Nightmare Fuel / Stuart Ashen

BABY LOVES YOU.

Anybody of a nervous disposition should leave the room now.

— Stuart warning viewers about the terrifying Bart Simpson... thing.

• The reveal of the bootlegged non-Bart Simpson figure that adorns the box of the Huge Screen v2 when he removes the sticky note covering it. His scream when it's revealed and description of it both sound fairly comical, saying that the creators were going for a Guile look and somebody took some bites out of it but... as Ashens says himself, "just look at it!◊"
  • His voice for the bootlegged Bart Simpson (as said here and here) sounds like the Hammer Haunts from Thief.
• Stuart wasn't kidding when he said that this video would get more disturbing as time went on. Who would have thought cheap animation could be so horrifying?
• The Breakfast Mess commercial (also featured in the Huge Screen v2 review seen above) featuring a very disturbing harlequin and a dissonant theme tune isn't much better. It appears again in his Halloween 2016 review.
• The dissonant sounding "God Save the Queen" at the end of the Royal Wedding Tat review. At least before it's apparent that the music is breaking as it slowly stops to a crawl.
• Any occurrence of Noseybonk, a little-known source of Nightmare Fuel from the old British 80s Game Show Jigsaw. Yeah, an already unnerving entity gets made even more terrifying. Even better, Ashen's Noseybonk mask is scarier than the original!
  • Especially when you don't expect it, like at the end of the Switch Lite review video.
• Hidden page, hidden page. You've found the hidden page. Made so much worse if you have the DVD and find that page totally by accident.
  • It smiles at the end, it fucking smiles...
• The Gnome Radio. Not only does its face plunge straight into the Uncanny Valley, the sound quality apparently doesn't help as it makes things sound distorted and loud. Even worse, when Stuart realizes he can get away with playing a few seconds of the radio, it instead plays creepy rhythmic noises that sound straight out of a horror movie. Even Stuart is completely thrown off and can only surmise that "it tunes directly into hell."
• In the 2011 Halloween special, when Stuart points out a "big twig"... look in the background... There's a creepy, eyeless face right behind him, as you can see here.
• In his review of Girl's Toys, he brought up a doll dressed up in wedding garb. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the positioning of the doll's eyes inducing this trope with a very big bang. Even when he just looks at it, the only thing he says is just pure screams of terror as he is very visibly is having a sanity breakdown and literally ''burns the toy to kill it''.
• The Creme Egg knockoffs in the Easter Tat Special were disgusting and rancid, but not initially horrifying. And then Ashen finds a maggot sitting in the package. Though admittedly a fake one, planted as part of a behind the scenes prank, the Creme Eggs were still so disgusting that Ashen legitimately thought they had turned bad and became infested with maggots.
• The review of an interactive E.T. toy is already made of creepy thanks in large part to the toy itself, but as the review progresses, Stuart gets more and more angry and insane at it before he outright snaps, ranting about how he will make everything better for E.T., violently grabbing it as it makes one final sound. The video cuts to a horror-film style montage of shots (complete with a score) where we see a glimpse of a bunch of tools and then Ashens holding a switchblade or a pocketknife, before it cuts to the aftermath of it; the rubber casing on poor E.T. has been removed, and it's making horrific screeches that sound like a cross between a broken Speak n' Spell and a crying baby.
  • The device itself already looks disturbing, there is a reason things like that aren't meant to be seen.
  • There. Much better.
  • What he actually did is known as Circuit-Bending. Basically he cut off the outer coating (skinned it alive) then fiddled with the internal circuits. The result made it sound like E.T was being brutally murdered while his screams were muffled. This combined with Ashen's speech about how he is going to make it better causes it to be nightmare fuel.
  • It gets worse. After the traditional ASHENS.COM at the end of the video, we see E.T.'s rubber face pinned to a corkboard with the same Scare Chord as heard before.
  • That very same E.T. makes a cameo appearance in another one of his videos in the background. Imagine if you were just a casual viewer who didn't see video Ashens made about E.T. and saw that horror.
• Ashens & Dan eat dead insects. Nothing more than needs to be said.
• The Stock Clearance Special, when Fridge Horror hit Ashens on how the "Cutants" are, in Polly Pocket's world, alive and sentient. He gets upset by the idea, and he decides to make a horror short to illustrate just how scary things would be if Polly Pocket and her group of mad scientists decide to move on to humans and were to come after your girlfriend...^warning Contains unhealthy high doses of Body Horror
• Near the end of one of his Poundland Food Specials, Ashens comments that his cousin Steven went to Japan a couple of months ago and visited Amigara Fault. This also doubles as a Shout-Out.
• The Face Bank from his Meze 88 headphones review. Ashens is horrified just to see it work!
• From his "Bag Of Crap" review, the Bruce Forsyth mask... both times.
• "Vinnie Vole's Existential Nightmare" from Ashen's Tech Dump. Sleep tight.
  • "YOUR FAULT."
• The Tatco pirate figure, thanks to its Thousand-Yard Stare. Goes From Bad to Worse when it stares right into your eyes along with the other Lego ripoff figures...
• The beginning of his review of Fortress Guardian on the Neo Double Games.
• You wouldn't expect a semi-Christmas related advent calender to have anything terrifying in it, right? You'd be wrong. Hell, the grass masks in general. From assimilating both deer to hanging Santa from the tree by his sleigh.
  • The grass masks return in the 2014 Block-Tech advent calendar series. For the first 20 days, they do nothing but pop up occasionally and be very unsettling, which is exacerbated by the fact that Stu never once so much as alludes to them during the main videos. On the 21st day, Stu has an unseasonal bout of hay fever. On the 22rd day, he finds a handful of grass stuffed into the sofa. On the 23rd day, we have... this... And on the 24th day... well, see for yourself.
• One of his earliest videos in the POP Station Saga is a review of one of the games that frequently comes pre-installed on the rotten little pieces of trash, Submarine Invasion. The review itself is significantly shorter than the run time of the video, but Stuart managed to fill the leftover time... by using somewhat grainy grayscale video footage of someone in a white lab coat and what appears to be a welder's face mask fiddling with a machine that rattles off lists of numbers. That's all the extra footage consists of, and it's deeply unsettling.
• His Big "SHUT UP!" to the iPhone 5G was rather convincing, to the point that it does paint an ugly picture about what he could be like when set off.
• The Gangnam Style toy, right down to the light-up eyes and the fact that it plays a creepily-deep sample from the song... or at least until Stuart slaps it, at which point it plays normally.
• His take on the Drawn My Life meme. Wait, how could he make an innocent fad like this disturbing? Well...
• His Viewmaster Stereoscope review has a really dark turn at the end where he plays the "Little Red Riding Hood" slide on the JR. Projector. Before that, Ashens commentary on the previous films were hilarious and descriptive, until the aforementioned film shows up. Ashens narration in this is monotone and blunt^note made even worse that he's actually reading the descriptions seen on the slide, and combined with the unsettling claymation models and creepy music made it rather disturbing.
• In 2011, his announcement that he would be making videos full time, seen here. Or if you'd prefer the "director's cut", in which he adds a painfully brickwalled "Morningtown Ride" by The Seekers in the soundtrack.
• A LOVELY BABY, one of the most horrifying examples of the Unintentional Uncanny Valley due to its misaligned sticker eyes and poor build quality. The sticker of Tinky-Winky with blank black eyes on its left leg doesn't help. The review itself has no dialogue until the very end, instead playing "Psycho" Strings while showing off each part of the toy.
• The Horrifying Macaulay Culkin Doll. It starts out scary right from the beginning with it appearing from the bottom of the screen, complete with a Scare Chord!
  • "THERE IS NO LIFE IN THE VOID."
• The 2016 Halloween Special ends on a colossal cluster-bomb of nightmarish images and videos. The video contains some Freeze-Frame bonuses^note (like Mentski's head that appears in some of his videos◊) rendered in Google Deep Dream which can probably startle somebody if they were watching it, but that's not the worst part. After reading one too many awful Halloween jokes from the Halloween crackers, Stuart lapses into a state of utter despondency for 40 seconds, before manically screaming and smashing the camera. As the video glitches in and out, we get glimpses of previous clips from his videos, like Quincy the Singing Caterpillar^note (who sang obscure Beatle songs), a video of fellow YouTuber Mentski in deep shadow looking confused with blaring audio, the creepy clown puppet from the Breakfast Mess advert with modified lyrics, The Silver Skull desperately reaching towards the camera ("You've forgotten me... you've forgotten me!"), Noseybonk, and finally, a collection of various other images with a very loud sound before finishing on a fake "This video has been removed by the user" notice... although only 10 seconds later, a final last blast of booming, distorted audio and glitchy graphics is displayed as the image changes one final time. The red "sorry about that" icon is replaced with a red Grass Mask from the Playmobil 2013 advent calendar videos and the text above reading how the video was removed now says "This video never existed." Witness the horror for yourself here. Have fun sleeping.
  "Dot the i's and cross the t's, dot the i's and cross the t's..."
  • The Google Deep Dream image of Chef Excellence is extremely unnerving. Plus, the text that usually says "An excellent X" is broken and just says "nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn" as the jingle plays alongside glitched up audio.
• The Mrs. Potts Funko Pop (and by extension, the Chip Funko Pop) from his "Worst Funko Pop Vinyl Figurines" video is rather unsettling with her dead eyed stare created with the big black eyes that Funko Pops are well known for, giving her a soulless Thousand-Yard Stare, and when combined with her grin, creates something really unnerving. Chip has the same eyes but his smile at least takes away some of the disturbing factor. Later on, near the end of the video, she ever so subtly bares her teeth.
  • A commenter said that the two reminded her of the Other Mother from Coraline (also known as the Beldam). With their dead-eyed stares, the big eyes may as well be replaced with buttons. It doesn't help that in the movie, the doll that Coraline received acted as a spy for the Other Mother, and seeing as the Mrs. Potts figure already opened its mouth, who knows what kind of entity it could be a spy for (or if she actually is something like the Beldam)?
• Ashens review of the Gloobee Dolls is probably the most horrifying thing he looked at yet. It even puts that already Uncanny Valley bootleg baby doll to shame!
• Whenever he reviews a crappy costume piece, he'll usually do a quick shot of him wearing it and being thoroughly uninterested by it^note (examples being the Reindeer antlers and red nose item and one of the Halloween emergency costumes). In the 2018 Royal Wedding tat video, however, he demonstrates a Prince William mask with a scene that turns it into the visage of a horror monster, sped-up footage, grainy black-and-white camera and all.
  ''Brother dear, let me in, I have your wedding spoooooooon~!''
• In the 2018 Halloween Special, Ashens creates a horrific monstrosity from the Poundland tat such as an electronic light-up witch, a fake plastic brain, a fake plastic eyeball and doll body parts. It's genuinely quite unsettling.
• The Addendum to the 5th Wish.com special has him performing a catchy song after finding out via the comments section how the wooden frog was supposed to work. It all seems well, until the end when it abruptly cuts to the infamous "Jimmy gets Electrocuted" PIF, specifically the scene where the girl shouts, "JIMMY!", making this an unexpected Jump Scare.
• The monstrous Santa bubble sprayer featured in the 2015 Christmas special, with his weird Zardoz-esque gaping mouth, the Fridge Body Horror, and his angry stare. Never let a Nightmare Fetishist design your Christmas toys, people.
  Stuart: (imitating what it looks like this Santa toy sounds like) MERRY FUCKING CHRISTMAS!
• During the 2020 Valentine's Day special, Stuart looks at a mug with a joke involving "boners". After explaining the joke, he proceeds to go off on a brief screaming tirade:
  You see? Do you see? Do you see?! DO YOU SEE?! DO YOU SEE??? DO YOU SEE???