Follow TV Tropes

This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Following

Nightmare Fuel / JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders

Go To

https://mediaproxy.tvtropes.org/width/1000/https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/cfcefeff_cecb_486a_b984_76985c96af18.jpeg
All it takes is one small injury, and suddenly, there's a monster under your skin.
If we had to sum up all the terrors that plague the Stardust Crusaders in one word, it would be this: DIO, who not only has a new Story-Breaker Power that makes him nigh-unstoppable, but his own legions of Stand users with very unsettling powers that invoke psychological and physical horror, on top of the majority looking like regular people or even animals, so everything the heroes meet along their journey might potentially be an assassin sent to kill them.

Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned!


  • Jotaro's unsettlingly calm anger is this in-universe for almost everyone around him, but we never really feel that as the audience, since we know he doesn't emote because he believes that makes him easy to read... and then we get a moment in the anime adaptation, after Steely Dan taunts Jotaro's inability to save Joseph from him, a look of sorts at Jotaro's state of mind. A closeup of Jotaro's Death Glare on a black backdrop immersed in a red flame with what can only be described as screaming static blaring. It only lasts for a few seconds, but that short moment is downright chilling. You get a realistic murderous vibe from Jotaro; one that's rightfully deserved for a scumbag like Steely Dan, but still.
  • Because DIO's abilities as a vampire weren't creepy enough, he gets another creepy ability: being able to implant Flesh Buds that subtly brainwash victims. How does he do this? By turning his hair into grotesque tentacles that slither into the victim's body and veins. Even Joseph is creeped out by them at one point. Episode 40 of the anime also gives us Kakyoin's recollection of when DIO did this to him, complete with a first-person view of the tentacle entering his brain. Naturally, it's utterly disturbing.
  • Think about what it is like from the perspective from normal people watching nearby Stand battles in public. At first, they are wondering why a few people would start yelling at each other like they are doing LARP. Next thing they know, injuries spontaneously appear out of nowhere between those people and they start spasming, shortly before at least one of them gets hurled to the ground or explodes into gore. No wonder Jotaro thought he was being haunted by a ghost in the first episode.
  • Tower of Gray. A Stand that looks like a massive stag beetle. Its main method of killing — namely, by literally ripping out the tongues of people — is pretty disgusting.
    • Tower of Gray may be a Starter Villain, but it has a massive body count. Multiple cases of arson, train crashes, and a plane crash in England that killed 300 people, all of which are untraceable due to it being Invisible to Normals. Its user, Gray Fly, also isn't controlled by a flesh bud like Kakyoin or Polnareff. He committed all those atrocities largely just for shits and giggles, and was simply paid to assassinate the Joestars. He's an early glimpse at just how depraved most of DIO's minions really are.
    • When Hierophant Green rips Tower of Gray apart, Gray Fly's status as the user is revealed by a beetle symbol appearing on his tongue, right before it splits in half and blood erupts from his forehead. Yeesh.
  • After defeating Polnareff in their duel, Avdol casually notes that burning is a very slow and painful way to die. He then draws a dagger from his cloak and gives to Polnareff, suggesting that he use it to kill himself. A surprisingly brutal moment from a character who's supposed to be one of the good guys.
  • Forever is extremely creepy, being an intelligent orangutan that acts very human at times. Him lusting after Anne and brutally killing all the crew on his ship Stand (Strength) just to get to her makes it many times worse.
  • Ebony Devil is a creepy enough Stand that looks like a vaguely humanoid insect and has a Combat Sadomasochist for a user, but it resides in and possesses an Ax-Crazy Creepy Doll with More Teeth than the Osmond Family that can kill you by biting you or cutting you to death, and its small size makes it harder to catch.
    • A bellhop that Polnareff called earlier enters his hotel room, only for Ebony Devil to slice off the poor dude's entire face with a straight razor.
    • How Polnareff killed him wasn't exactly G-rated either; Devo's corpse was shredded into hamburger meat by the time he was done with him. Small wonder that Polnareff got arrested in the anime.
    • And in the Capcom Fighting game, this terrifying ditty is his theme, which is perfectly fitting for a psycho assassin.
  • The CD Audio Drama adds one more new villain Stand - Strange Relation. Disguised as a simple pipe organ, it is capable of playing music which hypnotizes other Stand users into attacking each other and the surrounding citizens. Worse still, its own user, a seemingly ordinary old man, appears to be not related to Dio in any way, he simply does it for his sick meaning of fun. Not even summoning your Stand will do you any good since when the music starts playing, you fall under the villain's control, that's it. The old man manages to brainwash most of the Joestar group one by one, including Jotaro himself, and has them attack innocent civilians around and themselves too, with Anne helplessly watching the chaos unfold. He is only stopped when Joseph (who pretended to be affected by the organ music) wraps Hermit Purple around the organ insides and breaks it from within.
  • Yellow Temperance consumes a random family's dog in front of a father and his child. Or at least, the body — when the dad pulls on the leash attempting to get the dog free, its head gorily rips right off of its body. The anime makes this worse with a brief shot of the dog's eyes bulging and Blood from the Mouth.
  • J. Geil, a deformed, sadistic serial killer who raped and murdered Polnareff's sister Sherry, among many other young women. One detail in the OVA version makes it worse. Namely, when Sherry's friend is violently decapitated in one swing by Hanged Man before J. Geil himself goes to attack her.
  • The buildup to the encounter with Enya and Justice, and later the encounter itself, is pretty damn creepy, especially if you have trypophobia. Before arriving to a remote Pakistani town, Jotaro briefly sees what appears to be a dog impaled on a stake. Afterwards, they find a dead man lying in the middle of the town, and attempt to ask other townsfolk only to be rebuffed, and as the townsfolk they ask walk away, they are secretly revealed to be rotting away or hosts of lizards, roaches, and scorpions. Later, when Enya reveals herself as a Stand user, she is revealed to be controlling the townsfolk with Justice through numerous holes in their bodies, even including a baby. It doesn't help that what happened to the town is never explained until Enya is defeated, leading to the implication that Enya murdered the whole town in order to puppeteer their bodies ahead of the Crusaders' arrival, although thankfully it's later revealed that the town itself was an illusion by Justice, and the zombie townsfolk were formerly just interred corpses in a graveyard rather than being killed by Enya.
  • Hol Horse's "death" in the OVA. It might not have truly stucknote , but it's still played horrifyingly straight. After being taken control of by Justice — through Enya suddenly stabbing him through the wrist with scissors — he is forced to shoot himself with Emperor. Once the Joestar group are inside the hotel and Polnareff is chatting with the disguised Enya in the hotel bar, a badly-wounded Hol Horse stumbles out of a nearby closet and only just has enough time to gasp out a warning to Polnareff about her true intentions, letting out genuinely horrible death rattle-like noises and keeling over backward with his eyes still open, blood dripping from his mouth, and his hat slowly drifting down over his face as Enya's Justice zombies begin closing in on them...
    Hol Horse: Hey... be careful, Polnareff. Even a small wound... (shows his earlier wound, which has now gone right through his arm completely) can end up like this.
    Enya: (quietly furious) Why are you still alive? Such a stubborn man.
    Hol Horse: (tries to stand up) What kind of idiot... would get himself killed... by his own Stand...?
  • The preview for episode 19 of the TV anime is just a sound of a baby crying while zooming onto Kakyoin sleeping in a black background, after a few seconds, he starts screaming and the episode title cuts in. Death Thirteen. What really doesn't help is that there's no background music this time.
    • The dream that Kakyoin and Polnareff gets trapped in during the plane ride starts off with a mutilated dog on a ferris wheel seat, then it gets worse when Death Thirteen arrives. Kakyoin is then partially-melted into a ferris wheel post, getting tied onto it, and Death Thirteen oozes out eyeballs into his mouth. The eyeballs then sprout spider legs and start crawling up onto his face.
    • Later, when he has everyone in the adventuring party pulled into his dream-world, he lets the unreality run free... as in, the flowers and mail-boxes start laughing like the furniture in Evil Dead 2 crossed with a Disney Acid Sequence run free.
    • To make matters worse, Death Thirteen's stage in the Capcom fighting game is the amusement park in his dream world; albiet in an unnerving orange haze, demonic faces adorning everything, and an enormous grinning Monster Clown statue in the center of it all. The music, which sounds like it's being played on a broken down merry-go-round calliope, is all but fitting for this grotesque imagery.
    • Not to be outdone by Rubber Soul, Mannish Boy's Stand, Death Thirteen, mutilates a dog's head and then later in the nightmare world has eyeballs bursting out of the slain dog in a huge gush of blood. And the boy who was its owner mourns it in the real world, showing that the dog happened to be dreaming and was just an unfortunate bystander caught in the way of the Stand's scythe. Oh, and this scene where the poor boy finds his dog slain takes place before the moment Mannish Boy has eyeballs burst out of it, which is sure to have made mincemeat out of the poor animal in the real world and thankfully, we don't get to see that, too. Why does Araki write villains to show how evil they are by hurting and killing dogs so much?
  • Boingo's Stand, Thoth, is a manga that can see into the future, and its art style is absolutely deranged. It perfectly predicted the time and manner of death of a traveller that read it; a bus crash that throws him out with enough force to completely impale his throat on the rungs of a utility pole.
  • Boingo's "UKEKEKEKEKE" laugh in the original Japanese dub is seriously wrong, like he's giggling and choking at the same time. Even Oingo ends up being disturbed by it.
  • The battle with Mariah is mostly a Breather Episode, with a lot of Not What It Looks Like humor from Joseph and Avdol getting magnetized together... except for one part near the beginning, where a civilian happens to be hammering nails when the magnetized Joseph passes by. The magnetic force causes the nails he's holding in his teeth to fly into his mouth and pierce the side of his face. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be a fatal injury, but still, YIKES.
  • Alessi's Stand, Sethan, has the power to reverse people's ages should they step in its shadow, so he can harm them more easily. A woman who had been taking care of a regressed Polnareff ended up regressed back into a fetus and would have died had Polnareff not defeated Alessi in time.
  • Pet Shop's screeches are absolutely chilling, sounding like a heavily condensed, distorted cross between a vulture's cries and a lawnmower. They're even worse upon witnessing how depraved a creature he truly is, what kinds of violent deaths he likes to inflict on his victims, and the fact he absolutely will not stop pursuing them until they're dead. Worse still, the anime displayed the entire scene of Pet Shop using his beak to tear out an eye from one of the dogs he'd just killed, and slowly eating it in front of its distraught owner. The only thing they did to censor it was darken the eyeball.
    • How it kills the two dogs is even worse. When they crawled under the fence due to being curious about its shadow, Pet Shop immediately cut off their heads before impaling those heads with a giant icicle and throwing it above the gate for Iggy and the audience to see. And then their headless bodies proceeded to get forcefully pulled and crushed under the gate before disappearing.
  • Telence D'Arby. Unlike his much more noble and genuinely affable older brother Daniel, Telence is a childish, disgusting psychopath, changing anybody who is defeated by him in a video game into a doll while keeping them fully aware of their situation and powerless to do anything about it. He is especially creepy when he's shown changing their clothes and suggestively touching them (especially taking his time with both the female dolls and Kakyoin, making him a sex offender as well), and takes a perverse level of pleasure in his victims' descent into despair and insanity. He also uses his Stand to give himself an unfair advantage in games to ensure his victory, while claiming that he isn't cheating. While he is just a minor villain, it's not hard to see why Telence is one of the ones that the heroes show the most revulsion and contempt for, especially Kakyoin.
  • Vanilla Ice's Stand, Cream. A demonic-looking figure can devour both itself and Ice himself, turning into a sphere that erases everything it comes into contact with. It's horrifying to see how it takes out Avdol and Iggy. Avdol's death is shockingly sudden and it comes out of nowhere, leaving only his arms behind. In the OVA, Iggy gets torn in half and you have to look at his dismembered waist stump. In the manga, Iggy dies by the wounds he sustains from a (literal) Kick the Dog moment and through protecting Polnareff.
    • The anime shows the fatal beatdown in full detail, complete with Iggy vomiting up blood and making horrible death rattle-like noises with every kick, backed by disturbing music and both Show Hayami (original) and Jalen K. Cassell (dub) making Vanilla Ice sound utterly deranged.
    • Ice's rage in general is pretty terrifying. Up until Iggy tries to attack him with a sand copy of DIO, he was practically emotionless and no-nonsense, showing a bit of strategy in how he attacked with his Stand, such as attacking Polnareff's foot to make sure he couldn't retreat. As soon as he destroys the DIO copy, however, he utterly explodes over the fact Iggy made him attack his master in any way, to the point he calls back his Stand, abandons all his strategies, and proceeds to deliver the beating that kills Iggy with his bare hands (and his legs), all while Ice is furiously screaming at Iggy about how it's all the dog's fault for angering him.
      Vanilla Ice: My dark abyss could swallow you hole in an instant, but a quick death wouldn't satiate my fury! This mess... it's all your fault! This is what happens to those who anger me! Have you learned your lesson yet?! How about it?! Is this better?! Tell me! Is it?! Is it?! IS IT?!
    • While the OVA version instead uses a Gory Discretion Shot for Ice stamping on a dying Iggy, it's still almost as horrific for two reasons; one being Ice basically already having killed him by the time he starts stomping on Iggy before kicking what's left against a wall, and the other being the absolutely petty reason he goes out of his way to desecrate him so violently. Namely, because Iggy saved Polnareff from being killed by him.
    • Vanilla Ice's own death is also pretty graphic. First, he got up from being stabbed in the head, getting stabbed some more times, and then dissolving in the sun; which the anime helpfully showed happening to his face. In the OVA, he instead gets rapidly pierced with hundreds of holes before having his brain cut out with a slash through his eyes by Silver Chariot; causing the top of his head to come off and his mutilated corpse to slowly slump to the ground where he was standing.
  • DIO ordering Senator Philips to speed across a crowded sidewalk in his car, killing everyone in the way. The anime mercifully cuts to Jotaro and Polnareff as he starts driving and then shows the front of the car covered in blood, but in the manga and OVA you get to see the slaughter in full detail. It's made even worse in the OVA by Philips sobbing in absolute horror and fear afterward; unsuccessfully begging DIO to let him stop.
  • During the fight against DIO in the OVA, Jotaro gets launched against a tram and crashes through the side of it with enough force to derail it. Then once DIO calmly follows him in after, he cuts off Jotaro — who desperately tries to warn the people inside to get away from the vampire — by slashing bystanders in half with just his fingers and thens licks up their blood from his hand. The shots of the passengers' mutilated corpses afterward are especially harrowing.
  • Another understated disturbing moment in the OVA version occurs when DIO hurls Jotaro into the River Nile. At which point, the vampire picks up a nearby barge out of the water and smashes it into Jotaro to force him underwater and flatten him beneath its prow; for several seconds, looking like he succeeded. Although Jotaro saves himself by using Star Platinum to push the sinking boat off of himself in time, the thought of simultaneous crushing and drowning at the bottom of a river is a grim fate to think about.
    DIO: (lifts the entire barge out of the river) SINK, WILL YOU?!
  • DIO's appearance after this is very disturbing in contrast to the regal air that he had emitted up to that point. With spiked-up hair, deranged expressions, darker shade of red irises and sudden lips, all invoke a Monster Clown.
    • His behavior in this state compared to his usual stoic and even his Part 1 theatrical state. At his worst, he maintains an air of wicked sophistication and shows some sanity to his psychotic behavior, but after he absorbs Joseph's blood, he begins to scratch his head to the point it bleeds and even drills his finger into his skull just to test out the regeneration while making deranged expressions and going into insane tangents about either he's in a high or how the Joestar Blood is within him. It's clear that the power has eroded his already questionable sanity and he's finally exposed as the crazed, evil monster others claim him as.
  • The terror of The World. Its ability is stopping time. You can do whatever you want to guard against it, but it is pointless against a being that can just do the equivalent of a Training Stage on you. The OVA really shows how terrifying it is from the perspective of the Joestar Group, with DIO seemingly teleporting around in complete silence. No big sounds or flashy effects; just one moment he is there, and the next, he's gone. It says a lot when even Jotaro is visibly scared by it when he confronts DIO and The World on his own.

Top