Nightmare Fuel / Squid Game

Per site policy, all Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned!

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This is just from the first episode. It gets worse from here.

For a show that takes children's games and twists them into life-or-death outcomes, there are bound to be frightening moments in Squid Game.

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General:

General

• The state of South Korea before the games are even introduced. It's evident that there are a lot of people who have been plunged into debt with a variety of entities, and judging by Gi-hun's situation, loan sharks run rampant. There are people suffering due to the fact they have no money to afford basic necessities, or are in such deep debt they run the risk of getting into trouble with loan sharks. No fantastical elements here either; it feels like a country plunged into realistic poverty.
• The way the games are executed (no pun intended) if one thinks about it too much. The games may be fictional, but it can happen. Sure, it may sound ridiculous, but that's exactly how the staff get away with their crimes; so people would think the players are crazy. They target the dregs of society because the authorities wouldn't bother investigating their disappearances. The only police officer who cares about the disappearance is someone who lost a family member to the Game, and needs proof to bring the perpetrators to justice. Plus, there's no way to think people as wealthy as the VIPs and the Host can have any problems affording it all, and the connections to stay away from the public's radar. In short, a Deadly Game is made plausible simply on factors that happen in Real Life. Which makes one wonder, what if the disappearances in real life without any explanations were because of the Squid Game? So if you fit the contestant criteria, the Salesman might be waiting to recruit you.
• In terms of walking Nightmare Fuel, these characters particularly stand out.
  • Jang Deok-su. He's not just a dangerous gangster and the most intimidating and physically imposing contestant in the competition. He's a vile Sadist who doesn't give a shit about morals, taking pleasure in killing people just so that he has a better chance of winning the grand prize. It's really shown when he kills a fellow player for calling him out for cutting in line, and subsequently murders another person who ratted him out when he realizes that the guards won't do anything to stop the carnage between players.
    • He's also incredibly bloodthirsty, as shown when he violently stabs a gang member on a bridge who tried to betray him to Filipino enforcers. The scene is further elevated to Nightmare Fuel when it's clear the gang member has already suffered a mortal wound while the enforcers are closing in on Deok-su, yet he's so bloodthirsty he continues to stab the underling, even at the (seeming) expense of his own capacity to escape the attackers!
  • In the later episodes, Cho Sang-woo becomes this. Even though his backstory and ulterior motives makes him far more sympathetic, he's proven to be no better than the aforementioned Deok-su. Especially since he grows more and more ruthless as the game progresses, going as far as to betray and murder contestants out of pragmatism. His statement of "trying damn hard to stay alive" speaks volumes over the fact that like Deok-su, he doesn't care about morals, only the prize ahead of him (the fact that he's also more intelligent than the gangster makes him far more dangerous). What makes it a Tear Jerker is that you can see he was rooting for Gi-hun to cross the finish line and gave him advice to beat the first game.
  • On the topic of game staff, the Front Man can easily count as this. You're talking about an intimidating, deep-voiced no-nonsense masked man dressed in black who's perfectly willing to kill players and staff if they happen to cross the line. It gets much worse when he continues to keep surveillance over Gi-Hun, even after the latter wins the games.
  • The Salesman. He approaches desperate people and offers them to play a game. They win, they get ₩100,000 won per round. He wins, he takes the money or delivers a Bitch Slap. Because he's good at the game, he smacks them repeatedly, as bystanders watch with horror and apathy. After they win a round, he lets them walk away with the money... and a business card for an opportunity to earn even more. As the video screens from the first episode show, he did this to at least 500 people for 2020 alone, and the contest has been going on for a long time.
• When you think about it, Gi-Hun's progress because of what it required to come to fruition; namely, nothing but dumb luck. At 4 out of 6 games, he only makes it through thanks to the abilities/actions of others, whether he's aligned with them or not, and he was one bad decision away from instantly losing the 5th game. If even a single factor or decision on his part had been different, it could have been him in one of those coffins. And overall, this shows that the only real way to win the games as a whole is to be Born Lucky.
• According to Il-nam, the whole purpose of the games is to show that Humans Are Bastards, especially those who are poor and desperate. Yet we see time and time again that this isn't a black-and-white issue: in the 2020 contest, 14 players refused to participate because they weren't going to risk their lives or that of other people in exchange for the mere chance of securing necessary funds, several people initially thought they were going to have fun, and Sang-woo tried to help Gi-hun before he started going down the slippery slope. Then there's Ali, the nicest of the players, who returns because he knows he'll be arrested for maiming his boss and robbing him, and he doesn't want to drag down his innocent family with them after telling his wife to take their kid back to Pakistan.

Episodes:

"Red Light, Green Light"

• The episode begins with a group of loan sharks chasing down Gi-hun and making him sign a blood contract that if he doesn't have the money, he'll have his kidney and eyes cut away. Even worse, he had a large portion of the money for them, but Sae-byeok took it from him when he crashed into her. Gi-hun lies to his daughter that the bruises he received from the lead loan shark are from a mosquito bite.
• Gi-hun agrees to go and participate in the games, to earn enough money to secure custody of his daughter. Then he's loaded into a van and knocked out. When he wakes up, he's in a set of barracks in a jumpsuit with a number. He can't find his things, and no one knows where they are.
• Sang-woo speaks up, questioning the Front Man. He points out accurately that they were told about a job opportunity, not to be kidnapped with their belongings taken. The Front Man shuts him down by revealing everything he knows about Sang-woo, including that he's been fired for embezzling funds from the company where he's a bigshot. Sang-woo can only meekly quiet down.
• The reveal about the true nature of the games. At first, it seems to be a friendly competition, and if you lose, you get to go home safe and sound (but without the money) right? You may lose your dignity at worst, given the Salesman was giving a Bitch Slap multiple times. Nuh-uh. If you lose in your respective game, the punishment is death. In fact, that Red Light, Green Light reveal was so shocking, a lot more people died from a sudden body response of running due to their acknowledgment of what losing in this tournament meant. While watching the preview might dampen the horror (since that reveals the game's nature right there), it's still a tense scene to watch.
  • The first deaths we see (of 324 and 250) are easily the most shocking, because we actually have time to process them. 324 cockily rushes forward and ends up stumbling a bit when the Red Light signal goes off, cueing a cheeky remark from 250 about how he lost the bet... and then a gunshot rings out and 324 falls to the ground. At first, everyone’s just shocked and has no idea how to react, with 250 heading over to 324 and telling him that he's been eliminated and he can get up and leave now... Cue 324 vomiting up blood and dying and 250 desperately trying to run and getting shot too, with his blood splattering over the horrified woman behind him (pictured above), and it all goes downhill from there.
• The way that more than half the players try to go for the doors, banging for them to open and screaming for help. Mercilessly, the turrets fire as they collapse to the ground. Gi-hun survives by sheer luck that he got knocked down and was too frozen to move. It hits home that they really are trapped, like rats in a trap.
• To emphasize how A Million Is a Statistic, the profile photos are on a giant digital screen. They start blinking out in rapid succession.
• The doll used for the game is a pretty creepy case of Uncanny Valley, being a giant doll of a child that can turn its head a full 180 degrees, and the eyes of which can move independently of each other to track its targets. It used to be the page image for a reason.
• And all of these factors taking place on a likewise uncanny, artificial reconstruction of a sunny, pastel-colored playground (as do some other games) dip everything in pure Scenery Dissonance. When the timer runs out, everyone looks up as a sunroof opens and closes. It makes them realize they were inside an enclosure the whole time, and we zoom out to see the players are on a remote island, in the middle of nowhere.

"Hell"

• The episode starts with the bodies of the dead being cremated, packed in coffins designed to look like gift boxes. As the camera pans out to show all the boxes, fingers shakily push the lid of one of the boxes. A member of staff pushes the fingers back in and seals it shut, trapping the person inside to be cremated. Likely they were still alive as they were put into the furnace.
  • As revealed in a later episode, some caskets aren't burned so that some of the staff can harvest the victim's organs. This was probably one of them.
• The Faux Affably Evil way that the guards try to reassure the scared survivors who beg to go home, and they'll pay their debt. They correct the players that this is not an extreme round of loan shark 101, but simply the rules that were established. One man aptly points out that they didn't sign up for murder to go with the games, and says he wants to see his family.
• Clause 1 of the contract says that players must participate. Then Clause 2 says that those who do not play will be eliminated. Sang-woo fortunately stands up and invokes Clause 3: players can vote to end the game early.
• 255 players died in the previous round, and even then, there were 100 people who wanted to keep playing, because their actual lives were that much worse. And after the vote to return home, of the 101 players who voted to leave, all but 14 of them returned.
  • And those 14 aren't entirely safe, either. One guard tells another to keep tabs on those who didn't return, meaning that even if you leave the game, you're still under the surveillance of those that run it.
  • Think about the vote again for a moment: the players have found out that for each person who dies, the prize money amount gets bigger until the winner wins 45.6 billion won (around $35 million US dollars). 100 people vote to continue the games - that means 100 people are all but declaring that they are fine with every single person in the room dying aside from them if it gives them a chance for that money.
    • On the other hand, at that point, the players had no idea that there could only be one winner at the end, as the rules stated just say if they complete all six games successfully they can win, not that only ONE contestant will be able to complete all six games and win, which means they probably believed that there could be multiple winners at the time. Heck, even right before Game 6, Gi-Hun seriously proposed to Sae-Byeok that they divide the prize money after defeating Sang-woo, which means even by then there was no confirmation for the players that there could only be one winner.
• Ali confronts his employer about not paying him his rightfully-earned wages. His boss says he doesn't have any money to pay him, but very clearly has an envelope full of money that he unsuccessfully tries to hide from Ali. He and Ali get into a struggle over the envelope, which ends in the employer stumbling and his fingers getting wrung through a machine. Ali looks appropriately horrified but grabs the cash while he still can. There's also the fact that he can't tell his wife what happened, only to order her to take the money, fly back to Pakistan with their child, and don't worry about him. That's the last conversation they have.
• After his proposed plan for the heist goes wrong, Deok-su proceeds to stab the hell out of his man after he snitched on him to the Filipino gang. The scary part is that Deok-su does it emotionlessly, which further demonstrates his ruthlessness.
  • Much like what Gi-hun's loan sharks told him if he doesn't pay them in time, the Filipino gang in question are trying to take Deok-su's organs, such as his kidney and eye. Sure, Deok-su is an asshole, but it doesn't make that scene any less terrifying, especially since plenty of gangs in Real Life do the very same.
• The Realism-Induced Horror that the people behind the games actually keep their word and let everyone leave when they ask, fully confident that the bleakness of their normal lives will get them wanting to go back in before too long. They're proven absolutely right.

"The Man With the Umbrella"

• The second game is horrific for different reasons. The players are forced to carve a shape on a really fragile piece of dalgona candy and pull it out whole and intact, while under intense pressure and risk of a Boom, Headshot! if they break the shape. Gi-hun barely makes it before time runs out.
  • The shapes (in order from easiest to hardest) are triangle, circle, star, and umbrella. Gi-hun just barely gets his umbrella shape out by the skin of his teeth. Understandably, he collapses into tears of relief when he makes it with seconds to spare. But no other player is shown successfully getting an umbrella shape out—making one wonder if all the others were doomed the second they chose it.
  • One of the losing contestants panics and grabs the gun of the guards' commander, holding him at gunpoint and using him as a human shield. When he sees beneath the guy's square mask, he's so horrified when he finds out the guard is a normal-looking young man, that he kills himself.
    • The dead-eyed expression of the commander, paired with his clearly young age and his high ranking, is also quite disturbing.
  • It also bears mentioning that the staff members' lives are forfeited if anyone sees their faces, as the commander is quickly executed by the Front Man. It also goes to show the sheer disregard for human life that the Squid Game is built on - even staff members are considered expendable.

"Stick to the Team"

• The episode's riot, in which everyone starts killing each other—not just to get rid of competition, but to get more money in the pot. Even Il-nam starts panicking as beds fall, and people start beating each other to death. All of this was a Batman Gambit by the Front Man to weed out the weaker members. They also have the lights turning on and off at random, for no other reason than freaking everyone out even more.
• The third game is tug-of-war, where the contestants have their hands cuffed to the rope and wear white shoes with slippery soles; you're more likely to see those shoes in a bowling alley, if anything. The losing team would fall off the platform and dangle for their lives before a guillotine slices the rope and makes them all fall to their deaths. A later scene even shows one contestant surviving the fall, but he's unable to do anything as the guards put him in a coffin anyway.
  • What makes this game worse than the previous ones is that while the first two games were primarily individual tasks where everyone, in theory, has a chance to survive, this one guarantees that half of the players at the time will be killed off, and the players themselves are forced to do the killing, complete with strategizing. To emphasize that they chose to return to this, the players are forced to take an elevator to the platforms in question, and draw out the process of handcuffing them to the rope. Oh, and the teams going later are Forced to Watch from the safety of a lower platform, in case they don't need any more psyching up before combat.
• The first tug-of-war round involves Deok-su's team curb-stomping their opponents. A middle-aged man is the leader of the opposing team, and you can see tears in his eyes as he loses his footing. Cue the screams and silence when the guillotine comes down and slices the rope. Deok-su smirks and laughs, while even his teammates are horrified as it sinks in what they did. He then says it's a pity he wasn't going up against Gi-hun's team, because he wanted to kill them personally, before it's their turn.
• In the second tug-of-war round:
  • To show how high the stakes are, Il-nam stops smiling. While he doesn't care about dying, he cares about Gi-hun and their motley crew. He gives serious instructions about how Gi-hun's team can win: have a strong leader in the front that will not falter and study the opponents, put a strong man in the rear, make sure that your feet are facing forward, and use your armpits to hold the rope for extra reinforcement. Instead of pulling with all their strength, lean back for the first ten seconds.
  • Gi-hun's team makes sure Il-nam is in the back-middle with the girls, with Ali holding the rear. While one Jerkass member says that he needs to save his strength, they still pull rank. They know that he's the weakest of the team, but they're damned if they put him in an easy position to be killed.
  • When you look at the opponents, they're not taking joy in this any more than Gi-hun's team is. They're scared, and for a good reason. One missed step, and it's game over. So their leader gets a second wind and shouts at everyone to pull, before he pulls them to their deaths. Just a reminder that all of these players are still human beings, and most of them haven't taken a life before.
• The reveal that a player and a team of guards were running an underground organ theft business.
  • At least one of the harvested contestants woke up in the middle of his eyes being removed because he wasn't on anesthesia, they presumed he was dead.
  • And it's mentioned in the following episode that apparently, some of those guards raped a female contestant whom they thought was dead.

"A Fair World"

• The moment when Gi-hun's team wins. There is a brief moment where the weight of the other team starts to drag them down as well, before the guillotine comes down. As they collapse on the platform, there's a moment of silence, as the realization comes in that they killed ten people to save themselves and progress forward.
• The doctor's breakdown when the guards reveal they weren't told what the next game is. It's implied he actually doesn't like conducting organ donors on people and doing these incisions while sleep-deprived and hungry, after helping kill ten people. He snaps when the guards promise that they have every reason to keep him alive, and holds one hostage. The guards are forced to disarm him, and he fights them with a crowbar. Even the Front Man is implied to feel sorry for him when they view the organ extraction room and the dead bodies on the slab.
• The players and guards involved in the organ theft business are all killed, and their bodies are hung on display for the other players to see. And they weren't punished for the organ theft. No, it was because they were unfairly feeding a few other players information on the games before they commenced.
• Jun-ho finds the Archive Room, where it's revealed that the games were started all the way back in 1988. Several hundred people died in all those years for a big cash prize. Sharp-eyed viewers will also notice here that there's never been more than one winner...

"Gganbu"

• The players are instructed to get into pairs for the next game, so naturally friends pair up together, fully intending to help each other through. Then they find out that every pair will compete against each other, not together. Meaning that the majority of the players are left to play a game that will decide if they or their friend will be killed via gunshot. It's even worse for the married couple among the players.

"VIPs"

• The Front Man searching his office with a gun when he realizes someone else used the phone. He says that this "intruder" is a Worthy Opponent and simply tripped up on the minute details. Jun-ho is tucked into a cubby, not making a sound.
• The fifth game is crossing a bridge with glass panels. The catch is, there are two columns: one side contains glass that can withstand the weight of two humans, and another would shatter upon the impact of someone landing on it. Unless you're a glass expert, there's no way to tell which glass is which until someone falls through.
  • This game stands out as the only one among the six in which there are no skills that can help you. It doesn't matter how smart or strong you are—every time you move to the next panel, it's nothing more than a coin flip to see if you're going to fall to your death. One player realizes the hopelessness of it all and decides to just sprint for it and hope for the best.
• There's something rather unsettling about the fact that wealthy individuals from all over the world are gambling on the lives of these players, betting on them as if they were nothing more than racing horses.
• One of the VIPs says "the contest in Korea was the best." Not "the contest" itself, the contest in Korea. That sentence alone opens a whole new can of Fridge Horror - if other countries have their own version of the Squid Games, that means there's a whole group of people preying upon the desperate, making them participate in these deadly games for a chance to get millions of dollars worth of money. And given that the records archive shows that the games first started in 1988, this means that thousands of people have died for the entertainment of a bunch of wealthy assholes.
• VIP 4 takes interest in the masked man serving scotch to him. (It's an undercover Jun-ho, who fortunately can speak English fluently.) He makes Jun-ho sit with him, a tight grip on his arm, and orders him to take off his mask. Jun-ho, playing the part of a naive caterer, stammers that he'll die on the Front Man's orders if he does that. The Front Man hears and doesn't correct that. VIP 4 then whispers, if this prettyboy doesn't comply, he will make sure the caterer dies anyway for not servicing him. Jun-ho goes Oh, Crap! as he requests they have a private room, ostensibly to save his own life. From everyone's nonchalant and teasing reaction, VIP 4 regularly coerces the caterers, threatening to kill them if they don't comply.
• VIP 4 attempting to coerce Jun-ho to perform oral sex on him in the private room, complete with grabbing his head and saying such a face is too pretty to hide behind a mask. Even though Jun-ho overpowers him and twists his nuts to hurt him, complete with a gun to the forehead while getting his confession on tape, it's still extremely unsettling and disturbing to watch.

"Front Man"

• Sae-byeok's big bloody stomach wound.
• Jun-ho manages to escape to an island, but the Front Man and his guards track him via the scuba gear. He's forced to run for his life while desperately trying to get a signal on his dying phone so he can send the Korean police the evidence he's gotten about the games. Despite all his efforts, the Front Man eventually corners Jun-ho at the edge of a cliff. When Jun-ho lies and claims the police are on their way, the Front Man calls his bluff, and then The Reveal happens: The Front Man is actually In-ho, Jun-ho's brother. So not only were Jun-ho's efforts All for Nothing, but it turns out the very person he was trying to find is the one who's now running the games.
  • What makes it even creepier is we never really get a straight answer about why In-ho is now helping to run the games despite having participated in them before. It makes you wonder what the hell happened that caused him to go down this path.
• The last three players are told to get dressed up in nice clothes and are given a delicious steak dinner to eat. It's clear that they're only being given this meal because the end is about to approach.

"One Lucky Day"

• The fight between Gi-hun and Sang-woo is absolutely brutal, which eventually culminates in Sang-woo stabbing Gi-hun in the thigh and then through the palm. After Gi-hun offers to Sang-woo for them to leave the game together, Sang-woo stabs himself in the throat so that Gi-hun can leave with the money.
• The episode's final scene confirms that even the winners are kept under heavy surveillance. When Gi-hun registers for the second time in the airplane tunnel, the Front Man replies that he is better off getting on that plane. It's also noted that he is still referred to as "Player 456" in this conversation; to the rich, a winning horse is still a horse after all. No wonder why Gi-hun's last line for the episode is telling the Front Man that he's a human being.

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