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Nightmare Fuel / Jam

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Chris Morris's Jam (TV)

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/screenshot_760.jpg
And this is just from the intro. Oh yes, there's much worse things to come.

  • Pretty much the entire show is this! The series, with few exceptions, is deliberately intended to make the viewer incredibly uncomfortable if not terrified. Unsurprising given that the opening more or less tells you it's about people who have totally broken down beyond all rationality.
  • The way the show is edited and structured is nightmare fuel all on its own. Shots are jerky, grainy, distorted almost to the point of being unwatchable at times and the tone jumps abruptly between funny to outright disturbing. The music is often relaxed and jazzy, but then switches to loud, blaring and screeching. The show often feels like a televised bad drug trip or decline into insanity (and adds to this atmosphere by featuring many deranged and unhinged characters and situations).
  • Symptomless coma. A horrible affliction that is invariably fatal and only seems to happen to healthy young people...oh, and the doctor is the one causing it...
  • Every intro to the show. The very first features a woman dancing to "techno" only to realise it's her baby's ECG.
    • One introductory scene has a man who wakes up and discovers he's just a head and a spinal column in a maggot-like body...
    • The intro featuring a man alienated from his friends and alcoholic (walking to work "all swig-faced"). His only respite from his messed up life is being regularly captured by "dung-breathed men" in broad daylight and forced to wrestle pigs on a farm in front of a crowd. Equal parts bizarre and disturbing.
    • But dear god, the intro to to the sixth episode. The first part shows a man feeding something kept in a locker some milk from a baby bottle. We don't get to see what it is, but just from looking at how horrified he is when he leaves, it's probably best if we didn't. But if you thought that was bad though, the second part gets worse. A LOT WORSE. It basically shows a woman dragging around a decomposing dog on a leash towards a playground, then she calls the children over to admire it! No wonder they were "deranged by what you're dragging round". And for added Fridge Horror, she locked the dog in a shed and forgot about where it went for 7 months! No wonder she was presented with that monstrosity pictured on this page upon opening the door long after it probably died of starvation.
  • The sketch where a man jumps into a wood chipper that sprays his bloody remains all over his ex's house (and into her face, as she was leaning out of the window).
  • The Gush.
    • The most disgusting part may be a throwaway line about how you know the victim's dying "when it turns red, then eventually black." Doubly so if you know what causes Black Blood in real life.
  • It has this effect on so many people that, according to The Other Wiki, Jam came 26th in Channel 4's top 100 scariest moments poll, beating actual horror works such as Carrie and The Silence of the Lambs.
  • The ending to the "Lizard Man" sketch - the husband becomes a hysterical, crying wreck...because there are lizards coming out of his TV.
    • Also the implication that the creepy guy (played very convincingly by Mark Heap) representing the TV company is somehow tormenting the family deliberately.
  • There are multiple sketches involving dead children and child-sized coffins and they almost all involve weirdly cheerful adults, happy music and no real plot to the sketches. They're also pretty much completely devoid of actual humour (perhaps a postmodern comment on how child death isn't funny) and are very disquieting because of this. This particular troper found them easily the most disturbing out of everything in the show.
    • An extension of this is the sketch involving the missing child's parents appealing for him on TV. It ends with a "joke", with the parents singing part of their appeal, but it's still a thoroughly horrifying scene because it feels like a genuine appeal for a missing child and the actors appear distraught. If you could call it humour, it couldn't be any darker.
  • The "Sex for Houses" sketch, in which a couple cruelly send a mentally disabled relative to be abused for an indeterminate time by an exploitative perverted weirdo just to get money off a house he's selling.
  • Lucy Tiseman. A woman who is so desperately lonely that she begins deliberately hurting people to give herself opportunities to "befriend" them. She crosses the Moral Event Horizon when she lies to a woman that her son has died; the woman's sobs are pretty heartbreaking and it's all so this weirdo can give her "sympathy".

Yahtzee Croshaw's Jam (Literature)

  • The graphic description of Frank being dissolved.
  • The cultists in the mall. Particularly Lord Awesomo. This is what happens when psychotic hipsters form an equally psychotic cult. When tossing a cult member into the deadly jam, instantly killing him, all Awesomo has to say is "He died ironically. You older generation just don't get our sense of humor."
  • Imagine watching your best friend since childhood slowly lose his grip on sanity until he's actively killing people.
  • Hell, just the realization of how little time it took before seemingly most of humanity has gone completely starkers in the face of the jampocalypse in one way or another.

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