Nightmare Fuel / Halo 2

And I Must Scream doesn't even begin to describe this...

"This is not your grave. But you are welcome in it."

—The Gravemind

• The Gravemind is a particularly frightening being that truly lives up to being a Eldritch Abomination, thanks to Voice of the Legion and its creepy competency at delivering breaking speeches and corrupting people to evil. Its appearance, particularly its graphically updated one pictured above, doesn't exactly help matters either. Plus, there's no telling where those awful tentacles will pop up next...
  • Oh, and one of those tentacles? The Prophet of Regret is melded to one of them, still completely conscious and clearly in great pain (see page image). There's no answer for why the Gravemind would do such a thing other than he can.
  • This is not your grave...*incomprehensible gurgle*...but you are welcome in it.
  • The HD Gravemind has another detail that makes him worse than his original graphics. In the original, the impression that the Gravemind gave was that of a vast Venus Flytrap-esque beast. Look closer at the HD Gravemind when he talks, specifically at the back of his throat. That's a giant fanged maw with brief flashes of what looks like an organic meat grinder of teeth in its gullet. The way it's animated makes it look like it's in a perpetual Slasher Smile as well.
  • In the original game, the animations made it look like Arbiter was struggling against it's grip and at least gaining some ground if not enough. The anniversary edition and it's improved animations makes it clear that the Gravemind is just toying with the Arbiter, twisting and turning him at its leisure. It says incredible things that Arbiter manages to keep his Nerves of Steel when he's being held very close to the Gravemind's horrible maw.
  • At one point, you can just barely make out the voice of a child.
• The level "Sacred Icon" where you play as the Arbiter is an exercise in creepy. It starts with some Nothing Is Scarier, in sterile, quiet, brightly lit Forerunner corridors filled with the bodies of dead Covenants who were on the same mission as you wiped out by the Sentinel security systems and a few surviving traumatized Grunts and Jackals. To proceed in the level the Arbiter needs to open "pistons" and slide down a series of tubes that take him down to God-knows-where in the bowels of Halo, utterly powerless to stop his descent, while "Psycho" Strings play in the background. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of Luke Skywalker's falling down the shafts of Cloud City.
  • And then you start running into the Flood, this time in poorly lit Forerunner corridors filled with toxic Flood mist that fog your vision while all kind of Flood monstrosities crawl around and you hear the panicked chatter of Marines over the radio as they're overrun by the Flood and infected.
  • It's not over yet! You jump once again into a series of shafts once again with the "Psycho" Strings and end up at night in a desolate wasteland of snow, dead trees, and Forerunner wreckage, heavily implied to have been turned into a freezing lifeless environment by Halo's security systems to hinder the massive Flood outbreak. It looks eerily desolate, even worse than something you'd find in Fallout. At least the swamp in 343 Guilty Spark was a natural but alien ecosystem. Here it looks like a nuclear winter. And then the Arbiter links up with an Elite outpost and has to hold out against several waves of Flood forces constantly encroaching on your immediate area. How does a new wave warn you to their appearances? With an announcing scream that doesn't sound like it should be made by the vocal chords of anything human or in the Covenant.
  • Fairly late into the Sacred Icon level you can encounter Sentinels who don't attack you (they still show up as enemy, and shooting them will make them retaliate), implying the infestation got so bad that they focus entirely on the Flood instead of you (though the Forerunner constructs go back to being hostile in the next level).
• You probably think The Flood are incapable of anything beyond their usual gurgling noises, eh? Think again... Their laughs in victory are very creepy to those not used to them like an avid Halo Veteran would be.
• The hidden messages in the game. In Halo 2's soundtrack, we have Mausoleum Suite, a song that plays during the intro cutscene of the The Arbiter and during the confrontation with Tartarus in The Great Journey. In this track, a voice can be heard in the background. At first, it seems intelligible, but play the song in reverse, and you get this. Fans like to speculate that this is Mendicant Bias.
• Much like the first game, the soundtrack itself offers many terrifying tunes:
  • The middle section (Infected) of "Mausoleum Suite". It starts out with slow jungle drums and spooky moaning voices (similar to the Shadow Temple music from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) and then turns into a cacophony of synthesizer effects with guttural voices that seem to be reversed speech but are really just gibberish.
  • Another scary one is "Ancient Machine", a Twilight Zone-like melody with organic Flood noises and vocals similar to the aforementioned "Infected".
  • The second section of "Librarian's Gift" from Halo 2: Anniversary heard on The Oracle after the elevator ride (replacing the second half of the aforementioned "Infected") will give you recurring Flood nightmares for a long time to come.
• When you kill a Brute, you may see his eyes twitch.
• Speaking of Brutes, the Brutes themselves are terrifying considering their capabilities. In Halo 2, their introduction makes them one of the most terrifying enemies you could possibly encounter. Their health is quite high for any Covenant infantry and they're even capable of killing hunters, which usually kill anything that gets close to them, let alone at a good enough distance they can use their fuel rod guns instead of just chasing after their foes. And when they're the only pack member left alive, they "berserk" which basically means they beat the living soul out of whatever they consider an enemy, including you, the player.
• The infestation of High Charity. As if the Enemy Civil War wasn't bad enough, suddenly a human spaceship teleports into the central dome of the Covenant's capital city and crash-lands, disgorging a horde of zombies; infested Pelican dropships are sent across the city in every direction, immediately rendering quarantine impossible. As all hell breaks loose and both loyalist and rebel forces lose ground, the Prophet of Truth's reassuring transmissions are hijacked by the Gravemind, who gleefully taunts the populace and reminds them that resistance is futile. Eventually even the life support systems are contaminated, filling the entire city with a poisonous miasma. In the end, the city - and its civilian population - is simply abandoned by all sides.
  • Parts of the "High Charity" level are a Blackout Basement. That's because the Forerunner dreadnought in the middle of the city was the main source of power for the city, and since Truth is preparing it for launch, it's disconnecting from the power grid. Imagine being a Covenant civilian, knowing that the Flood are spreading, desperately trying to escape, and then the lights go out. Add to that the Drone of Dread ambient track that plays throughout this section...
  • The battling fleets outside don't fare much better; despite better success at quarantining the city from space, individual ships are still boarded and overrun, their shipmasters begging for allied cruisers to open fire on them as the Flood force their way into the command chambers.
• The remake of the multiplayer mode in Anniversary provides us with a design for Flood-infected Spartans with a design that's almost as terrifying as the concept itself◊. Halo 4 had previously featured infected Spartans in multiplayer, but Halo 2 Anniversary's takes the idea to a whole new level. Mercifully, neither of these monsters have appeared in the canon story...yet.