Nightmare Fuel / Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Ladies and gentlemen, the Jurassic^note Well, mostly Cretaceous. Boogey-saur.

"Welcome to Jurassic World."

— Dr. Ian Malcolm

Filled with fire, new and old dinosaurs; and a lot of scare chords, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom likens itself as a horror movie, and it shows.

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• The movie opens with one hell of a case of Paranoia Fuel. A mini-sub is diving into the lake of Jurassic World to recover the remains of the Indominus rex. Everything is pitch-black with the only light source being the sub's searchlights. We all know that the Mosasaurus lives in the lake, so every second of the scene will have you on the edge of your seat expecting her to come out of the darkness any moment. The mercenaries assumed that with the long Time Skip since the last film, the Mosasaurus would be long dead. Oh, how wrong they are. We first see a glimpse of her as lightning strikes above and reveals a shadowy behemoth swimming above where the mini-sub is. Soon after, as the ground-side mercenaries attempt to contact the pilots of the mini-sub, the Mosasaurus closes in on the sub from behind, her head dwarfing the sub as it prepares to strike. We're not shown the aftermath except the lights from the sub going out and the ominous radio silence not long after, but we can guess what happened down there. In addition, the chaos upside involving the resident T. rex (another Nightmare Fuel case in itself) causes the gates of the Mosasaurus lake to become stuck and remain open. The last thing we see in that scene is the Mosasaurus swimming out into the open ocean. Depending on how sturdy the mini-sub was, it's unlikely that the crew died quickly. They were probably drowned or slowly crushed while in absolute terror, or trapped in a leviathan's stomach...
• Imagine being Jack the mercenary in the opening scene. A flash of lightning and you turn and the greatest predator that ever lived is right there, and then you're running as fast as you can down the street and grabbing onto the rescue ladder of the helicopter and clinging for dear life as said predator bites the other end, trying to pull the entire aircraft down as your own buddies prepare to cut the ladder loose to sacrifice you to save the helicopter...
  • Even worse is that the T.Rex tears away the lower half of the ladder, but Jack is still safe. He laughs in relief and frantically climbing to safety, only for the Mosasaurus to leap out of the water and swallow him.
• The Indoraptor is a smaller version of the Indominus rex that was foreshadowed by Hoskins in the previous film. Seen in full, the Indoraptor is very creepy. He basically resembles a smaller, black Indominus with longer, more human-like arms and yellow stripes. But what makes him really disturbing is the way he moves: being semi-quadrupedal in stance, some of his movements are eerily Alien-like. Yes, InGen has created a dinosaur version of a Xenomorph...
  • And the primary reason the villains are trying so hard to develop Indoraptors? Sell them for profit as a military Attack Animal. Seeing what it can do in the movie, you can tell how disturbing it is, and how many times worse than just doing it For Science! or, at worst (as we thought), for amusement purposes.
  • Leaked info claims that the Indoraptor can move with total silence, even in darkness. The end of the second trailer makes good on displaying this; as Owen tells a guard that they need to get out of the building, the guard moves to inform his superior...and then the Indoraptor erupts from the side out of nowhere, snatching the unlucky man up in his jaws and barreling off-screen quickly and brutally. In the film itself, he actually grabs two guards. Granted, those two guards were going to shoot down Owen and Claire on Mills' orders at that moment, making the Indo something of an Accidental Hero in that scene.
  • The fact that this thing has clearly developed hands (as did Indominus) is deeply disturbing. While species like the Spinosaurus and the various raptor breeds had manipulators good for things like batting door handles open or clawing faces off, neither of them had fully-developed hands. Possible evidence of human genes being integrated aside the danger of a creature like this that has the possibility to learn tool use is too great to state properly. And like the raptors, he too can open doors...
  • The movie repeatedly goes out of its way to showcase how horrifically sadistic this thing is. First, there is the scene where he gives Wheatley a slow and brutal death in his cage. Then there is the one when he stalks a terrified Maisie in her room. The Indoraptor knows where she is and can just easily go for the kill. Instead, he slowly raises his hand in her direction, apparently delighted by the young girl's despair. It's pretty clear that this thing really has it in for poor Maisie. Even while he's caged, he stealthily reaches through the bars not to try and grab her, but just to tweak her ponytail so he can give her a Jump Scare. By this point, it's not much of a stretch to say that the thing just likes the sound of screaming humans.
  • Though Blue manages to kill the Indoraptor by dropping him through a roof, the fact that the InGen scientists are shown carting away three incubating eggs implies that there may soon be more of the creatures. Possibly subverted as the mercenaries accompanying Mills are carrying suitcases containing those eggs. Which means the dinosaurs may have saved humanity from these monsters ever surfacing.
• The dinosaur auction is Nightmare Fuel on two levels. First are the large number of arms dealers, specifically of the Russian who wants two carnivores. This means anything from the Russian mob to rogue states now have access to dinosaur weapons. The second part of the Nightmare Fuel is the dinosaurs themselves. How many of these giant beasts go from living in a wide-open field with excellent food, to a small cage at some bootleg Jurassic Park or even worse. To be fair, their alternative was burning to death in the island, assuming the destruction of it was total. Then the Indoraptor is being auctioned. Hoskins' vision of a dinosaur Super-Soldier has become reality.
  • And for one final dose of Nightmare Fuel from that scene, just the simple fact that Mills was willing to sell off the Indoraptor to the highest bidder. While he doesn't see it as a big deal since they can just "make more," Wu understands the implications of letting something like the Indoraptor out of their control in a world where cloning is far more advanced and sophisticated than it is in the real world, noting that "So will they." One Indoraptor in this world was bad enough. Now imagine several, all just as psychotically flawed as the original.
• The shot of the Indoraptor, perched atop a Gothic rooftop in the rain, roaring loudly at a full moon like a goddamn werewolf! This creature is so unnatural that he actually comes off with vibes of a supernatural monster!
• The Indoraptor tapping his claw into the floor is a Call-Back to the original movie, but it's also a chilling reminder that the creature is lurking about somewhere, sniffing you out. Think it's safe to say that little Maisie will have nightmares of that sound for as long as she lives. The scariest part of this is when you can't actually see him. For example, Owen switches off the lights in a room so the creature cannot track them by sight, but when you hear that tapping sound stalking about in the dark, it just becomes all the more terrifying. Then Zia and Franklin unwittingly switch on the lights just when Claire, Owen, and Maisie were relying on the cover of darkness. Maisie finds herself gazing into her own reflection in a window...only to realize that there is something behind it; the Indoraptor had been staring her in the face the entire time, less than three feet away.
  • The scene is made even more disturbing by the fact that, for some moments, the Indoraptor's reflection is exactly overlying Maisie's one, making her look like a human with a dino face.
• The death of mercenary Ken Wheatley, which ends up being the closest the films have come to adapting the very graphic deaths of Nedry and Wu in Michael Crichton's original novel. He thinks he has the Indoraptor cornered but, in truth, the Indoraptor has him. Although Wheatley has his death coming for obvious reasons, his death is very prolonged and agonizing as the monster tears and chomps him while he screams. The camera is out-of-focus for the shot, but Wheatley is still being explicitly dismembered even further by the Indoraptor, and still alive and screaming through it all, to boot. And there's still a lot of him visibly left when the Indoraptor gets distracted by the screams of the woman Eversoll shoved out of the way to get to the elevator controls.
  • Wheatley is clearly suffering after the Indoraptor's first strike, with tears and drool running down his face as the pain and terror set in (and be honest, so would you in his shoes). We've seen dinosaur attacks all throughout the franchise, but that moment highlights just how horrific it is to be mauled to death by a vicious animal.
  • The Indoraptor's Slasher Smile. What makes it worse is that he IS smiling at us. If there is a better application for The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You, then this is it. It can be darkly amusing, or just plain creepy, but for the paleontologically inclined, it's outright horrifying. No dinosaur has the facial muscles required to form that expression, and there are only handful of species it could have inherited that trait from. For a moment, it looks almost human...
  • Here's the kicker, as karmic as it was, Wheatley gets his armed severed ON SCREEN. Not a lot of deaths in Jurassic Park do that, and whenever that happened to people such as Eddie Carr in The Lost World, as cruel as the death was, it was from a distance, mostly blocked out, or mercifully quick. Here, the drawn-out nature and in-your-face brutality of it is perfectly capable of catching someone off-guard even though we all know Wheatley was doomed as soon as he walked into the cage.
• How the Baryonyx is introduced, which consists of Claire and Franklin watching a blip on a motion detector get closer and closer...and then a crocodilian head looms out of the shadows of a service tunnel and roars at them.
• One of the promotional teasers before the first trailer shows Claire trapped in a fire-filled room while a Baryonyx lunges out at her from the shadows.
  • The teaser underplays the scene itself. The fire is actually lava that has started oozing through the shelter's walls and ceiling. At one point, it looks like Claire and Franklin will have to choose between two hopeless situations: Should they risk going into the tunnel where the Baryonyx is waiting for them or should they stay out of the tunnel and have the lava consume them?
  • Think of this from the Baryonyx's perspective as well. This is either an animal forced to attempt to attack some prey surrounded by lava, or it is so scared, it is rampaging and lashing out at the other two living things in sight. Either way, this is a very desperate animal willing to do anything.
• The brief shot of the destroyed gift shop with some dinosaur toys...and one of the "toys" turns out to be a live Compsognathus which promptly runs off.
• Owen meets Blue and sticks his hand out to pet her. She looks like she's going to let him but then suddenly turns to face the viewer and opens her mouth wide from being shot in the neck by a tranq dart from a squad of mercenaries that followed Owen.
  • Also that brief moment where Blue, in a desperate attempt to save Owen and kill one of the mooks shooting her, is digging her claws into the poor bastard's face? We get some good shots of those claws dug deep into his face. This man's final moments before shooting Blue must've been excruciatingly painful.
    • A few drops of blood splatter on the lens while Blue's attacking the mercenary.
• Rexy nearly chomping Owen in half after she wakes up. Mitigated slightly by the fact that it wasn't out of intent and more out of panic (the real danger was that her foot would crush him after she panicked; he had to dive through her jaws to avoid that).
• The changes made to the old website are both this and a Tear Jerker. All the park's attractions have been destroyed, the Mosasaurus has escaped and is loose in the ocean somewhere; and the site seems to be constantly trying to remind everyone that the island is a ticking time bomb of volcanic activity.
• Just the knowledge that the Mosasaurus is now loose in the ocean somewhere, with no easy means to track it, is terrifying in itself and she is seen at the end about to devour a surfer while swimming in a wave. Granted, there's little chance that a single Mosasaur with no means of reproduction could have a sizeable effect on a healthy marine ecosystem, but it's still a very eerie thought.
  • Well... Judging by how much Wu likes messing with Dino genes, to make a Dino that size he may have had to slip some Whale DNA in there, who knows? it might be a close enough match to breed with.
• Owen, abandoned by the mercenaries after being shot by a tranquilizer dart, wakes up completely paralyzed and unable to move, while a Sinoceratops curiously inspects him, licking him all over. But he has more to worry about than dinosaur drool: Soon the Sinoceratops flees and he finds himself laying only a few meters away from a quickly incoming lava flow! As his entire body is immobilized by the dart, he can't even shout for help and is reduced to muffled moans of terror. As the lava slowly inches toward him, he frantically tries to wriggle and squirm away, completely helpless, and laboriously tries to haul himself over a log to protect himself from the molten magma... Fortunately for him, he soon regains his motor functions and is able to stand and run from the dino stampede that follows.
• Eversoll and three other auctioneers barely evade the Indoraptor via an Elevator Escape, only for the doors to malfunction moments later. The four of them can only watch helplessly as the elevator slowly opens to reveal a very amused and patient Indoraptor waiting on the other side. With the Indoraptor's sadistic tendencies firmly established moments prior and nowhere for the defenseless humans to flee, it likely took its sweet time killing them one by one as the others were Forced to Watch.
• Claire and Franklin trapped within the gyrosphere, underwater, while the glass begins to break and Owen desperately tries to free them before she drowns, first with a gun, then with a knife. Unfortunately, it causes the water to leak in faster...
• Maisie being revealed to be a clone of Lockwood's daughter. Is InGen cloning humans now? Are they creating the hybrid dinosaurs with human DNA included? Is Maisie herself secretly a human-dinosaur hybrid? This raises a lot of disturbing possibilities, including the possible parallels between Maisie and the Velociraptors. She is shown to be clever and persistent, with her escape from a locked bedroom filmed in a way very reminiscent of Jurassic Park's raptors learning to open doors, and later bonds with Owen and looks to him as a father figure. Does this seem to imply that Maisie is part-raptor?
  • Maisie, in her introduction scene, is implied to love playing hide and seek with her caretaker Iris in the Lockwood mansion and give her a nasty Jump Scare every chance she gets. While this could be put aside as just normal playful child behavior, what if it isn't that simple? Raptors do love to play hide-and-seek with their prey before attacking as well, after all... And there's the disturbing fixation the Indoraptor seems to have for her, reaching out to her with his hand on two separate occasions. Does he single her out as a specific victim? Is he actively recognizing her? Or perhaps identifying with her as a fellow "artificial organism"?
  • There are also the "simple" legal implications of her being a clone in the first place. While the United States has no federal law that outright bans cloning, 15 states, including California (where Maisie lives), outlaw reproductive human cloning, meaning that her existence is at least in violation of State law. That's why she was kept hidden, not being allowed her outside the house.
    • Her creation was a crime, not her existence. She still has legal rights, whatever the circumstances of her conception, same as the offspring of the criminal act of rape still has legal rights. But the fact that Lockwood kept her so isolated to conceal his own crime is itself rather nightmarish, the more so in that he knew he was dying and still did nothing to introduce Maisie to the wider world she'd have to face once he was gone.
  • Mills is quite hellbent on keeping Maisie for himself, insisting she is his property. Given she is a clone, it is implied Mills primarily wants her to have Wu and his scientists perform awful experiments on her just to keep improving the genetic code of any bioweapons they may cook up.
• Lockwood's death. After he learns of Mills' nefarious plans and orders him to call the police, Mills looks at a phone and pillow instead. In a completely emotionless voice, he states that Lockwood's hands aren't clean either, then grabs the pillow. It's heavily implied that he suffocated Lockwood, with the ending shot being Lockwood's amber cane falling and shattering.
• The really grisly death of Eli Mills. Rexy snatches him up screaming with her jaws, chomping on him several times, before dropping him underfoot and tearing his torso apart, sending one of his limbs flying into the eager waiting jaws of the Carnotaurus, who greedily munches on it, only for Rexy, still devouring Mills' remains, to smack the limb out of the smaller dinosaur's mouth. Just damn. And the Compsognathus are there to pick on the scraps!
  • Just the build-up to his death is filled with Paranoia Fuel. Mills first survives a very terrifying stampede by hiding under a car and almost gets crushed by it a number of times. He then climbs out from under the wrecked car, with a group of Compsognathus (which fans know to be quite dangerous in numbers) standing atop it and watching him. A moment later, the Carnotaurus is seen lurking in the background, not making any sound whatsoever, and stopping to watch Mills. Just when you think the Carnotaurus will go in for the kill, Rexy shows up without warning and snatches Mills up, just like she did in the very first movie.
  • Mills' death is toned down in foreign theaters, but in a way that's arguably worse. Rexy carries the screaming man off into the forest, apparently willing to deal with him at her leisure...
• Blue is now free and roaming the Grand Canyon, and while she is supposed to be cast in a heroic light, she nonetheless is a powerful and deadly carnivore who will eventually have to hunt to sustain herself. Will she end up posing a threat to local humans in the vicinity? A threat to humans? She'll be dead long before reaching any human settlements. The final shot of the film is Blue atop a ledge overlooking a desert suburb. Chances are what happens next won't be pretty.
• The ending of the movie serves as a HUGE Fridge Horror. The freed dinosaurs are now at large, roaming among nature (well, American nature for now, but still) with basically no methods to find their whereabouts; they haven't harmed anyone during the montage yet, but as they're now out of control, they'll probably do eventually...and the consequences will NOT be pretty. Even Owen, the hero of the story, looks unsure and concerned as he watches the Pteranodons fly off towards the horizon, realizing that his and the others' actions might lead to the worst consequences possible.
  Dr. Ian Malcolm: How many times do you have to see the evidence? How many times must the point be made? We're causing our own extinction! Too many red lines have been crossed! And our home has, in fundamental ways, been polluted by avarice and political megalomania. Genetic power has now been unleashed. And of course, that's gonna be catastrophic. This change was inevitable from the moment we brought the first dinosaur back from extinction. We convince ourselves that sudden change is something that happens outside of the normal order of things, like a car crash, or that it's beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We don't conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as woven into the very fabric of existence. Yet I can assure you, it most assuredly is. And it's happening now. Humans and dinosaurs are now gonna be forced to coexist. These creatures were here before us. And if we're not careful, they're gonna be here after. We're gonna have to adjust to new threats that we can't imagine. We've entered a new era. Welcome to Jurassic World.
  • As there are only a few specimens loose in a relatively small area (and thankfully only one T. rex and one Velociraptor), along with the Mosasaurus' continued adventures, the dinosaurs' population isn't really THAT much of a concern. What's really frightening, however, are the pterosaurs which, in a short span of time, managed to travel all the way to Las Vegas and appear to be nesting atop the replica Eiffel Tower! Given their implied ability to breed, potential to travel very far, and complete willingness to carry off and eat humans, the pterosaurs are sure to be a major cause of concern. Rexy, Blue, and Mosasaurus may be the last of their respective kind, but they aren't the only carnivorous dinosaurs; there are still several Allosaurus, Baryonyx, and Carnotaurus to worry about.
  • It should be noted one of the DNA vials saved is labeled as Tyrannosaurus rex. Rexy won't be the last of her kind for long...
  • Related to that, the scene of some people going surfing while a Mosasaur swims in the wave behind them can be quite scary, especially to those with thalassophobia (fear of the sea or sea travel).
• What about all the species that will face certain extinction if the dinosaurs are given enough free reign? There's a reason plant GMO face such restrictions on their implementation; if left unchecked or un-monitored, they are dangerous for wild plant life. Just imagine how much more dangerous is the introduction of modified animal life into an unprepared ecosystem. With all the potential danger of the choice, was leaving the dinosaurs to roam free actually a good thing?.
  • Even worse, what about the fact that some of the dinosaurs like Blue were developed by using the DNA of modern parthenogenetic (animals that can develop embryos without a fertilized egg, basically reproducing asexually) reptile species, according to additional material? Even if you were to argue that the dinosaurs would be contained by the lysine contingency, they would only need to consume enough animal protein to get the lysine they need. Then the JP/JW universe can kiss the ocean ecosystem as it knows it goodbye, what with a 60-foot Mosasaurus now roaming the seas at will. Remember how deer are known to scavenge carrion and even kill small animals when they're lacking certain nutrients and develop cravings for blood? Not to mention the theories that hadrosaurids (like Parasaurolophus) and ceratopsians (Triceratops, Sinoceratops) may have done the same? Those herbivore dinos might not stay vegetarian for long... Though if it's any comfort, it's incredibly unlikely that they would start going after healthy adult humans or really any live prey larger than a small lizard. They could still very well pose a danger (viewers familiar with animal behavior will certainly be aware of just how extremely dangerous large herbivores can be in Real Life), just not a predatory one.

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