Nightmare Fuel / Animal Crossing

8 Following

Despite being one of Nintendo's lightest and softest yet, players can still be scared by this seemingly-harmless little series.

Shared Examples

• Whilst many are upbeat or at the very least relaxing, there's quite a few unnerving songs from K.K. Slider.
  • K.K. Dirge is about as pleasant as the name implies, being a foreboding track reeking of dread. The song has creepy moaning noises throughout, weird, glitchy computer bleeping and synths, and finally, it ends on several abrupt bangs... before simply starting up again like normal.
  • K.K. Oasis. There's something unsettling about the desert feel and the Jump Scare of the elephant before the song loops.
  • K.K. Lullaby. You wouldn't expect a track like this to send shivers down your spine... but what first appears to be a soft, comfortable-sounding lullaby song throws a random barrage of high-pitched backmasked notes at you right at the end of the song. It can send shivers down the spine, and is more than likely to make you slowly turn around to look behind you, just in case something's there.
  • Hypno K.K., a distorted, melancholy song that almost sounds like it's playing in reverse. The trippy cover art doesn't help matters much.
  • K.K. Synth, quite simply, just sounds rather messed up and glitchy, all the while giving off an unnervingly sad-sounding vibe.
  • K.K. Swing sounds like ordinary, relaxing classical music at first, albeit with a few off-kilter or strangely loud-sounding notes... then towards the end it suddenly starts to sound as if it's going backwards before going back to normal like nothing happened. It gives the feeling of something rather sinister or creepy being concealed behind a normal, benign facade.
• Due to his long-winded and abrasive rants, many younger players were scared of Mr. Resetti, to the point that there's a warning about him in the manual for Animal Crossing: City Folk.
• Bee Swarms are incredibly vicious if you shake up the wrong tree and drop their hive. You'll only have a couple of seconds before the swarm starts chasing you and, unless you're able to use your net correctly or get to the nearest open building, you won't be able to outrun it. Before New Horizons, getting attacked by the swarm is accompanied by a horrific screeching noise, as if you can hear your character is screaming for dear life before the bees disperse from their stinging onslaught.
  • While this screech is replaced by drums in New Horizons when under attack, the bees are replaced by wasps whose implications qualify for From Bad to Worse.
• The tarantulas in Wild World onwards. Thankfully rare, if one sees you approaching while carrying a bug net, it flips out and attacks you. Your character then passes out and the screen fades to black. Luckily, you end up in front of your house, no worse for the wear, but it's still a horrifying event in a game where the seemingly worst fate for your character is being stung by bees/wasps. The scorpions do the same thing as the tarantulas.
  • In addition, in New Horizons, if you run close to a tarantula, the arachnid will bolt after your sorry behind. If you wish to catch one in that game, it's an exercise in nerve-wracking patience. Approaching a tarantula while their front legs are up will provoke them to strike, turning the process into a tense game of "red light, green light".
  • Tarantulas and scorpions show up at nighttime, specifically from 7 PM until 4 AM, which can create a source of Paranoia Fuel for players who can only play during these times unless they either time-travel or have someone visit their island/town.
• A few Gyroid families are quite creepy... well, if you don't just think all Gyroids in general are creepy. All of these families fall under the "Quirky" interior theme, which says something.
  • The Howloids are a vibrant red, magenta, and purple (Mega, Regular, and Mini, respectively) and have domed heads. Their facial holes feature a turned-down mouth outlined in blue, and bags under their eyes, making them look like they're screaming. Oh, and they do, with a "bending down and covering face" and "spreading arms when rising" motion.
  • The Freakoids (two sizes, Mega and Mini) are both purple and blue with flat-topped eye holes and look like they have stringy hair, with lines under their caps. They also have a hole to be a nose, and a half-circle for a mouth, flat side down. They have the same motions as the Howloids and sound like crying babies.
  • The Lamentoids invoke Uncanny Valley by Gyroid standards. They are brown Gyroids in the four standard sizes, but their faces aren't the usual holes, but painted like an African tribal mask. They make a sound like a deep tumbling bell, but their colorful face paint is really unnerving.
  • The Poltergoids are more spooky than creepy, but they are pretty strange. All four are beige Gyroids with two large circular eyeholes and several small mouth holes forming a creepy smile, making them resemble a skeleton. They have square designs on their base and the rim of their caps. They make a rapid vibrating rattle, like a stereotypical ghost or bones snapping.
  • Adding to the creepiness of Gyroids, talking to Dr. Shrunk in the Cafe he states that the Gyroids on stage appeared out of nowhere one day and he has no idea where they came from. It's possible that a villager may have put them there without him knowing, or their love for music drew them to Club LOL... except they aren't mobile (or are they?)
  • If a Jock villager visits your house and comments on a Gyroid there, he may bring up that he has no idea how Gyroids work, so they can be both sentient and non-sentient, are based on burial urns, and no-one seems to know what they exactly are...
  • The 2.0 update for New Horizons brings them back, for better or for worse. On one hand, they feel more alive and animated, but the key word is alive, because the method for obtaining them is far creepier than before: You obtain them by locating Gyroid fragments, burying them in the ground, and then watering them, to which the crack in the ground housing them will start to emit vapor, almost like a breath... These aren't just animate pottery, but animate pottery that can be regrown in the earth.
    • The new Gyroids introduced in New Horizons are weird, which is par for the course for a Gyroid, but one that gains special notoriety is the Crumploid which, as the name implies, looks and sounds like crumpled paper. While it's considered to be the most Ugly Cute of the new Gyroids, some people might find its battered appearance a bit unsettling.
  • The creepiest part about the Gyroids is their inspiration. The Gyroids are based off of Haniwa, cylindrical humanoid ceramic figures that were buried in tombs during Japan's Kofun Period (600-400BCE) to act as funerary offerings, retaining structures and protection against evil spirits. While their exact origins are a mystery, legend has it that Emperor Suinin ordered them to be created as a replacement for voluntary live burial.
  • Coco the rabbit villager resembles a Gyroid. Her eyes are just two empty black pits in her head, and her expression never changes.
• You can build sentient snowpeople. They slowly melt away over the course of days, and it's possible for them to only live a single day after the snow completely melts in late February.
• If you don't play the game long enough or time travel forward a long period of time, cockroaches will invade your house. You have to squash them in order to get rid of them. In New Horizons, you can use the room edit mode to squash them with furniture or other items rather than stepping on them, but it's still an unpleasant experience.
• Kangaroos' joeys always mimic their mothers' expressions. This can be a bit eerie in the same way as Creepy Twin Telepathy, suggesting of a Hive Mind between the mother and child. From a technical perspective, it also means the character model for kangaroos must have four eyes.

2001 (GameCube)

• There's a quest early in the game to deliver an axe to a villager. When it's a cranky bear or someone with similar vibes, and you're really young and not aware of the game's non-violent nature, it might feel as if the villager will go axe-happy on you (especially if you're playing at night).
• If you were unlucky enough to not save when you're away traveling on the train, the villager at the startup screen will realize that something is wrong, and warns you that if you play right now it will be only "the data you left behind". Should you not heed their warning and continue, you'll find that you've lost your money, your items, and your face. Yep, imagine the horror of stepping out of your house, turning around to the camera, and having an empty, gaping face. Empty eye sockets, open, expressionless mouth, warty skin, and a disturbing resemblance to a ReDead.
• The 11 PM and midnight music are really spooky for such a lighthearted game like Animal Crossing. The 1 AM music is fairly minimalist, but still similarly unsettling.
• After coming off of 1 AM, 2:00 a.m. made many players jump because of how out-of-place it sounds compared to not only the rest of the late night music, but also the rest of the hourly music in the game. In contrast, the next two installments' equivalent only has this sort of tone in its Super Smash Bros. remix.
• The original Animal Crossing started up with a voice saying "Nintendo" that differs depending on how many times you've loaded the title screen without powering down, with the cycle repeating. Eventually, it will start up with a deep voice saying "Nintendo" not unlike the one in Luigi's Mansion, and then while it usually shows a random character walking around, this time it shows a villager carrying an axe randomly chopping down trees. Here's an example of this.
• The Japanese versions have the "Tomato Juice Shirt". While its design is supposed to be self-explanatory, the tomato juice ends up looking like blood.
• Normally, headgear does nothing but change your looks, but you don't hear the normal sound used for equipping an accessory when you put on King Tut's mask. Instead, you hear a deeper, distorted version of the same sound, which is your first clue to the item's true nature. Then you start running around town, and you begin to trip over. As long as you have the mask on, you're cursed. Where did the Able Sisters get this Artifact of Doom? In New Horizons, this item can instead be crafted. How does something you craft wind up with a pharaoh's curse?!

City Folk

• When you try to delete your town, Rover freaks out and explains in a panic all of the consequences thereof, but he smiles if you go through with it. After he's finished wiping your town out of existence, he cheerfully says "It's gone. Bye-bye!" The black void behind him makes it even creepier.

New Leaf

• The 7 PM music sticks out from the rest of the hourly music like a sore thumb. It has a creepy sense of urgency to it, almost as if sorrow is plaguing your character.
• The 12 AM music. Unlike the 4 AM theme, which is creepy because it's essentially Nothing Is Scarier in musical form, the instrumentation in the 12 AM track has some unsettling knocking in it and makes many players jump at the beginning. It sounds very out-of -place between the 11 PM and 1 AM music, which are more sad-sounding like Wild World and City Folk's 11 PM-2 AM music.
• 4 AM music. It opens with slow, metallic sounding percussion mixed with oddly bright strings, which then transitions into a slow, unsettling piano melody which then loops back into the opening percussion. Its minimalistic nature compared to the other themes gives it a Nothing Is Scarier feeling.
• The 5 AM music. After the unsettling 4 AM music, you're treated to what sounds like a deranged arrangement of the beautiful 8 PM music. Unless you have either the Early-Bird or Night-Owl ordinances, no one else is up. The music sounds distorted and has occasional pauses, with a tribal-sounding drumbeat, comparable to the 12 AM theme's woodblock sounds, giving off the impression of oncoming insanity.
• The eeriness of the early morning music may have something to do with the Ushi no toki mairi, Japan's answer to the so-called "witching hour". It refers to a ritual that takes place between 1 and 3 AM, in which a cuckolded woman would nail a straw doll to a sacred tree in the hopes that it would fatally curse her unfaithful lover.
• The 3:33 AM alien message, which is only available on Sunday and Monday, has no explanation as to why it happens. It's just... there.
• Some of the "Creepy Set" of furniture obtained on Halloween:
  • The Creepy Statue. It's a male bust made of dark stone, but when you interact with it, glowing red eyes appear. It's just a decoration, but it can still be startling when interacting with it for the first time.
  • The Creepy Crystal is a small table with a crystal ball on it. When activated, a moaning face appears. The face itself follows you when you rotate the camera.

New Horizons

• New Horizons has an extreme case of Mood Dissonance when it comes to the both disturbingly and depressingly realistic-looking gravestone, which is a piece of furniture that can randomly be given out by villagers or found in Nook's Cranny. It's not surprising that its sighting in the February 2020 Direct sparked more than a few theories.
  • Harvey's Island can be a surprisingly creepy place to visit. While it's just a photo studio in context, from a gameplay perspective, you're essentially kidnapping/duplicating your villagers and force them to take pictures with you. It goes further, as the villagers are utterly lifeless, only repeating the interaction you gave them and when you go into another room, they teleport there to follow you! It feels like something straight out of The Stepford Wives or Us.
• The darkness in the museum's fossil rooms is a little unsettling. There's also a glowing meteor replica in the second room that you can't see unless you stand in a certain spot, and a Scare Chord plays when the camera finishes moving to show it. The International Museum Day Stamp Rally also refers to that part of the room as the "Extinction Spot".
• New Horizons added something new to fake artwork: some of the fake pieces are haunted. For example, the fake version of The Girl With The Pearl Earrings (the Wistful Painting) will sometimes open and close her eyes. Others will change expression, direction, or even levitate at will. Perhaps the most quietly unsettling is the fake "Beauty Looking Back", which has a creepy human-shaped stain on the back of the piece. The real terror, though, is that there's no pattern to this behavior, and the art can remain still and lifeless for a very long time, making you wonder if it always looked like that or if your mind playing tricks on you.
• Upon catching a sea butterfly, it wiggles around like all other fish, but hold it for long enough and its head will twitch and burst open, revealing multiple tentacles. This is typical hunting behavior of the creature, but it's unnerving and alarming when you see it for the first time - it's almost reminiscent of something out of the Alien franchise.
• Crazy Redd's ship in New Horizons. From the start, Redd is an incredibly shifty character who clearly isn't doing business by legal or ethical means - but the first time you encounter him, he's wandering around your island like everybody else. Explore a little before you talk to him, though, and you'll find a shabby, run-down old fishing vessel docked in the upper-left corner of your island. It's already reminiscent of haunted ships and the typical zombie apocalypse aesthetic, but try to interact with the ship and you'll get a message from your character stating that they have an uneasy feeling about the ship and think that it's best if they don't board without permission. Being able to board after Redd invites you onto the boat isn't much better. The eerie music and dark lighting combine with the cluttered, damp room below deck to create the sense that it isn't a safe place. You have to use a flashlight to see the details of any art you're interested in buying; Redd stands in the center of the floor commenting on everything you interact with; and when you decide to buy something, his dialogue might make you wonder if he didn't just take more of your Bells than you agreed to pay. For a final creep factor, neither of Redd's lines when you leave the boat are very comforting. If you bought something, he'll say "You won't regret it!" If you didn't buy anything, he'll only mutter "...Thanks." In both cases, the camera stops and swings around at an angle, with Redd and his unfriendly-seeming face dead center of the shot...
• New Horizons' 2.0 update introduced a lot of new items and decorations. One of them is the Graveyard wallpaper, which you can purchase from Saharah. It already looks eerie enough on its own, but you turn off the lights and hit the right button the final time in the cycle before the lights go on again, a shrouded white ghost appear in the distant background (although the ghost may be hard to notice). Cycling through the lights again to bring back the ghost brings them closer a couple of times until they're standing in one of the tree gaps right in the foreground.
• Happy Home Paradise unlocks soundscapes for ambient audio to be played in rooms. One of them is "creaking," which creates far-too-realistic creaking noises that can bring to mind intruders or ghosts.
• If you start the game on a Nintendo Switch with the internal clock set to later than December 31, 2060, an error message will warn the player to set the system's internal clock to between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2060 with red text, as if your island disappeared after all that time.

Other

• There's a scene in the movie where Ai and her friends go along with Yū and Alfonso into a deep cave. While going down a rapid waterfall is already a near-death experience, it gets worse: they find a skeleton of a seismosaurus, the dinosaur Blathers dreamed of finding. Yū tries to climb onto it only to fall and hurt himself as a piece of rock he was grasping onto gives out. The whole cave starts to collapse soon after, and while everyone makes it out just in time, Yū is naive enough to try to go back in. Ai holds him back just as the tunnel becomes completely blocked with a boulder. If it weren't for her, he would have died.