The Little Mermaid (1989 film)/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • When Ursula shows what happens to her clients who break their contracts—they get turned into these immobile, screaming, limbless worms stuck by the hundreds to the floor of her cave and then it happens to King Triton.
  • Several things about Ursula. She's a fairly grotesque octopus woman with pasty grayish skin. She eats live (and, as it turns out, sentient) shrimp as snacks. The entrance tunnel to her lair is carpeted with the shrunken heads of her transformed former clients who "couldn't pay the price." She conjures a pair of wraithlike disembodied hands to forcibly thrust down Ariel's throat and extract her voice. And at the climax of the film, she transforms into a giant, saw-toothed version of herself with a Stygian voice, uses the power of Triton's stolen trident to create maelstroms and raise up the rotting hulks of sunken ships, and finally is impaled on a spar of one of said ships and sinks, clutching the hull of the vessel with her tentacles in her death throes. The directors' commentary on the Special Edition DVD noted that they probably wouldn't get away with Chef Louis (or Ursula) in a modern film. Also, she has a great singing voice.
  • The part where they've crashed the wedding and everything looks ok, then the sun sets and Vanessa BURSTS OUT OF HER SKIN AS URSULA and CRAWLS ALONG THE FLOOR to grab at Ariel.
  • The skeleton of a deceased sea-monster that serves as Ursula's home was a corpse when she found it. Want to know where all that rotting flesh went? Well, there's a reason why she's so fat.
  • The fact that Ursula's final scene is stolen from HP Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu doesn't help matters at all.
  • This is parodied in The Proud Family, where Oscar had to watch the movie "through his fingers" or something.
  • When Ursula is looking in the mirror, she essentially squishes a clam's insides up and uses it for her lipstick, meaning she was using clam guts/clam blood for lipgloss.
  • The whole concept of Ursula disguising herself as a shapely young woman is pretty unsettling.
  • Ursula's transformation from "Vanessa" back into her actual self, which involves the bodice of her dress ripping open down the front and her tentacles spilling out. As if that wasn't enough, she then (shudder) crawls over to Ariel and kidnaps her, all while laughing demonically.
  • The whole scene with Louis the chef gruesomely hacking up fish while poor Sebastian runs around in terror had to have made some people become vegetarians. It doesn't help that he's singing during most of it, making him look like a sociopath right before he goes off the deep end chasing a small crab.
  • The scene where Ursula steals Ariel's voice with the demonic glowing hand.
  • Ursula's Villainous Breakdown towards the end when Ariel destroys her eel pets and One-Winged Angel form. Also her death.
  • Ursula, while not a good character, was sane and composed during most of the film. However, when she transforms into Vanessa, its implied that she lost quite a bit of sanity (to the point of becoming a borderline Ax Crazy) when turning into her, as she talks to her mirror in a manner similar to a schizophrenic, emits a psychotic grin when throwing a pin at a mirror's head with enough velocity to knock the mirror back, and most certainly kill a person had that been a human being, and her cackling.
  • Ursula's line to Ariel and the accompanying visuals: "If he [Eric] does kiss you [Ariel] before the sun sets on the third day you'll remain human permanently! But...if he doesn't you turn back into a mermaid and...you belong...to me!!!"
  • The aftermath of Flotsam and Jetsam's destruction, as well as Ursula's. If you look real close, first when Ursula says, "Babies! My poor little poopsies!", you can see an eye and remnants of the eels, and after Ursula's been destroyed and the trident's sinking, the remnants of her are sinking to the bottom, even as the merpeople she's tricked into making a Deal with the Devil change back, and quite possibly showering them in it.
  • In the sequel, Morgana trying to feed baby!Melody to her huge shark minion.
  • In the TV series episode "Charmed", Ariel ends up trapped in an abyss that's the equivalent of being trapped in a haunted house or living your worst nightmare. She comes across several disturbing creatures who want to grab her, such as a pair of giant devil hands that caress her, gets caught in the tentacles of what seems to be a jellyfish, and gets frightened by several horrible faces peering in the darkness. But by far the creepiest is a hag-like creature who seems really keen on putting Ariel in her sack.
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