History Main / NightmareFuelColoringBook

* ''VideoGame/PartumArtifex'', a first-person horror game, have you playing as a SerialKiller, and near the end you can explore a gallery of your own artwork. Including a portrait of a demonic creature wreathed in flames, a tire-trail of blood on snow, a gigantic human eye with blocks coming out of it, and a Satanic humanoid creature with wings holding a bloodied sword.

* In the intro cutscene to ''VideoGame/{{AMY}}'', the title character is seen drawing a chaotic scene of [[spoiler:the ZombieApocalypse that left most of the city's inhabitants dead]].

* In ''Literature/HouseOfLeaves'', the Navidson children draw entirely black pictures when asked to draw their blue house. Eventually, the narrator starts doing it too.

* Madame Talbot's Victorian Lowbrow blog has featured, among other things, the webmaster's [[http://victorianlowbrow.blogspot.com/search/label/Kiddie%20Drawings childhood drawings]]. Most of them involve some combination of vampires, coffins, skulls, and syringes... not too different from [[NightmareFetishist the rest of the site]], really.

* In ''Film/{{Dragonfly}}'', Joe's dead wife tries to reach him through the terminally ill children she cared for in the hospital. They begin drawing unnervingly similar pictures of rainbows (which they say are "loud"), and squiggly crosses which appear to be (but are not) dragonflies.

* ''Fanfic/AkiChansLife'' has a moment of this with young [[SpinOffspring Aki Ikari]] drawing a blood-red sea and a giant naked Rei Ayanami, much to her kindergarten teacher's disquiet. [[ItMakesSenseInContext There's a perfectly innocent explanation]], but she probably wouldn't believe it.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* The website [[http://coloringbookcorruptions.com/ Coloring Book Corruption]] is a collection of images from coloring books that have been defaced to depict various scenes of debauchery. Of course, whether or not it's actually NightmareFuel or [[CrossesTheLineTwice side-splittingly hilarious]] all depends upon what sense of humor you have. Also, mind that link, since many of the images on it are NSFW.
* On a documentary about the Israeli-Palestine conflict, there was this 10-year-old girl who drew her dead mother bleeding over her as she was crying and her older brother holding his dead baby while its brains were spilling out.
** There's also this infamous drawing from [[https://web.archive.org/web/20150911113723/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/23/Sderotchilddrawing.jpg Sderot]]
* ''Reader's Digest'' had a piece on a 12-year old boy who survived Hurricane Katrina and drew excellent pictures of the flooding that killed his mother and made him homeless.
* A surprising subversion to this occurred in real-life tragedy. Dedrick Owens found a handgun in his uncle's home and took it to school with him, and wound up shooting and killing Kayla Rolland when they were both only 6 years old. While Dedrick was at the police station, only fifteen minutes after the shooting, one police detective gave him a set of crayons to occupy him. Dedrick drew a picture of himself outside his house, smiling and the detective had the picture framed, keeping it hung in his office. Preserving the last moments of innocence, it could be supposed.
** Said case also inspired the episode "Baby Killer" of ''Law and Order: SVU''.
* There's a whole sub-field of psychology devoted to this: art therapy. Like play therapy, where children are encouraged to act out their traumas so they can learn to deal with them, art therapists get them to draw pictures or make play-dough sculptures. Anyone who has trouble communicating verbally or in writing might find it useful, including teenagers and people with Pervasive Developmental Disorders, the family that includes autism. Senior centers, nursing homes and assisted living places offer it just as a way of communicating and staying engaged.
** Speaking of art therapy, [[https://radaronline.com/photos/michael-jackson-secret-drawings-lauryn-hunter-art-therapist-los-angeles-joe-brat-florida-analysis/ these]] recently released drawings by the late Music/MichaelJackson, while not quite nightmare fuel, are definitely disturbing.
** ''A Terrible Thing Happened'', a children's picture book about coping with tragedy, advocates it. The main character is a young anthropomorphic raccoon-boy named Sherman Smith who witnessed an unspecified "terrible thing." It is implied to possibly have been violent, but vague enough that the reader or person being read to can imagine it as whatever they may have witnessed. He ends up seeing a school therapist who encourages him to draw a picture of how he feels when he's angry. He draws this and several other pictures depicting stuff like his bad dreams, among them being what appears to be a picture of a child fleeing from a house on a dark night. Eventually, he draws pictures of the "terrible thing," which is depicted as a large blob of red and black.
* In the book ''Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ'', there was a story about a mother and her son who were abducted by the mother's ex-boyfriend. The kidnapper made the child hide under a blanket while he beat the mother to death. Later, a psychologist asked the son to draw a picture. The result was a race car driver with a pair of humongous eyes, which were interpreted by the psychologist as symbolic of the boy's own wide eyes as he peeked at the killer.
* As an art student or artistic person, one has to be careful to avoid invoking this. Obviously watching TV/reading books/absorbing popular culture will mean one might want to draw bloody things or [[TrueArtIsIncomprehensible bizarre things]] from time to time, that are completely non-indicative of one's experiences and personality. However people will often be a little disturbed if they see said pictures - [[TrueArtIsAngsty well... except perhaps at an art school.]]
* The children that were allowed to be taken out of the Waco compound before the fatal showdown happened had been given crayons and paper, and many of them drew cheery little houses and rainbows - with said houses going up in flames, and many of them were days before the actual compound went up in smoke. Along with carefully drawn bullet holes in the walls and roof.
* Creator/EdmundMcMillen was apparently sent to a psychiatrist for his bizarre and morbid doodles as a child. It didn't take, and a lot of said doodles were updated later in his life and put into ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaac''.
* More than once, teachers of refugee children have been startled to find them drawing pictures of the wartorn environments their families had just recently escaped. The song "The Children Draw Guns" (see the Music folder) was written after the author saw a display of these.
* The Foreign & Commonwealth Office has this one [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QFUD2Q6D8k]]
* ''Ant in a Glass Jar'' is a biography written by [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polina_Zherebtsova Polina Zherebtsova]], a survivor from UsefulNotes/TheChechnyaWars that wrote it as a child attached with drawings she made from the conflict.
* Morgan E. Geyser, one of the two girls behind the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man_stabbing Slender Man Stabbing]] had a lot of creepy drawings related to [[Franchise/TheSlenderManMythos The Slender Man]] found in her room by investigators after the incident. There were also a few mutilated Barbie dolls covered in body markings from a red marker.
* 10-year-old English serial killer Mary Bell, who murdered two younger children, came back to the scene of one of her murders to leave childish scrawled notes on school tablet paper with messages such as "I murder so I may come back" and "Look out! There are murderers about!" As part of a school assignment, she drew a picture of one of her victims captioned "Once there was a little boy who just lay down and died," which she then ''turned in for a grade.''
* In a film clip shown in ''Series/JimmySavileABritishHorrorStory'', Creator/JimmySavile mocks a young hospital patient who had made a drawing depicting him as an evil monster. "What did I ever do to make you draw me like that?" he asks. The child tearfully replies, "Everything." Years later, it's horrifically clear what must have inspired the child's drawing after [[HiddenInPlainSight revelations of Savile's serial predation came to light]].
[[/folder]]

* The CreepyPasta "[[http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Little_Pink_Backpack Little Pink Backpack"]]

* Parodied in a ''Website/CollegeHumor'' sketch, ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WTkJHHF4B4 Horror Movie Daycare]]'' when the daycare worker expresses her concern about [[Film/TheOmen Damien]] to his mother. She passes over several drawings of human sacrifice and gore to show his horrified mother [[WhatDoYouMeanItsNotHeinous a stick figure with boobs]].

* Some of the far more disturbing scenes in the infamous ''Webcomic/{{Sonichu}}'' can only be described as this, in no small part due to the art style being worse than a 6-year old's first drawing. Particularly the [[spoiler:execution of the Asperpedia Four]] in ''Sonichu #10''.
* [[http://www.whatisdeepfried.com/COMIX/Family/PAGE1.html Family Portrait.]] Made all the worse by the fact that [[spoiler: the teacher, even after seeing all the drawings, ''suspects absolutely nothing.'']] The drawings are respectively of [[spoiler:a man who has blood in his feces, a girl, her sibling and grandma visiting her mother in jail, but Clarissa made ''two'' drawings: Clarissa's family eating breakfast ([[StepfordSmiler that is far, far from the truth]]), and her other drawing is eerily similar to an InterspeciesRomance between a squirrel drawn suspiciously like her and a wolf drawn suspiciously like her father. She also implies that the wolf raped the squirrel. ''The teacher all but catches on.'']]

* From ''Webcomic/SaturdayMorningBreakfastCereal'' - [[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=606#comic loosely classifiable as an inversion?]]

If a CreepyChild or PsychopathicManchild draws pictures, they will be this trope. If it's the MonsterOfTheWeek the child has been drawing, expect the Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book to come in handy when the heroes come along - after all, now they've got a wall full of pictures of their enemy. Sometimes, it fails to get NightmareFuel itself, and comes off as cute, stupid or laughable at worst, devolving this trope into NightmareRetardant Coloring Book.

If a CreepyChild or PsychopathicManchild draws pictures, they will be this trope. If it's the MonsterOfTheWeek the child has been drawing, expect the Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book to come in handy when the heroes come along - after all, now they've got a wall full of pictures of their enemy. When it fails to get NightmareFuel itself, and comes off as cute, funny or stupid, devolving this trope into NightmareRetardant Coloring Book.

If a CreepyChild or PsychopathicManchild draws pictures, they will be this trope. If it's the MonsterOfTheWeek the child has been drawing, expect the Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book to come in handy when the heroes come along - after all, now they've got a wall full of pictures of their enemy.