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Nightmare Fuel / House on Haunted Hill (1999)

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As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.


  • The opening of the film where Dr. Vanacutt is operating on a patient. The muffled screams and the fact that he has his nurses filming it is something out of a nightmare. He doesn't say a word the whole time.
  • Right afterwards, one of the patients approaches the desk and gives a very seductive smile to the receptionist. He smiles back like it's nothing, but then he hears several voices, and more patients break through the windows behind him. They end up stabbing him through the neck, with the pencils he'd just sharpened. It's not helped by the patient's Slasher Smile and the receptionist's gurgling and gasps for air.
    • The patients then break into the operating room, overpowering Vanacutt and his nurses. They drown one of the nurses, strip another with the clear intent to rape her, and drag Vanacutt to the operating table. The patients end up stealing the camera, filming themselves operating on Vanacutt and one of the nurses.
    • The Five-Second Foreshadowing for this is also quite creepy. They hear the patients laughing and screaming first. They look up... and see dozens of hands pressed and bashing against the skylight above them like something out of Poltergeist.
  • Steven's Establishing Character Moment at the start of the film literally has him playing with the line between "safe" thrills and "dangerous" thrills with the grand opening of his newest roller coaster, Terror Incognita, labeled as "the only rollercoaster to the... hereafter." As the reporter notes that it looks like a generic roller coaster and asks "What's the gimmick?", Steven replies, "Ever seen one that starts at the top?"
  • Melissa finds herself videotaping a ghostly vivisection in an empty room, then senses something behind her. She turns, sees a shadowy figure peer around a corner way down the hallway, and in the blink of an eye, it's right there in her face, teeth, blood, and all.
    • The worst part prior to the creepy-jittery ghost suddenly attacking her? She only sees the vivisection on camera. The room seems empty and abandoned, but through the camera's screen, the doctors and patient can be clearly seen... and then the doctors turn to look at her.
      • And the operation? That's the operation Vanacutt was performing at the start of the film.
    • Steven later finds Melissa's dismembered head, limbs, and organs in a cabinet.
  • The scene where Steven discovers that another character's face and the insides of his head are missing (this discovery is accompanied by Ominous Latin Chanting, of course). To make matters worse, he sees the unnaturally-twitchy ghost doctor taunting him with his large bloodied knife on surveillance footage. See the scene here.
  • The nightmare sequence in which Steven is in the "saturation chamber". First, his head is tightly wrapped and dunked in water by twitching creepy ghosts. Then, he sees a beautiful young woman submerged in water who starts bleeding from the mouth before revealing her Nightmare Face (which consists of smooth-ish skin where her eyes and nose should be and a GIANT gaping mouth) while screaming at him. Finally, he is exposed to his wife holding his (still alive!) severed head while laughing evilly. See the creepy scene here (NSFW because of brief nudity, also seizure warning).
  • Evelyn rotting to nothing by "the Evil," which then proceeds to chase Steven.
  • Sara's encounter with a spirit in the basement. Sara looks for Eddie after she walks away from him when he figures out that she's actually an assistant named Sara Wolfe and not Jennifer Jenzen. At first, she gets annoyed, thinking he's pranking or making fun of her. Then she finds him jumping into a tank filled with what looks like blood. When she begins to panic and try to help him out, she keeps calling his name. Until she ends up hearing the real Eddie in front of her. So who is in the tank? Cue Sara almost being pulled in by the thing, and Eddie realizing she's being attacked.
  • The post-credit scene suggests that Steven and Evelyn have met with a fate worse than death. That the scene is played as completely silent makes it even more unsettling.

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