The Simpsons (animation)/Nightmare Fuel



You wouldn't think that a show staring a cartoonish family could be scary enough for its own page, right? Wrong.

== In order for Nightmare Fuel tabs to survive, a new writing style is going to be used, nicknamed Example Lobotomy. Basic rules: just list facts as they are, don't just say "character X" or "the X scene" (such zero context examples will be Zapped), spoiler policy to be determined on a case-by-case basis, italics to be applied to works' names only and not to give emphasis on what tropers say. "X scared me" is already implied by the mere addition of that example by the troper. ==

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Regular Episodes (and The Movie)
""Fiddle-dee-dee. That will require a tetanus shot.""
 * 500 Keys: when Lisa finds the hamster skeleton in the Habitrail ball, and when she falls into the lake and finds Bus 23, apparently full of  (eventually revealed to be . Otto reveals he's had to live with the belief that he , fled from the scene of the crime, and killed the "hobo with a big mouth". At another point of the episode, Maggie is stuck in the car with the windows completely rolled up. Then there's the yokels and the umbilical cord in another scene, where Bart throws his Key to the City into the woods and it falls at Cletus' feet. He tells Brandine he can "cut her umbilical cord now", and the camera pans to her sitting on a rocking chair with a maybe 10 year old boy beside her, still connected by the cord; she asks him if he wants some chocolate milk, then drinks some and the milk passes through the cord to the boy's stomach. At the end, back to the main bus plot,.
 * Bart Gets Famous: Lisa's fantasy in the first scene, where she's rich, has cured all diseases, ended all wars, and has reunited the cast of The Facts of Life. When Bart is shown polishing her awards, she kicks him down onto her Nobel Peace Prize - thus impaling him - and only comments on the Irony. Back to the present day, she is sighing happily about it.
 * Bart of Darkness: The bit where the axe-wielding murderer Ned Flanders slowly walks up to the attic where Lisa is, humming, "Mary Had A Little Lamb".
 * Bart the Daredevil: The ending where Homer falls off the gorge twice. Once was bad enough, but that he is then put on a stretcher which somehow falls out of the ambulance and he falls down again, while chained to the stretcher this time. Even after a horrific injury, he got injured again before getting to the hospital. In The Simpsons Movie, the ambulance is shown to be still there.
 * Bart the General: the episode chronicles Bart's first run-ins with school bully Nelson Muntz (long before Nelson attained Jerkass Woobie status) and includes a notorious scene wherein Bart imagines that Nelson - who is now a deep-voiced and seemingly immortal giant - is chasing him through a surreal landscape. Nothing Bart tries can kill Giant Nelson - not knives, which just stick in Nelson without shedding any blood, and not even cannonballs, which just rebound off his chest with loud, scary bangs. When Nelson finally catches Bart, he eats him: then the scene shifts to Bart's funeral, with Nelson proving what a Complete Monster he is in Bart's mind by approaching the casket, muttering "Here's one for the road, dude," and punching Bart's corpse in the stomach.
 * Bart The Lover: Homer tries his best not to swear and tires to brush everything that gets him mad as a minor offense. One such incident involves Homer stepping on a nail, going right through his foot.

""I need a soul, Ralph. Any soul. YOURS!""
 * Bart Sells His Soul: where Bart sells his soul to Milhouse, in one of the darkest episodes of the series as noted by many. Bart becomes a Creepy Child pretty soon throughout the episode, eventually culminating in him threatening Ralph Wiggum.

"Marge: "Now we can blame him for everything!"
 * "There's No Disgrace Like Home": Homer's vision of his family compared to another worker. Very frightening.
 * Bart the Murderer: The nightmare sequence from "Bart The Murderer", where the "dead" Skinner says, "YOU KILLED ME BART!".
 * Bart vs. Thanksgiving: Bart ruins Lisa's home-made centerpiece she made for Thanksgiving. She put "all her soul into it", and Bart's guilt results in a Nightmare Sequence.

Homer: "It's your fault I'm bald."

Abe: "It's your fault I'm old."

Maggie: "It's your fault I can't talk!"

Uncle Sam: "It's your fault America has lost its way!"

Everyone: "It's all your fault! It's all your fault! It's all your fault!""

"Bob: "The hard part was removing my own face. Luckily, as Krusty's sidekick, I'd been hit with so many pies that my face had lost all sensation..."
 * Blunder Years, The: Homer was hypnotized to age twelve. In the flashback when he pokes the stick into the drain to figure out where the water went and the decomposing (maggots and everything) corpse washes out and lands on top of him: it was Waylon Smithers Sr. Homer was twelve when this happened.
 * Burns' describing his death as he watched it was unsettling as well, becoming more and more unnerved by it. Burns' changes in his facial expression act as a clever, if somewhat cruel, inversion of Audience Surrogate: allowing the audience to imagine it happening.
 * Bob Next Door, The: Sideshow bob visibly removing his cellmates' face and cutting off his own. Then Sideshow Bob stops at a rest stop and a waitress who's takes an interest in him, manages to pull off a loose thread used to keep his face on, causing his entire face to flap down, exposing all of his muscles and tissue. And then moments later, it happens again with his cell mate he switched faces with.
 * This line in particular is on the Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror:

(Bob starts cutting his face open while screaming in agony)

Bob: "...or so I thought.""

"Homer: "It knows you're afraid.""
 * Boy Scoutz 'n the Hood: quoting the Simpsons Wiki, "Meanwhile, the rest of the Junior Campers (led by "celebrity dad" Ernest Borgnine) fare even worse. They take the correct fork of the river, but end up drifting through some dark scary woods where they are stalked by hillbillies. Later they encounter a bear and Borgnine's first thought is to fight off the bear with his pocketknife, but he discovers it's missing (Homer having stolen it to give it to Bart). They later shelter at an abandoned summer camp and sing around the campfire, and are stalked by a mysterious person or creature in the woods. The final shot of the episode is of Borgnine screaming as the stalker attacks. What happens to the group of campers after that isn't known, but they are never seen again."
 * The superimposed shot of Apu's face laughing getting closer and closer during the "squishee-bender" sequence.
 * Boys of Bummer, The: The worst part being Bart jumping off a building at Chief Wiggum's request after going insane after Springfield as a whole was mad at him for losing a baseball game, including normally nice characters like Apu, Lenny and Moe are in the mob. And they even continued their torment even AFTER he survived that fall! Thankfully, Marge chewed out the entire town afterwards.
 * Brother From Another Planet: when Bart is finally picked up from soccer practice after being out in the rain. Homer apologizes for his latest blunder, but Bart is so mad, he sees Homer (and everything around him) burn and melt amid Hell's fire with Homer (whose face is now partially melted and his eyes devoid of pupils) moaning, "NOW, HOW 'BOUT A HUG?!", which counts as a Big Lipped Alligator Moment (or at least an Imagine Spot) as that scene is never mentioned again, with Bart watching a TV show in the very next scene.
 * During a Nightmare Sequence earlier in the episode, Homer realizes he forgot Bart and dreamt that he drove up to where Bart was supposed to be waiting and all there is left is a (spiky-headed) skeleton.
 * Cape Feare: Bob's prison tattoo of Bart's severed, bloody head on a skateboard saying, "Ouch, man!"
 * Homer with the Chainsaw and hockey mask, as a jarring example of salab-stabbing.
 * Bob in this episode was acting like a Knight of Cerebus: deliberate, calculating, and predatory. Until he trips over the rakes... and is trampled by entire street parade.
 * Children of a Lesser Clod: when Homer shows Milhouse and Ralph his bloody and scabbing knee. Seeing the scab-wound starting to heal over Ralph's hand.

"Marge: "This place ain't so bad once you get used to being drugged.""
 * That scene where Homer chases Bart down the street with a mace while screaming "I'll mace you good!"
 * Computer Wore Menace Shoes, The: Homer getting dumped on this weird island (a Whole-Plot Reference to The Prisoner), whilst at home he's been replaced by a fake..

"Alan Wrench: "You put it together yourself! All you need is me, Alan Wrench!"
 * Crepes of Wrath, The: Bart is enslaved by criminals in France while what the family knows is that he's simply "in France".
 * Dangerous Curves: Bart sticks some gum in each ear. Homer pulls it out, and with it comes Bart's ear bones.
 * Deep Space Homer: another in-universe example is the The Itchy and Scratchy Show episode, which is a parody of Star Trek. Scratchy is trapped out in space, cut in half, and undergoes Explosive Decompression. Bart and Lisa find it hilarious, but Homer, who is about to go out into space himself, is sweating profusely.
 * E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt): Homer starts farming both tomatoes and tobacco at the same time, resulting in "Tomacco". Aside from the fact that Homer makes his plants' growth "quicker" through radioactive stuff stolen from the power plant, after tobacco lobbyists ask Homer to sell them the rights to sell it (due to it being both "simple tomatoes" and as addictive as tobacco), the Simpsons family's refusal ends with a bunch of nicotine addicted animals attacking the Simpsons' house.
 * Eight Misbehavin: after meeting the mascot of Shøp, the following exchange occurs.

Homer: "He's named after what he is."

Bart: "Hey, cool costume!"

Alan Wrench: [Robotic voice] "It's not a costume. They found me in a meteor!"

Marge: Where do you keep your sparkplugs?

Alan Wrench: [Normal voice] "Sparkplugs? Third aisle." [Robotic, to Bart] "Help! I need tungsten to live! Tungsten!""

""Hey, no fair, I never do this to you! Talk to me!""
 * El Viaje de Nuestro Homer: an equally as freaky hallucination sequence happened in the episode where Homer ate a superpowerful chili, including its creepiest moment when Homer sees Marge facing away from him, and walks around and around her desperately looking for a face.

"Bart: "You know that rattle when you shake up a can of spraypaint? That's a kid's tooth.""
 * When Homer goes out walking at night looking for his soul mate he looks into a pet shop, sees a pair of kissing fish and smiles, then one fish swallows the other whole and looks at Homer with an evil smile. Homer backs away in horror.
 * Eternal Moonshine Of The Simpson Mind: Krusty taking a "forget-me-shot", and getting his pupils enlarging for a split second as a result; then, at the end, Patty and Selma push Homer off the bridge. At first it may seem like that they intended him to  But then they tell him of an "afterparty at the bottom of the ocean" and telling Homer to carry an anchor.
 * The Falcon and the D'ohman: Wayne's continuous violent flashbacks. Also, Homer being snatched by gangsters, and being trapped under an ice rink.
 * Four Great Women and a Manicure: Homer killing Dr. Hibbert (in a non-canon tale), and the creepy look on Dr. Hibbert's face after he died.
 * Funeral For a Fiend:
 * Girl Who Slept Too Little, The: Lisa's Nightmare Sequence, when Lisa deals with her fears, has "Grandma" saying, "Don't worry, sweetie. Grandma will protect you... BUT I'M NOT GRANDMA!".
 * Gone Maggie Gone: Marge burning her retinas by looking at the solar eclipse. Very hard to watch.
 * Good, The Sad, and the Drugly, The: the smiley faces that Lisa was seeing were funny at first, but not when they were all over Lisa's room, and especially when placed on a fan Lisa was about to kiss. That, and when the smiley faces began pouring out of an injured cop.
 * Homer and Ned's Hail Mary Pass: the episode where Flanders starts making Bible films. Mostly because they were horrifyingly violent, as a Take That to The Passion of the Christ. In an earlier episode in which Flanders made a Biblical film for that film festival headed by Jay Sherman from The Critic, it was way tamer.
 * Homer Loves Flanders: the ending, at the "haunted house", contains some of the most disturbingly realistic screams in cartoon history.
 * Homer vs. Dignity: Homer being electroshocked into submission and (presumably) raped by a panda.
 * Homer's Enemy: a man (specifically, "a real-world person") is so appalled by Homer's incompetence that he loses his mind and accidentally commits suicide ("But I can, because I am Homer SimpZZZZOLT"). The fact that he's the only one in the entire sector who hates Homer's ways just adds to it; and at the end at the funeral, everyone laughs because Homer is mumbling in his sleep while the coffin lowers itself into the ground.
 * In a much later episode, he has a son named [Http://Simpsonswiki.Net/Wiki/Frank_Grimes,_Jr. Frank Grimes Jr] who is out to get revenge on Homer.
 * Homer's Triple Bypass: ff Lisa hadn't been there, Homer would've died at the hands of the ultra incompetent Dr. Nick Riviera.
 * Homie the Clown: The Krustyburglar sketch was pretty funny, especially when Homer started attacking him, but then it Crosses the Line Twice when he slammed the guy's head against a rock one too many times, and that kid started crying, "Stop! Stoooop! He's already dead!".
 * Hurricane Neddy: Ned having a mental breakdown and chewing out the neighborhood.
 * Krusty Gets Busted: The first appearance of Sideshow Bob's maniacal Evil Laugh, complete with rather extreme lighting and horrifyingly mad look in his eyes.
 * ''Krusty Gets Kancelled": While Gabbo the dummy isn't that scary by himself (just obnoxious), there's the rather disturbing implication that he's sentient and can move and talk on his own without his owner.
 * Last Exit to Springfield: Lisa needs braces and Homer protests against the power plant, especially after being shown computer images of what Lisa would look like in the future without braces. At age 18, one of her malformed teeth forms a huge spike coming out of her top jaw through her head. After she gets the crude horrific braces installed, her reaction is a Shout Out to Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's Batman.

"Bart (already homesick): I want to go home.
 * Last Tap Dance in Springfield: Homer gets laser eye surgery, but forgets (read: doesn't want to spend any further money) to use his prescribed eye drops immediately after. Both eyes are instantly engulfed by thick, foot long crusts.
 * Lisa the Drama Queen: Lisa and her new best friend Juliet create a fantasy world and start living in it. Lisa has a tentative grasp on reality, but her friend is completely off the deep end and wants to live in the (according to imdb) Heavenly Creatures-inspired world of Equalia.
 * Lisa the Skeptic: the part where the angel's skeleton makes an announcement that the world is coming to an end and everyone preps for it, while Lisa tries to prove that the whole thing is a sham and no one will listen to her, not even her own mother.
 * Lisa's First Word: Homer is unable to afford a professionally built bed featuring Krusty the Clown's likeness for 2-year-old Bart, so he builds a clown-shaped bed; however, thanks to Homer's inexpert handicraft skills, Krusty's appearance is poorly drawn and takes a disturbing appearance. Immediately Bart imagines it saying "If you should die before you wake..." and laughing maniacally, before having a nightmare about the bed swallowing him whole, followed by a Gilligan Cut to the next day with a shivering and wide-eyed Bart. This is Played for Laughs, but it's easy to tell a clown is scary when it makes a little kid not want to go home:

(looks out the window and sees the clown bed)

Bart (terrified): No I don't!"

"Mr. Burns (grim, quiet, and calm): You inspired it all, Little Lisa..."
 * Make Room For Lisa: Near the end of the episode,.
 * Mobile Homer: Homer, while cleaning the garage, sees a spider and chases it. It runs behind a box and Homer lifts it only to discover that the entire underside of the box is covered in spiders which proceed to fall on and crawl all over Homer.
 * My Sister, My Sitter: Lisa babysits Bart and he dislocates his forearm, and he waves the arm around as a way to tell Lisa he clearly does not want her to be his babysitter. Most fans agree that "My Sister, My Sitter" was a very dark episode overall, and some viewers even say Bart got a Karma Houdini. Even what is supposed to be the happy ending is actually also very dark, once you think about it. After the entire town is convinced that she was a drug addict that tried to murder Bart, the parents, in the end, still call her to babysit their kids, although the implied meaning of the joke is that the parents want her as their babysitter because she did that to Bart himself.
 * New Kid on the Block, The: In the episode where Bart falls for the neighbor's daughter, she tells him "I have something wonderful to tell you! I have a boyfriend!" Bart then imagines her saying "You won't be needing this" while she rips his still-beating heart out, and kicks it against a wall, into a trash can.
 * Old Man and the Lisa, The: Lisa tries to help Mr. Burns earn some money by suggesting he give up his evil ways so she introduces him to recycling. Mr. Burns enthusiastically begins grabbing every can he can find, causing Lisa to believe that he has changed. Eventually, Burns earns so much money that he is able to open his own recycling plant. Burns gives Lisa a tour, showing her that its environmentally sound and made of recycled materials. At first, Lisa is impressed, but then Burns shows her "the best part". He has attached millions of six-pack holders together into a net which he uses to catch tons of sea life, in order to make L'il Lisa's Patented Animal Slurry, a multi-purpose edible compound. Lisa is horrified, proclaiming Burns not only still evil, but even more evil when he tries to be good.

"Dr. Nick: Now don't worry. You won't feel a thing... *picks up nightmarish device* till I jam this down your throat!"
 * Papa Don't Leech: Homer has a dream were he smothers his father to avoid taking him to the hospital or something. If it was meant to a funny parody of a similar scene from an episode of The Sopranos, it wasn't as funny as it was meant to be.
 * Pranks and Greens: Bart finds out that Principal Skinner used to be really laid back, and that the school used to have a swimming pool, until a bigger prankster even than Bart did a prank so big it turned Skinner to how he is now: filling the pool with worms when Skinner went to dive in it, and then closing the pool, sealing Skinner in a dark, enclosed space, full of worms, for more than two days.
 * Raging Abe Simpson and His Grumbling Grandson in The Curse of the Flying Hellfish: Burns kicked Bart into the crate that he then kicked into the ocean, where it started to sink.
 * Rosebud: the ending, where we see, in a distant future, men are slaves to apes, Mr. Burns is still alive in some strange robotic life support machine, and Smithers's head is grafted onto a robo-dog's body. Even when the entire world is ruined, Mr Burns remains alive and well.
 * Scorpion's Tale: after many people, including Abe Simpson, take a new drug that was created from a desert flower and duplicated by a pharmaceutical company, its side effects causes their eyes to pop out.
 * Selma's Choice: Selma takes Bart and Lisa to Duff Gardens after Homer falls ill from food poisoning. The trio are on this "It's A Small World"-esque ride called, "The Little Land of Duff," with robot kids from all over the world singing, "Duff Beer for me/Duff Beer for you/I'll have a Duff/You have one too..." Bart dares his sister to drink the water. Lisa is then forced to drink it by Selma and Lisa begins tripping -- first, she sees the Little Land of Duff robots fading away (along with Lisa's reality), then Lisa begins rambling, "They're all around me! No way out! NO WAY OUT, I TELL YOU!", and finally, Lisa sees Selma as a Medusa-like creature with multiple eyes and a snarling mouth for a shoulder.
 * Simpsons Movie, The: it starts with Green Day (as themselves, even) on a barge sinking into the toxic Lake Springfield; later, an angry mob wants to get Homer after his stupidity led to the whole city being put under a glass dome, but despite a claim that they only wanted Homer, there actully five nooses on the tree out back, showing that everyone is after the whole family. And the Big Bad wants to nuke Springfield by the end.
 * Some Enchanted Evening: The "Babysitter Bandit" voiced by Penny Marshall who ties the kids up and robs the place on a first season episode of The Simpsons. It wasn't Played for Laughs.
 * Springfield Files, The: a Whole-Plot Reference to The X Files, where Scully and Mulder - the actual characters - end up in Springfield following the reported sight of an alien, which turns out to be  by the end.

"Lisa: How'd it rip your stomach without ripping through your shirt?
 * Not to mention the alien itself. This troper was frightened senseless of that thing as a child.
 * Tale Of Two Springfields, A: A badger mauls Homer and it appears it tore open his stomach. It currently provides the image for this page.

Homer: What do I look like, a tailor?"

""Oh no, my brains.""
 * Team Homer: Mr. Burns (high on ether), drilling Moleman's head offscreen.

"Homer: SAY IT! SAY I NEVER SHOT YOU... *suddenly regains his senses* before!"
 * Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part 2: The Twin Peaks Red Room sequence in Who Shot Mr Burns is almost as unsettling as what it's parodying. Also the ending, with Homer completely losing it and becoming Axe Crazy. After being briefly rendered unable to say nothing but his name, Burns recovers and angrily proceeds to ask who Homer is. Homer lets out a primal scream, turns around and pulls a gun out of one of the mobs hands and aims it right at Burns' head.


 * Yokel Chords: Dark Stanley. To make it worse,  (alternate link).
 * Non-specific episode: Whenever the whole family screams. Bart and Lisa normally scream at Sideshow Bob which has been played up and Homer and Bart have their own comical screams, but when they're all joined by Marge suddenly the audience knows things got bad. Many examples on this list are made worse when even the most level headed Simpson freaks out.
 * Sideshow Bob in general, especially in earlier episodes, is a driven psychopath with an obsession with killing ten-year-old Bart, as well as Krusty, although his menace has decayed recently.

"Apu: (upon realizing that Snake's hair possessed Homer) Snake? But you're dead!
 * Treehouse of Horror: the very first Treehouse of Horror's Bad Dream House segment had a possessed house, with blood dripping down the walls in the kitchen.
 * The episode's rendition of The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe. The poem is narrated by James Earl Jones, with the scariest part being when Homer's character opens the chamber door to see who is knocking, and all he finds is "darkness there, and nothing more", accompanied by a shot of an impossibly long hall just stretching away into darkness.
 * Treehouse of Horror II: when Homer is turned into a robot right after Mr. Burns slices open Homer's head with a pizza cutter: "Dammit Smithers, this isn't rocket science! It's brain surgery!". And then Burns puts Homer's brain on his head, while quipping: "Look, Smithers, I'm Davy Crockett!". The joke ending of the short has Homer waking up with Burns's head on his shoulder was worse, complete with a joke teaser for "next week's episode".
 * The ending to "The Bart Zone" got me: near the end of Bart's nightmare, Bart and Homer share a heartwarming father/son moment, but when Homer kisses Bart on the cheek, it cuts right back to reality where Bart screams in an extreme close-up. Then the camera moves inside his mouth to create a black screen for the commercial break.
 * Treehouse of Horror III: the Zombie Apocalypse Halloween segment "Dial 'Z' for Zombies" was scary by itself, but the ending makes it worse even though the family has destroyed the zombie plague. When they sit nicely in the chair and they watch TV. Marge said that they have to be happy that they didn't change into mindless zombies, but Bart interrupts them for watching TV: a guy falls on screen, and a laugh track plays only for Homer to moan, "Man. Fall down. Funny".
 * Clown Without Pity: The Doll Episode where the Creepy Doll role is played by Krusty the Clown. The episode's apex is arguably the line following Homer's remark about a doll saying "I'll Kill You!" supposedly being "cute": "I said I'm going to kill you! You, Homer Simpson!".
 * Treehouse of Horror IV: "Terror from 5 and 1/2 Feet" was a homage to The Twilight Zone's own "Nightmare from 20,000 Feet", ending with Skinner taking Bart due to him "misbehaving on the bus" despite Bart trying to warn them all about a gremlin he saw through the bus' windows. As a final insult to poor Bart and the psychological damage he went through, the gremlin appears in the back window of the ambulance he's in, while holding Ned's decapitated head which is saying "Hidely ho, Bart!". But it wasn't a clean decapitation, as Ned's very spine was clearly hanging out of his ragged neck.
 * "Bart Simpson's Dracula", which parodies Dracula with Mr. Burns as the vampire. The twist at the end being that Marge is the head vampire.
 * Treehouse of Horror V: The Simpson family is infected by a mist that causes people to turn inside out. And then they break into a song and dance about it. If that's not demented enough, Santa's Little Helper drags Bart away to eat him. All set to a re-lyric-ized version of A Chorus Line: "The family dog is eying Bart's intestine...". That aside, the main plot of that short was even worse, as it involved the teachers of Springfield Elementary eating all of the students, and Marge telling them to defend themselves ("saying 'don't eat us' is up to you!") when they told her.
 * The view down at the meat grinder had blood splatter fanning out from the "collection vat", immediately following an absolutely demented look on the Skinner's, the teachers', and Lunchlady Doris' faces when they began advancing on them.
 * Right after becoming sane again, Homer's final line of the "Shinning" segment (parodying The Shining) serves as a nice bit of Fridge Horror: as soon as he notice he can't change the channel, he mutters, "Urge to kill... rising...".
 * The Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque Treehouse short where Flanders is a supreme overlord as a result of Homer messing with his toaster (he accidentally turns the toaster into a time machine and changes the future by stepping on prehistoric bugs), specifically the part where a lobotomized Moe shows Homer "you get to keep the little piece they cut out", or even worse, where a lobotomized Marge says "It's bliiiiiiiiiissssss..." shortly afterwards. More generally, the nicest guy in Springfield playing the Big Brother role is unsettingly ironic.
 * The Big Lipped Alligator Moment in the same short, when Maggie whacks Groundskeeper Willie in the back with the axe and says "This is indeed a disturbing universe" in James Earl Jones' voice.
 * Treehouse of Horror VI: The A Nightmare On Elm Street parody, when Willie's tongue snakes out of his mouth and strangles Martin Prince. After Martin dies, we hear a familiar, out-of-place haw-haw from Nelson, and Lunch Lady Doris accidentally takes Martin's corpse into the kindergarten part of the school. Martin doesn't exactly leave a handsome corpse either: his bulging eyes and gagging grimace are permanently affixed onto his face.
 * In that same segment, Willie's initial death in the flashback was unbelievably horrifying, what with Skinner shutting him up with "Willie, please! Mr. van Houten has the floor!", as Willie, screaming for help, burns to a crisp during a PTA meeting.
 * At the end dream sequence, when Bart thinks he has finally killed Willie, he's rising out of the quick sand as a giant spider.
 * "Homer 3", in which Homer is stuck in another (CGI) dimension and can't get home even when it collapses. Thankfully (so to speak) Timothy Lovejoy was right when he said "he's gone to a better place".
 * While the episode itself ended with the most heartwarming rendition of the Simpsons Theme ever, the beginning of the episode wasn't pleasant: right after a headless horseman-like Krusty throws his head towards the viewers (with the obligatory blood splatter spelling out the title card), the Couch Gag was the most Nightmare Fuel-ish ever seen in the whole show: while in The Simpsons Movie the family was only threatened to be hung, [[media:werealldead_7618.jpg|this episode did it for real.]]
 * Treehouse of Horror VII: "The Thing and I". Due to a discovery of the "evil gene" at Bart and his siamese twin's birth, Dr. Hibbert suggests to take the newly-separated baby who has it and lock them up in the attic. Ten years later, the kids decide to investigate this and it ends up with the other twin trying to "re-sow" himself to Bart. Luckily, the family and Hibbert arrive and stop this before it happens. But then, to make that moment of saving moot, it is revealed that Bart is the one with the "evil gene", and he is forced to switch with his twin's position.
 * Treehouse of Horror VIII: In the short "Fly vs. Fly" (Whole-Plot Reference to The Fly), when Bart was messing around with Homer's teleporting machine and Santa's Little Helper and Snowball get in the way, that may have been another good example of crossing the line between parody and Nightmare Fuel. On the parody side, Bart inadvertently made the Simpsons version of Cat Dog. On the Nightmare Fuel side, he also made a creature that, for the sake of identification, will be called "ButtButt".
 * There's one scene, in the beginning of the episode in question, where Fox Censor (the Fox censor) proudly announces that thanks to his editing tonight's Simpsons episode is rated TV-G. But as he says this, a hand with a knife appears out of the on-screen rating icon and stabs him in the back repeatedly, raising the rating with every stab (culminating in TV-666). The resulting blood splatter, following tradition, spells out the title card.
 * The Homega Man, when Springfield getting nuked (for real this time) resulted in a disastrous aftermath, including the mutation of the survivors in the short's second half. There were some deleted scenes that were considered to be "too much" even when the episode had Homer watching a movie among the bodies of nuclear bomb victims.
 * Treehouse of Horror IX: Bart and Lisa are transported into an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon via a supercharged remote, especially when a bunch of piranha eat most of Bart's flesh.
 * In "Starship Poopers", Maggie was revealed to be an alien and the daughter of Kang and Kodos - even going through stages of alien mutation such as sprouting fangs, developing tentacles, and walking up the wall. The Simpsons go on the Jerry Springer show to try and solve the crisis, but they end up fighting with Kang and Kodos who zap members of the audience with a ray gun. At the end Marge says that going on Jerry Springer didn't solve anything and Homer adds "Let's go home!"; then, suddenly, Maggie says in a deep menacing voice "Very well. I'll drive!" and lets out an Evil Laugh.
 * The opening sequence for this THOH episode, the ninth, is the first, and so far only, to be a properly "halloween-ized" version of the opening sequence thanks to some purposefully screwed-up timing: Bart falls off of Homer's car and snaps his neck, then Lisa runs into the car on her bike and gets launched head-first through the garage wall, and at the end, Homer runs from Marge and Maggie in the car, as they beep the horns and he gets impaled by the hood ornament.
 * "Hell Toupee" makes a classic little kids' comeback sound fearsome:

Homer/Snake: I know you are, but what am I?"

"Krusty: "Yeah, that's right. Look at your hero!""
 * Treehouse of Horror X: The last episode of the 1999 Treehouse of Horror which had the Y 2 K end the world and two rocket ships, the good people go to Mars, the bad to the Sun. Bart and Homer get stuck on the bad one, and at the end of the short Bart and Homer escape the rocket ship to die faster, only to suffer Explosive Decompression offscreen.
 * There's a scene where Dick Clark melts at the beginning of that very short, revealing a Terminator-like robot suffering the Y 2 K as a play on how he always looked youthful; this joke is made worse now that he's dead.
 * The spoof of I Know What You Did Last Summer (the very first segment) had Homer dangling with the corpse of Flanders, let alone the actual Werewolf Flanders.
 * Treehouse of Horror XI: Goldilocks' fate in the fairy-tale halloween clip has her eaten by the three bears. She struggles to get out of the house (was locked in by Bart and Lisa, who fled just a moment before). The scene then shoots from the outside of the house and all we can hear are her screams until she dies, and we only see blood coming outside.
 * Treehouse of Horror XII: "The House Of Whacks", when the Simpsons installed the house with Ultrahouse with Pierce Brosnan's voice, who did all the housework for them until things took a turn for the worse when it fell in love with Marge. Homer ended up in a whirling garbage disposal (splattering the kitchen with blood as a result), complete with Homer's terrified scream. Additionally, one of Ultrahouse's other voices was Dennis Miller, infamous for causing murder suicides.
 * In the opening sequence, when the Simpsons are going to Mr. Burns house for trick-or-treating, they're so freaked out by the "accidental" Halloween decorations that they run through the gate, which slices them in the style of an egg slicer and their pieces run all over the place. Mr. Burns did it by having Smithers electrocuted on the power line for a cheap laugh. And he calls it his lucky decoration.
 * The ending of the Whole-Plot Reference of Harry Potter, "Wiz Kids": Slithers (snake Smithers) eating Lord Montymort (Burns-Voldemort)'s corpse. As a whole.
 * Treehouse of Horror XIV: in the "Reaper Madness" segment, Homer becomes The Grim Reaper and must kill Marge, but instead kills Selma. Despite the lack of continuity-related consequences, in the consequent "Frinkenstein" segment Homer mentions something like "This is the most fun I've had since I was Death".
 * "Frinkenstein" by itself was scary: Frink's dad is made into a Frankenstein's monster expy and goes on a body-part-collecting rampage.
 * Treehouse of Horror XV: the end of the segment "In The Belly Of The Boss", which has a shrunken Homer regrowing while still in Mr. Burns. Then, the Simpsons' family is shown eating a fancy dinner with Homer's face covered in Burns' flesh (with Homer complaining he needs a hole for eating and maybe "a few more").
 * Treehouse of Horror XVI: the segment where everyone turned into what they were dressed as for Halloween, including Homer becoming a headless ghoul and poor Disco Stu, who had the unfortunate idea of having a fake-arrow-in-head as his only costume.
 * Treehouse of Horror XVII: the end of "Married to the Blob". The poor people of Springfield gratefully rush through the door of what appears to be a new homeless shelter, and straight into the jaws of a gigantic, ravenous Homer. This gross-out moment becomes chilling social commentary considering that Mayor Quimby organized the whole thing in order to allow the newly mutated Homer to "benefit society" by cleaning up the streets.
 * The alien blob trying to escape from Homer as/after he devours/devoured it at the beginning of the segment was unsettling as well, as Homer sniffed it back inside. Later, Homer's initial phase of the blob-induced possession involve him repeatedly smacking Snowball II over the head with a frying pan as the poor thing tries to emerge through his belly.
 * The end of the segment "The Day the Earth Looked Stupid", a Whole-Plot Reference to The War of the Worlds, where all the humans are gone was kind of unsettling. It was also based on the Iraq invasions: "We had to invade! They were building weapons of mass disintegration!". The ending was originally supposed to include a remark by Kang and Kodos, "This is a lot like Iraq will be" when the camera panned over a Desolation Shot of Springfield's ruined remains, but it was cut: not because of Executive Meddling, but because of redundancy.
 * Krusty's appearance in HDTV at the beginning of "You Gotta Know When To Golem".


 * Treehouse of Horror XVIII: Ned turns into the devil and teaches the children a lesson using his "heck house" ride. Some citizens of Springfield are seen suffering fates appropriately suitable for the sin they're committing: Groundskeeper Willy being attacked by his own tractor for wrath, Homer bursting inside-out and turning into spaghetti for gluttony, Moe taking a stripper's money and then getting kicked in the crotch for lust, greed, and envy, and Homer again ("I thought I got killed by that magic spaghetti...) getting ground through into huge square chunks of meat for sloth.
 * The Halloween episode with the play on ET. Homer asphyxiating the alien and murmuring "Shhshhshh" while doing so, like he's putting a child to bed.
 * Also, the title card and the opening credits, where they are made out of characters from various Fox shows, with House and American Idol among others.
 * Treehouse of Horror XIX: Krusty being fed through a woodchipper in "How to Get Ahead in Dead-vertising". His constant agonized screaming, ending with a pile of an organs in the end...
 * Treehouse of Horror XX: In "Don't Have a Cow, Mankind" (a "Twenty Eight Days Later"-meets-"Children of Men" parody), Krusty's burgers had mad-cow disease inserted into them and turned the rest of Springfield into ravenous zombies, after eating the commercialised product.
 * In the same episode, the "There's no business like Moe business" segment, Moe serves Marge Homer's blood after being impaled on his beer-culturing machine; however, this segment stands out as it tries to give a canonical explanation for the non-canonical body count of the halloween episode, namely.
 * Non-specific episode: The Halloween variant of the Gracie Films logo, in which the "Shh!" is replaced with a woman's blood-curdling shriek, and the normally soothing musical signature is played on a creepy organ in minor key.

Itchy and Scratchy
Various examples hailing from The Itchy and Scratchy Show.

"Krusty: What the hell was that?""
 * The "Scratchtasia" segment that Bart and Lisa watch in "Itchy & Scratchy Land." Scratchy chops up Itchy to a microscopic, airborne-particle size, only to be literally turned into dust from the inside out by the invincible, axewielding Itchies after breathing them in.
 * The animatronic characters going berserk at the end (a la Westworld) was unsettling as well.
 * The Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, which in addition to sporting a picture-perfect, shot-by-shot parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, is where Itchy breaks any possible barriers by yanking Scratchy's helmet off, causing his head to blow up like a balloon, and then popping his head with a pin, causing blood to splatter on the TV screen in the form of the words "The End".
 * Itchy and Scratchy has countless more examples. When Scratchy was showing off his new muscles at the gym, Itchy assumes they are fake inflatable muscles. So he tries to pop them with a pin, and they do not deflate. Itchy, for no reason, decides to stab Scratchy with the needle a couple hundred more times, until Scratchy faints from blood loss. Itchy then starts dissecting Scratchy with a chainsaw, starting with the skin... and he stops halfway through for an in-episode Product Placement commercial break.
 * Another Itchy and Scratchy episode had Scratchy apply to be Itchy's apprentice in a glass blowing shop. Itchy shoves Scratchy into the furnace and starts to blow him out like a piece of glass as he screams. Itchy pulls him out and Scratchy says "i quit" only to get shoved back into the furnace. Later, we see Itchy and his girlfriend drinking in a hot-tub while Scratchy, as a "No Vacancy" sign is in the background flashing. Each time Scratchy lights up, he says "No" in a voice that suggests he's continuously in pain, but not dead.
 * Itchy & Scratchy are visiting the U.S. Mint. Itchy throws Scratchy onto a press, where he is flattened, stamped, and sliced into individual hundred-dollar bills. He then takes a bundle to a lounge, where millionaire dogs are smoking cigars. One of them uses a Scratchy-bill to light his. Scratchy's eye is atop the pyramid on the seal, panics when he sees the fire, and lets out a blood-curdling scream as he's consumed by flames.
 * The short scene when staying with the Flanders': Scratchy is sitting in his cottage, reading "Nice" magazine. He hears a knock at the door, and discovers Itchy in an orphan basket. Hugs and hearts until Itchy smashes his bottle, let's out a maniacal laugh, and stabs Scratchy repeatedly in the chest. He then steals Scratchy's TV, leaving bloody footprints as he walks over his chest, Scratchy's skin getting sucked upward by Itchy pulling the bottle away. Scratchy can only cry out weakly, "Why? Why? My only son...". While Bart & Lisa think it's hysterical, Rod & Todd are terrified beyond comprehension.
 * Another Itchy and Scratchy episode, where Itchy jumps down a well in a fake suicide attempt. Scratchy dives in to save him, only to be devoured horribly by a crocodile, and to have the water turn blood red. But when he flies up to Heaven, Itchy shoots him in the head, and his wings and halo fall off, which he then plummets again. In another occasion, Itchy prays to God to kill Scratchy and cast him down to Hell for no reason.
 * "Homer the Father"'s Itchy and Scratchy cartoon "Ain't I a Stinger?": the bees turn Scratchy's stomach into a fleshy hive of honeycombs.
 * In one of the comics, we have Scratchy's attempt to stop a chandelier from falling on his former girlfriend. He grabs it before it falls, but it winds up slowly and graphically ripping him in half.
 * Worker and Parasite. The one where, in a parody of Eastern European animation, a badly drawn cat and mouse are fighting in what appears to be the Greek underworld. Or something.


 * "Planet of the Aches" from "Bart of Darkness". Scratchy is sealed in a chamber for 3000 years, and is finally freed by a bunch of evolved, big-brained Itchys. These Itchys don't speak but merely pulse their brains to communicate and perform telekinetic actions, and every time they pulse, they emit a sound which is like a miniature choir inside their heads. Anyway, these futuristic Itchys are surprisingly nice to Scratchy; they groom him and give him a nice robe. Of course, this unexplained kindness doesn't last, and they use their telekinetic powers to throw sharp objects at Scratchy in an arena.

Other

 * The fan series Bart the General: not the episode, the fan series. (here's episode one, two, three part one, three part two, three part three, four.)
 * Speaking of Simpsons fan works, Dead Bart.
 * Springfield's status as a Crapsack World presumably escapable only by Lisa, the character who's a preachy Granola Girl on her good days and a Creator's Pet on her bad days.
 * Some of the earlier Tracey Ullman shorts count as the designs are horribly Off-Model and the animations more cartoony and fluid. Examples include the kids' expressions in "Making Faces", how Marge is animated in "Burping Contest", and the extreme close-up of Homer's mouth yelling "BART!!!" in "Bart Of The Jungle".
 * The original Tracey Ullman shorts design for Homer. Sharp teeth? Check. Threatens to kill Bart? Check. Attacks Lisa and even Maggie as well? Check.
 * The Couch Gag for the episode "MoneyBART", created by famed British graffiti artist and culturejammer Banksy, showing FOX Studios as an Asian sweatshop creating the animation cels and merchandise for the show.
 * The Running Gag of how Homer always tries to strangle Bart.