Chick Tracts/Nightmare Fuel
Chick Tracts have several disturbing moments that can traumatize you, especially since they make it seem so easy to go to Hell. Frequently, Scare'Em Straight methods are used by Chick to the point where a reader has PTSD from reading some of his work. But that's the whole point. To scare you into accept Christ into your heart.
- Ashley Wilson's hallucination of her face melting in "Bewitched?"
- Happy Halloween has enough examples for its own page.
- Just the sole idea of a Halloween-related comic is enough to scare more than a few, but they manage to make October 31st seem more evil that it actually is.
- The spider in the haunted house can scare readers with arachnophobia.
- Also, when the witch drops them into a random room, Timmy, Bobby and the unnamed kid with glasses stare directly at the audience with very weird and cringeworthy faces as Bobby says, “What’s that?” They make Halloween is Grinch Night, Are You Afraid of the Dark, and It’s Not Scary seem suitable for the same Kidz Bop demographic that ZOOM is aimed at.
- The sequence where they're in fake Hell takes up the whole page 7. And 7 is supposed to be the lucky number. It gets worse on page 11, where while Timmy is dragged to Hell for real, you can see his gory face.
- In fact, this comic was even referenced on an episode of MindMash when aired on The WB. It could not get past the censors when aired on Comedy Central, however, as their censorship for the comic was a Kidz Bop cover of Noggin's “I Don’t Like Candy Corn.”
- Same goes for Lance in "No Fear?": after he commits suicide and his friend Dolly is saved from the same fate by converting to fundamentalist Christianity along with her sister, they just forget about him, as if they're happy that they didn't end up in hell like Lance, who has just burned up and vanished into "the darkness outside". Seriously, they have no respect for the dead or even visit them, which brings out the "Christian" message that people should only care about themselves and forget about others if they die heathens.
- Some of the tracts are a little jarring, like "The Thing", especially the final.
- Also those creepy, easily converted children and how Jack thinks other people react to Christianity.
- Satan's appearance at the end of Somebody Goofed and Oops! He has this weird mix of positively goofy and grotesque that manages to somehow combine into disturbing. While the dialogue's ridiculous, the face sure isn't.
- The nightmarish cherry on top of the sundae of fear- this is somebody's actual beliefs. Jack Chick is totally serious. Of course,this is somewhat debatable.
- As someone who has had a fundamentalist Christian education since preschool, I'm convinced that he's serious. We are actually taught these exact beliefs.
- Seriously, imagine living in the Crapsack World depicted in The Last Generation. Christians are rounded up and sent to "mental camps", natural disasters are all over the place, and a new pagan-mashup state religion involving animal sacrifice is enforced in schools, in a world government not unremniscient of Chaos.
- "Lisa," and the thought that someone somewhere may actually believe that raping your elementary-school-aged daughter and sharing her with a neighbor - oh, and also giving her herpes, apparently - is something that can be fixed with a little prayer. If Jack Chick's God would forgive that so easily, then why not just hang with Satan? Or the Papal Conspiracy?
- "Lisa" is no longer stocked, and can no longer be read on Chick Tract's website. Perhaps enough people complained about how frightening it was, and disgusting, that they apparently believed this?
- The entire "The Sky Lighter" tract. Especially considering the fact that it is Abdulla's own grandmother who is trying to get him to blow himself up. And the fact that Abdulla blows himself up- and everyone else around him. Imagine surviving that and becoming deformed- or just witnessing it. And just the concept that the Deity who is supposed to love you would actually want you to do something so horrible. No wonder Yusuf is the only sane man in the entire tract.
- The whole concept of a God that tortures people forever if they do arbitrary things like celebrate Halloween or play Dungeons & Dragons.
- Or simply doing missionary work to help improve people's lives without forcing religion down their throats, don't forget that.