Nightmare Fuel / Halloween Horror Nights

"You'll never sleep again!"

— Tagline from 1997's event

Yes, the quote on top is not joking. While every single aspect about Universal's Halloween Horror Nights is basically high-octane Nightmare Fuel, there are plenty of specific examples we can describe of things that, well, stick out to us in particular when it comes to this trope.

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General

• The Director. An Ax-Crazy snuff film director who lets his actors get only one take. He calls it a short take.
• Lady Luck's monster form. She'll turn into this whenever you lose.
• Eddie Schmidt. While he was shafted in the year 2001 due to 9/11, his backstory and eventual return as an icon still makes him downright terrifying. A full blown psychopath who runs a chainsaw gang hellbent on causing as much carnage and chaos as humanly possible. According to his lore, he is a movie buff obsessed with slasher movies, hence his love for chainsaws. He was supposed to appear in the attraction called RUN, which was a gameshow type of attraction where the only goal is to survive Eddie and his gang. Eventually, he returned in 2006 for Sweet 16 with an attraction called RUN: Hostile Territory. Basically, it is like Hostel, but worse because Eddie is running this murder-for-hire business. Oh and to top it all off, he's Jack the Clown's brother.
  • Here's a picture of what Eddie looks like.
• Fear.
• Jack the Clown, mostly if you have a fear of clowns.
• The Caretaker. Not only does he look creepy, but he will ensure that you die feeling as much pain as possible, due to his desire to perform "living breathing autopsies".
  • One of the particular promo images of the Caretaker certainly sticks out as, well, frightening. (Hence why we originally used it for this page).
  • Back in 2002 they slapped this image on billboards all over Orlando. No one in that town slept well that year.
  • It should also be pointed out that on some of the billboards they even had his eyes glowing soullessly white.
• The famous promo art from HHN 1997◊ which depicts a creepy little goblin biting the eyelid of some man.
• The promo art for the 1999 year◊ featuring a close-up of an undead mummy's face qualifies too.
• Then there's also the 1998 promo art◊.
• Heck, even the art for the 1992/1993 years◊, showing a pumpkin getting chainsawed counts.
• Much of the music used during the event. (Thank you very much, Midnight Syndicate.)
• The whole "Terra Cruentus" world from the 2005 event (set inside Islands of Adventure). It's a world that literally operates off of the "sacrificing" of victims, as basically everything in that world needs blood, including for the soil, harvesting, and for the creation of weapons. So naturally, the murdering of people is commonplace there.
  • The 2005 website fittingly describes it as "A horizon of horror you were told exists only in nightmares." and, "A world that the practical mind refuses to see, the rational mind will not accept, and the stable mind dismisses as impossible."
  • On a side note, we should add that really much of the 2005 website is pretty heavy nightmare fuel, with its rather disturbing descriptions of the different sections of Terra Cruentus as well as creepy music and occasional jump scares to boot. You can find an archived version of it here.
• 2008's Reflections of Fear website was a full-blown interactive story, focusing on a fictionalized "origin" of the Bloody Mary legend. The story follows Dr. Mary Agana, a psychologist, attempting to cure her patients of their fears through a dangerous experimental therapy - place them in dangerous situations where they're forced to face their fears, or face deadly consequences. However, one of the experiments really does end up killing a patient, and Mary begins to realize she enjoys watching her victims suffer and eventually die, leading her to set the experiments up with no possible chance for her victims to escape them. The site decays right along with Mary's mental health. Her pristine lab becomes a dark, chaotic mess. Her professional notes turn to childishly morbid scribbles. The worst part has to be her narration, which go from a desperate bid to maintain control over herself, and fully giving herself over to her sadistic pleasure, with the glee of a kid in a candy store. The humming and giggling and moaning peppered throughout does not help.
• 2009's Ripped from the Silver Screen website also had an interactive story, focusing on the dark history of the Universal Palace Theater. Stories such as the severed finger found in the hot dog, the rowdy teenagers that disappeared in the sewer, the deformed dolls and toys, the binge drinker that got electrocuted, the man talking on his cell phone getting trapped in the balcony area, the bride-to-be ending up drained of blood, the obnoxious man getting mauled by a werewolf and the disappearance of aspiring actress Evelyn Crane. But the one story that sticks out is the story of the year's icon: Julian Browning. During a 1940 re-release of The Phantom of the Opera, Browning got in a scuffle with a rude theater patron that ended with the patron tossing his flashlight and tearing the screen. Angered, Browning tried to retrieve the flashlight, only to get tangled in the sandbag ropes that were a leftover from the theater's time as an opera house and was slowly strangled to death. Since then, the ghost of the usher has been seen prowling the lobby, aisles and catwalks of the theater...usually whenever something goes horribly wrong.
  • There's also interactive model of the Universal Palace Theater created by the Universal Studios team. It is essentially a small scale model of the theater with dolls representing the victims of the incidents that haunted the theater, including the Usher.
• The houses at Singapore and Japan deserve more attention. The houses and scarezones are not only based off of movies, games and TV shows, but are also based off both countries' urban legends and folklore. For example, there was one house based off of a story of a subway train that goes through a tunnel that was dug under a cemetery. Expect a lot of angry ghosts coming out the train's windows. Another house tells the story of a beauty parlor that disfigures and turns women's faces into pure nightmare fuel.

Commercials

• 1997: This ad is rather tame compared to the ones below, but nonetheless still contains the unpleasant imagery of a small goblin-like creature lifting up a man's eyelid and then biting into it.
• 2000: A couple is shown walking into a photo booth, and as they have their pictures taken, they are suddenly attacked and killed by "Jack the Clown"; which is shown in a twisted variation of the Photo-Booth Montage.
• 2001: Jack the Clown sinisterly watches as a group of people wonder where he is, just before a chainsaw maniac bursts out of a window and attacks them.
• The radio ads for Halloween Horror Nights 13 qualify too. Especially the Coca-Cola radio ad. The victim screams loudly while getting killed and tortured by the Director.
• The commercial for HHN 18 where Bloody Mary is shown coming out of the mirror and screaming bloody murder.
• 2002: This is where the ads really start to get scary.
  • The first commercial is done in a very quiet and creepy manner as "The Caretaker" is shown picking out which tool he will use to dissect his victim alive with, via "eenie meenie minie moe". Upon uttering the last "moe", he picks up the chosen weapon, which looks like a dreadful combination of a surgical clamp and a pair of garden shears. The victim then silently gives an Oh, Crap! look before the information for the event is given, with the ad's quiet mood then being broken as it ends with a Jump Scare.
  • The second commercial features a couple walking down an ominous dark alley, not noticing that they're being watched. The wife then briefly suspects that something's up; only to soon have that suspicion confirmed when The Caretaker closes in on them with his surgical clamp, followed by the wife's scream.
  • The third commercial has The Caretaker creepily messing around with the toes of his dead victims, while doing the "This little piggy..." rhyme.
• 2003:
  • Perhaps the scariest out of all of them, the first commercial features "The Director" forcing a jester to smile by impaling two hooks into each side of his cheeks and then pulling said hooks upwards. A single tear is briefly shown coming out of the jester's eye before The Director moves closer, and the last shot is of a jester bell that has a drop of blood on it falling down.
    • Even more unsettling is how they pulled off the effect without actually harming the actor: by making a complete 100% replica of the jester's face out of silicone. The results are shockingly convincing.
  • The second one is not as bad as the first, but that's not saying much. It shows The Director filming a victim he's placed in a Electrified Bathtub. He films the victim's sheer terror for a bit before turning on the bathtub, sporting a major Slasher Smile on his face as he does so. There's also a black and white version of the ad that has the victim screaming in pain as he's being electrocuted to death. Both of these ads were considered extremely controversial when they were first released, with many upset viewers attempting to get them taken off the air.
  • This trio of commercials, features The Director talking about how he makes snuff films because of a very twisted form of Doing It for the Art; along with showing some extra footage of the two above commercials.
• 2004: A man is shown walking into a completely white room, when arms and faces begin to start coming out of the wall. In terror, he flees out the door, only to find himself right back in the same room. This time, he sees a body bag get up and begin to unzip itself. In vain, he tries to run again but ends up in the room once more; where the walls now begin to bleed while he watches in horror.
• 2005: What appears to be a kind old lady reading a bedtime story to a young man turns out to not be what it seems when she pulls back the bedsheets to reveal that the man is laying on a bed of nails. The camera then shows that there's a giant anvil hanging right above him, which the lady ("The Storyteller") is about to cut; but not before wishing him "sweet dreams". The anvil then falls towards the man as he lets out a horrific scream just before being forced into the nails.
• 2006: A victim finds himself waking up inside a giant glass box. As a series of feet are shown walking towards his location, he panics and desperately tries to get out, but to no avail. Looking above him, he now sees the event's four icons above him, here to celebrate the "Sweet 16" of the event. The Caretaker is about to "cut the cake" before the commercial ends.
• 2007: A sketchy-looking carnival is shown as a man gets into a fortune teller tent. He sits in front of the fortune teller as said teller then brings out cards of Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Leatherface. The man, puzzled, asks, "So what's my future?", to which the fortune teller then reveals himself as Jack the Clown, responding, "You don't have one!". Freddy and Jason then appear and briefly terrorize the man before Leatherface comes in for the kill.
• 2008: Bloody Mary is shown preparing herself (including using blood as her lipstick) as a man begins to summon her. As he says "Bloody Mary" the third time...you can imagine what happens from there. Along with that, an unaired version of the commercial ends with Bloody Mary appearing behind a female victim and then grabbing her by the throat and lifting her up as she desperately gasps for air.
• 2009: As the intermission song, "Let's All Go To The Lobby" plays, a trip to the concession stand goes horribly wrong as a man walks out to see that the area has been trashed, not noticing that The Wolfman and Chucky are hiding within the wreckage. He is then met with Billy riding in on his tricycle and announcing, "Let the game begin." Immediately after, the man finally notices The Wolfman and Chucky and screams as they lunge in for him. For the event in Hollywood, a different version of the commercial was made, which replaces The Wolfman with one of Jigsaw's pig-masked minions.
• 2010: A security guard patrols a warehouse filled with props from the event's past years until he notices a sole lantern acting strangely, realizing all too late that said lantern contains the personification of fear itself, which then busts out of the lantern and kills the guard.
• 2011: Frank Sinatra's "Luck Be A Lady" is heard as a much more sinister version of Lady Luck spins a victim on a wheel, laughing the whole way through before eventually revealing her true face.
• 2012: A group of people appear chatting together, before someone comes in and screams at them to run, with it being revealed that he's running from a horde of zombies. They all desperately run and eventually manage to trap the zombies behind a gate...before it's shown that on the group's side of the gate lie far worse monsters that are threateningly standing behind them. Cue Gory Discretion Shot.
• 2013: A group of people are once again shown, this time standing in the middle of a forest. To their terror, they see an army of monsters running right towards them. They get down on the ground, only to be confused when all the monsters run right past them. It turns out that those monsters were actually running away from a much bigger creature (one that's never shown). Via Shaky P.O.V. Cam, we see the creature moving right in for the group before the ad cuts to black. The commercial itself is actually a slightly shortened version of an advert that was used for Hollywood's event in 2010 and 2011.
• 2014: The Walkers are shown breaking into an airport and wreaking havoc, with the commercial ending with one of them about to kill a Screaming Woman. The radio ad for the event acts a prequel to this, themed as a Distress Call a plane flight attendant is sending out, saying that all of the plane's passengers have been turned into the zombies and that she and the captain have locked themselves in the cockpit. Shortly after, the zombies can be heard breaking in, with the screams of the flight attendant quickly following.
• 2015: A couple is shown strapped to some chairs that's on top of an oversized spin board, before being greeted with "Chance", a demented-looking clowngirl, giving them a creepy smile. She then walks off and begins to spin the two while a vinyl record plays a creepy-version of "Pop Goes The Weasel". It's shown that there's three cages the spin board could end up facing, one that has Freddy Krueger in it, one with Jason Voorhees in it, and one with a horde of Walkers inside. The spin board, along with the couple, end up facing the Walkers. Jack the Clown then emerges from the shadows and declares, "Looks like I win...again!", before releasing the undead monstrosities. As the Walkers close in on the now-screaming for dear life couple, Jack decides to also release Freddy and Jason just for the heck of it.
• 2016: A man screams in horror as the camera pulls back to reveal Twisty, Leatherface, Walkers, and Regan MacNeil, before moving to show "Chance" screaming with sinister excitement. An alternate version of the commercial released for the Hollywood event instead ends on Regan doing her infamous Exorcist Head move. It's best to lower your volume before watching both ads.
• 2017: This commercial, directed by Eli Roth, depicts a group of friends being led into a freaky-looking house party where things quickly take a turn for the worst as they come across the Grady Twins, Jack Torrance, and a woman struggling in a reverse-bear trap as Billy watches, before the group is attacked by the Piggy Man.
• 2018: A woman is wandering through the sensory-deprivation world from Stranger Things. She first comes across the television screen from Poltergeist, where a ghostly hand suddenly tries reaching out for her. She then encounters Micheal Myers, and finally the Demogorgon, which roars at her just as she screams.
• 2019: A party between friends goes awry as they all meet their demise in various ways. Two guys are pulled into the Upside Down where they see the Mind Flayer and a Demodog, which attacks them. Meanwhile, a woman is slain by a Tethered clone of herself. Finally, another woman preparing food in the kitchen suddenly has the lights shut off on her. She only gets a few seconds to wonder what's going on before Dracula yanks her away.
• The Storyteller in the Halloween Horror Nights: Tales of Terror ad. She looks friendly at first, until she's revealed to be a psychopath that's about to brutally murder a young man.
  • The horrific scream her victim makes just before an anvil drops and pushes him down into a bed of nails certainly doesn't make things better.
  • On top of all that, you can also hear some faint creepy singing in the background at certain points.
• The commercial for the Sweet 16 year. Waking up trapped in a glass box is certainly not a pleasant situation.
• 2023: A group of friends wandering the park come across an open doorway leading down to an eerie little shop that's not on the park map. When the group notice the occult symbol carved onto the table, all the candles are blown out by a mysterious force and they all find themselves transported to different locations. One woman finds herself alone in a dark corridor being menaced by the Infected from The Last of Us; the man of the group finds himself shackled to a chair and being menaced by a possession victim from The Exorcist: Believer; the third friend wanders a hall and is initially relieved to see her friend there... but she's not responding. She's in the Upside-Down, and the Vecna has set his sights on her.
• The commercials for the Universal Studios Singapore version of Halloween Horror Nights:
  • 2011: An aspiring actress arrives at a seedy-looking location for a film audition, where she ends up receiving far more than what she had bargained for as The Director comes out and terrorizes her while filming everything with his camera.
  • 2012: A couple is shown desperately trying to escape from a narrow space, and are then cornered by two demented figures, one of which takes the woman away. The man desperately tries to run after her, but is met with a dark Egyptian priest that breathes demonic bats at his face, knocking him out. Upon waking up, he sees that his girlfriend has been turned into a human-marionette by "The Puppet Master", who then offers the screaming man to "join his collection".
  • 2013: Not really containing much of a plot, this commercial consists of a series of shots depicting three twisted sisters going nuts and tormenting two victims.
  • 2014: A powerful world leader walks past an adoring crowd of citizens and into his office, where he shows his true self as he transforms into a demon while giving the camera a Kubrick Stare.
  • 2015: Probably worth noting that this one flat-out starts off with a viewer discretion warning. In it, the moon is shown being experiencing an eclipse that turns it into the "Blood Moon", which causes numerous dark forces to start appearing; which all eventually builds up to the graphic ending shot of a bloodied body being dragged away. Most notably of all, the commercial's stinger contains a very effective Jump Scare.
  • 2016: This ad is quite unrelentless, to say the least. A man is shown investigating a mirror... that a Mirror Monster suddenly appears out of and pull him in. The man finds himself inside a seafood restaurant, where he is attacked by the restaurant's diseased and zombie-like employees before being saved in the nick of time by a glamourous woman that not too long after reveals that she's actually a werewolf-like monster and attempts to kill him. After seemingly escaping her, the man ends up inside a morgue where the bodies start coming back to life. He attempts to dash towards the exit, but discovers that he's still trapped within the mirror and is then taken down by the inhabitants he came across earlier.
• These three commercials for Universal Studios Japan's HHN start off scary, but then very swiftly become Nightmare Retardant as, unlike all of the above ads, the victims shown in it are in the end hardly scared by the terrifying situations they get into.

Haunted Houses

• Possibly 2008's house of the year, Dead Exposure had one room that made about 75 percent of the people entering want to turn back. It involved about 20 zombie mannequins with two or three real ones. We'd also like to acknowledge this house's only lighting was from the timed flash of a "camera."
• The general idea behind the Scary Tales houses. Normally, you would associate fairy tales with innocence and safety. Not here. In these houses, they've been twisted and corrupted beyond belief.
  • The third Scary Tales house more so. The first two were basically just tongue-in-cheek Disney parodies set inside some wacky funhouse, but with Scary Tales 3, that's where things got truly dark and disturbing.
• For people obsessed with hygiene, the bathroom scene in the Psycho Scareapy houses.
• A scene where a screaming victim is having their spine ripped out has been used in several houses for good reason.
• Terror Mines involved groups of people going into a near-pitch black environment with all sorts of terrifying creatures lurking about. The only source of light was from a miner hat that was given to one person per group.
  • Did we mention that there were times when the light on the hat would flicker out?
• It's worthy of note that there was a house that was so unspeakably scary that the higher-ups actually pulled it at the last minute, fearing potential guest controversies. It was known as Severe Fear and was originally planned to be at the 2003 event. For most of the house, you would have been all by yourself, and the scareactors would've been allowed to touch you as well as blindfold you. Read all about it here.
• The premise of 2014's Giggles & Gore Inc. alone is pretty chilling - that kidnapped people are taken to this factory and get gruesomely mutilated and then brainwashed to be evil clowns. The actual content of the house is not much better, as you get to see the mutilations and brainwashing up close.
• Hollywood's 2014 clown factory is just as nightmarish. Clowns 3D: Music By Slash tells the story of Sweet Licks Family Fun Center & Ice Cream Emporium, an old ice cream factory/roadside attraction run by clowns who turn people into "all natural, high protein" ice cream that's later sold to the public. It really makes you wonder if that strawberry ice cream really is made of strawberries.
• The La Llorona houses from Hollywood's Horror Nights events feature some particularly frightening scenes of the urban legend in question, such as her eating a little girl whole◊. Pictures from these houses have become very popular on the internet to use for creepypastas or other scary content. There’s a reason why it’s the current page image.
• Florida's Slaughter Sinema, while mostly dark comedy, does contain very disturbing scenes. For example, in one scene, you walk through a Chuck E. Cheese-esque restaurant where the kids ate something that made them...well, feral monsters.
• Holidayz in Hell turns eight beloved holidays into living nightmares, with the exception of St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween’s areas.
  • New Year’s Eve has skeletal men and women in tuxedos and dresses drinking champagne, skeletal babies, a demented Father Time and a creepy nurse.
  • Valentine’s Day has a psychotic Cupid with a butcher knife torturing couples in a tunnel of love with creepy Candy hearts
  • Easter. Where do we even begin?! For one; the Easter Bunny is creepy as hell and has a bat in his hand, the four Easter eggs feature a creepy bunny, a creepy smile, a PERSON’s arms and legs and a deformed marshmallow peep! And don’t get us started on those poor kids in the basket and the ones who get bullied by Easter Bunny suits!
  • 4th of July features a somewhat demented Uncle Sam, which isn’t that scary.. But ya gotta admit, the legless guy is kinda scary in a way..
  • Thanksgiving. For starters you have evil turkeys scaring you with tomahawks in their hands, a person is cooked like a turkey and all of the other people are killed in some way.
  • And lastly, Christmas. Not only does Santa have a demonic mask, but the trees are decorated with INTESTINES in place of tinsel!! Don’t even get us started on the scare zone his wife set up!

Scare Zones

• JP Extinction. Jurassic Park going haywire with the electric fences glitching out with huge sparks, Velociraptors roaming freely and popping out of the dense foliage, gruesome mutant half-human half-dino hybrids lurking through, and terrified JP scientists futilely trying to hide from all the insanity.
  • If you truly want to be scarred for life, take a look at some of the concept art and masks for this zone right here. And here.
• The Island Under Siege zone qualifies as well. Here, all of the Marvel super heroes have either been killed in battle or given up and fled. Super villains roam the streets with no opposing force to stop them, and the remaining police force has apparently been zombified. All this happens while the villain Carnage stands proudly atop a building, announcing his final victory against all good as the city falls into chaos.
• Treaks◊ and Foons.◊
• 2004's Field of Screams zone was definitely unsettling with its cornfield setting. Just imagine what it would be like to walk through there alone...
• The mutated people in 2003's Toxic City and 2009's Containment.
• The Path of the Wicked depicted the Wicked Witch of the West conquering all of Oz, and all the usual Wizard of Oz characters heavily twisted. A Not-So Cowardly Lion, a (literally) Ax-Crazy Tin Man, creepy munchkins, flying monkeys swooping down, and so on.
  • It's worth mentioning that the Scarecrow was also in the zone carrying around a backpack...with Dorothy's clothes in it.
• Then there was also Asylum in Wonderland, which, while actually a bit more playful than the typical scarezone, still managed to feel like a giant acid trip from hell, with its disorienting lighting and creepy background noises.

Shows

• For 2006, they had a show called The Arrival, which featured each of the four HHN icons at the time being brought back to wreak havoc. Each icon would kill a person in particularly gruesome way.
  • The Director repeated the "electrocution in the bathtub" stunt from the aforementioned 2003 commercial, but this time with a girl as the victim.
  • Jack the Clown had a man placed in a giant blender...and then proceeded to turn it on...
  • The Storyteller, with her scissors, goes in and brutally cuts a man's tongue out.
  • The Caretaker performed one of his "living breathing autopsies", happily ripping the victim's organs out one-by-one while he screams in agony, until he finally rips the victim's heart out.
• 2007's Carnival of Carnage, while a bit more comedic, had several examples of this as well. The storyline of the show was that Jack had "selected" several people to be in his carnival show, and knowing the nature of the event, you can probably imagine what happens to them before we actually tell you in detail.
  • Each victim is killed in a certain way, such as one being slowly shoved into a wood chipper, another chainsawed to death, while another had their head literally bashed to pieces by a sledgehammer.
  • Even a security officer attempting to intervene got placed on the classic rack device, which subsequently rips his torso in half, causing his intestines and blood to splatter out everywhere.

Studio Tour

• For 2006, the Director took over the Studio Tour and turned it into "Terror Tram: The Director's Cut." Guests were forced to embark - on foot - through various studio lots that had been taken over by Pavel Pranevsky's minions.
  • During the initial tram ride, a video was shown detailing the history of Pranevsky. Originally from Slovakia, he was expelled from his homeland after his first film, The Widow's Eye, shocked audiences. Before you watch, however, know that it actually uses footage from Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou, namely one of the most graphic sequences in movie history: a woman getting her eye slit open.^note According to the film's director, it's actually a dead calf's eye, with skin-bleaching and clever lighting making it resemble a human Watch at your own risk.
• In 2016, the Studio Tour told the story of Hollywood Harry aka Harold Kappowitz aka Koodles the Clown, a former circus performer turned unofficial mascot for Universal Studios after it opened in 1964. But he was reduced to becoming an unpaid street performer due to people's growing fear of clowns thanks to sensationalized news stories and unflattering depictions in the media. A few years later, he was banned from the property due to his increasingly erratic behavior. But he came back with a vengeance in 2016 with an army of other disenfranchised clowns and circus performers.

Queue Line Videos

• The one for Screamhouse shows a wide range of disturbing imagery mixed with unsettling police reports.
• The Cold Blind Terror queue video is extreme nightmare fuel. It combines some of the most horrifying and gruesome clips from movies like Day of the Dead and The Ring and adds on a disorienting effect to the clips combined with disturbing sounds. Viewer discretion is heavily advised.
• The queue video for Blood Ruins (second half of queue video here) again uses clips from different movies such as The Name of the Rose and The Cell, this time to give off a hopeless and apocalyptic feeling. The clips include (but not limited to), people being burned at the stake, someone's intestines being removed in the most painful way imaginable, and people being subjected to a wide variety of classic torture devices.
• The Demon Cantina queue video, especially the really unsettling sound of revving engines at the beginning and end of it. You may never look at (or hear) motorcycles the same way again.
• Special mention also goes to the queue video for The Skool. One of the scariest pieces of music you'll ever hear combined with clips from The Children of the Corn. Yeah, good luck with sleeping.
• In the Screamhouse: Resurrection queue video the Caretaker and his minions are shown literally ripping a young man apart internally and happily partying around with his organs. All while he's still alive. And you can assume there's no anesthesia involved here.