Nightmare Fuel / Conan the Barbarian

From Howard's stories directly to your bad dreams!

• The Slithering Shadow/Xuthal of the Dusk: Let us introduce you to Xuthal: a palace-City in the middle of an endless desert, inhabited by depraved Lotus eaters that tend to look dead most of the time. And what about its god, Thog? The child of a Blob Monster and an Eldritch Abomination made of darkness, so dazzling that it's impossible to look at properly. Oh, and he frequently wanders the corridors of the palace looking for prey. And judging by Thalis' fate, being captured by him is NOT pleasant.
  • Thalis mentions that the only thing that gets the citizen out of their lotus eating phase is a youthful woman like her, doing things even their artificial dreams can't create in level of depravity. And she warns that this may be Natala's fate, if they are captured.
  • After beating Thog so bad it retreats in a deep well Conan slowly walks back to free Natala, looking as good as someone that fought an Eldritch Abomination can look. For a moment he keeps muttering about hearing the people of Xuthal coming but Natala realizes this is not Conan's Super-Senses at work, he is half-delirious from the beating he took.
• The room with the hidden Giant Spider in The Tower of the Elephant.
  • On a similar note, Conan and the Spider God: a dungeon inhabited by a bull-sized Tarantula and her children.
• Homophobia aside, Tascela from Red Nails is a disturbing character with heavy Psycho Lesbian tendencies. Not that the city of Tlazitlan itself is better: a giant palace infested with murder-obsessed psychos, monsters and forbidden secrets...
• The monster summoned by Thoth-Amon against Ascalante in The Phoenix on the Sword: Part mummy, part ape, and so monstrous that it can destroy the soul of a man just by gazing into his eyes, as happens to Ascalante and almost happens to Conan himself. Even Thoth-Amon doesn't look at it directly.
• The Gray Apes in general and similar monsters all have the bad habit of appearing with the most horrifying background in the stories. Especially Thak in Rogues in the House, who is smart enough to use deadly traps from his master
• The restless giant slug in The Hall of the Dead is quite jarring: it can't be killed by conventional means, never tires and spew acid.
• The wraiths in The Castle of Terror are quite pitiful at first... then they go One-Winged Angel and merge into a giant, monstrous multi-headed thing with claws and legs which proceeds to slaughter a group of Stygians in a Grand Guignol-esque fashion.
• The boar-like demon in The Snout in the Dark.
• Khosatral Khel, the titular The Devil in Iron. The whole part when Conan is in his palace and must rescue Octavia sounds like a written Survival Horror against an invincible enemy. One of Conan's few Oh, Crap! moments.
  The Cimmerian leapt back, quivering in every sinew... His fingers had brushed not flesh, but blasphemy: it was a body of living iron that opposed his.
  • Notably, a description of Khosatral Khel is the quote for the Humanoid Abomination page.
• The many horrors of The Scarlet Citadel, including a Blob Monster with tentacles and a toad-like head. Oh, and it cries and laughs like a mature woman.
  • Tsotha-lanti, wizard and true power of Koth. Allegedly born from a a woman that was assaulted by a demon, Tsotha-lanti empowered his dark arts by offering women to Set, then he discovered the Scarlet Citadel and the hell in the dungeon to experiment and make horrible creatures in the well. He boasts that he's going to skin King Conan's concubines alive and turn their flesh into scrolls upon which he will document his triumphs.
  • Fridge Horror: the toad-headed tentacled thing that cries and laughs like a woman? Given that Conan's world is part of the Cthulhu Mythos, it may be one of the nameless race known only as the Servitors of the Outer Gods; the daemon-pipers and flutists who perform music for Azathoth itself.
  • The least horrifying thing Conan finds in the dungeon is a giant snake that he knows he stands no chance against. Only because at least he knows that it's certain death instead of whatever the blobs and ethereal things are. Even His cellmate Pelias makes him so uneasy that while thankful for the help he brought to save his kingdom, Conan never wants to see him again.
  • Arpello's short rule of Aquilonia, first thing he does is ask heavy taxes just to enrich himself, when the merchants send representatives to negotiate they are beaheaded on the spot. Then his men starts raping and looting the kingdom like they are foreign army instead of the actual guards. When Tsotha-lanti and Strabonus are on their way Arpello doesn't even bother keeping that he isn't in their pocket secret he just laughs at the people's faces.
• Akivasha and her unseen cohort of night horrors in The Hour of the Dragon.
  • And then Big Bad Xaltotun himself, a preternaturally handsome Evil Sorceror trying to rebuild The Empire of Acheron, he was supposedly fully resurrected using the Heart of Ahriman, in truth the Heart never restored his body from his mummified state, but created the illusion of life to everyone, even to himself.
  • The way the nemedians and Valerius in particular treated the kingdom of Aquilonia, despoiling, raping, enslaving, torturing and mutilating its people, all the more horrible as the Aquilonians originally supported Valerius as a legitime heir to their kingdom after Conan's apparent demise.
  • From the same novel, the Ghouls in the forest and the four Khitans with their deadly staves.
• Conan's encounter with a Kraken in Conan of the Isles is of the worst kind, but then enters a giant shark.
• The finale of The Dagger of Flame, where a horde of ghouls rise from the depths and take over the citadel, forcing everyone to flee.
• The Black Stranger. Thoth-Amon must have taken lessons in Nightmare Fuel, seen how he psychologically tortures Count Valenso.
  • There's also the harrowing scene where Valenso has his niece's protegee, the young girl Tina, savagely whipped because he thinks she is lying about the Black Man.
• Thugra Khotan in Black Colossus: the darkest and most twisted example of a nightmarish stalker out there. Kotan is a long dead sorcerous overlord that found a way to cheat death and come back as a mummy. The one thing that he wants more than destroy Koth and rule Stygia back with an iron fist is to force Yasmela as his bride. Being a sorceror he uses his magic to come at Yasmela in her dreams to say just want he intends to do with her.
• The people who brutally tortured and killed a demigod in Iron Shadows in the Moon. The fact that they awaken to murder intruders when hit by the moonlight only adds fuel to the fire.
• The women-things of the titular The Vale of Lost Women, and the demon they worship. . . or serve. . . or are enslaved by (it's vague). Conan's explanation for how he was able to sword the thing to death ironically doesn't help: he states that "Demons of the Outer Dark" have to obey at least some physical laws if they want to visit our world, so they have physical bodies that can be injured or even killed. But that doesn't mean the thing itself is capable of being killed, and may just retreat back to the Outer Dark for a time before coming back. . .
• The People of the Black Circle: including the four inhuman sorcerers and the Master. Dear God the Master. Like Thugra Khotan the Master still has enough human cravings in him to find pleasure in breaking a woman into a Sex Slave, but he gets more time with his captive to mentally torture her by making her experience the rape and labor pain of her ancestor before Conan arrives. Then he magically pulls out the heart of one of his opponent and in his last moment try to kill his prisoner as a snake just to rob Conan of his victory.
  • The Black Circle of Ysma main power is hypnotism, where even their acolyte has enough power to order someone to kill themselves. Two of the inhuman sorcerors can mass hypnotize Conan's group so they advance to willingly get their head chopped by the sorcerers.
• The creature from the "The God in the Bowl". Even more scary because it's not fully described, allowing you to imagine its appearance...
  • It's heavily implied its a giant snake with a human head though
• The ferocious tribe that like to fossilize their enemies alive using The Pool of the Black Ones is unsettling. Then it turns out that the bottomless pool is the real adversary. It's alive... and mobile... and immense. Conan and company aren't safe until they're aboard ship, and even then they can see the mass questing along the beach, looking for them... Conan notices that the trees fall in the green water as if their stem were cut but they aren't floating back to the surface.
• The creature Yag-kosha in The Tower of the Elephant was written before 'evil things from space' became the Conan tradition, and in his case it turns out Humans Are the Real Monsters. The 'monster' has been tortured for decades, forced to teach black magic to Yara, the despicably evil human master of the Tower. Such was Yara's utter cruelty that Yag-kosha was not even allowed to die to escape his torment.

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