"He chose... POORLY."
- If you're ophidiophobic, the sequence where Indy gets his famous fear of snakes will likely make your skin crawl. When he tries to escape the henchmen by crawling across a platform. It collapses and he lands face-to-face with a large snake that hisses at him and when he tries to escape from it, he ends up landing in a crate full of snakes that slither around his body.
- When Indy and Elsa have to navigate the catacombs and they notice that it is infested with rats; it doesn't help that they are forced to go really close to the rats when navigating the tunnels. If you're musophobic (afraid of rodents), DO NOT watch this scene.
- Indy nearly grinding up Kazim to get answers as the boat they're on gets destroyed by an exposed ship propeller. Possibly a Call-Back to the infamous scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark also involving propellers...
- Even for a more light hearted film than the previous two, the Book Burning in Germany and the close encounter with Hitler himself is nothing short of tense. The encounter with Adolf Hitler himself deserves a special mention. Indiana Jones is jostled by the crowd gathered to meet the Fuhrer and by chance, is pushed to meet the man face to face. No words are exchanged, and luckily, Hitler doesn't know what Indiana looks like. Thanks to his disguise, he mistakes Indiana for a fanboy officer and signs the journal, which he thinks is an autograph book, and Indiana Jones escapes meeting with one of the most powerful and evil men in the world by pure chance. The terror on Indiana's face during the meeting is obvious.Henry Sr.: My boy, we're pilgrims in an unholy land...
- The entire sequence leading up to Indy taking on the Grail trials is pretty freaky, really. People's heads plopping down the steps at the beginning of the tunnel with no indication of what exactly caused it, the blades that come whipping out of the walls when you can't see anything for the cobwebs, the invisible handspan-wide bridge over the bottomless crevasse...following a film that up until then is pretty much more kid-friendly than the previous two Indy movies, that was some serious Mood Whiplash. After one poor soul gets beheaded by the blades with his head rolling back toward Donovan's party, Donovan commands Helmut to send another volunteer. You hear the horrified reluctance from the group to Donovan's sheer apathy toward their lives. They clearly weren't "volunteers". In fact, if Indy had not been chosen by chance, all of those would have died.
- The Grail Knight's existence. He's been in that tomb for centuries, all alone, with nothing to sustain him but his faith and the waters of the Holy Grail. He doesn't even seem to understand how much time has really passed when Indiana Jones appears and he mistakes him for a knight on a grail quest. Though he does seem to immediately sense Donovan's malevolence when he and Elsa arrive in the chamber, even though he has no idea about the Nazis or knows what the object in Donovan's hand (a pistol) is.
- It makes total sense why he doesn’t know how much time has passed: everything in his immediate area hasn’t changed in a long time & he doesn’t leave.
- Donovan's Rapid Aging after he drinks from the wrong Grail. What's even more terrifying is that he's still attacking Elsa even after he's been reduced to a skeletal corpse, likely realizing she lied to him! You can ever hear his voice going from words into this deafening roar as his flesh literally decomposes off his bones. All the more horrible because, even when he appears to be nothing but bones, he is still mobile, terrified, and in agony... even when he should have already died. It's very possible that drinking from the wrong grail grants both eternal life... and eternal death.Knight: He chose... poorly...
- The look in Elsa's eyes when she picks up the grail and tries to leave with it. Her obsession and the trials she faced to get it have driven her insane. Indy has the exact same look when he falls down the crevice and is trying to reach the Grail. It's easy to read as a mystical compulsion, luring the greedy to their doom.
