http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NightmareFetishist

What horrifies the one may entice the other.

Tai: I like the glow of Locust blood in this light.

Dom: ...You've got a sick mind, Tai. Gears of War 2 : I like the glow of Locust blood in this light.: ...You've got a sick mind, Tai.

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This character is happily intrigued by whatever is strange, dangerous, disturbing, and/or frightening. If this character is "part of The Team", their fellows may regard them oddly. Indeed, what's Nightmare Fuel or Squick to other characters could very well be a fetish or Squee! to this character. For example, a Nightmare Fetishist may consider Halloween their favorite holiday, harbor an obscure or oddly specific kink, think that the monsters they're supposed to be fighting are cute, or simply be born with this trait as part of their species or family.

In wackier portrayals, a Nightmare Fetishist might also be repulsed and horrified by things most people would consider wholesome and tame. Possibly as a good version of Bad is Good and Good is Bad (though evil characters can be Nightmare Fetishists as well).

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This kind of person is very difficult to coerce or break through the usual methods; as they can be Too Kinky to Torture or Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth. Note that this trope is a sliding scale that does not always include a literal, sexual fetish; Nightmare Fetishism can range from a harmless fondness for morbid stories to a literal sexual fascination with the life-threatening.

Gustave Flaubert said that "One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us." In this case, people who find a very strong aversion in someone or something will slowly become desensitized to it and may even eventually develop an interest to it.

See also Freaky Is Cool, Freakiness Shame, Fluffy Tamer, Boys Like Creepy Critters, Admiring the Abomination, Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant, Creepy Good, and Creepy Awesome. Someone like this may enjoy our Nightmare Fuel page.

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Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Comic Books

Comic Strips

To describe Liō as one of these would be a bit mild. He thinks a zombie eating someone's face is absolutely hilarious. (His father has been seen reading a book entitled Is My Kid a Psycho?)

In Calvin and Hobbes, a lot of Calvin's creations and imaginary antics disturb his parents, like making a bunch of snow people terrified at their impending melting. Perhaps the most chilling of all of Calvin's fantasies had his parents clucking over him delightedly as he played with his Tinkertoys ("He's creating whole worlds over there") - without knowing that their son was imagining that he was the god of his own private universe and enjoyed sending mortals to Hell. Calvin once invented a game called "Gross Out" in which players score one point by coming up with the grossest thing they can imagine; nobody has ever played a full, 50-point game with him.

A classic Charles Addams cartoon shows a movie audience all with somber, teary-eyed faces... except for Uncle Fester, who's grinning delightedly. Of course, the rest of the family shares his tastes.

Fan Works

Films  Animation

Edith from Despicable Me. Her bedtime prayers include the request to not let bugs go into their ears and lay eggs in their skulls/brains, she finds it "cooool!" that she and her sisters are sleeping in old, inactive bombs after Gru adopts them, and she is extremely excited to see that her pancake is shaped like a "dead guy."

Lilo of Lilo & Stitch practices voodoo, owns a handmade doll that she pretends has a bug-infested skull and is generally considered a freak by her peers. While this is implied to be a coping mechanism to deal with her parents' deaths, she still ends up with her only true friends being from outer space, and Lilo & Stitch: The Series has her befriending dozens of weird alien experiments.

Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School: Sybella, Winnie, Elsa, Phanty, and Tanis are all this, as is Miss Grimwood herself to an extent. Examples include enjoying rotten food (including fungus fudge, toadstool tea, swamp brownies chock full of mosquitoes, and poison ivy punch) and relishing the thought of swimming in quicksand.

Winnie from The Boxtrolls is blatantly obsessed with the titular monsters and their supposed barbarism, and is genuinely upset when that turns out to be false. Winnie : (eagerly) Did they kill your family? Did they let you watch?

Eggs : What?

Winnie : Make you watch? : (eagerly) Did they kill your family? Did they let you watch?: What?

The Nightmare Before Christmas: Everyone in Halloween Town. There's a moment when Jack roars at Lock, Shock, and Barrel to scare them into shutting up. Shock almost looks like she's going to faint... and not with fear.

Films  Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Pinball

Invoked in The Addams Family when Gomez lovingly describes the swamp. Gomez: "Quicksand, fumes, toxic waste... it's all ours!"

Podcasts

Walter from the Cool Kids Table game Creepy Town scares Will by threatening to impale his head on a meat hook, revving a chainsaw at him, and eagerly splattering fake blood all over one of the haunted house rooms. All because Will though a claymore didn't fit in the hillbilly torture shack. Die also qualifies, gleefully cutting open a fake corpse to make it look more realistic and getting excited when Olivia starts painting a satanic mural in fake blood. Then she installs a flamethrower.

Janel of Fat, French and Fabulous, professionally as a psychology student, personally as a True Crime podcaster, and romantically as a connoisseur of underweight social rejects in trench coats. Janel : "I am exclusively attracted to people on government watch lists."

Tiffany from Less Is Morgue is immediately attracted to terrifying and disgusting Humanoid Abomination Florida Man. They even end up hooking up and going to chillis.

Sick Sad World: A couple kissed over the corpse of a girl they murdered for supposedly flirting with one of them. Host Mari serves as a much less scary example. They've been interested in horror from a young age.

Antigone from Wooden Overcoats is a mortician, and while she's not into corpses like that, she does take great pride in her work, and regards death as being oddly beautiful. She sometimes forgets not everyone shares this view, and accidentally traumatizes Lady Templar by taking her on a tour of her mortuary.

Tabletop Games

Theatre

In Love Never Dies, this is what makes Phantom realise that Gustav is probably his son. They both share an obsession with "Beauty Underneath" - things that are "dangerous and wild" and would seem scary to the rest of the world.

Katisha from The Mikado (and Ko-Ko, depending on how "There Is Beauty In The Bellow of the Blast" is played).

Senta from The Flying Dutchman. She has a massive crush on a man whom she hasn't met (the titular Van Der Decken aka the Dutchman) after looking at his portrait, cheerfully tells other girls about his tragic story and swear that she will redeem him if she ever meets him, and is thrilled at the prospect of being taken away by him.

Video Games

Visual Novels

Web Animation

Webcomics

Web Original

Western Animation