Postal/Postal Redux
10/21/1997: I am the celestial gardener, policing the planet of the stink weeds and poisons which leak out even through the cracks in the cold asphalt sidewalks of the City of Sin!
- The reason for going on a killing spree in the first place. According to the manual, the town of Paradise has come under the effect of a madness inducing plague and the Postal Dude is the only person able to put a stop to it. Of course, given his diary entries and sadistic enjoyment of causing death and destruction, he's probably just flown over the cuckoo's nest.
- The diary entries in between levels, e.g. "10/17/97 The Earth is hungry. It's heart throbs and demands cleansing. The Earth is also thirsty..."note
- The screams of the dying will definitely qualify.
- The unsettling menu screens, very unsettling loading screens, and the total horror of the credits screen (pictured above), in which also features a deceased BABY in it! (Albeit this was edited out in Redux) The amount of Body Horror depicted in all of these is disturbing as all hell.
- And in case you thought it wasn't disturbing enough, Redux has redrawn the menu and loading screens for extra detail, and given them animation.
- Also, due to Early Installment Weirdness, the violence isn't Played for Laughs nearly as much as Postal 2 and the subsequent sequels: the only thing remotely funny is Rick Hunter's signature Badass Baritone quipping Bond One Liners - and even then, it's implied that he isn't the voice for The Postal Dude himself, but a Literal Split Personality and/or Demonic Possessor forcing The Postal Dude on a killing spree For the Evulz.
- The ending for the original game
counts as this, big time. The final level starts off at an elementary school, where you're seemingly given no choice but to gun down the laughing and playing children - except they don't die, or even react, to being shot at, running through fire, or dodging rocket launcher rounds. Then the Postal Dude, seemingly having what little remains of his sanity snap like a twig, passes out, while the camera blurs out to blackness. Then he wakes up locked in a Bedlam House, while a distorted voice talks about how the stress of modern day life causes people like the character to "Go Postal", all while saying your atrocities would never be understood by anybody else, even if you deluded yourself into being a One Man Army fighting against all odds. The voice then says that, while they will never understand what set you off, "rest assured, we WILL have plenty of time to study [you]."- The ending for the Redux edition isn't much better. Simply put, The Dude comes across a funeral procession, and this simple event causes him to have his breakdown due to one of two potential reasons: One, he likely thought the funeral was for him, and that he was Dead All Along. Two, if there are people capable of mourning the dead in the middle of a hate plague he was allegedly the only one left uninfected in, that means that there probably was none to begin with or he did TOO good a job at stopping it, and he likely killed hundreds and hundreds of innocent people for no reason other than his own paranoia.
- Also, take note that the only hostile on the map is no one but the Postal Dude himself. Once the coffin hits the bottom of the grave, the hostile count ticks down to nil.
- The Hard Mode ending only opens up more theories, considering that we now see a man and a woman standing over the casket as it is lowered down into the grave. Could it be the Postal Dude's parents watching his own son's funeral procession and that the whole game was nothing but a Dying Dream? Some people have noted that the two persons standing over the grave along with the priest look a lot like the Postal Dude and his wife from Paradise Lost. This could very well mean that we've been playing as T. Dude, Sr. the whole game and that he just watched his own son watch his funeral.
- The soundtrack qualifies as insanity in music form. Here's an example.
- Redux's soundtrack manages to be even more horrifying.
- If you're brave enough to face your fears, wait until you see The City loading screen (pictured above), which features a flaming skeleton-like figure which will likely keep you awake the whole night! God have mercy! While in Redux, the song uses an ear-ringing noise instead of a looped human scream.
- To make things even worse, the "Texbeast" loading screen from the said level appears as a cop carrying a Rocket Launcher and a handgun in Postal 1's Trading Cards, bearing a Psychotic Smirk, putting the actual loading screen to shame. The things the Postal Dude sees in his mind may be terrifying, but they aren't much better in the real world.
- Redux's soundtrack manages to be even more horrifying
- Some of the Dude's lines are pretty creepy, but with a touch of Black Comedy. He really changed a lot from Postal 1 to Postal 2. However, in Redux, the Postal Dude sounds like an actual mass murderer instead of a comedic lunatic.
- Some of the game's areas have eerie ambient sound effects playing once you're near them that really pump up a little more of that psychotic feel of the game. The same sound effects can be heard in Postal 2, playing in certain areas for no reason at all other than weird out the player.
- As Civvie 11 points out, somehow the screams in the Japanese exclusive expansion pack Super Postal are more terrifying than the screams in the base, English game."Because, when you hear it in English, it's cheesy and campy. But not understanding it makes it worse."
2007 Film
- The head's on pikes in the Postal Dude's boss's office, as pictured. Even though the boss jokes that they are fake and just there to scare employees (even though one of them starts leaking blood), they are still pretty creepy.
- J. K. Simmons' creepy smiley face after getting bombed by a suicide bomber.
- All the kids at Uwe Boll's Nazi Theme Park getting gunned down. We get a pleasant aerial shot of the huge pile of dead kids laying about.
