Fanfic/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Not all nightmares are officially published. In fact, often the only things scarier than a professional writer's nightmares are what the fandom can build from them

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He thought he could hear screams, but over the roaring flames, he couldn't be sure.

    • Flame tanks. Yeesh. The description of their brutal efficiency is horrifying.
    • It isn't just Nod and their penchant for fire that's scary. Being on the receiving end of a GDI Mammoth Tank assault is just terrifying.
    • LEGION. Even if he is voiced by Tim Curry. Remember what happened to his predecessor?
    • And back on the GDI side: Zone Troopers and their railguns. They have ultra-durable Powered Armor, inhuman accuracy thanks to their sensors, can penetrate armor and buildings effortlessly, and the Nod infantry regulars facing them don't even have standardized rifles, let alone equipment to compete.
    • The "smart" claymores. They're small, innocuous disc-like devices that can be attached to walls or ceilings. If you're wearing a recognized uniform or IFF tag, it lets you pass. If you're not, it will hit you with a cloud of hypersonic shrapnel and white phosphorous that literally leaves the victim spread across an entire room as nothing but blackened meat and shredded equipment.
  • And by the same author, Forward, a Firefly fic that doesn't skimp on the horror from the series.
    • In the first story arc alone, you have River and Jayne being graphically tortured by Niska. Then later on, you get more graphic brutality with the Reavers assaulting an Alliance ship.
    • Inducer psychics. You think River was kind of creepy? She can only read your mind. In this story, one of the other projects the Academy was working on were Inducer psychics, who can alter and control your emotions and feelings. But its worse than mere Mind Manipulation; there is no defense against them, even if you know what they're doing, and their effects are lasting. If an Inducer makes you hate someone, you'll keep hating them for no fathomable reason. If the Inducer makes you love someone, you'll still love them, even if you hate them too, again for no reason. Many of the story's reviewers found the description of the Inducers to be terrifying, and this became even more pronounced when they learned the entire story arc introducing them involved one actively controlling the entire crew for her own ends. Including River.
    • Also in "Charity", it is shown how River gets a full blast of the emotions, thoughts, and history of someone as she kills them in close quarters, triggering her Out, Damned Spot! moments. This apparently includes Reavers.
  • By the same author, Renegade has an absolutely horrific moment when Corporal Jenkins encounters a swarm of Scrin buzzers.

Pain erupted along Jenkins' body as ten thousand tiny, thread-like razorblades ran across his skin, into his body, slicing apart muscle and bone and blood vessels. He tried to scream, but blood erupted from his mouth and nostrils and flooded into his lungs. His weapon fired wildly into the air for the few moments his arm remained attached to his body.
It ended a merciful moment later, when the buzzers found his brain and surgically sliced it apart, ending all consciousness. Jenkins' armor crumpled to the floor, weeping blood from a dozen rents and holes.

  • An Axis Powers Hetalia fanfiction called Awakening has Canada and America being taken as prisoners of war by the Germans. They are then sent to Auschwitz and experimented on by Dr. Mengele. Canada has blue dye injected into his eyes, while America is dissected alive and infected with tuberculosis and typhus.
  • Another Hetalia fanfic example: Imagine you're North Italy. Your lover is dead, you've been living alone for several months, and you're pregnant. Then one night, a strange, possibly psychotic man breaks into your house, with the intent of killing you and stealing your unborn baby.And good luck having anyone you called for help leave your house alive. And to top it all off? The author claimed to base it off of an actual horror movie. Brrr!
  • Old, old Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane fanfic in which SJ awakens from a nightmare, in which she and the Doctor have suffocated in the TARDIS control room. At which point he comforts her, pecks her on the forehead, and carries her through the closed doors of the TARDIS, holding her so that she can't see the two dead bodies on the control room floor.
  • Challenge of the Super Friends: The End, where the Legion of Doom travel to a horrific Lovecraftian universe and end up like victims in the Event Horizon and Hellraiser films. Lots of horrific transformations and mind-bending imagery.
  • This Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street fanfiction. There's mindfuckery and Prison Rape and the setting and-- what's-- there's botflies.
    • Almost anything done by its author, Das Mervin, qualifies, from the humorous fic with a Mary Sue getting STDs from Captain Jack Sparrow to their backstory for Sheldon Sands. It's pretty much the opposite of putting him in leather pants. Sands as manipulative quasi-psychopath is canon. The sheer awfulness of the eye gouging is canon. This writer's backstory for him has heavily implied Brother-Sister Incest. It's rape.
  • Bridgette's nightmare. This sequence that begins chapter 24. It begins with a blood-stained Bridgette huddling in the corner of the shack, crying in pure fear after having just witnessed Geoff's murder. Suddenly, she hears snapping twigs and the creek of a door. She also sees Ezekiel's toque. Is it him here to comfort Bridgette and get her away from the camp grounds just like Geoff tried to do? Nope. Its a cleaver weilding Eva, back from a killing spree of everyone on camp. Long story short: she's next!

Eva: It's payback time, TRAITOR!

  • There's a writer on ff.net whose volume of work consists almost entirely of extremely gory, badly-written, but extremely disturbing short stories in multiple categories in which a character randomly dies gruesomely, most of them titled "(Name Of Character) Dies a Horrible Death". Interestingly, the extreme badness of the writing makes the stories even more nightmare-inducing, seeing as the language is abrupt and casual and stilted, as though a kid was writing them without putting any serious thought into it or feeling as though there was anything serious about the stories. Just take a minute to think about what kind of person would write like that....
  • Latias' Journey contains some utterly horrifying imagery, including a full on bloodbath at Wing Fortress where Pokémon babies are being ripped apart and eaten.
    • The sequel is a LOT tamer, but there is still plenty of Nightmare Fuel. Such as the Tree of Life arc, Paul's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Ash, the sheer savagery of what the Nhilators do to their prisoners, the fate of the past world, ect....
  • For some intentional horror, check out Evil Be Thou My Good, a crossover between Harry Potter and Hellraiser. While the story is very well-written and absolutely terrifying, here are some choice moments:
    • The off-screen seizing of the Dursleys. This is also a Crowning Moment of Awesome for everyone (read: the entire fandom) who wanted these characters to get their just deserts. The same goes for Fudge and Umbridge at the end.
    • The entire scene in the Great Hall. Voldemort orders Harry to open the Lament Configuration for him. If you've ever seen Hellraiser, you know what happens next.
    • Harry's own disturbing nature throughout the whole thing. After opening the Configuration as a boy and causing the death of the Dursleys, he ends up... well, different. His obsession with rebuilding the box, his Briar Patching to get Voldemort to call upon Pinhead and company, and especially the steps he's willing to take, including allowing Ron and Hermione to get hit by the Cruciatus Curse to reach the above, show how warped he's become.
  • A Rose and a Thorn, a Sonic the Hedgehog ficseries on AdultFanFiction.net. Especially during the second fic, in which Shadow is tortured by GUN, has nightmares about it after being rescued, and then proceeds to stab an illusionary Amy in both palms with knives during a fit resulting from his experience at the GUN facility.
  • Control, an Azumanga Daioh fanfic. It's extremely well-written, includes some well-crafted Fan Characters who manage to avoid Gary Stu territory, it takes some "controversial" approaches to some characters (especially Yukari) without straying too far out of line... and if you've ever considered trying hard drugs before reading this, you never will again. It's rated M not just for some Lemon scenes (some involving rape) but also some of the most graphic violence ever seen in an Azumanga fic (as well as explicit accounts of the horrible pain of drug withdrawal).
  • The entirety of He had no fingers, a sort of Cosmic Horror Naruto fic, starting with Naruto's body and spirit getting warped beyond recognition by the Nine-Tails until... well, the title is indicative. "Highlight" right at the beginning: Naruto's belly opening up and DEVOURING Kakashi (and Naruto then feeding the bits to passing strays). And that's basically the mildest thing in the whole fic.
  • The aptly named horror fic Nightmares. This is a fanfic of The Brave Little Toaster, a movie already known for Nightmare Fuel. To clarify, the story is a series of first-person vignettes, detailing the horrific dreams of the other four main characters during Toaster's Nightmare Sequence. It starts out only slightly unsettling, but gradually builds up, accumulating in the truly horrifying Chapter 4.
  • This Tales of Symphonia fic Blood Is Thicker, one of the few vampire fics that really stands out, with dread starting only a few paragraphs in. The Big Bad is Lloyd's grandmother, Maetala, a Complete Monster of a caliber that makes Alucard look tame. After turning Lloyd into a vampire, she twists and manipulates him into giving up what little humanity he has still retained encouraging him to eat a boar alive is probably the least horrifying thing she does all fic long, and the results leave Lloyd, a canonical Determinator a psychological wreck and makes it horrifically believable.
  • You wouldn't think horror and Lucky Star could go together... until you read Ahoge. Tsukasa is (arguably) taken down to extreme ditz levels when she thinks Konata's Idiot Hair could grow into a plant... This is either badass or just plain Character Derailment. The last chapter is an especially horrifying as Sojiro Izumi takes revenge on the entire Hiiragi family through Cold-Blooded Torture. A, umm, nail gun is involved at one point. You probably won't look at Tsukasa the same way again.
  • There are a lot of disturbing Pokémon fics out there, but the second half of Reunion is just downright disturbing and at times grotesque. It starts off as a slightly darker AAML fic, with a lot of funny scenes, and then--Butch gets his throat torn out by a Mighteyana, a sadistic psychic rocket elite who assimilates the minds of the humans and Pokemon he kills is literally torn apart as the souls he absorbed struggle to free themselves by literally growing off of his flesh, before throwing themselves to their deaths...with smiles on their lips... And it gets worse from there...
  • Much of the Evangelion fic And If That Don't Work? qualifies, but really the standout if when the acid-dripping spider angel managed to turn the entry plug of Unit 02 into a vat of acid and the resultant fate of the pilot. This is even worse considering her fate is blatant Author Appeal; none of the characters view it to be a bad thing for more than a few sentences and even Asuka herself considers it an improvement.
  • Shinji and Warhammer 40 K mostly manages to cancel any horror with mind-boggling levels of awesome, but plenty of things slip through. Sahaquiel killing who knows how many millions of people around the planet in less than a day by flinging parts of itself into various cities and utterly annihilating two of them wasn't exactly pleasant. The Zombie Apocalypse unleashed on Tokyo-3 was far worse, with zombies that teleport anywhere they want, can even infect the dead and heal quickly from almost any damage, only a bolter round to the head a guaranteed kill. The crowning jewel however is what happens when the Earth's Cradle crashes into Germany. Essentially, it combines the Necrons (kill everything), Tyranids (eat everything) and Chaos (corrupt everything) into an impossibly horrible amalgam that renders most of the continent barren and swarming with monsters, leaving nothing behind. The intimate accounts of some of the survivors are custom-made nightmare material.
  • Darker and Edgier Redwall fanfic Vengeance Quest is brilliant, but terrifying. The violence was one thing, but Guardcaptain Kiern's attitude is also creepy: he's pretty sure the actions of his sadistic co-workers are morally wrong, and lets them happen anyway. There's a scene where Captain Veneno rapes a prisoner in order to force her husband to spill the info they need, in front of Kiern, who's getting progressively more uncomfortable, but still doesn't do anything to stop him because there's no other way they'll get the information. Later on he talks to Big Bad Nightdeath Longclaws about it, essentially asking to be persuaded that it was okay to do this. Brrrr.
  • The description of Azkaban in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality -- especially the woman who accidentally killed someone, immediately went insane with remorse, and then is forced to relive the moment of the murder over and over by the Dementors. Also, the scenes where Harry is walking around protected by the True Patronus, giving momentary relief to the prisoner s in the cells he passes, but forced to keep walking and leave them again to the Dementors, and hearing their screams to stay. The in-story Aesop is that Azkaban is simply evil, and afterwards Harry concludes that because the nominally democratic magical government allows Azkaban to exist and in fact runs it, he is under no obligation to obey the wishes of the majority.
  • An Invader Zim fanfic called Dark Harvest by Swing-21. Even the name screams Nightmare Fuel. A fanfic rated M for a very, very good reason. Starts out creepy, ends up with a horrifying Twist Ending... of Dib actually kidnapping Sara, and the poor reader learns that HE is the one that is stealing organs to keep Zim alive, who had apparently lost his own. Zim isn't stealing organs this time... ALSO, the mental image of Keef, loyal to Zim and... ahem... "donating" his organs, covered in blood and stitches gives the chills. Darker and Edgier, anyone?
  • Ellen Brand's Power Rangers Mega Crossover Personality Conflicts runs on this and angst. First, you have Tommy's multiple personalities anthropomorphized as an Eldritch Abomination. Then, you have...pretty much anything dealing with Nyghtmayr or the Shadow Empire. Did we mention that since the main rangers are trying to get witnesses for Zordon's trial, children fight Shadowborg?
  • The Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic The Chong Sheng Trilogy. First installment, War, ends with Ba Sing Se being carpet bombed to rubble while the characters are trapped underground listening to it and freaking out. The second installment, Peace, involves among other things Katara witnessing Jet's torture and murder at the hands of the Rhinos, and subsequently going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge ... using their own blood to literally rip them apart, a side-story involving some original characters where a troubled soldier tortures his own father by slowly removing his skin in small patches and giving him an occasional hit of opium just to keep him conscious through it, and lastly, Zuko confronting and killing Ozai, who has lost his mind entirely to the point that he thinks he's fighting Iroh instead. Also, one of the aforementioned original characters is a borderline pedophile, and very heavily implied to be sexing it up with Azula.
  • The Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic "When All Your Dreams Come True". The premise: Zuko succeeds in capturing Aang and his friends sometimes during Book One and takes them back to the Fire Nation. The reality: Sokka immediately gets tortured and killed, since the Fire Nation has no use for him. Katara gets her tongue cut out and turned into a gladiator-style "training exercise" for Fire Nation soldiers, to get them to practice fighting a waterbender. She eventually loses an eye, becomes known as the Widowmaker, and evolves into a sort of proto-Hama. Aang gets both his eyes put out and thrown into prison to live out the remainder of his life in misery. He goes insane. Toph wasn't even in book one, but also gets killed off for no good reason but to add angst. Finally, Zuko goes completely mad from guilt and drinks himself into oblivion, conjuring up detailed delusions of himself joining the Avatar and teaching him firebending, falling in love with Katara, bringing down his father, and ending the war. After reading, you feel like you want to scrub your brain clean of the images.
  • The Avatar: The Last Airbender Fanfiction, Bad Ends, is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It's a series of one shots depicting a rather different ending to what we're expected from episodes and moments in the show. For example, Katara, in her little undercover mission to save Haru from the Earthbending Prison, is captured and sentenced to the barrocks for the men to play with. Then, Remember when Zhao said he wouldn't kill the Avatar, but keep him alive, but just barely?. Honestly, it's a Darker and Edger retelling of most of the series, and once you read them, you'll be glad the Series had the endings that it DID.
  • Visio Vestri, a Mega Crossover Fanfic which depicts the GameFAQs Character Battle of 2010 as a contest where 128 videogame characters must scale Tartarus and face their worse nightmares. It is actually a nice fanfic, but Captain Price's death is disturbing. After the Reaper blasts him with a spell of blinding light, his body is ripped APART and he LAUGHS as this happens.
  • Counts of Blood is a good Buffy the Vampire Slayer that crosses over with the Muppets, of all things, but its portrayal of Count von Count is terrifying. For starters, he apparently cut up a mathemetician into over a hundred pieces and put them in small boxes, and early on in the story, removes the feet of the poor sap who took the pills he needs to curb his violent tendencies!
  • It Makes Me Happy That I'm Not Them, set in an Ironic Hell, veers between the merely eerie and extreme Gorn. It works surprisingly well for a horror fic based on books aimed at ten-year-olds, but it's still terrifying.
  • Just about anything Ann-Kathrin Kniggendorf (otherwise known as AKK) wrote for Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. "The Lie" has a brutal rape depiction that can shock even the most veteran reader, and acts as a crushing inversion of Double Standard Rape (Female on Male). It says something when the poor hero views having his soul ripped out afterwards as a relief! Her pre-series Supertrooper works are all the more chilling when you hear the violence and death described with clinical precision. Walking Through Nightmares depicts severe asthma, lung damage, and the inability to breathe in graphic detail. And then there's Raumjaeger. Oh, shit. The classic idea of "what if Nazi Germany won" played for all the horror you can imagine and then some. You will not be sleeping well after it, especially after little details like the human-skin lampshade. Worse is that Ann-Kathrin, like half of the fandom's writers, is German and English isn't her first language. The show itself? A kids cartoon from The Eighties.
  • Parts Of A (Bung)Hole. It starts off as a bit weird and angsty, with one hell of a Crack Pairing, though the author does his best to make it believable. The ending, however, is positively hellish. After learning that Beavis and Butthead (mostly Butthead) raped Daria & drove her to alcoholism & death in a drunk driving accident, Jane tears open Beavis' throat with her teeth while they're having rough sex & then uses his insides to paint a portrait of Daria on his bedroom wall. Daria fans do love them some Dark Fic, but ye gods...
  • The epic Kirby fanfic The Dream Land Story has the entire sequence in Marx's mind, which was probably intended to be creepy. There's also Kirby's Dark-Matter-induced night terrors which are never described to the reader. And to top it all off, Meta Knight's graphic suicide.
  • The Never Never Land, A Harry Potter fanfic where McGonagall takes in the grand-daughter of an old friend. It turns out the grandmother had possibly gone mad and created a series of potions to freeze the girl at ten. It's implied that the girl has also been kept locked up in the house for years with only granny and a house elf for company and was probably abused emotionally as well. Also, the kid is one hell of a Creepy Child. She talks like a robot and needs precise directions. When the grandmother kicked it she spent about four days in the house with the dead body, going about her business. The author promises Body Horror in later chapters.
  • We Are Nothing, a crossover between Harry Potter and A Nightmare on Elm Street by Ruskbyte. While the murders featured in the story are par for the course for Freddy Krueger... geezus. When someone is able to make you feel sorry for a Complete Monster like Umbridge or cringe at Big Bad Voldemort getting curbstomped to death, you know that evil has just been turned Up to Eleven.
  • The Shadows Grow Longer. More disturbing than frightening, this World of Warcraft fanfiction is twenty chapters of watching a woman succumb to Stockholm Syndrome to a Complete Monster who spends his time torturing her physically, mentally and sexually.
  • One Mistake Too Many, a Wicked fanfic that explores what might happen if Boq's transformation hadn't gone as smooth as it had in the musical- ie, if Nessarose had decided that she should be the one to cast the spell. Here's a hint: the first chapter is called "Transformation Trauma."
  • Our little Doll, a Coraline fanfic, where the Other Mother rapes Coraline. The actual rape is implied, with just the preparation shown (Coraline being bound and having her clothes ripped off her body by Other Mother). Then we cut to the aftermath, with Coraline waking up in real world with no recollection of what has happened - until she gets abdominal pains so strong that she collapses. In hospital, the doctor says that she was violated by freaking knitting needles, prompting disbelief from her mother. And then it is revealed that Other Mother can take control of Coraline, forcing her to come to the Other World again and again...
  • Cupcakes, A My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fan fiction... where Pinkie Pie slowly tortures Rainbow Dash, then dissects her while she's still alive. The reason? To use her organs as ingredients in her "special" cupcakes. And the worst part? Pinkie thinks of the whole thing as a 'party', and is thoroughly enjoying every moment of killing her best friend.
  • Dalton contains the thoroughly crazy stalker Adam Clavell. He's got a wall covered in photos of his lust object, Julian, he stuck them to the wall with his own blood, and he's made a hit list consisting of a bunch of photos with the faces mutilated and the words off with his/her head written on the back.
    • The final part of chapter 26 begins with this author's note:

TRIGGER WARNING for blood, violent acts and images, and the behavior that revolves around this theme. If you are not comfortable with these types of scenes and images, I strongly urge you NOT TO CONTINUE.

  • Ultimate Sleepwalker: The New Dreams has multiple examples, fitting for a series whose protagonist is an alien from another dimension who fights supernatural horrors and demons:
  • Ultimate SpiderWoman: Change With the Light, set in the same universe as Ultimate Sleepwalker, has quite a bit of this too:
    • The disturbing rants of the Brothers Grimm, who's apparently a Psychopathic Manchild Reality Warper who uses all sorts of disturbing fairy tale and toy paraphernalia in his crimes and who is prone to arguing with himself in an increasingly disturbing fashion, and whose idea of "performing" consists of kidnapping people and forcing them to watch disturbing sequences involving demonic toy soldiers ripping apart superhero dolls, witches juggling severed teddy bear heads, and skeletons juggling their own bones in choreographed dance routines;
    • Jack O'Lantern, a ghoulish Halloween-themed mass murderer who considers himself one of The Unfettered and a Nietzsche Wannabe whose ultimate dream is To Create a Playground For Evil. He became consumed by his supervillain identity and now seeks to spread misery and horror as much For the Evulz as any actual hope of profit;
      • In the first Halloween Special, we see Jack sitting in his cell on Halloween night. He's dreaming of the fond memories he had of hacking into pumpkins, ripping their guts out and carving their faces to resemble jack o'lanterns...and he's fantasizing about what it would be like to do the same thing to a human head.
    • Moonstone, a Manipulative Bitch who kidnapped several people as part of a twisted scientific experiment to analyze the physiological reactions of their families in stress situations;
    • Firebrand, a violent bully whose attitude towards life was Screw the Rules, I Have Money, and who thought Daddy's connections and Daddy's chequebook would allow him to be a Karma Houdini. This was before he became a fire-manipulating, mass-murdering Pyromaniac;
    • Mayhem, a high school student and victim of a high school prank gone ghoulishly wrong, who later returns as a Mind Raping otherworldly monstrosity determined to to exact a cold, sadistic revenge on everyone who turned her into the freakish...thing...she is today.
  • The Lost Tales of Fantasia gives the Captain's Log of Captain Hook:
    • Starting from a noble pirate on his Honeymoon, diving down deep into depression, to the point of starting a war to aleviate boredom, and then after a brief Hope Spot, Hook goes completely mad and starts trying to kill his wife. And then there's the fact that Tinkerbell is Peter Pan's mother, and in order to survive childbirth they had to use the magic flower from Tangled.
    • And Shego's fate. At the age of five years old, she's put into a spandex costume to fight in a war. And then she has to watch the Headless Horseman, who is already pretty frightening, kill her older sister. But then when she tries to burn the Horseman, and he puts on her sister's head to mock her. Watching her sister's head burn up puts her into a Heroic BSOD.
    • All of the inhabitants of Underland. Just the concept that if you're born to the wrong parents you have the chance of becoming a Devil, and it's implied this could be the fate of Peter Pan would be scary enough, but they're pretty scary. The Headless Horseman, who has the strength to drag a battleship under the sea, and absolutely cannot be stopped. And Alice, who's been taking smiling lessons from the Chesire Cat and it's heavily implied that she raped the magic mirror. Most rape is bad, but a cute little girl with a Slasher Smile demonically violating a piece of glass? Nightmare.
    • And in the latest chapter we have Ponyo. Ponyo! Ponyo! Ponyo! P0NY0!
  • This VOCALOID fanfic, in chapter 6, involves Rin waking up in the middle of the night, walking down the hall, seeing eyes at the end of the hallway, and being "attacked" by it. If you read it carefully, it could be implied that whatever the thing was was attempting to rape her. However, it's revealed at the end of the chapter that the monster was actually "Caiden" and he wasn't trying to scare her.
  • Used, a House fanfic. The things Tritter does to House are pretty certain to give one nightmares, including raping him with his own cane, and a knife.
  • Imperfect Metamorphosis' Chapter 31. This story is already dark, taking many Touhou ideas and twisting them just enough to inspire terror and awe. And then you reach this chapter, and the slowly dawning dream from the last four chapters breaks and you realise that Yuuka Kazami (already an insane supplier of scary scenes) has broken through the fourth wall with the simple words:

"Or to be specific, I may converse with you, the you that's watching behind your eyes."
With that, she smiles, looks you directly in the eye, and smiles at you.
Yes.
You.
"Hello dears," Yuuka says sweetly. "Enjoying the story?"

...but it was foaming at the mouth while a green acidic blood poured out from numerous gashes all along it's body. Multiple organs clung to the many spikes sticking out from it's body. Parts of it's scales had been scraped away exposing muscle underneath, and some parts of the muscle had been what looks like eaten leaving bones sticking out. It flopped around and gasped for air while disturbing gurgling sounds emmited from it's mouth.

  • Seven Little Killers, an Axis Powers Hetalia fic in which... well, basically, everybody dies. It starts when Switzerland is murdered, and Italy walks in on his dead body. Everybody blames one another, and at first it's all just he-said she-said and pointing fingers, but then the bloodbath starts. The fic is based around the idea that there are seven killers on the loose, each named after the color of the mask they wear, lead by the infamous, shadowy Black and trying to kill off enough nations to completely reform the world order. Japan, Italy, and Germany are the ones on the hunt for the truth. Some of the nightmarish highlights are America masquerading as Canada masquerading as America killing several characters and crushing Japan's fingers as payment for letting his other captives- including Canada-as-America-as-Canada- free, China murdering New Russia on the orders of the killer Yellow and then going bonkers over it, several cities being completely decimated to weaken their nations, America manipulating Canada into killing a boatload of people, including Alaska and Hawai'i- whose death scenes are both cut right away from, although Hawai'i's is over Facebook, for crying out loud- and... well... the entire thing really.
  • The fic Revenge for the Princess and The Frog fandom in which Facilier returns and well..wants revenge. The first chapter isn't horrifying really, just a short thing about his downfall. But then comes the second chapter.. Facilier seems to have fallen for Tiana, he tries to enlist Mama Odies help, she refuses and Facilier has his shadow stab hers to death. Disappointed, he then turns Lois into his slave, has him brutally maul Naveen, dragging the nearly lifeless corpse back to Facilier's Voodoo Emporium. Facilier messes Naveen up a bit more, then hangs him by his short intestine. He then announces he's taking over New Orleans. The citizens don't take kindly to this, and Facilier sends Louis on them, mauling and killing people in the process. The deaths seemed rushed, yes but the author has plans for more,including Facilier stitching Naveen together(which may or may not include a song that a certain fandom might recognize), and a special treat in store for Tiana and Charlotte.
  • The Shape of the Nightmare to Come. Long story short - perfect example how to make Warhammer 40,000 even more packed with Grimdark than it already was. Just few examples:
    • Orcs goes into fight with Tyranids resulting in two species merging into unstoppable New Devouer, that eats half of the galaxy
    • God Emperor Of Mankind dies only to be reborn in Warp as Star Father - Chaos God of Order
    • Then there is The Ophilim Kiasoz that destroys entire star systems just by passing through them
    • Don't forget the Nex (Keyboard attempts to bite editors fingers off and snags a thumb, new editor takes over) the merest mention of which causes the scroll the stroy is written on to turn into a swarm of spiders that nearly devour the author of the story before a sentry gun destroys them.
  • This Doctor Who Auton-centric fanfic has a moment at the beginning that involves a girl falling into a vat of plasmatically-charged plastic...and being torn apart, molecule by molecule (though she gets better eventually, by being reborn as a non-Auton living mannequin). Doesn't help that one of the original characters is a serial killer bent on "tying up loose ends", and the implication that all of the Doctor Who monsters are real.
  • Crimson Echoes has the scene towards the end when the team is exploring The Darkness Beyond Time...which is a horrifying enough concept as it is. But then you see the journal... "There is nothing outside the windows. I mean that. Nothing." And you realize the people who are there aren't all just frozen and they're...alive and they're aware and there are billions of them, and you realize all the times when you played Chrono Trigger, you put them there...
  • The Regular Show fan story Regular Addictions involves Benson going on a drug-and-alcohol binge because he is unhappy with his current life and wants to end it all. Since he's a gumball machine (lacking organs and what not), he realizes it leads to nowhere. What's one of the first things he does in his bout of insanity? He decides to kill Veronica, his ex-girlfriend who is said to have dumped him callously, while saying the lyrics of a song he wrote for her with a dark tone. As if that weren't bad enough, Mordecai had to keep it secret after Benson told him about what happened lest any other event could worsen the situation.
  • Eddward, an Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy fanfic in which Edd murders and tortures all other kids.
  • A Calvin and Hobbes fanfic, Camp Nightmare, involved Calvin getting signed up for a day camp, which seems like Tastes Like Diabetes until Calvin finds out it's actually a cult that kills the kids and eats them! Not only that, but Calvin discovers a room where the corpses are kept.
  • The CSI fic Face The Music by Elm22 has a lot of this in the form of Grissom's kidnap and torture (and later Sara's as well) by a Complete Monster villain. The fact that it's an extremely well written, well researched fic makes it all the more haunting.
  • Mercurial Cognizance, a deeply disturbing Durarara!! fanfiction that shows us what potentially goes on in Mikado Ryugamine's head. An evil doppelganger attacks Mikado, stabs him with a pen, and rapes him. All the while Evil!Mikado tells Good!Mikado that everyone has a dark side that needs to come out, while poor Good!Mikado is less concerned with the fact that he's being raped by himself than he is truly terrified of the fact that he himself is capable of doing something like that to another person. Fortunately it turns out to be a dream...and then Mikado looks down to see that his hand is now bandaged. And then he shudders and bursts into tears upon remembering the last thing the doppelganger said to him...

Doppelganger:It's not a dream.

  • The comic version [dead link] of the Axis Powers Hetalia AU fic The First Cut: Or, The Angels of the Rye takes the implied horror of what the protagonist witnessed and shows it to the reader/viewer, showing aptly just why the titular first cut was hidden away. Namely the haunting images of Poland and Lithuania, who were last reported killed during the Terror several decades before the story, staring right at you, pleading for help. Also, the protagonist is their grandson.
  • From Dragon Ball Multiverse we have Universe 16 Pan being strangled to death by Bojack. When it looks like she is about to break out of it...he SNAPS HER NECK. Hell Is That Noise indeed.
  • Cheerilee's Garden, a My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fanfic, is about Cheerilee brutally murdering all the little fillies and foals she is supposed to teach, Saw-style. For some, it is even worse than the previously-mentioned Cupcakes.
  • All Grown Up!, touted as a "theory" of Rugrats.
  • This Axis Powers Hetalia fic tells about five times in history that France died. Four of them (the Black Plague, the Battle of Hastings, the American Revolution, and the German invasion of France in World War II) were frightening enough, but the worst was the French Revolution, which tells how France was beheaded in front of his own people, was still conscious some time after, and finally awoke to represent France as a republic.
  • For You, I Will is a Twilight Hate Fic that took the series' concept of werewolf imprinting and bring it to the logical extreme. One minor werewolf character imprints in a woman that turns out to be a complete sociopath, who then uses her new "lover" as her weapon for raping and killing other women. The poor guy eventually ends liking it, as he is supernaturally compelled to do everything that she wants to be happy, even if it's immoral or wrong. When his tribe begins to ask too much about their activities, the woman makes him to murder them all, which he complies without protest. The worst part? Its author, Das Mervin (mentioned above for her other fics), didn't even have to twist things to bring us these horrific conclusions; she followed the canon rules exactly as they were exposed by Meyer herself.
    • One of the most chilling scenes, both on its coldness and on its canon compliance: before being genocided, Jacob tried to convince the murderous couple to limit their killings to the criminal and the homeless. Not out of care about the lives of humans, but because the werewolves think that the sake of an imprinting bond is above all things, and if the couple were discovered and caught that bound could suffer.
  • Astral Journey: It's Journey, Spice Girls Alternate Universe Fic/Elsewhere Fic, has some cases of this. Spare a thought on the narrator for this.
    • For starter, getting hit by a random car and shocked thanks to area becoming an electrical field.
    • Next, Near-Death Clairvoyance as her body is done, including seeing it being given last rites as there's no telling if you'll live.
    • Seeing one of her friends have a heart attack and seeing her Astral Projection while still in a coma.
    • Finally, regaining of her body, only to go through insane amount of pain, being subjected to ESP testing.
    • Having a seizure every time she go into her Astral Projection.
    • Watching someone get electrocuted in first of her astral form.
  • Final Stand of Death: Spice Girls going through the automation, with Melanie of Liverpool going though the worst. If being in a life-support machine after being decapitated while your body is being worked on, you would feel sorry to be her.
  • Case of The Missing Technology has Unwilling Roboticisation as this, just go ask Girls Aloud and Melanie C on how that having their heads in strange devices to stay alive.
    • In the squeal, After Case Report, more details is disclosed like being Forced to Watch each part being removed. Let's not forget, being left as a head and a set of lungs left.
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