Nightmare Fuel / Emesis Blue

"You ever have bad dreams?"

Jeremy: What did you see, Doc?
Ludwig: You don't want to know...

Emesis Blue is a Surreal Psychological Horror tale set in the Team Fortress 2 universe and despite how wacky and insane the source material is, it still manages to deliver a completely mind-boggling and heart-pounding story.

Moment Subpages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.

---

• Right off the bat, the beginning of the film shows a series of respawn experiments conducted on the Tenth Class - dressed as an ordinary American GI (from "Day of Defeat: Source") - in the style of an Analog Horror. The results of each are horrifying and only get worse as the trials continue.
  • Keep in mind that excluding one shot, we never see the Tenth Class in detail, only getting his shadowy figure, leaving most of the details up to the imagination.
  • The first respawn seems completely fine at first, with the Tenth Class returning physically intact. Then he says that "It's eternity in there!" and then collapses to his knees. This quote is taken directly from the short story ''The Jaunt'' by Stephen King, wherein teleportation is a common mode of transport but must not under any circumstances be taken while conscious. This is because to a conscious mind, a jaunt takes an unfathomable amount of time to conclude and invariably drives people insane if they jaunt while awake, trapped in a white void with only their thoughts for company, with what seems like eternity but is actually just a few seconds. The Poor Tenth Class must have believed himself to have spent aeons in respawn limbo, unable to do anything about it. And this is only the first of the trials.
  • The second trial seems similar to the first initially. Then the Tenth Class simply states that his eyes hurt and we get a blurry close-up of his face that quickly comes into focus so that we can see the effects of the second trial in all their gory glory. We see his eyes gouged out, with blood leaking from the cavities. The implication is that either the Respawn Machine malfunctioned and destroyed his eyes upon respawn or he gouged them out himself after going through the same experiences of the first trial.
  • The third trial shows the Tenth Class undergoing some pretty violent bodily spasms after respawning. Unlike the first two he is silent and makes no comment and the camera stays on him for an uncomfortably long period of time. Afterwards it cuts to a closer shot of the Tenth Class which lets the viewer see just how violent his shakes are, all while keeping him in the shadows, giving us zero indication of what he looks like after respawning.
  • The fourth and final trial is the most terrifying because of just how little is shown. The door to the Respawn Machine stays shut, leaving the viewer anticipating the effects of the respawn. Then a faint banging noise starts that is likely coming from the other side of the Respawn Machine. The sound increases in speed and volume, all the while, a dark fluid that is most likely blood starts coating the floors, door and windows of the Respawn Machine. The shot is then abruptly bathed in dark red, with a black round square placed over where the left window would be. While this could be a graphical glitch of the tapes, it could also be a conscious effort to obscure what became of the Tenth Class when he came into view.
• The shots in the trailer and ancillary media show Jeremy's mom eerily looking over the corner with her face covered in shadow. It's scary enough without context, but the full movie makes it worse because that isn't actually her... but rather her severed head being waved around by someone to toy with Jeremy, in what is widely described as the most disturbing scene in the movie.
  • The scene in general gradually mounts the signs that something is deeply wrong from the moment Jeremy looks away from the TV to when the final reveal happens. The murderers take advantage of Jeremy's condition and the volume of the TV to murder and decapitate his mother in the next room over, leaving clues by replacing the dinner in the oven with some unknown fleshy mass, and rearranging the chessboard less than a foot from his seat while he's zoned out that only serve to hammer home how hopeless his situation is once he notices them all at once.
    • It gets worse. As pointed out by comments on Emesis Blue and video essays analyzing it, several of the mother's lines sound off in terms of pitch. "So how was the doctor, dear?" and "Dinner's ready, dear." are prime examples of this- it sounds more like someone edited various recorded lines together. Her opening line "Where the hell have you been? You're soaked!" has a similar quality, most noticeable between the two sentences, albeit to a lesser extent. Since we never see her, it's possible and likely she was killed before Scout got home, and he was unknowingly walking into a trap.
• Jeremy's death. While trying to escape, he gets spotted by the Conagher brothers and they decide to punish him. Maynard strikes first by shooting him in the legs with a wrangled sentry, and after taunting him a little, Zed drags him into another room and brutally tortures him to death with an electric drill. Thankfully it's not shown on screen, but Jeremy's piercing screams make it horribly clear how agonizingly painful the whole process is for him. It's made even worse by the fact that Ludwig is forced to hear the entire thing and later finds Jeremy's body after he's killed Zed and Maynard; we don't see the body, but Ludwig's horrified reaction says all you need to know about what Zed did to him with that drill.
  • On a similar note, the death of the officer who pulled over The Undertaker. We only get to hear the poor bastard's blood curdling scream over the radio, followed by static.
• During Ludwig's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Maynard Conagher, he knocks the man's helmet and goggles off—where there should be eyes, there are only two blank walls of flesh.
  • Maynard doesn't scream, or fight back, or even react negatively in any way. Instead, with blank eyes and a mouth of broken teeth, he gives Ludwig a bone-chilling chuckle.
• Almost all of the Slaugherhouse Mercenaries are terrifying in different ways.
  • The Creature, a being that stands out even amongst the Slaughterhouse mercs with its completely feral mannerisms, freakishly long limbs and uncanny elongated fingers make it incredibly terrifying. The way it's almost always hidden in shadows and out of sight, alongside its strange movement and the sounds it makes make it as memorable as it is horrifying.
  • When the Detective is the Butcher's prisoner, they take off their mask and it seems like we'll get a Gory Discretion Shot. And then the Butcher steps into the shadows and illuminates their face with a lighter, revealing just how disfigured they are underneath. Lovely.
  • The Hunter's face is permanently stuck in a wide and painful-looking rictus grin. That would be creepy enough on its own, but when you combine it with his mannerisms it makes him seem completely wrong, like a being that used to be human but has been warped and twisted so much that there are no words that can accurately describe it anymore.
    • Speaking of the Hunter, he was creepy even before his physical mutation. In his first appearance, he growls like a rabid animal.
• Conagher Slaughterhouse is basically what would happen if you take 2Fort and turn into an Eldritch Location warped by the unspeakable things that have happened inside it. Even ignoring the horrific abominations shambling around the place, there are all sorts of oddities that make it clear that the Slaughterhouse's existence is fundamentally wrong.
  • Space and time are completely fluid, allowing characters to observe, enter and interact with places and events removed both spatially and temporally. This means that at any given moment of the film, there is the possibility that characters are being watched by one of the many horrors of the Slaughterhouse (or even a future/past version of themselves), even after they have already been killed.
  • Underneath the Slaughterhouse are eight-hundred thousand corpses left over from the experiments done with the Respawn Machine. They are transported through a vast network of tubes like blood through capillaries into a pit that looks like a gateway to Hell. And in the penultimate part, Jane ends up falling into the pit while trying to escape Stalingrad, and has to fight his way back to the surface.
• One scene has Jane coming across a war room, with a bunch of dusty skeletons in formal/military clothing in various poses, as if they died there and no one ever found them. However, the scare comes in where Soldier, listening in on a phone call from Archibald to Blutarch, looks up at the map to look at the big glowing red spot on New Mexico, only to turn back around...and all the skeletons are now somehow staring at him.
• Ludwig attempting to manually respawn Jeremy through the respawn terminal. The file is corrupted, but he initiates the process anyways. The process is almost complete when a "FATAL ERROR" message starts flashing onscreen, and there's a horrific groaning sound as a deluge of blood floods out the respawn door.
  • That's not just blood. The terminal was reconstructing Jeremy's genome, organs, and metabolic functions before it went horribly wrong, so what came through that door was essentially Jeremy's liquefied remains. Though, it's probably for the best that he didn't come back; with his file corrupted, there's no way to assure that he wouldn't have come back so, so much worse than before...
• The final shot reveals that Ludwig seemingly died mid-drive and crashed into a telephone pole, and his corpse is less than appealing. From the way his eyes are bulging out of their sockets, to the fact that he is decomposing while keeping an unnerving grin, it either shows he has been dead for quite a while, or his resurrection abilities took a toll on his body.

---