Nightmare Fuel / Resident Evil (Remake)

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

How many of you lucky bachelors out there want to wake up next to this cutie-pie?^note By the way, neither of those faces are hers.

The original game, in spite of its infamously narmtastic voice acting, is still the very game that named and launched Survival Horror itself, and was considered a horrifying and scary game to play. This was with the graphics of that time. However, the monsters, the Jump Scares, and the story did enough to frighten viewers.

Now the game has returned with extensive rewriting, much better acting, far more realistic graphics, and a revamped formula designed to catch veteran players off guard. Everything that made the original game so frightening? This is far worse.

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• The Chained Creature, aka Lisa Trevor, and this page's photo. There's the first cutscene, then the unexpected appearance in the underground caves, but the journal entries and the creature's general backstory make it the most disturbing (and simultaneously heartbreaking) thing in the whole game.
  • Its theme is by far the most disturbing track in the whole game. Not only is the ambient track just riddled with creepy voices singing in the background and hollowed noises, but it also has a very tragic and depressing feel to it, which such an emotion is hammered in when you finally understand the entire story behind Lisa Trevor. Basically, she's the daughter of the architect that designed the mansion and to prevent him from going public with the knowledge of Umbrella that he had learned, she and her mother were taken hostage by the company. Along with her mother, Lisa was experimented on with the virus, but unlike her mother, who was granted death from failure to bond with the virus, Lisa successfully bonded with the virus so well that she was eventually implanted with the NEMESIS parasite (the very same thing responsible for the conception/creation of the ever popular and feared pursuer of the same name in RE3). It drove her to the point of nigh-invulnerability and no matter how much she doesn't want it, Lisa's all but immortal and was so feared by the company that they took extreme measures to kill her (even reportedly striking her with a tank missile). When the company thought she had perished and the mansion was abandoned and contaminated, Lisa had in fact survived and continued to wander aimlessly around the mansion and grounds, searching for her mother, who was already long dead.
  • Eventually, you can help Lisa discover her mother's remains during your last battle with her. After she unleashes an out-of-nowhere scream and then a pants-wettingly anguished "MOOOOOOOOOOTHEEEEEEERR!", Lisa throws herself down a supposedly endless pit to be with her mother. Unfortunately, as Umbrella Chronicles discovers, it's ultimately Wesker, one of the two men responsible for Lisa's endless misery, who puts her down well enough until she's finally consumed in the mansion explosion.
  • You might be forgiven, at first, for thinking that the multiple faces on her body are mutations. They're actually other people's faces, ripped from the heads of female Umbrella staff sent in as a half-baked effort to trick Lisa into thinking that they were her mother, so she could be easier to control. Instead, she killed them, taking their faces to give to "mother". While the reasons for it are more tragic than evil, it's still disturbing to see her coming at you wearing her "collection", and knowing that in all probability, she wants to add Jill's face to it.
• You find several files written by the man who designed the mansion. All those wacky, crazy, elaborate death traps and puzzles, but there's heavy implication that he was forced to design all this by Oswell E. Spencer as a means of keeping the mansion secrets safe. And even with all this, George Trevor still wasn't trusted well enough and he and his family both were taken captive by Umbrella. While the fate of his wife and especially his daughter are terrible, his is just as bad; getting lost in the traps and mazes of the very mansion he designed only to die of starvation and depression, but not before finding a gravestone marked with his own name, finally enlightening George to the fate he was destined for all this time.
• The Crimson Head zombies. Nothing like entering a room you killed a zombie in a while back, but you were somehow unable to decapitate/burn it at the time, only to discover that the corpse has disappeared... and then you discover that, not only is the damn thing alive/undead again, but that it's stronger. And faster. Super fast. And it has claws. They let out player-bowel-voiding noises, have almost shining-neon-white eyes, crimson-red skin (hence the name), and come out of nowhere!
  • The worst possible way to run into one of them? When you only have a pistol, and they're between you and where you need to get to, and their back is turned to you. You can see their face reflected off a mirror, but they're completely oblivious if you keep your distance, so they just stay in one place, waiting for you to make the first move.
  • There's a certain hallway that you go through multiple times, with nothing interesting happening each time. But for some reason, after a certain number of trips there, two crimson heads decide to jump in from the windows.
    • Given that there are several windows in the mansion that will be broken through by zombies or hunters at various points, you might expect the same to happen in the residence when you come across a corridor full of them. Nothing ever happens.
  • At least one player out there has encountered an unintended glitch where they blew a Crimson Head's, uh, head off, moved to continue about their business after the initial adrenaline-filled panic, and then stopped in horror as the decapitated body promptly got back up and then continued to lunge at them.
  • Lighting zombie corpses on fire with your limited supply of kerosene is the only way, short of not killing zombies at all or blowing their heads off, to avoid Crimson Heads appearing. So you better notice that the corpse you're about to handle has reddened skin and sharpened claws, or an attempt to burn it will lead to them pushing you off and being close enough to immediately attack after it gets up.
• That video that you pick up from Kenneth Sullivan's corpse (your friend from Bravo team) at the beginning of the game? When you reach the laboratory, you find a tape player that allows you to view its contents. What's on it? Kenneth's last moments. It's not pretty, you've been warned.
• There is a room where you find a dead zombie and the body of a scientist who hung himself. Then a note that explains the heart-wrenching process of him having to kill his best friend and then hang himself, with the pistol used to kill himself on top of the note — called the "Suicide Pistol." But the worst part is that you go into an adjacent bathroom to collect an item, then hear a *THUMP* as he FREAKING CUTS HIMSELF LOOSE.
  • Only in Jill's game. If you stop in the bathroom while playing as Chris, the hanging man...keeps hanging around. Either way, it's scary when you enter and hear an ominous creaking, assuming it to be some offscreen monster you haven't encountered yet.
• After playing through the game once and learning Wesker set the whole team up, the game becomes a whole lot creepier when certain disturbing facts and catches of the eye come to light. Notice all those picture frame with the glass smashed and the photos removed scattered in certain areas of the mansion? Notice parts and pages of some documents missing? Yeah, Wesker is slowly going around parts of the mansion and removing all traces of evidence that he worked with the company for as long as he can until he wants you to find out the truth. More disturbing is depending on how you play and the game; the choices you make when presented with them, can yield a scenario where Jill/Chris find a ''master key" of sorts that allows them to escape the facility. This item alone brings the implication that Wesker was able to make it through every room in the mansion and get rid of any clues or evidence pointing to him all so his master plan wouldn't fail.
  • There's also heavy implication that Wesker was watching everything that transpires in the game between Chris, Jill, Rebecca, and Barry in the comfort of a locked, well hidden room, on cameras, and smiling as everything was transpiring as he wanted them to.
    • Though they aren't exactly canon in any way, SD Perry's novelization of the first game, The Umbrella Conspiracy, actually supports this theory. That study near the back exit? Wesker hangs out in there during the book, intending to wait on the others to fumble around for a while before making his way to the labs. He even gives Barry the Armor Key after "recruiting" him to the cause. Essentially, SD Perry's book does show that Wesker has his own set of the necessary keys and is hiding away where you can't get to, thus explaining why you never see him at all until the Guardhouse.
• The L-shaped hallway is arguably worse in REmake. As you approach it, the window glass cracks loudly... but the dogs don't come crashing through, so you make your way to the other end of the hall watching the windows in wide-eyed paranoia. And of course, should you think that was just a Red Herring and decide to come through that hallway from the other side, the dogs do come through the windows.
• The remake models the Black Tiger after the Sydney funnelweb, whose appearance is freaky enough. However, it's made worse that not only is it a real spider (as are the tarantula/bird eater types), size is not the only thing the Black Tiger has going for it: the funnelweb is a lot more aggressive, much deadlier, and arguably just as tough to kill.
• Jill taking a close look at a bathtub. Guess what was hiding inside?
• The Face-Revealing Turn scene is worse in the remake as it adds many more details, such as the recently dead Kenneth still twitching from having his throat bitten out and the zombie's jaw quivering. And yes, the shot of the zombie glancing back at Chris/Jill is the image for the whole series' NF page.
• In the remake, some zombies can open doors. Have fun.
• In Jill's scenario in the Dormitory, she stumbles upon a conversation on the other side of a door between Barry and Wesker where the latter is blackmailing the former with his family being in danger if he doesn't follow his orders with with the most ominous track in the game playing in the background . When Jill enters the room after the cutscene, she finds only Barry. However, after the cutscene, if you go into the adjacent bathroom, you hear a door closing from outside the bathroom. You return to find a zombie, but this alone implies that Wesker was hiding somewhere in the room and finally had an opportune moment to leave when Jill went into the bathroom, and somehow he eluded and lured a zombie in his place.
• The remake is packed with so much more detail. Notably the kitchen and surgical room are very unsanitary, with festering meat and insects crawling everywhere.
• If you load a save file, you'll get one of two ominous messages. "Fear can't kill you...but..." and "Are the faint sounds of footsteps those of survivors?"
• In one of the rooms in the Umbrella lab, there's a large walk-in freezer. Entering it reveals several transparent body bags hanging from a rack with a bunch of frozen, naked corpses with expressions of terror still on their face as they hang around.
• Going through the downstairs kitchen will trigger a cutscene. Not long after you enter, there's an abrupt cut to an FMV of the hallway you just went through. Only this time, under the dim, flickering glow of the lights on either side of the hallway, we get to see the first-person perspective of a zombie as it slowly, menacingly inches towards the door right behind you.
• One of the most tense moments in the remake doesn't even have to do with a boss or enemy. It's a task that requires either Chris or Jill to carry a capsule of NITROGLYCERIN from one area to another. The tense part is that you absolutely must proceed slowly without running or firing your gun because if you don't, the capsule explodes and it's instant game over. The journey is also rather far. So, better pray you cleared the lab area of all hostiles and saved enough kerosene to burn any downed zombies if you weren't lucky to get headshots on them or it's Crimson Heads for you. Oh, and the area that you need to put the capsule in? It's full of Chimeras that like to travel through crawlspaces and can be tricky to clear the room of before you start this mission unless you're thorough. Enjoy.
• Speaking of the Chimeras, the remake amps up how horrifying they look. One of the more notable aspects is that their default facial expression seems to be a perpetual scream, thanks to their lack of a human lower jaw. This combined with their very asymmetrical design has the result of making them look even more deformed than in the original.
• Psychological Horror is normally more of a Silent Hill thing than a Resident Evil one. But there's one subtly creepy little mystery in the REMake: when you first enter the stairwell in the west wing, you find a bird cage with a dead crow inside, a corpse slumped against a wall (which you're told "seems to have been an instant death" if you examine it), and a set of chains hanging from another wall nearby. This is subtly unnerving as it is, but when you come back to this stairwell after using the peridot arrowhead to unlock the crypt in the back graveyard and retrieve the Sword Key... the body is gone and a small flock of crows have colonized the stairwell. What happened to the body? Did it get up and walk away? Was it taken away? How it'd end up there in the first place? Why are there chains on the wall? You don't get any explanation for any of this...
• One subtle little Jump Scare. In the original game, there's a tiger statue that you need to place two gemstones into in order to get two goodies, including a vital component for saving the missing protagonist^note Jill or Chris, whoever you didn't select; one red, and one blue. But in the REMake, there are three gemstones; red, blue and yellow. If you use the original red and blue gem combo... trapdoors open up in the ceiling and drop zombie snakes onto your head!
• The Neptunes in the original Resident Evil were largely window-dressing. They were quite small, with only the "prime" Neptune being as large as your player character, easily dodged, and effortlessly dispatched, as you simply had to run in a straight line from the entry door to the pump room on the far side to pump out the water. In the remake, the flooded lab is now the Aqua Ring, and the Neptunes are enormous, with the pups being the size of adult Great Whites and the mother being so huge she can devour your character in a single bite. And that simple dispatch? Oh, no. Now you have to descend into an observation chamber to activate the pump... which means the mother Neptune can start trying to smash her way in through the window. Which means you have to activate the shields first before the pump will kick in, leading to a tense moment when the pressure cuts out at halfway through. And if you can't get the shields restored and down before the timer runs out, the mother Neptune will break through and you will be Eaten Alive. It's scenario straight out of the nightmares of somebody who's afraid of sharks,
  • Then there's the second half of the scene. To get an important key, you have to descend to the bottom level of the drained Aqua Ring and take it from a keybox. There's only one small problem. The keybox is an area that's just low enough to provide a pool of water big enough to keep the mother Neptune alive. You have to walk right past her to get the key — and right before you can grab it, she rears up and snaps at you, causing it to fall into the pool next to her. To finally get the key, you have to push an electrical machine into the pool and then turn on the power, electrocuting her, before finally you can walk around her and get it... and all the while, wondering if she's really dead.
  • Playing the Chris campaign makes the Neptune encounter all the more terrifying, because if you save Richard Aiken, then you get a unique cutscene when you first reach the Aqua Ring where you get to watch Richard be Eaten Alive by mother Neptune.

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