Nightmare Fuel / Resident Evil 2

WARNING: Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies to Nightmare Fuel pages. All spoilers will be unmarked.

Sherry? Sweetie? Your daddy's here...

Just as the original game managed to terrify people, this game continues this trend, but ups the scare factor significantly. And the remake is even worse...

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• The themes for Birkin's various forms are often considered some of the most frightening music in the series.
• Dear lord, the music that plays in the police station basement is so chilling. You go down the stairs and the music comes on. Scary enough, but then you hear a "tap... tap... tap" noise. You are now frozen in fear at this point and know that zombie dogs await you. The combination of the dogs and the music is enough to drive a player to complete their tasks and move on from the basement as quickly as possible. A YouTube comment explains it best:
  "If you're stranded in the desert with this song on your iPod, you'd most likely survive the heatstroke. It's just that fucking cold."
  • And then there's your return back through on the way back upstairs with the Club Key in hand. By now, you've either cleared the dogs out or can evade them well enough or have enough ammo now to take care of them, right? Cue the entry and you don't hear "tap...tap....tap" but rather the clicking of claws and the raspy breathing that signifies lickers in the room....and you're likely returning from an angle where you can't see where they are...
• Experiment room, anyone? It doesn't help that it's filled with three Lickers, gruesome failed experiments, dead Umbrella soldiers that look like HUNK, and one lone, empty capsule that's been broken open... from the inside. The incredibly unsettling music does not help.
• The introduction of the Licker. When you enter that room in the police station and whatthefuckwasthat you glimpse a skinless, man-sized '''thing''' padding across the outside of the window like a gecko. You look back and... nothing there.
  • Then, you enter a hallway that is drenched in blood. A corpse lays in the hallway, decapitated with its head twisted off. All while the sound of something like a leaky faucet is heard. You get a short cutscene of your character looking up to see the Licker, slowly stalking along the ceiling, hissing and dropping to the floor in front of you. Is it any wonder they have become one of the series' most iconic enemies? Not to mention it could have been even worse: Your character's startled reaction before looking up was supposed to be from the aforementioned corpse's head dropping down in front of them, but it was Dummied Out at the last minute.
  • And then there's the noises they make, made even worse when you can't see them due to the camera angle. When you hear the clicking sound of their claws speed up, you know it's about to attack.
  • Given how much ammo they can take before being put down, most players likely don't want to fight them if possible. Since a Licker is blind and relies on sound to hunt, the player CAN maneuver around them if they are slow and don't run. However, this becomes EXTREMELY unnerving when trying to slip past one since many of the places they appear are in cramped hallways, and getting too close will alert them immediately.
• So you've got the Unicorn Medal from the STARS office, and you're backtracking through the police station hallways when you get a little too close to the boarded up windows... and zombies reach through the windows and grab you! It doesn't hurt that much; it's just there to scare the hell out of you.
• When you step back outside to progress across the police station to hear the howls and moans of the undead, the haunting ambience of what was once Raccoon City. It hammers home the fact the first game was for all its horrors a Closed Circle, an isolated incident no one else in this U.S state would ever know of, let alone suffer. But the second Resident Evil, the whole city and its inhabitants are already doomed before you arrived.
• Alright... let's talk about G. Here goes:
  • Here's the thing: The G-Virus doesn't create zombies - it creates the unholy spawn of Satan◊ and some◊ kind of◊ devastating◊ cancer◊ - trying to kill the damn thing is preposterously risky, as the G-Virus was meant to have regenerative properties and every one of those is a different mutation of the same creature brought on by fighting it without eliminating it. Oh, and in the second image? His head has started deteriorating and being replaced with a new one - that's his face you'll notice on the left side of his chest if you look close enough. That new head, as seen in the third stage, looks like a freaking devilish skull, and starting there, it starts developing multiple limbs, all tipped with foot-long sickle claws, and More Teeth than the Osmond Family until it finally morphs into its last form, a shapeless toothy blob of flesh with corpselike arms sticking out all over it. It also creates embryos that are launched into people's mouths once it gets an opening, which then develop inside said people until they reach maturity and burst out of their host's chest, subsequently growing rapidly into something like this◊ (or, more famously, this◊). It just gets worse and worse when you hear its theme music. Or, for that matter, if you remember that, like most of the main boss monsters, it Was Once a Man (albeit a truly vile man), an Umbrella scientist with a fellow Mad Scientist for a wife and a Delicate and Sickly kid, both met through the game in which it appears, who injected it into himself both in an attempt to save himself (again, its regenerative properties) after surviving a machine gun spray and to keep Umbrella getting ahold of this thought-to-be masterpiece of his (it in itself was obviously not as planned).
  • Hearing G's roar for the first time is utterly chilling, especially since it comes out of nowhere.
  Sherry: But there's something out there. I don't know what it is, but I saw it. Much larger than any of those zombies... and it's coming after me!
  (loud, roar suddenly cuts through the air)
  • It just sounds like a person making a "RAAAR!" sound. Which makes it so much worse, rather than the Narm you might think it would be.
• Poor Sherry Birkin's entire existance when you think about it. Her father is one of Umbrella's most despicable researchers and a man who has a history of letting his curiosity get the better of him and honestly from how it appears, had very little if any time to spend with her. Sherry's mother is barely any better (although the worst she's probably guilty of besides providing Brian Irons with bribe money to keep Umbrella's acts secret is the lengths she goes for her husband) and whom probably only at the time the Raccoon City incident began finally showed any concern for Sherry's well being and ordered her to go to the police station. Sherry is no safer in the station than back home or on the streets and finds herself not only hunted by zombies, but the likes of Mr. X and what was once her own father. And then her father eventually implants her with his embryos (which Claire and Leon only barely manage to save her from). Then with both her parents dead, she's at first in US government's protection and then fell into her father's good friend, good ol uncle Albert Wesker before finally left in better hands under US National Security Advisor Derek Simmons's protection. It's a wonder she's made it through all this.
  • Info from the unlockables in Resident Evil 6 reveals that the only reason Sherry made it through was because Simmons "allowed" Claire to check up on Sherry and be there for her...when in truth Simmons didn't want Claire to have ANY association with her at all. She DOES survive and she becomes a hardcore survivor like Claire, kicking ass against her own share of B.O.W's, but DAMN the poor kid just barely got that far...
  • More about Annette. While her sending Sherry to the precinct was fairly reasonable an assumption, the novelization expands her mindset on this by explaining that while she thought Irons a moron, he at least was semi-competent and even if he couldn't be trusted, the men and women under him WERE capable. Oh you poor misinformed child...too bad the zombies and monsters easily overwhelmed the police, and not only was Irons so batshit insane and self-centered, but he both began slowly seeing to his officers' demise by spreading out the supplies to out of the way locations, hiding crucial resources behind ridiculous puzzles, and actively hunting some of his men down like he's on a psychotic safari, and you just sent your daughter into that mess.
• Police Chief Brian Irons was horrifying, in so many ways:
  • He raped at least one woman in college, he may have had his secretary killed, and his policies towards ammunition storage and the door key system were intentionally designed to cause as many casualties as possible in the disaster. It's bad enough that he moved through the police station, killing off survivors so that they couldn't leave his "beautiful city," (and then later wrote a diary entry about how beautiful the pained face of one of his employees was) but his love of taxidermy and stuffing the mayor's daughter as a trophy to "preserve her beauty"?! Just goes to show you don't have to be infected to be a monster.
  • This quote from The Dark Id LP sums up Brian Irons's state of mind in this chilling statement:
  No crossdressing or singing. No elaborate robes or kooky traps. Just murder and rape for old Brian Irons.
  • The novelization implies that the "stuffing" wasn't just in the taxidermy sense...and that it was done after she was killed.
  • Just watch his introductory scene.
    • Just to reiterate this a bit more, his introductory scene is filled to the brim and overflowing with Paranoia Fuel if you think too much about it all. He asks Claire who she is, but then writes her off as another soon-to-be victim of the outbreak, seeming to become mournful of everything that's happened to the city he used to safeguard...nothing TOO out of the ordinary considering the circumstances. It's when he talks about the mayor's daughter and makes mention of her "being a true beauty, her skin nothing short of perfection" that you begin to sense something VERY wrong with him, even further when he makes the offhand remark about "taxidermy used to be a hobby" while still discussing her and about preventing her from reanimating. In the novelization, the entire conversation begins to creep Claire out and the taxidermy remark sets all her internal alarms off that the chief is deranged and dangerous. All the while, this is playing, appropriately titled "Madness Under the Mask", perfectly illustrating Irons' deranged state of mind....
  • Meet up with Sherry and return to his office....he's gone, along with the mayor's daughter's corpse. Claire's confused "Chief...?" and the isolation are suddenly terrifying...made even worse when you pick up the seemingly ordinary diary sitting in Irons' desk chair....yeah, that somewhat melodramatic guy you just met that gave you creepy vibes? Turns out he was in on Umbrella's plots all along, actively hampering everyone's efforts to find out anything on their activities and making it all the more difficult for anyone to escape the ruined city before going utterly batshit insane and hunting down his own cops and the mayor's daughter....and now he's gone and you don't know where he is....
  • One of the files you pick up, named "Secretary's Diary B", has Brian Irons's secretary saying that he "found out what the chief has been hiding all along" and that if Irons finds out, his life is going to be in serious danger and the next page says it got late and that he's just going to take that one day at a time... and then we turn to the next page. The last page is ominously blank. Since every other diary up to this point has been written to the very last page, we can deduce that Irons got him before he could finish writing (unfortunately, the Gamecube port cut the last page of the file for unknown reasons).
  • Notably, the Dark Id's LP, when it gets to Brian Irons, plays him utterly straight (apart from some very, very Black Comedy), and he becomes a Knight of Cerebus in a LP that managed to make every other piece of the game hilarious.
  Irons: That's the mayor's daughter. I was told to look after her. But I failed, miserably.
  The Dark Id (as Irons): "Yes, I failed. Multiple times. Into her stomach."
  • And then there's his room in the basement. The Dark Id's LP sums it up like this:
  Claire: *at the table with the saw* And this is where Chief Irons would bind his victims and cut out their still beating hearts. Which he would show to them with glee as they breathed their last. *at the shelves full of chemicals* Here we have the chemicals which the Chief used to subdue his victims as he raped them over and over and inflicted grievous, painful burns across their body until death mercifully came. After that, he would strip the flesh from their bones and collect trophies from their remains. Many of which you can see displayed prominently here. *moving over to Irons' corpse* Finally, we have the mutilated corpse of the man himself. Who died and agonizing death as a horrible mutant gestated inside his body and tore him asunder from the inside out at birth. Much like the chestbursters from Alien. Only far more gruesome and painful. Did I mention the implanted monster came from the penis tentacle on the hand of your terrible mutant father? Who searches for you, to do the same, as we speak.
  Sherry: *whimpers*
  • The scene when Claire stumbles upon Irons in his "sanctuary" as the chief menaces her with a gun and threatens to kill her...simply cause he's pissed at Umbrella supposedly "stabbing him in the back" and thus everyone is going to die there with him. The selfishness and savagery really comes through even though he's doing little more than seeming ready to shoot Claire in the face. And then the G-embryo or Birkin kills him, both of which are their own Nightmare Fuels...
    • The novelization is INFINITELY worse, as Irons is so completely batshit NUTS that he thinks everything to be an Umbrella plot to elaborately destroy him and everything he loves. As a result, he believes Claire to be an Umbrella spy and when holding her at gunpoint, immediately believes the STARS were all spies as well, with Chris being the ringleader since they all left before the outbreak. In his madness, he basically intends to rape and skin Claire alive and basically take excruciating joy in listening to her screaming throughout it before he's killed by Birkin, saving Claire. While she seems impressively fearless when Irons confronts her in the game, that is not the case here, where Claire is obviously frightened out of her wits and Irons laughs at her when she pleads for mercy. It takes her a few moments to recover, and NOBODY can blame her...
  • And the worst thing? Brian Irons isn't even a bio-organic threat. He's not a zombie, he's not a BOW, he's not a Tyrant. He's literally just a fuck-off cop with no superpowers whatsoever, which makes him even more chilling in a setting where every other villain is a diabolical mastermind or a serial killer. Then there's how dangerously realistic Brian Irons is as a villain. People really will act like this in the middle of the apocalypse, especially when the chips are down, and the bets are off, and they have all the power in their disposal to do just about anything they want to.
• The police station's first floor music in RE 2. Discordant piano, dissonant string chords, and a sudden loud noise 2/3 of the way through the track. Possibly creepier is the library music, made even more dissonant by the fact that there aren't any enemies or traps in the room. Until you return with the Gold Gear...
  • The only music in that game that wasn't ungodly scary was the finale music, which was actually pretty epic.
• Three words and a hyphen: Two-Way Mirror. Walk into a room, totally quiet and completely free of enemies, but with that damn two-way mirror that you can't help watching. Then, when you grab one specific item in the room, a licker crashes through the mirror and attacks! Even if you know it's coming, it doesn't help. What makes it so scary is that the licker doesn't crash through the second you grab the puzzle piece, but rather waits until you're in front of the mirror to burst through. Then in the B scenario, nothing happens. ...Unless you grab the First Aid Spray on the table directly in front of the mirror.
• "Zombies are Inside!" To clarify, you need to get a key from a generator room in the back of the police station. At first the room looks fairly typical; a typewriter, some ink ribbon, and a box of handgun bullets. Oh, and a door to hell. You see that window next to it? That's where the quote comes from. Opening the door gives you probably the biggest scare in the game, as two zombies enter during the loading screen! Which then attack you! And the music! After that the game tells you "It's too dangerous to go outside!" Really?! Still think your "safe room" is safe?
• Tyrant T-00 AKA Mr. X. Its theme music alone will terrify you, and there's the paranoia that it may smash its way through the wall any moment. Which he does at one point. And unlike Nemesis, there is no forewarning to his appearance, but when you hear the characteristic Scare Chord, you know it's time to haul ass.
  • There's a moment in either B scenario where you proceed through a confined, u-shaped corridor in the underground Umbrella facility that leads to a computer monitor. Proceeding to view the video, you're treated to a scene of Mr. X approaching the camera with his characteristic Scare Chord playing and proceeds to break it. The worst part? That's where you just came from. And sure enough when you're leaving, he's right there to meet you.
  • Its final transformation after it falls into the furnace. With its coat gone, it mutates into a larger version of itself with huge claws for fingers. And it's on fire. Great.
• The blood-sucking, poison-spraying, giant moth, and its lair, the eggs on the walls and ceiling with maggots dropping out of them, and the music.
• Files you find in the police station are mostly from police officers who survived the initial zombie attack. They talk about plans to take the station back and rescue survivors, but all of it failed.
• Entering the western wing from the police station's main hall treats you to a high-angle shot that shows almost nothing ahead of your character, despite the fact that you can hear the footsteps of zombies approaching you. Lots of footsteps, to the point that you either turn tail and run back out to the lobby or start firing blindly in their direction and praying you can drop them all before they reach you. Newbies may complain about the fixed camera angles nowadays, but there's a damn good reason several contemporary reviews called attention to this specific moment as being one of the most tense and frightening parts early in the game.
• The scene where Marvin (the lone officer you meet in the police station) becomes a zombie. You find him just in time for him to transform, and you get a close up of his face decaying for your pleasure. Poor Marvin really got a raw deal, and that's saying something considering everything going on in the nightmarish outbreak. He knows full-well he's wounded and infected, thus will inevitably suffer brain death as the virus destroys his sapience. Yet he tries to thwart the T-virus anyway, by ordering you to leave and locking himself up so he can't harm you. How do you thank him? By poking your nose back in his office as he's dying. His last human sound is a sad groan, knowing you're in danger, before he lunges upon you.
  • The music that plays as you return to the office room is appropriately titled 'The Build-up of Suspense' (for unknown reasons, it doesn't play in the Dreamcast version). As soon as the player enters the west office room, they will likely remember that Marvin was last seen badly wounded and likely infected by the T-Virus, and had locked you out of the room to keep himself from killing you if he turns. Later on, you have no other choice but to return to the office room to obtain a key item. You're more or less treading inside the lion's den, knowing that what was once Marvin could attack you at any time...
  • Crosses over with Tearjerker, but when Marvin first throws you out of the office, he begs you to rescue "the survivors in the other rooms". Outside of Ada for Leon, and Irons and Sherry in Claire's story, there are no other survivors, and all of Raccoon holed up in the police station as the city fell apart. Either Marvin is so delirious from blood loss and pain that he's unaware that there really isn't anyone left to save, or there had been but you were already far too late, and the three other side characters are all that's left....
• The slow, but increasing dire state of the deteriorating police station is unnerving. Your would-be sanctuary has fallen to the outbreak already. But it continues to worsen. By the time you have access to the sewers, all the survivors there are either dead or became zombies. The infected start to shamble in through the windows into hallways previously cleared as an indicator of how bad the situation now is on the streets, filling you with the urgency to escape or die.
• Once you enter the sewers during Claire's A scenario, a grate opens up behind Sherry and she's pulled into another tunnel, far away from Claire, with nothing to do but to push on and pray she meets up with her again along the way. The music that plays is appropriately named and thoroughly terrifying 'Wandering Alone'. It surely conveys Sherry's position alright, being a kid in a VERY dangerous place, with no one to protect her. And it's the one place in Claire's story where it actually is relatively easy to get Sherry killed when she starts crawling through the ventilation shaft and has to contend with swarms of roaches. If too many cling to her, she can be stunlocked and killed easily.
• The Library. The music is utterly chilling and there's a jump scare on the balcony where your character suddenly falls through a weak section back to the first floor. There are no enemies in this room, just that one jump scare and the highly unnerving music...
• Fan-made iterations of the unfinished Resident Evil 1.5 show that the basement area was originally two levels, with the cellblock being on B2 and filled with zombies that would reach out through the bars to grab at your character with disturbingly long arms. The main corridor on B1, meanwhile, was going to be nowhere near as well-lit compared to the already eerie basement corridor in the final release, with only a few very dim fluorescents sparsely illuminating the sickly bluish-green walls, as zombies quietly hide in waiting in the darkened areas. Adding to that, the fact that the rest of the police station looked so much more like a real office building in this version (as opposed to its more gothic look of the final game that —like the much spookier design of the mansion in the REmake— seems a bit more naturally conducive to scary goings-on) adds a level of mundanity to the surroundings that sharpens the horrific effect and quietly reinforces just how badly the situation has deteriorated all over Raccoon City.

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