Now you see me, now you wish you didn't.
One must keep in mind that Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi has several horror elements, and the production team behind The Untamed didn't forget this fact.Warning: Spoilers Off applies to these pages. Proceed at your own risk.
Pre-Time Skip
- Any time that resentful energy affects Wei Wuxian, he hears tortured screaming.
- The water ghosts. They're octopus-like creatures made of seaweed that overturn boats or knock people overboard.
- The dancing statue and the puppets it turns people into. You expect the statue to start moving when it first appears, but it stays still again... and again... Just when you think it isn't going to move, it does. Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji have difficulty defeating it. When it's finally stopped moving they look out the door and see a whole crowd of its puppets coming for them.
- A flashback shows the statue stealing the souls of Wen Qing's family. Wen Qing, who was just a child, saw it happen.
- People hear knocking and screaming from an abandoned manor, so Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng go to investigate. They hear something knocking the door. When they open it they find two corpses hanging inside. Further in the manor are the bodies of everyone who lived there, covered in blood and with blank white eyes.
- In Episode 12, Wei Wuxian is detained by the Wen Clan. While he acts nonchalant about it, his mood changes immediately when he realizes that he'll be sharing his cell with a very ferocious-looking dog. It doesn't help that Xiao Zhan does a perfect job in portraying Wei Wuxian's trauma and fear, with Lu Zhixing nailing his screams. And by the end of it, Wei Wuxian is a complete mess, looking deathly pale, bloody, and completely frazzled. Not even the novel or the donghua attempted something like this; and it would be hard to blame Wei Wuxian if he will never get over his trauma.
- As Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji and their fellow prisoners explore the cave, something watches them from the water. We don't see what it is.
- When the creature in the water finally appears, it looks like a giant snake. But unlike snakes it has eyelids and teeth, and it has a shell like a turtle. The more we see of it, the less it looks like a snake and the more it looks like an Animalistic Abomination.
- Inside the Xuanwu of Slaughter's shell, Wei Wuxian only starts showing fear when he discovers humanoid figures wrapped in some kind of slime. When he inspects one of the figures, he sees their very human face and recoils back.Wei Wuxian: It not only eats human flesh, but also digests their spirits.
- Both horrifying and upsetting, but the series spares no details about the massacre of Lotus Pier. The audio drama is only very vague, and the donghua only showed the aftermath, but in The Untamed we get to see everyone in the Jiang Clan getting killed off, from the leaders down to the youngest disciple. Worse yet, some of the bodies are hung up later on for display whilst the Wens are celebrating their takeover.
- The Cold-Blooded Torture Wei Wuxian suffers when he's captured by the Wens. To start with he's badly beaten and left with bruises on his face. Then Wang Lingjiao cuts open the burned mark on his chest. And then they throw him into the Burial Mounds.
- The Burial Mounds bombard Wei Wuxian with a cacophony of restless screaming.
- As Episode 20 reveals, the series closely follows the novel in terms of how brutal Wei Wuxian deals with the Wens. While he doesn't make Wang Lingjiao choke on a chair leg, he has her scar her own face before making her hang herself. With Wen Chao, he frightens him with apparitions of his lover as a ghost, and it's enough to make Wen Chao madly ramble and kowtow. And that's before the flaying starts...
- Even with the Autocannibalism removed from the torture, it would be hard to blame anyone to feel grossed out when they see the bloodied state Wen Chao is in, even if he deserved it.
- Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng and other cultivators arrive shortly after Wei Wuxian attacks the Wens. They find the courtyard full of bodies, some of them frozen in place with expressions of fear. In the background we hear the eerie, high-pitched sound of Wei Wuxian's flute, one of the few times a flute becomes Hell Is That Noise.
- The Hundred Holes Curse.
- When Wen Ning attacks Jin Zixuan, Wen Ning has two pupils and two irises in each eye. It's deeply unsettling even for Wen Ning.
- Jin Zixuan's death. Wei Wuxian is trying to calm Wen Ning down, when with no warning he punches his fist right into Jin Zixuan's chest. Wei Wuxian can only watch, horrified, as Jin Zixuan dies.
- Wei Wuxian after just witnessing his elder sister being killed in front of him followed by everyone blaming him for anything he's done, he finally snaps. He holds up the Stygian Tiger Amulet and tosses it into the crowd. Everyone literally turns on each other as they stab, maim and kill their allies as they try to grab the object, blinded by their greed for power. Wei Wuxian noticing their hypocrisy starts to cackle madly as he watches the blood bath ensue. His last string of sanity had been broken, and yet he doesn't even care anymore because all he can do is laugh.
Post-Time Skip
- The evil spirit that attacks in the first episode. It turns its victims' left hands into monstrous talons that look like they're rotting, and in one case it choked its victim to death with their own hand.
- Wen Ning's first appearance. His eyes are black, he's bound in chains, and his neck has black marks on it that look like veins. He doesn't move or react to anything except when Wei Wuxian plays the flute.
- It's unsettling when Jin Ling, under a swell of tense noise, suddenly sits up and opens his eyes in the swords catacombs. His gaze is empty, he doesn't blink, and he tries to step back into the hole in the wall he was trapped in. Props to Qi Peixin for playing this moment so intensely.
- Wei Wuxian discovers how Wen Ning was kept under control: two long needles stabbed into his skull.
- Xue Yang disguising himself as Xiao Xingchen all the way down to how his face appears and his voice sounds to others comes across as very unsettling, such as when we're effectively seeing Xiao Xingchen's face sport a chilling and bloody Slasher Smile. If anything, Song Jiyang deserves props for effectively pulling it off.
- The flashback to Xue Yang living with Xiao Xingchen and A-Qing. They take him in when he's injured and let him live with them. He repays them by tricking Xiao Xingchen into murdering innocent villagers, turning Song Lan into a puppet, driving Xiao Xingchen to suicide, then torturing and murdering A-Qing.
- Xiao Xingchen confronts Xue Yang about massacring the Chang clan because one of them broke his finger. Xue Yang's response shows just how monstrous he is.Xiao Xingchen: But why did you have to kill his entire family? Does one of your fingers need over fifty lives to equal the cost?Xue Yang: Of course! The finger is mine, but the lives are theirs. No matter how many I kill, it will never be enough. It was only fifty people. How can it equal to one of my fingers?
- Then he reveals the Awful Truth about the "puppets" he made Xiao Xingchen kill. They weren't puppets at all; they were living people whose tongues Xue Yang cut out.
- After Nie Mingjue kicks Jin Guangyao down the stairs of Koi Tower, his qi deviation starts kicking in. Jin Guangyao notices this and smiles, while taking a steady and deliberate Unflinching Walk back up the stairs to taunt Nie Mingjue.
- Nie Mingjue's death by qi deviation isn't pretty to watch either, either by him randomly slashing illusions of Jin Guangyao and yelling in rage, or him bleeding from his eyes and mouth (and if you look closely, his torso is also bursting in bloody holes). And all the while, Jin Guangyao watches with a cold smile, which he easily replaces with a distressed front when Nie Huaisang arrives at the scene.
