Surreal Horror

... the hell?

"This is nine! Nine! This is nine! Nine! This is ten! Ten! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead! This is six! Six! Eighteen! This is now eighteen! Take cover when the siren sounds! This is four! Four! Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room!"

— 1408

As much as they might scare some people, at least monsters, Serial Killers, and Primal Fears are scary in a comprehensible way.

This is where Surreal Horror comes in. It's not just nightmare-inducing; it's nightmarish in a literal way, by being, well, surreal, disjointed, dreamlike, and filled with bizarre imagery, usually saying goodbye to all logic and sanity in the process. You cannot reason with a nightmare — something that exists only in the illogic of a dream. In some cases, though, it might not always work.

This is likely the main reason clowns can be scary.

It's worth noting that not all Surreal Horror works may be considered "horror" in the genre sense, but they're horrifying all the same.

Often overlaps with Body Horror, Deranged Animation, Eldritch Abomination, Eldritch Location, Evil Is Visceral, Mind Screw, Mundane Horror, Our Monsters Are Weird, Silence Is Golden, Through the Eyes of Madness, and You Cannot Grasp the True Form.

Super-Trope to Word-Salad Horror.

Compare Accidental Nightmare Fuel and Psychological Horror. Contrast Nightmare Retardant. Compare and contrast Surreal Humor. See also Nothing Is Scarier.

---

Examples:

Alternate Reality Games

• Omega Mart: A few of Omega Mart's products are absolutely bizarre and wouldn't be out of place being contained by the SCP Foundation as an SCP Object, like their "Millk" which has glitched out the aisle they're located on to stretch out like a nonfunctional window in Windows XP, never mind the eyes and mouths the flowers in the floral department have or the Omega Mart Lemons on recall, which are sentient enough to recognize and fear their oncoming demises.

Anime & Manga

• Cowboy Bebop:
  • The episode "Pierrot Le Fou", in which Spike is hunted by a bizarre, balloon-like, and apparently invincible assassin. Given how realistic and low-key the show usually is, the sudden shift in tones is even more jarringly horrifying than most examples as a result.
  • "Toys in the Attic", another unusual horror-based episode in the series, mostly plays the horror straight: It is basically an homage to Alien, and an affectionate parody of the genre, as a small purple Blob Monster stalks the corridors and neutralizes the crew one by one. However as the episode enters its final act, Sole Survivor Spike spots an unpowered fridge in the cargo bay and suddenly realizes the probable origin of the creature: a lobster he had left in that fridge many months earlier. Mustering up his courage, Spike opens that fridge, and for only a couple of frames we get a glimpse of what can at best be described as a horrifying mass of indescribable "growths". The haste at which the episode cuts away from the horror only serves to intensify the nightmarish quality of the contents of that fridge.
• Pretty much every manga by Umezu Kazuo, notably Drifting Classroom, in which an entire elementary school is transported to a nightmarish After the End world, and Fourteen, in which a humanoid chicken (named George) is leading Nature's revenge against the industrialized humanity.
• Mononoke combines classic Japanese horror myths with a surreal art style and puzzle-like battles.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The second half of The End of Evangelion is pure surreal horror, especially when the mass-production Evas become covered in bubbling, multiplying Rei-faces. The spectacle will likely leave you with the same look on your face as Shinji. There is a taste of it as early in the second episode, when Shinji sees the reflection of his Eva after a battle, half its skull showing through broken armor. A giant eyeball regenerates in the socket while he's watching, then it focuses on him. He passes out screaming. The reaction is understandable.
• Paranoia Agent is about a serial assaulter who hits people of low sanity with a bent golden baseball bat. This increases when he begins exhibiting inhuman powers, and events are often shown from the mental perspectives of the characters.
• The Witches' labyrinths in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Most of which look like getting attacked by a cross between a Salvador Dalí painting and the opening theme song to Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei.
• Requiem from the Darkness. Bizarre imagery abounds, characters and architecture are truly strange-looking, and the series' roots in Japanese horror folk tales are rife with surrealism.
• Serial Experiments Lain physically represents the Internet as another layer of reality. Unlike other shows which would display a friendly, clean cyberworld, this one portrays it as disorienting and bizarre. Add in hallucinations and the blending of the real world and the Wired (Internet) and several scenes get quite intensely strange. Even the more mundane stuff has a surprisingly unsettling atmosphere.

Animation

• Clinic is a short film about a series of bizarre, Medical Horror-themed nightmares had by an elderly patient in a hospital.

Arts

• Francisco de Goya's Black Paintings. One look at the horrors that this series portrays, with even the more abstract being clear representations of the ugliness that he lived through and the choice of name becomes clear as day. A very dark day.
• Louis Wain is a good example of mental deterioration affecting one's art in this way. Near the end of his life, he suffered from what is believed to be severe schizophrenia, so his comical drawings of cats◊ in human situations transformed into increasingly abstract pictures that hardly resembled cats at all◊.

Comic Books

• Dylan Dog: Rather than being a monster hunter type, Dylan more often than not investigates cases that are usually pretty Mind Screw-y, akin to some sort of mix between Terry Gilliam and Lucio Fulci. An excellent example of this is the issue "Golconda!" (#41) with a giant tentacular eye killing two teenagers before riding off on their tandem, and an army of Men with bowler hats straight out of a René Magritte painting descending from the sky and killing people in graphic and bizarre manners with their powers.
• The Sandman (1989): The Corinthian has shades of this, where this trope meets the more reasonable horror trope of the Serial Killer. Guy who strips teenage boys to their underwear, ties them up, then cuts out their eyes to eat them? Freaky but not too out of place in a realistic setting. Immortal literal nightmare who's been doing this for about forty years running for his own amusement? Freakier. (And, of course, he has More Teeth than the Osmond Family in his eye sockets in lieu of eyes. Yet he can still see. And he can eat things with them, like people's fingers if they try to take his shades. And if he eats someone's eyes that way, he can see things they've seen.)
• Every conversation about Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron will bring up David Lynch. It was Based on a Dream the creator had, and a man with shrimp◊ growing from his eye sockets is one of the more normal things that you'll find inside.
• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its spin-offs. Throw Goth, Surreal Humor, Black Comedy and Surreal Horror in a blender and you get this... and the inside of Jhonen Vasquez's brain.
• Much of Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol. Notably, the Scissormen, his first story-arc. Weird, red-suited slenderman-lookalikes. Oh, but they have scissors for hands, and speak in nonsense phrases, and "cut" people out of reality and into a city in another dimension. Grant Morrison does some weird stuff, long story short.
• Also from Grant Morrison, The Invisibles is their magnum opus but also their most complex and surreal work. It features our universe being born after two higher dimensions overlapped, Alien demons that want to turn the Earth into a death camp, an assassin from Hell that always has a sketchy, blurry face but covers it by wearing the flayed skin of his victims because he believes himself to be Xipe Totec, a living planet forcing a kid into becoming humanity's saviour by making him absorb all suffering on Earth, alien pornographers, a demon that enslaved our language and, in the end, humanity collectively achieves Nirvana and dissolves into a literal sea of endless possibilities.
• Mister Miracle (2017) is one of the weirdest books DC has put out in years. Scott Free's story is frequently interrupted by "wait, what was that" moments, grotesque violence, and bizarre format disruptions, many of which are implied to be a side effect of Scott's deteriorating sanity. And although we barely see him, the menacing atmosphere means the reader will never be able to forget how the power of Darkseid is growing with every issue that passes.

Comic Strips

• The week-long (Oct 23-28, 1989) Garfield Story Arc where he wakes up one morning and finds his home inexplicably empty and decrepit, as though no one has lived there for years, and images of the people he knows fade away into nothingness as he approaches them. Yeah, Jim Davis was really going for something else in those strips.
  "An imagination is a powerful tool. It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice... or terrify, all depending upon how we conduct ourselves today."
• Liō often resembles a Victorian morality fable, but more random. Go fishing? The fish are fighting back, and ready to eat you! Ignore the warning not to go sledding on a particular hill? There's a monster hiding under the snow at the bottom! Naturally, the emphasis here tends to be on the brutal death awaiting those who make the wrong choice.

Fan Works

• Chapter 21 of Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail is filled to the brim with this as it is an intense "Nightmare Therapy" session in which Goh must learn how he had been a horrible person to all he cares about with influences including Sion Sono films and "firefly Funhouse".

Films — Animation

• The Forest of Still Life in We Are the Strange. Toys and strange machines are scattered haphazardly all around, and then, we're introduced to a rather unnerving stopmotion Creepy Child with a doll's head.
• Svetlonos (The Torchbearer). Made by Václav Svankmajer, the son of the surrealist Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer. It combines Greek Mythology and Steampunk with a Nightmarish dose of LSD...
• Coonskin is a really trippy blaxploitation satire from the man who brought you Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic. Highlights include demons ripping out a man's eyeballs, among other things. Truly worth checking out.
• It's Such a Beautiful Day combines Surreal Horror with Surreal Humor. Justified because the protagonist Bill is mentally (and perhaps terminally) ill, and has to deal with how his depressing (yet ridiculous) life may eventually end with premature death.
• Dumbo features the infamous "Pink Elephants on Parade" number. After Dumbo gets Unsuspectingly Soused, we get treated to a Disney Acid Sequence featuring Pink Elephants with Black Eyes of Evil.
• Disney would later follow up the creepiness of "Pink Elephants on Parade" with a similarly bizarre Nightmare Sequence in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Behold, "Heffalumps and Woozles".
• A Christmas Carol (2009) is full of this. The motion-capture and general animation style can make every character look creepy, but the Ghost of Christmas Past gets it the worst, especially when its face rapidly cycles between people Scrooge knows. Segments and additions that weren't in the novel, such as Scrooge being shrunk and chased by his own funeral hearse, as well as flying into the sky on Christmas Past's cap like a rocket, are also very weird.
• The Wolf House is a Stop Motion film which is made to look as though it was filmed entirely in one take, and the visuals constantly shift and change shape. The film itself is meant to be in-universe propaganda made by a manipulative cult leader, and despite its dreamlike atmosphere it shows some very unsettling images.
• In Turning Red, Mei's nightmare involves bizarre disturbing images. Some of these include:
  • Devon the store clerk as a merman who flops around at first, but then this abruptly cuts to a close-up of him doing a Thousand-Yard Stare while he's being prepared as sushi.
  • The members of 4*Town appearing as flowers and doing a split-second Nightmare Face while mugging the camera.
  • A dead bird next to shattered eyeglasses.
  • A folding fan that shows Ming’s distressed face on it.
  • A horse coughing up... something. Possibly a worm, since the next frame shows a worm split in half.

Films — Live-Action

• Altered States centers on the protagonist attempting a Mental Time Travel by using sensory depravation tanks and a hallucinating drug he discovered from a Mexican tribe... instead it results in wild Mushroom Samba sequences that get progressively more Body Horror-ridden.
• Blood Machines runs almost entirely on this. Who are the Human Aliens Vascan, Lago and Tracy encounter? Their employer wants the Mima, but we never find out why. What exactly is the entity that emerged from the Mima? Why did it travel to the Derelict Graveyard? It's clearly an important site to the Human Aliens, but why? What destroyed so many ships in that area? Was it the Human Aliens? A similar entity? What the hell is the ending?!
• The Cell: Although it mostly limits its Journey to the Center of the Mind of a Serial Killer visuals to elaborate Costume Porn worn by Humanoid Abominations, a surreal horror stand-out is the scene of the horse getting vertically sliced up by thin slabs of glass and the separate parts remaining alive between them.
• Un Chien Andalou. Watch out for razors. It also contains elements of Surreal Humour, which makes the atmosphere even more unsettling.
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: One of the main reasons this pioneering work is so creepy. The plot itself generally makes sense, but the set designs, costumes, and overall mood are very dreamlike and strange, even for a silent movie.
• Beetlejuice is an interplay between Surreal Humor and this, given its unique take on ghosts and the afterlife. Stuff like attempting to leave the house you're haunting taking you to Saturn, where its bizarre yet creepy looking Sandworms instantly go after you, Adam and Barbara deforming their own heads for Juno's approval and Betelgeuse animating some eerie modern art sculptures to assault the Deetzes during the climax feels as if Tim Burton took the drawings of a 5 year old child's nightmares and faithfully adapted them for the screen.
• David Lynch is one of the most famous users of Surreal Horror, raging from having disturbing Nightmare Sequences in otherwise understandable plots (like Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart), to being a bit more Mind Screw-y to follow (Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr.) to then just making a whole movie an unsettling fever dream like Inland Empire and his infamous debut Eraserhead, which seems to depict its main character having an Awful Wedded Life to a woman that moves at a fast pace with things just happening (she announces having a baby the night he comes to have dinner with her parents, forcing him to get married) and the baby itself being a disgustingly deformed Humanoid Abomination that eventually ends up haunting the protagonist's dreams (pictured above) and makes things more disturbing building up to a Gainax Ending.
• Carnival of Souls is another classic example, following a young woman's disturbingly surreal visions of being stalked by a terrifying ghoul, and did the Dying Dream plot decades before Jacob's Ladder below.
• Jacob's Ladder, which also turns out to be the protagonist's Dying Dream, slams back and forth between terrifying weirdness and mundane drama with the abruptness of getting hit over the back of the head with a brick. Also, that damn Demonic Head Shake...
• Monkeybone has several moments of this, particularly the Deliberate Monochrome nightmare scenes (Julie dreaming of Stu getting his life support cut off, causing him to deflate into a rubbery hollow husk, or when Stu revisits his old nightmare of being a root headed for a Meatgrinder Surgery by a doctor with an Eldritch Abomination sticking out of his forehead) or when Herb is exposed to the Oneirix (which is a literal Nightmare Fuel chemical solution) and hallucinates his clothes coming to life and attacking him.
• Berberian Sound Studio is a slightly meta take on the genre, but certainly shows shades of this when Toby Jones' sound engineer slowly starts losing his mind as the boundaries between the main plot and the Show Within a Show are increasingly blurred. The final act is incomprehensibly terrifying.
• Begotten, a silent, high-contrast black-and-white experimental film that opens with God disembowelling Himself. It just gets weirder from there. The sequel, Din of Celestial Birds, is just as weird.
• Several scenes from Angel Heart veer into this territory, most notably the infamous sex scene. You know you're not watching a normal horror movie when one of the most chilling scenes is Robert De Niro biting into a hard-boiled egg.
• The ending to the film Society. An incredibly bizarre exercise in Body Horror as the protagonist stumbles across the most disgusting orgy in cinema history. With legendary splatter-movie guru Screaming Mad George doing the effects, what else would you expect?
• In the Mouth of Madness is pretty much a surreal Cosmic Horror Story, being full of Mind Screws, Cosmic Retcons, and Breaking the Fourth Wall sequences. But the tip of the iceberg is the ending: It turns out the movie you're watching is the one which is driving people insane and turning them into monsters.
• The Lighthouse contains surrealistic elements, insofar as it's often unclear which of the disturbing and grotesque events are actually taking place as opposed to being nightmares or hallucinations of the main characters.
• Don't Look Now has several scenes where the main character has recurring visions of his deceased daughter and of his own death and funeral as he wanders lost in abandoned plazas, courtyards, and palaces in Venice (which themselves are distorted and dreamlike due to the near-absence of other people).
• The Passion of the Christ is already a horribly gruesome movie before you bring in the weirder touches like a group of possibly demonic children tormenting Judas, shots of the rotting corpse of a donkey with an eerie grin on its face, and one of the weirdest depictions of Satan in cinema - as a bald, androgynous woman with an eerily deep voice, who is occasionally shown carrying a disturbingly ancient-looking baby.
• Come and See uneasily swirls together the nightmare reality of war with the surreal weirdness of regular nightmares to very disturbing effect. Several sequences in the movie are implausible and downright surreal, and intentionally so.
• Finnish director A J Annila's Sauna. Its main antagonist is the titular piece of Sinister Architecture that feels far more sentient and malevolent than an immobile building rightfully should.
• Most of the '80s output from Lucio Fulci qualifies, with the copious Gorn mixed with bizarre dream-like happenings that really make very little sense. The Beyond is the one which likely takes the cake in the Mind Screw department, ending with the last two protagonists stuck in a kind of ontological maybe-symbolic post-apocalytic hellscape that is either Another Dimension they're now trapped in or what our world just turned into in the space of a few minutes.
• Friend of the World is a black-and-white film with an aesthetic for Nightmare Fuel and bizarre imagery.
• Hausu: The premise - a group of young protagonists enter a house in which bad scary stuff happens - is simple enough, but the "scary stuff" is much more bizarre than the film's Western peers.
• The surrealistic elements of Michael and Mark Polish film Northfork are more absurd than horrifying, but some of his creations, from the porcelain hands and strange glasses of "Happy" to the Dali-esque horse on crutch-like stilts are certainly unsettling.
• Donnie Darko is about a troubled teenager who has regular meetings with a six-foot tall anthropomorphic bunny rabbit who can see the future, and just gets weirder from there. Like, when a translucent wormhole comes out of his chest, or when a movie screen implodes.
• Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) is somewhat like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in that the unsettling tone of the film owes much to its characters going about their business in some pretty bizarre interiors… apparently without ever noticing◊ anything◊ unusual◊. Suspiria's actual plot details are a little weirder, though.
• In Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the whole portion inside the factory is surreal and often creepy, but the ultimate example is the infamous Disney Acid Sequence during the boat ride. Even the cast had no idea Gene Wilder would be singing! It's so creepy that many modern showings leave it out, and Disney Channel put a content warning before their showings of the film (the only time they've used a content warning for anything below a PG-13 rating) mainly on the strength of this scene being included in its near-entirety.
• The 1981 porno Nightdreams was an attempt to make porn that worked as legitimate art. Along the way, something went horribly wrong, and the final product was a bizarre, nightmarish, sick movie that is very disturbing and not the slightest bit arousing. Totally worth checking out.
• The Shining. In the book, a lot of the hotel's history is explained to us. In the movie, we see the ghosts and visions as the characters do — with little to no context or explanation as to what the hell is going on.
• Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is a strange arthouse-horror-sexploitation movie about a demon possessed bed that eats people by melting them with a pee-like substance. It gets way weirder, nonsensical, and trippier from there. And there's a guy who lives behind a painting that constantly talks to the bed with no response.
• Cube, for taking place in a bizarre yet definitely dangerous setting of the, well, cube.
• The Woman Who Powders Herself, an insane black and white short from the '70s that features lots of animation effects and disfigurements.
• Possession. A husband searches for his missing wife with her lover. They find out she's shacked up with a second lover, who turns out to be not a human. It all goes downhill from there.
• Monty Python's The Meaning of Life utilises a heavy amount of this, hopping disjointedly from one bizarre and creepy scenario to another. Let's see, there's Find the Fish, Live Organ Transplants, Mister Creosote...and it all culminates in a meeting with The Grim Reaper himself. Worth noting that the segment with Mister Creosote is the only scene in any movie that's scared Quentin Tarantino.
• In the film Being John Malkovich, being the original John Malkovich and not knowing when a hole in an office building could allow you to be controlled by someone else; then there's the time he tries to go through it himself.
• Mandy (2018) is the rare place where this trope crosses over with the revenge thriller genre. The premise - An '80s period piece with Nicolas Cage taking vengeance on evil cultists - is fairly straightforward, but its bizarre, hypersaturated visuals and intensely ominous atmosphere (in addition to the cult's possibly demonic biker henchmen) make it much weirder than that plot description makes it sound, and it's ultimately unclear how much of what we're seeing is actually taking place and how much of it is the protagonist losing his mind. It's directed by the same guy who did Beyond the Black Rainbow, so no surprises there.
• Dream Scenario depicts the surreal nature of nightmares, with an emphasis on Scenery Dissonance. Like Sophie's Dream Intro of helplessly floating up to the sky and calling to her dad, who keeps raking leaves absently, or Andy's nightmare of walking through a sunny forest wearing a smoking and eating strange mushrooms before finding himself on a meadow among a group of well-dressed men standing still and having to run from a blood-soaked Humanoid Abomination coming to get him.
• Mamoru Oshii dips into it on occasion with his live-action films. In particular, Talking Head is about as close to a David Lynch film as you can get without the man himself directing.
• mother! (2017) fits this trope like a glove, made by grandmaster of psychological-thriller surrealism Darren Aronofsky, featuring a tiny cast of nameless characters, a heavily allegorical plot featuring tons of sexual and violent unpleasantness, climaxing in literal baby eating.
• The 1983 short film Possibly in Michigan won some notoriety on Reddit and TikTok for its use of this trope. Its YouTube summary ("Two women are chased through a shopping mall by a cannibal") isn't necessarily inaccurate, but it only gives you the faintest idea of the movie's true scare potential. You see, the victims are a pair of Ambiguously Human women with eerie lilting voices who burst into rhyme at random moments, the cannibal is a mysterious tuxedoed stalker with a distorted rubber face who somehow no one can see, the shopping mall is an almost-empty building that hosts wild dance parties for people in animal masks, and the chase is punctuated by random bursts of Stock Footage. That's Surreal Horror.
• The Mask 1961, billed as the first Canadian horror film (no relation to the 1997 movie with Jim Carrey), is mostly a pretty standard, even slow-moving scary movie about a haunted Aztec death mask that drives anyone who wears it to madness. The thing that makes the movie truly memorable, however, is that every time the Doomed Protagonist puts on the mask (three times, in total), we're treated to an elaborate and genuinely strange Nightmare Sequence in 3D.
• May I Please Enter?: Throughout the short-film, it's clear that something isn't right in the house, and there are moments of very strange and nightmarish imagery alongside the otherwise mundane scenes of Amy and John giving the Cowboy a house-tour; for example, their doorbell ends up spooling-out on the ground like a noodle, they own a "weapon" that looks more like an ominous breathing sock, and have a room full of people "sleeping". Everything just leads to more questions, and nothing is resolved or explained by the end.
• The amateurish B-movie The Item by Dan Clark goes into surreal horror territory when the mind-breaking, talking worm creature shows up.
• Holidays: Father's Day has some strong elements of this. A woman is led by a tape her father left to her into a very strange place where she thinks she'll meet him again, while instead encountering... something bad.
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God starts out as a straightforward journey through the jungle, and then numerous unexplained and/or bizarre events begin happening with the characters displaying little to no reaction. By the end, the audience ends up feeling in the same state of madness as the characters.
• Men plays on this several times. To start, every man the protagonist, Harper, encounters around the small town community the story takes place in has the same face (with all being played by Rory Kinnear), but Harper never comments on it, nor seem to notice, and the narrative never explicitly acknowledges it either. While something the events of the movie can only be explained as the result of some supernatural force, there is nothing to suggest what that could be. And then there's the sequence where the various men Harper has met throughout the film give birth to each other in visceral and gory detail.
• The transformations in We're All Going to the World's Fair definitely count as this. From turning into plastic, to having arcade tickets come out of your arm, to having a game of Tetris inside your body.

Literature

• Mikhail Bulgakov 's The Master and Margarita. Satan arrives to Moscow with his minions, and surreal things begin to happen.
• The King in Yellow, an anthology of short stories all based around a common idea: There is a play so decadent that it acts as a Brown Note linked to a Humanoid Abomination implied to be the Anthropomorphic Personification of decadence; we don't know how that can even be possible. And the play is also linked to a cursed symbol which summons an undead creature; that creature's nature/origins are completely unexplained. We don't even know if the Crapsaccharine World depicted in "The Repairer of Reputations" is real or not; the tales featuring the play are interconnected, but that's the only one which explicitly depicts such a world, and it has an Unreliable Narrator. Everything is weird and nothing is certain; only decadence and doom are (except for the sort-of lucky pair in The Mask. Maybe). Naturally, this book was a huge influence on H. P. Lovecraft.
• H. P. Lovecraft: A horse with a hundred horse legs, 50 human heads, 200 human legs, and the whole thing is purple. H. P. Lovecraft one ups that by 100 levels.
• House of Leaves: A book that is a labyrinth of Framing Devices, set in a house featuring a hostile labyrinth built from Alien Geometries that may or may not contain a minotaur, featuring stories that fold back in on themselves or may all just be a tangle of metaphors.
• This is the reason some people find Alice in Wonderland to be nightmarish rather than amusing.
• Tim Waggoner tends to do nightmarish imagery a lot. Picking Up Courtney is a good short-form example.
• Thomas Ligotti, who has drawn on a lifetime of intricate and disturbing nightmares for much of his writing.
• Stephen King's From a Buick 8 has as the theme that there are some things you just can't understand and sometimes you'll never have answers. Also, the things that come out of the Buick's trunk make you feel like you're being raped. They're not even malicious, but their bizarre nature horrifies everyone who sees them.
• The Third Policeman is a nightmarishly surreal novel by Irish author Flann O Brien (think James Stephens meets House of Leaves while being dictated to by Salvador Dalí) and after reading you'll probably never look at a bicycle in the same way again.
• The alien needle monsters in Eden Green take strange, absurd shapes, and the title character nicknames them things like 'herbivore' and 'giraffe'.
• Lots of Neil Gaiman's works use this. For instance, American Gods has a scene in which a prostitute swallows a man through her vagina, and "The Problem of Susan" shows us a deranged version of The Chronicles of Narnia in which Aslan rapes the White Witch and gruesomely devours the Pevensie children. Hell, even his children books revel in this. Coraline is about a girl who crawls through a tunnel into another world full of puppets who want to stitch buttons onto her eyes, and The Graveyard Book has a scene in which two children enter a mausoleum inhabited by a naked, tattooed Celtic warrior (who, thankfully, isn't real) and an enormous, undead, snakelike monster.
• Even the original Narnia series introduced this at one point, when the characters sail through a fog of nightmares in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Since Real Dreams are Weirder, some of these nightmares are pretty surreal — for example, Eustace's nightmare involves giant scissors, and we can only guess what that entails.^note Though it became Hilarious in Hindsight after The Big Lebowski featured a more comedic Nightmare Sequence with giant scissors, this time representing the threat of a Groin Attack.
• Goosebumps has its fair share of these in many books. However, none of them could match the bizarre and graphic horror this trope displays in I Live In Your Basement, which even has children turning inside out of its graphic, gory glory!
• John Dies at the End. The crude humor might lead you to assume otherwise, but it's definitely horrific and strange.
• The Torque in China Mieville's Bas-Lag Cycle. A cancerous force of mutation that is hard to describe in its effects. It blights the landscape turning them into constantly shifting and wrong geometries, it has startling effects on living things (one of the most prominent examples in the series is a train full of people, merged with the train car they were in turned into one enormous amoeba like mass which seems impervious to damage, or the researcher who slowly notices that small circular holes of herself are disappearing). Even the Mad Scientist main character of the first book views Torque as an uncontrollable and terrifying force.
• The later stages of Lamplight. What starts off as a shadowy ghost story takes a full turn into reality-warping horror by the final third of the novel.
• Naked Lunch is full of surreal Body Horror and Big Creepy-Crawlies, as are most of the books of William S. Burroughs.
• Most of the stories and novels of Franz Kafka qualify as this trope.
• Catch-22 starts out as a silly, absurdist parody... until about halfway through, where it starts veering into this trope by showing how horrifying it would really be to live in a world where things like loyalty oaths or turning a profit by selling eggs to yourself are treated as totally sensible and rational; many of the characters show absolutely no reaction to the utterly bizarre and horrific events occurring around them, culminating in Aarfy getting off totally scotfree after raping and murdering a woman. Why? Because nobody with the power to punish him cared enough to do so.
• The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin reads like a fever dream. The world reflects the fears of all the characters in the most bizarre way possible, and things continue to unravel the further they go, typically ending in a forest made of liquid meat that surrounds a black hole shaped like a willow with teeth.
• Unhallowed, a surreal horror Web Serial Novel about three sisters dealing with dark family secrets and witchcraft in a small New England town. Is this the story of a girl spiraling into madness? Or did a young witch really break the universe by invoking mystical forces? Influences include H. P. Lovecraft and David Lynch. It's not about the goat.

Live-Action TV

• Various scenes from Twin Peaks (again by David Lynch), including the dream at the end of episode 2, the Black Lodge scenes in the finale, and every scene with Killer BOB. The Return also has plenty of this, Episode 8 of the Revival is almost an entire episode of nothing but weird nightmare imagery.
• The Danish TV series The Kingdom (Riget), which is set in a hospital and involves such things as the birth of a fully-grown man with way too long legs, and a doctor having the cancerous liver of another man transplanted into his own body For Science! and as a trophy.
• The British series Sapphire and Steel, while nominally SF, is also deeply unsettling in the fashion of a good ghost story — little or nothing is explained in any detail, which tends to enhance the dream-logic feel of the show.
• The Prisoner (1967): Did he escape? Who captured him? What the hell is going on? Who is #1? Why do they care? Who are these people? WHY DOES THAT DOOR OPEN THE SAME WAY AS THE ONES IN THE VILLAGE?!
• The Eric Andre Show is basically what would happen if David Lynch hosted a daytime talk show. Most of the time, the surreal bits are humorous, but when they aren't, they're usually this. Especially if you're one of the guests.
• Channel Zero: Each season so far has featured some very bizarre moments of horror, ranging from a monster made entirely out of teeth to zombies that consume memories to a chess-playing butler made entirely out of meat to a Monster Clown who brutally kills a man only to then perform a circus act (complete with jazz hands).
• Doctor Who has dipped into this with some storylines:
  • "The Web Planet", which focuses on several races of Insectoid Aliens and uses lots of dreamlike imagery in the visuals, sound and deliberately nonsensical dialogue ("We must make mouths in the walls and then they will speak more light"). Not to mention the sheer dream-logic which the aliens run off — beeping ants with larvae that fire bolts of shrieking light controlled by a strange tentacled creature that speaks through web tunnels, makes the TARDIS console go spinning out of the TARDIS and away, and can control anyone wearing gold; giant bees with strange inhuman voices that can fly through space to the moon… The rather unrealistic costumes also enhance the weird atmosphere, perhaps unintentionally.
  • "The Mind Robber", which takes place in a kind of dream dimension, starts in a blank white void, and has things like Jamie's face getting turned into a 'puzzle' that the Doctor has to solve, but he does it wrong and ends up changing Jamie's appearance.
  • "The Deadly Assassin" involves the Doctor being sent into a computer nightmare based on common bad dreams strung together with no narrative coherence in a dreamlike manner — a surgeon with a giant syringe about to inject him full of blood while he's paralyzed, a soldier leading a horse wearing a gas mask, and sudden falling being just three things.
  • "The Doctor's Wife" has the characters landing on an extra-dimensional junkyard asteroid... that turns out to be an Eldritch Abomination that devours TARDISes. Among this entity's minions are a sinister Cthulhumanoid and a ragged man and woman made from dead Time Lord body parts woven together.
  • Notably, this trope is why a number of fans, most notably Peter Capaldi, believe that the original cheap-looking Mondasian Cybermen are much scarier than the cosmetically superior Cybermen from the new series. The audience has seen plenty of scary killer robots, what they haven't seen are clearly-living humanoids with blank, cloth-covered faces, empty black voids for eyes, and mouths that just kind of hang open when they talk in bizarre singsong voices. They're less a logical, realistic depiction of cybernetics and more like a child's nightmare version of what a Killer Robot would look like.
• Tim & Eric's Bedtime Stories abandons the Surreal Humor of previous Tim & Eric creations for this, featuring a world where toes are removed by scissors as often as tonsils are taken out.
• The infamous Max Headroom incident is a good example of this. On 22 November 1987, an unidentified prankster hijacked Chicago airwaves ^note first during the WGN-TV news, and then during WTTW's airing of classic Doctor Who episode "The Horror of Fang Rock" and broadcast eerie footage of a guy in a Max Headroom mask spouting gibberish (and briefly, at the end, being spanked by someone in a French Maid costume). Cracked has a good summary.
• This House Has People in It is a short film from Alan Resnick that never explains itself. Nothing seems to make sense? Why is that girl sinking into the ground? Nobody knows! Why does this simple house need a surveillance system? Nobody knows! What the hell is Tom's deal? Nobody knows! Why is everyone sinking into the ground now? NOBODY KNOWS!
• Legion (2017) runs off of this, given that it's the story of a man with both deadly mutant abilities and severe mental illness. It's the kind of show where the Big Bad can give the protagonist a chilling Breaking Speech comparing love to a disease spread by ants and then bust out into a spectacular James Bond-style dance solo set to a raucous cover of Nina Simone's "Feelin' Good". And it actually gets even weirder as the series progresses. Bonus points for most of the scenes with the Devil With the Yellow Eyes successfully conveying the "slow-moving, inescapable, irrational horror" feel of an actual nightmare.
• Hannibal initially makes a half-hearted gesture at realism by having its protagonist suffer regular hallucinations, but eventually that explanation is dispensed with. And often the more horrifying things are literally happening, like a man whose skull was hollowed out to make room for a working apiary, the two separate "artworks" constructed from mutilated human corpses by unrelated "artists", the... everything involving horses or pigs, and a body flayed and manipulated to resemble an oversized, anatomically-correct human heart. The show draws inspiration directly and openly from David Lynch.
• The House in Beyond the Walls has its merry way with the laws of physics in every conceivable way. The zombie-like creatures inhabiting it don't help either: you can't communicate with them, they vastly differ in intelligence and hostility and sometimes seem to wear boar heads for fun.
• WandaVision, featuring two superheroes, one of whom is supposed to be dead, trapped in a Stepford Suburbia sitcom reality while the government tries to figure out from outside what the hell is going on; and it seems that one of the heroes may be somewhat responsible for this.

Music

• Neutral Milk Hotel's lyrics fall here pretty often. Especially "A Baby for Pree" and "Two-Headed Boy".
• "Revolution #9" by The Beatles has this effect on some people. It's a mashup of strange sounds which bears little to no resemblance to what most people think of as "music."
• Some of Pink Floyd's early instrumentals have this effect on some people, particularly "A Saucerful Of Secrets", "Main Theme", and "Sysyphus". You can definitely count also "Careful With That Axe, Eugene."
• Rush's "Cygnus X-1", which also overlaps with Cosmic Horror Story.
• The Residents. An avant-garde music group formed in the 1960's who have managed to stay anonymous throughout their whole career. Here's a taste. Besides the music itself, the music videos, video game and other creative output all serve to emphasize this.
• Pretty much everything by Swans, an experimental industrial band from New York. One of the band's members, singer/songwriter/proverbial witch and keyboardist Jarboe, has solo material that delves so far into the realms of Surreal/Psychological Horror to the point that it becomes impossible to listen, although you can't help but wait it out in terror. The release of their 2012 album marked their 30th anniversary; it sounds as though they haven't missed a step nor do they plan on doing so.
• Many modern Technical Death Metal bands that focus around using dissonance, disorientating time signatures and bizarre vocal styles to create an extremely dark and dreamy atmosphere fall into this. Examples include Pyrrhon, Portal, Artificial Brain, and Ulcerate. This style can be traced back to Gorguts' album Obscura and the Finnish band Demilich; arguably the two most unsettling examples.
• The Pixies were influenced by movies like Eraserhead and Un Chien Andalou. (Source)
• The later works of Scott Walker are the stuff of nightmares, especially the album The Drift.
• Antihoney, a mysterious Japanese musical project, features a unique dreamlike soundscape. Their songs are free, available to download on their official site. The music is already pretty weird on its own (some songs even completely reversed on release), the ethereal vocals only emphasizes the creepiness. It was brought to fame (among fans) largely by the sinister imagery created in the fan made music videos by Youtube animator nana825763 (best known for the famous Youtube video Username 666), and they fit suprisingly well with the music. It's very, very trippy.
• The Mars Volta slips into this at times, with their odd Word Salad Lyrics and odd, Mind Screw music.
• Queen's video for "I'm Going Slightly Mad" — well, what do you expect for a song with Reality Subtext about dementia brought on by the terminal stages of Freddie Mercury's AIDS?
• Likewise, David Bowie's video for the song "Ashes to Ashes" on his album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). Again, the song itself has some dark Reality Subtext, this time about Bowie's drug addiction — though as with the aforementioned Queen song, the video is just a mishmash of freaky images. Even darker are Bowie's videos for "Blackstar" and "Lazarus", both released right before he died.
• Much like the Technical Death Metal example above, many of the stranger bands in Black Metal are prone to doing this, often through use of Uncommon Time, bizarre vocals, dissonant guitar tunings, and unconventional song structures. Deathspell Omega and Blut aus Nord are the poster boys for this style. Some of the other bands who practice it include Oranssi Pazuzu, Jute Gyte, Spectral Lore, and arguably Liturgy.
• Much of the work of Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin, falls into this category. Whether it's the often robotic vocal effects, discordant melodies, or bizarre and often frightening lyrics, we guarantee that you won't be sleeping for days. Oh, and the music videos.
• The music video of LeaF's MopeMope is infamous for its frequent Art Shift from adorable kids-themed animation to a creepy seizure-inducing Deranged Animation with botanical abominations with human arms for petals and realistic human lips, etc.

Podcasts

• Welcome to Night Vale straddles the line between Surreal Humor and this, focusing on news broadcasts from a small town with a terrible and unknowable dog park (where dogs are not allowed), a faceless old woman who lives in your house (yes, yours), a Boy Scout troop with ranks that go up to "Eternal Scout" and whose initiation ceremonies result in dark-eyed children coming to town, and the sheer carnage of Street Cleaning Day.
• The Magnus Archives can venture into this on occasion, especially whenever the Victim of the Week finds themselves dealing with The Other Circus. Including the protagonists, at the end of season 3. You know things are bad when the violin music in the intro is replaced by circus noise.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000: Try leafing through the descriptions of Chaos mutations sometime. And good luck catching a peaceful night's rest if you do. Oh, and Chaos imagery and architecture also counts. Explicitly described is the alphabet of Chaos as "sanity blasting sigils".
• Normality embodies this trope, as it lacks a dice mechanic and largely consists of furious ranting at a world gone wrong.
• In Deadlands, players may have to run through a session or two of this if they die and come back harrowed or travel through the Hunting Grounds.
• Changeling: The Lost has Arcadia, comprised of the domains of The Others. The other Dark Worlds in the New World of Darkness pale compared to it, simply due to its sheer variety and absurdity (except for possibly Mage: The Awakening's Temenos, the part of the astral world where every idea humans have ever had is real and can be found somewhere - including all derangements, fictional works, and flights of fancy).
• Exalted: The entirety of the Wyld. Mortals entering it will be unmade, but the Exalts might have a slight chance of surviving with both their mind and body intact.
• In JAGS Wonderland, Chessboard One has elements of this. The Chessboards below it are this.
• The Hastur Mythos in Delta Green are made of this, because Hastur personifies the breaking of the laws of reality and logic. They are modelled after The King in Yellow.
  It's horrific when an unnatural tome reveals the secrets of the universe; it’s surreal horror when that book written in 1611 contains a description of you down to the smallest details, including the fact that you’re reading that book right now.
  • The campaign Impossible Landscapes starts fairly mundane, but as the players get exposed to Hastur's corruption and inadvertedly start entering deeper into Carcosa reality starts to break down more and more. The Handler is recommended to throw in completely mundane scenes to contrast with all the insanity going on.
• In Don't Rest Your Head, the player characters are people with abnormal insomnia that gain strange powers (which work with dream logic) and are driven to a place called Mad City, a city that is a total mess full with Anachronism Stew and Bizarrchitecture where all the missing things and people from our world go. Also, the city is ruled by strange beings that prey on humans and have dream logic powers as the protagonists.
• Invisible Sun has players as magic-users called vislae who have discovered the Actuality, a dream-like dimension of magic and imagination. With its fantastical nature, the imagery can quickly go from semi-normal to nightmarish when spells are used, leaving characters covered in screaming mouths, having eyeballs for fingertips, or any other kind of twisted deformations that they can use to hurt others... or as an advantage for themselves. The horror comes especially when the story involves a horrific war of magic that happened in the past and caused many vislae to flee the Actuality in the first place.

Video Games

• Afraid of Monsters is incredibly surreal. The protagonist, David Leatherhoff, goes through several nightmare sequences in his own mind, where the world is a deep, matte black. Twitching, growling things lurk in the walls, which seem to be drawn out of white ink.
• All of Our Friends Are Dead's nightmarish imagery is a particularly hellish example of this. Being a Run-and-Gun, it has been described as "Contra on a really bad acid trip."
• American McGee's Alice: The source material is pretty surreal already, so of course a darker version of it is going to evoke this.
• Ao Oni would just be normal horror, if it weren't for the fact that the monster is a bizarre invocation of the Uncanny Valley that manages to look simultaneously humorous and horrifying.
• Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning is a game with the general aesthetic of one of these really terrible edutainment games from the '90s, except it takes a horrific turn a few minutes in.
  Baldi: Great! You're doing fantastic! Problem three! *loud static noise* plus *loud static noise* times *loud static noise* equals... [player inevitably gives a wrong answer] I GET ANGRIER FOR EVERY PROBLEM YOU GET WRONG.
• Baroque, especially the original release due to a heavy atmosphere created by the limitations of the system.
• Blank_01, a freeware horror game that combines minimalist graphics and increasingly bizarre visuals to make a Soul-Crushing Desk Job truly nightmarish.
• BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm drifts deeper into this the further you stray from the main plot. /x/, which is mandatory, has several optional areas filled with unexplainable monsters, especially the house with the doll which loops over and over again and has things like faceless copies of your party members. The Deep Web is filled with nightmarish enemies, like huge skeletal mantises and the giant floating head of a little girl that's unraveling into a mass of eyes. Then there's the many hidden rooms sprinkled throughout the game, like Ny'agai Street and the haunted subway platform, that seem to exist purely for the sake of being utterly weird. And the secret "PC Ending" calls the game's entire setting into question in the freakiest way possible. In short, if you follow the plot and don't get lost, then you'll mostly have a grand old time — however, if you wander off the path, you might end up in a totally different, much creepier type of game.
• The Binding of Isaac is the deranged tale of a little boy whose brutally abusive mother intends to sacrifice him to God, filled with Body Horror, Big Creepy-Crawlies, disturbingly Freudian imagery, and Toilet Humor.
• Bug Fables: This trope plays a part in making a group of lategame enemies as disturbing as they are. The Dead Landers barely resemble anything on Earth. Alpha vaguely looks like a stickbug and Gamma vaguely looks like a spider or crab, but all of them have surreal and warped appearances that are a far cry from the more defined bug designs of everything else in the game. What they are exactly is never explained.
• Castle Red: The Hedge Maze is a sprawling labyrinth fool of bizarre and random imagery meant to disorient the player. The rest of the game features strange happenings and inexplicable events as well, but the Hedge Maze is perhaps the point of maximum surreality. No other section of the game features a garden of human heads, for example.
• Catherine: Never have the consequences of infidelity looked quite so nightmarish.
• Chzo Mythos: A bit of Serial Escalation in that the first two games are mostly about supernatural but still comprehensible killers, and the latter two have transcended into full-on Cosmic Horror Story.
• Close Your Eyes: Redux is a bizarre and surreal adventure through unreal worlds as your murderous marshmallow protagonist attempts to escape their execution by hanging, their journey narrated by the voice of a hammy gameshow host who encourages them to "Close... your... eyes...".
• Coil provides little context for the events within yet seems very sinister even in ambiguity. Most people interpret it as a story about rape, but Edmund McMillen's personal interpretation is about somebody meeting with Death.
• Cry of Fear^note which is made by the same team as Afraid of Monsters features this to some extent throughout but a few "nightmare sequences" use this to even greater effect, the start of one is signified by Alien Geometries and/or hallways and rooms coated in blood. In the subway behind the brick wall is an excellent example, after some hallways using Alien Geometry you drop down into a maze covered in blood and full of impossibly tall people bound up in bags with twitching heads that look like they've had their grey matter squeezed out. All of them are hanging from the ceiling like cattle in a butcher factory and constantly moving around. Touching one results in instant death and the soundtrack does not make things any more pleasant.
• Cube Escape: The room escape puzzles include slicing open a fish and watching a fully grown tree sprout out of it, descending into Van Gogh's severed ear to his bedroom in Arles, and cutting open an old man's sewn-shut mouth to let his human head be replaced by a crow's. Oh, and terrifying Humanoid Abominations created from the unpleasant memories extracted from the bodies of dead humans.
• Darkwood features a great number of eldritch natured creatures that roam the forest, leading to the Protagonist having to fend for himself against a variety of horrors. And while not all the creatures are hostile by nature, many don’t go out of their way to befriend him either.
• DARQ, being set in a series of nested nightmares, is packed with this, from the bizarre enemies to the way the protagonist can walk on walls and ceilings and rotate the world around him like a puzzle box to the unnaturally connected areas.
• Death Stranding is full of this. The reveal trailer alone is one long parade of bizarre, inexplicable happenings, with such sights as a man suddenly acquiring a bloated, glowing, translucent, pregnant belly, revealing the fully-grown infant inside, a titanic Mechanical Abomination, and a man being saved from drowning... by the aforementioned baby... which appears inside his windpipe... giving a thumbs-up. Okay.
• Drakengard sneaks up on the player, beginning as a dark Medieval European Fantasy that just happens to have weird references to "the Watchers" sprinkled in. The standard ending mostly avoids the trope, but each unlockable alternate ending gets successively more unhinged until the fourth, in which giant demonic babies fall from the sky.
• In Eternal Darkness, the Surreal Horror angle runs rampant, especially once your sanity meter runs low. The whole thing is just one big screwed up wide awake nightmare.
• Eversion is a very happy example of this. Enjoy your blood.
• This trope pretty much describes most of The Evil Within. It starts off with the main character investigating a mass murder, but then you encounter monsters that reek of Body Horror, Facial Horror, and occasional Uncanny Valley, locations that just randomly appear and disappear, various enemies (namely the Big Bad) that can warp reality, and a really creepy hospital that you can go to to upgrade and save your progress. All justified once you discover exactly where you are.
• EXCUSE ME SIR certainly has shades of this. The itch.io page describes the game as "creepy, surreal, and if you're not careful... deadly!"
• Fallen London and its spinoffs Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies are full of nightmarish imagery, which particularly spikes up when your Sanity Meter gets low. Sunless Skies takes the cake for taking place in a world where the laws of reality are literally dying off.
• The pages consisting of Fancy Island are full of nightmarish imagery, jumpscares, and pages that look just plain wierd. For example, Chaos.html is a series of moving fake pop-up windows with an eye and several organs where each window redirects you to a different page, and Eye.html (accessible when you click on the eyes on Chaos.html) is a rather striking page with a pair of zombie-ghosts with their entrails showing, and on the center a pair of blinking eyes that act as the entrance to the next page, and on top of the eye some strange gibberish.
• When it isn't a tactical shooter, First Encounter Assault Recon goes for this.
  • One of the highlights of the first game is an extended sequence in which you can't be sure if the man taunting you is a hallucination or in the room with you, and doors you try to flee through seem to move away from you. It ends with a dive into a pool of blood that leaves you standing beneath a gore-soaked ceiling. The first expansion has a very memorable sequence in which the player tries to open a door at the end of a hallway. Finding it locked, you turn around to see that the hallway you just came down has transformed into the entranceway to an asylum.
  • Entering one room and finding it empty, save for an operating chair and a door on the end. Go through that, and find two operating chairs. Repeat until blood starts appearing and the increasingly large volume of chairs start getting attached to the walls and the ceiling, as the walls start to progressively cave in. Hmm.
• Grey Matter uses motifs based around mental illness and the brain in general.
• Harvester has absolutely copious amounts of blood and guts, but a lot of the creepy factor comes from just how utterly wrong the entire town is. Then, in the endgame, you break into the headquarters of the Lodge of the Harvest Moon, and things get really weird.
• In Here They Lie, the main character takes a journey through a muted dreamlike apocalyptic landscape encountering impossibly vast industrial cityscapes, insane people with animal heads, boat journeys through kaleidoscopes, an abandoned train station filling up with blood deep underground, sinister giant businessmen on fire and a theater filled with people attempting suicide among other bizarre events along the way.
• Ib has some pretty decent mind screwing. A few examples: stairs that meow, walls that give applause, hallways that never end unless you walk through it a certain way, paintings that come alive, roses that determine your value of life, marble statues that can walk, and crayon drawn books whose pictures move and depict preschooler murder.
• Killer7 is a technicolor acid nightmare of a video game.
• The normally comic Kingdom of Loathing descends into this in its more serious zones, such as fighting an Eldritch Abomination resembling Mr. Peanut in the Caliginous Abyss or having the embodiment of the Crackpot Mystic's fears, doubts, regrets, and anger be old-school video game characters.
• The Last Door is chock-full of this. Everything feels a little unhinged from reality and each person seems to be at least a little insane. The closer Jeremiah gets to solving the mystery of what's going on, the more warped and bizarre everything gets.
• The Legend of Zelda: Of the games, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask uses this trope to the largest extent, which inspired the creation of Ben Drowned. The titular mask of Majora is shaped like a heart but with eyes on it and it's being worn by a demented scarecrow. Meanwhile, the moon has an evil leering face that constantly stares down at the people it's about to crush. Just to name a few points. Other games show surreal moments at specific times, such as the Fused Shadow backstory in Twilight Princess.
• Limbo (2010) is set in a grainy, monochrome world mixed with forested and industrial terrain. There are dead bodies in the early part of the game, and almost everyone and everything are there to kill you — and when they do, the deaths are quite gruesome. There is one part where you have to use the husk of a Giant Spider as a makeshift bridge across a pit of spikes — and that is not the end of it.
• LISA seems fairly tame at first glance, up to the point when the people around the protagonists begin to horrifically transform into savage and contorted monsters and their hallucinations gradually worsen.
• Little Nightmares takes place in a world of twisted humanoid monsters where diminutive children are captured and butchered to be served to the gluttonous Guests of the Maw, a floating restaurant that surfaces once a year. Its owner is a mysterious woman known only as the Lady who feeds on her Guests' life force, and she employs two monstrous Twin Chefs and a creepy long-armed Janitor, all of whom appear to be wearing masks made of skin over their true visage.
• Lone Survivor is this mixed with Survival Horror. The monsters are fleshy, twitchy things, walls are covered in gore, half the dialogue makes no sense, and mirrors teleport you to your apartment.
• In LSD: Dream Emulator, you explore colorful and quirky dreams with a lot of randomly generated content. The more dreams you play through, the stranger and more deranged things get.
• The Magic School Bus games can veer into this with the amount of odd things that can show up when the player clicks around. This is especially true with the first two (Solar System and Human Body). While a lot of it is played for Surreal Humor, some of it can also end up becoming quite unsettling instead. Solar system in particular has an odd globe where the player can view some very odd things. While intended to resemble a tech demo, it can easily come off as unsettling.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is a Dark Fantasy Adventure Game inspired by Danganronpa set in a futuristic city of constant rain called Kanai Ward, and aside from the aesthetic, the characters, plot, names, music, and the title itself, and possibly even the pre-release marketing too, all feature an overwhelmingly strong, mysterious, cyberpunk style, and the entire game is seemingly backed with a strong Brutal Honesty and a harsh criticism of society and its issues, in a Darker and Edgier way with a darker message than its predecessor.
• Meat Boy is tame compared to the other examples here, but it still contains Hell, sawblades, zombies, copious amounts of blood, sawblades, ruined landscapes, and a psychotic fetus. And lots of sawblades.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has a lot of very weird, disturbing imagery, such as unmanned biomechanical robots that moo like cows and can rotate their legs on 360-degree joints to climb buildings, a very sexy woman in a skintight suit wearing Snake's face while murdering people with huge robotic tentacles and laughing, and the 'white room' segments after defeating the bosses in which you hear a distorted soundtrack of women moaning in orgasm and crying/screaming/snarling/laughing, and so on.
• Milya[broken] takes place in a nightmarish world where Body Horror lies at every corner. In addition, little of the story makes sense at first, thanks partially to an intentionally shoddy machine translation.
• The atmosphere in Mondo Medicals and its sequel Mondo Agency is very oppressive and your goals vague. Even the gameplay evokes this trope through the bizarre perspective tricks.
• Mother:
  • While much of EarthBound (1994) is surreal and trippy, its endgame heads straight into this trope.
  • Mother 3's famous removed unused enemy backgrounds even more so.
• Everything in Mother Chef: The Musical! is quite dreamlike and strange, such as the moving backgrounds, the odd looking "food babies", and the giant arrows pointing toward the demon customer's mouth. It gives the whole game an off-putting and unsettling nature.
• OFF eventually turns into one during Zone 3. Even earlier than that if you return to one of the purified Zones and discover that the Batter's mission isn't as good as you thought it was.
• The Path is the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a series of nonsensical (or possibly allegorical) scenes and vignettes.
• Penumbra starts off as a fairly normal horror scenario of the PC going into an abandoned mine full of savage wildlife to find his father. Then you end up in the Elaborate Underground Base of an ancient conspiracy dodging sentient virus-infected zombies, and in the final game, you're solving puzzles in a weird mash of all the locations in the first two games while the PA system begs you not to finish the game so that she won't be alone and dead supporting characters rant inanely at you.
• Pilgrim (RPG Maker) involves very strange logic in order to get past the floors of the strange building in the Other World. For example, each Storey except the first and last is guarded by a living, sentient door with a realstic human-looking face, and the way to unlock them is to put a fake eye in their empty eye socket. Other phenomena include two Womb Levels, various faces melted into the walls but still alive, Giant Spiders and Creepy Cockroaches, and odd NPCs like a giant talking cat who wants to eat an also talking mouse.
• The horror in Pity Party relies on things being nightmarish and strange, such as the two creepy guests, the protagonist being alone, and the guests casually eating poison and thumbtacks.
• Rule of Rose: A cruel caste system ruled by little girls is weird enough, but then there's the monsters...
• Sentinel Returns has been described as "the most terrifying E-rated game ever made". It is set in a surreal, dark, chequered landscape where you play as a robot with the mission to absorb monstrous creatures of flesh and metal called Sentinels before they absorb you, by teleporting to gradually higher altitudes. The landscapes feature trees that look like spermatozoa and breathing boulders with a sphincter on the top. This is the introduction. And the soundtrack has been composed by John Carpenter. By the way, if you're expecting explanation for anything about the game to come from anywhere, you're going to be disappointed.
• Shadows of the Damned drifts toward this frequently, with content that's as disturbing as it is nonsensical. Somewhere between goats being a source of light and finding out strawberries are made of ground-up tongues, you either learn to just roll with it, or give up.
• The Silent Hill series sometimes drifts into this:
  • Silent Hill 2 contains several examples:
    • Pyramid Head's appearance in Silent Hill 2 is also a visual example of Surreal Horror, with his massive, rusted polygonal head that could never be supported by the rest of his body. It's even deconstructed; it's shown that he hates the big heavy helmet but has long since given up on trying to get it off (closer inspection shows that it's apparently part of his head, with flesh reaching all the way to the "brim").
    • The Alien Geometries of several locations are very disorienting.
    • Maria's repeated deaths and sudden reappearances are very disquieting.
  • The nightmare hospital from Silent Hill 3 and its infamous mirror room that shows various mismatched reflections.
  • Silent Hill 4 has an infamous hospital room.
  • Silent Hills' playable teaser has you looping through a slowly degrading suburban home over and over again, finding Eraserhead-esque babies in a decrepit bathroom and talking to a mutated paper bag, among other strange things.
• Sonic Dreams Collection uses this in conjunction with Surreal Humor. Every game except Make My Sonic (which is almost entirely surreal humor) has some degree of disturbingly bizarre content:
  • Eggman Origins, after going through the hidden process of making it available, turns out to be a game where the player's custom Sonic character feeds an egg/bird-like Eggman worms in an empty white void. Eventually, a tower rises with Eggman in the middle, and he seemingly turns the character into the original Sonic. This is noted as the player having "One ascension."
  • Sonic Movie Maker features one-eyed egg people that ask for bizarre things, a noisy eye inside of the moon, a hidden glitchy blue ball that can deform structures and blares out static if one moves too far away from it, Sonic eating Tails, and a section set in Rouge's womb (which is also like a stomach) where the player eventually falls into a crib.
  • My Roommate Sonic is a first-person "Dating Sim" where a spying Eggman sends the player text messages explaining what to do. Eventually, Sonic's eyes merge into one, which becomes a portal that sucks the player into an alternate landscape where they become a Sonic-like creature. While the phone appears in the background, giant, giving one final message.
• South of Real starts in a rather bog-standard haunted mansion, albeit one the player character grew up in. True to the title, though, the reality of the game goes completely south by the end of the game as the main character realizes the depths of depravity their own parental figure sunk to in an effort to save the world.
• Spec Ops: The Line starts veering into this territory as the main character's grip on reality becomes more fragile. It doesn't help that the setting, Dubai in ruins and constantly wracked by sandstorms, makes for a vicious, victory-less battle on ever-shifting ground amidst collapsing infrastructure with basic supplies dwindling... set among some of the most beautiful and opulent displays of wealth on Earth, all rendered worthless in the struggle. Say, a shoot-out in a glitzy night-club between dusty, screaming soldiers, bullets ripping into the artwork on the walls and cover provided by life-size jewel-studded giraffes, while a floor-installed aquarium of live fish flits beneath their feet and burning hot sand spills in through the windows. Hallucination? Nope. It's just what warfare in Dubai would look like.
• Spore has a subculture among the creators known as UBD, which lives for surreal Body Horror, making bizarre, twisted versions of just about any animal, plant, body part, or object you can imagine, as well as a few you thankfully can't imagine. The morbid puns they use for names don't help. Neither does the fact that all of Spore's hardcoded character animations are goofily exaggerated.
• The Orz from Star Control II are your friendly neighborhood aliens, who look a bit like large parrotfish, and, due to their language being too alien for the Translator Microbes to manage, they also speak in broken English. In truth, they are not individual creatures, but the physical manifestation of an extra-dimensional Eldritch Abomination. And remember: never, ever ask them what happened to the Androsynth.
• Survival Crisis Z looks like a standard Zombie Apocalypse at first, but the observant player will notice something... odd about these undead. (For instance, they giggle as they attack.) The farther you get, the crazier it gets.
• Tamashii is inspired by Japanese horror games and takes after them with bizarre Satanic imagery. The levels are filled with fleshy, J-horror-esque monsters, the bosses are fleshy monsters with their brains visible, much of the dialogue is cryptic, and there are many creepy secrets and Easter Eggs with no explanation (for example, in the Hub Level, a Jump Scare will sometimes randomly play and turn the whole area into a Womb Level for a brief time), and Ominous Visual Glitches appear as well to break the fourth wall and make everything even more surreal.
• Time Fcuk is the deranged tale of a young man whose future self throws him into a very strange box in which time and physics make little sense. Most of the horror here is psychological, as the protagonist slowly goes completely insane navigating the physics-breaking puzzles, dying repeatedly with no consequence, talking to both past and future versions of himself, and talking to the growing lump/clone on his head (which he names "Steven").
• UIN is the story of a boy lost in a cupboard filled with Eldritch Abominations.
• Undertale has Photoshop Flowey, often known by the Fan Nicknames God Flowey and Omega Flowey, in the Neutral/Pacifist Route climaxes. It appears a horrific fleshy pronged skull with eyes that appear to be crudely cut out from video footage, connected to a series of tubes and a TV screen showing a 2-bit photorealistic human face that looks like it's in intense pain. Endlessly looping thorny vines stream from its face and two clawed cactus-arms appear to be connected to the tubes. Its attacks include rains of nuclear bombs with normal Flowey sprites drawn on them, huge bush-worms with human teeth, finger guns connected to plants that fire pairs of sunflowers, and laser-guided vines aimed at the player. During the fight, horrific "music" plays and Photoshop Flowey will repeatedly use the power of the human souls to attack with crudely drawn knives, star/ballet shoe combos, and abusive words among other things. The horror is taken further if you're on a pacifist route as you're forced to take on multiple nightmarish abominations in the hellish True Lab. Both must be seen to be believed.
• Weird Dreams is set in a demon-addled mind. Therefore, rather bizarre and horrifying situations such as being Eaten Alive by a soccer ball with teeth or having to fight a giant, hostile bee with an electric eel are in high supply.
• the white chamber, thanks to its shifts to a Dark World.
• World of Warcraft occasionally veers into Surreal Horror when the players encounter something truly mindbending. Certain locations like the top of Karazhan and the depths of Ahn'Qiraj seem to be in endless voids, when they're both tangible places you access in the real world, and certain bossfights, notably Yogg-Saron's, screw with the player's perception of the world, forcing them to kill illusions of friends and heroes.
• Yume Nikki: Sure, it's a dream, and dreams are weird, but how many people have whole worlds in their head full of bloody eyeballs? The fan sequels, including .flow and Yume 2kki, fall into this category as well.

Visual Novels

• Doki Doki Literature Club!, a cheery, seemingly innocent Romance Game that nevertheless is prefixed with a Content Warning about disturbing content. The game eventually devolves into a mix of Psychological Horror and metafictional, fourth wall-breaking Existential Horror, with lots of disturbing glitches and the occasional bit of gore. Surreal though it is, it makes sense eventually — but before that, if you don't already know, it's just inexplicably freaky for a long time.

Web Animation

• Boisvert is a Youtube series based around an antler-headed guy who suffers from being haunted by demons who make him more depressed. The gritty and dark atmosphere of the videos emphasizes the emotions the antler-headed guy is feeling. The series makes use of digitally mirrored images, floating motion graphics, and dirty footage and artwork.
• Cyriak's works are Deranged Animation par excellence, tending to intersect somewhere between Body Horror, Eldritch Abomination, and Acid-Trip Dimension. Most of the situations depicted don't make a lot of sense (for instance, in 7 billion, unusually rubbery rabbits reproduce in a variety of unsettling and horrific fashions before merging to form frolicking bipedal Hive Mind Kaiju), and it doesn't help that many of his animations are oddly rhythmic, usually in time with the music.
• Read the first word of "surreal entertainment". The "entertainment" part depends on how well you sleep at night.
• The Alfred's Playhouse videos have quite a bit of this with Surreal Humor, including singing about Alfred's sexual abuse and his escape from it into fantasy to the tune of the Pee-wee's Playhouse theme song, Dictator Alfred is friends with cheerful imagined versions of Hitler and Stalin, and Alfred cross-dresses from time to time.
• hololive ERROR, mostly the animated manga. The story of Shino Misora and Aogami as a whole is filled to the brim with Ominous Visual Glitches, characters inexplicably acting out-of-character or going all "Welcome to Corneria", and plain confusion on both the characters' and viewers' ends as to just what the hell is going on. Especially after the twist in Chapter 15, showing that the New Transfer Student we've been following in the present day segments is Shino... even though the apparent ghost of Shino had been the antagonist for most of the series until then.
• A lot of animations (including Jimmy Neutron Happy Family Happy Hour) made by seinfeldspitstain are all this, especially alongside Surreal Humor. As an example, Happy Family Happy Hour contains a scene where Hugh and Jimmy Neutron watch TV with the former holding a shotgun to the latter's chest, before being decapitated by a pizza delivery.

Webcomics

• June uses this and creepy art to its advantage. Talking Communist dogs, Stan's repeating deaths, the obsession with faces (or lack of), no inner fourth wall with a TV that can control space...
• Unsounded has one where Sette falls through a shadow and into the Khert, or fabric of reality itself, which is created from the memories of the dead. It's as bizarre as it sounds.
• Astray 3 is plenty surreal from the first strip, but the oven-head monster is even worse than the carnivorous umbrellas. At least the killer whale guy seems friendly...
• In Little Robot, Big Scary World, some of the dream sequences were done in jarring art styles, often with flashing lights and scary noises to add to the experience.

Web Original

• Whateley Universe: Maybe half the dimensions Josie ends up visiting in "I Looked into the Abyss", including one that was half Cthulhu Mythos and half Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
• Many SCP Foundation pieces use this; the objects are often extremely strange (some are even surreal without being particularly horrific) and the way the clinical, detached nature of each article gives you a feeling that, even though you have some information, you have no way of knowing exactly what these things are all about. A few specific examples include SCP-1782, SCP-1425, SCP-2030, and Bees.
  • The artist behind SCP-4158's image, Trevor "@slimyswampghost" Henderson has a reputation of creating Found Footage artwork not that out of place from the SCP Foundation's world.
• The City of Never is full of this. The story focuses on a community of ordinary people being under attack by bizarre, uncannily built monsters and creatures from another dimension — one of which is capable of putting its victims into a coma if they gaze at its body. As the story progresses, the characters venture into the eponymous City, an Eldritch Location in another dimension full of these creatures, as well as powerful deities and entities that have the power to travel between the City and the real world as they attempt to destroy the universe.
• The Interface Series runs wild on this, starting with accounts of bizarre organic tunnels called "flesh interfaces" appearing all over the world, a terrible being called the Mother with Horse Eyes, and time travel, among many equally weird things. This one is particularly notorious not only for its content but for its dissemination, rather than posting the stories in one place at one time, the author cut out tiny snippets and posted them in comments all over Reddit, sometimes on pages that had nothing to do with the series or creepypasta in general.
• Bogleech heavily favors examples of this to more conventional horror, the accounts of people's real-life nightmares are prime examples.
• ENA uses this and Surreal Humor interchangeably but leans more towards horror as the series goes on.
• Poison Bonbons: Many of the stories use horrific, dreamlike imagery. In "Laundromat at Night", for example, the narrator has a pleasant conversation with a woman's severed head in a clothes dryer.
• The Sick Land veers back and forth between this and cosmic horror.

Web Videos

• Marble Hornets, especially the videos made by totheark. A lot of Slendy stories, actually, especially once Sanity Slippage sets in. After all, it's a freaking terrifying meme/artificial Urban Legend where the primary figure is... a tall guy in a suit with no face.
• Don't Hug Me I'm Scared depicts this and Surreal Humor. because each episode has a trio of puppet characters (Red Guy Yellow Guy and Duck Guy) being teached by talking objects causing them to enjoy themselves by using their imaginations... until their imaginations turn the episodes nightmarishly surreal. In the end, everything goes back to normal and nothing happens.
• The Nostalgia Critic's "Top 11 Nostalgic Mindfucks" discusses some of these moments (in addition to some less scary ones, like Toontown from Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Title Sequence to Pee-wee's Playhouse). In a meta-example, the video itself can be pretty freaky as well.
• Lasagna Cat, while obstinately driven by Surreal Humor, is not afraid to play into this at times, especially in second "season" which overall is markedly darker than the first. Just check out the ending of "Sex Survey Results".
• Hbomberguy's video Serious Lore Analysis 3 — an analysis of Ctrl+Alt+Del, its animated series, and The Room (2003) — has Hbomb getting hunted by a masked man trying to stop Hbomb from creating lore analysis videos.
• Mad God is an ongoing Stop Motion series that runs on this. There's not much of a story, so it's hard to describe the series, but it seems to be about an unnamed figure in a gas mask and trenchcoat traveling through a World Gone Mad for an unclear reason, and seeing some very strange things along the way. It's also unclear who the Mad God of the title is, but the obvious interpretation is that it's the show's creator himself, animation legend and neglectful dinosaur supervisor◊ Phil Tippett.

Western Animation

• Superjail! is known for this, in particular the episodes "Dream Machine" (with Jailbot's dream of being the Warden's human(oid) son resulting in creepy animation part, and the part where the Warden dreams of his crotch morphing into Jared's head and face, while his dream version of Alice quickly rots into an angered zombie that shouts "I need my BEAUTY SLEEP!") and "Don't Be A Negaton" (the hallucination scene at the end, especially with the rotting dog and D.L. Diamond's actual face without his wig or makeup is exposed as sore-infested and decaying). [adult swim] shows in general could probably qualify.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog tends towards this sort of style to keep its Defanged Horrors scary: on top of the creator's overall outlook (claiming heavy influence by Salvador Dali), the show often uses Medium Blending for when a villain really needs to stand out, like, say, the Spirit of the Harvest Moon, King Ramses, or that cute violin girl.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • In "Nightmares and Daydreams", most of Aang's nightmares (and later, hallucinations) are merely funny. However, his last nightmare before he decides to avoid sleep altogether (leading to the hallucinations) is downright terrifying, even making Momo (Aang's pet lemur) creepy.
  • Zuko's Nightmare Sequence in "The Earth King."
• The paraphernalia wagon sequence from Halloween Is Grinch Night. It's very easily comparable to Yume Nikki, being basically the protagonist walking through a series of strange, nightmarish visuals.
• On the topic of Dr. Seuss cartoons, The Butter Battle Book features a similarly creepy Disney Acid Sequence about building weapons of mass destruction. The Butter Battle Book is way darker than Seuss's other material for kids, and Ralph Bakshi directed the Animated Adaptation, so no surprise there.
• The collective animation project Hopital Brut (French for "Gross Hospital") has something to do with horrific experiments at the eponymous hospital, including lobotomies that entail the complete obliteration of the rest of the head. It's best not viewed by the faint of heart or the sound of mind.
• Adventure Time drifts into this sometimes:
  • The episode "No One Can Hear You" features Finn waking up alone in a hospital, finding the Candy Kingdom abandoned except for a delirious and concussed Jake, who has convinced himself everyone is off preparing for a surprise party. Then Finn finds out everyone was abducted by a bipedal deer with human hands.
  • Marceline's father turns out to be a demon lord who rules over "the Nightosphere" which, as seen in "Return to the Nightosphere" and "Daddy's Little Monster", is more or less a cute, animated version of Bosch's hell.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998) exhibits this whenever Him (a Creepy Crossdresser Humanoid Abomination) shows up.
• Gravity Falls has Bill Cipher, living embodiment of all that is both hilariously deranged... and just plain deranged, when his interests are against yours.
• Of all places, this shows up to surprisingly chilling effect in Thomas & Friends in "Rusty and the Boulder". It concerns a new quarry that's being dug in the mountains of Sodor, but the mountain they dig into happens to have a gigantic, unnaturally spherical boulder sitting on the cliff face high above, threatening to fall down at any moment. To make matters worse, the boulder is heavily implied to be sentient, with Rusty feeling like he's Being Watched whenever he's near it, and when rock fragments start falling onto the railway below, he observes "The boulder is telling us to go away." When it inevitably falls off the cliff onto the rail line, it seems to actively pursue the engines in ways that should not be physically possible and completely defy the laws of physics (moving absurdly fast, not losing any speed when going uphill, and even appearing behind Rusty and his driver at one point) before eventually destroying a shed and almost several of the engines. Oh, and it has a weirdly realistic face that we see twice, once when it's staring at Rusty on the clifftop and at the end when the Fat Controller moves it to another mountain very far away like he's trying to exorcise a demon.
  Fat Controller: (disturbed) We should have left this part of the island alone.
• The Simpsons:
  • The show parodies Twin Peaks in "Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part Two)". Chief Wiggum falls asleep on the job and finds himself in a strange building (which looks just like the Black Lodge), where Lisa makes odd, cryptic references ("THIS... SUIT... BURNS... BETTER") in a stilted voice and reality changes at a moment's notice. The trouble is that Wiggum is too stupid to figure out what the heck is happening, and Dream Lisa is eventually forced to drop the mysterious act and outright tell him her message ("LOOK AT BURNS'S SUIT! Yeesh!"). When the Chief awakens, he happily talks about the "weird backwards-talking dream" he just had, prompting concern from the other cops.
  • Don Hertzfeldt directed this Couch Gag for "Clown in the Dumps". Yes, it's a satire of a Franchise Zombie. Doesn't make it any less surreal/disturbing (it looks like something Starfish Aliens could make when trying to imitate The Simpsons; it even mentions viewers' flippers. And whoever made it is ruled by a self-styled "dark lord" who seems to want to remark that all animals can scream and that "amusement is control").
• Some of the post-movie episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants qualify, possibly unintentionally. The most obvious case is the Season 7 episode "Squidward in Clarinetland": it starts with two nausea-inducing scenes of Krabs completely breaking out in hives, and SpongeBob getting the flesh of his right arm eaten off by a cloud of insect-like creatures... and then Squidward enters the safe. The poor guy first navigates a labyrinth of filing cabinets that could not possibly fit in there, while following SpongeBob, whose laugh is unusually creepy in this episode. Then he opens a door, and winds up in a field that is empty except for the giant clarinets growing out of the ground and a buried, talking eagle head, which eats him. In its stomach, we see that the eagle has multiple esophagi despite only having one beak. Then Squidward gets flushed out of the eagle's stomach, somehow winding up inside a pinball machine which turns out to be a giant SpongeBob, with a giant Patrick there to torment him as well. Even the Encyclopedia SpongeBobia admits that "this episode scares children." They would hardly be the only ones.
• The Real Ghostbusters; especially episodes happening in Another Dimension or those that involve poltergeists, goblins and the like.
• The Shivering Truth is essentially just a series of short nightmares directly transcribed into a television format, and in the creepiest possible stop-motion animation, with all the horrifying strangeness that implies. It's done by the same people who did The Heart, She Holler and Xavier: Renegade Angel, so if you've seen any of those shows, you know what you're getting into.
  • Off the Air is more or less the same.
• The OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes episode "Plaza Alone" leans into this during its climax. After wandering the mysteriously empty plaza all day, KO, Rad, and Enid accidentally get locked in the bodega's break room. They then suddenly begin to hallucinate. Rad turns into a hot dog, Enid fails to stop KO from eating Rad and then explodes, KO turns into a horse, and they all panic about both their actual situation and their bizarre hallucinations.

---