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Nightmare Fuel / Night Gallery

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  • The paintings shown on this show are creepy as hell. One particular example is Camera Obscura, supposedly a photograph in-universe, consisting of a collection of skulls staring at the viewer.
  • In "The Cemetery", the night Jeremy thinks his uncle is coming to get him. It's a dark, windy night. Jeremy is spooked by the Creepy Changing Painting and Portifoy's statement that he thinks the uncle can take care of his own business. He tries to get in touch with Portifoy and the police over the phone, but no one will agree to come. He pants and screams as the painting continues to change, showing his uncle coming for him. Finally, when the painting shows the living corpse of his uncle standing right outside the door, Jeremy, mad with fear, falls down the stairs, and dies from a broken neck. The door finally creeps open....revealing Portifoy, who staged the whole thing both to get his hands on the inheritance, and to get revenge on Jeremy for the death of his old employer. However, after Jeremy's burial, he's settling down to await his coming riches, but suddenly he notices that the painting has changed again... Except this time it's happening right away, and it's the NEPHEW rising from his grave. The camera keeps cutting between Portifoy's terrified face, and the painting which is changing to a new scene with each cut. Finally, someone slowly opens the door, and it cuts to black as Portifoy screams...
  • The ending of "Escape Route". A Nazi fugitive hiding in Argentina spends his days in a museum dreaming in front of a serene painting showing a man in a fishing boat, which he fantasizes about fleeing into to escape his miserable existence, which becomes an increasing obsession as he's recognized by an elderly Holocaust survivor, and targeted by Nazi hunters. Killing the old man, the fugitive flees into the museum with the hunters close by, and stops in front of the painting, pleading to be allowed to escape into the world of the painting... only to notice too late that the boat painting has been moved and the fugitive barely has time to scream when he notices what has replaced it. The hunters arrive seconds later, and seeing the fugitive nowhere to be found, thinks that their prey has escaped them... only for one of the hunters to think he hears a pained whimpering from somewhere far away, before moving on. The viewer is finally shown what painting the fugitive had found himself trapped in: the painting of a crucified Holocaust victim.
  • "The Academy": Imagine as a young man, you are sent to this place. You will never, ever leave this prison, which is bad enough, but your day is filled with punishing drills (for no ultimate purpose) and classes (education you will never apply in the real world you have been forever banished from). It's an academy, so there are no promotions (you arrive as a cadet and will die as one)... fifty or more years of hard work, which will accomplish absolutely nothing, stretch out before you...
  • "Lone Survivor": A ship finds a man drifting on the ocean in a lifeboat that impossibly seems to have come from the Titanic, which had sunk three years before. The man is amnesiac, but his true nature is gradually unraveled throughout the story; he was a crewman on the RMS Titanic, who cowardly tried to escape by dressing in female clothing and forcing his way onto a lifeboat, being the only survivor when the boats wires snapped and the boat fell into the water. What makes this really disturbing is this: the crew gradually begins to realize that not only is the man telling the truth, NO ONE EXCEPT HIM is real! The ship is in fact the Lusitania, sunk by the German Navy in 1915 and leading to the U.S entering World War I, and the crew are simply phantasms of who they once were, which they begin to realize when none of them can recall anything about their lives away from the ship. Suddenly, the ship is completely empty aside from the survivor, just as the German u-boat approaches. For his cowardice, he has been damned to drift from shipwreck to shipwreck, reliving maritime disasters for eternity, with no one to accompany him except the ghosts of history.
  • "A Question of Fear": An adventurer accepts a bet to stay in a haunted house for $15,000. It's eventually revealed to be a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax perpetrated by the man who made the bet, who reveals he's the son of a man the adventurer crippled while working as a mercenary. The climax is very disturbing, as the man reveals the adventurer has been drugged with a serum that will turn him into a giant, mindless worm, and when the adventurer remains skeptical, shows some very convincing evidence, including a slime trail leading to a closed door. Already unbalanced from the rest of the nights events, the adventurer decides to shoot himself rather than take the risk that the man was lying about the serum. He was, there was no serum.
  • "The Housekeeper" has a man use black magic to convince his homely but kind-hearted housekeeper to switch bodies with his beautiful but bitchy wife. There is so much horror attached: what does he intend to do with the housekeeper once she's in his wife's body?
  • "The Caterpillar" has been called one of the most frightening episodes in television history...by horror legend Stephen King, no less. It features the jealous Macy plotting to kill the husband of the woman he wants with an earwig placed on his pillow to gnaw through his brain — but the earwig gets placed on Macy's pillow by mistake. We are then treated to a graphic weeklong montage featuring shots of him crying and covered in sweat while tied to his bed and begging to die so his suffering can end (see the above image to understand how deep his agony is). After it's all over and the insect exits his other ear, the doctor tells him the earwig was female.
  • "The Flip-Side of Satan" has the tapes JJ plays for the radio station, which go from bizarre "music" to a tape that summons all the demons in hell, demanding that they take “the condemned” (JJ). The syndicated version adds flashes of the spirit of his deceased lover, the black carriage that is apparently coming to claim his soul, and the creepy-looking face that flashes on the screen occasionally.

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