Nightmare Fuel/Theatre

For all the works that scare people that are performed on stage.

The Blue Snake, a French Canadian avante garde ballet. At the end of this scene, a creepy moaning giant puppet based on the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk appears. This is where the scene and the clip end. In the next scene, the giant eats people, then he gets his head smashed open and red-clad dancers jump out of the hole.
Macbeth (aka The Scottish Play) by William Shakespeare. Jeez, where do we start? Bearded hags, apparitions of creepy, dancing children, potions brewed from dismembered animal and people parts, murder, madness and general mayhem. Fun for the whole family.
Shakespeare had a bit of a talent for NF as Titus Andronicus proves.
This page does not have a musical category yet, because most musicals aren't Pippin. They don't end with the main character nearly succumbing to the peer pressure to immolate himself, resulting in the narrator's screaming tantrum when he refuses. The narrator and most of the cast then proceed to peer over the stage, noting that there are many people in the audience must feel the same, and if they're ever so tempted, "we're right here in your heads," implying that the whole thing was the hallucination of a young man building towards suicide. Then they remove all the trappings of a musical comedy leaving the protagonist and the woman who helped him half-naked and vulnerable on a darkened stage. "How do you feel?" she asks him. "Trapped." THE END. Licensed versions try to make it a little cheerier, but it's still a musical "comedy" about how most young people have no role models or direction, and must learn to either accept their soul-crushing mediocrity or literally destroy themselves. Thanks so much, guys!
- The alternate ending is potentially even worse. After Pippin and Catherine decide to content themselves with their ordinary life (which was portrayed rather positively in the production I saw), her son Theo starts singing the chorus to "Corner of the Sky." The Lead Player and the chorus return to the stage and surround the boy, implying they'll start pushing him down that same suicidal path. Creepy.
In A Contempory Theatre's seasonal production of A Christmas Carol, the Marley's Ghost sequence is epitome of this, with several jump scares, mirror scares, etc. leading up to his appearance, where he jumps out of Scrooge's bed. Not from under the bed, from inside it.
The Woman in Black. The ending....
Anything and everything by Sarah Kane. She wrote five plays in her short life (she committed suicide at the age of 28) - all including absolutely horrific happenings. Examples: a soldier sucking out and swallowing a man's eyes, a dead baby being eaten, a man's genitals being cut off and barbecued, several instances of brutal rape (one concerning a man being sodomized with a metal pole), and people being eaten alive by rats. Her last play, 4:48 Psychosis, is a disjointed nightmare even just to read on the page, with no stage direction or indication of character at all. It gets worse when you read about her life and realise that the play is basically her suicide note.
In Julius Caesar, the scene where Cinna the Poet is killed. An innocent man is literally torn to pieces simply because he shares a name with an assassin. This is something that could happen to anyone.

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