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Nightmare Fuel / Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

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"Do you fear death?"
This film in particular makes liberal use of the characters walking into scenes where something horrific has just happened, and experiencing the aftereffects just as whatever caused it finds them—Will on what he thinks is the Flying Dutchman is a particularly good example, but it's everywhere on Isla Pelegosto, from Will exploring the abandoned Pearl while it slowly becomes obvious that something terrible happened, or Jack finding a suspiciously vacant East India Trading Company settlement. This film used suspense and dramatic irony as much as it could for the sake of tension, and it makes the air of fear a lot more pronounced.
  • The Kraken deserves a section all its own. A massive sea monster: half-whale, half-giant squid, and More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
    • The moment Jack receives Bootstrap's warning, he immediately breaks out in panic and orders a course towards any piece of land. The scene plays out comically enough, but Jack is not overreacting.
    • Gibbs' description of the Kraken conjures some pretty unnerving images.
      Gibbs: Well, if you believe such things, there's a beast does the bidding of Davy Jones: a fearsome creature with giant tentacles that'll suction your face clean off, and drag an entire ship down to the crushing darkness... The Kraken! They say the stench of its breath is like... imagine, the last thing you know on God's green Earth is the roar of the Kraken and the reeking odor of a thousand rotting corpses... If you believe such things.
    • The worst part is, the audience gets to experience almost all of that. Even before we get that speech or even see the Kraken clearly, we see it pulling a ship full of innocent fishermen underwater to their deaths in an instant. When Will boards what he thinks is the Flying Dutchman, he sees a man with no face, and what's left horribly warped — the directors' best impression of a face suckered clean off. We only see the horrific image of its mouth clearly at the very end... but luckily we can't smell its breath.
    • The derelict ship that Will thinks is the Dutchman. At first Will thinks it's run aground, but then one of the survivor reveals it's being held afloat by the Kraken so that Jones can have his pick of the survivors. Plus, the mentioned survivor is clearly shell-shocked.
      Survivor: No! Beneath us! Foul breath!
      • A barely-alive man falls from the stricken rigging into the water near the ruined deck and just manages to crawl aboard. Will goes to investigate and discovers that he has no face—just a mess of overstretched skin where the Kraken presumably latched on with a head-sized sucker and did who only knows what before letting go.
    • Whenever the Kraken attacks and sinks a ship:
      • Captain Bellamy's death is just horrible. The Kraken doesn't even devour him immediately; he gets pulled underwater and played with like a ragdoll while the rest of the crew watches and listens to him scream at the top of his lungs before being dragged back underwater and then killed. The fact that the Kraken chose to keep the captain alive for a couple more agonizing seconds before finally ending him just to scare its prey shows that it's not only killing for food, but also for fun.
      • The final moments of the Edinburgh Trader when the Kraken brings its largest tentacles crashing down on the middle of the ship, snapping it clean in half, at which point the tentacles grab both halves of the ship and start shoveling any of the crew still aboard into its gaping mouth - essentially double-fisting the boat halves and the sailors on them. The screams of terror as crewmen are swept or dropped into the open maw where the centre of the ship used to be are accompanied by what can only be described as a screech of glee as the Kraken stuffs itself.
      • There's also the terrifying moment when the ship's mast snaps, dumping Will in the water...and there is a clear expression of terror on his face as he sees the monster in all its horrific glory.
      • At one point Gibbs is desperately trying to hold on to a guy who's been caught by a tentacle. As he's ripped away, the guy screams "Shoot me!" clearly preferring to die by bullet than being ripped apart or eaten alive. Gibbs appears to grant his request seconds later.
      • Another tentacle pulls a guy out of one of the cannon holes, basically breaking him in half to get him through, all while Pintel and Ragetti cower and wince.
      • The last time we see the Kraken, it's fighting a captive Jack aboard the Black Pearl. The remaining crew can only watch as its tentacles envelop the Pearl and finally pull it under the surface.
      • A small one but connected to this; when the Black Pearl manages to get out of range of the Flying Dutchman's guns, Jones orders his crew to break off pursuit. Maccus asks the captain if he's giving up so easily, whereupon Jones turns to him and says nothing, just gives his subordinate a knowing smile. As Maccus realizes what Jones is thinking, both of their faces light up with truly evil grins at what's about to happen next.
      • When it looks like they've defeated the Kraken, Gibbs makes this chilling remark, "No. We just made it angry."
  • Davy Jones. The man, the myth, the nightmare! His first scene shows just how ruthless he is and throughout the film he proves why he is the true terror of the sea.
  • While minor only in comparison to what just entailed, Maccus asks Davy Jones what to do with the few miraculous surviving Edinburgh Trader crewmen of the Kraken's attack. Unlike how the scenario previously played out where Jones offers survivors the option to serve the Flying Dutchman, Jones just says, "There are no survivors". Cue the Dutchmen crew simultaneously bludgeoning the survivors in the back of the head.
  • The crew of the Flying Dutchman, particularly Wyvern. The guy's been on the ship so long, he's become stuck in the wall. When he pulls away from the ship to talk, only the front half of his body pulls away, and you can see his brain... or possibly what used to be his brain and has now become a chunk of brain coral, in which case it's still horrifying as a Visual Pun. They certainly take "Part of the crew, part of the ship" literally.
    • Perhaps this is how the Dutchman repairs itself when damaged - using mutated, still-living members of the crew to patch the holes...
  • The Turkish prison scene where crows peck out a prisoner's eyes.
    • Mixed with a man saying "No!.. Please no!" while getting pulled by two guards.
  • The Pelegostos — imagine an island full of people who can hide anywhere, can and will catch you, and once they find you, they will cook and eat you without a second thought. The lead in before we discover them is particularly tense, with Will running into Cotton's Parrot who echoes the dead crewmen's screams of "Don't eat me! No! Don't eat me!" while remaining totally oblivious of what was going on.
    • At one point, the heroes are suspended over a large ravine in hanging cages made from what look suspiciously like human bones. Gibbs confirms this by saying that the cages weren't built until after they arrived when asked what happened to the rest of the crew.
    • The deaths of the men in the second cage can be pretty unsettling, especially for anyone who has acrophobia. Whilst climbing the side of the ravine they're dangling over, one man accidentally grabs a (harmless) snake and panics, causing the other men in the cage to also panic and lose their grip. The cage falls and the force of the drop causes the rope holding it to snap. The men can only scream in helpless terror as they plummet to their deaths in the ravine below, with the heroes being visibly disturbed by the sight. To make matters worse, this also catches the attention of the guard who alerts the entire tribe.
  • The ubiquity and ruthlessness of the East India Trading Company, particularly how Beckett is effortlessly able to get anyone arrested, manipulated, controlled or outright murdered the moment he wants to... and there's nothing the heroes can do to stop him.

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