Line #24 NightmareFuel/Jumanji


1	* ''NightmareFuel/JumanjiTheAnimatedSeries''
2	* ''NightmareFuel/JumanjiWelcomeToTheJungle''
3	* ''NightmareFuel/JumanjiTheNextLevel''
4
5	'''WARNING:''' Spoilers are unmarked.
6	----
7	!!General
8
9	* The concept of a game that makes everything the cards say happen to the player--from crazy hunters to violent animals--and the fact that you have to finish the game to escape, or potentially be stuck in that nightmare forever. Made worse by the fact that, at the end of at least the picture book, two kids who had been stated earlier to never finish games find the game...
10	* A [[{{Defictionalization}} real board game]] was made some time after the movie. It seems to take place in the nether-realm of Jumanji itself, and loves to find new and terrible ways to murder the players, such as spontaneous vaporization, encounters with venomous snakes and spiders, and running afoul of Van Pelt. The kicker: Under certain conditions, cards are placed on the spaces marked on one side of the board. The final space contains a carnivorous plant and the words:
11	-->''A card placed here brings dreadful news. [[RocksFallEveryoneDies The game is done]], [[TotalPartyKill all players lose]].''
12
13	!!The Film
14	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/24263365_10.jpg]]
15	[[caption-width-right:350: [[FalseReassurance Need a hand? Well, you just wait. We'll help you out...]] [[SpidersAreScary We each have eight.]]]]
16	* The opening of the film, with the two boys who had played the game before burying it. Most notable is one of them falls into the hole they're digging and screams that the game "is after him" when [[JungleDrums the drums start beating louder]], and then when the deed is done, the boy asks the other about the possibility of someone else digging it up. The reply? "May God have mercy on his soul." Said with a thunderclap. Obviously, they've been through so much hell, the older boy doesn't worry about the nearby wolves. Life will probably be a picnic for them when compared to whatever horrors Jumanji put them through.
17	* Alan getting ''sucked into'' the game.
18	** This exchange before it, when Alan accidentally drops the dice, is '''very''' creepy.
19	--->'''Alan:''' Oh, no... the game thinks I rolled.\
20	'''Sarah:''' ...What do you mean "the game ''[[ItCanThink thinks]]''"?
21	* Alan's monologue after Peter tries ReversePsychology to get him to play:
22	-->'''Peter:''' Come on, Judy. He's not gonna help us. He's afraid.
23	-->'''Alan:''' What did you say?
24	-->'''Peter:''' You're afraid. It's okay to be afraid. Let's go set it up in the living room, Judy.
25	-->'''Alan:''' ''(laughs)'' No, you have no idea what you're getting yourself into!
26	-->'''Peter:''' Whatever it is, we'll handle it by ourselves. We don't need your help.
27	-->'''Alan:''' ''I don't think so.'' You think monkeys, mosquitoes, and lions are bad? That's just the beginning. I've seen things you've only seen in your nightmares. Things you can't even imagine. Things you can't even see. ''There are things that hunt you in the night. Then something screams. Then you hear them eat, and you hope to {{God}} that you're not dessert.'' "Afraid?" You don't even know what afraid is. You will not last five minutes without me.
28	-->'''Peter:''' So, you're gonna help us?
29	-->'''Alan:''' I'll watch. But I'm not afraid.
30	* Those mosquitoes.
31	** Their effect on people. We see one of their victims, the realtor who sold Alan's house. She seems catatonic and is, according to a paramedic, suffering symptoms that resemble a heart attack. Think of how much blood a mosquito that size would be able to draw.
32	** Could be worse, as the realtor has what looks like an injury on her forehead akin to a mosquito bite. Meaning the mosquito put its proboscis into her skull...
33	** Not to mention the diseases they could carry. At the very least, it was known then that mosquitoes carried malaria.
34	*** Their size is mentioned in the Junior Novel:
35	---->''Mosquitos the size of pigeons. With stingers like knives.''
36	** In addition, in real life, mosquitoes are annoying at best and [[MedicalHorror deadly]] at worst, [[MadeOfPlasticine but they're still easy to kill]]. The ones in ''Jumanji'', on the other hand, have probosces that are strong enough to punch through car roofs and break glass. And the paramedics mentioned over 50 people already have suffered attacks.
37	* The giant yellow plant that tries to eat Peter. It manages to sneak up on him by curling a vine around his leg and trying to pull him into its mouth. This thing was strong enough to pull on a boy’s leg while his sister and two grown adults, one who spent his youth surviving in the jungle, held onto him. The scariest thing is that it was dangerously close to getting Peter until Alan sliced its vine. Some added fuel is the fact that Alan has encountered plants like this in the game. One can imagine how scared young Alan must have been dealing with things he normally wouldn’t have seen as dangerous before.
38	** That yellow pod was bad enough in the house where it was small. Its vine was maybe about normal sized to a real vine. The vine that grabbed Carl's police car was as thick around as a tree trunk! The pod must have been MASSIVE.
39	** The innocuous purple flower that shoots a barb into Judy's neck. It's so pretty and small, and it actually kills her, or at least comes close.
40	* The lion's entrance. Peter senses someone--or some''thing''--in the room with him and Judy. Then the lion's massive tail menacingly trails along the keys of a piano...
41	** The lion reveals itself in a dark corner of the attic. Its face slowly becomes visible, practically melting into view, and [[OhCrap it dawns on Judy and Peter (and the audience) that it's preparing to strike]]. Poor Judy, in a frightened whisper, futilely tries to convince her brother (and herself) that the beast is a hallucination...[[DreamRealityCheck then the lion roars]] and bolts after the kids. The sheer speed with which the lion moves and pounces makes clear that had Alan not shown up as well, they'd have been done for.
42	* [[EgomaniacHunter Van Pelt]]. Imagine it: A very good marksman who is interested in hunting you in particular. Let your guard down for even one moment, and you die. Alan has ''lived'' through that. ''He'' should be the one in therapy. You can tell his heart is racing when he reads the description of his nemesis: "A hunter from the darkest wild. Makes you feel just like a child."
43	** Van Pelt didn't just make Alan feel like a child. He was possibly hunting Alan ''since'' he (Alan) was a child. And who knows if Van Pelt ages? He could maintain that level of skill in hunting over the years, against an aging prey.
44	** As if that wasn't bad enough, the hunter strongly resembles Alan's father! It helps that they are played by [[Creator/JonathanHyde the same actor]].
45	** Also the fact that Van Pelt is indestructible. He ''did'' have a shelf of large paint tins fall on him and ''lived'', after all. Not to mention having a sword embedded in his shoulder and [[NoSell just ignoring it]].
46	*** The junior novel makes it even more ominous:
47	---->''As [Bentley] drove out of the store, a hand reached out from the pile of paint cans. Slowly Van Pelt clawed his way out. He was dazed and half-conscious.'' ''[[TranquilFury And he was very, very angry]].''
48	** Maybe the true source of the threat of Van Pelt is that he's not merely a living human being at all, but a robot or fantasy concept powered by magic. He's unstoppable because nothing like him is known in the real world.
49	** Van Pelt's entrance is an EstablishingCharacterMoment for HuntingTheMostDangerousGame. The first thing that enters the scene isn't the man himself, but one of ''his bullets''. He's trying to kill Alan before he even comes on-screen for the first time!
50	---> '''Van Pelt:''' You miserable coward! ''Come back here and face me like a man!''
51	** After he runs out of ammunition, Van Pelt goes to a weapons store, only to be told the ammo for his 6 gauge weapon is no longer in production. [[ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney Bribing the owner with some gold coins]] (God knows where he got those), he's instead introduced to the wonders of modern firearms and is given a massive semiautomatic shotgun. He doesn't miss a step and takes to it like a fish to water, making him even more dangerous. There’s also an [[TruthInTelevision undercurrent of truth here]], since lots of real life shootings in America have been due to unscrupulous arms dealers letting dangerous people have guns with no questions asked.
52	* If you have arachnophobia, spiders the size of medium-sized dogs will send you over the edge. The fact that they're rather pathetic puppets and move like wind-up toys helps surprisingly little.
53	* All of the discord and turmoil Brantford goes through, just because of one roll of the dice sealing up Alan! By all accounts, the Parrish shoe factory was the major source of income in the whole town, and once Alan's father went off the deep end and let it go under, the town's economy collapsed.
54	** Alan's parents came home to find their son missing without a trace, and no matter how much money they expended or how hard they searched, they were never able to find him. Even worse, people spread rumors that Alan's father murdered and dismembered him, which was surely agonizing for them.
55	** Nearly all the damage done to Brantford by the specters of Jumanji. The monkeys go around raiding downtrodden shops and even hijack the police station, the stampeding herd of elephants, rhinos, and zebras destroy at least several cars and might have trampled more than a few people to death, plus minor flooding occurs when the crocodiles are unknowingly released from the Parrish house by Carl. [[KickThemWhileTheyAreDown The poor town just couldn't catch a break.]]
56	*** Given that Carl [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse doesn't show up again]] in the original timeline after being drifted away unlike Aunt Nora, [[FridgeHorror who's to say]] [[KilledOffscreen he didn't end up as croc food or drown?]] The universe couldn't give [[CosmicPlaything the man]] his break either in '69 or '95 (initially), and from his point of view, he was just doing his job.
57	* Nearly all of the animals unleashed by the game are darker, scarier versions of real-life creatures. Mosquitos are enormous and their bite will make you ill very quickly. Monkeys are deliberately malicious and dangerous, throwing knives at people. Lions are larger, fiercer, and have [[ToServeMan a craving for human flesh]]. Even the plants try to shoot venomous barbs at you on purpose. Only the herbivores like the elephants and rhinos seem less destructive, [[RealityIsUnrealistic though just like their real-life counterparts, they can be aggressive and extremely dangerous; for example, elephants and hippos kill more people in Africa than lions and crocodiles]].
58	** All of the animals seem slightly...off, owing mostly to the animatronics and early CGI used in their creation.
59	** In the animal stampede through Brantford, some of the elephants take their sweet time in crushing the car that Peter takes shelter in.
60	* And how to forget that ''[[FeatheredFiend pelican]]'' which has a very strange and disturbing appearance. Not to mention his [[RedEyesTakeWarning blood red eyes]].
61	** The pelican was purposely trying to stop Alan from finishing the game, and it looked like it was ready to bite off his hand.
62	* Peter turning into a monkey, which may seem a little funny; the riddle implied he was becoming ''more wild'' than any of the vicious monkeys we saw.
63	* There are those who think the face Van Pelt makes when we last see him is hilarious. To others, it's a final bit of NightmareFuel the darn game couldn't resist.
64	* Just imagine what poor Sarah went through. Seeing her friend get sucked into a board game, being chased by a swarm of bats, and being bounced around from therapist to therapist who kept telling her she made it all up, and the whole town treats her as an outcast well into her adulthood. Is it any wonder she tried to get the hell out of dodge when Judy and Peter pulled out the game? It ruined her whole life.
65	** Then there's her reintroduction to the game. The thing she and the rest of the characters face is a man-eating plant that is trying to eat one of them. It's no wonder why she tries to run away after that. Seeing something that dangerous reawakened her memory of the game and probably caused her to have a panic attack.
66	* Thoroughly lampshaded by Creator/RogerEbert in his review of the film with Creator/GeneSiskel, who found the amount of NightmareFuel in this to be so much he feared for any kids who might've gone to see it.
67	* In the junior novel's prologue, we have this line:
68	-->''And no one, not a single soul, has ever played [Jumanji] twice.''
69	* When Alan is being sucked into the game and therefore Jumanji itself, he desperately calls out for Sarah to roll the dice on the chance that she will roll a five or an eight and immediately set him free. Instead, she runs away when a group of bats envelops her, and Alan is then trapped in Jumanji for twenty-six years.
70	-->'''Alan:''' Roooooll the diiiiice!!!
71	** Even worse is the game's insistence on the rules. They were lucky enough that Sarah was still local. What if she'd left the country? Worse yet, what if she'd gone insane or ''died''? Does the game have an exit clause if a player is essentially forced to forfeit, or does it simply mean the game remains unfinished forever?
72	* It's great for Alan and Sarah that the game considers the entire timeline a consequence to be erased, but Judy and Peter are lucky they even exist in the new history. Yeah, Brantford is more prosperous, but who died or didn't even get born in the new timeline?
73	** The absolutely horrifying fact that Alan and Sarah remember ''everything'' when they go back to being kids in 1969. These are 12-year-olds who have 26 years' worth of profoundly traumatic memories and no way to process or explain them to people. The movie makes it look like a good thing; they see enough of the future to know how to game it, make Carl's sneakers a success, save Judy and Peter's parents, and prevent Brantford from going under. But... Alan has 26 years of traumatic memories and so does Sarah. He was alone, being ''hunted'' in the jungle for three decades. She was ostracized by an entire town, forced to tell a lie she knows didn't happen. Yes, they now have each other to lean on and share the trauma but can you imagine the nightmares Alan would be having? How confusing it would be for Sarah to have all those firsts again? Her first kiss, boyfriend, whatever?
74	*** Fortunately, there's a line from Sarah when they dump the game that implies most of her and Alan's memories from the original timeline are disappearing.
75	* The movie from Nora’s perspective. Her niece and nephew don’t go to school and she has no idea that it’s because they found a dangerous board game that insists its players keep going until one of them wins. Throughout the day, strange and frightening creatures come out of the game, wreaking havoc in Brantford. The only things she sees onscreen are the stampede, a monkey that snuck into her car, and a carnivorous plant that eats Carl’s cruiser. When she runs into Carl, he asks if she has children, which she confirms. Her reaction tells the audience that she’s imagining the worst possible things that might have happened to Judy and Peter. Her arrival back at the house doesn’t help either as she can hear the sounds of screaming from inside and she’s helpless in doing anything to help them.

Context NightmareFuel / Jumanji