Nightmare Fuel / Halo: Combat Evolved

Oh shit.

"Stay back! Stay back! You're not turnin' me into one of those things! I'LL BLOW YOUR BRAINS OUT! GET AWAY FROM MEEEEEE!!!! GAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!! Don't touch me you freaks, I won't be like you I'll die first! Find your own hiding place, the monsters are everywhere! Play dead... that's what I did, played dead... they took the live ones... oh god, I can still hear them... monsters! (AAAAAHHHHHH! AAAAAHAAAAH! AAAAAAHHAAAAHH!!) JUST LEAVE ME ALOOOOOONE!!! (Beat) Sarge...? Mendoza...? Bisenti...? All gone... the things took them... away away away... they went away... THEY'RE GONE!!! GET IT?! GONE!!!! They won't get me! Oh god... oh god, I don't wanna be like them please... please no... please noho..."

— The Marine on 343 Guilty Spark that just survived an encounter with the Flood

• Everything Flood-related, especially the first encounter with them in the level 343 Guilty Spark, which is loaded with creepy. See Bleak Level on the main page.
  • The downed Pelican ("We're under attack by an unknown enemy! It isn't Covenant!"). The abandoned artillery pieces are all facing away from you. The Grunts that used to flee at the mere sight of you run right into your killzone in a panicked retreat from something even scarier. Strange shadows and noises seem to follow you through the trees. "Allies" appear on the HUD, only to disappear almost immediately without any trace. You follow the trail of carnage into a vast, underground complex, all painted in Covenant blood and deserted save for one man, a wounded Marine so insane with terror that he can't tell friend from foe. You wander deeper and deeper into the ancient ruin and finally find what's left of the rest of his unit. You download the feed from one unfortunate soldier's helmet camera, watch the entire squad get slaughtered... and then your radar goes wild. Even Master Chief looked briefly disturbed after watching the video feed.
  • And the thing is that their introduction was a total surprise. There had been no signs in the instruction manual or anything in the game that indicated that it was going to turn into a horror movie. Yes, the Grunts were running away, but that could have been from anything. Everyone remembers when they first walked into the last room and suddenly a bunch of red dots appear on their radar, and then these jellyfish appear out of nowhere and start jumping at the screen.
• The Infection Forms seem to bounce off your shields, causing only minimal damage. A burst from the assault rifle can take down a lot of them at once. Surely the Flood are only a true threat for unarmored Marines, not a Mjolnir-equipped supersoldier like you. This is going to be easy. Then the Combat Forms show up...
  • The Pod Infectors don't always infect their victims either. According to the helmet cam footage Chief finds, Pod Infectors can literally tear open their victims' chests if they don't feel like infecting them. In fact, it's possible to find the brutally murdered Elites seen in the helmet cam footage in CE. Where they are exactly is unknown, but successfully finding them can guarantee Bring My Brown Pants for any player that so much as catches a glimpse of their mangled chests
  • Sticking with the horribly mutilated Elites here, there's no actual explanation for why the pod infectors scrambled the Elites' chests. It's possible that the Elites were attempting to forcefully remove them from their chests and ended up removing a little more than the infection forms. To make shit worse for you and your buddies, there are Elites that are disembowelled as well making it pretty obvious they were caught by surprise by combat forms that were able to rip their stomachs open before they could react, and you can actually see their innards and entrails still resting inside their stomachs. It's even more graphic if you're playing with the remastered graphics.
  • It appears that only the Elites were brutally murdered (unless you want to count the poor Jackal with Grunt Blood splattered all over the fucking walls).
  • Even taking away from the initial horror of the sudden appearance of space zombies, you've seen enough movies and played enough games to know that zombies are only dangerous up close. After all, they're shambling, mindless corpses, right? That tune very quickly changed upon your first encounter with these particular zombies carrying guns. Oh, and and it gets worse when you encounter zombies with rocket launchers.
• Seeing the Covenant get smacked with The Worf Effect in Keyes is horrifying, especially if you know what they've been capable of up to this point. That same faction which has been destroying scores of human planets and burning through the entire UNSC military with barely any effort is now getting their asses completely handed to them by the Flood.
  • 343 Guilty Spark features subtle examples of Enemy Mine between the Marines and the Covenant - the Chief can find human and jackal bodies lying next to each other with weapons scattered around them, the implication being that they stopped fighting each other to deal with the Flood. Yes, the Flood is so terrifying and dangerous that squads of humans and Covenant were willing to cooperate to deal with a far, far worse adversary. And it still didn't help one bit.
• Bungie recently had an article that talked about the creative origin of the Flood. Upon being shown a single still picture of just one Flood form, the ESRB demanded the game be given an M-Rating. And that's without the lovely things mentioned above.
• The Flood music themes. Features Ominous Ethereal Choir, "Psycho" Strings, and Scare Chords. Special mentions go to "Suite Autumn", "Shadows", the ambient section of the "Truth and Reconciliation Suite", and "Library Suite". Above them all stands the Flood's main theme, and likely the scariest song in the entire franchise, "Devils...Monsters...".
  • You thought the original Flood themes were scary? The Anniversary remixes turn the nightmare dial up to eleven: "Between Beams (Shadows)", "In the Substance of It" (not on the original OST), "Bad Dream (Trace Amounts)", "Dewey Decimate (Library Suite)", "Demons and Heretics (Devils, Monsters)", "Unfortunate Discovery (What Once was Lost)" (now sounds like a Sunn O))) drone doom piece), "Xenoarcheology (Alien Corridors)" and "Fragments".
• Pvt. Jenkins, who got overran by the Flood and remained conscious after transformation! In the second book, he made attempts to throw himself into harm's way, but as luck would have it, he ended up being the only Flood form they captured alive for study. Throughout the book, his mind and the Flood's mind are battling it out.
• Captain Keyes' fate, getting turned into an immobile mass of flesh, only to get the sweet release of death when Master Chief burns him.
  • According to the second book, he was slowly losing all his memories as the parasite took over. Towards the end, he was struggling to remember his own name! Furthermore, if you'd been around five minutes quicker, you'd be able to save him.
  • Not only that, but in the game, at the start of that particular level, you start RIGHT OUTSIDE the room he's in, but of course, you need to do the rest of the level first. Just take a peek through those grates to the right...
  • In Halo: Anniversary, under him, there's a terminal containing his last moments from his point of view. He's repeating his serial number, and they're rifling through his memories...We see Miranda and Dr Halsey, and those memories are being stolen, and he knows it, and his voice keeps switching between normal and Flood-toned. And then at the end, he swears, "You will not have me." And then the Flood speak again, and now it's the Gravemind: "We already do."
  • "Oh God. You don't want Earth. You want everything."
• Regarding non-Flood examples, pretty much all the aliens in the series look frightening in some way, whether they actually look scary like the Jackals or are just scary to fight against like the Hunters. It's made even worse in the first game by the fact that half the time you're in dim corridors and it's incredibly quiet, because of the suspense. Some more examples include:
  • The Grunts. Yes, you heard right. It's hard to comprehend since we're seeing everything through the eyes of a seven-foot-tall Super-Soldier, but they're still large aliens with disturbing-looking faces.
  • The Elites (especially camouflaged Zealots) when they roar or when they're right next to you and you bump into them.
  • The Hunters have no actual limbs. They're comprised of a bunch of worm-like things (1.4 meters) called Lekgolo that come together under their armor. In later games, they also make up the Scarabs.
    • The encounter with Hunters in The Silent Cartographer deserves special mention. It starts with being dropped onto the beach by a Pelican, surrounded by allies, as you storm through countless easy Covenant enemies and enjoy the pretty scenery around you. You even get a Warthog halfway through, making the level even easier than it already is. But wait, the trees up ahead look too dense to drive through, so you begrudgingly leave your allies behind and head forward, figuring that if it was easy so far, what's the worse that could be up ahead? Suddenly, you come upon a clearing, and in it are two, huge, lumbering, armor-plated aliens making loud groaning and roaring sounds in the distance. Though intimidated slightly, you step forward, figuring that they probably can't be as tough as they look, only to have them shoot a series of explosive green blasts at you. You try to close the distance a bit and hope that melee will be a bit more effective, only to fly several feet forward after realizing that one of them has hit you from behind. The next one then charges at you like a roaring, alien freight train, and swings its massive arm at you, killing you in an instant.
    • In Truth and Reconciliation, two of them drop down from the gravity lift while ominous music plays. At night. It's arguably worse. To make it even worse, the encounter on Truth and Reconciliation makes them seem unstoppable if it's your first time playing through a Halo game. Anyone who played Halo: CE as their first Halo game knows the sheer terror that pair brought upon you, cutting through all of your troops like they were nothing, deflecting sniper rifle bullets straight off of them, and grenades only making them flinch. However, the horror is slightly deflated when you eventually discover that a single pistol shot to their weak spot (their back) takes them out.
• Think of Master Chief from the Covenant's perspective. He's just one soldier, but he is perfectly capable of picking off entire squads one by one until every last fighter is dead and then moving on to repeat the process ad infinitum. There's a reason he's called "Demon" by them in the sequels.
• Type-33 Guided Munitions Launcher, more infamously known as the Needler, is basically a terror weapon incarnate. Homing crystalline spikes that not only embed themselves in your flesh but also explode, breaking bones, displacing organs and tissue, further dispersing tiny flechettes of crystal in and near the wound and commonly to nearby people. If hit by multiple shards, you are as good as dead, but just one is incredibly dangerous.
• The entire purpose of the enigmatic Halo array and the way it's slowly unveiled to you. At first, Halo is just presented as a mysterious megastructure with. There are various hints that it was built by the ancient Forerunners, but its true purpose is unknown at the time. Then you encounter the Flood. Along comes 343 Guilty Spark, who explains that Halo is a weapon designed to destroy The Flood. All is well and good, right? Then, just as you're about to activate Halo, Cortana explains its true function: Halo doesn't kill The Flood, it kills anything The Flood can infect. Each of the 7 Halo rings can emit a destructive pulse that wipes out just about all sentient life within a 25,000-light-year radius. Because the Forerunners figured that the only way to stop The Flood was to starve them to death, and the only way to do that is to kill an entire Galaxy. And as Halo 2 points out, the entire Covenant religion is based upon deliberately activating the rings.
  • One of the terminals in Halo: CE Anniversary has a (soon to be rampant) 343 Guilty Spark lament about how alone he is on Halo, guarding a weapon that has no target...which he says he could tune to any target.