Nightmare Fuel / Jurassic Park (1990)

• Rexy is even worse in Crichton's novel than she is in the movie. Unlike her film counterpart, she is far more malicious and intent on killing anything she sees, even abandoning a fresh kill at the prospect of more carnage. Remaining still won't save you for long as she will suspect your presence despite her impaired vision (thanks to her great sense of smell) and deliberately roars in your face to make you move. Trying to squeeze into a place where she can't reach won't save you either, as her tongue is long and flexible enough to drag you out from inside a car. Failing that, she can throw said car into the branches of a tree with such force and speed that, from Grant's perspective, the vehicle had simply vanished into thin air. Try to run, and she will track you across the entire park. Try to escape via raft, she will swim after you. Stay on the river to travel faster and minimize your scent, she will figure out where you're going and be lying in wait for you at a waterfall. It's a chilling depiction of being hunted by a 7-ton predator that wants you dead. See also the illustration here.
• Nedry catches his own intestines. Before getting his leg chewed through. Made even worse in that he had been recently blinded by the Dilophosaurus's venom, and he couldn't see where the dinosaur would attack as it came closer to him step by step. Here's the illustration, and alternately a CGI interpretation is provided here.
  • Imagine the fear and helplessness you would feel in Nedry's situation in all reality. First, you're in a dark forest; a tropical storm is in its prime where you can barely see as it is. Then you come face to face with a creature that was supposed to be extinct, trying to comprehend your situation. All of a sudden, your eyes are in EXCRUCIATING pain, then the sudden realization dawns on you that you're blind and helpless, nothing but a torso with limbs. As if things couldn't get any worse, the dinosaur in front of you wastes no time in GUTTING YOU LIKE A FISH, BEFORE PROCEEDING TO EAT YOU ALIVE.
    Nedry fell to the ground and landed on something scaly and cold, it was the animal's foot, and then there was new pain on both sides of his head. The pain grew worse, and as he was lifted to his feet he knew the dinosaur had his head in its jaws, and the horror of that realization was followed by a final wish, that it would all be ended soon.
  • The description of his decomposing remains after Gennaro and Muldoon scare off a pack of Compys is unnerving in more ways than one.
• Another fun scene: Dr. Wu and the other survivors are holed up in the Safari Lodge while Ellie is making a distraction for the raptors so they won't attack Grant who is trying to restore the park's power. However, two raptors already inside the compound which the survivors had kept in sight suddenly disappear, so Wu goes out to warn Ellie that they're on the move. As he does, one of the same raptors jumps down from the roof, tears him open, and eats him while he is still alive. The attack is so sudden that Wu tries to push the raptor's mouth away from him without noticing his intestines have spilled out of him.
• The bit in the prologue with the injured kid whispering "Raptor, losa Raptor!" As if that isn't creepy enough, he starts explosively vomiting blood.
  • "Oh no, we swear he was run over by a backhoe!" And the "Bloody three-toes footprints..."
• Face it; Malcolm is convinced that the park was destined to fail and everybody's noticed the fallacies in securities. Even without Nedry, there would have been accidents sooner or later thanks to the park's proximity to hurricanes. And no auto-locks on the damn car doors? And if it hadn't happened then...who knows how many people might have been on the island when there was a real foul-up?
  • As of Jurassic World, now we know.
• In one of the very first chapters of the book, the perspective jumps to a Costa Rican midwife who is checking in on her newborn charge. She hears strange chirping noises and rushes into the baby's room, only to see three dark-green "lizards" (in reality, a pack of Procompsognathus) crouched over the infant's crib. Right before her eyes, they resume eating the baby's face until the midwife scares them off. It's too late, however, and the baby is already dead.
  • One fan of the novel was kind enough to visualize the scene for us.
• The raptors in the novels are fairly chilling by (perhaps artificial, perhaps not) nature. Intelligent as apes, built for frightening speed, sporting a variety of sharp killing instruments, and hunting in highly-organized packs. Not only that, they're explicitly mentioned to hunt and kill because it's fun to do so.
  • The raptor breakout, due in no small part to how sudden and unexpected it was. Just when it looks like things might settle down and the park may actually survive, an alarm starts blaring that the auxiliary power is almost drained, and the park staff realize that the main power has been out since the storm. Cue a cold, horrifying dread spreading throughout the survivors as they realize the raptors have had more than eight hours to escape their pen without anyone realizing. Then they hear screams of terror in the distance...
  • The protagonists in the movie actually had it easy; they only had to contend with three raptors, and never more than two at once. In the book, they have to deal with a bloody swarm of them, who exploit their numbers via coordination and teamwork to deadly effect.
    • It gets worse: when the characters figure out that the dinosaurs must be breeding, Malcolm advises them to recalculate the dinosaurs' population with a higher threshold for the total number of them. Among these, six species turn out to be breeding, including the raptors. The expected number of them was eight. How many were found after they told the computer to look for more than that? Thirty-seven.
  • In the movie, the protagonist only finds a couple of dead bodies. When the raptors start their rampage in the novel, there are dozens of mangled limbs and guts littered everywhere. At one point, Lex realizes that she's standing on someone's ear. To top it off, while all of the bodies were mutilated only a few appear to have been eaten; the raptors butchered the corpses for their own amusement.
  • Muldoon states that all the dinos are very hard to kill, as their nervous system means that even if they are mortally damaged it can take a long time for them to die. We see this when Muldoon nearly blows the leg off one... and it is still able to hunt and nearly kill Gennaro.
  • In universe, Malcolm and Grant note that the raptors' response to seeing/smelling humans is a predatory, hunting one. Which only happens if an animal had learned humans make easy prey...
• Hammond's death at the hands of Compys. While he deserves it for being a greedy and unrepentant bastard who refused to shut down the park, it is disturbing to see him as a helpless cripple slowly being Eaten Alive, with the dino venom dulling his senses into thinking that it was paradise.
  He felt a slight pain, only slight, as the compy bent to chew his neck.
• The book features a PR director, Ed Regis, who leaves Lex and Tim in the car to hide while Grant saves the children from the full-grown T. rex. Once it goes away, he comes out of hiding and is surprised by a juvenile T. rex, which is less than half the size of the adult. The scene is played rather innocuously, since Regis tries to push it away like he would an overly-affectionate dog. Then it knocks him down to the ground and bites him. He starts screaming as it starts to eat him, and Grant has to take the kids to hide in the jungle.
• The kids hide in a baby dinosaur nursery with an infant raptor. They hope letting the terrified creature go towards the adults will distract them, and it does. THEN the raptors rip apart and eat the infant as it screams horribly. The innocent description of the baby raptor makes it so much worse when it's ripped apart like finger food.

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