Line #36 NightmareFuel/TheHungerGames


1	''Literature/TheHungerGames'', a series of books and a film about children murdering each other for the entertainment of the elite and a threat to the oppressed. You'd better believe there's heaps of NightmareFuel.
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3	Beware of any unmarked spoilers below, and remember: don't step off the platform too early.
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5	!In General
6	* The series does ''not'' skimp on the terrifying deaths during the Games.
7	* The Hunger Games in general. These children finish High School with approximately 12 less school-mates. Haymitch is the only District 12 Victor still alive by the 74th Games, and his year was a Quarter Quell where double the usual number of Tributes were taken. Which means the 12 districts have lost a total of 1,725 children in the arena.
8	* The Hunger Games only exist because the districts rebelled in the first place. Can you imagine being forced into servitude, then as further punishment every year you see 2 children from your district die. Would you want to have kids then? How many families died out this way? How many only-children got reaped? How many families had their entire family reaped?
9	* The parachutes dropped in-arena. The sponsors aren't just saying "I hope you survive". They're basically saying, "I hope everyone else dies".
10	* What destroyed civilization before Panem was founded?
11	* FridgeHorror when you realize that since the first rebellion was quashed and District 13 went underground it has been 74 years of them keeping a low profile. That means there may be people in District 13, living in that bunker, who have never seen the sun or walked on Earth. There could be 73 year olds in there that never felt the sun rays on their face.
12	** Actually, it's not that bad. They most likely didn't have to literally stay underground all the time, just not to reveal their survival to other districts. And the surface isn't radioactive or anything, it just makes more sense to live underground than among the ruins.
13	* Until Haymitch won his games, District 12 tributes didn't have a mentor, so they had no support during the Games.
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15	!Books
16	!!''The Hunger Games''
17	* Throwing teenagers into a death match is bad enough. But turning them into celebrities beforehand, putting them into social situations where they even eat with the people they will eventually kill or be killed by, and even forcing those from the same District to fight against each other, destroying any camaraderie or prior relationship they might have is just plain monstrous. And that's not even getting into what happens to the victors after the Games.
18	* Mixed with TearJerker -- after Katniss' father died in a mine explosion when she was 11 and Prim was 7, their mother fell into a state of such deep depression that she stopped taking care of both herself and her daughters. Katniss did her best to provide for her family, in order to keep herself and Prim from being sent to the OrphanageOfFear. But the money began to run out, and the family came with inches of starving to death. They would have, if Peeta hadn't taken pity on Katniss and thrown her two loaves of burned bread that [[SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments subsequently reignited Katniss' will to live.]]
19	* To get more food for their family, a child can sign up for tesserae starting from age 12, which involves entering their name more times in the Hunger Games reaping ball in exchange for enough grain and oil to feed one person for a year. By age 18, Gale has his name in the reaping ball 42 times because he's been providing for himself, his mother, and his three younger siblings for seven years.
20	* Katniss mentions that some tributes go completely feral in the arena, comparing them to raging beasts. A few years before the 74th Hunger Games, a tribute named Titus from District 6 went insane and started [[ImAHumanitarian eating]] the others. The Gamemakers had to stun him with tasers in order to collect the bodies of his victims before he ate them, and eventually killed him with an avalanche just so they wouldn't have a lunatic for a winner.
21	* To punish people for treason, the Capitol cuts out their tongues to turn them into mute servants called Avoxes. One of the Avoxes that waits on Katniss in the capitol is a girl she briefly saw years ago, trying to run to safety with her male companion before they were caught by a Capitol hovercraft. They shot a spear through the boy and killed him instantly, but took the girl alive and turned her into an Avox.
22	* The horrific hallucinations shown by the tracker jacker venom involving ants crawling onto the main character.
23	* Glimmer's face being melted off from the Tracker Jacker venom.
24	* The Peacekeepers in District 11 are much harsher than the ones in 12. Rue mentions that a mentally handicapped boy named Martin was killed on the spot just for trying to keep his sunglasses.
25	* Cato's death, where his flesh was devoured by mutant wolves made out of the bodies (or minds) of the deceased tributes.
26	** He was alive the whole time for hours while this all happened to him. He was suffering for an entire night until Katniss shot him out of mercy, not hate as it had been up until that point. But to make matters worse, she and Peeta sat on the Cornucopia waiting for him to die slowly and painfully, just so the people in the Capitol would have their sick show of violence. Only when Katniss couldn't bear it anymore did she do something about it. It seems she didn't realize that, even with the armor, it would take ''that long'' for him to die. Plus, she didn't have a clear shot at him before he and the mutts came out of the Cornucopia. And if the mutts really were made out of the dead tributes' body parts as opposed to just looking like them, then Clove, Glimmer, and Marvel--his allies--also killed him, and he was reminded of them right before his death.
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28	!!''Catching Fire''
29	* During the Victory Tour, when Katniss gives her speech in District 11 and thanks them for giving her the bread during the 74th Games, an old man whistles Rue's four note song, inciting an act of rebellion in which every person in the crowd performs District 12's funerary salute. The Peacekeepers promptly drag the old man out in front of the crowd and shoot him in the head. Two more shots are fired, but Katniss only hears them, not knowing who else was shot.
30	* Cray, the Head Peacekeeper of District 12, takes advantage of starving young women by offering to sleep with them in exchange for a few coins to feed their families. Katniss is aware that if she had been older when her father died, and she hadn't known how to hunt, she would have had to sell herself to Cray to keep herself and her family alive.
31	* After an uprising in District 8, Gale brings a wild turkey to Cray's house, expecting the man to buy it off him like he always does. He finds the new Head Peacekeeper there, Thread, who promptly arrests him for poaching and has him publicly whipped more than forty times (and it would have been more if Katniss, Haymitch and Peeta hadn't stepped in). Darius, a friendly Peacekeeper, tries to protest the whipping but is taken away and turned into an Avox. And this is only the first sign of things to come, as President Snow cracks down harder on the districts to kill any hope of a rebellion.
32	* The third Quarter Quell in general. Winning a single Hunger Games, which would be traumatizing enough as it is, and then settling down to a regular life, knowing that at least you're safe from having to fight again no matter how bad things get. Then, all of a sudden, this belief is torn from you, and you have a definite chance of being reaped into an arena where you have to fight and kill your friends out of some desperate need to survive. It doesn't matter if you're senile, hard-of-hearing, addled by drugs, or if you have a family you have to leave behind. If you are alive, you can be picked. How's that for {{Paranoia Fuel}}?
33	** Quarter Quells in general. Each one adds an additional, cruel rule to the already monstrous Hunger Games. The fact that they're painted as a ''special festivity'' makes it even worse.
34	** Also, while we don't get an exact number, Katniss notes that there are enough envelopes containing Quarter Quell twists / "gimmicks" for the Hunger Games to last for ''centuries'' (being generous, that's a minimum of 8 twists). Good luck trying to sleep after ''that'' little nugget sinks in...
35	** The twist of the very first Quarter Quell. The Tributes were voted on by the people of their own District, likely by their own neighbors, friends, and possibly even family members.
36	* "Tick, tock." There is something deeply unsettling about the whole "the arena is a clock" idea.
37	* The section of the Quarter Quell arena that Johanna, Beetee, and Wiress got stuck in after Blight was killed. [[RainOfBlood They got stuck in a downpour of hot, thick blood, and they could not escape it.]] This lasted for a whole hour. It got in their mouths, their eyes, ''everywhere,'' so that they're all completely red when they meet up with Finnick, Katniss, and Peeta. And we have no way of knowing if the blood was artificial (this is the Capitol, after all), or if it was actual blood, human or animal (again, this ''is'' the Capitol we're talking about).
38	* One of the arena sectors' traps is a fog that burns your clothes and skin, paralyzes you, and if you are completely submerged, makes you have seizures and die, as sadly demonstrated on an 80-year-old woman.
39	** The way she decided that dying was the thing to do at that point and just walked into the fog was awful.
40	* The jabberjay section of the arena. If you get trapped in there, you just have to sit there and take it as you're bombarded by the agonized screams of your loved ones...for an hour. Even when you realize that the screams are just fabricated, it's still some serious emotional torture to have to listen to that.
41	** Most especially true when Finnick points out that Jabberjays ''repeat'' sounds... so the victim has to wonder if their loved ones were actually tortured, just so the birds would have screams to copy.
42	** For that matter, any of the endlessly inventive ways of killing people that the Panem scientists have invented - during "Mockingjay", it's clear that the Capitol prefers psychological warfare to flat-out annihilation of opposing forces, even though it's clearly capable of the latter.
43	---> '''Katniss:''' No mutt is good. All are meant to damage you. Some take your life, like the monkeys. Others your reason, like the tracker jackers. However, the true atrocities, the most frightening, incorporate a perverse psychological twist designed to terrify the victim. The sight of the wolf mutts with the dead tributes' eyes. The sound of the jabberjays replicating Prim's tortured screams. The smell of Snow's roses mixed with the victim's blood.
44	* Another section has an [[NothingIsScarier unseen beast that Katniss doesn’t even want to know about]] that left a tribute having to be picked up by the hovercraft in pieces. The claw has to dip down five times just to retrieve all of him.
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46	!!''Mockingjay''
47	* The Hanging Tree song. Katniss' explanation of the song doesn't help and neither does watching the events transpire that inspired the song in the first place in ''The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes''.
48	-->"Are you, are you, coming to the tree... Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me..."
49	* Some of the ways the rebels, including Johanna, Darius, and Lavinia, are brutally tortured in Mockingjay, which include cutting off people's body parts one by one until they are dead, delivering electric shocks to the rebel until they have died, and drowning the rebel in water and then electrocuting them.
50	* The fact that many victors, not just Finnick, who are very attractive end up as prostitutes in the Capitol. If they refuse, Snow kills their loved ones, which was what happened with Johanna. It's just horrible...
51	** Imagine if Plutarch hadn’t manipulated Snow into altering the Third Quarter Quell so that they were reaping victors just to get rid of Katniss or Peeta or both? If instead, the plan was to make the districts think that now Katniss & Peeta were spoiled darlings of the Capitol by showering them with gifts, attention... paying for their wedding & bringing them to the Capitol to show them off? They were both young, attractive & coveted by the Capitol populace... and anyone who wanted a night in bed with The Star-Crossed Victors would probably have been willing to pay whatever he asked. People talk about the fact that Snow could have prostituted them individually, which is true... but he had more than enough leverage on them both to have forced them into being prostituted as a couple for anyone that wanted a threesome/moresome/orgy... or even just an outrageous party with them having sex in front of a crowd of total strangers as the starring attraction. After all, the Capitol is analogous to Rome, especially in its uncaring decadence, and slaves used to be required to have sex on display for parties back then, too.
52	** FridgeHorror when you realize that Katniss was a hair's breath away from becoming Johanna or Finnick. If Peeta died in the first games, Snow would try to prostitute her the first chance he gets. After all he needs to break her spirit and she's very popular. And on top of that, in the future she'd have to be mentoring children just like Haymitch. Every other district probably has 2 or more previous victors mentoring. District 12 only had 1 winner until Katniss came along so regardless of her wishes she'd probably enter the mentoring program and watch the kids she trained die year after year like Haymitch did. And what if her sister got reaped again? Or what if one of Gale's younger siblings got reaped? What if she trained the person that would ultimately end up killing someone she loves?
53	* Many of the "pods". Particularly the one that does in poor Messalla. His flesh melted off like a wax candle.
54	** Another notable trap is the "collapsing street" pod, which causes a large section of street to fold in on itself. Anyone on that street would fall into a pit. If you survive the fall, something, implied to be mutts inside the pit, will do who-knows-what to you.
55	* The giant lizard mutts in the Capitol. Even before the reader sees exactly what they can do, they're described to smell like blood and roses (Snow's signature scent) and are able to say the word "Katniss" in the most frightening way possible. Oh and they maul and dismember anything in their path, even Capitol citizens, to get to Katniss.
56	** In the movie, they look like a cross between Gollum and a Xenomorph.
57	* President Snow himself. Think about it. His rise to power was mainly due to one thing, poison. He would kill his enemies and even some of his allies. But the most horrible thing is that he would even drink from the poisoned cup himself and his mouth would bleed. That's why he uses roses, to cover up the stench.
58	** His granddaughter lives with him. Why not with her mother or father? Snow might have [[MakeitLookLikeanAccident killed them when she was a baby because he felt his power challenged by his kids]].
59	* The hijacking. Both what it does to the victim and what it does to Katniss. The idea of seeing someone you love, who has always loved you, suddenly hate you and have warped memories of many of the significant things you've shared is terrifying.
60	* Primrose's death in ''Mockingjay.'' She was burned ''alive'' and: in front of her sister, Katniss. Almost certainly she died instantaneously and didn't suffer. Still horrible, though not quite as much.
61	* "By the way, I know about the kiss." Also ParanoiaFuel, because HOW does he know? And how did the Peacekeepers know Katniss went into the woods that time, so they turned on the fence? Was it cameras, spies? And how long has the area been monitored? Did the Capitol know about Katniss, Gale, even her dad hunting, but just didn't care until she became a Victor, the Mockingjay, and a threat? Or has she only been watched since then? Katniss never actually finds out, so neither do we.
62	** If so is Prim getting reaped just luck or was it planned as punishment for her family hunting?
63	** Was Katniss's father killed because he hunted and were the others just collateral damage? Or was it punishment for Gale's and Katniss's families friendship?
64	* The fact that the children who were behind the barricade happily took the parachutes, believing them to have food or gifts, and were brutally murdered. Some of them did not even die; no, they were only mutilated. And then Prim and other rebel medics came in... and a second set of explosions went off, killing them too. All of this happened on ''Coin's orders.'' And Katniss ended up seeing the entire thing in person.
65	* Had Katniss not murdered Coin, it's entirely possible that there would be more Hunger Games set up for the remaining Capitol children.
66	** President Snow has a granddaughter that he dotes on. Imagine what it would have been like for her; she would definitely have been forced to play in the Hunger games. People who hated her grandfather would have made sure that she was humiliated and killed in an absolutely cruel way. Sponsors? Forget about that; unless they want to prolong her suffering, she might not have sponsors on account of the fact that the audience will be people who were wronged by Snow. And IF she manages to survive that Hunger Game, what's to say that she won't be killed by an assassin? Or worse, forced to go through another Hunger Game, or more? Her life will become a living nightmare... and ''she's a child.''
67	* The fact that so many people in the districts immediately wanted to inflict the horrors of the games on children for revenge is just chilling. Fortunately, that does not happen.
68	* ''Mockingjay'' is filled with these. At one point, Katniss witnesses a group of Capitol refuges get mowed down by rebels, who were apparently aiming at the Peacekeepers. She sees a little girl in a yellow coat, one who had just seen her face scant minutes before, sobbing over the dead body of her mother. More bullets rain down, tear through the little girl, and she dies instantly. Katniss is so horrified she can't even speak at first.
69	* Gale's desire for revenge in the third book. He desires revenge so much, that as the rebellion drags on he becomes willing to commit atrocities just as bad as those committed by the Capitol. At first he builds snare bombs which are designed to kill medics and noncombatants, but his bloodlust soon culminates in him causing an avalanche in the Nut which kills thousands (not just peacekeepers, but also civilians and rebel spies). He knows that there are civilians and spies in the Nut, and not only does he not care but in fact he also wanted to BOMB THE ESCAPES to ensure nobody survives. The fact that he survived the bombing of District 12 actually makes this worse, as he knows how wrong it is to kill civilians but he still does it.
70	* Snare bombs designed by Gale end up being dropped in the final battle, killing Prim as well as a hundred other innocent children.
71	%%* Towards the end of ''Mockingjay'' in the sewers when Finnick is killed by mutts.
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74	!!''The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes''
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76	* Watching Snow, who wasn't the nicest person to be around but certainly far from the President we all know in The Hunger Games trilogy, move further and further towards his future personality in ''The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes''. A boy on the fringes of Capitol society just trying to secure his spot towards a good future ends up with a body count of '''FOUR''' (Bobbin, Mayfair, Sejanus and Dean Highbottom) and he's only '''EIGHTEEN''' with his power and influence growing. If he can poison and kill at just eighteen, there's no telling what else he did in order to eventually become the President Snow we all meet in the first Hunger Games book.
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78	!Films
79	* When the mutts first appear in the arena in the movie. All you see are Peeta and Katniss running together through the dark woods, then the mutts jump out at you from ''NOWHERE''. One can only imagine if that was in 3D...
80	* All the other incidents of violence -- the mutts, Thresh and Clove, Glimmer's death -- are all either really violent so as to be almost unbelievable, covered up with a JitterCam, or not particularly scary, like Rue's death by spear or Foxface's poisoning. The death of the District 3 boy is so senseless, happens so quickly and is done with such little emotion that it's shocking.
81	* The Career tributes, Clove and Cato in particular. One of the most disturbing scenes is after Katniss's leg has been burned and she's soothing it in the lake. The disturbing part: They're ''glad'' that they're about to kill somebody. This is also Fridge Horror when you realize that these people probably reflect their districts.
82	** Movie!Glimmer comes off as scarier than Cato or Clove because while those two always came across as always AxCrazy, Glimmer acted disturbingly like a normal teenage girl at times which made her creepier.
83	*** Toss in just a moment before - the Gamemasters had run Katniss right into them. Senaca's thoughts: "Get a cannon ready" - and then exchanges a smile with the operator.
84	* The screams of the girl who lit the fire. And still she gets off easy in the film - in the book she was dying slowly, probably bleeding out, after the Careers left her. Then Peeta went back to end it.
85	* '''The Tracker Jackers'''. Everything about them, from watching them swarm around Glimmer as she screams to Katniss's hallucinatory run from them, is ''terrifying''. And they're actually ''LighterAndSofter'' compared with the book, where Katniss gets a hallucination of Glimmer's face being melted off. And as for the eradication of her features, that was the result of the huge lumps from getting stung.
86	** Another more terrifying hallucination is the death of her father. He and Gale's father, along with a few others were working in a mine. When they went down the lift, there was an explosion which blasted everyone inside to pieces.
87	* A subtler form of NightmareFuel: Seeing a boy in the Capitol being given a toy sword in the Hunger Games. The people at the capital have come to see these horrendous Games as mere entertainment, not by advanced drugs or brainwashing, but by [[ParanoiaFuel mundane methods that we see everyday: parents teaching their children the way the world works]]. The Capitol isn't protected from the {{Dystopia}} outside, it's the core.
88	* The death of Clove at the hands of Thresh is terrifying to watch, even for Katniss. After strangling her for a bit, Thresh slams her head against the Cornucopia.. once, twice, and on the third time, he cracks skull open, which is heard rather clearly.
89	* There's a deleted scene in Catching Fire where Plutarch goes into a room with lots of little cubby holes, goes to one, pulls out the paper inside, and replaces it with another. That CONFIRMS that the third Quarter Quell was not originally supposed to be a victors game. What makes the scene even worse is that there are HUNDREDS of these cubby holes around. The Capitol had centuries, if not MILLENIA of Hunger Games planned.
90	* '''The Cornucopia Bloodbath sequence.''' The 24 Tributes are placed on pedestals as an incredibly loud pounding noise counts down in sync with the clock that signals the start of the games. Some kids look absolutely BLOODTHIRSTY, ready to kill anything and anyone, others are clearly terrified, scared out of their minds. And then the games start. All sound cuts out, save for an incredibly minimalist and tense score up until Katniss sees the bag that is filled with supplies, at which point it turns somewhat hopeful. Oh, and while this is happening, we keep getting shown incredibly quick cuts to scenes of kids being stabbed, sliced, slashed, bludgeoned, and beaten. The film employs JitterCam to avoid the R rating, but if you look at stills from the sequence, they're quite graphic, with lots of blood flying.
91	** One boy manages to hide in the Cornucopia during the bloodbath. He exits as it dies down, with a bag of supplies and a smug expression, and runs straight into Cato.

Context NightmareFuel / TheHungerGames