Nightmare Fuel / Extra Credits

The Nightmare Face of the Strigoi.

Extra Credits

• Missile Command apparently was this to its creator for years, and Dan's own description managed to make an innocent arcade game seem intense and horrific.
• James' description of his breakdown over game compulsion quickly descends into this.
• The Actions creature from the episode on Propaganda Games can be rather disconcerting, particularly in one close up where it says "Good job, kid."
• In "Symbolism 101" while describing "the uncanny", there's a picture of Allison hunting a deer with its head hidden from the audience. When it lifts its head, its face turns out to be something straight out of The Last of Us. With horrific detail.
• Dan's explanation of the true definition of horror in "Where Did Survival Horror Go?" is rather chilling.
  "Horror is about human psychology. It's about understanding those primal fears that have tormented mankind since its early history. Horror is about the irrational, and the breakdown of our modern faith in logic and the fundamental order of the world. Horror is about all those things which drive us toward our darker impulses, and justify our most bestial actions. Horror is about hopelessness and facing things so unimaginably greater than ourselves, that for all of our self-importance, and assurance of our place in the universe, we're nothing before them."
• Sesame Credit, an upcoming social platform by the Chinese government that rewards users with gifts and discounts for being good patriotic citizens while punishing users who aren't. The way it secretly controls the masses is very similar to 1984.
• In "Because Games Matter: How Video Games Saved my Life", the description of Zhenghua Yang (also known as Z)'s illness. A nosebleed that lasts fourteen hours? Kind of unsettling, but not too bad. When he went to the ER the next day, he found that his platelet counts were at one tenth of one percent of normal levels and still dropping. He began spontaneously bleeding from his body and forming bruises, even passing out from blood loss. When he came to, a nurse told him he was going to die in a few hours and handed him his will. And the worst part? The doctors had no idea what was causing it. In the comments, Z revealed he had a rare autoimmune disease that caused his white blood cells to attack his platelets.

Extra History

• Shaka Zulu captures his enemy's mother, tosses her in a locked hut with jackals and wolves — then burns the hut after a day. Brutal.
• Cholera becomes this in "The Broad Street Pump" series in Extra History. The description of this disease, the conditions that caused it, and the fact that medical knowledge at the time was ineffectual at treating it. This crosses into Nausea Fuel as well.
• If you thought cholera was frightening, the Plague of Justinian in the "Theodora - X: This is My Empire" episode makes it look practically harmless. Particularly chilling are the descriptions of those who fell into comas and starved to death if no one was there to help them, people shoving corpses into mass graves and guard towers, and ships filled with plague-ridden corpses that carried their grim cargo to other shores.
• Everything about the Battle of the Denmark Strait in Part 2 of their "Hunt the Bismarck" series. From the search for the Bismark in the foggy weather and the ensuing desperate battle, to the destruction of the Hood, to the hit on the Prince of Wales bridge. Particularly the part where the Wales navigation officer attempts to raise the bridge above to ask if everyone's alright, only to get blood dripping through the voice pipe as a response. And the part where a colossal explosion tears the Hood in half, and the bridge crew don't initially know how badly damaged they've been... and then the shredded corpses of their shipmates begin to rain down from the sky onto the stricken ship, an image so horrific it had to be portrayed in silhouette. And the final blow: a friendly destroyer arriving after the battle, grimly prepared to rescue and treat hundreds of injured sailors from the Hood's crew of 1418. They rescue three.
  • The Bismarck herself. A massive behemoth of 15-inch guns and heavy armor, in open violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Making matters worse is the perpetual fog and snow in the North Atlantic. The fact a ship this large could sneak up on you is chilling.
  • A shot from Episode 2 has◊ the Bismarck giving the Prince of Wales and Hood a Death Glare.
  • Sinking the Bismarck turns the British forces to this. They pound the great battleship relentlessly and scores of Kriegsmarine sailors run along the deck to get the hell off their ship. Some even try to surrender, but they're shelled down in the coming salvos. The British ships' chaplains beg their captains to stop shooting so they can pick up survivors, but the captains are having none of it. They have orders to sink the Bismarck, no matter what. We knew it was personal, but Jesus.
• The whole of the Cuban Missile Crisis episode. The number of times you realize that a random bear or a technical issue or a single vote or the wrong people to handle nuclear armament almost caused the end of all life on Earth... By the end of it all, you will be amazed we're still alive.
• The first episode of "The 1918 Flu Pandemic" describes it as a horror story, and it lives up to that declaration:
  • The opening of the first episode: Dr. Wells and his assistant are investigating a corpse. The poor man had turned blue. His lungs are so filled with fluid that he drowned in his own body. As Wells leaves to get some air, he passes by hundreds of bodies. They're turning blue.
  • In Episode 3, the plague has gotten so bad people are literally dropping off horses or walking along then collapsing on the sidewalk, dead. Without warning. Keep in mind these are civilians, and even the doctors and nurses are falling ill. The virus is so lethal it kills people in just twelve hours, making the bubonic plague look lethargic in comparison.
  • Several episodes mention it, but at the time, nobody was sure what caused it, a bacillus or a virus. One expert described looking for a cure and a vaccine like "fighting a ghost". Even now, when we know the strain that caused it, we are no closer to knowing how it came to be and how many exactly died.
  • In Episode 4, the Catholic Church sends priests and other clergy to help clear the backlog of bodies from the Philadelphia morgue. They arrive to find it at over 12 times its maximum capacity. The city not only runs out of coffins, but it runs out of wood to make more coffins. Because of how full the morgues and graveyards are, people end up having to keep the dead in their homes, often eating and sleeping next to them.
  • Episode 4 also briefly touches on how children adapted to the epidemic by making a jump-rope rhyme about it. Adding a Voice of the Legion effect when reciting it only makes it more creepy.
  • In Episode 5, the U.S. Coast Guard sends a team to a village on Alaska's Wood River. The only living things they find are sled dogs stuck in a cabin, surviving by eating the corpses of flu victims. Upon seeing this, the guardsman slams the door shut, shoots the dogs through a window, and orders the entire village burned to the ground.
  • The Cytokine Storm ^note named after the extreme immune response the flu triggered which can produce so much fluid in an attempt to literally flush out the sickness that it fills up the lungs, which end up being inflamed and unable to produce oxygen, causing the patients to turn slowly blue and drown in their own fluids, the ending theme of the series, would not be out of place in a horror movie or game, and in places sounds like a funeral dirge. Fitting, as the topic has been described as a horror story in the first episode and several episodes emphasised people running out of coffins, the material to make coffins, or people to dig the graves.
  • In the end, there isn't a real victory over the virus; it killed and infected so many people throughout the world that it exhausted possible hosts. All the best medical minds of the day tried to find a vaccine or treatment, with little success except for a vaccine against secondary infections.
• Episode 2 of Saipan, Suicide Island ends on a somber note, describing one plane taking off, and heading to its target.
  ''A lone B-29 bomber lifted off from Tinian airfield overnight, [[MPs] had kept troops away from the aircraft and it's odd, specially built loading pit. The B-29 hit it's rendezvous point then turned towards Hiroshima.
  • There's no picture of a mushroom cloud. No fireball. Just the lone B-29, casting its shadow over the Japanese islands.
  • The Saipan campaign was nightmarishly bloody. The battle became hopeless for the Japanese after their naval support was decimated. Civilians committed mass suicide because they believed they would be subject to horrific torture at the hands of American forces, even when American translators tried to talk them down.
  • The Yakusei, in which the remaining Japanese forces were ordered on a suicidal charge against American forces. By the end, one-third of American forces are dead, most of the survivors are wounded, and more than four thousand Japanese soldiers are dead.
• The series on the Irish Potato Famine has several, from the bleak backdrop of the system, the descriptions of hungry, destitute and desperate people, and up to the negligent-at-best and outright-malignant-at-worst British government.
• The video on the Warsaw Uprising is chilling, depicting the unhinged brutality of the Nazis, backstabbing of the Soviets, and helpless situation of the Polish population.
  • A major portion of the Polish rebels were only teenagers.
  • The rebels were often the only thing protecting Polish civilians from reprisal by the German army. Every time the rebels had to fall back, they also had to leave civilians to their probable deaths.
• "History of Dentistry" depicts the brutal mishaps caused by quack doctors trying to treat teeth.
• The first video on the Haitian Revolution does not shy away from depicting the horrors of colonial Haiti's slavery. The opening depicts a newly arrived slave learning that his time on Earth being so short, his masters won't even bother feeding him.
• The 3rd Century crisis:
  • The fact that during the crisis, there were Twenty six emperors, (and those were the legitimate ones), because most Emperors were murdered by their own men for cash.
    • Doubly so due to the fact that said men were none other than the Praetorian Guard intended to protect the Emperor, and thus would be the people closest to him outside of family and high-ranking advisors. High octane Paranoia Fuel right there.
  • Aurelian being betrayed by his men simply so they could save their own hides.
  • Diocletian clearly murdering many of his rivals, while claiming a myriad of other causes. He even Death glares at the camera.
• Pope Urban III dying of a heart attack from the shock of Jerusalem being vulnerable and the True Cross being captured.
• The episode Do No Harm: Black Medical Exploitation, features two examples.
  • James Marion Sims, a doctor who researched gynecology by experimenting on enslaved test subjects. Worse yet, he pried apart the skull-plates of newborn children with a shoemaker's tool and kept their corpses for dissection. Expectant mothers had their children murdered right after birth, in front of their eyes, and couldn't even lay their children to rest in a dignified manner.
  • Eugenic Boards in the United States, especially the one in North Carolina which approved 7,600 sterilizations. These women were denied their right to start families through no fault of their own, and some of those sterilized were as young as nine.
• The Teddy Roosevelt series has a far more mundane horror: the corruption of monopolistic businesses:
  • The crooked business practices of John Rockefeller. Offering buyouts, but ruthlessly outcompeting those who declined them. Bribery, buying every company in the manufacturing process, secret deals. The book Ida Tarbell finds in the New York Public Library about the Southern Improvement Co. is the only copy left. Standard had the others destroyed.
  • Offhandedly, but it's mentioned inefficient oil practices would end up with rivers set aflame from products being dumped into them. Products that (credit to Rockefeller for noticing) could be used themselves.
  • How nightmarishly racist Benjamin "Pitchfork" Tillman was. Called that due to the utter vitriol his speeches were drenched in, he led a terrorist group known as the Red Shirts (who engaged in the stereotypical ballot stuffing and intimidation other groups did), and after hearing Booker T. Washington had dined with the Roosevelt family, made a statement the E.C crew could not bear to repeat aloud. "Ben Tillman was a piece of (bleep)" indeed.
  • The fact that not only was Upton Sinclair not exaggerating about how unsanitary the meatpacking plants of Chicago were but the fact that the plants were still nauseating to federal inspectors even after a three-week cleaning spree.
  • How unregulated medicine led to children overdosing on heroin that was put into their flavored medicine.
• The Thirty Years War:
  • Due to how overwhelmingly devastating the war was to the average person, Extra Credits saw it best described by the Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
    • Conquest: The domination of all Europe between the Catholics and Protestants, which destroyed lives, and the poor Calvinists were seen as heretics by both sides.
    • War: The fate of Magdeburg. Originally put to siege, but then a fire meant to draw out the defenders consumes the entire city, with only those in the Church surviving. The rest, burn, asphyxiate, or are murdered and raped by the various armies, who leave with all the food.
    • Famine: Beyond the simple food being taken, Kings begin debasing coinage to pay armies, and then some noblemen got in on it, resulting in a cycle of people discarding the debased currency and keeping the good ones. The worst part? Con men were hired to actively spread the bad coins.
    • Death: Diseases, previously contained by the fact people didn't travel very far, are unleashed upon the various armies. Soldiers of both sides are decimated, towns are abandoned.
• Japanese Militarism
  • The series talks about how Japan in the early 20th century embraced fascism from the Japanese perspective, focusing on the domestic politics as it grow and evolve. The corruptions of the higher class and government turns the poor and lower-class people to worship the Army as the last savior of Japan. As the military began to act in their interest, there is nothing the government can do the keep them in the line. For decades, the frenzied and disgruntled people stirred up populism sentiment in Japan as the voices of reason were overwhelmed by blind patriotism and accusations of treason. In the end, the entire country transformed into a war machine to fund the war throughout Asia, bring death and suffering to the civilians in other countries, until being defeated at WWII.
• The series on Frederick The Great begins by documenting how horrible Frederick's father was: on top of beating his son, mocking his sexuality, and forbidding him from pursuing unmanly habits, the elder Frederick had his son's confidant and possible lover Hans Hermann Von Katte executed before his very eyes. The fact that Frederick fainting in shock is a good thing shows the depths of Frederick's Father's cruelty.
  • It's mild by comparison, but the animation of Zoey turning into The Thing at the end of the final "Frederick the Great" episode is quite unsettling.
• The series on John Brown does not flinch in showing the horrors of slavery and the pro-slavery violence that occurred in the lead-up to the civil war.
  • As a young man, John Brown witnessed a seemingly nice slaveowner beat a slave senseless for not serving a meal fast enough.
  • The infamous beating of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks on the Senate floor is depicted, and it is not pretty. By the end, Sumner is blinded by his blood.
  • The brutality of the pro-slavery border ruffians in Kansas is shown in horrible detail, with the mobs threatening to violate women, destroy whole communities, and dismember several pro-settlers. (Brown and his sons' retaliatory attacks are presented somewhat more sympathetically, but without attempting to sugar-coat their brutality either.)

Extra Mythology

• Their video on the Aztec Founding Myth was the very first to include a trigger warning and there is a very good reason for that, including among other things graphic dismemberment and skinning.
• Even Christmas is not spared. In many lands, Christmas is a time to be jolly, happy and holly, and other words ending in 'olly'. But what you didn't know, is the existence of Krampus, Santa's satyr-esque companion. Santa takes care of all the nice children, but Krampus takes care of the naughty ones.
  • Then we get to Iceland, where a troll witch comes out at night to snatch naughty children because they're delicious.
• The "Pricolici & Strigoi" episode talks about Romanian myths, culminating in a Strigoi beckoning a young child to open the window and let him in, with its face transforming into a Lovecraftian Nightmare Face.
  Strigoi: Open the window! We can go back to the woods and play and run and skip forever! And you'll never have to be afraid again!
  Boy: Strigoi?!
  Strigoi: (Evil Laugh) I am your friend! (enters, its face transforming, voice deepening) The LAST friend you'll EVER need! The ONLY ONE you WANT! And I want to play WITH YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!
• The video on the Rusalka has loads of creepy moments. Including, but not limited to, Olga nearly being drowned by a pair of thieves, only for the men to be killed by the Rusalka themselves. After brutally drowning the would-be killers, the ghostly girls turn to Olga...
  Rusalka #1: We died here.
  Rusalka #2: Drowned, by evil men. (gestures to the bodies floating down the river) Now we linger to return Fate's favor. (points to Olga) You almost ended up as we did. You still could...
• The new Queen of disturbing, who needed another trigger warning. La Llorona or the 'Crying Woman'. A lady who out of madness drowned her sons, then herself and now wanders the river crying "¿¡¡¡¡DONDE ESTA MIS HIJOS?!!!!" (WHERE ARE MY SONS?!!!!) And if she encounters any straying ones she drowns them too.
• The Bloody Mary episode is already scary in its own right, but special mention goes to jumpscare at the ending when Matt tries his turn in the darkened bathroom calling her name.
• The Kuchisake-Onna manages to leave a rather terrifying impression for the main character Ren. Having heard multiple versions of the tale of why the Kuchisake-Onna (Split Face Woman) existed, all of which resulted in her face being cut open ear to ear, he's naturally terrified of encountering her on his way home, since she typically preys on lone children. He almost manages to make it home without encountering her, even seemingly managing to reach what he thinks is his mother's arms...until a blood-chilling statement is heard from his "mother":
  Kuchisake-Onna: Do you think I'm pretty?
  • She turns out to be just as horrifying as the stories about her implied, when Ren desperately stalls for time to avoid being harmed by her, only to find out that simply answering "yes you're pretty" isn't enough to pacify her, as she removes her surgical mask to reveal her split face mouth with razor sharp teeth, before asking the same question again with a demonic, raspier voice. It also makes it clear that there's no good answer to give her: If you said no, she'd attack you. If you said yes, she'd cut your mouth to match hers with her bloody scissors. While it's ultimately downplayed somewhat by her weakness (throwing Japanese hard candy on the floor to make her pick them up slowly), it makes no bones about the fact that Ren was extremely lucky to escape.