Nightmare Fuel / Radiohead

We should've waited longer...

Radiohead: Masters of scaring the hell out of people.

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The Bends

• In the music video for "Just", a man lies down on the middle of the street for no reason, and when pushed to tell, causes everyone in hearing shot to lie down as well
• The first 15 or so seconds of "Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was", consisting of very unsettling sounds and noises.
• Some lyrics of "Street Spirit (Fade Out)":
  Cracked eggs, dead birds
  Scream as they fight for life
  • The music video is very surreal and confusing, but the guy that appears out of nowhere with blood on his face is at the very least unsettling.

OK Computer/OK NOTOK

OK Computer

• The meaning behind "Paranoid Android":
  paranoid android. in a bar in hollywood* the centre of the western universe, standing at the bar (social drinking) after doing the talk show bit. do you want to know this? this is what we aspire to is it? it is dark, there is a woman opposite me o is as sociably anorexic as her poodle, she looks desolate in her make up and lost eyes, next to her her husband boyfriend is persuading a younger fleshed half his age stewardess to come back to the hills to their mansion to sample his wine. she looks t him like he's a character in a hammer house horror. one of our friends spills a glass of wine over a vacuum packed gucci outfit complete with matching white hand bag. the witch goes crazy, we think it is fuunny. until we see the evil in her eyes. m friend is asked to leave. the gucci creature is the closest thing i have seen to the devil. the woman is possessed. i cannot sleep that night asking what we've got our selves into. voices talking like fax machines, hissing and spitting like demons, this is the master race. and now im part of it. anyway you didnt want to know that.
  • During the endlessly chilling final reprise freak out of "Paranoid Android", mixed quite low in the background, there are blasts of what sounds like White Noise on normal speakers, but on headphones, you can hear that it's (presumably) Thom screaming his lungs out and babbling incoherently.
  • The song's official music video, especially the part where the fat evil businessman strips himself completely naked in the middle of an open public road (prompting the black guy standing next to him to regretfully take a sip from his flask for every weird/ridiculous thing that he sees the businessman do, naturally) and starts trying to chop down a metal light pole with his axe, before finally accidentally cutting all four of his limbs off and sinking to the bottom of the ocean, where he is picked up by freakishly large-titted mermaids who then proceed to wrap him up in a blanket as if he were a baby and plant him in a nearby tree.
• "Exit Music (For A Film). A song that was made for the film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.And what do they have? The intense guitar and electronic choirs that accentuated its quiet beginning, the broken-sounding raw vocals, the drums kicking off, all of it?! Well, they succeed it.
• "Karma Police" starts as a calm song (even if something feels out in it) but it becomes downright scary when it pitches up and Thom seems to be in a Madness Mantra: the distorted "sirens" which close the songs are also pretty disconcerting.
  • The video can be horribly unsettling sometimes, especially when the camera shifts to Thom's unreadable face or the terrified hunted man. The ending is probably the creepiest part; the hunted man finds that the car chasing him has a gas leak, so he lights it with a match. The car eventually catches fire, and the driver frantically looks around before slowly turning back to look at Thom in the backseat. The backseat is empty.
• "Fitter Happier" is a list of random, vaguely authoritarian slogans set to a minimalist soundscape and an out-of-tune piano. The list itself is spoken by a computer.
  FITTER. HAPPIER. MORE PRODUTIVE.
• "Climbing Up the Walls" is arguably the one Radiohead song with an outright reputation for being terrifying. It's a song about people living next to an insane asylum being unable to sleep at night for fear of someone coming in the house, sung entirely in a slurred, unintelligible tone over a musical duel between screechy strings, noisy electronics, heavy drumming, and loud guitars. About it, Thom has said:
  This is about the unspeakable. Literally skull-crushing. I used to work in a mental hospital around the time that Care in the Community started, and we all just knew what was going to happen. And it's one of the scariest things to happen in this country, because a lot of them weren't just harmless... It was hailing violently when we recorded this. It seemed to add to the mood. Some people can't sleep with the curtains open in case they see the eyes they imagine in their heads every night burning through the glass. Lots of people have panic buttons fitted in their bedrooms so they can reach over and set the alarm off without disturbing the intruder. This song is about the cupboard monster.
  • Thom's tortured scream at the end adds to the effect.
    CLIIIIMMMBBINNNNNG!!! UUUUUUPPPPPP THHHHE!!! WAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGGGHH!!!!!!!
    • The scream is amped up to 11 on the version released on the OKNOTOK cassette which is recorded straight from Thom's acoustic pickup from his guitar. A fair volume warning to those who wish to hear it.
  • The last 25 seconds of eerie noises, which sound like something from Krzystof Penderecki's early orchestral pieces (themselves Nightmare Fuel).
• "No Surprises" is a quite calm and emotional song and it's gentle nursey rhyme material; But the lyrics are filled with images suggesting suicide, alienation, depression, burnout, and pollution. Not to metion the lines about carbon monoxide poisoning. Hell, you even hear the background vocals singing "Let me out of here!"
  • The music video for "No Surprises" is probably not for anyone with a fear of drowning. It depicts Thom Yorke singing "No Surprises" in close-up while wearing a dome over his head like an astronaut. As he sings, the dome begins to fill with water. When it is completely full, Thom goes limp and motionless for almost a full minute. The dome drains, and he gets out alive. He was never in any actual danger — they Over Cranked the film in order to make it appear he was motionless. He actually only had to hold his breath for a few seconds. The kicker? The video took several takes to film, and each time Thom grew more and more stressed out and agitated. Horribly, eye-wateringly claustrophobic.

OK NOTOK

• There's something disturbing about the quiet, traumatized-sounding, gratuitously panned backing vocal in "Pearly*" contrasted against the aggressive 'rawk' lead vocals — it sounds like there's one Thom wailing away onstage and another one right behind you. The fact that the song is about a group of Japanese girls who prostituted themselves to get tickets to a Radiohead concert (much to Thom's horror) just makes it even more unsettling.

Kid A Mnesia

Kid A

The entire album is creepy and offputting, though never outright scary (in general, it just sounds.... wrong). Here are some of the more unsettling qualities, track by track:

• The opening track, "Everything in Its Right Place", has strange synths which mix and Thom's distorted voice, combined with its constant build-up.
• The song "Kid A" is initially only kind of unsettling. It gets creepier when you figure out the lyrics ("standing in the shadows at the end of my bed...") and the fact that to Thom they represent something so horrible he distorted his voice in the song to distance himself from it. The speculation regarding what exactly that is doesn't help (the creepy pied piper imagery suggests pedophilia, while Thom has hinted it's about cloning or mind control). Then you look up its pages in the maze section of the Radiohead website, one of which is a picture of a man with his eyes sewn shut. And then you look up the lyrical outtakes, made by Thom's usual semi-comprehensible stream of consciousness to seem like they were written by a lunatic:
  "I am the bloody pied piper rats and children follow me out of town a scarecrow that dont scare the crows nowadays i get panicked i have ceased to exist my words you know are out of ink. drooling looney tunes moving room to room did you lie to us tony? we thought you were different but now were not so sure now you know were not so sure. we can blow a hole in anything thatchers children see you on the way back down. kill the enemy within unhinged cowboys and indians moving statues yur safe until you look away. i would like to change back now please to the shadow of my former self. iam the bloody pied piper. & the rats and the children will follow me around so you hade better make it worth my while. please allow me the suspension of your disbelief the benefit of the doubt."
  "never say anything"
  "be instrumental"
• "The National Anthem", especially the ending when the instruments drop out, and we're left with distorted samples of dialogue and an orchestra at the end.
• "How to Disappear Completely"'s calm but dissonant string arrangement.
• "Treefingers" is comparatively soft, but is still empty and cold.
• The music of "Optimistic" is both bloodering and gloomy, and indeed some of the lyrics are unsettling ("Flies are buzzing around my head / Vultures circling the dead"), while most of the lyrics are optimistic. "You can try the best you can, you can try the best you can, the best you can is good enough".
• "In Limbo" is hazy, off-balance, and ends with what sounds like a siren wailing through a snowstorm.
• "Idioteque" is an extremely anxious and paranoid dance song. Its rhythmic energy doesn't make it lighter, but instead more desperate. The song ends on another distorted sample, this time of wailing, atonal strings.
• "Morning Bell" comes in on Idioteque's Last Note Nightmare.
  cut the kids in half.
  cut the kids in half.
  cut the kids in half.
• "Motion Picture Soundtrack" is an ironic example. The harp samples are so sweet as to be sickly and seem to have deliberately invoked Disney soundtracks, but the lyrics are still cold, distant, and offputting, especially with its references to the afterlife.
  • Early live versions of the song included a third verse, which added some Body Horror themes:
    "Beautiful angel
    Pulled apart at birth
    Limbless and helpless
    I can't even recognize you"
• Nearly any of the promotional 'blips' that were made. Downright creepy scenes and imagery, and incredibly apocalyptic and futuristic:
  • "I'm Not Here" has an ominous figure who deliberately reaches its hand to the screen (and the viewer) while bearing a Psychotic Smirk.
  • "Living In A Fantasy World" features two men witnessing a large flock of modified bears flying around the city while one of them appears to be calling the police with a horrified look on his face.
  • "The Lights Are On" involves a CGI bear sitting in the darkness while looking at the viewer only for a LOUD noise blaring in the background (which doubles as a Jump Scare).
  • "Wanna Play?" starts with an innocent little girl asking the viewer if they want to play with her as she holds a modified bear plush in her arm. The bear itself, in the other hand, is thinking about killing the girl and her family with a hatchet. Even a YouTube comment about the said blip is even more of a doozy!
    "The things we buy will betray us at the end as we are blinded by consumerism."
• Stanley Donwood's artwork is naturally kind of creepy, but the Kid A art deserves special mention.
  • The album's hidden booklet, especially the caricature of Tony Blair with a Slasher Smile, as well as the liberal doses of Word-Salad Horror.

Amnesiac

• The opening track "Packt Like Sardiness In A Crushd Tin Box" with its jiggering lyrics "I'm a reasonable man, get off, get off, get off my case".
• "Pyramid Song" even this lyric which adds to the song's creepiness
  I jumped into the river,
  Black-eyed angels swam with me.
  A moon full of stars and astral cars,
  And all the things I used to see.
  All my lovers were there with me,
  All my past and futures.
  • The music video has a CGI stick figure in a world where everything's underwater who goes on a deep diving mission to find his old city. He finds his old house, sits in his old chair, and disconnects the oxygen tube.
• "Pulk / Pull Revolving Doors". Not much of a melody to speak of, a hellish-sounding rhythm and sparse, ominous lyrics:
  "There are doors that let you in and out
  But never open
  But they are trapdoors
  That you can't come back from"
• The lyrics of "You And Whose Army" mostly consist of the narrator taunting someone else, with phrases like "Come on, come on. Come on if you think, come on if you think, you can take us on, you can take us on" and "You and whose army? You and your cronies?" However, the song is very mellow and gentle, with the melody played by quiet acoustic guitar, and sung in a downcast, defeated tone of voice. Hmmm.
• The upbeat, but still bone-chiling electronic riffs of "I Might Be Wrong".
• "Knives Out, quite possibly the catchiest song ever written about canibalism.
  • The music video contains a lot of strange imagery as well, such as a woman's head on a giant Operation game table, images on a TV screen where Thom Yorke's head is replaced by a giant heart, a scene in which his feet are replaced by cooked chickens and being cut up, and an image of his face on a mouse's body.
• "Morning Bell/Amnesiac" is a much darker, and more orchestral reprise/verison of "Morning Bell"
• Dollas And Cents.
  We are the dollars and cents
  and the pounds and pence
  and the mark and yen, and yeah,
  why don't you quiet down?
  we're gonna crack your little skulls
  we're gonna crack your little souls.
• Hunting Bears. Just, Hunting Bears.
• "Like Spinning Plates" is extremely unsettling, from the distorted vocals in the first few lines to the fact that the music itself is another song played backwards.
  • The music video (which uses "Pulk / Pull Revolving Doors" as an intro to the song) may be one of the most disturbing things Radiohead has put out. Most of the video centers on a bizarre machine that pulses and flickers, and it's only toward the end of the video that the viewer sees the crying babies inside the machine. We would call them Siamese twins, but that's a bit of an oversimplification. The babies' upper torsos are joined from opposite ends in some horrific CatDog-esque procedure, and their legs jut out from their sides. The video ends with the babies' chests rising like a chestburster is about to come out, and their entire ribcage is ripped out of them. Yeah.
    • The way the machine moves so gracefully takes on a disturbing quality once you realise it's basically a centrifuge, and the CGI look of the machine mixed with how clean it is and how white the room it's in gives off an uncomfortably sterile atmosphere.
    • It's about par for what the artist Johnny Hardstaff was doing at the time according to his sketchbooks.
• "Life in a Glasshouse" is a minor-key, New Orleans-style dirge about the suffocating nature of celebrity, with Thom Yorke singing about constant prying eyes and restrictive expectations against a backdrop of wailing trumpets and clarinets.
  There's someone listening in...

Amnesiac singles

• There's something extremely unsettling about B-Side "The Amazing Sounds Of Orgy". The weird synths, the pulsing percussion, and Thom's eerily sexual singing.
  "Cease this endless chattering
  Like everything is fine"
• "Trans-Altranic Drawl" begins as a fast-paced rocker but suddenly morphs into a haunting electronic instrumental.
• "Kinetic": the lyrics sound like they're from the perspective of someone trying to escape an inevitable (and horrible) fate.
  please keep moving... better keep moving.....
• "Fast-Track". Nuff said.

Hail to the Thief

Hail to the Thief

• The way Thom shouts in 2 + 2 = 5
  BECAUSE! YOU-HAVE! NOT! BEEN! PAYING AT-TEN-TION! PAYING AT-TEN-TION! PAYING AT-TEN-TION! PAYING AT-TEN-TION! YOUHAVENOTBE-EN! PAYING-AT-TEN-TION! PAYING AT-TEN-TION! PAYING AT-TEN-TION! PAYING AT-TEN-TION! YOUHAVENOTBE-EN! PAYING AT-TEN-TION! PAYING AT-TEN-TION! PAYING AT-TEN-TION! PAYINGAT-TEN-TION!
• Sit Down. Stand Up
  THE RAINDROPS! THE RAINDROPS! THE RAINDROPS! THE RAINDROPS!
• The entirety of "Where I End and You Begin" especially the conclusion.
• We Suck Young Blood:
  "Are you fracturing?
  Are you torn at the seams?
  Would you do anything?
  Flea-bitten, moth-eaten?
  We suck young blood
  We suck young blood....."
• The eerie Madness Mantra that is "The Gloaming (Softly Open Our Mouths in the Cold)".
• "There There" patiricually the climax.
  • The music video. The amount of purely surreal stuff in the video is already scary enough, but its equally surreal ending stands out. Basically, the moral of that story is "Don't wear clothes you find in the woods or crows will attack you, then you'll turn into a tree."
    • Thom's transformation is also depicted in very graphic detail, intercut with his terrified reactions. His skin turning to wood, roots growing from his feet, branches ripping through his pants...
    • The freakiest part has to be the final frame, where you see Thom's still screaming face on the tree...
• "I Will" is equal parts sad and disturbing, really, since it's an anti-war song dealing with how children can be war's casualties and resources. Reportedly, the lyrics of the song were inspired by a horrific scene on the news depicting a bomb shelter full of children and families being destroyed during the first Gulf War.
• "Myxomatosis". Heavily distorted lead synth and guitar that constantly seems off-key? Check. Screeching organ in the background? Check. Vaguely ominous and brutal lyrics containing such lovely phrases like: "the mongrel cat came home holding half a head", "But now. I. Don't. Know. Why i. Feel. So. Tounge. Tied. "Don't. Know. Why. I feel. So. Skinned. A-live.", and "twitching and salivating like with myxomatosis?" Check. An unnatural rhythm that defies any time signature? Check. And then you find out myxomatosis is a disease that gives rabbits huge skin tumors before killing them. Nice.
• "A Wolf at the Door":
  Steal all my children
  If I don't pay the ransom
  But I'll never see them again
  If I squeal to the cops
  No no no no no no no.
  • Made even freakier when you consider that Thom compares Hail to the Thief in its entirety to a nightmare, and this track (the final one on the album) is like waking up only to find that the real world is (problaby) even worse than the nightmare.

Hail to the Thief singles/COM-LAG

• "I Am Citizen Insane"s actual melody actually sounds quite lovely. The same cannot be said for all the eerie drones and groans backing it up.
• "Where Bluebirds Fly" falls into this with all the weird dissonance and skittering beats. Thom's wordless moans over the whole thing do not help.

In Rainbows

• The intro track, 15 Step" is a song about a failed love that uses metaphors connected to hanging, with instances such as the line revolving around the Title Drop ("15 steps, then a sheer drop"). It also keeps a consistent 5/4 rhythm and consistent key until the very end of the song, which fades out on a distorted off-key chord. In the Animated Music Video, it's made even scarier with a completely Off-Model gun zooming in toward the viewer.
• Bodysnactchers. Particularly the ending:
  I SEEN IT COMING!! I SEEN THEM COMING!!
  ''I SEEN IT COMING!! SEEN THEM COMING!!!!
• Nude:
  You'll... go... to... hell... for... what... your... dirty... mind... is... thinking...!
• The music video to "House of Cards" is used entirely 3D plotting technologies, and heavily features Thom singing with his face processed into a 3D figure. The results are... odd, to say the least.

The King of Limbs

• The album cover for The King of Limbs.
  • In general, TKOL had some pretty freaky art.
• The creepy wailing, echo-y vocals that is "Bloom".
• "Feral". All of it!
• The brass background of "Codex" is .. quite unnerving.
• Separator:
  Wake me up, wake me up!!!!
  Wake me up, wake me up!!!!

TKOL RMX

• "Bloom (Mark Pritchard RMX)" and "Separator (Anstam RMX pt ii)" are both quite dark and ominous.

A Moon Shaped Pool

• "Burn the Witch"; is both this and Paranoia Fuel, along with its' increasingly discordant strings. However, what does Radiohead do for the video? A cutesy stop-motion animated version of The Wicker Man (1973).
• "Daydreaming" is Sweet Dreams Fuel for the most part... at least until those sinister backwards-masked voices start chanting near the very end.
• The reversed recordings of people shaking shakers and laughing in "The Numbers".

Other

• A lot of weird stream-of-consciousness-style text (in addition to the exceedingly morbid and surreal art) can be found in their aptly-titled book Dead Children Playing which pretty much showcases all of Donwood/Yorke's artwork from OKC to HTTT. A little snippet:
  Just a million mobiles and modems squawking and sputtering and hissing like piss on a fire like a million gallons of piss on an inferno just think of it, ok? Just think of that. Vertebrae being sewn apart sounds like this.
  NOTHING NOTHING YOU JUST IMAGINED IT A NOISE NOTHING A SILENCE JUST THE HOUSE "SETTLING". WHO'S THAT WHO'S THAT NOTHING IMAGINED IT WHO'S THAT OUT THERE / IN THE KITCHEN THERE'S NOTHING IN THE COLD COLD LIGHT NOBODY BEHIND THE DOOR NOTHING.
  EVERYBODY STOPS AND GAWPS
  EYES POPPED OUT LIKE CIGARETTE MACHINES''
• Some may find Thom's video for "Brain in a Bottle" to be highly disorienting and even unnerving, considering how close he is to the camera.
• Thom Yorke's "Very 2021 Rmx" version of "Creep" - he basically took an old acoustic version of the song, drastically slowed down the tempo (to the point where it's just over 9 minutes long), and added some synthesizers and effects. The digitally slowed-down vocal and acoustic guitar tracks have some deliberately left-in audio artifacts that land them in the Uncanny Valley, and the synthesizers are quite eerie too.
• This trailer for the Kid A Mnesia Exhibition video game. At some points, it could easily pass as a straightforward horror game.
• The last minute or so of "Fake Plastic Trees" B-Side "India Rubber" loops fragments of Studio Chatter from the recording session over the music - this includes making a short clip of Jonny giggling sound like someone going Laughing Mad.

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we've got heads on sticks... and you've got ventriloquists... standing in the shadows at the end of my bed...