Nightmare Fuel / Devil May Cry

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Prince Of Darkness.

• The entirety of Mallet Island gives off this unrelenting vibe of a nightmarish location when you examine the libraries and documents early on in the game. Crops and plantations were irregularly reaped, with winter crops coming in the summer and vice-versa, a book detailing how, at night, the statue of Mundus at the main hall would suddenly vanish, and not to mention the alarming number of executions and incarcerations that took place at the castle itself. There's even a library book Dante can examine that says the castle grounds went through excessive renovations and reformed, with the author even asking if the builders and residents were possessed by evil spirits.
  • The moment night falls and you come back out to the open courtyard, both before and after heading into the Colosseum. The previous ambient music and wind sounds are gone, replaced by the sounds of crickets... And several animalistic growls and noises. Those are surely stock sounds common in horror media, but in particular, there comes a noise that sounds close to that of a monkey, which sounds eerily like evil laughter. And since the island doesn't show any signs of life except for Dante and the demons, are those truly animals you're hearing?
  • The castle at night. The layouts of several rooms have changed and everything is now dark and dead silent, save for that one music track that continuously plays in the background, and the occasional presence of a demon. Aside from that and the bosses you fight, the entire place is now openly hostile against you, as opposed to being only overrun by the enemies.
  • Reading the castellan's memo in his bedroom in Mission 4. He speaks of how at some parts of the castle, flowers take a lot longer to bloom while in others, they wilt as quickly as they sprout. The island wasn't just being invaded by demons, it was probably already theirs.
• The secret missions can be both awesome and frustrating, but then you get to Secret Mission 7 in the sunken ship after it reaches its destination. A secret mission where, from the moment you hit "Mission Start", EIGHT BLADES ARE NOW SWIMMING RIGHT TOWARDS YOU! To add more to the creepy factor, the whole level is submerged in dark water. Anyone with a fear of alligators or thalassophobia (fear of deep water bodies) will have a good reason not to sleep at night.
• Nobodies. Freaky humanoid... things that crawl on all fours and throw EXPLODING EYEBALLS at Dante, all the while laughing and howling like monkeys. And if one dons a mask, the Nobody grows twice its size and can siphon Dante's Devil Trigger gauge by... some kind of ritual dancing. Not to mention you first encounter them in the Mirrored Castle, which is saturated with red, with the camera tilted slightly and the screen mostly blurry. If Dante gets grabbed by a giant Nobody when his health is critical, the enemy snaps Dante's neck. Complete with a clearly audible *crack!* sound.
• If you're afraid of bugs, then the Beelzebub enemies will certainly terrify you. They're giant flies said to be possessed by demons, and the blue ones constantly spit and drool what looks like maggots from their mouths, which, if they touch Dante, will prevent him from using any ranged weapons for a while (apparently described as an "evil power" rather than actually being maggots). The green ones can catch you off-guard due to letting the blues distract you, and if they sneak up on you with your back turned, they'll force you down and gore you while they try to snap you in half, backwards. If they do it while your health is in the red, Dante actually does get snapped in half at the last second of the animation. It's as scary as it is cringe-inducing.
• The Mirrored Castle itself is pretty damn freaky, with the odd camera angles, the blurry look to everything, and that damn music.
  • As early as Mission 4, once you can enter the castellan's bedroom, which houses some locked doors and the mirror from which Nelo Angelo emerges, checking said mirror will prompt Dante to comment that while the mirror is rather beautiful, he can sense that something is just off about it. Sure enough, many missions later, Dante enters the mirror and is proven right. On the way back to the door to the mirrored bedroom, off in the distance is an enormous, howling vortex (part of the Gate to the Underworld). Checking it will have Dante say that while it's too far away for him to reach from where he is now, he can sense a massive amount of evil energy pouring out from it.
  • Pay attention to the walls of the courtyard in the Mirror World. In reality, there are a few windows and other indentations on the walls, a few holes here and there. In the Mirror, all of it is replaced with etchings of screaming faces.
• Even the normal castle music can be unnerving, with the gothic design adding to the soundtrack as you explore the empty rooms... Well, empty at first.
  • How about the song that plays when you traverse the ancient castle at night? The battle theme doesn't even play when encountering an enemy, and the music doesn't change either when you go to a statue. It's just this song constantly playing until you get to the boss fights with Nightmare and Nelo Angelo. It's really unnerving...
• The early enemies in the game are quite creepy. Marionettes are giant puppets possessed by evil spirits, wielding sharp hand-blades or shotguns. Bloody Mari have their clothing dyed with human blood. Sin Scissors have the ability to phase out of walls and pictures and have a really disturbing laughter which persists for a while even after their death, all for an added Paranoia Fuel. If you read the manual, it says that the Sin Scissors like to decapitate humans while they're still alive.
• Mundus himself. When players reach him, he has the appearance of a cherubic-looking statue (of course, this is allegory for Satan before his fall from paradise). Ok, no problem here. Then, he reveals his true form, where the statue appears significantly older with a visible, gaping wound in his chest. Ugly? Yes, but still not terrifying. When Dante defeats "the Lord of Darkness" and tries to escape Mallet Island, Mundus comes back. His appearance by this point is truly the stuff that nightmares are made of. His marble shell begins to crumble away, revealing a writhing mass of flesh and hands. His face is nothing more than a featureless mound with three eyeballs lazily dangling from their stalks (which are also hands). The fact that he takes up a sizable chunk of the screen and is slowly crawling towards you in his fanatical quest to take Dante down with him only adds to the terror.
  • And you don't even kill him. The best Dante can do is seal him away with Trish's help, (much like his father did alone years before). Dante may have been joking when he told Mundus to give his regards to his son, but what if Mundus returns?
• Nightmare. It pretty much exemplifies the idea of an Eldritch Abomination, as the enemy file says it's unclear whether or not the thing is even alive or just some repulsive weapon. In addition to being incredibly difficult to fight, it's freaky as hell, looking like something right out of a Giger painting. It is capable of sudden rapid movements, including shooting giant spear-like appendages out of its body at you. In its normal state, it is a sickly mound of goo, filled with half-digested corpses of its previous victims, and it constantly tries to trap you in a literal nightmare world.
  • Read the file on Nightmare's "trap" move. The world that Dante is sucked into is "a representation of the trauma that rests deep within Dante's subconscious" — the loss of his beloved mother and his brother.
• A late-game mission takes place in the Underworld. It's a sickeningly creepy Womb Level, complete with life-sucking tendrils coming out of the walls, pulsating tissue walls you have to hack through, and visibly beating "organs".
  • There's something very unnerving and off about the fact that upon reaching the heart of the Underworld and opening its door, it suddenly goes from Womb Level to... pristine white cathedral, complete with glorious and heroic-sounding organ playing in the background. Truly, Hell is a World of Chaos...
• During the timed final mission of the game, if you let the countdown get to zero, the screen fades to white, an explosion sounds, and you get treated to Dante's bloodcurdling death scream.
• Phantom and the Kyklops are not a good sight for arachnophobes. Especially since the former will chase you in the tight corridors of the castle, spitting lasers at you and bellowing. Phantom's fatality? He swallows Dante whole.
• The first game is the only one with fatalities (Dante's vitality meter must be completely red for these to happen), and all of them horrifying to watch. As mentioned above, Phantom will grab and devour Dante alive. Giant Nobodies will snap his neck. Sin Scythes will impale Dante and swing him around like a flag before tossing him to the ground. Shadows in their red state will swallow Dante, bash him around and explode, leaving no trace of him left apart from his sword landing in the ground. Beelzebubs will, if allowed to, gore him and pull him backward far enough to snap his spine backwards. Blades/Frosts impale him in the chest, kick him down, then ram their claws into his face. Death Scythe will throw Dante into the air, and then use his scythes to cut him to ribbons off screen. Even the most common Marionette enemy will latch onto Dante and gash at his head and neck even after he falls down dead, while a Fetish will peck his face off, then knock him down and roast his upper body with their flame breath.

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