"Learning isn't scary?" Yeah right...
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Miscellaneous Myths
- The video on Dionysus makes a good job of emphasizing the mysterious and older aspects of the god. Specific credit goes to the Pentheus' myth illustration, where it shows him see through Dionysus' mortal disguise into his horned, dark true appearance. Dionysus' serene grin as the transition occurs only makes it creepier.
- On a similar note, Red's video about The Oresteia has a pretty scary moment where Orestes is seemingly freaking out over nothing... but then the image slowly changes, as the background darkens, the people become red-tinted, and the Furies Fade In.
- "Cu Chulainn" gives us the Gae Bolg, a spear that extends spiked barbs throughout the veins of whoever it pierces.
- According to "The Five Suns", the earth and its continents are actually made up of Cipactli. Basically, the very land is made up of the corpse of a primordial crocodilian monster that will wake up and eat people if it's not fed enough blood.
- "The Journey of Ra" has some frightening illustrations. Much of the soundtrack is pretty eerie as well. Some highlights:
- Seker's appearance in Hidden, as a dark winged figure covered with a red glow flying ominously through the night.
- The Realm of Night and Darkness, represented by pitch-black background. There's also a creepy green light in the middle of the realm's first illustration. Even though said light turns out to be Khepri, a divine scarab who is important for Ra's rebirth, it's still pretty spooky for a first-time viewer.
- When Ra's barque sails through the Abyss of Waters, we get a depiction of the mysterious gods on the banks of the river. Two rows of silhouettes with glowing purple eyes doing... nothing in particular, except watch the barque sail between them. While they don't do anything malicious, they still give off an ominous, foreboding mood.
- The depiction of Apophis. Red really captured how the Ancient Egyptians perceived him: as a horrifying monster of oblivion feared by even the gods themselves, who only has to be lucky once in order to permanently destroy Ra and end the world. And this happens every night!
- And let's not forget the Mouth of the Cavern. It's a dark place with some spooky red lighting. Where is this light coming from? Why, the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of Fire and Brimstone Hell!
- "Pele" has a few scary moments, but perhaps the scariest is when Pele resolves to destroy Mauna Kea. Let's just say the facial expressions of the four local kupua are very appropriate.
- In the Hyacinthus video, when Zephyr decides to take the If I Can't Have You… course of romance when the titular lad chooses Apollo, Zephyr's expression fades from a mundane, yet still unsettling smile to a hellish, glitchy red mass completely obscuring his face save for his eyes.
- There is something ever so slightly... off about the depiction of the "Original Pan" or "Pan Hermes" in the Hermes video. Might be due to the combination of a wide grin, his glowy-eyed stare, and said eyes having horizontal slit pupils like a goat's, and the fact that his face is drawn in a far more realistic style than the cartoon-ish later Pan and Hermes contributes as well.
- "The Animal Bride" and its story of the selkie doesn't stop at a bittersweet ending where she escapes her kidnapper. Years later, her farmer ex-husband plans a hunting trip with his friends to poach some seals in a nearby cave, but that night he receives a prophetic dream from his selkie ex-wife warning him not to hunt her mate and pups. Yet, come the day of the hunting trip, not only does he kill her seal family, he proceeds to brutally mutilate and cook them to get back at her. Afterwards, the selkie appears to her husband in the form of a giant troll, cursing him so that he and his fellow island-dwellers are doomed to fall off the cliffs and into the sea until the body count is high enough to circle the island. It's not hard to tell who the real monster is, between the two of them.
- Red explains exactly why Typhon is the greatest threat to the gods. Sure, primordial entities like the Protogenoi may be more powerful, but they're generally not too big on the interfering thing. Typhon, on the other hand, is a direct child of Gaia and Tartarus who's prepared to wreck shop anytime. Typhon was so terrifying that the gods ran off to Egypt when he showed up.
- In "Loki's Wager", Odin wonders if the magic golden ring he received (which can create 8 duplicates of itself every 9 days) can also create 8 more duplicates out of each of those duplicates. A furious Brokk strongly implies "no", because this would be very bad. In the background, he takes out a chart that proves such a thing would dangerously overrun the earth with gold rings in only a matter of six months. So thank goodness it doesn't work that way...
- Tam Lin ends with the Fairy Queen saying that if she'd known the title character would end up in the arms of a mortal woman, she would've started things off by turning his eyeballs to stone.
- The Wild Hunt is full of horrors:
- The whole visual design of the Wild Hunt is terrifying, dark figures colored in all blue and black, with cold, glowing eyes.
- Perchta is depicted in the video as just a white cloak around utter blackness, with a single glowing eye.
- The fate of Herla Cyning, King Herla of the Britons. After attending the wedding of a friend among the dwarves, he returns after a three day banquet, only to find that his land has been ruled by Saxons for over 200 years. The time he spent among the dwarves amounted to 300 years in the real world, and everything he ever knew is long dead. As if that wasn't enough, one of his companions jump off his horse in shock and immediately crumbles to dust upon aging 300 years. With no way of leaving his horse, forced to ride eternally, Herla Cyning became the lord of The Wild Hunt.
- Amidst the warm fuzzies of the Miscellaneous Myths about Hades and Persephone, there's a heavy emphasis on Persephone (and her mother Demeter, in fact) likely having started out as a terrifying Humanoid Abomination goddess who was so fearsome and powerful that no one ever dared speak her name, instead calling her by the epithet "Despoina". Why? Because it was thought speaking her true name would get her attention and no one wanted to risk that. It's even posited in the video that Persephone's characterization as starting out as a sweet Innocent Flower Girl may have been a retcon, partly to give her more backstory and partly to make her less scary, which evidently didn't work. It's telling that when Hesiod describes her and her husband, he calls them "stalwart Hades and dread Persephone", clearly showing us which one is really meant to be seen as "scary".
- As sympathetic as she is, Medea is a walking example of how it gets easier and easier to resort to killing once you start. By the time the King of Creon wonders how much she can do in just one day, Medea knowingly says "Good question"...
- While Red depicts Zahak the Serpent King as an overall affable and naïve figure, that doesn't change how utterly terrifying he is. A Fallen Hero who was manipulated by the Satanic Archetype into becoming a tyrant king, which is only made worse by the two serpents growing from his shoulders that eat brains. His complete obliviousness to his own evil only makes it worse.
- It's actually scary to imagine Zahak was once an openly friendly and innocent young man in the beginning, because it drives home how the transformation from hero to villain doesn't always have to start with a moustache-twirling bad egg. Sometimes, it all starts with a nice guy too blind to his own bad choices to see what he's becoming...
- "Urashima-Taro" explores the horrors of Year Outside, Hour Inside and how it can ruin someone's life immensely. Urashima went to the Dragon Palace thinking it would simply be the beginning of his new married life. But once he makes land after what seems like three years later, he's confused and scared to learn he's been away for centuries! He has no living family, no hometown to return to, and no way of remembering how to return to the Dragon Palace. And when he tries opening the box his wife told him not to open out of desperation, he learns the hard way that the box contained his life force and was the only thing keeping him from turning into a corpse.
- The way Red explains the moral behind the story, bringing up the (darkly ludicrous) idea of moving in with someone before you're on the same page, leading to learning their home is cut off from time. The way she frames that last part feels like the premise to a Cosmic Horror story...
- Even when it's not framed as a Cosmic Horror, it's still unsettling. Red lampshades that moving in with a partner whose home generally isolates you from your family and friends forever is a "red flag". And she's right when one bears in mind that (even without time-warping abilities) in real life, possessive spouses use isolation to control their partners.
- In "Werewolves", Heinrich Kramer is a real-life example of what happens when you don't nip a problem in the bud, and how the consequences of leaving such people unchecked can have lasting consequences. Speak out against him? He'll have you tried for heresay. Ban him from the church? He'll just write about how innocent women are witches who deserve torture for having thoughts and opinions. Discredit his story as controversial? Too late, the practice of witch-hunts has already been invented. If anything, his story is scarier than the werewolves themselves.
- In the same video, there's the account of Peter Stubb, a Serial Killer executed for, among other things, cannibalism and incest. That is pretty terrifying on its own, but it becomes somehow even worse when Red reveals that he only pleaded guilty under torture. In other words, this man was either a horrifying example of a Real Life monster... or a perfectly innocent man who was executed because the courts still thought Trial by Ordeal was a valid form of justice. His daughter was also executed for his alleged crimes.
- The Wrath of Demeter, aka what happens when you provoke Beware the Nice Ones with a nature goddess; while Erysichthon deserved every inch of it, what with him being so callous and arrogant to not only cut down an obviously sacred tree, but one that bled, Demeter shows how horrifying even the nicer members of the pantheon can be when she subcontracts Limos, her Arch-Enemy, to come up with a worse curse than she is capable of. Limos does not disappoint, using her power as the goddess of starvation to give Erysichthon an unstoppable Horror Hunger that leads him to attempting to sell his own daughter into slavery to pay for it and eventually eating himself alive. Red notes that this is probably something Demeter is a fan of when invoking Passive-Aggressive Kombat with Hades.
- The sight of Limos leering over a sleeping Erysicthon and sinking her claws into his side as she casts the curse is equally frightening. Her glowing, demonic eyes peering through the darkness like some unholy feline doesn't help either.
- The fact that Limos' powers are so intense that even Demeter, the literal goddess of nature, can't go anywhere near her is really a testament to how terrifying Limos is. Even the nymph sent to petition Limos has to keep a huge distance out of the very real fear that the goddess' presence alone would be enough to drive her insane with hunger.
- The tree-slash-nymph bleeding to death when a cavalier King Erysichthon starts chopping it down. It's a surprise that wasn't a big enough warning bell to make him stop. And it only veers into uncanny territory when the part where it was chopped opens into a big bloody mouth as it tells Erysichthon he's doomed.
- The maddened look that creeps into his eyes just before his starvation-fueled insanity drives him to eat himself.
- When Demeter learns of what Erysichthon did she is...calm. Deadly calm. There's no outburst of emotion like when Persephone got kidnapped, she just clasps her hands together and mutters a simple, "Interesting.", that seems to literally drip with venom, while her power radiates like vines around her. Red says she even takes her time mulling over exactly what to do to the arrogant king. Her request to Limos wasn't an example of burning divine wrath, but a carefully thought out plan of retribution.
- Hossiadam. She isn't illustrated to just be a scary witch in "The Sun Maiden and the Crescent Moon": she's illustrated as the scary witch. She's made to be the kind of creature that, as Red puts it, can eat and subsume mortals a la "The Thing (1982)". When our lead male starts to suspect he's not his sister, we see tiny pupils dot her irises. And when she starts to chase him down, she morphs into an abomination that eats through every single means to slow her down with her razor-steel teeth!
- Achilles' wrath in Red's "Iliad" video was mostly played for comedy, but in the "Trojan War" video, it straddles the line between this and Tearjerker. He's left a broken man at the death of the one he loves more than anything else, and with nothing else to do but fight, he fights, carving a bloody swath through the Trojan forces and leaving nothing but death in his wake. He's such a Broken Bird that all he can do is hurt the people who hurt him, and not even his allies are spared from his rage, as a man who mocked him for mourning the death of an Amazon who he laments he could have been happy with is treated to an Offhand Backhand so powerful it explodes his skull.
- The Ghosts in "The Saga of Grettir". Full stop. True to Red's celebration of the Halloween Season, this brand of specter is not for the faint of heart. They're treated as Eldritch Abominations all covered in shadows and possessing glowing blue eyes. One such ghost devours livestock to the point their bones are turned inside out. When it kills a sacrilegious shepherd, said-shepherd comes back as a ghost in a manner where its unholy essence creeps out from within the grave. When Grettir defeats this particular ghost, it doesn't go out without cursing him to see its maddening eyes in darkness and everyone hating him. Good luck sleeping tonight.
Legends Summarized
- In "The Nine(?) Realms", some of the titular realms are pretty spooky. Special mention goes to:
- Nifleheim is as scary as it is beautiful, depicted as an icy cave with a massive statue of Hel at its gate.
- Urd's Well has the Norns, shrouded in shadow around a cauldron with their eyes glowing an ominous yellow.
- Jarnvidr (or "Iron Wood") is a dark, sinister-looking forest with the glowing eyes of Fenrir's children visible in the shadows. Then the scene pulls out to show Fenrir's (or his wife's, it's hard to tell) absolutely gargantuan eyes glaring menacingly at the viewer.
- Aegir and Ran's unnamed realm is probably not a place you want to visit if you have thalassophobia.
Classics Summarized
- The Divine Comedy naturally undergoes all of the punishments of Hell, but it also shows how bad Purgatory and Heaven are, which aren't picnics either. At one point, Dante comes across people on one level of Purgatory who are climbing the mountain, but they all have their eyes sewn shut. This prompts Red to actually scream in horror.
- In the Edgar Allan Poe video, when the protagonist of The Pit and the Pendulum sees the titular pendulum, it can be faintly seen that the Grim Reaper is holding it.
- The cloaked Red Death is no slouch either, as he wears a mask with the most uncanny Slasher Smile.
- Speaking of Poe, there is also Red's telling of "The Tell-Tale Heart
" that sounds convincingly unsettling…
- "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" has the image of Jekyll midway between himself and Hyde when his potion starts losing its potency, which looks... wrong…
- The Dracula episode has some pretty creepy images, such as vampire Lucy preying on a child while she's giving one hell of a Nightmare Face or the scene where she is killed off for good.
- The Lovecraft video has what's probably some of the creepiest imagery in any of the videos OSP has made as of late. The creepiest of all coming from the retelling of The Colour Out of Space, which depicts in exquisite, cheerful detail how Mrs. Gardner succumbed to the Colour's effects (as pictured above).
History Summarized
- Blue's description of the Battle of Cannae, one of the worst defeats in the history of the Roman Republic, and the single most devastating battle of the Punic Wars. The way the Romans are entirely surrounded and slaughtered is nightmarish, and Blue even says that he found a statement saying that the Carthaginians only took prisoners because their arms tired from killing!
Journey To The West
- Part 3 has Sun, Tripitaka and Pigsy encountering a tiger demon who introduces himself by RIPPING OFF HIS OWN SKIN. ...okay.
- Part 6 has the True Fire of Samādhi. It's extremely powerful, can't be put out by a normal rainstorm note and even Sun Wukong (who's immune to most other kinds of fire) is not impervious to it. As a matter of fact, it nearly kills him.
- Part 6 also has Quan Yin trick the wielder of the True Fire of Samādhi into sitting on an illusion of her lotus platform, which is actually, as Red puts it, "a metric f***ton of swords". And this because he pretended to be her to lure Pigsy into his cave. Beware the Nice Ones, indeed. Even Sun Wukong is freaked out!Sun Wukong: So, I know I never say this, but if this is how you handle threats, thanks for dropping a mountain on my head and feeding me molten copper for 500 years.
- Part 10 has some classic Paranoia Fuel for Monkey: a perfect imposter who knows everything about him and takes advantage of the real Monkey genuinely trying to improve to steal not only his identity (and subjects), but try to replace Tripitaka and the rest of his True Companions purely for the impostor's own ego. Even worse, said impostor, the Six-Eared Macaque, actually tells Sandy he's going to replace Tripitaka with the unknowing monkeys, fully intending to utterly ruin Monkey's friendships. It's a really good thing Monkey's repentance was in Quan Yin's presence to provide an alibi, otherwise his gradual Character Development would have all come to naught just because of the Macaque's greed.
- Also, the Macacque is just as strong as Sun is and would thus likely destroy whoever and whatever revealed which was the genuine article:
Di Ting: We are in very real danger, and the truth will destroy us. - Part 11 has the Bull Demon King so incensed at Sun (politely) asking to borrow the Palm Leaf Fan from his wife that he tries to kill his own former blood-brother, denies her asking him to simply give Sun the fan, and ultimately is only defeated when the Buddha and Jade Emperor send in reinforcements to make him stop.
Di-Vine OSP
- Lady Macbeth in "DiVine OSP 3 sounds and looks absolutely psychotic, with a Dissonant Serenity face and hands and face covered in blood.
Modern Classics Summarized
- From Stranger in a Strange Land, Michael laughing for the first time (upon witnessing a larger monkey beat on a middling monkey in a zoo, who then hits a smaller monkey) is very creepy, with his pupils shrinking and turning distorted and his laugh only represented by a single huge "HA".
- Additionally, Michael's recount of how the Old Ones of Mars destroyed a planet (making the Asteroid Belt) is accompanied by a frantic choir, serving to drive home the horror of humanity's situation.
- While it's not initially addressed, the characters (even Michael) start to realize that his ability to send anything to oblivion at will is very unnerving and a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up.
- The way Michael keeps vanishing people he doesn't like (and becomes especially blatant in the second half of the story) makes you wonder if he isn't a Villain of Another Story.
Red: Wow, Mike's really getting cavalier with the murders... are we sure this isn't a horror story?? - Michael's concept of believing cannibalism is right (even/especially if it's a dead body) just makes the story feel so... wrong.
- When Red narrates that Mike can only make people understand his concept of God by having sex with them, the look in his eyes looks somewhat demonic.
Trope Talks
- The Trope Talk video about Space Horror, goes into description on everything about how Space is scary. Because of this, Blue decided it needed a content warning!Red: Space was really, really creepy. Not just creepy; existentially disturbing. It hit that perfect balance of claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Space is so deadly that you could only survive in a shielded, pressurized, terrifyingly fragile vessel, usually cramped and disorienting. And outside that vessel is millions of miles of nothing, and the nothing really wants you dead.
Other
- Their appearance in the Extra Credits video. The Extra Credits artstyle makes Red and Blue look like, as one commenter put it, "Vampire Genasi"
