Nightmare Fuel / Corpse Bride

• The teaser trailer cleverly chose to scare us all by having In the Hall of the Mountain King as its music.
• The grim, stifling Land Of the Living, a satire of Victorian England, which is so soul crushingly miserable that even colour is rare! Almost everyone shown is unhappy, cruel, selfish or apathetic, with Victor and Victoria some of the few people who seem to have any positive emotions at all. It's really telling that the Land Of the Dead is much preferable to being alive in this setting. Thankfully, it's lessened somewhat by the end.
• At at the beginning of the movie, two men greet each other by bowing. Immediately afterward, Lord Barkis appears out of nowhere. It might have been a mistake, or a way to show how creepy the guy is... and how he snuck up on Emily right before murdering her.
• Victor screwing up the wedding, at least from his perspective. Being on the receiving end of those scathing glares from his parents and Victoria's parents must not have been very pleasant.
• The scene where Victor puts the ring on what he thought of as a twig... and the subsequent coming-to-"life" of Emily.
  • After he places the ring on the "twig's" finger, things begin to take a turn. The wind begins to blow and Victor looks up to see every tree branch has a raven alit on it, all watching him. Then the arm reaches up and grabs him, yanking him (or his arm anyway) into the dirt, as if trying to drag him down below physically.
  • After Victor tosses Emily's dismembered arm away, the ground where she was buried begins to be violently pounded from below before she crawls out of the dirt, clawing her way up, her face shrouded. She brushes the veil and you could never believe the completion of a vow could sound so creepy.
    Emily: ...I do...
  • The chase scene right after Emily comes back to life. Imagine being chased through a cold, dark forest at night by a rotting corpse in a wedding dress that came back from the dead after you jokingly put a ring on its finger, with Offscreen Teleportation and Jump Scare in full effect.
    • The Jump Scare of Victor suddenly turning around and Emily is right behind him. From Victor's POV, her next action could be considered one as well.
      Emily: You may KISS the Bride...
• The first part of the movie, from Victor's POV. Sure, the Dead eventually turn out to be more pleasant than the living, but this kind of story is very common in old European myth, where the dead are not anything you want to interact with.
• Truly, stop-motion animation is the creepiest medium ever, and there's something unnerving about that cheery "We all pass away" song.
  • The scene, in silhouette, where Lord Barkis looms over Emily, and she screams... "And then, baby, everything went black..."
• Emily herself is normally very kind and gentle, especially towards Victor. Doesn't mean she can't look absolutely frightening when she wants to, especially towards Victor.
  • She even pulls off a Kubrick Stare at one point.
  • The moment where Emily drags Victor back to the Land of the Dead right in front of Victoria. It's like something you'd expect out of a straight-up supernatural horror film such as Evil Dead or The Exorcist.
  • The way she says hopscotch. You wouldn't think such an innocuous word could be made to sound terrifying, but Emily certainly managed it.
    • In the German dub, it gets even more unsettling, since the magic word to say there is Heaven and HELL.
• The coachman Mayhew dying from his Incurable Cough of Death, and Victor's parents don't even notice.
  • Even worse, Victor's parents are never seen again after this.
• Lord Barkis grabbing Victoria and violently shaking her.
  • The fact that Lord Barkis killed Emily for her money, and was going to do the same to Victoria and got away with it for years is terrifying. Especially since he could have done the same thing to others and no one would know.
  • There is also the Fridge Horror of Emily's family never knowing what happened to her. Her body was left in the woods and obviously wasn't discovered by anyone until Victor came along. Her family may have assumed she eloped with Barkis, but still she disappeared one night and they would never really have known why.
• And of course the Ironic Echo near the end. Mrs. Plum says it, and she's caressing a fork in her hands, so did they...?
  Mrs. Plum: "New arrival..."
  • And even if they didn't, an eternity of being tortured by the dead isn't a pleasant perspective either. But, of course, Barkis deserved every second of it.
• After Emily transforms into a cloud of moths, moving on at last, it leaves you wondering, "Why doesn't that happen to everyone? Are they stuck in that nightmarish town of the dead forever?"
  • The fact that the rest of the town gets to stay in their happy afterlife, but what happens to Emily? She's just gone.
    • This gets mitigated when you realize that Emily turned into butterflies, not moths and remember the symbolism of butterflies. Emily's not "just gone", she's managed to move on and ascend to the actual afterlife while the rest of the undead exist on earth until they move on too.

---