The Rock King from hell.
For the most part, those who never watched any trailers or commercials for the movie expected a cheerful musical with bright sets and visuals and dancing, friendly Munchkins.
The first half has threats of brain damage via late 19th-century shock therapy in a very bankrupt mental hospital heavily implied to be an asylum, when she gets to Oz, it's not the pleasant fairy tale land she went to before, but a decaying and destroyed wasteland, now ruled by human-headed/wheels for feet laughing monsters, a vain sorceress who takes the heads of living women to add to her collection, and the equivalent of the Devil and his legions of hell if they were made of rock clay-motion.
Contains unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned!
- Outside of the more fantastic scares of Oz, there's the fact that Dorothy gets there after escaping a mental hospital where she was about to get electroshock therapy. Let's say that again: Dorothy, a little girl, was about to get electroshock therapy to deal with her "fantasies". It's made even worse if you know your history; electroshock therapy and even lobotomies were not unknown for children in early 20th century psychological 'treatment'. And mind you, electroshock therapy can kill and there are many cases where patients actually died from the treatment; as for those who survived the torture, many were left with burns and are severely traumatized. Granted, modern psychiatric medicine has refined the idea into electroconvulsive therapy, a less traumatic form that is useful for treating certain serious illnesses (depression and mania), but this is clearly not that kind of ECT.
- The mental hospital was creepy enough on its own. At first, it seems like a perfectly nice, reputable place. Then we see the rest of it. It's got all the staples: dirty, dimly lit hallways, creepy orderlies, an even creepier nurse, and a doctor who seems a little too enthusiastic about trying his new therapy on a preteen girl. And then there are the "damaged" patients who've been locked in the cellar...
- The way the doctor tries to anthropomorphize his electroshock machine to Dorothy is even worse. "Look! Those are his eyes, he's happy to see you!" One wonders if he's done this with the 'failed' patients kept in the basement.
- Dorothy and the mysterious girl escaping from the hospital, and winding up getting swept up in a river during a terrible storm. Dorothy only survives because the girl helps her climb onto the porch, which broke off the hospital, and wounds up floating in the water, so they can use it as a raft. The girl herself just vanishes beneath the water... Don't worry, she's okay. But that still must have been terrifying for Dorothy, who, as far as she knows, just watched a child and her only ally die.
- The Wheelers; Laughing Mad, human-headed four-legged things with wheels for feet that creak very loudly, complete with high-pitched shrills as calls resembling demented clowns complete with distorted human-face helmets that initially seem to be their actual faces.
- Their introduction. Dorothy is wandering around the wasteland of Oz, observing her petrified friends, when we hear a terrifying squeak of wheels on asphalt and the Wheeler turns the corner.
"Come here... chicken..."- And their threat:
"You'll have to come out sooner or later and when you do... We'll tear you into little pieces and throw you in the deadly desert!" - Mombi when initially introduced, doesn't seem as threatening as the Wheelers, being a seemingly normal princess in an elaborate dress. She then takes Dorothy into a room where there are 29 life-like heads that all glare at her with menacing stares. She unlocks a door and removes the head like one would remove a hat and proceeds to get another head, she then looks at Dorothy with the currently bodiless head in her arms and asks what do you think?. It becomes very apparent that rather than being a simple princess, she's some sort of headless monster that steals the heads of other beautiful women to fulfill her own sense of vanity.
- With her replaced head, the previously dazed expression is replaced by a piercing stare like she's eyeing and touching Dorothy's face like one would eye an animal that they intend to turn into a fur coat. Because that's essentially what she intends to do to Dorothy once she's matured enough to be qualified for her collection- decapitating her and robbing her individuality to become an extension of Mombi.
- It was retroactively foreshadowed earlier with the circle of headless women statues, that Mombi had managed to take the heads and add them to her collection, along with other unseen victims. These women not only were rendered unable to move, but also had the added misfortune of their heads stolen- with their individuality repressed by the same monster that aided the tyrant that ruined Oz. A seemingly innocuous and odd detail that has sinister revelations.
- Her speech to Dorothy which is almost entirely accurate to the books but tweaked near the end to make the distinction very clear, is an observation that her counterpart, Princess Langwidere said to Dorothy. But the intention between the two is very clear when you read between the lines. Langwidere spoke of it in a casual manner of trading hats with no ill intent despite the morbid manner-- showing how odd she was, as her heads weren't stolen. Mombi is fully aware of how vile her actions are but doesn't care— she fully intends on keeping a young child Dorothy locked in a tower like an animal for years to groomed ready to be decapitated and Mombi adds it to her collection, in the same way that animals are skinned for hats, showing how much of a vain monster she truly is.Langwidere: You are rather attractive. Not at all beautiful, you understand, but you have a certain style of prettiness that is different from that of any of my thirty heads. So I believe I'll take your head and give you No. 26 for it.
Mombi: You will be very attractive, one day. Not at all beautiful, you understand, but you have a certain prettiness. Different from my other heads. I believe I'll lock you in a tower for a few years till your head is ready and then I'll take it.
- There's also the casual nature of how Mombi treats the situation, she isn't gloating about how heinous her actions are but rather, is treating the whole ordeal like an everyday hobby of trying on and collecting hats. This reinforces how much of a monster she truly is- she's so vain that she doesn't care she's robbing others of their heads and will just cover her insecurity and reinforce her fragile vanity.
- The head scene when Dorothy went to retrieve the Powder of Life from the 31st head of Mombi in a corridor of heads. When she finally opens the door and gets the powder, the head comes to life and says "Dorothy Gale" in a Creepy Monotone, and then the other heads wake up to scream loudly as she runs away from the headless Mombi.
- Taken up to eleven in the novelization's depiction of events; the head is described as “jumbled in with a horrible assortment of charms and spells, monkey skulls, dried spiders and other things Dorothy did not want to even imagine.” Yikes.
- It's also a subtle detail about Mombi's true head that deconstructs the infamous ending where Dorothy's friends had counterparts in Kansas that were always kind to her. Both the heads that Mombi used and the gallery of heads were of people Dorothy never met before. And while the Wheelers, particularly the head one, resembled the orderly from the facility, this trait wasn't as emphasized as their frightening appearance. When Dorothy opens the door, she isn't shocked that it's an ugly head, but rather that the head has an uncanny resemblance to the sinister nurse of the facility. It's a metaphysical moment that flips the intent of the uplifting moment of the M.G.M.'s finale into a terrifying revelation that truly begins to blur the reality of her own life and that of Oz. Rather than discovering retroactively that the friendly people she met in Oz were people already knew in Kansas, Dorothy discovers that somehow the horrible people she managed to escape from to help Oz, have counterparts in Oz, instead of it being a joyous moment, is an existential horror of uncanniness that reality itself is allowing these awful people to follow Dorothy no matter where she is, even it's separated by time and space to enact their cruelties onto her, with even greater power this time to back it up.
- If if one takes the coma dream theory as fact, then Dorothy corrupted her ideal fantasy by inviting these already sinister adults with insidious intent into her subconscious and imagining them as horrifying monsters bent on destroying her innocence and psyche.
- The Deadly Desert. It surrounds all of Oz, and if you touch even a toe in it, your body turns to sand. Several Wheelers fall into it as a group of them chase after Dorothy and company as they fly precariously over it in the Gump. We get to see what happens to one of the Wheelers, who turns into what seems to be a sand sculpture of a Wheeler, and then it gets shocking when his entire head and face start to crumble and fall apart into simple loose sand, as though nothing had ever been there in the first place.
- How seemingly innocuous the Nome King first appears. After hearing his voice under a hellish flickering underground with a sinister tone. When he finally reveals himself, he's just a vaguely humanoid face on a mountain cliff that doesn't look threatening despite the build-up. He then starts to make a vaguely aggressive counterargument with a slightly more hostile tone and starts an Evil Laugh as he collapses the ground beneath Dorothy and friends as his formed face begins to crumble.
- Dorothy is then teleported through a surreal location of clouds and reforming diamonds until she lands right next to the Scarecrow. Then just as she's happy to reunite with him, the Nome King turns him into an ornament, vanishing in her arms. He then says with a casual tone that it's her fault for reminding him to do it and thanks her for it to drive the emotional knife.
- How disarmingly pleasant the Nome King is at first glance. Instead of the ominous and irritated tone, he spoke earlier and in comparison to the more bombastically evil Mombi and especially, the Wicked Witch, the Nome King acts comforting to Dorothy, speaks politely to the group, and never raises his voice despite his increasingly evil acts. His evil doesn't become apparent until Gump gets turned into an ornament and states that he's immune to Dorothy's rightful accusations of withholding vital information, believes that what he says is the only that matters, and if they don't like it, he can throw them into his fiery furnace, the first time he raises his voice- revealing himself to be an egotistical sadist that only by his whims that the group isn't immediately killed off and even then, he remains calm and casual- a subtler and more dangerous sort of evil.
- The Nome King's Death Trap of a game. He turns the Scarecrow into an ornament, hides him in a huge room of bric-a-braces, and they have three guesses each to find the item the Scarecrow has become, and if they win, they can leave without harm. What the Nome King doesn't tell them is that if they guess incorrectly, they themselves will be turned into ornaments, what's worse is that he gives them no clues, and Dorothy and her friends have to go in one by one. It gradually becomes obvious they're walking to their deaths due to this rigged game and the only other option is to be burned in the furnace. Dorothy figures out the Nome King's game, realizing Ozians turn into green-colored ornaments - and we see plenty of those during the opening pan of the room. So how many other Ozians have fallen for the Nome King's game? And with each failure, the Nome King starts looking more and more human.
- On the matter of his transformations on just how unnatural they are the closer he becomes human-like. After comforting Dorothy, the Nome King takes on the form of a chiseled statue of a benign-looking king of stone. After Gump fails, he becomes a more defined humanoid statue, now with uncomfortably human blue iris eyes, no longer attached to the wall, becoming subtly off to look at. After Jack fails, the Nome King stops being an StopMotion figure outright as he transitions to being a live-action actor in heavy makeup to look like a king made of ornate gem-covered stone with limited facial expressions with his wide eyes emphasized, creating a surreally unnatural vibe of being much more human-like than before as he looks more like the doctor from Kansas. After Tik-Tok fails, he becomes a gray-skinned, gray-haired human in stone regal garbs with his eyes continuing to be emphasized to show how unnerving and unnatural the form is. He heavily implies that with Dorothy's failure, he'll become a human completely with none of the Nome's weaknesses and being completely invincible.
- During the scene where Dorothy blames The Nome King for turning The Gump into an ornament at the guessing game, he gives them the alternate option of visiting his Fiery Furnace where we get to see flames appear briefly on the other doorway, signaling the seemingly polite Nome King is a cruel and sadistic person. And to add to the horror, it's the more merciful option compared to being turned into ornaments forever.
- The fact that Nome King comes extremely close to triumphing. Dorothy was down to her final guess in the game described above—and she was the last of the heroes to play. The Nome King's line, "Soon, there'll be no one left who remembers Oz," indicates that something much darker was happening: if Dorothy had failed, the truth about Oz and its original state would have been lost forever, giving him presumably unlimited power. Keep in mind that the only reason Dorothy gets her final guess right is pure luck—she closes her eyes and spins around to select an ornament, and only just happens to see the emerald-green paperweight on a table. Had that last desperate guess failed, Oz would have become a desolate wasteland, and every single non-Wheeler or Nome inhabitant would have either been permanently trapped in stone or trapped as an ornament forever.
- If the theory that the whole film is all just in Dorothy's coma dream is really correct, she'd be an unconscious living, breathing corpse had she not been able to wake up.
- As stated above, as each individual fails the guessing game, the Nome King is slowly transforming into a human, implying that if the last guess (Dorothy) fails, he'll become completely human without any of the Nome's weaknesses and being completely invincible. then what would have happened if Dorothy failed, now an ornament and the Nome King and his forces had succeeded? Once the now humanized immortal Nome King and his minions completely destroyed Oz 100% clean, they would probably break into our real world (Dorothy's world) and started conquering and attacking people and nations worldwide, likely doing the same thing they did to Oz.
- While somewhat silly out of context, the sudden revelation that the Nome King is wearing the Ruby Slippers and used them to cause the events of the story is harrowing and visually unnatural just for the sight of an iconic item being worn by a villain and being warped to do vile things. It's especially disturbing on Dorothy's end as she realizes it's her fault that the Nome King came to such power due to an accident.
- When The Nome King loses his temper and becomes a huge one-eyed, half-furious, and half-deranged giant intent on eating the main cast. It's a stark contrast from the dissonantly calm sadist he was beforehand and with the environment taking on a fiery exterior, it generates the feeling they've entered Hell and the group is now trying to escape being eaten by the Devil.
- And shortly before that when he shrieks in rage at Mombi in an utterly inhuman voice, "YOU HAD HER AND YOU! LET! HER! ESCAPE!" The Wheelers are shown quickly getting the hell outta there during that.
- Furthermore, the death scene of the Nome King. He begins to decay rapidly after eating his one weakness, a chicken egg. It starts with his eye eroding before his face "rots" into a skull as his body crumbles away. It doesn't help that the transformation begins with the Nome King's eye turning to stone in a manner akin to how the eye becomes opaque when it dies.Nome King: Don't you...know that...eggs...are...poison...
Billina: Poison indeed!
Nome King: Poison...poison...to...Nomes! - Also, listen closely to the way his voice slowly begins to distort worse the more he decays. It’s sure to give you chills.
- The Nomes themselves are demonic in form, but the scariest ones are the ones that reach out at the Scarecrow. It's shot from a first-person perspective, so it looks like they're trying to get you.
- Then there's Paranoia Fuel of their existence, they are literal rock monsters who can appear from any rock to spy on them as observed by the scout of the Nome King without them noticing, they can appear from walls/ceilings/etc that is made of earth, and there's no escaping them since the world is comprised of earth.
