Nightmare Fuel / Masters of Horror

Masters of Horror is obviously going to have some Nightmare Fuel, as it's a series of one-hour films by respected horror directors. But some of them just cross the line. Spoilers below.

---

• "Imprint": The episode is about an American journalist looking for a Japanese girlfriend whom he had promised to rescue from prostitution. While looking for her in Japan, he meets a young woman who tells him that the girlfriend (Komomo) is dead, and recounts how Komomo died. The woman was the child of an alcoholic and an abortion doctor. She was adopted by a Buddhist priest who molested her and inspired an obsession with Hell, and she later beat her father to death because he had raped her. She had to become a prostitute and befriended Komomo, but stole the Madam's ring and planted Komomo's hairpin to frame her. The Madam tortured Komomo and forced her to confess, and after the torture, the young woman killed Komomo. She did this to save Komomo from Hell: by having such an evil friend, Komomo would be damned, and the young woman had planted the hairpin to sever their friendship and free her from damnation. At the end it is revealed that her mother and father were brother and sister, and that the young woman has a parasitic twin on her head that convinced her to plant the ring. The woman also begins to speak in Komomo's voice...
• "Jenifer" is disturbing in many ways. Firstly, it's about a feral blonde succubus with a horrific Nightmare Face but a stunning body, who manipulates those who pity her. Not to mention how she is found devouring a cat, neighbor child, and an employer's teenage son (the latter still being alive at the time). And just to make things worse, the segment ends with Jenifer moving onto another guy, thus starting the cycle over again...
  • Jenifer (the titular succubus) basically acts like a demonic version of a brood parasite. She gains a male victim's sympathy by presenting a pathetic state; after she insinuates herself into his life, he finds himself unable to stop thinking about her, and is drawn to care for her (which eventually escalates into intrusive sexual thoughts). She gradually consumes his every waking moment, getting rid of his friends and family by murdering them or driving them away with her increasingly violent behavior. Once the victim is isolated, she continues to follow him everywhere, killing everyone he meets (out of envy). Abandoning her won't work, and invariably leads to more violence. When the victim finally turns on her and tries to kill her, she is rescued...by her next victim. It's a form of predation that's as foolproof as it is horrifying.
  • This Jenifer is actually worse than her comic book counterpart from So Hideous, My Love, a story that appeared in a 1974 issue of the comic series Creepy. That version was just as hideous and murderous as the live-action incarnation, but the art style gave her a certain Ugly Cute appearance. The TV version gets no such mercy.
• "Family" from the second season is also deeply disturbing. It's supposed to be dark comedy, but the particularly twisted take on Unreliable Narrator (Harold hallucinating sexually explicit conversations that clearly were not happening) creeps one greatly. And that's not even considering, you know, Norm from Cheers melting corpses with acid and hanging out with skeletons while cheerful Jesus music plays. Oh, and it was directed by John "An American Werewolf in London" Landis.
• "The Screwfly Solution." The worst parts had to be severed breasts displayed like trophies and the overall notion that sex and violence are so closely linked.
  • There is also the Fridge Horror of what happened to the infant girls when the plague occurred.
    • Just picture a little girl confused and helpless when their father is about to murder her while under the influence of the Hate Plague.
  • The religiously themed violence of the misogynistic Sons of Adam cult is bad enough, but the casual cruelty and brutality of the males seemingly unaffiliated with the cult lends its own brand of horror, such as during Alan's flight, when one male passenger murders a female passenger just so that he can go to the toilet, while another woman passenger, who understandably reacts to the brutal murder she just saw with horror, is "controlled" by a male flight assistant who snaps her neck.
  • The Hate Plague works by essentially replacing the male sex drive with violent impulses on the most primal level, meaning that those infected begin lashing out at every woman they see, making no distinction between the elderly, the young, their own relatives... By the end of the story, one of the men regretfully tells his friend that he's been driven to kill his underaged son!
  • The "angels" some of the men mentions seeing are the actual source of the plague - they're part of an Alien Invasion, using the plague to force humanity into driving itself to extinction before they swoop in and wipe out of the surviving men. While never stated outright, it's possible the aliens also inspired the creation of the Sons Of Adam cult.
• "Right To Die." The dentist's receptionist/mistress being skinned alive, and being AWAKE DURING THE ENTIRE PROCEDURE! She has been given enough anesthesia that she's not in pain and is not really aware of what's happening to her, but the fact that she's awake throughout the process pushes the whole scene deep into Nightmare Fuel territory.
• "Sounds Like" is probably one of the creepier episodes due to the slow-paced source of the horror. There are no monsters or killers to run away from, it's just the main character slowly growing mad because his sense of hearing keeps getting better and better and everything around him becomes intolerable.