Nightmare Fuel / Love, Death & Robots

The producers weren't kidding when they said that they'll focus on the concept of death...^note The protagonist of this short isn't dead here, but he probably wishes he was.

Sonnie: Are you scared now?

Moment Subpages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.

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Volume 1

Sonnie's Edge

• Picture for a moment if you will, you have won your 18th Deathmatch in a row, and you are about to get lucky with one of the most beautiful women in the world. When suddenly, mid-kiss, you have four spikes lodged through your skull, and are being hoisted up by said spikes. While the psycho and her pimp are mocking about how you are about to die.
  • Now, flip perspective. The woman you have Impaled with Extreme Prejudice, smashed to the ground, and then literally Curb Stomped (a few times).... is still monologuing. You soon find out why when you see the body you excessively killed doesn't have a brain, but someone still talks... and the only other thing that has a brain in the room is a very angry bio-engineered killing machine the size of an elephant.

Three Robots

• Your world is ending, all your friends are dead, you figure you might as well end it all. And years later some robots on vacation poke at your still-hanging corpse.

The Witness

• Two people are stuck in a Stable "Groundhog Day" Loop, ending up killing the other one each loop. And every. single. time. they try to just talk and explain the situation to the other side, they end up murdered in self-defense, triggering the other half of the loop, then reset. The fact the loop takes only a few minutes and constantly keeps them in a hurry only adds to it - there is no rest or peace for them and they might end up doing it forever.
• The Deranged Animation of the episode feels reminiscent of a psychotic break or a horrible acid trip.

Suits

• You've stopped the invasion of horrific alien monsters, at a heavy cost, and there's still a planet full of them outside the dome.
• On a more visceral level, the terrified and pained cries of the cows as the bugs rip them apart in gruesome fashion.
• Flip perspective: you are living a simple life on your planet, then some invaders arrive, take part of the planet and reshape it to their convenience, bringing in new species. And you are hunted down for trying to live on the new resources. As if it wasn't enough, their farmers are armed with mechs and weapons able to take your people down by the dozen, and no qualms using it. Yeah, you would want to eradicate them pretty quickly as well...

Beyond the Aquila Rift

• The station the routing error sends Thom's ship to. It’s at the edge of the galaxy, so help isn’t an option. The real appearance of the station however, is covered in what looks like muscular fiber, keeping Thom's ship, and who knows how many others, suspended there.
  • If the routing error isn't corrected, then more ships will keep being sent there.
• The reveal of whatever Greta really is. It starts out looking to be some type of busty chitinous alien, until it moves out of the shadows and is revealed to be a horrible Lovecraftian spider thing.
• When Thom wakes up, he looks to be horribly emaciated, surrounded by organic growths and what sounds like screams.
• Thom never wakes up for real. What he sees as a reality is in fact still a dream, but rather than being a soothing fantasy, it's showing him his real surroundings... and he isn't awake. Probably can't even get awake, unless allowed to. Which will never happen, as it's all but stated outright he ends up in a state of shock and panic each time the whole charade comes down.

Good Hunting

• Yan's fate. A huli jing, she is unable to transform back into her nine-tailed fox form due to the increasing presence of technology sucking the magic out of the world. Unable to hunt, she is forced into prostitution to survive. One of her clients, the Governor, at first appears a gentleman, only seeking her for company and nothing sexual... because he can only get it up for robots. His solution? Drug Yan unconscious and perform a full-body cybernetic replacement. Which is performed without anesthetic and while she is fully awake.

Helping Hand

• Alex's whole situation. First, the solitude of doing an EMV alone, in outer space. Second, being knocked away from your anchor and having your life systems shut down. Third, having to take your glove off, freezing your arm and ensuring it'll be amputated, in order to use the momentum from throwing it to get back to your ship. Fourth, having to rip your own frozen arm off, because you missed your trajectory.

The Secret War

• The entire nature of the, for lack of a better term, demons. A seemingly numberless swarm of lighting fast, insectoid creatures the size of a horse, packing razor-sharp bladed limbs and are so ravenous that they will eat you as you fight back. And they nest in a dense mountain forest, the perfect terrain to slaughter anyone sent to deal with them.
  • The fact that they're explicitly supernatural, as they were first brought into the world by a Soviet officer conducting a Satanic ritual, complete with Human Sacrifice.
    • There's also the facet that, while their higher-ups were the ones to go full-blown Ghostapo, it's the grunts that are subsequently left to clean up the mess they made.

Volume 2

Automated Customer Service

• While mostly played for laughs, the premise of this short is very disturbing if you think about it. Just imagine, that one day, completely out of the blue, something that you had trusted suddenly and violently turns on you without hesitation or warning.

Pop Squad

• Of course a world in which immortality to the entire society is accomplishable by killing off children to prevent overcrowding can only be described as Nightmare Fuel. There is also the fact that society for so long was run like this, nobody anymore even bats an eye about it and the immortals are puzzled why someone would want to have a child (which first requires to stop taking the immortality treatment for the duration of the pregnancy and delivery)
  • The only thing more frightening than the titular squad is the utterly apathetic citizens who are too busy with the privilege (if you can even call it that) of living for hundreds of years to even recognize someone would want to have children or, even weirder, irreversibly age two years for that.

All Through the House

• We are introduced to Love Death+Robots' version of Santa Claus in this short, and this is one version of Santa you don't want coming down your chimney. Is he still the fat, jolly, sweet old man we all know and love? FUCK NO! Instead, we are presented with a crimson-skinned monstrosity that looks like a mix of the Cloverfield monster and a Doom demon. He drinks milk with his straw-like tongue and gives presents by vomiting them up. He still gives children presents for being good, but it is little comfort to them as they are up all night wondering what would have happened if they weren't good.

The Tall Grass

• The eyeless fanged horrors featured in the short, which the Railman speculates to have once been people who were lost on the plains or perhaps passengers on the train who wandered off.
  • Even worse, while we only see a small few of the creatures, the final shot of the short shows the tall grass surrounding the tracks being lit up on all sides by their luminous skin, indicating that there are possibly dozens of these monsters lurking out there.
• The Railman also says that the train somehow loses steam and is forced to stop at the exact same spot surrounded by the tall grass every time it travels this way, and he believes that there's some kind of door to another world hidden within the grass. If this is true, then whatever causes the monsters to exist, it wants people to wander into the grass so it can claim more victims.

Volume 3

Bad Travelling

• The Thanapod. A giant, man-eating crab that is able to take hold of a dead corpse and use it to talk, with one hell of a creepy voice to boot. And like its mundane, real-life counterparts, it's an extreme Explosive Breeder which can produce hundreds of offspring in one batch.
  • Worse, it's made very clear that It Can Think, as it negotiates with the protagonist for safe passage to an inhabited island so it can devour thousands of innocent people in exchange for sparing the lives of the crew. We never see whether it would've held up its end of the bargain, but this is probably for the best.
  • When Torrin kills the rest of the crew after they attempt a mutiny and throws their bodies into the hold, we get several close-up shots of the corpses being crushed as the Thanapod 'tenderizes' the corpses so that it's easier for its offspring to feed. Special mention goes for the shot where the Thanapod flattens a crewmate's skull as if it were a ball of clay.
    • The corpse that the Thanapod uses to converse with Torrin visibly rots throughout the short.
• When Torrin tells the Thanapod that he needs the key to a lockbox under the captain's bed, the Thanapod regurgitates what's left of said captain onto the floor, as he kept the key on his person at all times. Torrin is then forced to search through the slimy, half-digested remains of his deceased captain to find the key. Worse, considering Torrin knows where the gun is kept, it's very likely he and Torrin were good friends who trusted one another. Now take a moment to imagine not only losing a friend, but also having to rummage through their mangled remains after they're dead, just for a chance at staying alive.

Swarm

• The titular swarm is essentially a Non-Malicious Monster. Start doing experiments on it, however, and it will activate "genetic protocols", in which it first creates a new caste to grant it sapience, relying on its previous Genetic Memory. Then clones you and sends its new, loyal troops with fervor to exterminate you. Then makes a new Slave Race using the leftover genetic material. One of its previous assailants was apparently The Empire: its descendants are now vomit-eating scavengers.
• The swarm uses Galina as a Dead Guy Puppet to speak to Simon, by means of tendrils digging into her skull and body (a closer inspection reveals that the top of Galina's skull is gone and the tendrils are going directly into her brain) and a forced, agonized voice. What makes it worse is that Galina might not actually be dead, or at least not fully; as her original personality (sounding incredibly tortured) comes through a few times. Plus the swarm plans Simon and her to be a perfect 'breeding pair', which in turn means that the swarm expects him to have sex with what it's turned Galina into...

In Vaulted Halls Entombed

• When the soldiers enter the cave looking for the insurgents and their hostage, they find their skeletal remains on the cave floor, after they had just been seen alive mere minutes ago. They all wonder what could do that to a man in just a few minutes. They soon find out...
• The carnivorous bugs that inhabit the caves are truly terrifying. They're more like small crabs than insects, but they each have a large mouth lined with sharp teeth. They swarm anything that enters the tunnels, and together they can strip flesh to the bone in mere seconds. Anyone with arachnophobia is going to have a difficult time watching this episode.
  • The bugs only get worse when they leave the tunnels and enter the main chasm area, transforming into larger, metallic creatures that can shred people to pieces with their sharp legs, as poor Spencer finds out the hard way.
• When the surviving two soldiers enter the large tomb, they encounter something that makes the bugs look tame; a giant, eldritch monster with multiple eyes and huge wings that looks like it came straight out of the works of H. P. Lovecraft. The beast is chained up, and keeps demanding that the humans release it, as it reveals to the soldiers and the audience what horrible fate awaits mankind should it be let loose upon the world. It almost succeeds in freeing itself by taking over the mind of one of the humans.
  • Fridge Horror sets in when you remember that as horrible as the carnivorous bugs were, they were only there to stop anyone from potentially freeing this horrible creature.
• The final scene has Harper wandering through the desert whispering in an alien language and carrying a bloody knife. It's then revealed she used said knife to gouge out her eyeballs and remove her ears, presumably to prevent herself from falling victim to the monster's influence. Whether this method worked or not remains unknown.
• And this episode seemingly takes place in Afghanistan or another country just like it. Not some distant planet, not some alternate dimension, but Afghanistan. An all-powerful and destructive Eldritch Abomination, with the power to control humans, is entombed in a remote cave in the middle of one of the most unstable nations on Earth. And as we can see from the beginning, the insurgents are fully aware this cave exists (though they don't appear to be aware of what's inside it). It was defeated this time, but who's to say the creature won't get out eventually?

Jibaro

• Pretty much the whole episode could count thanks to its fast-paced camera work and Deranged Animation reminiscent of The Witness. But some standout moments include:
  • The Siren, or the Golden Woman. Thanks to it being comprised almost entirely of valuable metals and jewelry, the creature resides deep within the Uncanny Valley, especially with its metallic mask. Then there's the sounds it makes.
  • When the knights hear her sounds, they are lured toward her, moving almost as if they're doing ballet dances. And if that isn't creepy enough, they then proceed to butcher each other until only the deaf Jibaro remains.
• Jibaro becoming more and more deranged throughout the episode after witnessing his fellow soldiers' slaughter and later being pursued by the Golden Woman since, thanks to his immunity from her Compelling Voice, he piqued her interest. It reaches its apex when, after the Golden Woman tries to seduce him (that including ignoring his pushing back and biting part of his lips off), he viciously beats her to a bloody mess then tears the metal and jewels off her body in a manner disturbingly similar to rape. He discards her broken and battered body into the river, and as he gathers the loot the river starts turning into blood...
• The Golden Woman being Not Quite Dead and, because he drank from the bloody river which in turn gave him hearing, getting her revenge by luring Jibaro into the river and drowning him.
• The Woman cuddles up to Jibaro. As he's sleeping. While the camera has an inexplicable light on them that can't be diegetic. And she stares at us the whole time.

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