Nightmare Fuel / The Death of Stalin

• Life in Stalin's Russia is not presented as a very nice place, particularly the prospect of people coming for you in the middle of the night.
  • It's mostly Played For Black Comedy, but seeing so many people offering to name names and blaming others for their "crimes", as well as always thinking they're under some kind of surveillance, is pretty frightening.
    • Look closely at the young man who denounced his father at the beginning - he's remarked to be cooperative, but he seems frightened and there are wounds/scrapes on his face.
  • Even something as mundane as loud and long rounds of applause becomes rather scary, since NKVD agents are in the room and watching everybody, indicating that the first person to stop clapping will be arrested ^note And yes, this is Truth in Television. Excessive applause actually became a problem, to the point that a bell would be sounded indicating the audience should be quiet..
• Stalin himself is terrifying. The very first scene he's in, Beria is showing him a list of people marked for arrest. One of them is a writer whose work Stalin likes, but he decides to keep him on. And when Beria asks about the writer's wife, Stalin answers, "On. They're a couple, aren't they?" And he says this with a smile on his face. Even Beria is a bit spooked by that.
• Even Stalin's inner circle are not safe from him. During a party, where everyone is drinking and joking around, Georgy Malenkov accidentally wonders aloud what happened to Polnikov, someone who Stalin had liquidated. The very second he brings the topic up, the room goes deathly silent and Stalin fixes Malenkov with a Death Glare and asks in a dangerously soft voice if he really wants to know about what happened to Polnikov. If it hadn't been for Beria distracting him with a prank on Khrushchev, Malenkov might not have lived past the night.
  • And then there's Molotov, a man who is unquestionably loyal to Stalin, even after he ordered his wife's arrest. Beria mentions offhand that he's on the list of enemies. Why? Apparently for no reason at all. One's fate in the Soviet Union is dependent entirely on the whims of Stalin, no matter how high up they are and his good mood is all that stands between them and the gulag or a bullet.
  • Once he gets home, Khrushchev begins listing off all of the jokes he made during the night with Stalin, and most importantly, detailing whether Stalin laughed or not. It shows the lengths that people will go to make sure they stay within the dear leader's good graces.
    Khrushchev: I made a joke about the farmers.
    Nina: Did Stalin laugh?
    Khrushchev: Yeah. I made a joke about the navy. No laugh.
    Nina: No more navy jokes.
• Lavrentiy Beria. Head of the NKVD, Stalin's personal executioner who he called "his Heinrich Himmler", a serial rapist. All in all, a power-hungry and very despicable person. And he was even worse in real life if you can believe that.
  • There's one particular scene that opens with him staring down the audience in an interrogation room with a big grin on his face, looming over the audience and being generally unnerving.
  • When Beria rushes to the dacha after Stalin's collapse, he's giving instructions to an aide about how to get a confession out of a prisoner. He tells him to loudly torture the man's wife where he can clearly hear her to get him to talk. When his aide comments that the man's wife would do anything to get him released, Beria sneers, "Yeah, and she did everything. I thank the union for bringing me so many devoted wives who fuck like sewing machines."
  • When Georgy Malenkov expresses his desire to have Beria given a fair trial, Khrushchev is having none of it, as he knows just what Beria will do if he somehow manages to escape his fate.
    Malenkov: No. No! He deserves a fair trial! He's one of us!
    Khrushchev: What about Tukhachevsky and Pyatakov? Did they get a trial? What about Sokolnikov, who begged him to look after his elderly mother? And what did this monster do? He strangled her in front of him! It's too late. The only choice we have is between his death or his revenge.
  • Beria's show trial, ending with him screaming for mercy before he's shot, is as harrowing as it is satisfying. So many times before, Beria had been on the other side, condemning countless innocent people to death or the gulags. Now he's in the same position as them.
    Beria: No, please! Please, don't shoot me! Don't hurt me!
• There's something very unnerving about the constant chorus of "Long live Stalin! *BANG!*" in the scenes in the NKVD prison.
• Nikita Khrushchev spends the first third of the film as a total Butt-Monkey who can't scheme to save his life. And then we get a reminder that he's just as cold-blooded and murderous as the rest of the Presidium, when he orders the trains into Moscow to resume, knowing that the NKVD will open fire on anyone who tries to enter the city, and that the resulting bloodshed will allow him to undermine Beria.
  Khrushchev: New security orders: restart the trains. Let the people back into Moscow. They deserve to see the old man. Let's see how Beria's goons cope with that.
  • The subsequent riot and reaction of the Presidium as a result of this move is also quite disturbing. The NKVD massacring those attempting to enter Moscow is one of the few moments of violence which is played for genuine terror and without any hint of Black Comedy, and the Presidium (all of them) are far more concerned with finding someone besides themselves to blame for it rather than displaying any real concern for the victims.
• The round-up/massacre of the staff at Stalin's dacha. All those people liquidated simply because they were inconvenient. One of the NKVD members nonchalantly blows his comrade's brains out for no apparent reason. Mercifully, this never happened in real life.
• Weirdly, even the end credits manage to have an element of this - various shots from the film are presented as old photographs which then slowly become doctored with people's faces scratched out, Beria being replaced by a Soviet flag, people fully removed from the picture, and so on. The fact that the Soviet Union did actually engage in this as an exercise in revisionism makes the whole thing somewhat chilling.
• The list of Beria's rape and molestation victims read out by Khrushchev during his trial is particularly harrowing and shows how truly evil Beria was, causing even his fellow presidium members and others present to howl for his blood. Tellingly, Beria stops complaining about the Kangaroo Court and falls deathly silent at this point, indicating that however trumped-up the other charges may be, these accusations are completely true.
  Khrushchev: You are also accused of 347 counts of rape, of sexual deviancy and bourgeois immorality and acts of perversion with children as young as seven years old [...] Petra Nikova, aged 13. Nadia Ranova, aged 14. Magya Holovic, aged 7. Would you like to read the list yourself?!
• When Zukhov's men are arresting Beria's staff, the commanding officer makes a point to tell them to search the bedrooms. They end up rescuing a young girl with a Thousand-Yard Stare; given what Beria is known for, it's not hard to imagine why.^note A deleted scene all-but-confirmed that was indeed the reason.