Nightmare Fuel / Battle for Dream Island

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

I humbly request that you look at yourself, Pencil.

Yes, this is not a funny gag. Despite its off-the-wall artstyle, familiar brand of humor, and reliance on reality TV stereotypes, even a show that spawned an entire genre quite like Battle for Dream Island can have its fair share of unnerving occurrences. After all, it isn't a battle between anthropomorphic objects to win the ownership of an entire luxury island... without stakes.

---

General

• Any of the deaths in the later episodes can be this, especially the fact that most of the characters are fragile. What makes this scarier is the fact they get recovered, meaning they actually died, rather than having an Unexplained Recovery. The deaths by fire are even more disturbing.
  • On top of that the overly violent nature of the show, even more than later season 1, in BFB.
• Ice Cube has her moments of being Ax-Crazy. She once left a bunch of contestants to fall off of a cliff for being mistreated by some. Another time, she imagines some of former FreeSmart burning to death. It's somewhat mitigated by her "revenge" being directed towards those who mistreat her.
• Snowball, Eraser, and Blocky's disliking of Golf Ball has gotten them to try to kill her.
• There's something creepy about some of the music tracks.
  • The second soundtrack that plays in the series is "Minutes", which suddenly just shows unsettling urgency. Not to mention, it's played with the mentioned Pentagon scene below.
  • There's "Night Mote" as well. It's a slow track that plays whenever we cut to the random waterfall where Roboty randomly teleports to sometimes. What's wrong about it? When it's sped up, it sounds a bit unsettling. Used to especially eerie effect in the montage of Taco trying to break out of the jawbreaker.
  • The "Nice Mote" variant amps up the eerieness tenfold.
  • The sudden Mood Whiplash that happens in "How A Future Bass House is made". It sounds like the sound of the world ending.
• Just the thought of being locked in a metal chamber with nothing to eat or drink, and this causes Flower to Go Mad from the Isolation and bite a chunk of metal off Announcer during BFDI 25, and yet the announcer leaves.
• Flower, particularly in the early seasons, is a narcissistic, Hair-Trigger Temper Alpha Bitch who does not hesitate to threaten the characters. She gets worse in BFDI 25 when she destroys all the recovery centers and pops Bubble.
• Blocky in the first few seasons. Just imagine an ax-crazy jerk jock, who would prank others, but on the other hand, keep on killing you, not to mention his signature slasher smile.
  • In BFB 1, he literally grabs Tennis Ball and Golf Ball and rips them in half off-screen just because they were managing the team!

Battle for Dream Island

• In "Don't Lose Your Marbles", the remaining contestants and the recommended characters willingly threw themselves into a pit of hydrochloric acid so that they could grab the Announcer's marble collection to earn 15 bonus points.
• Snowball unintentionally causing more than a single death he caused, due to Leafy's ball just bouncing off of Pencil in "Don't Lose Your Marbles".
• The bug invasion in "Insectophobe's Nightmare 2". The bugs eat everyone alive (except Announcer and David), and if you're not horrified yet, the moment after Firey tries burning them should do it. Everything on screen is bugs.
• Any time David gets angry. What's with his whole body turning red and lightning bolts flying out of him as he furiously screams "AW, SERIOUSLY!?" Also, these come at the least expected times, which makes this a Jump Scare.
• The stinger of episode 16 has the recommended characters in the audience being set ablaze inexplicably with everyone in there screaming.
• The Tiny Loser Chamber lands in a lake deep enough to submerge it in episode 18, meaning that there was probably a chance that the eliminated contestants would drown, but the sun managed to lift the TLC just in time before it filled up with water. The sun later crushes the Locker Of Losers afterwards.
• Leafy flashing between her normal self and Evil Leafy, leading to the contestants ripping Leafy in half to see the "real Leafy". It's played for laughs, but seems that would be cruel enough. However, all tension is thrown out the window when it’s revealed that she’s actually a football/rugby ball.
• Woody gets a heart attack over silver and grey colors in the Announcer Transportation Device, and it comes with him moaning to boot.
  • Fridge Logic comes into play here, because Rocky, Needle, Announcer, and Golf Ball are gray and Woody doesn't seem to be scared of them.

Battle for Dream Island Again

• Leafy's anger issues. Period. In "Get Digging", she tried to murder Gelatin, Needle and Puffball by throwing knives at them and successfully dodged several “Acid Spitballs” they shot at her. Just because Needle slapped her.
• This "alternate cut" of the "Leafy Detector" scene in BFDIA 1.
• Evil Leafy. Sure, she's just a color swap of Leafy with bulging eyes. But then she reappeared in "Get Digging". In that episode, she chased down Book, Ice Cube and Spongy, teleported over to them over a long while away and then randomly sank into Spongy when he collapsed. Pencil and Match seemed pretty happy about the latter.
  • Special mention goes to the ending of Episode 5a. Freesmart gets swallowed up by Evil Leafy, and the remaining two minutes are Evil Leafy standing on the edge of a cliff with quiet music in the background, with nothing happening. It's surprisingly unsettling.
  • It's implied she's a Genius Loci as well. Why? BFDIA 5B is a game set inside Evil Leafy after Freesmart, Golf Ball, Tennis Ball and Rocky are swallowed by her. It's actually pretty creepy. A red ground, grey skies, spike death traps... and what is with that music?
  • There's an Evil Leafy maze game made by Michael for Halloween 2013. It's very amateur, but the fact that everything is an expanse of grey tunnels with the only goal being to survive as long as you can before Evil Leafy gets you can give a cheap little game like this the creepy factor. There's not even any audio to accompany it.
  • In BFDIA 6, it's revealed that Evil Leafy can be summoned to your location by chanting her name, as WOAH Bunch learnt the hard way, leading to that team to suffer from sleep deprivation as they were on a dehumidifier pipe seesaw above a pool of water constantly submerging the team's members in water like being waterboarded.
• Needle and Spongy's death scene in BFDIA 5c: due to Spongy being impaled on spikes and Needle being used to slap the rest of the W.O.A.H. Bunch to the top of the cliff, Yellow Face gleefully throws a flamethrower down at them to put them out of their misery, believing that they could just recover her afterward. The resulting scene is disturbingly well-animated, and the silence makes the gravity of the situation even worse.
• In BFDIA 5d, Freesmart drive the Supervan through the Goiky Canal, which is over 500 miles, to get to Yoyleland. This means everyone on Freesmart dies multiple times throughout the journey as they are travelling through water with no oxygen to breathe, meaning they have to be recovered multiple times. When they reach Yoyleland, thousands upon thousands of dead bodies litter the bed of the canal in the end. The fact that no music plays until the end of this part makes it more ominous.
• There's something hauntingly pristine about Yoyle City as all the buildings are largely intact, despite being abandoned for who knows how long.
• The replacement Tiny Loser Chamber W.O.A.H. Bunch built-in "Intruder Alert", as it's filled with handcuffs, crushers, chainsaws, and Flower's hideous face. Not helping is Nickel imagining himself inside the torture device. Fortunately, it was destroyed.
  • Also, Yellow Face in the intro for this episode: "I AM IN YOUR WALLS."
• BFDIA 9 has a lot of wonderful moments.
  • Yellow Face gets eliminated at the Cake At Stake, but instead of being flung to the WTF he instead gets trapped in the Eiffel Tower and dies from being submerged in acid instead, with his screams being heard while he does so.
    • Also the way the acid itself seems to ooze across the ground like a Blob Monster.
  • The fact the challenge veers more into Deadly Game territory as the challenge is to perform charades in compactors and the other teammates need to guess what you're doing so that you get teleported out, the compactor is reset and the guesser who guessed correctly gets teleported into the chamber. The first team that gets completely killed off is up for elimination.
  • Anyone that gets crushed by the compactor gets sent to what is essentially hell, and the characters there are also animated in a very disturbing CGI artstyle (pictured above). It's also confirmed In-Universe that this does not normally happen when someone dies, though YMMV on whether or not that makes it worse.
  • Coiny spends the entire episode with the terrifying fate of being stuck in a cash register floating in space billions of miles away until he finally dies of asphyxiation.
  • Puffball Speaker Box mutilates Book for reading the word "lips" in the compactor chamber because she read Ruby's lips before in a case of Exact Words. What's left of Book are just her shreds to better sell her violent demise.
• BFDIA 10:
  • The hell dimension returns, and it apparently has a tighter grip around its occupants than whatever the standard BFDI afterlife is, given that cranking the HPRC is more difficult to do when recovering anyone who was sent there.
  • Fries kidnapping and convincing Bomby and later Needle to dig underground. This is surprisingly disturbing because you can tell that they clearly don't want to before getting sent into a trance-like state.
• BFDIA 11:
  • Ice Cube removing Pin's face because the latter prevented Ice Cube and Book from going to Match's dance party. What makes it more terrifying is that we get to see from Pin's perspective what it looks like, with the scene becoming progressively darker and the scene shutting off like an old TV and the last thing that she sees is Ice Cube sadistically smiling. It's also worth noting that she was generally fine mentally without her limbs but after becoming faceless, her sapience drops to slightly more than that of Box's, putting her in an And I Must Scream Scenario.

IDFB

• In "Welcome Back", Evil Leafy shows up in the science museum for a split second after Tennis Ball said about borrowing the Wall Teleporter.
  • Golf Ball's flashback in the science museum, hiding away from a killer in IDFB 1. Not to mention that deep voice.
  • The stinger for the episode, Coiny approaches Fries and "deep fries" his breaths. And by "deep fries", we mean dunking his body into BOILING oil and screaming while Fries screams at him to stop, which we cut away from. Then there is Leafy, who is still Ax-Crazy and tries to stab both Fries and Coiny before being deeply disturbed by what she sees and hiding away.

Battle for BFDI/BFB

• Four casually mutilating Pin in BFB 1 just to demonstrate how twisted and sadistic he is!
• Lollipop scams Death P.A.C.T. with fork repellent, essentially exploiting their Honor Before Reason as the fork repellant at first repels forks as advertised in BFB 3. In BFB 4, the fork repellant is revealed to have a side effect as after a certain period of time, it starts to attract forks, and the forks start flying towards Four, meaning that Death P.A.C.T. was risking getting Impaled with Extreme Prejudice.
• The BFB eliminations in which a contestant is sucked up by Four. Bracelety's elimination is a special mention, as Four practically swallows her. Dora's elimination is also unsettling, what with her whole body being sucked slowly and painfully into Four as if she was being sucked into a black hole, complete with spaghettification.
  • Pencil's elimination, where she screams and gets sucked into Four in a split second.
  • Liy "restraining herself" by flipping her face to a realistic light switch in Fortunate Ben.
  • Even without Four, the eliminations are still unsettling. Case in point's 8-Ball, he flat out dies from getting crushed by the earth and the moon. While the death itself isn't scary, halfway through being crushed, his face goes to a teeth frown with his eyes spreading out, indicating he died sad. He gets better in BFB 10, but is sucked into Four not even a second after being resurrected. Loser gets eliminated as well, and gets trapped in a giant jawbreaker like Taco did, only this time inside-out meaning that Loser cannot hear anything outside.
• Speaking of sucking up, Pen's death in BFB 3 is violent and unsettling and does not match the overall sillyness of the scene.
  Bottle: And Pen is dead!
• Taco has to eat part of herself in order to survive being stuck in a jawbreaker in the stinger of episode 2. Also, as explained in Episode 7, sound can come inside the jawbreakers, but can't come out of them. Now, imagine being stuck in one like Taco was...
• There's something pretty creepy about the Jump Scare of the pentagon shaking around in the first few seconds of "Getting Teardrop to Talk".
• Pretty much the entirety of BFB 7. Loser getting trapped in an inside-out jawbreaker by Donut, the "data void" Robot Flower is in (and then it downloads a bomb), Remote getting hacked, and the subsequent glitches that follow, Loser flying off into endless space, Stapy popping Balloony's head, Woody ripping Foldy in half (this is his first kill by the way), Naily impaling Bell just to take the Liar Ball from her (and Needle doing the same thing to Naily off-screen), and, albeit very brief, the giant Four coming towards the screen in space. His small, spread-apart eyes (compared to his cartoony, big eyes) bring up uncanny vibes.
  • Also, notice how Fanny gets angrier and angrier as she rants toward Loser. It makes her sound serious and rather intimidating. This definitely falls into They Really Can Act.
• The ways the contestants try to bring Four back are usually silly (Pillow licking Lollipop, Bottle hitting Golf Ball with a club, Gelatin bending a fork...). Then Pie tries breaking one of X's legs to make the shape of Four. Remember that the leg X had broken was the same one he had bandaged up in “Fortunate Ben”. The last attempt is Firey stabbing Donut with a syringe and then getting whatever is inside of him through it. Sure, they got Four back (albeit liquified), but it looked like they sucked out some of Donut’s cherry filling along with it. He looks like an onion ring when Four is sucked out.
• Fanny's death by decapitation in BFB 11 is rather unsettling. Rather than dying violently or cartoonishly like other contestants, she just lays there lifelessly after she is killed. In BFB 12, it's revealed she survived her decapitation, but she has to drag her head on the ground because it's only connected to her body by its cable. The way she looks when decapitated is both disturbing and funny.
• Eraser's fear of pentagons. Sure, it's mostly Played for Laughs, but it can be pretty unsettling, e.g. the stinger of BFB 12.
• In BFB 14, several arms wriggle out of Four's mouth one by one like snakes as the background gets darker and the music slows down. Fortunately, it's just the arms of Death P.A.C.T. members inside Four.
• In Fortunate Ben, Four literally tears X's leg off off-screen.
  • Also, during the airplane challenge, Four says that no flying contestants are allowed and flat-out obliterates the flying contestants with no care. Until he gets to Puffball, to which Fries says to simply disable her. This causes Four to get angry and says "Fine!" as if he is annoyed at the fact that he can't kill contestants for his own personal gain.
• Ice Cube and Teardrop's "happy thoughts" in "The Four is Lava" are disturbing. Ice Cube thinks of her own friends burning for revenge. Teardrop's is her disturbingly smashing windows with a hammer, and Pillow tells her she can't do that, but smashes Pillow anyway. To make matters even worse, she screams.
• Four becoming even thinner than Donut did when he was sucked out of him and killing Basketball off-screen just because she called him pudgy! He resembles leafless branches.
  Four: Pudgy?! You think this is PUDGYYYYYY?!
• Four becoming next-level mad. Definitely the angriest we ever see Four. Holy crap. The sky turning red with the menacing angle and Four's eyes becoming black help sell the scene.
  Four: (absolutely furious) I. AM NEXT LEVEL. MAD.
• Four pulling four fingers out of Balloony's hand. It's just unexpected, and it sounds like Four is doing something questionable with him when taken out of context. Not to mention how he's sounding like he's in pure agony.
• Lollipop's head is made of candy, so it's fragile, and can break. This means the stick doesn't just hold the body, but it is.
• Four's acid trip-like mirage from getting hurt by Firey Jr.'s flames in BFB 16. It also borders on Funny.
• In BFB 14, you get to see characters get disintegrated and burned alive by lava on-screen, and there's not even a dead body. Imagine getting your head burnt off by that thing.
• In the stinger for Take the Tower, Lollipop has to put up with Ruby and Leafy's awful singing, and she falls into a Sanity Slippage. Doubles as a Funny Moment.
  Lollipop: Get me outta here... Somebody help...
• Gaty burning to death in BFB 15. Despite it being only on-screen for a second, her scream is feminine compared to her voice actress' vocal dissonance.
• In Getting Teardrop to Talk, Flower gets Black Hole to get the cyanide jar to open by moving him close to the earth, nearly causing the world to end.
• In Take the Tower, when Leafy is faced with fighting Firey, she begins to suffer some sort of trauma. Some viewers have commented that it looks like she is having a panic attack.
• Much like BFB 7, BFB 19 is also chock full of Nightmare Fuel. Lollipop's continued (and arguably worse than before) torment in the beginning, Woody burning to death (all on screen, no less and animated with more detail than usual), X still burning (and he survives it), and the Have Nots burning to death near the sun. The cherry on top? This is Loser's first death. Ye gods...
• BFB 20 has the Have Cots (except Lollipop, who got obliterated by a laser from Leafy and Teardrop, who's made partly of oxygen) nearly suffocate due to lack of oxygen in space.
  • Flower whispering at the end of this episode
  Flower: Saave yourself...
• In BFB 21, one of the Have Nots' gifts is a cardboard box for Woody. Woody ends up getting really angry, thinking that he's not being treated right, and he scrunches up the box. While doing so, his face turns red and a kettle sound effect plays He's that angry.
  • To top it all off, the fact that in this scene it's Woody, the one who is normally a shy coward and is afraid of everything, actually being downright livid makes matters even worse. O.O.C. Is Serious Business indeed.
• At the end of every Battle for BFB episode, we get to hear what it's like in the BRB. It starts off with just Balloony screaming combined with metallic clanging. As the episodes go on, more of the eliminated contestants join in this screaming.
  • It gets even worse. In BFB 21, it is revealed that not even Loser can stand it.
  • We find out in BFB 22. It's a big rotating building in the sky, spinning the eliminated contestants around in cages. While it's not as bad as isolating others, it still tortures the characters with their fears, though they seem to get over it once Blocky releases 58 pages of Donut's diary online.
• During Woody's testimony in BFB 22, both Leafy and Taco look really creepy. Leafy has red eyes, and Taco has snakes coming out of her shell (although they were actually jumping rope together). Four, on the other hand...
  Imaginary Four: (demonic voice) Hello everyone. Protect my diary, or I will eat all of you!
  • His eyes also get really crazy with that last part.
• In BFB 23, Purple Face escapes from his box, chasing the members of the Have-Cots around the warehouse and eventually eating them. Alive (although they manage to protect themselves from the stomach acid with Flower's sweaters).
  • We also see a talking Portable Music Player, and Gelatin dissolve alive in acid.
• Four's ultimate Sanity Slippage moment in BFB 28, in which he sinks into the desert, contaminating it with his presence. The ominous way in which he speaks before doing this sells it.
  Four: The Announcer was right; we lost all control...
  X: Four... It'll be okay.
  Four: BUT! In the end, this show is MINE! So it's time for you to leave! You can't make this show without me!
  Announcer: Wanna bet?
  Four: Just watch this: I'll be a constant presence! You'll NEVER get rid of me! (Merges into the floor) Mwahahahahaha, I'll be here FOREVER!
• The face Four creates when he talks through the earth in the BFB finale. Something about it looks a bit... off.

The Power of Two

• In BFDIA 5d, Yellow Face's corpse was glued down in the desert. Cake encounters its skeleton ten years later in Gardening Zero. Also, any water it touches is apparently cursed. The Funny Plant immediately disintegrates upon coming into contact with the cursed water.
• Snowball can be considered unhinged in TPOT 3 and TPOT 4. Especially towards Grassy. In TPOT 3, he punches Grassy so hard that Grassy flies through the sky and off-screen. Then, when Grassy returns, Snowball ties him up and tries to get Two to punch him next. In TPOT 4, he lights Grassy on fire! What makes it worse? No one, except Basketball, finds anything wrong with it.
• Marker eating a cheesecake covered in glass in the stinger for TPOT 3. He also catches on fire in TPOT 4 after accidentally coming in contact with Grassy.
• Puffball forcing Death P.A.C.T Again to make a Sadistic Choice, either save Ice Cube from slowly dying horribly and painfully or complete their challenge, in TPOT 4.
• Lightning zapping Puffball in TPOT 4.
• Pillow's moments are Played for Laughs, but imagine a human genuinely acting like her.
• While the actions of the narrator of "Just Not's Journey" are Played for Laughs, it doesn't change the fact that it's relentlessly tormenting Just Not for seemingly no reason and even tries to get them to commit suicide. Unlike all of the other nightmare fuel characters on this list, the narrator is a narrator, so there's absolutely no hiding from them either if they decide to torment someone.
• Pretty much the entirety of TPOT 7. It is considerably Darker and Edgier than most of the show, and although it was played for Black Comedy, Tree's death is likely to scare even the teens.
• Lightning's reaction to getting eliminated in TPOT 7. He zaps multiple people in anger and then flies up into the sky, exploding into a huge thunderstorm and destroying seven landmarks.
• TPOT 9 involves a full-blown Zombie Apocalypse that strangely gets played mostly straight after a zombified Barf Bag begins to infect the other contestants, leading the survivors to flee from their former friends to avoid getting turned themselves.
  • What makes TPOT 9 more terrifying is the fact that this is the first time a host truly has no control over the challenge, even the lava incident from BFB 14 doesn't cross this threshold because Four was never in any real danger from it.
  • Pillow's Ax-Crazy personality is taken up a notch when she starts murdering the rest of her team one by one, since she believes the challenge is really about "two teams—completely wiped out—". She eventually decides to cover herself in Book's remains and, on top of that, gets a chunk torn out of her by Price Tag. The fact that it wasn't enough to kill her makes her look and feel terrifying.
  • Two in their zombified state is... unnerving, to say the least. They're locked into a blank pose with an equally blank facial expression; the few lines they get before we actually see Niall Burns whisper them in a voice that barely sounds anything like them; they glide instead of walking; they only seem to care about teleporting the contestants to the elimination area, and they get more sloppily-drawn between the two times they appear — almost as if their appearance is uncontrollably degrading.
  • The mere fact that if the cure was never found, then this could've been the end of the BFDI series, is highly unsettling, seeing as the bad ending could’ve easily happened had it not for some lucky coincidences including Teardrop dying to save Goiky. Had they not happened, the zombies could’ve easily overtaken Goiky and the whole series would probably end right there.
• In TPOT 10, we finally find out where the eliminated characters are. An upside-down world with no direct way out.
  • And what makes this so terrifying? Simple: There's something about it that wasn't in any elimination place: The isolation. The contestants are put into their own rooms, and literally no one else is there. They are left alone with their thoughts.

Misc.

• In "Happy Birthday, Battle for BFDI", the contestants literally eat their friend and fellow competitor, Cake. His line, though recycled from previous episodes, really sells it.
  Cake: I CAN'T HANDLE THIS TORMENT ANYMORE!!!
• The BFDI Short Claustrophobes Nightmare has Book, Match, and Donut get stuck in a claw machine that naturally has claustrophobic results, but the real Nightmare Fuel comes from the fact that the claw machine is essentially indestructible with even Four and X taking a crack at breaking it. Even when it is finally destroyed, it comes at the life of those who were stuck in it, and recovering them just causes the claw machine to recover as well keeping them trapped. The worst part about all of this however comes from the fact that the machine is apparently an Immortality Inducer, as even after the heat death of the universe, when everything else (minus the announcer for some unexplained reason) is gone, they are still trapped in the claw machine.

---