Hayao Miyazaki/Nightmare Fuel

Hayao Miyazaki is one of the greatest Anime film directors of this generation. That being said it doesn't mean that his works won't frighten you.

• Nausicaa of the Valley of The Wind has its own page.

• My Neighbor Totoro:
  • The possibility that Mei might have drowned in the lake.
  • The Catbus. That smile and the glowing eyes... its hollow body. Good lord, how is that thing not terrifying?!
    • It could also be worse. It's a nekomata; those are usually evil, but at least this one's reformed. Probably.
• Princess Mononoke:
  • Some of the violent scenes. It does get watched by viewers much younger than the target demographic, unfortunately. The opening scene has the Boar God decay and melt, as if in acid, from flesh to the bloodied bone.
  • A much later scene in which Ashitaka gets shot and gets a big, bloody, gaping hole in his abdomen...and he's still standing like nothing happened.
  • A guy blocked an arrow with his sword, and the impact ripped his arm out. Apparently, this was all due to superpowers imbued by the demon in Ashitaka's arm. Some viewers consider that violence realistic enough to stop watching.
  • The Kodamas. Yes, the creepy little spirits with white bodies and huge void eyes.
  • The Tatari Gami, the creatures turned into worm/tentacle monsters by hate, look so truly toxic. Touch one, and your features melt into squirming black glop. San screaming "I don't want to be a demon!" and getting drawn into the sea of muck didn't help. And those huge black insta-kill blobs of Forest God neckflesh? Just as bad, if not worse.
  • The Forest God as a not-a-deer, with the stretchy neck and a flat face. And then it turned into a Humongous Mecha of a see-through critter.
  • The hands of the blobs of death that bring about instant death while looking for the head of the Forest Spirit, reaching into the forest and killing everything they touched.
  • The empty-eyed boar "ghosts". They are really hunters with poison darts wearing the skins of the dead boar-gods, but that doesn't make it any better.
  • Moro's decapitated head slithering across the ground in a last-ditch attempt to get revenge on the woman that shot her.
• Spirited Away:
  • The opening sequence seems specifically designed to tap into the childhood fear of being left alone in a strange place. When the hero Chihiro's parents eat some cursed food that turns them into pigs, the sun goes down, and all kinds of creepy black blob monsters flood into the streets. Chihiro runs to the river, where more weird creatures disembark from a riverboat. Finally, she starts to fade into nothing.
  • This movie is packed with nightmare fuel, from No Face's rampage to the creepy faceless people on the train ride.
  • Then there's Yubaba, whose head is scary enough on its own...then you see how proportionately huge it is to her body. Apparently, Yubaba was based physically on the original (and most famous) illustrations to Alice in Wonderland, the ones by Sir John Tenniel, such as The Duchess.
  • The corrupted No-Face rampaging around the bathhouse and, at various points, eating people, making death threats at the heroine, destroying everything in sight, and puking his guts out.
  • The River Spirit in the bathhouse. Its face is like a zombie's.
  • The three green severed head things rolling around Yubaba's office that don't talk and eventually pretend to become her child.
  • Watching Haku thrash about bleeding from the mouth after being attacked by a swarm of paper birds.
  • The theme of losing oneself. Kohaku being reduced to following rules and orders from and hating Yubaba, No Face getting..."sick" from being in the bath house, "Sen" changing so subtly over fewer than 24 hours that neither she nor the audience notices when she first ceases to realizes that she was anyone else.
  • Chihiro and Haku are falling through the bowels of the bathhouse, and featureless shadow-things stretch up toward them. What are those things?
• Howls Moving Castle:
  • The Witch of the Waste, her blob things, and what happens to her in the room of lights.
  • Forget the room of lights, what's even worse is when Howl makes his contract with Calcifer in the flashback, which puts into perspective exactly what those lights are, expands the ideas of what they can do almost infinitely, and worse, tells you that they are out there somewhere and not created or under the control of any magic user. Complete with unintelligible Ironic Nursery Rhyme.
  • Howl's gradual transformation into a bird-monster, with it being harder, slower, and more painful to change back every time.
  • The dream Sophie had where she discovered Howl in said form and he says, "Go away." Enough to send chills up anyone's spines, especially if you recognize Christian Bale's Batman voice during the dream.
  • That moment when Sophie thinks that Howl is dead and the ring helps her to find him. Miyazaki always has great visual representations for magic, but liquid darkness is probably the most awesome (and one of the scarier) things that happen in anime.
• Ponyo:
  • The scene where Ponyo tells her father she wants to go back to Sousuke. When you think about it later, you realize that Fujimoto is basically forcibly sedating his daughter to the point of knocking her out. Her sisters look a bit freaked out themselves.
  • Fujimoto's minions. They're very unsettling with the distorted mumbling and the freaky eyes. And fact that they rush and submerge a five-year-old?
  • Ponyo's chicken leg transformation.
  • Anyone watching this who has experiences with little kids capturing wild animals will be consumed with anxious certainty that Sousuke is going to kill that fish. Seeing him yanking her stomach around, hammering a rock over her head, carrying her suffocated body away from water in his bare hands, then sticking her in the bushes is not a good way to build the audience's trust in a stupid little kid, Miyazaki!
  • There's something unsettling about the scene where Sousuke finds his mom's abandoned car. While the rest of the film was very fantastic and whimsical, (just moments before you had a five-year-old and his best-fish-friend sailing an enlarged, candle-powered toy boat) but all of a sudden Sousuke seems genuinely frightened and vulnerable, just like a real kid. The suddenness and realism of this scene, with Sousuke tearfully crying for his mom, is oddly disturbing, tapping into the fear of a kid being alone and a parent knowing their kid is alone. It's made worse moments later when Ponyo starts to change back into a fish.