Paul Verhoeven's previous SciFi outings RoboCop and Total Recall were already notorious for having their own creative Nightmare Fuel, and with Starship Troopers, a story about militarized human bastards fighting Big Creepy-Crawlies from outer space, the mad Dutchman delivers a Bloodier and Gorier Aliens loaded with traumatic visuals that won't easily leave your head or help you sleep at night.
- Right off the bat, the sheer scale of the death and destruction is horrifying. The Gory Discretion Shots are few and far in between, most battle scenes make sure to show off the Arachnids tearing into the humans and messily rip them apart with plenty blood being spilled around.
- And when we don't see the Bugs in action, we're still shown the aftermath of their carnages like the Mormon Extremists on Dantana. No use of Nothing Is Scarier or obscured corpses, instead copious amounts of Body Horror and human bodies ripped to shreds are on display laying everywhere in broad daylight.
- Breckinridge getting his brains blown out during the No OSHA Compliance training with live ammo. A whole chunk of his head goes off after getting hit by a round designed to penetrate the Arachnid exoskeleton, and as a Freeze-Frame Bonus you can briefly see the animatronic bust of Breckinridge's actor before his head pops open, looking like a creepy Unintentional Uncanny Valley face that contorts into a gaping, bloodied husk.
- As part of some delicious Fridge Horror, Rico gets punished for making Breckinridge take his helmet off, and while it's true that as a team leader Rico shouldn't have made him take it off in the middle of a simulated battle scenario, in the end it's still the Mobile Infantry's fault for using real ammo in the first place because the bullet was shot from below, thus the helmet would've done jack shit to preserve Breckinridge's life. He would've died regardless, Rico would've been held responsible unjustly, and this whole training with live ammo is simply a fatal firearm accident waiting to happen that can easily end the lives of precious recruits.
- The destruction of Buenos Aires through a meteor that was allegedly launched by the Arachnids. We only see the final moments before the disaster when Rico's parents notice the sky suddenly darkening as the transmission is cut off, then we're treated to newsreels that show the city being an unrecognizable furious blazing inferno, and later the disheartening aftermath of the survivors overlooking the ruins of the city and the victims, which includes a poor dog. Imagine being a citizen of Buenos Aires when the meteor struck: you're minding your own business during a completely normal sunny day, then something gets in the way of the Sun casting everything in a foreboding shadow, you look up and realize That's No Moon, but a gigantic fireball getting mercilessly bigger and dipping everything in its fiery light source right before the impact. It's safe to assume that Rico's parents and all the other casualties of the Bug Meteor must have died while being utterly and helplessly terrified.
- The Arachnids themselves are a nasty piece of work all around:
- You've mainly got the Warrior Bugs, which are essentially giant, walking CLAWS with extremely pointy arms that rush at you fearlessly with the only goal of either picking you up and crunching you in two or stab and tear you into shreds. The worst part is that they need PLENTY bullets to go down during a messy open battle, and even when one is nearly dead, its nerves have still enough forces to rise up and fatally wound the enemy, like the one that stabs Rico in the leg. They are even colored with yellow and black stripes, the classical "warning coloration" in the animal kingdom that is worn by poisonous frogs and wasps. Speaking of...
- The flying Hopper Bug. It's bad enough that it's essentially a Green and Mean Warrior Bug with wings, what's creepier is the strange, distorted elephant-like sound it makes, and it mainly kills its victims with its claws that can decapitate humans in one swoop, and similar to an Earth wasp, it has a pincer located on the rear end of its tail, which offers one of the worst displays of Arachnid violence when one Hopper Bug picks up Sergeant Gillespie and carries him up to a higher ground where it proceeds to seemingly stab him in the rear with the pincer continuously. The Hopper Bug wasn't just killing an enemy or picking up food, it was maliciously torturing Gillespie and planning a Cruel and Unusual Death for him if it wasn't for Rasczak performing a Mercy Kill.
- The giant Tanker Bug, that makes its presence known through Bad Vibrations before erupting from the ground, and when its sheer size and powerful limbs aren't squashing the puny humans, this Kaiju-sized beetle demonstrates to be capable of mowing down numerous people by spraying a stream of flammable, corrosive liquid from its head that brutally melts the enemy alive.
- The Brain Bug can almost come off as Ugly Cute compared to all the other Arachnids due to its multiple eyes and lack of threatening, pointy features. But make no mistake, the Brain Bug is a Fat Bastard Arachnid that can think and obtains enemy data by brutally draining the brain out of the humans' skulls, formulating strategic plans that takes the Mobile Infantry by surprise. Not to mention, General Owen showing Farley's corpse with a hole on the top of his head, explaining how the Brain Bug "got into his mind" and sent the Distress Call luring Rico's squad into a trap, meaning that it used Farley as a Dead Guy Puppet. Brrrrr.
- After the Rodger Young gets carved in half by the bug plasma, several crewmen are seen sucked out by explosive decompression.
- Even worse? Look very closely at the scenes outside the ship as it burns. You can see kicking human bodies floating in space.
- You don't even have to look closely. One of them lands on Carmen's windshield.
- The film's Comic-Book Adaptation takes a step further
by showing a man getting the innards messily squeezed out of him by the vacuum of space.
- As the Rodger Young is falling apart from the major enemy fire, Captain Deladier falls down on the bridge's threshold and gets crushed in two by emergency doors shutting down on her, causing Blood from the Mouth before dying right in front of Carmen and Zander.
- The Brain Bug drinking Zander's brains like a milkshake. You actually see and hear them sloshing through the bug's translucent sucker. And as pictured above, it leaves Zander with eyes rolled up white and a sunken, zombie-like face. Some of the deaths can come off as Bloody Hilarious, but Zander's fate is positively horrific.
- "It's afraid... IT'S AFRAID!" as creepy and brutal as the Arachnids are, the ending can have leave some audience members Rooting for the Empire given how the thing that gets everyone cheering and clapping is Carl confirming that to the Brain Bug, us humans have become its Nightmare Fuel, that we horrify the horror. The final propaganda transmission shows that the Brain Bug has been taken to a laboratory where the humans are "studying" it in ways that look less like zoologists at work, and instead the Hazmat Suit-clad scientist painfully stab the Brain Bug with nasty looking injections that look more like DRILLS, and finally one of them uses an unsettling instrument that looks like a mix between an injector and sharp tongs that the man forcefully shoves deep into the Brain Bug's vaginal face which gets censored as it purposefully resembles something non-consensual. The Brain Bug is an intelligent creature, and it's getting severely traumatized by these harsh, unorthodox treatments instead of attempting to communicate with it and try a peace negotiation to end the war.
- Finally, due to the militarized nature of the Federation, they simply cannot let the Bug War end in order to keep the human society in check and constantly at war against a common enemy, sustaining all the workers that produce and develop new weapons and star cruisers. Rico, Carmen and Carl have become the new cogs of the system, and all the horrors listed off in this page aren't gonna end anytime soon...
