Nightmare Fuel / Moon Knight (2022)

Moon Knight has always dipped into the horror aspects of the Marvel Universe, both the physical and psychological kind, and the show is not afraid to terrify the audience out of their minds.

Moments subpages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned!

General

• Khonshu. He's very imposing and frightening to look at, being an enormous mummified creature with a giant bird's Skull for a Head with haunting empty sockets. Not to mention that he has the ability to appear and disappear at any time to Jump Scare the audience and goad Marc and Steven into committing murder or other heinous actions to enact his “justice”.
• A great deal of the show's horror themes come from Steven being an alter in a system without knowing it, making it terrifying when when he wakes up from violent blackouts in Jump Scares that leave him disoriented and covered in blood.

Episode 1: The Goldfish Problem

• The Cold Open starts off creepily enough by showing Arthur Harrow crushing a glass and putting the pieces in his shoes before putting them on and walking away. To make it even more unnerving, Harrow doesn't react at all, even though this should be badly cutting his feet.
• All throughout the episode, there are a series of jump cuts as Steven blacks out in one scenario and wakes up in another without knowing what's going on. It's like looking at a superhero version of Perfect Blue, and you never know what's going to happen when the camera shifts.
  • The scene from the trailer of Steven trying desperately to stay awake only to suddenly wake up is even worse in the episode proper, as instead of waking up in his bed, he wakes up in a field in the middle of nowhere with a dislocated jaw, Khonshu's voice in his head for (it's implied) the first time in his life, and gun-wielding mercenaries trying to kill him. Neither he nor the audience has the slightest idea how any of this came to be.
  • Steven losing control of his body and being unable to hand Arthur the scarab back no matter how hard he tries is creepy enough, but when the cultists seize him and try to take the scarab by force, the scene suddenly jump cuts to Steven covered in blood and surrounded by dead cultists. What exactly he did to them is left to our imagination, but it definitely wasn't pretty.
  • Whenever Steven is about to lose control of the body, the camera and audio visibly stutter and Steven's eyes can be seen rolling back in his head. This is all the cue the audience gets before the jump cuts, and it's still more of a cue than Steven himself gets.
• Steven returns home from his date, after learning he stood her up, and finds someone with his voice talking to him. To which he turns a mirror to see his reflection shaking his head and then approaching.
  Marc: Stop looking, Steven...
• Arthur has Steven cornered at the museum with the help of his cultists (some of whom were Steven's longtime coworkers), and the way he so casually invades Steven's personal space and seizes his wrists in preparation to judge him is incredibly unsettling and rife with I Have You Now, My Pretty imagery, even before taking into account the context of how Steven is basically trapped, surrounded by his followers, and has no choice but to accept it. Brrrr.
• When Arthur works his magic, his tattoo moves a la Anubis judging souls. A man is judged as safe, and is praised for it. An old woman? Well, we only see her hands becoming more skeletal before she collapses offscreen, even as she begs Harrow that she's been good... Harrow also claims that his judgements take into account the evil that his cultists will supposedly do in the future, meaning that the woman might have been entirely innocent, but (according to Ammit) she was destined to do evil, and thus deserved to die before she had actually done anything.
• The scene of Khonshu stalking Steven down a dark hallway and into an elevator... only to be revealed as a sweet old lady. As the elevator moves, the old woman acts calm before her voice starts getting frantic at seeing Steven sitting down like a crazy person. She rushes the hell out of there by claiming she has a friend on the fifth floor and randomly knocks on a door to escape. It's unclear whether any of it is real or all in Steven's head, and once the woman is gone and Steven is alone, he turns around to find Khonshu...
  • After Steven sees Khonshu staring down at him in the elevator, he suddenly wakes up on the bus to work. He looks out the window to see Khonshu standing outside and quickly gets off the bus... and then he sees multiple passengers on the bus glaring at him along with Arthur.
  Steven: Oh my god, it's real...

Episode 2: Summon the Suit

• Khonshu busts out some horror movie monster maneuvers when he meets Steven outside of Marc's locker, chasing him through a corridor of flickering lights in very frightening fashion.
• After Marc reasserts control of the body and Steven is now the one in the mirror, he tells Marc that he wants nothing to do with this life with Marc telling him to stop it. The camera flashes back and forth between the two alters as the church bell rings until Marc snaps and repeatedly kicks the mirror until it's completely cracked while frenziedly screaming at him to "SHUT UP!".

Episode 3: The Friendly Type

• On two occasions, while fighting Harrow's goons, Marc suffers the same stuttery blackouts that Steven did in episode 1. The first time, it's easy to assume Steven is just trying to de-escalate the violence, as he was already pleading for Marc to stop fighting and give him control. The second time, however, Marc wakes up to find two of the goons dead, and the third, a teenage boy, wounded and backing away from him in fear. The idea of Steven giving in to violence is terrifying enough in its own right, but then Steven insists he wasn't responsible. This implies that there's a third, even more violent alter lurking inside the system who has been responsible for all of the violence that occurred during the blackouts in the previous episodes... one that neither of them knew about.
• The teenage boy who would rather die than betray Harrow and his goddess Ammit coldly and creepily declares his allegiance to her, before he willingly cuts off his scarf and falls off the cliff Marc has him suspended over to his death. His fanaticism calls to mind the cult suicides like Heaven’s Gate and Jonestown.
  Kid: Praise Ammit.

Episode 4: The Tomb

• As the episode opens, we see Osiris' avatar Selim place Khonshu's ushabti on a shelf, a shelf surrounded by dozens of other ushabtis, indicating that other gods who defied the Ennead have been similarly imprisoned. That would be creepy enough, but as we slowly pull back to reveal those other shelves, Khonshu can be faintly heard crying out...and then the voices of the other imprisoned gods join his in a whispery cacophony.
• We witness a surprising amount of Gorn when Steven and Layla enter Ammit's tomb, with bones and blood littering the decrepit halls, leading to the appearance of a Heka guard, who drags in the false police detective, Billy, hoists him up on a bench, and starts tearing out his internal organs as some sort of impromptu mummification. We don't see it onscreen, but judging from the sound effects it definitely isn't bloodless.
  • As Layla escapes and crosses a deep chasm, she lands on a small platform. Suddenly, she is attacked by a mummy and is dragged into a dark narrow space, with the camera slowly moving closer as we hear screaming and sounds of a struggle. Luckily, she escapes without much damage, though she does have to deal with the Heka guard trying to stab her with his severed arm bones before she takes it down.
• Everything about Marc in the mental asylum sequence.
  • To start, we transition from Steven dying via a shot to the heart from Harrow to a trashy 80s adventure movie, and then to a mental asylum that shows various characters previously seen in the series as patients, including Donna, some of Harrow's cultists, and Layla. The scene is shot in a disorienting and unnerving way, causing the viewer to be as disturbed by the jarring situation as Marc himself is.
  • Marc has a therapy session with Harrow, who seems to be nothing more than an unassuming psychiatrist. However, after seeing various items around the room previously associated with Harrow, Marc flees in terror. The worst part? It's hard to tell at this point whether Marc is correct in his assumptions or if he's been just imagining the entire series.
  • After Marc escapes the guards, he finds himself in a room with a sarcophagus and someone screaming to be let loose. It's just Steven, but as they're trying to escape, they see, in another cell, a second sarcophagus, trembling violently...

Episode 5: Asylum

• Marc and Steven entering a room filled with the bodies of people Marc has killed. There's quite a few people in the room, and they all sit frozen and zombie-like with pieces missing from their bodies, and with canopic jars holding what is implied to be their organs.
• For more Realism-Induced Horror: Wendy Spector turning into an absolutely chilling Abusive Parent. After Marc's brother's death, she goes from blaming Marc for it to being emotionally distant to outright cruelty and beating him whenever she gets the inclination, and poor Marc is just a child visibly falling apart because of it. It culminates in a scene where Marc has locked himself in his room while she beats on his door like a demon busting out of hell, while he huddles on the floor in terror trying to deny that she's coming, and Steven just... happens out of sheer need to avoid her presence.
• The resurrection of Marc Spector is utterly chilling, with Khonshu's voice coming out of nowhere like a demon and, as Steven notes, manipulating Marc into serving him with a foreboding tone comparable to Harrow of all people.
• The unbalanced souls of the sands of the Duat trying to drag Marc down. Their bodies are made of sand that merely looks like their living forms, resulting in one continuing to fight after having its entire face beaten off, leaving a gaping hole where the head should be.

Episode 6: Gods and Monsters

• Jake's utter ruthlessness is pretty frightening in a Nothing Is Scarier kind of way. Towards the end of their fight, Harrow has both Marc and Layla at his mercy, on the cusp of winning. And then Marc blacks out again. When he wakes up, Harrow is in his arms, heavily wounded, and fire and destruction surround them both. It's also notable that Harrow, who has otherwise been nothing but confident and calm in the face of divine threats, can only shakily ask Jake to wait before he's shot and killed.

---