Nightmare Fuel / Macbeth

• Bearded hags, apparitions of creepy, dancing children, potions brewed from dismembered animal and people parts, murder, madness and general mayhem. Fun for the whole family. The Patrick Stewart telefilm version makes it worse. The witches murdering the captain from the beginning of the play, Banquo getting right back up after his murder, the witches using corpses to give Macbeth the infamous Birnam Wood prophecy... Goddamn.
• The 1936 Orson Welles version set in Haiti had a climax of a Decapitation Presentation of MacBeth that was truly unnerving.
• While you're at it, try scaring your kids with the creepy animated film by the Russian studio Soyuzmultfilm. Everything about it is enough to do the job: bleak, desolate backgrounds; disturbing character designs (the witches themselves are bizarre); a gloomy colour palette, and plenty of surreal sequences. It perfectly captures the tone that Shakespeare was going for.
• The Witches tend to be creepy, but the Patrick Stewart version really takes the cake; this adaptation really drives home the idea that the Witches are full on Humanoid Abominations, appearing as a trio of nurses who move in near perfect synchronization, have a tendency to appear almost at random and slip into scenes undetected and have a truly menacing version of their infamous incantation.
  • The 2000 RSC production presented them as extremely creepy, semi-feral, homeless young women, possibly junkies, scurrying around like rats and spooking the crap out of Macbeth and Macduff.
• The 2006 version has several moments, namely the deaths of Macduff's family (also a Tear Jerker) and the sex scene between Macbeth and the younger, hotter versions of the Witches.
• From the original play, the scene just after Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have assassinated King Duncan.