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️Thu Oct 09 2014

This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Scary Moments (Nightmare Fuel) in Art

They say that death is the eternal sleep... but what happens when it's just a nap?
The Premature Burial, by Antoine Wiertz

A list with haunting, scary paintings, sculptures, and other visual artworks.

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Antiquity

Many Egyptian mural paintings have an eerie look to them. The people depicted are 2D drawings, sure, but there's always one eye staring at you.

Middle Ages

Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo

Romanticism and Symbolism

Francisco de Goya:
- Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), a [gruesome collection of drawings showing executions, torture, Malevolent Mutilation, rape and other horrors inflicted on people during The Napoleonic Wars in Spain.
- Los Caprichos shows a lot of disturbing material, among them a woman trying to get one of the gold teeth from the mouth of a hanged man, covering her face away from him. All Will Fall in the same series shows a group of winged males circle around a half-woman, half-harpy. Down below the fallen males are plucked by a group of women.
  - The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters]], where Reason is fast asleep, while behind him all kinds of creepy bats, owls, and other monsters emerge out of the darkness. Most likely meant to represent the horrors that the Enlightenment ("Reason") unleashed in the form of the French Revolution and Napoleon (see here◊.
- Los Disparates has an image named Bobalicon, where a dancing giant, drawn from a popular carnival character, is transformed into a disturbing phantom with a Slasher Smile and ghostly faces looming up beside him.
- The Bewitched Man◊ where a creepy scene takes place where a man believes that he is bewitched and his life depends on keeping a lamp alight. Behind him several donkeys walk on their hind legs.
- Saturn Devouring His Son◊ really takes the cake. We would normally expect a bearded, still clearly sane man shoving children into his mouth, but no, Goya gave us the wonderful painting of a gigantic, bulging-eyed, white-haired Humanoid Abomination Saturn, blankly staring at the audience while Ax-Crazily devouring the arm(?) of a smaller human, [[Squick who has open, bleeding wound where their head and other arm should be]]. It's what Goya feared becoming - a madman who lost all traces of humanity and is now driven by his baser instincts of hunger and hate.
The painting The Nightmare◊ by Henry Fuseli.
Oedipus and the Sphinx◊ and King Diomedes Devoured by His Horses by Gustave Moreau.
Gustave Doré:
- Hop-o'-My-Thumb: The giant slashing the throats of his own daughters is pretty disturbing to watch.◊
John Martin's paintings of biblical apocalypse, Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and The Great Day of His Wrath◊ show impressive evocations of God's wrath.
Théodore Géricault made some studies of chopped up heads, arms, and legs in preparation of The Raft of the Medusa.
- Gericault's other paintings of people with mental illnesses also deserve mention, particularly the Insane Woman.◊
The Apotheosis of War◊ by Vasily Vereshchagin shows a huge pile of skulls, with crows coming to feast on them.
- As Gericault did, Vereshchagin based much of his work on actual historical events. Just something to think about, if you ever come across a piece like Suppression of the Indian Revolt.
Lucifer◊ by Franz von Stuck.
The Bear Dance by William Holbrook Beard was intended to be amusing, but seeing bears walking on two feet on a secluded place in the middle of the forest is rather creepy.
Many of the paintings of Antoine Wiertz are pretty horrific (subject matter includes people being buried alive, a woman graphically blowing her rapist's head off — although this kind of also counts as a Moment of Awesome — a man graphically blowing his own head off, and numerous studies of severed heads), but the creepiest by far is Faim, Folie, Crime◊ ("Hunger, Madness, Crime," which depicts a disheveled peasant woman with a Broken Smile clutching a bloody knife and a mysterious, bloodstained bundle, sitting by the fireplace in a nearly-empty cottage. Hanging over the fireplace is a cauldron...with a baby's foot sticking out of it.
- "The Premature Burial" by Antoine Wiertz.◊
The lithograph of a colossal octopus attacking a ship◊.
"Satan Sowing Seeds◊" from Félicien Rops' "Les Sataniques".
"Death Seizing A Woman" by Käthe Kollwitz.
The Plague Hag on the Stairs by Theodor Kittelsen, the most nightmare-inducing picture of The Black Death incarnate, ever. There are people who have problems just looking at this chilling picture. On the other hand, the "plague hag" can be Nightmare Retardant to others, thanks to its derp face.
Ilya Repin's painting of Ivan the Terrible holding his dying son◊, whom he'd struck down seconds earlier in a random fit of rage. The look in his eyes...

Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism

Winslow Homer’s ''The Gulf Stream'' shows a man adrift in a small boat with a broken mast surrounded by a swarm of sharks, with a menacing waterspout on the horizon.
Pablo Picasso: All those cubist people with melting faces are some veritable Body Horror, especially The Weeping Woman◊ and Guernica.
Edvard Munch's "The Scream"
Almost all of Expressionism, absolutely everything Otto Dix ever made.
Francis Bacon's paintings of "Screaming Popes", based on Diego Velázquez's baroque portrait of Pope Innocent X, portray the figure in a series of disturbing, Uncanny Valley-driven and Body Horror-laden situations; whether it is the simplicity of the screaming figure seen in Head VI and Untitled (Pope), the chaotic and tortured scenes seen in Study after Velázquez and Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, and, most-infamously, the dark, disgusting, and almost villainous depiction of a patina-faced character seen in Figure with Meat, it is bound to disturb you in some way.
- The Figure with Meat painting is considered so disturbing that, in its' appearance in Tim Burton's Batman, The Joker, Wicked Cultured Nightmare Fetishist extraordinaire, sees fit to spare it among all of the paintings defaced and destroyed by his goons in the Gotham City Museum.

Surrealism

Salvador Dalí: Soft Construction With Boiled Beans From Premonition Of The Civil War◊ shows a huge giant who has no romp, just a trapezium shaped nothingness in the middle, while his hands and feet appear in odd places.
- Even more unsettling is the sense that the giant looks this way because he's tearing himself apart.
  - Heck, MANY of his art could count. Or at least, just weird one out.
René Magritte:
- Young Girl Eating A Bird◊
- "The Rape" ("Le viol")
- The Menaced Assassin◊
Many paintings by Giorgio di Chirico show desolated landscapes which have a haunting atmosphere.
Paul Delvaux painted many images of skeletons, naked women and trains in night atmospheres. An example of his work can be found here◊.
Yves Tanguy specialized in painting twisted landscapes filled with objects and architecture that look like they have some purpose as first glance, but don't resemble anything real, making the works seem busy and lonely at the same time. Here's one titled "Fear," and here's a photo of the artist himself, wearing a look that's every bit as unhinged as his oeuvre would suggest.
Much of the work of Hans Bellmer, a combination of drawings and sculptures, consists of various people and sexual imagery combined with harshly distorted shapes and bodies, resulting in H.R. Giger by way of Salvador Dali. Even worse, some of this art depicts what appear to be children.
Roland Topor was a French (of Polish-Jewish origin) surrealist and shock artist whose work can be best described as a pythonesque fever dream, looking like something conjured from the mind of Terry Gilliam after a nightmare. While he's well known for co-founding the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky, he is best known as the co-writer and art director for Fantastic Planet, which is a nightmare fuel refinery in its own right.

Asian traditional art

The Dream Of The Fisherman's Wife'' by Hokusai shows a woman being erotically gratified by an octopus with large piercing eyes. (NSFW!)
One Chinese silk painting, Li Song's Skeleton Fantasy Show, made during a particularly deadly epidemic, shows a ghoulish figure luring a child away with a dancing skeleton puppet while his mother looks on in resignation. It is outstandingly creepy.

Art photography

The photographs of Diane Arbus show a lot of photos of circus freaks, twins, triplets, handicapped people or unusual men and women that border to the Uncanny Valley. Even when she shot normal scenes inside amusement parks or the interior of a room with a Christmas tree there's still a haunting atmosphere about them.
The photograph posted on the hide page. It is a still photograph, and yet people who have viewed that photograph have noted that they feel as if it is staring at them, or have noticed the eyes moving. This is due to an optical illusion of depth in the way the photograph is set up (his eyes look more deeply set/more prominent due to the lighting and makeup, and if your eyes move in the right way, his appear to move with them due to this) but to anyone unaware of the optical illusion involved, it can seem ghostly...
Just about anything by Joel Peter-Witkin, considering his subjects often consist of actual human corpses arranged in macabre positions. There’s a reason he inspired the “Closer” music video by Nine Inch Nails.

Sculpture

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's Karakterköpfe which shows dozens of expressive facial expressions made into sculptures.
The sculpture Fucking Hell by Jake and Dinos Chapman shows hundreds of tiny puppets all in a symbolic depiction of the worst crimes mankind has ever committed.
This memorial sand sculpture◊ of Michael Jackson (RIP).
Edward Kienholz's State Hospital depicts a naked, emaciated figure, with a fishbowl instead of a head, strapped to a filthy bunk bed with a leather belt. Above his head, surrounded by a neon speech bubble, is an identical figure — implying that mental illness and medical mistreatment have limited the bottom figure's thoughts and identity to his grim reality. Perhaps the most nightmarish aspect of the sculpture is the fact that it was inspired by a patient at the psychiatric hospital where Kienholz worked as an orderly.
Louise Bourgeois' Maman, depicting a lanky, otherwordly-looking Giant Spider carrying a sack full of its own eggs. Bourgeois has done other arachnid-themed pieces as well.
The Denver International Airport is home to a sculpture of a 32-foot blue horse known as "Blue Mustang" or more appropriately, "Blucifer" or even "Demon Horse" for a very good reason; it has red eyes that glow red at night which only adds to it's creepiness-factor. The worst part? It killed it's own creator,^note making it a literal Creator Killer. Even during the day, it's very unnerving to look at.
The lake, Neuchâtel in Switzerland is home to a statue of a skeletal dragon. Whilst the statue is actually tiny, it's still very creepy in appearance.
- Even worse however is that you can find the sculpture of a shark submerged in the same lake which is not only bigger than the dragon statue, but also has a very sinister Slasher Smile.

Other

Even without the obligatory "curse" backstory, "The Hands Resist Him" by Bill Stoneham is pretty damn creepy.
The painting "The Crying Boy" has several copies and several of them have survived house fires without any damage done to them. This led many people to think that it was "cursed".
Anything, anything, anything by H. R. Giger, the lovely man who brought you the look of the Xenomorphs in Alien. The fact that his art is inspired by his literal nightmares does not help. For those who are unfamiliar with his work.
- Giger tells the story of how a customs official once asked if his paintings were photographs. He commented that the only place you could take a photograph that looked like one of his paintings would be in Hell...
- Even more chilling is how Timothy Leary, one of Giger's friends, described his work: "Giger's work disturbs us, spooks us, because of its enormous evolutionary time span. It shows us, all too clearly, where we come from and where we are going."
While not particularly well-known, both “Tiger’s Blood” and “Ages 8 & Up” by Instagram artist Jackie J. deserve some form of mention, as - despite keeping their twisted sense of humor - they’re gory enough to be on the brink of becoming Splatter Horror.
- The former features an American zoo having been turned into a gory all-you-can-eat buffet full of blood and viscera, all at the hands of various iconic and well-loved animals.
- The latter depicts a full-grown adult having fallen into a Build-A-Bear-esque stuffing machine, and being blended up into nothing but strawberry jam; to make matters worse, the kid featured in the art may’ve even belonged to the victim.
The drawings of Paul Rumsey all show haunting Body Horror images, made in dramatic black and white.
Ivan Albright specializes in creepy paintings, most notably "That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door)" and his version of "The Painting of Dorian Gray".
Anything and everything by Zdzisław Beksiński. His works feature copious amounts of thoroughly creepy imagery, including deformed figures, dystopian landscapes, apocalyptic themes, sexual imagery, violence, death, and general weirdness, all drawn in a disturbing degree of detail. Interestingly, the man himself was by all accounts very cheerful and pleasant.
The late Dr. Jack Kevorkian was a painter in his spare time. Yes, they were creepy. Quite a few were inspired by illnesses; this one◊ was inspired by paraplegia.
The work Of Ken Currie also haunts viewers.
Tony Oursler projects people's faces, often intoning disturbing dialogue, onto the heads of small dummy dolls. The whole face ones are creepy enough, but he also likes to do the same for things like this. It's particularly chilling seeing them in action on YouTube. * shudder*
Laurie Lipton has done so much weird, creepy and downright scary art. Someone clawing a wall full of faces while a joyful person dances next to them. People eating in a TV room MADE OF faces, skulls, and reaching arms◊. A toddler with a knife and a freaky gleeful grin, waiting for their mom◊. Screaming heads flooding out of a music box held by a blank-staring doll◊. And that's not even the most fucked-up of it. Here's a link to her website
The art of Keith Thompson is characterized by unbelievable amounts of Body Horror, Squick and general creepiness. His "Undead" series are probably the worst - in particular, for the love of God do not look at his Pripyat Beast!
- He actually made a book on how to draw the undead.
Neil Blevins's horror-ish pieces are rare, but they are major. One, "Alternative Birth", has a bundle of wires/feelers coming out of someone's belly. This triangle-shaped Cacodemon's mouth is lined with eyes and full of pointy teeth. And this is a giant, floating mass of tentacles full of glowing eyes. Blevins gallery link
The "Transfiguration" artistic performances, by French painter and performer Olivier de Sagazan, is focused on a man altering himself his face, several times. In truly Nightmare Face ways.
The infamous Smile Dog◊ used to be the page graphic of the main Nightmare Fuel page, but it worked a little too well. The picture is a composite of this picture◊ and this one,◊ both of which are also Photoshopped and both of which are plenty scary on their own.
The work of William Burke, the closest to an American Junji Ito, whose online gallery should fuel some sleepless nights.
Tetsuya Ishida, surrealist Japanese artist. Some of the disturbing images include someone climbing out of a lizard's guts, and sauce smeared on people's faces and hands that looks like blood. If you think surrealist paintings are scary by themselves, you'll find these worse. If you don't, you'll find some of these scary anyway.
Art about Holocaust. Especially scary as it is often Based on a True Story of survivors...
- In similar vein, Nikolai Getman's paintings of his time in Stalin's Gulag, in particular his horrifying "Punishment by Mosquitoes."
Vann Nath's paintings of Cambodia's infamous Tuol Sleng prison are all the more horrific because he witnessed them all. Nath was one of seven people to survive Tuol Sleng—because his talents as a painter made him useful to the Khmer Rouge, who hired him to produce propaganda for them. After the Khmer Rouge regime fell, Nath painted what he remembered.
All of the paintings here are creepy in still-life form, but check them out animated. There's something both beautiful and unnerving about it.
Paul Cadmus's work was normally of the homoerotic variety, celebrating the male form in a seemingly wholesome style of painting. His Seven Deadly Sins series, however, was the opposite of wholesome or celebratory, and was downright disturbing. Rounding the corner at the Metropolitan Museum or Art and seeing these paintings might just stamp the nightmare imagery into the brain for the rest of the day at the very least.
The de Young Museum in San Francisco has exhibits that feature art, sculptures, and artifacts from all over the world. This includes the works of the Asmat people of Papua New Guinea. The collection of masks and reliquaries that adorn real skulls is simultaneously beautiful and creepy.
Tom Lea's painting The 2,000 Yard Stare◊, currently the Thousand-Yard Stare trope image. Made to depict the events of the Battle of Peleliu, the painting pretty accurately captures the nature of war, and damn if it isn't creepy as hell. The empty stare in the soldier's eyes pretty much drains any sort of humanity from him, making him seem more like a thing than a person.
A lot of the imagery in the films of Rachel Mclean, which doesn't so much exist in the Uncanny Valley as drill right through it and come out the other side of the Earth.
Boris Taslitsky's 111 Drawings in Buchenwald are simple line sketches on stolen paper that evoke the quiet dread of day to day life in a concentration camp. And, worse, it was his daily life, as he was sent to the camp for being a Jewish Socialist and a member of the French Resistance.
For those who have or had a relative that were suffering from Alzheimer's, the American artist William Utermohlen (1933-2007) deserves a special mention for showing how horrifying (as he was diagnosed back in 1995) it can be in which not only negatively affected his mind but also his painting and drawing skills as well. Even though his self-portrait in the next year looks perfectly fine◊, with the artist himself looking at the window while keeping a straight face, as the time◊ pass◊ and more◊ self-portraits have been made◊, his art style has started to look "abstract" even though Utermohlen was experiencing the said illness. In the year 2000, things have gotten down the hill where his final painting looks like◊ an unfinished, blurry mess.
Michael Whelan is best known for his gorgeous sci-fi and fantasy cover art (he did a lot of work for The Dark Tower and Dragonriders of Pern), but he can sure bring the creepy when he wants to. His painting "Boogeyman" is currently the page image for Things That Go "Bump" in the Night, and the artwork he did for a couple of Lovecraft collections rivals Beksinski's for Surreal Horror.
John Blanche is best known for his haunting pen and watercolor paintings, which depict the snarling demons, grotesque faces and nightmarish battle scenes that have defined the look and feel of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 for more than forty years. Imagine his work as the gothic lovechild of Yoshitaka Amano and H.R. Giger. Or just see for yourself here.
"The Judge" by John D. Salvatore helped propel Blood Meridian back into the spotlight with its terrifying depiction of the book's villain, Judge Holden. It shows the Judge looking down at the viewer with dead eyes, alabaster skin and a grin full of rotting teeth. Given the character's monstrous reputation and the feeling of immediate danger it gives, it might just be the scariest piece of fan art ever made.
The Corpses of The De Witt Brothers by Jan De Baen, considered to be one of the most disturbing paintings of all time and for good reason. It displays the gruesome aftermath of Johan and Cornelis De Witt having been Torn Apart by the Mob after they were blamed for causing the Dutch to suffer military defeats at the hands of the French. Faces, teeth, fingers, groins, toes and plenty of guts had been torn out before they were left to hang like sickening mockeries of butchered rabbits. Even Jan's assistant holding the torch is visibly rattled by the sight as he tries to cover his vision.