Nightmare Fuel / Splatterhouse

Jennifer has become a mindless beast, and you'd mostly want to too, after seeing these horrors.

The Splatterhouse series is one of the most Body Horror-filled games you will ever find in a video game since it graced the arcades, TurboGrafx-16, and the Sega Genesis. The 2010 remake is no slouch, either.

Unmarked spoilers below!

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Splatterhouse (1988)

• The arcade game employed some trick with its sound to make the effects of the carnage seem to be beamed directly into your inner ear. It cost 25¢ to play, plus $500 in therapy bills.
• The first level has you lopping the heads off flayed ghouls, while you stride calmly past partially vivisected people in cages and strewn on the floor.
  • The first boss is a room full of shredded human flesh, from which giant leeches leap out and try to attach themselves to you.
• The Stage 2 boss: the Poltergeist, who would later return as a recurring boss in the other Splatterhouse games. In this game, the angry ghost violently shakes the room around, making stuff fall from the ceiling. It then proceeds to possess a chair, three knives, and a creepy painting of an eyeball. When you beat it, it pulls off a Last Ditch Move, having a chandelier fall from the ceiling (which is an instant death, whether you're using cheats or not). The music doesn't help, sounding completely deranged, and as the fight progresses, it begins to sound more and more insane.
• One of the bosses, the Evil Cross, is inside an abandoned church in the original arcade version. Said monster is an inverted cross with demonic masks firing at you.
• The Necromancer's demonic chanting is creepy as all get-out.
  • On the flipside, it becomes funny considering that it sounds like he's saying "I'm a-groovin'!". And why wouldn't he, thanks to the music playing in the background]?
• Your girlfriend, Jennifer, who you're supposed to rescue instead mutates into a hideous clawed monstrosity you have to kill, and its evil laugh doesn't make things any better.
  • There are horrifying implications before and during the ensuing boss fight. First of all, you saw the monsters surrounding Jennifer just before she transforms, which may have just been the end of whatever arcane ritual was required to transform her. It may have been something else. Then as you fight her, she seems to painfully switch back and forth between her human and monster forms.
• The fantastically creepy (if not flat-out wrong) Womb Level in the first game where the only enemies are horrid fetuses that first fly off in a sort of bubble, then jump on you and drain your life away. And the boss is a pillar of meat with the bulging heart of the house that sends off millions of these "babies".
  • It's actually a uterus. It's more apparent in the arcade version, where its water breaks when it dies (which is also an instant kill, by the way).
• The final boss, Hell Chaos◊, is a giant rotting head and hands.
• The TurboGrafx-16 port commercial intercuts clips of the game with a live-action Rick dragging a log into a dark, foggy workshop, and sawing it down into a 2X4 plank. The ad only twice shows his head, wearing the blood-red Terror Mask; once when he wields a circular saw, again when he swings the finished 2X4 towards the camera. During the latter, the announcer (having completed his description of Splatterhouse's premise) loudly asks the viewers, "You say you wanna play his game?"

Splatterhouse 2

• Right before fighting the Warm-Up Boss Bellyache, the enemy that ran away from you witnesses two of its buddies being eaten by the boss. Terrified by this, it tries to flee, but sees you coming in. It chooses to be eaten by Bellyache (off-screen, of course) so as to not be slaughtered by Rick. What does that say about the Terror Mask?
• The second half of level 2 takes place in an especially eerie Blackout Basement, with the only meager light coming from the occasional dim fluorescent tube on the walls that constantly flickers out, revealing ghostly faces that slowly drift in the background. Then you travel deeper into the basement where it becomes pitch dark, stopping only because you've run directly into the boss; a HUGE, ghastly-looking face with bulging, blank eyes. And then when you've dealt enough damage, the face's eyeballs swell up and messily burst open.
• The bosses of the third level have you fighting off evil hanging fetuses known as Bloodpuppets.
• The final boss of the second game, known as Ultimate Evil, tops that by being a giant flying mass of red flesh and screaming faces.
  • The game pulls a Jump Scare after the credits roll.

Splatterhouse 3

• The second boss, known as the "Giant Boreworm". His laughter is very haunting.
• The cutscenes that happen during the game are all pictures of real actors that are low-res, yet photo-realistic. They still manage to be quite haunting despite the age of the game.
  • The most infamous cutscene is after saving Jennifer in Stage 1, you have to defeat the Giant Boreworm in Stage 2. As the timer ticks down, the cutscenes show the boreworm entering Jennifer's body and slowly devour her from the inside, with the marks on her chest growing as time passes. If you fail to defeat the boss before the two minute mark, you're immediately treated to a scene where Jennifer gives a blank stare as the game state the boreworm is eating her brain. She almost looks like Regan, but she couldn't be saved at this point. The music that plays (which also occurs in the Bonus Stage) doesn't help.
  • If you run out the timer, you'll get that particularly horrifying image of a wrathful, transformed version of Jennifer, which is also seen on this page. The version included in the 2010 remake had to replace all the cutscenes due to copyright issues, so this image on the right◊ is the replacement, making her look like a ghostly Medusa.
  Jennifer has become a mindless beast. Deformed by the Boreworm not even Rick can recognize her now. She is changed... forever.
• The battle with the teddy bear in the third level. It starts out as a mundane Curb-Stomp Battle, and then— WHAM! The teddy bear lets out an unearthly shriek as the ghost possessing it rips its way out as a long-armed monster and starts kicking your ass!
  • The preceding two bosses also have fairly gruesome second-phase transformations. The first one's head sloughs off after it's taken enough damage, leaving only its lower jaw and lolling tongue still atop its neck while it keeps attacking (and good news: there's plenty more where this asshole came from, too!), and in Stage 2, the Queen Boreworm's face explodes into a wriggling mass of squirming, maggot-like tendrils.
• If you decide to not continue after getting a Game Over, Rick's flesh quickly melts away while his skeleton remains, instead of just laying there intact like in previous games. The description of the video says it best:
  "It's bad enough the guy died. Did you really have to melt off his flesh too?"
• All of the bad endings are scary. Even the good ending qualifies as the Mask says before shattering that it can't see or hear anymore.

Splatterhouse (2010 remake)

• The opening scene is quite ghastly, showing Rick lying in a pool of his blood, at death's door, guts spilling out of his lacerated torso. Then he puts on the Terror Mask, and the Painful Transformation ensues.
• "The Doll that Bled". As if the title of the level wasn't eerie enough, the titular doll is really going to bother you. First you see a creepy looking doll, which the Mask seems a little cautious about it. It then begins levitating all the furniture around the room, in obvious reference to the second boss in the original game. Then, the doll starts growing tentacles. Lots of tentacles. It then proceeds to grow into a mammoth, vaguely humanoid beast composed entirely of tentacles, wearing the levitated furniture as body armour. From then on, it's okay... until you actually have to rip its jaws off and reach into its bloody mass to reach the Doll.
  • The doll itself is very creepy, falling easily in the Uncanny Valley and saying "Mama!" with a chilling, disturbing voice.
• The Meat Factory. Imagine a factory dedicated entirely to killing. There is no reason for it to be, it is merely an entire complex designed to, well, make "meat". There are even a few walls that are actually composed of mangled human flesh.
  • Roughly halfway into the level past one of the 2D segments, a freaky image of Jennifer and her eye pops up.
• Ladies and gentlemen... Biggy Man, from the remake◊! And yes, you fight him the classic 2D way from original game and the 3D beat-down way. The first time you see him is when the room is pitch dark and sparks suddenly shoot out. Then when you actually get to his fight, he RIPS OFF THE ELEVATOR DOOR to start it.
  • It may double as a funny moment when even the Terror Mask is worried about fighting Biggy Man. Yes, the Terror Mask — of all things — is worried about fighting him, even though Rick is quite plainly pointing a shotgun in his face! In the words upon seeing him in the remake:
  Terror Mask: "Wait, wait, wait — I know this guy! ...yeah, we are screwed."
  • During the fight, HE ESCAPES FROM YOU and then makes you look around an entirely pitch black room with just the revving of his chainsaws dragging across the ground as he rushes toward you at the last second! Have a great, sleepless night.
  • The worst part was the cutscene right after the fight, where Rick repeatedly rams one of Biggy Man's chainsaw hands into him, all the while you can hear him screaming in agony. He's the only monster in the game to actually SCREAM in agony. The screaming... dear God the screaming...
  • Not to mention that he kind of resembles Hell Chaos from the first game (I.E. His skin on his torso).
• The gigantic Cthulhu-like monster in the tank near the end of Phase 6. Said beastie will growl at you and try to reach Rick by hitting the walls of the tank.
  • What truly makes it creepy is its status as a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, as there is absolutely zero findable knowledge on what it is and what it is doing down there, and West himself says nothing about it when Rick finds him for the stage's boss fight. One of the scariest things in the entire franchise, indeed.
• Phase 8 has you enter a house of mirrors. Each room had three, each with the reflection of Jennifer. The first reflection begs you to save her. The second implores you to run and save yourself. The third tells you how pathetic you are. You need to break one of the mirrors to get to the next room. If you choose the wrong one, an evil Jen clone will burst out and try to kill you. And if you run out of time, a small army of Jen clones appear. God help you if you don't have Berserk Mode available. It doesn't help that they're the Demonic Spider variant of Hominis.
  • The Clown Corrupted. Just the freaky, fire-spitting Clown Corrupted. Not helped by the fact that they have their own loading screen.
• As if the Womb Level from the original game wasn't enough, Phase 9 is a full-blown Eldritch Location.
• At the end of Phase 10, a monster version of Jennifer (Or at least, one that resembles, as we later find out) emerges from the wicker man to fight Rick. Although it's a short sequence where she crawls all over Rick's body, it is still incredibly creepy.
• The Bittersweet Ending, in which the ritual succeeds, though it's not Lenora, but the Corrupted that got to Jennifer.
• Most of what the Mask says is hilarious. And then there's the rest of its dialogue, reminding you that you are wearing a force of pure evil. For example, when you absorb blood:
  "More... I want more."
  • Or when picking up a pipe:
    "Paint the walls red!"

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