House of Leaves/Nightmare Fuel

Pretty much the entire book could count, but there are definitely some moments that stand out.


 * The Five and a Half Minute Hallway gives a taste of the freakiness that is to come.
 * Any scene involving people exploring the house.
 * Especially Navidson's final excursion.
 * Johnnie and the pekinese.
 * Any of Johnny's hallucinations.
 * Navidson's nightmares about people stuck in limbo. There's this well, with all these people around it, too scared to jump in. Because if you've been good in life, then you get transported to heaven. But if you were a sinner, then you just sink deeper and deeper into the darkness for all of eternity.
 * The first time you encounter pages with seriously odd formatting.
 * 'forgivemeforgiveme'.
 * Johnny describing how you should not turn around. Just focus on the words.
 * The image of a book tumbling off the edge of a bookshelf. It shouldn't be possible to make something that innocuous frightening.
 * The scene where the house actually starts trying to kill the occupants. All this time, it had just been a static anomaly, safely locked away... then suddenly it isn't. OH GOD.
 * The part where everything the house doesn't have is described. For best results, picture it as a a rant coming from someone who has COMPLETELY lost their mind. Then while the format of the book changes to make it into a literal textual labyrinth, pretend that the rant is still being spoken in the background while you're reading the other scenes. Or that they keep alternating. And then..."Picture that. In your dreams." Gives me the chills.
 * The word "house" itself in the black-and-white edition. I can't speak for the other editions, but in this one there is only one understated Painting the Medium effect, and it's more effective than the more colourful ones sound to be. The word is always printed in grey and is randomly slightly displaced from the row of text in some direction by less than a millimetre, except when it randomly isn't. It varies page by page. Maybe that's even just a technical problem they were having with the different colour, but it works. Eventually you cringe every time you see the word. It really goes with the theme of how eldritch and uncanny the House is.
 * The descriptions of the events that had Johnny's mother sent to Whalestoe are fairly disturbing. The Pelafina letters, however, are terribly spot on for mental illness.
 * The secret message in one of the letters, if you decode it.
 * Johnny's attack in the tattoo parlor, where he panics, seizes up and loses his ability to breathe, afterward finding ten finger marks on his throat. Scary, but only becomes real HONF when
 * Or alternatively, it can be just as creepy if.
 * Johnny doesn't become aware until well into the novel that he is looking more dishevelled and crazy the more he obsesses over the manuscript, neglecting himself so much that his teeth start to rot by the end of the book.