"I want your daddy, too."
- Darren Cross. Either as himself or wearing the Yellowjacket suit:
- The vaporization of Frank, and later of a little lamb. Flushing Frank's remains down the toilet like some discarded tissue is distressingly cold at that.
- Just the incredibly casual way he says that line is just... off-putting.
- The similarly dissonant way he talks about selling off the Yellowjacket and his samples to HYDRA as if it was a board meeting is at once hilarious and unnerving.
- Cross' death is one: the first thing gone is his arm and then, POOF, he disappears. Unlike Scott, his regulator and some circuitry were damaged, meaning that he doesn't shrink uniformly, he gets agonizingly crushed inside his own suit. His scream during said death scene and when electrified by the anti-insect lamp is also very unsettling. It's like a mix of anger and pain all said at the same time. Not to mention poor Cassie watched the whole thing, though she was behind Paxton. If she didn't have a fondness for creepy/horrifying things (to a certain degree anyway), that could have easily scarred her for life.
- Even worse, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania reveals that this didn't kill him. This turned him into MODOK.
- His increasing insanity is very, very frightening, as it shows how dangerous Pym Particles truly are. From when Frank is shot to the attack on Cassie's house, it shows that Cross is clearly one of the scariest villains the MCU has to offer.
- Cross breaking into Cassie's bedroom while in the Yellowjacket outfit and mentally unstable. Her asking him if he's a monster is completely understandable. And at one point, she breaks down, crying for her father. Keep in mind that she's a Nightmare Fetishist who loves ugly plush bunnies and keeps giant ants for pets. The fact that Cross is scary enough for Cassie to wonder if he's a monster and cry for her father should say a lot.
- The first time Scott uses the Ant-Man suit and shrinks himself. It really drives home that when you're the size of an ant, Everything Is Trying to Kill You. On top of that, there's someone speaking to him via speaker and somehow knows his name. And when he makes it back to regular size, he's shaking uncontrollably. He's so freaked out, he breaks into the house again, just to return it.
- Even though the idea of Ant-Man has always been considered a bit silly, this film does a pretty good job of showing just how much damage someone could do with that power. Makes the idea of someone like HYDRA getting their hands on the suit, or a whole army of them, that much scarier.
- "Practical applications include: surveillance, industrial sabotage, and the elimination of obstructions on the road to peace." Cue a CG shot of the Yellowjacket suit tearing through a vehicle that looks suspiciously similar to the United States presidential limousine.
- What really sells it, is the reminder Ant-Man retains his strength and density while shrunk... focused into a quarter-inch of area. This results in a micro-sized individual, nearly impossible to aim at, but capable of ripping your limb off or outright killing you in a single punch. And that's only because Ant-Man doesn't use lethal force: try imagining soldiers with the same powers using sniper rifles, following the same rule of keeping their density while being shrunk... Ant-Man essentially has the potential to be one of the world's deadliest assassins. Hope's dialogue during Scott's training montage implies the difference between one punch killing a target and being a "love tap" is nothing more than the amount of force. Meaning that it's very easy for Ant-Man to kill someone purely by accident. All it would take for Scott to, say; kill a surrendering foe whom he only meant to knock out would be ONE slip-up in control or letting anger get to him just for a second.
- Let's not forget Ant-Man's ability to mind-control entire colonies of every single ant species imaginable to do his will, which is terrifying enough to anyone who's experienced a full on ant infestation before. Now imagine that kind of ant swarm doing complex tasks such as blocking out your lights, short-circuiting electronics, flying in a cloud right into your face, and biting through every orifice of your body with fire ants and bullet ants. Be glad that Pym doesn't have access to African driver ants, which will crawl into your lungs and tear at the tissue. Hank/Scott may not have any African Driver Ants yet, but it's not much of a stretch to imagine they could get some in case one of them has to be truly lethal.
- We get to see how truly scary Ant-Man could be if he was a full-on villain, especially during the flashback scenes. Imagine this. You're a HYDRA soldier in Berlin, when the alarms ring, meaning there's an intruder. You ready your submachine gun, and with your comrades, look around for the intruder... until the guy next to you is smashed into a wall by something... invisible. You look on in terror as more and more of your friends are smashed into concrete by this invisible intruder, who is somehow knocking them out with a single punch or kick. Then, as fresh soldiers pour in, the machine gun nest in the room fires on its own
◊ at you. The battalions are instantly chopped down by the high-powered rifle rounds as the machine gun turns by itself, fires by itself and aims by itself. Now, shaking and horrified, you rush outside to find help. You sigh with relief as the tanks roll in — but the invisible attacker, within seconds, turns the place into a war zone. Tanks blow up and set vehicles aflame. Burning men run screaming, rolling on the ground to escape the pain. The explosions from the sizzling fuel tanks wipe out men like mortar assaults. Again, forgetting your training, the fact you have a gun in your hand, forgetting that you are a soldier serving the most advanced and powerful 'peacekeeping' organization on the planet, you run, up until the invisible attacker finally reaches up with you and slams you into the ground, over and over. In your panic-stricken mind, while begging your attacker to just leave you alone, you wonder who the hell this thing is. Is it The Invisible Man? Is it a poltergeist? Has the goddamn Winter Soldier turned invisible and gone mad? WHO IS THIS ABOMINATION? - Heck, even in the Prelude Tie-In, on Hank's very first mission, he managed to make hardened, amoral HYDRA agents beg him to leave.
- The mere thought of Pym's residence brimming with 4 species of dangerous ants, knowing the critters could pop out at any time and saturate the place with their bodies.
- When Scott wakes up in Hank's house after escaping prison, there are bullet ants all over the floor. Hope coolly informs him that they're there to keep him in line if he gets the idea of stealing anything. Scott thus has to carefully walk across a room full of ants capable of extremely painful bites while wearing nothing on his feet. And he'd be lucky if they only bit him. Bullet ants don't need much provocation to sting you. They're basically flightless social wasps.
- The scene where Hope demonstrates how to control the ants by summoning a swarm so dense it starts to blot out the light, all with an increasingly deranged look on her face... the implication in the scene that she wasn't consciously telling the ants to do that, but they were responding to her foul mood and darkening the room to match it. What kind of laser focus do you need over your emotions to keep the ants from doing something really nasty to someone?
- The helmet of the Yellowjacket suit ends up looking especially ominous and threatening. Understandably, it took some inspiration from Classic Ultron.◊
- The Yellowjacket suit itself is a terrifying weapon even without the size-changing tech, giving the wearer flight AND built-in weaponry in the form of its lasers. Anyone who wears it basically becomes a fighter jet with legs, and one skilled operator could likely wipe out several squads of soldiers before even thinking about having to shrink.
- More terrifying still, if you consider that throughout Phase One, the prospect of people less well-meaning than Tony Stark developing and deploying similarly-weaponized personal armor has been looming over the MCU's technology-race. This time, the bad guy has already done so.
- Everything about the sub-atomic realm and the idea that you could be stuck in there forever, constantly shrinking while losing all perceptions of time and space. Heck, it looks like an effing Eldritch Location! And it's an Eldritch Location that's not off in some distant Mordor or alien planet or parallel universe. It's everywhere. You and me and everything around us are frickin' built out of that very Eldritch Location.
- Hydra may have lost the Yellowjacket suit, but Carson escapes with the imitation Pym Particles. It's even worse if your interpretation of the dialog is that Cross already sold the plans and prototypes. Given Hydra's manpower, we might see Yellowjackets wrecking havoc in no time.
- During the final fight at Pym Tech, Scott shrinks down into the model building and is shot at by Cross' goons. To us, it's just some guys shooting a model, but to Scott, it may as well be artillery fire. And as bad as regular bullets are to a shrunken Scott, it's even worse for the ants, considering bullets are at least as big as they are, if not moreso. No one deliberately tries to shoot them aside from the mentally-unstable Cross, but he manages to succeed with Anthony... and all that was left of him was one wing.
- The fight between Ant-Man and Yellowjacket for that one family. They are just normal people, innocently enjoying a barbeque night when something lands in their pool. Immediately after they are caught in a fight between two people in super suits, one of whom is willing to kill them despite the fact that they have literally no idea what is going on and besides Ant-Man's protection, they were helpless. And Cross didn't die when he collided into the bug zapper, so we can only hope he allowed said family to live as opposed to not leaving any witnesses.
- Thomas the (giant) Tank Engine, lying in front of the house with his eyes still wobbling...
- The absolutely horrible tension that just hangs in the air after Scott goes inside the Avengers facility. Nothing can be seen on the ant-cams, except for just the doors. The scene goes pretty much completely silent except for Hank worriedly yelling "Scott, we've lost visual". After a few seconds of horrible silence, Falcon comes flying out through the door with Scott inside the wing-pack deactivating it. It seems even Peyton Reed seems to take Alfred Hitchcock's quote about the scariest thing that could be shown on screen being a closed door close to heart.
