Nightmare Fuel / Wendell & Wild

This is what happens when you get the horrific geniuses that brought to life such creatures as The Other Mother and The Tethered together on a film. You get a film with equal parts laughs and dread.

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• The incident that took Kat's parents is more tragic than anything, but it's also pretty scary. The worm in the little girl's apple had two monstrous-looking heads for one thing. Also, there are few fates worse than being trapped in a flooding car while sinking into the abyss.
• Lord Buffalo Belzer's Scream Faire. It's an Amusement Park of Doom for the souls of the damned located on his enormous belly, and befitting such a Hellish place, it's as dementedly horrifying as it is darkly humorous.
  • First, souls are carried to the Faire Soul Jockeys (already some gnarly-looking crow/harpy demons), and into Belzer's mouth. After an unsettling trip through his body, they're thrust onto one of the many rides.
  • The roller coasters are made so that they crash into each other.
  • The Ferris Wheel has a tank full of skeleton electric eels for souls to be dunked into.
  • Perhaps the most unsettling one is a spinning teacup ride with a giant teapot looming over the souls. Every so often, an unlucky cup is filled with scalding tea, causing the souls to burn in agony.
  • The swing ride goes so fast some souls are sent flying over Belzer's head.
  • And throughout it all, Belzer is laughing it up while his sons toil away while regrowing his hair.
• The moment Kat discovers she's a Hell Maiden. During a demonstration featuring a mimic octopus, she approaches it, and it turns into a demonic-looking beast with a Skull for a Head. The desk suddenly starts to shake with supernatural energy, and she gains a toothy mouth on her hand! She's understandably freaked out by this.
• The Klaxons quickly prove how dark they are by killing Father Bests with a golf club and tossing the corpse in a frozen lake. We actually see the poor man's corpse sink to the water as Irmgard and Lane look on in satisfaction:
  Irmgard: Drowning is so peaceful.
  Lane: Indeed, sweet Irmgard.
  • Just how quickly they decide on killing Father Bests, just for the very idea that he might betray them.
  Lane: (whispering to Irmgard) Pop his clogs.
• The part where the demon twins test the cream on a tick by squashing it a couple times is guaranteed to make some people squirm at how visceral it is.
• Father Bests immediately pukes gallons of water upon being brought Back from the Dead by Wendell and Wild. While it's mostly Played for Laughs, it's still unsettling. But nowhere near as unsettling as what Bests now looks like. Irmgard hit him so hard in the back his spine dislocated, and now he looks like a pale-skinned hunchback.
  • His announcement the following day. Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated, says he on the speaker. Everyone treates it like a miracle except for Kat, Raul, and especially Helley. And worse, it's clear undeath has made him a lot less moral.
• Even Wendell and Wild can be quite menacing while in demon mode, complete with glowing eyes and creepy deep voices. First time is when they threaten to kill Father Best after thinking he won't pay for their dream faire. Second time is when they caught Raul using the hair cream on Kat's parents. Even Belzer sensed that something's wrong up there. Not-So-Harmless Villains, indeed.
• Upon swearing eternal servitude to Wendell and Wild, Kat's Hell Maiden mouth covers her own to speak "swear it" in her place. Even worse, it wakes up Belzer from below...
• The old-guard members being resurrected as zombies. Unlike the other cadavers in the movie, they've been in the ground for so long that they're now skeletons. And they're still able to vote in the Klax Corp Prison's favor.
  • At one point, The Colonel opens his mouth to reveal a bunch of worms crawling out.
• Belzer interrogating the Soul Jockeys who helped his sons get to the Land of the Living. At first, he seems to let them off the hook...then he crushes them all. It just shows how Faux Affably Evil he can be.
• The full scope of the Klaxons' true intentions in regards to their prison, as Siobhan deduces. Basically, Rust Bank gets bulldozed (and as we learn later, flooded with unused brew first), the prison gets built, the school is rigged so that troubled youths have no chance at rehabilitation, and they're all crammed into what the Klaxons are quite excited to make into a Hellhole Prison they'll be forced to stay in forever. All in the name of profit. Needless to say, their daughter is horrified by all of this, as should anyone in the know now.
  • It's so much worse when you consider that they drove the town to poverty in the first place by burning down the brewery. These two despicable human beings, not demons, were that willing to condemn hundreds of lives to a living Hell just for an extra buck.
  • Really, this whole thing reads as a damning commentary on the mere concept of Private Profit Prisons. The notion that one can make hundreds of bucks based on how many prisoners are in jail instead of how many get rehabilitated is scary for just how depressingly real it is.
• Kat's time in the Redemption Chamber is meant to break the hold on her that her Hell Maiden hand has, but it also means facing her past, this time rendered in spooky shadows and green lighting, the kind of thing one would expect from the likes of Selick. Aside from her parents' deaths, she was sent to a clearly greedy Orphanage of Fear. But the real scary part is what got her in Juvie in the first place; it was when she pushed a bully down a long flight of stairs, severely hurting or maybe even killing him. And then, all of her insecurities and rage turn into a towering borderline - Mechanical Abomination wreathed in chains and made with the orphanage as a base, the car with her parents as the torso, a prison gate for a mouth, and her Cyclops boom box as the head. Then it starts beating itself up, symbolizing the sheer self-loathing Kat has.
  • After she's able to own her memories, Kat sees Sister Helley collapse and hit her head on the ground, leaking very visible blood. It's not at all severe, but it's the first time any animated character has shed blood in a Henry Selick animation.
• Once Buffalo Belzer finds out where his sons are, he wastes no time coming up the Land of the Living and destroying half of the cemetery just by rising out of the ground. His first line on Earth doesn't help matters for our heroes.
  Bufflo Belzer: Fee-fi-fo-fum! I smell the blood of two thieving bums!!!
  • When he rises, his Scream Faire is destroyed, sending all of the souls into the water below to get attacked by the now loose electric eels.
• Upon seeing their daughter joining our heroes against Klax Corp, Irmgard lets out an almost inhuman shriek, and demands that they carry out with the demolition with her in the crossfire anyway.