raped and killed himself, only exciting him even more, in a perverted infinite loop of murdering. The whole thing is so sick that when the protagonist find a disc made by the killer and watch it he gets terrifically shocked and he's incapacitated for a few.
  • At this point a question must be asked: Is it safe?
  • Carrie Both the prom scene where a bucket of pig's blood is dumped on Carrie's head and she goes nuts and kills everybody all the people in the gym and setting it on fire with her telekinetic powers and the ending where her hand suddenly pops out of the grave. It turned out to be a dream but holy God.
    • In the scene in the remake, when the blood is poured it slows down the scene so it's like there's a whole hose of it spraying at her and when it's over she's completely covered in it.
    • The statue of Jesus on the cross as the house was collapsing and burning on top of Carrie and her mother at the end. Good God, the eyes...
    • The ending where the girl who gets alive at the end, Nancy, puts some flowers at Carrie's tomb and... Carry's hand come out of the grave and grabs her! It turns out to be a dream, but the fact that she seems to be unable to wake up made it even worse.
  • Begotten. The suicide scene is bad enough, and when the black robed figures show up.
    • Every single frame of Begotten proves it was in fact a documentary filmed in Hell. God disemboweling himself at the beginning, Man writhing helpless in the mud like a child in agony and as if it were badly disabled, the faceless robed figures, the lack of sound save for birdsong or the throaty gurgling of Man and the stark black and white coupled with the grainy footage all comes together to make one of the most uncomfortable and disturbing things once can ever experience. It's like every black metal album cover ever made into a movie directed by David Lynch.
  • The end of Isadora the biopic about ballet dancer Isadora Duncan. Look her up and find out how she died. The movie manages to recreate in horrific detail.
    • Also disturbing is how her kids die!
    • NO CAPES!
  • Arachnophobia.
  • "The Strangers": the scene in which one of the intruders appears behind the heroine without a single note of fanfare, without her knowledge, and with no motive other than to prove how anyone can be enter your house or simply watch you without you knowing......
  • Martin Scorsese's short 1967 film The Big Shave begins with some simple shots of a bathroom while some jazz plays (specifically Bunny Berigan's version of 'I Can't Get Started'), and shortly after, a man walks in. He begins to shave. Then he keeps on shaving. He shaves too much. The film is often seen as an allegory for what the United States was doing to itself in the Vietnam War. The film can be viewed here.
  • Dead of Night is terrifying. Especially scary is the very end part with the dummy strangling the architect before he wakes up BACK INTO an endless dream loop.
  • Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Over an hour of some of the worst body horror ever put on film, with effects that are amazing and somehow make a guy essentially covered in junk terrifying. The soundtrack is like shoving rusty pipes in your ears, and speaking of rusty pipes... Oh, and the mental trauma the characters goes through, whether they are brainwashed or just driven insane only adds to the horror of pieces of machinery sprouting out of your body.
  • In the 2004 movie Der Untergang (a.k.a. Downfall) which is about the final days of Adolf Hitler in the bunker, while the whole thing is scary itself, there's one person guaranteed to haunt your dreams. Hint: He's Goebbels, the guy who looks like the freaking crypt keeper himself! You know the world has come to an end when Goebbels makes Hitler himself appear to be nothing more than a raving drunk.
    • And the fate of his children. Just in case you started to feel sorry for anyone else.
  • Just saw The Lovely Bones. The look on Mr. Harvey's face when he takes the wash-cloth off it, after killing Susie, you almost expect him to growl like a demon. Who knew that Stanley Tucci could be that scary?
  • Home Movie. A camcorder movie about two parents video taping their childrens sociopathic behavior. Highlights include...
  • Eden Lake is a truly terrifying movie, with all too realistic and believable premise of a couple of young adults chased by teenaged hoodies. Especially the gang's leader Brett is a terror incarnate, possibly the most evil form of peer pressure...
  • French film Inside is about a nine month pregnant widow- home alone on Christmas Eve with a creepy woman standing outside her house. It gets worse...
  • Whatever you do, don't watch the final 12 minutes of the K-Horror flick White The Curse Of The Melody. If you do, well, let's just say bricks will be shat.
  • Zodiac is a lovely example of occasional terror, especially the basement scene. That you never know what was really going on made it oh-so-much worse.
  • Kill Theory: You and your friends are stuck out in the middle of nowhere and have three hours to kill each other, or a madman will kill all of you. Add in Paranoia fuel in the question of which of your friends can you trust and who will betray you to save themselves?
  • Cannibal Holocaust:
    • Where to begin? Hailed as one of the most disturbing films ever made, it contains scenes of rape, mutilation, dismemberment, cannibalism, and rapes all senses. What's more, real animals were killed onscreen, and footage of real executions were used, convincing the brain that what they are seeing may in fact be real. This isn't helped by the film being in clear daylight with all the bright colours of the rainforest, and the creepy music being used as inappropriate times (such as the gentle, almost happy theme song being used in the scene of a woman being decapitated).
      • It was considered so realistic that the Italian government thought the filmmakers had made an honest-to-god snuff film, and it took producing the (very much alive) actors to prove that it wasn't. They had to demonstrate in court how they'd faked the impalement scene.


Other Films: Part 7

  • The Invisible: Nick's predicament. Imagine being a spirit doomed to watch helplessly as everyone around you falls to pieces when they believe you're dead, seeing that people you hated or ignored are suffering horribly, while you yourself are dying, and the only person who can save you is the one who put you in a coma to begin with.
  • The Devil's Rejects, including such moments as the woman escaping the motel room wearing her husband's face.
  • I am Dina is set in 19th century Norway. At the beginning, the heroine, then a little girl, causes a the contents of a huge cauldron full of boiling water (used to wash clothes) to be poured on her mother. First you see the mother, completely scalded. Then the little girl, waiting on her own in an attic, listening while her mother screams constantly for hours, maybe days, before dying.
    • It gets worse. It wasn't boiling water, it was boiling lye.
  • Cracked.com lists 7 horrifying moments from classic kids' movies.
  • You don't think a biopic about the great jazz piano player Ray Charles will be scary? Check out the scene from Ray where he has a hallucination that his drowned brother is in his suitcase.
  • "Did you know that the brain can still function for seven minutes after the heart stops beating? We still have six minutes to play..."
    • "Why are you screaming? I haven't even cut you yet..."
  • The scene where Lisbeth is brutally raped in "Men Who Hate Women". Even more effective because we barely see anything, we mostly just hear.
    • Also, the scene where Martin Vanger talks to Blomqvist about his favorite part of raping and killing.
  • Mamá. It's a short horror film. It's also bloody terrifying.
    • It's going to be remake into a feature film with Guillermo del Toro producing, sweet dreams.
  • FUCKING TIGER!!!
    • The "Little arms" story that cinches it.
  • Kick Ass: The torture and attempted execution scene is incredibly unbearable to watch.
    • They lit Big Daddy on fire, and we watched him burn, complete with blisters and torched flesh in the aftermath as he struggled to breathe, and suffocated. That's one way to up the Octane. I don't think it counts as "Attempted" at that point
  • There is a collection of four short films based on the writings of Taro Hirai(AKA Edogawa Ranpo) known as Rampo Noir. "Mars Canal", "Mirror Hell", "Caterpillar" and "Crawling Bugs"
  • The tongue-cutting scene in Oldboy
  • Kalifornia. Not just the plot, horrifying as it is to contemplate, but specifically the scene where Early makes the store clerk lie down and cover his head, and makes him believe he might get out of it alive. And then, with the guy sobbing in terror, Early SHOOTS him. The image of a yellow smiley-face cushion exploding in fluff and blood still haunts me.
  • Phantasm from 1979: a scene with that terrifying, irrational "flying ball" with knives sticking out... and the Tall Man..."Boooyyyyyy".
  • Inception has a fair amount, especially the implied horror of Cobb's alluded-to past with Mal (until it is explained, though it is still quite creepy) and the scene with the elevator that leads to his subconscious. And the very last shot.
    • "WAKE ME UP! WAKE ME UP!" Also, it is implied that the projections in Saito's dream ripped Nash apart in the opening dream sequence.
  • Just the teaser for the remake of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Dark house...little girl in her bed with a flashlight...little girl hides under covers...little girl turns shines flashlight under covers to reveal a monster has actually crawled under them with her. FFFFFFFFFFF--
  • Lake Mungo. Cell phone footage. Don't mind me, I'll be hiding somewhere.
    • And the autopsy photos.
  • "Now it's dark."
  • The scene on the alien craft in Fire In The Sky. This film is not billed as a horror but it probably should be.
  • Braveheart: the ending, where William Wallace's torso is ripped open and his intestines are scrambled around while he is still alive. It is horrific to imagine enduring that much pain knowing that the damage is irreversible, and you're already as good as dead.
    • All the more horrible because it's true.
  • Hot Fuzz. For such a comedic film there are gallons of intentional Nightmare Fuel. In particular, the death of Tim Messenger was almost too much. The way he staggers for a while...
  • Piranha 3D: EVERY death scene. Maybe it was how good the effects were, maybe it was just how painful it looked.
  • The titular painting 1945 The Picture of Dorian Gray is scary as balls. First of all, it's in color, when the rest of the movie's black-and-white. Second of all, they always cut to it very suddenly and startlingly, with a piercing music sting to accompany it. And thirdly, it's just freaky-looking.
  • The otherwise hilarious Blaxploitation film Avenging Disco Godfather has an incredibly disturbing scene in which a woman high on drugs cooks her baby and serves it to her family. The whole movie has a pretty strong Drugs Are Bad message, but for the most part it's sort of tongue-in-cheek. BUT NOT THEN.
  • Go on, Google A Serbian Film. It features tons of snuff and rape and what can only be called "rape squared," by which we mean being drugged and forced to rape a woman who you then kill, then rape her some more, and then forced to rape your SON as your brother rapes your wife. There's also mention (though not shown, thank God) of " newborn rape."
    • Milos' rape face. It will haunt your nightmares.
  • The movie Antichrist: the graphic images of people cutting their own genitalia. Trailer.
  • Indio from For a Few Dollars More. One of the first things we see him do is order his henchmen to kill a man's wife and newborn child. Once they're dead, Indio forces the father into a duel for a "chance" to avenge his family using an eerie music watch chime stolen from a woman, who turns out to be Colonel Mortimer's sister, Indio raped to the point where she comitted suicide. Then there's the freakouts he has, going from calm to starkraving mad in the blink of an eye. Even his picture on the wanted poster is enough to scare someone, which is showing him laughing.
  • Angel Eyes' first appearance in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He offs a guy, after the victim offers all of his money so Angel Eyes won't kill him. Angel Eyes then goes to the man who ordered the hit and kills him too, because once he's paid, he always sees the job through.
  • Skyline has the images of hundreds of people getting sucked up into space ships, all of them screaming.
    • Worse still in the movie, where the aliens DISSOLVE the heads of human victims and leave the brain intact for, all intents and purposes, a BATTERY.
    • The giant "Tank" Aliens, who use their tentacles to capture humans and forcibly (no doubt painfully) suck them into their bodies.
  • This short film, entitled Head, by Chris Falkowski. Man with an evil Alter Ego consumes pills to control himself, until he doesn't and things don't go so well.
  • Evil Dead II. The laughing scene.
  • The Parable, a film strip. This is partly due to Genre Shift: you expect something sappy and uplifting, like most religious films, and instead get what could best be described as Federico Fellini directing IT. The film (which is directed in a surrealistic black and white style without any dialogue) stars a nameless creepy clown who is also supposed to be a representation of Jesus. This clown walks around a very odd-seeming carnival, trying to help out his fellow workers, but is met with reactions ranging from anger to disdain to bemusement. Eventually, he enters the main tent, where an insane puppeteer is showing a disturbing puppet show to a bunch of traumatized kids, all wearing large, uncomfortable-looking hoodies for some reason. The clown goes and starts to amuse the kids, which enrages the puppeteer, who captures the clown and hangs him on one of the puppet frames. As he forces the clown to perform a manic dance, the clown dies, but not before letting out an ear-splitting scream. And no, he does not get better, either, although there are hints that his sacrifice inspired other members of the troupe.
  • "Now say goodnight!.
  • The TV movie David, about a boy whose father sets him on fire due to a custody dispute. It was based on a true story, and the boy was burned over 90 percent of his body. John Glover played the father, and apparently the role was Nightmare Fuel for him.
  • Fatal Attraction has probably the quintessential Yandere moment in western cinema, when Glenn Close's character Alex Forrest takes the pet rabbit belonging to the daughter of her lover Dan Gallagher and boils it alive in a pressure cooker. This grotesque act of evil was chilling enough to earn an entry on the Moral Event Horizon page, has given many people who watched it some serious nightmares, and was enough to coin the phrase "bunny boiler" for Yandere-types soon afterwards.
  • The scenes where Alex kidnapped Dan's daughter. You can really feel Beth (Dan's wife) complete panic as she runs around searching for her daughter. That's every parent's worst nightmare--that your kid could so easily go off with a stranger despite your multiple warnings otherwise, that the stranger could be some perfectly normal-looking person rather than the psycho that they truly are, and though she returns the little girl unharmed, let's face it, she could have harmed her if she wanted to.
  • The mexican film Canoa holds no surprises: From the very first scene we're told a group of workers got lynched by a town who mistook them for communists. It takes one hour of build-up to get to the point where the fanatic villagers storm the house where the young victims are. As the aggressions begin, some of the victims watch in horror, as impotent as the spectator. The lynching scene is so long, graphic and horrible, there's only one thing capable of making it worse: It really happened.
  • Untraceable. The first victim wasn't that horrible, but the guy being roasted alive, and the guy being submerged in acid. add to that the fact that he was a cop.
  • Back in the 1970s, there was apparently a portion of the Turkish film industry who couldn't care less about copyright laws and made unauthorized films about a number of superhero, action/adventure and sci-fi properties. That's just kinda weird, but one of the most infamous was a film called 3 Dev Adam which involved Captain America, a Mexican wrestler known as Santos, and Spider-Man... except it wasn't Spider-Man. It was an evildoer who was called Spider-Man and had a similar costume to Spidey's. Even that wouldn't be so bad, except that this "Spider-Man" doesn't just want to rob banks or take over the world, he's also a serial killer and rapist. There's supposed to be some unfathomably freakish imagery and such, like he has some gerbils or hamsters eat someone's eyes out.
  • Nurse Betty is a romantic comedy about a woman played by Renée Zellweger starts to believe that her favorite soap opera is real and gets into some wacky hijinks trying to find a character from the show that she's smitten over. Fun stuff, huh... except there's also a scene where Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock tie up her husband and proceed to scalp him in brutal detail.
  • Lindsey drowning in the damaged submersible in The Abyss (while her husband has to watch, no less). The water's rising and she's clearly terrified, trying to breathe right up until the submersible has completely flooded.
  • The Skeleton Key, especially the ending. The more kind-hearted Caroline believed she was doing the right thing, the closer she went to her Fate Worse Than Death.
  • The Haunting: That scene with the wallpaper that looks like a face, with the man singing, the woman laughing and the children CRYING.
  • Biutiful: a roomful of sleeping immigrant workers (a total of about 25 men, women and children) all die as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning, presumably. When their boss comes in to wake them, they're just all lying there dead. And somehow, it gets worse: the main character, Uxbal, can communicate with the dead to some degree, and as he tries to apologize to one of the dead women, a friend of his, you briefly see the 'spirits' of the dead people suspended weirdly against the ceiling, their faces contorted with fear. It's all the most disturbing because there's no sound effects or dramatic music stings to highlight it. And towards the end of the film, Uxbal (who is dying of cancer) sees himself on the ceiling in the same way in his final hours. It's very, very effective.
  • According to Eva, the Tom Green movie Freddy Got Fingered.

Throwing a couple more gallons of nightmare fuel on the fire...

  • Disney's Darby O Gill and The Little People. The banshee might be the most terrifying thing to ever appear in a family friendly movie.
  • The scene with the vice in Casino.
  • The Canadian zombie film Pontypool. A virus spread not through blood or air, but speech; you can be infected simply by listening to a term of endearment. The repeated madness mantras of the infected are some of the creepiest things ever committed to film, especially combined with their expressions. The movie taking place within a radio studio makes it sometimes almost unbearably claustrophobic. Then there's the Downer Ending....
    • "For your safety, please avoid contact with close family members and refrain from the following: all terms of endearment, such as 'honey' or 'sweetheart'; baby talk with young children; and rhetorical discourse. For greater safety, please avoid the English language... Do not translate this message."
  • The early-90s anthology Body Bags was for the most part pretty Narmy, but the segment titled "Hair"...
  • The recent sci-fi horror film Altitude. By and large it's So Okay It's Average, but it has some creepy stuff in it. A small, twin engine plane flies up to go over a storm system, only to encounter a huge wall of black clouds that it can't avoid. Okay, ominous, but not too bad...until they realize that they've been flying through the storm for a while, and it doesn't seem to end, and their altimeter says they should be in the stratosphere, and all they can hear on the radio is this horrible screaming sound. But what really freaks you out are the brief glimpses we got of the thing that makes the screaming noise: something huge moving around in the clouds.
  • In the 2007 remake of I Am Legend, the protagonist copes with his isolation by populating certain locations (like a video rental) with department-store mannequins, which he gives names to and converses with. Will Smith is driving in one scene when he looks out the side window and sees a brief glimpse of one of his human proxies standing in the middle of the road - and in a quick first-person snap cut, the mannequin turns its head to look at you.
    • "What the hell are you doing out here, Fred?! What the hell are you... No. No! NO! What the hell are you doing out here, Fred?! How did you get out here?... Fred, if you're real, you'd better tell me right now! IF YOU'RE REAL YOU BETTER TELL ME RIGHT NOW!"
  • The Green Mile: The execution of Del Delacroix. Deliberately sabotaged by Percy, the sadistic guard, the scene goes on for several excruciating minutes. Instead of wetting the sponge that goes on the head of the person sitting in the chair, he leaves it dry, which interferes with the conductivity. As a result, instead of a relatively quick execution, the poor man's head catches fire and dies an excruciatingly tortured death.
    • The flashback to how Wild Bill kidnapped the two little girls is also incredibly disturbing. Seeing it go from shots of a happy family to the family's hired hand threatening the girls before raping and killing them is like something out of a nightmare.
  • The smiling family from from Insidious. Brrr.
    • The scene describing the monster's intentions for the first time. At first it seems like a normal introduction to the monster; it talks to the dreaming person, telling her that it (naturally) wants the comatose child's soul. All we see of the creature is its claw pointing at the kid, and then the sequence ends. And, right as she finishes telling her story, it shows up right behind her, screaming at the top of its lungs before running off. Mere words don't do it justice; the scene is pretty horrifying for a Jump Scare and can easily catch the audience off-guard.
  • The Shawshank Redemption, generally speaking, does NOT sugar-coat how horrific prisons in real life can be. The most disturbing scenes are actually earlier on, which is Fridge Brilliance in that it goes with one of the movie's themes about how prison is always tougher to deal with earlier on.
  • Most of the stuff with the ghosts in the original 13 Ghosts is just silly, but there's a suddenly terrifying moment where Cyrus sees several of them suddenly bursting into flames while screaming.
  • Howard the Duck: As Dr. Jennings flees with Howard's girl, he begins to run out of energy. The way he recharges sent a room of birthday children running screaming, and a pair of parents regretting they had rented the show. Witness it here.
    • The possessed Dr. Jennings, and the horrid aliens, creep out any kid. ANYONE.
      • It's even creepier when you find out quite a few disturbing things about actor Jeffrey Jones.
  • "Killer Klowns From Outer Space". I'm surprised that this hasn't been put on here. HONF in this movie includes, but is not limited to: Man-eating Shadow Puppets, Klowns luring children around, Killer Puppets, and Monster Clown!
  • Gozu. The kid in the 'yakuza killing' car staring down a barrel of a gun motionless with a smile that could be used for warfare. Perhaps Manami waking up to find a man with a cow's head wasn't surreal enough. And the ending... not even a spoiler could prepare you for what happens.
  • Gladiator: The scene where Maximus finds his wife and son crucified is both Nightmare Fuel and a tear-jerker, not unlike the scene where Commodus smothers his father to death.
    • Commodus is Nightmore Fuel personified. He kills his father, lusts after his sister, orders Maximus and his family murdered, taunts Maximus about it later, threatens to kill his own nephew unless his sister marry and have sex with him and later challenges Maximus to a duel to the death but wounds him beforehand so that he'll have the upper hand. He looks increasingly evil and vampiric as the film progresses. Ridley Scott said that he tried to use Commodus's make-up to create the impression that he's slowly turning to stone as he becomes more and more evil.
    • Or the scene where the female gladiator is sliced in half! That was so brutal and graphic, and the fact that it was a woman (who Would Hit a Girl?!) makes it even scarier!
  • Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: Any scene with the Sheriff and Mortiana as well as the part where Robin returns to his ancestral manor and finds his father's eviscerated carcass.
  • What happens to the moms in Mars Needs Moms: brain-draning and subsequent vaporization. Gribble's mom went through it too. After that, there's Milo's death by asphyxiation and his mother taking off her helmet to bring him back. What Do You Mean It's for Kids?
  • Caltiki The Immortal Monster, a 1959 Italian rip-off of The Blob, had a couple good ones, particularly for unsuspecting eight-year-olds. A memorable one involves Max, who has become more deranged throughout the film, as he holds a gun on his girlfriend (long story). Cue monster, which comes up behind him and does what Blob rip-offs do best. Now imagine his agonized face, blood oozing from his mouth as he's crushed, then his face disappears for a second, enveloped by monsta. Then his face, a freaking skull by now, reappears while his arm is still flailing wildly. An earlier one involves a diver who comes face to face with Caltiki and ends up in a face-off. Specifically, the skin of his face is gone (including eyelids but leaving eyes) and you can still see him breathing.
  • Holocaust (the 1978 NBC miniseries). Most movies about the Holocaust have more than their share of Nightmare Fuel, and this one, possibly the first large-scale film to go into detail about the concentration camps and such, is no exception. While the scenes involving the gas chambers were disconcerting to be sure, their impact was softened a bit by use of fade-to-black techniques. Depiction of the cold-blooded killings done by the Einsatzgruppen, however, left little to the imagination. The Einsatzgruppen, or SS mobile killing units, were the ones whose primary method of execution was by a firing squad felling groups of people at a time into a mass grave -- after making them undress. Completely. Scenes of these killings were shown multiple times, but one particular scene has the highest octane of them all. After executing a group of men in the usual manner, they all go take a look at the mass grave. We are actually shown what they see: essentially a pile of naked men at the bottom of a pit, bloodied in a manner that suggested strong spurting of blood with each bullet hit. After a deafening silence, we hear some human moaning from the pit. This only angered the commandant, who promptly handed the gunner a pistol, with orders to finish off anyone who might still be breathing. What makes the horror worse about this scene is that you can't just say "It's only a movie" since it was based on real-live events. The fact that an earlier scene implied that women and children were being slaughtered the same way (not dramatized) doesn't help. Indeed there might be some Truth in Television here, as Einsatzgruppen members were starting to get nightmares themselves, particularly from watching blood shoot out of people's backs unbuffered by clothing, and was one reason for the development of the gas chambers later in the war.
  • The original The Amityville Horror - mostly demonic entity/"imaginary friend" Jodie's antics. First we have the babysitter trapped in a closet with no lock, who proceeds to pound on the door until her knuckles bleed. Then the light goes out and she's stuck inside for hours. When she's finally let out, the little girl she was babysitting explains Jodie wouldn't let her open the door.
    • Later, the same little girl is singing "Jesus Loves Me" as her mother walks down the hall. She comes in and we - but not her - see that the rocking chair in the corner of the room has been moving on its own as the daughter sings to Jodie. When the little girl complains her mother scared Jodie away and she went out the window, the mother bemusedly goes to look in order to demonstrate Jodie is imaginary - only to be greeted by two glowing red eyes staring back at her.
    • What about the black pit to Hell in the basement filled with unknown black pitch? Terrifying.
  • Red State - the execution scene. Guy tied to a pole, they wrap him in clingwrap, including his head, and all the while he's screaming for help, before they put a revolver on top of his head and shoot him. And you can see the blood in the plastic wrap. Even more disturbing were the serene faces of the other sect members...
  • In Megan Is Missing, a fourteen year old girl meets who she thinks is a harmless boy around her age. When she goes to meet him, she is kidnapped and goes missing. Eventually, two disturbing photos of a young girl, who is confirmed by the FBI to be Megan, are found on a fetish site. Not only are the photos terrifying (depicting Megan in a dungeon having her mouth and nose stretched open in a permanent scream via a bizarre torture device) but they are also the last photos of her being alive. The film only gets worse after the revealing of the pictures because soon Megan's friend Amy gets kidnapped. The final twenty two minutes of the film is Amy getting raped, tortured, and then finally being buried alive. Add to this the fact that during this footage we see Megan's slimy, defiled, rotting corpse. The film isn't for the weak hearted or really anyone for that matter.
    • The photos and the sight of Megan's corpse in the barrel.
    • There's a scene in the middle of the film where Amy takes her video camera and records herself speaking in her special and secret place, which is under a bridge. Towards the end, we see that Megan's kidnapper and killer was actually stalking Amy the entire time; in the video she took, you can see him in the farthest corner blending into the surrounding plant life. He's been watching her the entire time.
  • The Towering Inferno has its fair share.
    • The people who get scorched on the elevator.
    • The deaths of Lisolette and the people who fell from the buyou.
  • The scene in Very Bad Things where Jeremy Piven's character accidentally impales a prostitute's head on a towel hook during rough sex and kills her made the rest of the movie impossible to finish. It is still cringe-worthy almost ten years later.
  • Jason's face in the Friday the 13th remake. The designs for the face have run anywhere from unsettling to disgusting in the originals, but they outdid themselves in this one.
  • The Marley's Ghost scene in A Christmas Carol is horrifying enough in any film adaptation, but in the 2004 musical, it goes above and beyond the call of duty, with the wandering chained spirits coming out of the walls and joining Marley in the song "Link By Link". View here.
    • In 2009 adaptation, maybe it not the same thing as Link By Link, but it comes right in the second place.
  • There's an obscure 90s movie called No Telling that used to air on IFC a lot. The plot is that a doctor is experimenting on lab mice, but then moves onto bigger things. The film remains relatively calm until the last 15 minutes or so. As it turns out, the doctor stole a little girl's dog, sewed it's legs off, then bought a calf, cut it's legs off, and put the calf legs on the dog. The worst part? It moves. However, the movie does end on a bittersweet note. While the dog dies, the doctor's wife leaves him, and he gets punched in the face by a farmer.
  • Inglorious Basterds - Whenever Brad Pitt's character pulled out his knife, scalped the Nazis and carved swastikas onto the foreheads of the survivors.
  • At one point in Hanna Marissa brushes her teeth to the point of drawing a lot of blood.
  • Red Eye being a Wes Craven Psychological Thriller had a lot. Jackson Rippner in particular can be quite creepy.
  • In the 1951 film adaption of A Streetcar Named Desire the depiction of Blanche's descent into insanity. Especially her Freak-Out moment after Stanley tears the paper lantern off of the lightbulb.
  • Dahmer: Particularly the part at the end when he slices the one guy's chest and stomach open and sticks his hands in his intestines.
  • Why are they called the Iron Jawed Angels? It's not because they had their mouths pried open with metal instruments and were force-fed raw eggs through a tube shoved down their throat. But after watching that scene, that's all you'll think of. Made even scarier by the fact that it's Truth in Television.
  • Girl with a Pearl Earring: Van Ruijven's attempt to rape Griet as well as when Catharina tries to suddenly stab the picture of Griet.
  • Titanic: The second half of the movie where the ship sinks is this and tearjerker fuel.
    • The deleted scene where Rose freaks out in her room before almost being Driven to Suicide.
    • Rose and Jack being trapped behind the gate while the ship is rapidly filling with water.
    • Jack and a lot of other people freezing to death. Especially the shot of the woman and her baby frozen to death in the water.
    • The captain's death.
  • The concept of Gamer. It takes place in the future, in which online video games have you controlling real, living, breathing people. If you're playing a first-person shooter, there's no respawning at all, so when your player dies, he's permanently dead.
  • Contagion. The whole thing. Do not watch it if you're a germaphobe, or afraid of getting sick.
  • The Adventures of Baron Munchausen: let's see: giant moon people who's heads can fly off, with their bodies still moving around; giant three headed bird creature; giant sea monster; people getting their heads cut off (with the heads still alive sometimes; and especially, the grim reaper constently showing up. Not a film to have in the library's family section.
  • Prince of Darkness gives us this scene.

This is not a dream. Not a dream. We are using your brain's electrical system as a receiver. We are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the year one, nine, nine, nine. You are receiving this broadcast in order to alter the events you are seeing. Our technology has not developed a transmitter strong enough to reach you in a conscious state of awareness. But this is not a dream. You are seeing what is actually occurring for the purpose of causality violation.

  1. ↑ Applicable to many of these examples as well
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