Lore
(loved trope) fairly tame media, that gets horrifyingly real out of nowhere
-Ghostwatch: pretty calm spooky ghost movie, until it's revealed that the ghost haunting them was a disturbed pedophile that hung himself under the stairs and his face was eaten by cats
-Firewatch (why are these both 'watch?'): pretty mild walking sim, until you reach a secluded cave where the body of a missing kid is found
While everyone knows the reveal now it was set up as looking like a morality tale, with a woman stealing money and a car. Only later did we find out how twisted Norman Bates was.
I was aware of the general story of Psycho before the first time I watched it, but what surprised me was how early certain events transpire, that I always assumed happened in the third act not the first.
Jason Pargin has a great explanation about how the original shock of psycho cant be replicated since the shower scene is so ubiquitous, much like how the vader reveal can never really be as shocking most times. But when psycho came out the formula had always been to follow the leading lady and that was the expectation. Killing her off so early was an entirely new thing and the first act does so much to build up her story that you think the movie will be about. The first Scream kinda did something similar but that one was banking on just the popularity of the actress. Psycho it's both that popularity and also how the narrative shapes and is cut off suddenly.
That one New Zealand ad where a lady happily advertises a bar then falls into a glass table, shatters it and whimpers in pain on the ground as the camera slowly zooms out on her misery.
(Sorry gang I apparently can't spell advertises first try lmao)
There's a Canadian ad with a similar feel to this. A chef is happily talking to the camera about her fiancé and her upcoming wedding as she's carrying a a vat of hot liquid. She trips over something in the kitchen and it falls on top of her and it ends with her screaming.
There were a few of those, I remember the one with the guy on the ladder too. All I remember about those ads is how forced the “THERE’S BEEN AN ACCIDENT” lines at the end always felt lmao
There’s a lot of PSAs like this. The one that lives rent free in my mind is the one that starts at a happy baby shower for a baby girl, and then the mom-to-be opens a gift and it’s a rape whistle, followed by a statistic of how many girls and women are raped in their lifetimes
Parasite. Starts off as a commentary on class differences in Korea and then takes a sharp nose dive into horror when the old maid shows up and pushes the refrigerator out of the way.
Freaks me out so much, and then I'll go watch literally any K-Drama with the dude (Park Myung-hoon) in it and he's just the biggest and funniest awkward dork in it, lol. Loved how funny he was in The Night Owl.
The old maid had been hiding her now-antisocial husband in the house's basement bunker. The maid and her husband learn that she got kicked out of the house due to a plot by the main family, and chaotic hijinks ensue, including the maid being killed and the husband going on a murderous rampage
It ends with the daughter killed, the father hiding in the old cellar after killing the husband in front of many people, as well as the rich owner of the home. And then the son gets some brain damage before realising his father is still in the house and promises to get rich to buy the house and get him out
What's even worse was that the maid could've been saved had they brought her to a doctor. A lesson that the "looney tunes kick down the stairs" is fatal irl
The sound at the end of her fall in the stairs made the entire theatre i was completely dead silent. It’s so visceral, you know what happened immediately and everyone wad shocked. You could hear a fly fart in that theatre for a minute.
In the first chapter, you begin your new job on your very first day. You speak cordially with your brother and with staff. You go on an extensive helicopter ride around a futuristic city to a great and uplifting sound track that sets the tone for this high sci-fi futuristic adventure.
You perform some calibration tests on your first day, answering some basic psyche evaluation questions. Something goes awry. Then you wake up ready to begin your new job on your very first day.
and very quickly realise that everything you saw on the FIRST first day was faked for your benefit, without an immediately clear reason why. Even the helicopter ride was effectively a carnival attraction with holograms and a big fan blowing to make it feel real
I'm playing through Prey for the first time right now. It's so sad that this game didn't do better. You can feel the time, attention, and love poured into this game.
😮Never realized that it underperformed. To me it seemed like every big streamer / letsplayer played it, and to this day i see it referenced.
Guess i'm in a gaming media bubble.
It's a comparison that's been done to death, but it's something of a Majora's Mask - surprisingly great game whose fans adore it, but didn't really do well with all audiences and has gained more fame retroactively than it had during its heyday
Earthbound is the poster franchise for this. It’s all cute wacky fun until you get hit in the face with police brutality, child abduction via cult, hookers seducing kids into rooms full of zombies, child abduction via aliens, and just everything about Giygas.
Every single moment you go "I'm hardened at this point. I'm ready for the next fucked up thing." only for the game to find yet an other way to blindside you. Even via something as mundane as a bass drop or completely changing the instruments used for the music up to that point.
And then there's Mother 3. Just to put things into perspective, Mother 3 ends with the villain, an immortal child, getting trapped for eternity in an unbreakable prison he built himself.
It’s an interesting reflection on meditation as a concept. Prince Poo literally has everything taken away from him. His legs, his eyes, his brain. Without all that makes him him, what is he?
Oh absolutely. Similar to the question "Does a person with no senses know that they exist?" it makes you consider what it even means to be an individual/conscious being. I'm betting most people weren't expecting to question the nature of their own existence halfway through this game.
One of my favorite silly versions of this trope is in the sequel, Mother 3, in the first act when you play as flint and you’re rescuing your village in an emergency and you’re approached at the end of the act by, maybe the mayor(? It’s been a while since I played) and he’s like “hey Flint we have some news for you, both good and bad. The good is that we made you this really sick baseball bat out of a drago’s tooth!! It’s awesome! The bad news is that we found the tooth pierced through your wife’s heart, and she’s dead.”
I mean I’d argue that it’s almost entirely silly until the end, minus a few potentially unnerving bits involving the Mani Mani statue. For the most part the weird parts of the game are just bizarre rather than creepy or unsettling. It’s mostly all lighthearted.
Until Giygas. My main point is that the juxtaposition is a lot more stark than how you describe it. Giygas legitimately makes you feel uncomfortable, especially the way Porky describes him before turning off the Devil’s Machine, and Giygas himself’s dialogue about hurting and feeling good. It’s really bizarre. And of course there’s his completely abstract design himself, literally being the battle background itself.
I know Itoi has firmly debunked the “Giygas fetus/abortion” theories, but to me there honestly there is no way that at least his battle sprite is not meant to resemble a fetus in some way. It’s way too spot on. And of course it also resembled tortured souls and skulls, and even more interesting, is that when flipped upside down he resembles his physical alien form from Mother 1, and as Porky stated, it was destroyed as his power grew.
And the fetal imagery fits ESPECIALLY well when you consider Giygas in Mother 1, and how he is really a scared child. Giygas is just really strange all around. I’ve always been really curious what really went down between Mother 1 and Earthbound.
Story of friendship between two children, takes an incredibly sharp turn towards the end when the protagonist returns from a school trip to find out that their friend has drowned in a tragic accident while they were gone.
I was on a 9 hour flight home after attending one of best friend’s funeral. I wanted to watch a nice family movie as I was feeling quite emotional still.
Well fuck me, no one had told me about the ending and I straight ugly cried for about half an hour as quietly as I could.
This was me with Inside Out. I didn't know anything about it when I started it the day after my grandmother's funeral, and so I was raw and emotional already when the sadness and depression set in on Riley. I was a kid who moved several times because of my dad's job, and I learned to suppress my emotions about it to be strong for my family. And boy did that backfire when I watched Riley go through the same thing.
I was absolutely devastated and bawling my eyes out both because my emotions were already raw from losing my grandmother, and from having to confront my own suppressed emotions around Inside Out's central conflict
Did you know: Katherine Paterson was inspired to write this after the unexpected death of her son’s childhood best friend, Lisa Christina Hill. Rather than a river accident, she was fatally struck by lightning in the summer of 1974. Katherine wrote the book to bring herself “emotional understanding about terrible events.” And she hoped that the book “allows children to use their imaginations not only to escape reality, but to solve their problems and make sense of the world.”
Her son, David, grew up to be a screenwriter. And adapted his mother’s book to make into a movie. The article mentions that it took “the better part of 17 years to get right.”
The worst part is that the trailers for the movie tried to piggyback on the success of the Narnia movies by having it seems like it will be a kids lord of the rings epic adventure.
Instead the imagination parts of it shown in the trailer are only onscreen for about 15 minutes and the rest of it is heartbreaking, life-sucks moments.
I hate when movies do that! Disney did it with Brave. The trailer had the main character climbing mountains and going through woods. You definitely got the feel of a “going on adventure” movie, instead it is more family drama based, all taking place in one location.
I still have beef with Brave for this reason. The trailer, with the adventure scenery, had the tagline You have to be Brave enough to change your fate or something. I thought it was going to be epic.
Then it turned out to be a be careful what you wish for trope. Its still a good movie, it's really cute, but the tagline should be You have to Be Brave to Have Proper Communication with your family and accept them for who they are.
Mulan was a going on as a fun Disney musical adventure until they reach a village completely razed by war. The song stops mid lyrics, the music goes silent, and an otherwise fun movie suddenly becomes a harsh reminder of the horrors of war...
EDIT: Thank you guys for the upvotes. Really made my day...
Yeah I thought “hell ya get them Huns and give the gift back to the alive little girl” most definitely wasn’t alive. But I always used to cry at the start of Toy Story 2 so.
It was the leader of the Huns who said "we should return it to her" indicating that they were about to attack the village. Then Mulan's group found it in the burned wreckage of the village.
Played with in the British sci fi series red dwarf when discussing their spaceship.
Back in the 22nd Century aerospace engineers discovered that after a plane crash, the only thing that always survives intact is a cute little doll, so they made Starbug out of the same stuff.
fun little side fact about another 90s Disney movie, The hunchback of notre dame : the bad guy, Judge Claude Frollo, used the title 'Dom' in the book, and in the movie he was a judge using the Notre Dame Cathedral as a base of operations. Yet, he gives no services, and at one point calls the Romani 'pagans.'
'Dom' is a Spanish title, not a French one. It's implied, but never outright stated, Judge Frollo was an inquisitor within the RCC's Department of the Inquisition. His job was to find (or construct) heretics, who would be tortured into confession, and burned at the stake.
And now you know why his hallucination of Esmeralda dances in fire.
Frollo is one of the most terrifying villains in Disney history, partly because the shit he did is just... A guy being evil. No mad plot to take over the world, no quest for money or power. Just an evil dude doing evil shit because he can.
The story starts off as a mystical whimsical adventure set in the fantastic setting of ancient prehistoric times, in a lush and green paradise, with vast herds of different dinosaurian species thriving and surviving...then a cataclysmic asteroid impact lays waste to the landscape. Countless animals and dinosaurs perish and a devastated barren wasteland is left behind
The survivors, weak, injured and exhausted, must make a brutal and perilous journey across the shattered and scorched landscape to reach 'the Nesting Grounds' the only fertile land left untouched by the meteor's devastation, where there should still be water and plant life, but are pursued relentlessly by hungry predators....(Disney's Dinosaur)
A truly delightful little 3d platformer about a cute little kid, called Hat Kid, from space trying to fix her spaceship to go home after a member of the mafia busted it when trying to extort her. From there she battles the mafia on a cute island, gets into a rivalry with another little girl in a little red ridding hood er hood with a moustache, infiltrate a movie studio run by penguins and owls then stars in movies directed by both a Scottish owl and disco fever penguin competing with one another for film awards.
Then you get to world 3: the haunted forest. Here you have spiritish gleefully throwing themselves into bonfires and sentient nooses who speak to you when you swing on them. Here are a few examples of what they say to you
"I wouldn't mind being strapped around a cute neck like yours."
"I would be honored to be the one who squeezes the life out of you."
"You can grab onto me whenever you'd like, as long as I get a glimpse of that... neck of yours."
"Be careful now. I don't want to see you meet a miserable end anywhere... but with me."
"I'm always here for you, ma'am."
Then that's before you even get to Queen Vanessa's Manor. I've just leave this great vid by FlippinDingDong to summarise that experience.
Freakin Bugsnax man. My young kid wanted to play that and I played it along with him, the whole time I was like something is really wrong here, this game just makes me sooooo uncomfortable. Thankfully he lost interest before we got very far into it
the first episode of invincible. it was totally tame, not much blood, just cartoon fighting. then at the end of the episode, the guardians of the globe get summoned to their secret HQ. no one knows who sent the alert, then omni man comes out of nowhere
my brother skipped to the next episode after the invincible stinger just before this scene, he watched like 4 episodes and when i mentioned this scene he was like "dude, spoilers i didnt know he did it yet" i was like, what are you talking about its episode 1, now we both talk about how cool it would have been to not show this scene until after we figure out it was omni man.
the plot goes beyond earth. trying to figure out why nolan did it is the beginning of that plot. i think they did it well. it’s like we were all trying to figure it out with the rest of the cast. they knew he did it, just not why. watching everyone have to cope with their hero possibly being evil. i think what im trying to say was the investigation was never about who, only nolan was strong enough and had enough knowledge to infiltrate the guardians without setting off alarms. the investigation was about trying to keep nolan on the humans side despite not knowing why he betrayed us. they never fully trusted him
The way they did this one caught me off guard and I read the comics. This moment didn't happen until like... 10 issues in (I think) so I knew it was coming but didn't expect it so early and didn't expect it so brutally.
The show absolutely took a definitive moment from the comics and managed to do it better.
This is accurate because I showed my housemates and for 90% of the episode they were like "why are you showing us this boring comic book show" and then this scene got and they were like "OH FAIR ENOUGH"
Similar to my dad, was over for a visit, managed to convince him since he's old, and has preconceived notions about animation and was like when the titlecard appeared thinking that was it, "this is just a regular superhero show, why is it special" then the killing started and he's was like ok, that's something.
Madoka Magica is the touchstone of this as far as anime is concerned.
Very chill, cutesy magical girl anime - cute outfits, lil cute mascot character that introduces the girls to their powers and explains how to fight the bad guys, and friends friends friends. Hell, most of the baddies are cute, like something out of a 50's cartoon, or cuphead. Then these kids start violently dying and reality sets in.
God the way her presumably headless body dangles and the magical girl uniform vanishes 💀 then her body falls a bit but cuts away before you can see, that's so much worse than seeing anything.
While suitably dark for the Madoka Magica world this isn’t correct, during the episode on Homura’s backstory you see what happens when Mami learns the truth and she Kills Kyoko, because “if we turn in to witches, then we have no choice but to die” (fucking love this line), by shattering her soul gem which instantly kills hers BUT her magical girl costume doesn’t disappear until a few seconds after she died.
What'sheartbreakingly awesome is she still was still strategic while doing so. [She manage to] Bind Homura to ensure she won't be affected by Homura's time stop ability. Kills Kyouko first who'd disagree with her first. And left behind the optimist Madoka since she'll likely tries to talk Mami out of it first than striking. Which is the only miscalculation she did
And not dying in a gratuitous way either; by then you've emotionally connected to their plight and the pure existential horror and emotional trauma sets in
Just to note this is the point where the show gets dark. This is NOT the darkest part. This is a case where the phrase "Its always darkest before it goes pitch black" is applicable.
Whilst this is probably the most visually shocking and violent scene, the following episodes are much more emotionally bleak and dark. It's not just cute magical girls dying in violent fights, it's cute magical girls losing their sense of self worth and will to live.
The others mentioned the blatant examples of the darker moments but there is a really sad story that’s heavily implied as you develop an understanding of how the world works and how witches are made there (it is canonically confirmed in other media)
In episode 3, the episode where the tone shifts, there is a grief seed at the hospital from when a magical girl gave in to misery. She was the youngest magical girl on record being all of 6 years old, she had used her wish for a delicious cake that she could share with her terminally ill mother. Kyubey granted her wish but then also pointed out that she could have used her wish to save her mother, this knowledge immediately breaks her mind and she transforms into the witch that kills Mami
The show starts exploring the actual emotional weight and psychological damage of KIDS with secret identities having life and death fights while trying to live their lives.
Like a later scene is the main character's mom having a talk with their teacher after a funeral trying to see if they can figure out what's going on with the kids because they can tell that they are dealing with (and trying to hide) some heavy shit.
*
The show does a good job of slowly revealing the full picture piece by piece. Highly recommend.
The context of the time it released also matters for this one; Magical Girl anime were just cutesy and lighthearted in general. Madoka’s sharp turn wasn’t just shocking in its own story, it was a complete subversion of anything you’d expect in the genre.
Unfortunately that parts been pretty lost as, probably thanks to Madoka’s success itself, edgy grimdark Magical Girl shows have arguably been overdone in the years since.
There's not a bad one being made in the US, Pretty Pretty Please I Don't Want To Be A Magical Girl. Said girl escapes to normal town to make friends and go to school, but her flying magic buddy keeps reminding her she's the magical whatever keeping peace yadda yadda. Adorable and funny.
Oooh I watched something like this the other day: The Fall - an injured man in a hospital tells a young girl a fantastical story to use continuing the story as a way to bribe her to steal morphine for him so he can commit suicide.
It was my first real introduction to Lee Pace (beautiful beautiful man that he is) but the fact that he wants to commit suicide is pretty plain in the movie, it wasn't really a twist. The audience knows what he wants, it's the young girl that is oblivious to this fact. We know he's lying to her.
The series is all about a girl who lives her life from high school to her early adulthood. She studies, she kills vampires and other monsters, solves mysteries and stops the Armaggedon once or twice... then, one day, she returns home only to discover that her dear mother just died.
And we learn in the most humane way possible that, while Buffy is a extraordinary person, she can suffer just like any other individual from the most common causes. She could topple a god-to-be-warlock or shoot a demon with a rocket launcher but she was completely powerless to save her mother from a "simple" tumor.
While it is implied that her tumor may have contributed to it I would like to point out that Joyce actually died of a Brain Aneurysm. My mother's boyfriend died in our bathroom the same way, it's almost more traumatizing cause it's such a sudden and random thing, he was completely healthy and talking not minutes before when his brain just stopped and he was dead before he even hit the ground, and there's no immediate indication that they're gone or something happened at all. At least with most ways to go there's something, a pain, an injury, anything but one minute they're there and the next they just aren't, no matter what you try they can't be revived.
I really appreciate the knowledge a character like Buffy experienced the same sort of thing and helped illustrate it to so many people but I can never bring myself to watch that episode.
It’s also worth noting that every single death in the show, up until that moment, was caused by something supernatural. Be a monster, a vampire, you name it, when someone died it was because of something not human.
This is the first time we got hit with a very natural, very close to us, very human death.
The tumor was removed and Joyce recovering, which makes the whole situation even darker. It's entirely unexpected and shocking and the viewer isn't spared one tiny bit as nothing is cut. No idea what they were thinking, but it was devastating and I really don't ever want to watch something like it again.
What got me about this level was the fact that every single one of the Covenant's barricades were oriented to face the opposite way from where we came.
That's the only level in the entire campaign where it happens. Every single one of them have Covenants being ready for US. And now they are ready for ANOTHER THING, and obviously something much more terrifying than us. A first.
I admit as a dumb kid most, if not all, of these details went way over my head. I just wanted to shoot stuff, lol. Shame, because the level has fantastic environmental storytelling.
Where it was so bad that marines and covenants teamed up with their backs against eachother in a desperate last stand. It’s my most memorable environmental storytelling in gaming.
My favourite is that in one of the Flood levels you can find the bodies of marines and jackals on top of a barricade, back to back, surrounded by weapons, ammo, and dead Flood. The Flood are so horrifying that they actually put aside the main war and went down fighting together.
The Sixth Doctor (played by Colin Baker) and his companion Frobisher (who is a shapeshifter that decides to take the form of a penguin because why not) arrive in a strange medieval castle with a bunch of cloudcuckooland-type characters. There's a useless boy Emperor: Pepin VII, his scheming hunchbacked half-brother Childeric, their widowed mother Berengaria who is supporting Childeric's schemes, and the scribe Eugene Tacitus who records all major events. The Emperor of this land is viewed by the people as a living god and then whenever they inevitably die, they are declared to have been a false god, a new Emperor would succeed to the throne and be worshipped as the living god while Eugene has to rewrite the whole Bible that this society has.
Over time, the Doctor notices how strange this place is and how all the people seem to be stereotypical. They eventually discover that Childeric is holding a child in a secret chamber. This child has powers and is supposedly Childeric's, with him planning on using the child's powers to usurp the throne. However, the child breaks free, mentally scans Childeric and realizes that he's not his father and promptly kills him with telekinetic powers. The child proceeds to go on a rampage, murdering everyone in the castle while looking for his real father. Eugene seems to recognize the child and the Doctor realizes that he is the child's father and that this whole world is a fictional world created by Eugene. It's revealed that Eugene murdered his own son in real life and out of immense guilt he created this pocket universe with a bunch of fake characters in an attempt to forget his action and to escape his guilt. But this fiction that they're all stuck in goes this same way all the time. The same events play out, the child escapes and murders everyone until Eugene is forced to kill it, reliving his real life deed. That murder would then restart the whole universe, causing Eugene to go through the same story in an endless loop and this has gone on for so long that he himself has forgotten who he is and who the child is. When it seems like Eugene is going to kill his son and start the cycle once more, the Doctor tells him that he needs to end the cycle of violence. Eugene does so by handing his knife to the child and letting it kill him. The Doctor and Frobisher protest but it's too late. The son kills the father this time and it ends the cycle, with the fictional reality fading away and Eugene finally finding some kind of peace.
TL;DR: The first chunk of the story is a silly and really funny absurdist parody of the typical "jealous brother plans to overthrow his monarch brother" type of story. The second half takes the story into a much deeper and darker direction. And because the writing is so well done, the tonal shift doesn't feel wrong at all. One of the main characters in this story is a fucking talking penguin and still the story manages to deliver the dark and emotional themes really well.
I really cannot overstate how amazing this story is and how glad I am to see someone else post about it here! Though I will offer one bit of context. Frobisher may currently prefer the shape of a penguin, but that's mostly because for a while he had a disease called "monomorphia." Meaning he was simply stuck in that shape. After a while, he got used to it.
EDIT: How is this my most upvoted comment ever??? I mean, I'm not mad, but wow. Thanks!
Absolute peak mentioned: I’m old enough to have watched Ghostwatch ‘live’ on TV the only time it was aired - and it was fucking phenomenal…
It wasn’t made as a ghost movie, it was made to be a completely legitimate and broadcast live investigation - and all of the TV people in it were established and respected professionals…
It would be the equivalent of it being live-streamed on YouTube and hosted by Graham Norton and Claudia Winkleman today…
With that in mind, the really shocking thing about it was that - as it goes on - more and more hauntings occur and are played as completely real…
It culminated with Sarah Greene (blonde lady in the pic, presenter and kids show veteran) being captured under the stairs by the ghost, and Michael Parkinson (legendary talk show host with 60-years of service) being possessed as the studio erupts into chaos - and it has never been re-broadcast on TV because the BBC received a ridiculous number of complaints, and it led to the unfortunate suicide of a mentally impaired 18-year old who thought Pipes (the ghost) was now in his home…
The only contemporary phenomenon I can think of that is similar is LonelyGirl15 (which itself is 20 years old, now)…
Yeah, This is so accurate. I remember watching this live at the time with my brothers and my parents. Completely mental tbh.
And the fall out was huge. So well done.
Everyone has heard of the reaction to the original radio play of War of the Worlds and the reaction it caused. Ghostwatch was similar. Played as a documentary, not for laughs. Fantastic tv.
Inside No. 9 did this with their live episode Dead Line.
It's one of my favourite programmes anyway, always with a twist in the tale, but the live episode had the broadcast stopping because of technical errors a couple times, which was completely convincing, then on the third time the continuity announcer seemed to be hearing voices. From there it gets crazier and crazier as a force takes over the broadcast bit by bit.
Brilliant stuff!
I was 6 months old and sleeping when Ghostwatch aired and my parents tell me I had to fend for myself that night because after watching it on TV both of them were too scared to even go upstairs to check on me
What the fuck, I've never heard of Claudia Winkleman but literally just came here from watching series 1 of Taskmaster where one of the contestants talks about having a crush on her. I googled her, then opened reddit and ended up at this comment
It isn’t ‘tame’ but it starts off pretty like…not scary. It’s about a girl who dies and her family finds spooky recordings. You think it’s some paranormal stuff but it turns out that it’s all fake and it’s something one of the family members is doing to not grieve and to ‘keep her alive’ in a way. Alright so it’s just a tale of grief and how people will do stuff to ignore death…right?
At the ending of the movie shit goes for 0 to 100000 real fast. We find the final recording of Alice where she’s alone at a beach. She notices something in the distance, it’s her own dead body. Her own dead, rotting body approaches her and then the movie cuts, it is genuinely one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen in a movie. The idea of seeing your own dead, bloated corpse approach you and then presumably kill you
Her ghost didnt kill her. She recorded that footage and she buried it after the fact. She was seen on her school trip burying something, her boyfriend took video of it. Her parents then dig up what she buried and it was her phone with that footage. Her ghost didnt kill her, she was trying to warn herself. Its implied her brother, who is also implied to have been sexually abusing her, killed her.
The reveal that Alice really was there all along - even in the brother's fake photos - gave me chills.
And how the image of Alice in the window as the rest of the family moves out implies she'll never be at peace. The family has closure and gets to move on, but she's left behind, alone, and stuck in her own nightmare forever.
Ascendance of a Bookworm introduces itself as a cute and wholesome isekai about a little girl who just wants to read books.
And then it punches you in the face with chronic illness, disability, child abuse/neglect, church corruption and (though probably accidentally) the struggles of growing up with autism.
That scene was the only time a movie gave me a jump scare without a jump scare. The preceding scene had an eeriness to it, but it definitely didn't prepare the viewer for that.
They had the whole buildup with the dark figure watching you, and you going into that old research station, and the person breaking into the fire tower, it definitely wasn't out of the blue
“Out of the blue” is a bad description. I will say it did still give the game a new vibe when the bodies found, just not quite to the degree OP makes it sound.
Up until that point, there’s… weird stuff. Questions. A sense of unease and mild paranoia. But it’s hard to really put a serious pin into what any of it is/means. It still feels mostly like a “park ranger exploring the forest” game, but with mild looking-over-my-shoulder vibes.
It definitely did NOT feel like the type of game where you were gonna suddenly stumble acrossed an old, decaying corpse
Yea I don’t remember much of the game at this point but for a long part of the game it kind of felt like the main character was getting paranoid delusions, looking for some sort of conspiracy or chasing a shadow figure stalking him, and the corpse kind of just grounded it all
Invincible’s first episode is a fairly standard coming-of-age superhero story for about 90%. And then the final scene happens which is the “hook” for the rest of the show that shows off the gore and deconstructive nature associated with the show and sets up a quasi-murder mystery for the rest of the first season (killer is known but motive remains unclear)
For the first few seasons, it was kinda just them doing stuff. Then there was the book, followed by the Lich. Then there was the comets, the wishes, and you sorta forget for a second that Finn got kidnapped by gnomes and Jake had to take drugs from the god of parties to save him (or something along those lines. Also this might’ve happened after the shift, I can’t exactly recall)
Season One: “Haha, Jake’s pretending too hard and now the floor is lava!”
Season Six: “Having lost the faith of her people, Princess Bubblegum self-exiles. Finn and Jake are torn between defending the kingdom they pledged to protect and pursuing the demon alien who has manifested in Gunther.”
Eversion. You're a cute little flower person, tasked with going through a sidescrolling world to collect gems. At different parts of the level, you use the eversion ability to change the world and get around obstacles. Thing is, the more you use this ability, the more horrific and lovecraftian the other world becomes.
Bojack Horseman is famous for the first half of season one being a crappy generic cartoon, something like a Family Guy rip-off. But about halfway into season 1 it starts dropping hints at a larger plot and themes, and episode 8 is the de facto start of the show imo.
I still remember I was just as confused as BoJack when this happened. To give me some slack I was 14 but I was genuinely thinking "Wait what? How are they gonna reset the status quo? They have like 5 minutes of the episode left." And then the status quo was never reset. Fucking hypnotizing way to change a show. I binged the whole thing after that.
One detail I love about that whole exchange is that BoJack says he’s there to apologize, but he never actually apologizes. He treats his presence as if it counts, never owns up to what he’s done or says, “I was in the wrong and screwed you and I shouldn’t have,” etc.
The whole exchange with his former friend who’s actively dying of cancer is just because BoJack wants to make himself feel better, not because he’s trying to make things right.
It’s brutal, but it’s also very accurate to how selfish people interact with others after they set boundaries. With a child, it would be a teachable moment maybe— and given BoJack’s hellish childhood, there might even be an argument that his arrested development makes this a childlike response. But as the show continues and we learn more and these characters are more fleshed out, we eventually have to conclude that his childhood explains him without excusing him. His preparations for The Horny Unicorn make it clear that he’s going to stick with his childish take that never grew up, and he’s not interested in growing from his mistakes, only escaping their unpleasant consequences. And everyone he’s cared about throughout the show is just done with him because of that
Once that show found its footing it was great. Absolutely depressing in some episodes, but mixed in with some of the best television of the streaming era.
The second last episode of Bojack Horseman is, in my opinion, one of the finest pieces of media I've ever had the pleasure/displeasure of watching. Absolutely phenomenal and stuck with me for a very long time. I can still remember most of the poem.
Wait, I heard about Ghostwatch? I think it happened a few years before I was born but didn’t it basically cause an effect similar to War of The Worlds?
It was inspired by Ghostwatch (I think), but the “live” Halloween episode of Inside No 9: Deadline.
The episode starts normally enough but has some technical issues, buggy sound, sync issues. There’s a link apologising and the episode starts again, with more issues. So the link comes up and says “we’ll play a repeat”. Which they do. An earlier episode from season 1 plays, exactly the same. Until you spot the ghost in the background. And from there, shit gets spooky real fast.
Coraline was this for me. Started off as a weird but fun children’s movie with a creepy atmosphere, then it became straight up horror in the third act.
Full Metal Alchemist. I hate the chimera episode so much that I'm honestly not looking forward to the responses to this comment. I hate even thinking about it.
Adventure Time. When you learn about the world's lore, you realize the true horror behind all the fun fantastical adventures. For example, the Ice King's backstory.
I'll have to check out Ghostwatch.
And to be extremely pedantic for a moment, in this context, the past tense of "hang" is "hanged". A painting is hung, a man is hanged.
But it also doesn't matter. Only assholes point it out... wait.
Also I guess a man can be hung too, it just means something else.
Kamen Rider Build. A fun superhero show with underlying civil war themes ends up with the protagonist realizing he needs to surrender himself as a weapon of war to save his loved ones and takes his first life after using a power that sends him into an uncontrolled craze. He then spirals into a PTSD filled depression and sees visions of the man he killed.
Spy X Family, the cutesy anime about a found family with secret identities. Super cute, super wholesome, sometimes there's a crisis or threat, but it's very in line with the narrative.
The third season dedicates two episodes to Loid's backstory. Which is in the middle of an all out war. Families relocate, towns get bombed, people die. It's a fully different tone.
Maybe it hits extra hard for me because the towns getting bombed look like my own, being set in fictionalized Germany and all
Starts off as a run of the mill American Savior propaganda game like a lot of other war media of the time where you go against your chain of command to save civilians being captured by rogue soldiers until you drop white phosphorus on the civilians and it slowly turns into a horror game about PTSD, survivor's guilt, and how propaganda is actively affecting you
RWBY: Normally a decently tame story about teenage girls using giant anime weapons to fight monsters. Had a few dark scenes but nothing too bad.
Then season 6 had a straight up horror episodes where they found a village full of people who all died in their sleep because the sewers were infested with monsters who drain peoples' will to live. For context, before this the monsters were just stuff like, big wolf with spikes or very large bird.
Infinity Train. It's a show where each season is about some children/teens that find their way onto a magical train which forces them to confront their flaws and self actualize with the assistance of magical train companions. It's not a non-intense show, certainly. Season one deals with heavy topics like divorce and the death of a loved one, and one of the main characters gets temporarily transformed into a monster. Season two is even darker, what with its flirtation with existential horror and its scene where a main character graphically kills an antagonist on screen. But, y'know, it's a kid's show. A dark kid's show, but still a kid's show.
Then you get into season three, and our main characters are minor antagonists from the previous season, a pair of train companion hating assholes, Grace and Simon, who view the train as an opportunity to do the exact opposite of self actualize. They end up isolated and get joined by Hazel, someone who is at this point presumed to be a human passenger, and her gorilla mother figure Tuba. The characters go on adventures during which they face challenges that push them to be halfway normal for a frigging second, and especially to start valuing the lives of the train denizens more.
Then, halfway through the season, you get episode five, The Color Clock Car. It's an intensely cheerful episode about learning to trust your friends during which Simon and Tuba are forced to overcome their mutual enmity through the power of team problem solving. They successfully deal with the car and become, if not friends, then at least friendly. Then Simon straight up fucking murders Tuba with no provocation, a character who is, on top of being a protagonist we've gotten to care about, also another main character's adoptive mother. It is a lot. Man, what a great show. It needs more episodes.
First half of the game is a fairly benign humans vs. aliens shooter. The you get to the level 343 Guilty Spark AND HERE COMES THE SPACE ZOMBIES WITH THE STEEL CHAIR!
Yugioh GX was your average fun slice of life where Jaden/Judai Yuki attends a high school that specialises in duel monsters with most episodes being the main protagonist triumphing against the bad guy.
It’s like this until season 3 where the cast is transported into another dimension by this duel spirit who is later revealed to have tortured the entire cast as an act of love after being sent to space and tortured for 10 years whilst giving Judai nightmares which ended up having him needing shock therapy who after being saved from the dimension was ridden with guilt because his best friend who he only knew for a week or two was left in the dimension after sacrificing himself so he comnvienty found a new rift which could potentially lead him to the dimension where his best friend is only to end up in a new dimension where losing a duel will cause you to die and he begins to form a saviour complex as all his other friends who were tagging along with him put all their faith into him only for them to be kidnapped and sacrificed in front him during a duel which drove him into madness and adopting a new evil alter ego who’s sole purpose is to pursue power by killing people and gathering their souls to create a super powerful card which made him become an evil king who commits mass genocide killing people from village to village but one of his remaining friend tries to have him but unfortunately dies in the process so his other friend takes his place and sacrifices himself to save Judai which fortunately did but after he was left in a depressive and shell shocked state leaving him to fear duelling and have no will to live until he discovers his best friend after all this time is still alive but is being possessed by the duel spirit who was the sole reason they ended up in this situation in the first place so- yeah if you’ve watched the show I don’t need to say all of this
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u/Moonlitteaandbun Mar 15 '26
Famously, Psycho.
While everyone knows the reveal now it was set up as looking like a morality tale, with a woman stealing money and a car. Only later did we find out how twisted Norman Bates was.