Nightmare Fuel / Pigs Is Pigs (1937)

• Piggy getting shoved and locked in a malicious stranger's house is a frightening concept even without the context of the short.
• The scientist in general is Nightmare Fuel. When he finally cuts loose with his evil grin, Piggy is appropriately terrified. Before the sequence is spelled out as a nightmare, you’re left to wonder just what his intentions are. Given he’s a pig in a fairy tale-like setting, it’s easy to assume he’s being fattened up for slaughter, one hell of a karmic death for a child so gluttonous who ate for pleasure.
• Piggy getting force fed for an entire day. If that was in Real Life, it would've killed him long before he explodes. He keeps squirming between and at food stations, fruitlessly trying to escape as the scientist cackles with glee at Piggy's agony. He has an Oh, Crap! that shifts from shock to genuine fear depending on the moment. When he's taken to the soup feeder, he violently squirms trying his hardest to get out of his restraints but is forced to keep eating. And his look of pure discomfort when he's brought before the pie and ice cream feeders is disheartening as Piggy recognizes his karma for earlier craving pies and ice cream.
  • Two stations that stand out are the banana and pie feeders. At the banana feeder, robotic hands push bananas out of their peels into Piggy's mouth that is being forced open, and Piggy looks like he's genuinely in pain from having to swallow them whole at such a rapid pace. The pie feeder also forces Piggy's mouth open repeatedly to force him to bite and chew the pie being forced into his face in a dark Call-Back to how he ravenously chomped into the pie of his own free will.
• When the feeding is done, Piggy has been fattened up to obscene proportions and it's not pretty.
  • He can't even walk properly, he's so bloated — an uncomfortable reminder of how obesity immobilizes you. He just sways wildly as he takes each step, ominously looking like he's about to tip over at any given moment. What's more, it doesn't even look like he could exit the house, he was too big for the door. The scientist cruelly laughing as he watches Piggy try to waddle away doesn't help one bit, and given what happens right after, he knew Piggy wouldn't resist the prospect of more food and knows he's about to die.
  • Piggy spends the majority of the short as an adorable, tiny piglet. After his feeding, however, he's an obscenely round blob that can barely walk and has completely lost his neck, his various visible body parts swollen and nearly indistinguishable from his fat. When he takes a final bite of turkey, he looks pretty inhuman as he just plops the leg into his mouth, completely filling it, and has a very vacant glaze to his eyes.
• As Piggy tries to leave the house, he takes a final bite out of a turkey leg, voraciously chewing it with visible pleasure... and his body explodes into several chunks with the intensity of a balloon.
  • What's even worse? Pause at moments he explodes and you’ll see Piggy grimace at the camera in terror as his body bursts into pieces, realizing the true horror of his situation in his very, very last moments and quite possibly even feeling the pain of his sudden demise. It’s no wonder Piggy wakes up screaming "no", having just believed he had died. Before his mother calls him for breakfast, he’s still shaken and sighs in relief that he’s still alive at all and it was just a nightmare.
  • With how much misery he seemed to be in before he saw more food, Piggy dying a sudden, violent death may just have been something of a Mercy Kill.
  • If it was real, Piggy’s mother and siblings would’ve never found out what happened to him, completely unaware he’d been killed.

---