Star Wars/Nightmare Fuel

That looks rather painful.

The movies

• The Phantom Menace: Darth Maul getting bisected by Obi-Wan and falling down a reactor shaft to his doom. Yikes.
  • It's made even worse in The Clone Wars, where it's revealed that he survived.
  • Maul's Nightmare Face, especially on the Ultimate Edition CD cover. Sweet dreams, everyone.
  • In the climax when the Nabooian pilots make off in their recently-liberated fighters, one of them takes a hit from a gun turret and loses an engine, plummeting helplessly to a fiery crash in the valley below. Imagine what those last moments had to be like for the pilot...
• Attack of the Clones has Anakin slaughtering a village full of Tusken Raiders. It's his eyes that really clinch it; for all the complaints about Hayden Christensen's acting, he does pull off pure, undiluted hatred very well.
• Revenge of the Sith, being easily the darkest in the prequel trilogy if not the whole series, has clear cases of this.
  • Order 66. Watching several Jedi get slaughtered by the clone troopers they trusted is not only sad, but fairly disturbing, especially when you think about it. An especially hard-hitting case is Ki-Adi Mundi's death, where he's leading a group of clone troopers through a dark and snowy area, only for them to turn against him and shoot him to death mercilessly. Ki-Adi-Mundi's expression as he turns around and slowly realizes that the clones have stopped and are aiming at him without even knowing why they're doing it is just icing on the nightmaretastic cake.
  • Anakin's implied-but-not-actually-shown murder of the Jedi younglings.

Child: "Master Skywalker, there's too many of them! What are we going to do?" Anakin: (a moment of silence, and then his lightsaber activates)

• • After the Anakin vs. Obi-Wan duel on Mustafar, Obi-Wan leaves Anakin slowly and painfully burning next to a lava river, and the movie actually shows us this burning. Yeah, this film earned its PG-13 rating, all right.
  • Darth Sidious (AKA Chancellor Palpatine). He succeeds in playing people around him like pawns in chess, including the Jedi Knights, and rises in power all by his own schemes. He is a resemblance of power-hungry, selfish politicians in the real world (past, present and future), and his force lightning is absolutely terrifying - so terrifying that only Yoda has managed to push it off!
• A New Hope has the IT-O interrogator droid used to interrogate Leia. Interesting euphemism, "interrogator droid". The radio adaptation actually shows us Vader's mind probe-assisted interrogation of Leia, and it's terrifying. First, he tries to convince her he's another rebel who needs to know where the Death Star plans are, before just causing her horrible pain.
  • The dianoga, which is somewhere between HONF and Squick.
    • For those who don't know what a dianoga is, it's that creature in the trash compactor.
  • The sight of the charred corpses of Owen and Beru Lars. It's very brief, but once you see it, you'll never be able to unsee it.
• The Empire Strikes Back has the Wampa scene, the Dark Side cave on Dagobah, the torture, and the carbonite-freezing of Han Solo.
  • The moment when Luke, disregarding Obi-Wan and Yoda's warning that he has no chance against Darth Vader, leaves to help his friends in the Sith Lord's clutches. Specifically, when Yoda contradicts Obi-Wan's comment about Luke being their last chance with "No, There Is Another." At that point, your horror for Luke will spike when you realize the kid has just lost his Plot Armor.
  • The moment when Luke faces Vader in the carbon-freezing chamber. Specifically, when Vader knocks Luke down the stairs early in the fight, Vader leaps at him like a dark wraith from your deepest nightmares.
• Return of the Jedi has the Cold Blooded Electric Torture Palpatine inflicts on Luke Skywalker, after he confirms that he'll never turn to the Dark Side.
  • The Sarlacc, which is said by Threepio to keep people alive for a thousand years, as they're slowly digested.
    • It ATE Boba Fett... may be subverted by the fact that he survived this, as explained in the EU. May also be even worse when you think about what it was like while he was down there.
    • Or, from the Sarlacc's perspective: You have just eaten something that disagrees with you. And it has begun fighting its way out from inside your stomach.
  • The Rancor.

Expanded Universe

• The Dark Side ending of the first game from The Force Unleashed. After killing Darth Vader, Starkiller tries unsuccessfully to attack Palpatine. Next thing he knows, Palpatine grips the Rogue Shadow with the Force and, with Juno Eclipse still inside the ship, throws it on top of Starkiller. The last thing Starkiller sees is darkness until he wakes up on an operating table, finding himself being clad in a suit of life support armor. Add some last-second Eye Scream, and you'll wish you'd chosen a different final boss.
• Knights of the Old Republic has enough to get its own page.
• There was a webcomic called Evasive Action, which described the lives of three Padawans who survived Order 66 and went into hiding. They were on Felucia when Order 66 was issued, and in a convenient spot to watch Aayla Secura get gunned down by her own troops. Take a look at the background image of Aayla's Dies Wide Open expression... yeah.
• Destiny's Way mentions some of the critters employed in the Yuuzhan Vong Sentient Sacrifice. Flaying knives, flesh-eating beetles... We knew already that it wasn't a barrel of laughs, these being the Yuuzhan Vong and all, but still...