Nightmare Fuel

Da da daaa~ da da da da da DAAAAAAH~


The wonderous TV Tropes has a section on Nightmare Fuel, unsurprising because it has a section on everything, and rightly so. Nightmare Fuel is stuff not intended to be truly scary, but has turned out being completely traumatizing for whatever reason.

Part eight of the examples is video games. They're great; the Tomb Raider ones are especially freaky, but I've just finished Starfox 64/Lylat Wars for the Xth time, and I'm amazed nobody's noticed it yet;

In the final battle of Starfox 64, you fly into a tunnel on the surface of stormy planet Venom, and fly down some winding tunnels, all the while the ape baddie Andross trash talks pathetically.

Eventually you leave the tunnel, far from being some underground base or cavern, everything around you is a swirling green LSD trip, and baddie Andross - just his head, his enormous head, and gloved hands, float before you.

He might fiddle you.

So far that's not so creepy, right? You shoot his hands and blow them up, you fire bombs into his mouth to stun him, then viciously shoot him in the eyeballs with your lasers until - screaming, with a look of horror on his face, he bursts into flames, begins to explode in places, before his entire head ruptures and blows up, leaving only his exposed brain and eyeballs, which then fire off and chase you. He exclaims "Only I have the brains to rule Lylat!!" which doesn't do much to dampen the effect, to be honest.

OH JESUS

In the resulting battle, you have to fly around and shoot what can only be described as his brain testicles in order to kill him. A mass of tentacles dangle below the brain, and if you get tangled up in those, they rip you to pieces. Yes, I did say brain testicles.

If you manage it, you get a cool Death Star escape scene, back through them tunnels, which just poke out into the weird green LSD world. By this point though, the damage is done. Nobody's going to forget Andross.