Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (novel)/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • "It looked as though Wormtail had flipped over a rock and revealed something ugly, slimy, and blind. Only worse, a hundred times worse. [...] A crouched human child, only Harry had never seen anything that looked less like a child. It was hairless and scaly looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. Its arms and legs were thin and feeble and its face - no child alive had ever had a face like that — flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes."
  • The entire graveyard scene, really, which was complete with mutilation, dead bodies, torture, and giant snakes. Though Order of the Phoenix was a much darker book overall, nothing in the book can compare to the graveyard scene in Goblet of Fire.

"Robe me."

  • Imagine being in your tweens, reading a series that has never showed anything but clean, abstract violence, and getting to the scene where Rowling in minute detail describes how Wormtail cuts off his own hand and how it looks afterwards.
    • In fact, Rowling applied a Gory Discretion Shot in that scene, as Harry shut his eyes during the mutilation and only heard the sounds of the knife and Wormtail's whimpers. Nevertheless, it's made clear what happens and the reader can easily put together the details in their own mind.
  • Out of all the Nightmare Fuelish scenes in the HP series, one of the most unnerving has/had to be in "The Madness of Mr. Crouch". You have a possessed man, dragging himself through the forest — foaming at the mouth, for God's sake — talking to a tree one moment, then desperately clutching at Harry's robes the next, issuing a warning and saying his son's death was all his fault. All the while, Harry can do virtually nothing to help the situation, Viktor is useless, and Crouch Sr. still gets killed (transformed into a bone, no less).
  • What about, "I'M YOUR SON! I'M YOUR SON!"? Imagine how Crouch Jr. must have felt, and the pure feelings of terror in that moment.
    • That WOULD be sympathetic... if you didn't realize by the end that HE DESERVED EVERYTHING HE GOT. Reason being, he's the reason poor Neville's parents are permanently insane. THIS is what I find Nightmare Fuel inducing: Neville was alone in the same room as one of the people who tortured his parents into madness, and he didn't even know it. And what's worse, the guy knowingly manipulates Neville so he could help Harry advance in the tournament and resurrect Voldemort. That's just chillingly horrid. And one more thing: imagine that your parents were tortured to the point that they don't even recognize you any more.
      • I always wondered about the thing with Crouch. See, he joined the Death Eaters because his father never loved him. He was rebelling against him, and I don't think teenage Crouch knew exactly what he was getting himself into, and regretted it. But after he was sentenced, locked up, and spent years under the Imperius Curse, which is shown to drive people mad after overuse. Crouch could be blamed for his son's actions, if his story is anything to go on.
  • Moody reverting into Crouch Jr. and clawing at his own eye... because another eye is trying to grow in the place of the glass eye. Ouch.
  • Moody was locked, bound and gagged, in his own trunk for ten months. Anyone who fears And I Must Scream will shudder at that thought.
  • Fridge Horror sets in during Moody's teaching scene. As he's demonstrating the Cruciatus Curse, Neville becomes visibly disturbed, as this is the curse which drove his parents into insanity. What makes this truly horrifying is that Neville is watching the curse being performed by the very man who tortured his parents all those years ago. Made worse in the film; Fake Moody's face indicates he's getting some sick pleasure out of it.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Goblet_of_Fire_(novel)/Nightmare_Fuel?oldid=2024411"