History NightmareFuel / Berserk

* Welcome to the UrExample of the revenge fantasy anime, where the troubled AntiHero will stop at nothing to take revenge against his enemies who betrayed him and his friends to a horrible fate amidst an unforgiving CrapsackWorld. And unlike its descendants such as ''Literature/TheRisingOfTheShieldHero'' and ''Literature/TheHeroLaughsWhileWalkingThePathOfVengeanceASecondTime'', expect no mercy, no fanservice (only FanDisservice), and ''endless'' amounts of grimdark, blood, gore and existential terrors.

Can we just cut the middle-man out and say 95% of [[Manga/{{Berserk}} this series]] is pure NightmareFuel?

No? Then we're going to be here for a while. As one of the goriest, if not ''the'' goriest [[{{Seinen}} seinen]] manga of all time, ''Berserk'' has more than its fair share of [[{{Mundanger}} everyday terror]], [[PsychologicalHorror suffocating trauma]], [[RealismInducedHorror realism-induced horror]] and [[ReligiousHorror demonic horror]] under its belt [[LongRunners in over thirty years of its run-time]].

[[caption-width-right:300:TONIGHT, [[ToServeMan WE DINE IN HELL!]]]]

* On top of that, for most of the series, the same music has been used throughout (mostly Behelit, Guts, and Forces), and has the same kind of tone throughout. But here, we are given two dark industrial tracks, Murder and Fear. As soon as that new track started, that immediately let the audience know something awful was about to happen.

* Despite all its adaptation faults, ''Anime/Berserk1997'' manages to give the Eclipse a completely new tone, very different from the manga and movies. Unlike them, the anime could believably look at first like a series about a mercenary warrior in a world very similar to our Middle Ages, without any shadowy overtone lurking at its back. The opening sequence only shows Guts in his pre-Eclipse look, the episodes are slow-paced and focused on the characters and their human struggles, and most of the manga's supernatural/bizarre elements (the female Apostle, Puck, the Count, Wyald, the Bakiraka, the Skull Knight and the Baron of Koka if the viewer missed the first episode) are expunged, so it's easy for a casual viewer to think that Zodd was a random fantasy cliché monster, that the Behelit is just a weird amulet, and that there are no problems in the setting which cannot be solved by Guts's sword or Griffith's smarts. Then the Eclipse happens almost out of nowhere and, surprise, things CAN turn bad beyond any hope for our beloved characters after all. Their world happens to be ruled by a pantheon of near-omnipotent evil gods who not only turn the Band of the Hawk into an all-you-can-eat monster food buffet, but also turn one of our heroes into one of their kind, who proceeds to horribly betray his friends and rape the female lead. And if that's not enough, the Eclipse sequence ends fading to black in its most horrible climax, and the next and last thing we see, a surviving Guts going to a presumable quest for revenge, is set after an unknown amount of time. We end up without any explanation of how Guts survived the carnage, what ultimately became of Casca or simply ''what the hell happened''.

* In general, the series' [[DiedDuringProduction former]] artist and writer, Kentaro Miura, drew some of the most terrifying (and disgusting) demons and monsters ever to grace the pages of manga, capable of rivalling the creations of similar artists such as Creator/GoNagai and Creator/JunjiIto alike. Furthermore, by the time you get far enough, assuming that the villains commit atrocious acts of murder, rape, and torture is the norm. The true dread comes in seeing the incredibly fucked up thing they do that makes them different from the other villains.

* For a good deal of the series early on, before Guts found his new TrueCompanions, became TheBigGuy for the FiveManBand and was simply a ferocious warrior with an unquenchable thirst for vengeance, one of the more unnerving aspects of the series was how easily Guts could be seen as an even ''more'' horrifying creature than the Apostles he killed. Some of the Apostles are shown to be veritable [[AlasPoorVillain Macbeths]] as far as their motivations and origins go. Examples follow in the respective sections.

* In addition to their already horrific abilities, some Apostles have the ability to turn humans into monsters like them. These Apostle Spawn, while of lesser power than their makers, are still more than a match for most humans they face, and are fully capable of tearing people apart.