As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is widely considered to be the most terrifying game in the series, and for very good reason.
Head here for the general Fatal Frame Nightmare Fuel page.
- The ghosts in general are significantly scarier than the previous games, combining a Nightmare Face alongside much more aggressive attack patterns.
- The song that plays in the infirmary is highly unpleasant to listen to, being a very loud, blaring, and almost cacophonic melody, and the characters actively note how awful it sounds.
- Madoka's death and transformation into a hostile spirit. After being ditched by Misaki, Madoka desperately tries to find her, and picks up the Camera Obscura to fight off a ghost. After she defeats the ghost however, she's suddenly locked in the room with more ghosts surrounding her. All Madoka can do is cower in sheer terror, and the screen cuts to black before anything happens. Once Ruka finds Madoka, she's become a malevolent ghost who immediately attacks Ruka.
- Almost EVERYTHING about Ayako.
- Possibly driven insane by the Moonlight Syndrome, she is a cruel and psychopathic brat who does all sorts of evil, including but not limited to pushing people down the stairs, cutting the nurses with scissors, dragging one of them by the hair, and cutting off the head of a canary.
- Her room has an eerie yellow glow to it, doll parts hanging from the ceiling and getting in your way, with eerie whispering and laughing in the background. She makes her presence known by dropping down on Misaki and attacking her, and later does the same thing to Ruka and Choushiro when they enter her room.
- The worst part is that due to being closely connected to the Haibaras, being the daughter of Yo and Sakuya Haibara, the staff can't actively raise a hand to stop her, and as shown in his notes, Yo actively enables her behavior and muses on how she likes to play with beautiful things.
- The Moonlight Syndrome in general, a debilitating mental disease native to Rogetsu Isle. Among the many symptoms include memory loss, sleepwalking, and the worst symptom being Blossoming: no longer recognizing one's own face or seeing it as blurry and distorted. And if a patient sees the face of another patient's Blossomed face, their own condition outright worsens and Blossoms on the spot.
- Even after death from the Moonlight Syndrome, the victim's corpse continues to Blossom and serve as a vector of transmission, which must be stopped by cutting their face off. A hidden ghost picture you can take actively shows you a corpse's face being cut off, in all of its gruesome detail.
- While searching for Director Haibara's assistant, Choushiro ends up being startled by Dr. Katagiri himself
, popping up on the screen completely out of nowhere. - When Choushiro enters Yuko Magaki's room, he trips over something in the rather messy room. Turns out that it's Magaki's ghost himself, crawling on the floor and grabbing Choushiro's leg.
- Some of the experimental treatments performed by Director Haibara in an attempt to cure Moonlight Syndrome are downright ghastly.
- Asagi Hizuki, a 6 year-old girl, was repeatedly operated on despite her protests, which only served to worsen her condition in a very awful way, causing her hair to fall out, making her cry Tears of Blood and see nothing but red, and rapidly deteriorating her sanity until she died.
- Himiko Kiriya and Yuuzo Takemura had a straight up medieval iron apparatus forced onto their heads, which ultimately did nothing but speed up their Blossoming and kill them quickly. Yuuzo suffers even more past his death, where his corpse was cut up into pieces in another futile attempt to study the Syndrome.
- Kyoko Kitazume was hanged upside down in a torture room and ended up Blossoming to death during the Day of Tranquility while still hanging upside down.
- Part of the process of preparing the titular Mask of the Lunar Eclipse requires that a face removed from a non-infected deceased be placed inside of it and have moonlight shine upon it all night, before peeling it off and letting the mask tan. Gross!
- Some of the music in the game is just plain creepy.
