The Neverending Story (novel)/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The book

  • The Nothing is the ultimate Nightmare Fuel. Paradoxic, isn't it?
    • The way it inexplicably draws in anyone who gets too close to it. There are literally no words to describe it, as demonstrated in the first chapter. Atreyu can't even look at it without his mind rebelling at the non-sight. It is, quite simply, something that can not exist, because it doesn't.
  • Morla, the giant sneezing turtle, has robbed many a child of sleep on her terrifying appearance alone. Her -pardon me,- their cynical views, complete indifference to everything and possible schizophrenia do not help the situation.
  • The Sphinx Gate
    • As if the sphinx alone wasn't terrifying enough, the scene where the knight's helmet blows open to reveal his charred skull creeped me out for years.
    • Ayup. Nightmares for years.
  • Gmork. Apparently there's a good reason werewolves and vampires seem to have an innate hatred each other; for if they were to ever marry...Well, there you go.
  • Ygramul the Many, a myriad of blue beetles acting as one, most of the time forming a big spider but changing into multiple forms when fighting with its prey, or into a huge face with antennae instead of a tongue when talking to Atreyu.
  • Our hero Bastian's descent into becoming a tyrannical nutcase toward the end of the book.
  • The City of Old Emperors. While a city of nonsense may sound funny, it's not. Former humans are trapped in Fantasia with no memories of who they are, or what they are, engaging in endless, nonsensical tasks over and over forever. Truly a World Gone Mad.
  • The insane shlamoof creatures have quite the Monster Clown vibe going on. And towards the end it is revealed they have been pursuing Bastian for quite a while.
  • Uyulala's death and the songs she sings while she knows she is about to die are both this and Tear Jerker.
  • Xayide's Family-Unfriendly Death, as she's crushed to death by her own mechanical giants.
  • Yor's Minroud is an in-universe example. It's a mine where dreams are found, isolated in a landscape of eternal winter (particularly cruel considering the previous chapter was set in an area of perpetual summer) and tended by a single blind miner. The thought of having to work there, in the dark, is enough to make Bastian, who still has all the gifts of Fantasia including fearlessness, shiver in dread.

The films

  • All three films. Especially the Gmork from the first.
  • The part where the horse sinks in a swamp made of sadness. Tear Jerker, yes, but also prime Nightmare Fuel. If I heard right, if you let the sadness get to you, you sink! What this means is the swamp possibly subjects you to unbearably depressing images until you get sadder and sadder and sink!
    • The kid actor also apparently got scarred for life because he got hurt several times during filming - during his horse riding training, he fell off and got stepped on. Then evidently, his leg got caught in the elevator and he got pulled under.
  • That hideous anthropomorphic chicken thing from the second film.
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