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Nightmare Fuel / Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

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WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.
  • The assassination of Jose Barrera: Imagine someone just minding their business working a drive-thru, and a random lady (T-X) drives up and asks for them by name. Next, she's at the pick-up window, makes a positive ID, and open-fires in a seemingly random shooting, horrifying everyone in the vicinity.
  • Likewise, the guy who has a party at his house who answers the door to T-X asking for him and his sister. After he confirms his identity and that his sister is upstairs, T-X immediately kills him and is about to kill his sister.
  • A disguised T-X is in the backseat of a police car. She makes her arm go through the driver's seat and the driver.
  • There's a creepy scene where Kate's fiance Scott wakes up, thinking that Kate is sitting on his bed. "Kate" turns out to be the T-X, who contorts her upper body 180 degrees to face him before murdering him with her buzzsaw. Later on, the T-850 tries to hit her repeatedly full-on with a fire extinguisher. Her head does a full 360-degree spin, and she tilts her head with a disapproving and nonchalant expression.
    • In fact, thanks to artificial liquid steel lubrication, the T-X's chassis is capable of moving its actuators in ways even older Terminator models can't do. The way the T-X contorts her entire body while fighting the T-850 can be creepy at the first view.
  • John learning from the T-850 that he is already dead in the future the T-850 was sent back from. Worse, the T-850 tells him very nonchalantly that he is the one who killed him. Imagine being told when and how you will die by your future killer.
  • Doubles as Fridge Horror when the T-850, in the final battle with the T-X at Crystal Peak, tells John to run and that "we will meet again". John clearly knows how THAT meeting is going to end for him.
  • T-X growling and snarling like a feral animal when she's about to die and John is about to survive.
    • To add further to this, as she's furiously struggling to get out of the T-850's hold of her, the last of the T-X's liquid metal skin forms along her face. The audience gets an up-close view of her face screaming and contorting with rage. Combined with the harsh flames in the background, the silver color of the skin against the machinery, and the face barely clinging to her head, it makes for quite a terrifying sight. She looks as if she's a demon who's trying to break out of a small opening from Hell.
    • Even more, her metallic face is more detailed than ever.
  • The ending gives us the rather chilling sequence of the nuclear missiles being launched on Judgment Day. With a soft violin piece playing in the background just in case the imagery wasn't enough.
  • On a more existential note, the whole idea that you can avert destiny is revealed to not be true. In a serious case of realistic consequences, Cyberdyne didn't suffer from No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup and sold the information about Skynet to the Air Force when they went bankrupt. All Sarah and John managed to do was postpone Judgement Day from 1997 to 2004. And in the end, when John and Kate think they have a chance to finally stop Skynet, it turns out the site that they thought held Skynet's main core is just a fallout shelter. They couldn't stop Judgement Day. All they could do was survive it.
    • What's worse is that '"there was no system core'' in the first place. There would've been one to destroy in 1997, but the 7 year delay and leap in technology allowed for Skynet to spread through computers all across the globe, something that would not have been possible during its original inception. Essentially, the delay only made Skynet stronger.
  • The Sgt. Candy deleted scene. It's Played for Laughs, but that's part of what makes it feel... creepy. One of the default faces of the T-800 model is a delightful Southern-accented soldier named Candy, who has no idea that his appearance will become the face of terror...
    • To add a little Fridge Horror, imagine if John, Sarah or any Resistance fighter from the future met Sergeant Candy. Even worse if the technician from whom the T-800 got his voice just happened to be in the same room.
    • Then there is the fact that Sergeant Candy shares the likeness of a mass murderer who is wanted for multiple counts of homicide, including the seventeen police officers killed at the West Highland Police Station massacre in 1984, in addition to other crimes, such as blowing up Cyberdyne's offices and grievously wounding multiple SWAT men in 1995. One wonders how Candy would have reacted had he seen the security footage of the incidents...

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