Nightmare Fuel / Fighting Fantasy

• A lot of the illustrations swung this way, considering they more often than not depict the many, many monsters of all sorts out to kill you and feast on your flesh, if not worse.
• Of particular note is Beneath Nightmare Castle, which also had some genuinely disturbing monsters, and a scene in which the player has to slaughter a gang of children armed with knives. Many of the deaths the player can suffer also come under this trope. Beneath Nightmare Castle was notable in that they couldn't print one of the illustrations drawn for the book — namely, that of a woman with tentacles emerging from her mouth — because it was deemed too disturbing for children.
  • The book also features Xakhaz, the Big Bad, who could be the page image for Lovecraftian Superpower - he's a nightmarish Eldritch Abomination with a body cobbled together from dozens of different creatures, including humanoids, beasts, giant insects, and something with tentacles. On top of that, he's immortal, meaning that you need some sort of weapon that can destroy the unkillable part, which is the "real" Xakhaz.
  • The Spiked Maiden, who appears on the cover of the original edition, isn't a real villain at all - she's the daughter of the local Baron, and has been enslaved by the malevolent Armor Of Spikes, which is using her body to slaughter anyone unlucky enough to cross her path, while the girl herself remains fully cogniscant, with her unarmored head begging for forgiveness and screaming at the armors victims to flee.
  • The Luminous Warrior, a Knight in Shining Armor, turns out to be a giant, horrific slug crammed inside a suit of plate armor.
• Razaak, the Big Bad of Crypt Of the Sorceror, turns out to be the single strongest villain in the entire franchise, dwarfing everyone who isn't an outright God, including Zanbar Bore, Zarridan Marr, Balthus Dire, Zagor, the Snow Witch, the various sorcerors, warlords and monsters fought until this point were barely a warm-up! Razaak is a hideously deformed undead sorceror who was only barely defeated once before, being sealed away inside his own tomb, only to be released centuries later, and immediately resuming his work at taking over the world. The only way to kill his for good is by using his own sword against him, which the player has to find first, and even with that, just surviving his magic is a challenge of it's own. And if you do, you're in the range of his Touch of Death.