Peter Gabriel is no stranger to nightmarish imagery in his music, as his former band can attest to during and since his time there.
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- "Moribund the Burgermeister", an introductory track about a mysterious sickness afflicting the village making the inhabitants thereof convulse. And there's also the chorus being backed by the eerie, watery synths:"No one can tell what all this is about,
But I will find out. I will find out. I will find out." - The Glowing Eyes of Doom image from the innersleeve
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- The "melting face" cover for his third album◊, and the similar covers for the related singles "No Self Control"◊ and "Games Without Frontiers"◊.
- "Intruder" introduced the gated reverb to great effect, and was bookended by the grating glass cutter sounds. There is also the creepy near-whisper for Gabriel's singing selling the paranoia that the narrating intruder knows his way of breaking into homes.
- "I Don't Remember". The song, at least on the album (the video uses a heavily edited live version) is nightmarish enough on its own, but the video... Have fun trying to get used to leather couches again.
- “Family Snapshot”, inspired by the JFK events, sung from the perspective of an assassin about to kill a politician. Also qualifies as Tear Jerker.
- "Lead a Normal Life" is creepy in a more understated way, a sunny melody juxtaposed with Gabriel's howls. The brief lyrics about someone who's been placed in a mental health facility are more sad than anything, but combined with the music the effect is pretty uneasy.
- In-Universe, the narrator of "Biko" is so disturbed by the titular figure's murder that he can only dream in red.
- The cover art for Security◊.
- "Shock the Monkey" has a discordant interplay between a "real world", where Peter portrays a CIA/MKUltra-type businessman, and the bizarre "modern primitive" world, where he portrays a shaman, that the two wound up colliding towards the end.
- “The Family And The Fishing Net”. The lyrics sound like a crazy Pagan ritual involving sacrifices and cannibals. But really it’s a metaphor for the ridiculous rituals and superstitions of weddings.
- "Mercy St." is probably his most nightmare-fuelled song, and actually contains many word-images that wouldn't be out of place in a Gothic horror film— it is in fact an ode to the suicide of poetess Anne Sexton.
- "Milgram's 37". For starters, it's named for the number of subjects in an infamous social psychology experiment, and it has a foreboding percussion with the recurring line "We do what we're told".
- Peter Gabriel's various CG versions of himself in the music video for "Steam". This one takes first prize.
- The music video for "Kiss That Frog" might be even worse, due to the bizarre, gross textures of the video's CG and that it seems to be a twisted retelling of The Frog Prince if the frog was a stalker, shifting to a black and purple form that's especially horrid, and at multiple points the frog eats the woman alive.
- "Darkness" starts with a simple, blippy rhythm intro and then out of nowhere comes this distorted, screeching howl, and the lyrics throughout don’t help anything. The entire song sounds like a twisted, bleak, industrial lullaby.
- The music video for "The Barry Williams Show" gets pretty creepy when the audience in a Jerry Springer-esque show suddenly begin to bleed until the entire stage is literally flooded with their collected blood. To top it off, the actor portraying Barry Williams (Christopher McDonald) is left stranded on a raft in the middle of it all until falling in at the end.
- The bridge to "My Head Sounds Like That".
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- The cover art is a black and white photo of Peter with his hands on his head, but it's been digitally manipulated to look a bit off when you examine it closely: Most obviously, his left hand is in a physically impossible position, as the corresponding arm is pointed straight down. Meanwhile his right hand seems to be merging with his face, while his right eye seems to be attached to his right pinky finger (or else the finger is semi-translucent).
