Your Unconventional Nightmare Fuel

I had a similar fear as a kid, only replace the Jump Scare with the THX logo. This can be blamed on several nightmares I had where that exact thing happened.

I used to be a bit scared of the THX logo too, due to how loud it was. I'm not nearly as sensitive to loud sounds now.

I have vague memories of being freaked out by the "Hi, I'm Paul" DNA Productions Vanity Plate that played after Jimmy Neutron episodes, though I can't confirm if this is true or just a false memory.

Oh, but this unlocked a definite memory of me being utterly uncomfortable by the animation and art style of shows like Book of Pooh; I think it was an Unintentional Uncanny Valley reaction because kid me was immediately turned off by it. Looking at it now it's not nearly as photorealistic as I thought it was when I was little, but then again I had no real frame of reference for how realistic animation could eventually get.

I think songs that end in spoken lines are pretty creepy for some reason.

Speaking of music, I think anything scary becomes scarier if there's music playing while it's happening.

Unfitting music can be creepy to me when it's not straight-up hilarious or narmy.

It's not so much "nightmare fuel" because it's more uncomfortable to me than outright scary, but given my difficulty making eye contact, I can't really handle looking at close-ups of people or characters' faces (especially if they're also looking at the camera) for much longer than a few seconds at a time.

My nightmares tend to be like horror movies. If I were an actual writer, I could try to make movies out of them. I do not always have nightmares but my dreams tend to be very surreal.

Mold. In general.

It kinda freaks me out..

Historical re-enactments, especially ones with people playing dead. The whole "they are pretending to be dead and this isn't real and is all a farce representation of past events but they are still representative of what was real people who really were dead and their lives back then were the present back then and this was to be the future" feel creates a disturbing psychological sort of Uncanny Valley to me.

Characters who are usually smart or logical being unable to use their usual logic. And I don't mean in the sense of "making mistakes" or bad writing; I mean actual loss of intelligence/reasoning ability.

What horrified me as a kid was the concept of spirits that died in gruesome ways and still feel the pain of their deaths for eternity.

They haunt you and try to kill you so that you can be added to their realm. They get driven to complete insanity and want to share their torment with you. Even the nicest people will snap when under infinite pain and hopelessness.

Here is where it actually starts to get absurd. Making the realm look superficially friendly makes the effect even worse. A false heaven hits way harder than blatant and fiery hell. Seeing a mutilated soul smile against their will is way scarier than just hearing screams.

How did this get weird? Dumb Ways To Die was the first one to trigger this reaction. 3rd grade me ended up becoming extremely cautious around everything. I avoided using even remotely dangerous objects in case something possessed me to do the stupidest thing possible. I remember screaming and slapping someone who was trying to drink a bottle of glue because I had a flashback to Calamity getting completely immobilized. I thought that I saved his life that day.

This got 10x worse when I saw the Happy Tree Friends version. It was far more gruesome and emphasized the tarnished innocence fear I had. This is when I started having nightmares.

In them, I discovered a cult that stalked and monitored the town, waiting for someone to die in a way that entertains them. They then collect their soul and trap them within DWTDHTF to relive their death over and over again. This is then broadcasted on the darker sides of the web as a form of entertainment. They spend eternity as a cartoon animal suffering through endless torture for the amusement of the invisible masses.

If you watch or play it, the souls of the tree friends start haunting you. Once this starts, the curse can never be broken.

My brain took that one fanwork and turned it into an entire creepypasta. Even now as an adult, it makes me feel a bad omen.

Not me but my brother; he was terrified of Unicron. I'd use my toy from the Armada line to keep him out of my room.

A lot of people are afraid of alarms and emergency alert systems, which isn't weird. I'm afraid of the voices of home alarms and EAS. You know, the voices that say things like "This is only a test" and "system armed" and the names of front/back/garage doors when they open. I just find them creepy. The alarms themselves don't bother me though.

Probably has something to do with how clear, concise, and toneless the voices are.

My stepbrother used to be terrified of the (very cheesy) Halloween decorations at our local apple orchard. In all fairness, he was only about 10 at the time.

Not sure if this is the right place to say this, but I genuinely fear the possibility of bad people wiping out all the good people in the world(like when all of one player's pieces get captured in checkers, only replace the players' pieces with good and bad people).

The famous "hurricane episode" of Sesame Street —- and no, not because of the hurricane, because of the "my nest, my home". The idea of being so emotionally distraught that you can only say three words scares me.

Edited by Unicorndance on Jan 20th 2024 at 11:45:05 PM

Swimming in large, open bodies of water in video games. When I was a kid, I swam out in Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy and got eaten by a Lurker Shark. Ever since then, I've always felt at the very least unsettled going out in oceans and the like in games, specifically if you can't see the seafloor (like, Seaside Kingdom is completely fine by me except for the drop at the edge that you can't even explore). Even if I know every enemy in the game and know that there isn't a Border Patrol seamonster out there that will eat you, even if I know there's nothing out there but an Invisible Wall, getting in to water gives me a slight subconscious "Get out of there right now leave leave leave" feeling. I am otherwise fine with exploring dark caverns, hideouts of serial killers, hellish zones, and so on (...in games, just to be absolutely clear). Oddly enough I'm also fine with using boats, but the moment my character touches the water and starts swimming I get uncomfortable.

Ironically I like the ocean as a whole. I'm even slowly switching to "NeedsMoreDeepWater" as my newer username in some spots.

Poppy from Scarlate and Vilote scares me. I think she's a haunted doll.

Smokey Bear kind of scares me — that intimidating voice and the "only you".