Nightmare Fuel / Silent Hills

Yes, that's a crying fetus. It talks to you, too.

In an interactive teaser, Silent Hills had already given people a severe case of the heebie-jeebies.

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• Part of what makes the scares so effective in the P.T. trailer is that it all takes place in an ordinary suburban home.
• The fetus found in the sink. What makes it worse is that you're locked in the bathroom with it for a while... while it's wailing. What's worse is that it's not just normal crying. It screams in agony. And later, it talks to you. With an adult male's voice.
• Also, when you're locked in the bathroom, someone's trying to open the locked door from the outside! Of course, when the door is unlocked and opened by itself later, there's nobody outside.
• The main "enemy," Lisa, is most definitely this. She is missing one eye, while her other eye is bulbous and with a white pupil. Her hair looks like she stuck her hand in an electrical socket, and may have possibly been burnt. Her mouth is always twisted into a cruel, toothy smile, and her chin and parts of her dress appear to have vomit on them. Speaking of her dress, it is bloodied at her crotch area, and she has apparently lost one shoe as the walking sound only makes noise on half her steps. If Samara is terrifying for her featureless body, then Lisa is scary for how much of the devil is in the details.
  • Whenever Lisa attacks you and gets really uncomfortably close to your face. The sounds that accompany her are not pleasant either, and not just the feral noises that Lisa makes, but the chilling music accompaniment. And the attack ends with the realistic sound of a neck breaking. After you fall to the ground, the camera shot lingers and twitches a bit, with sounds implying you're getting chewed on, or worse. Then you wake back up in the black room...
    • Fun fact: this jump scare is both repeatable and calculated to work on you even when you know it's coming. You will notice you have an extra set of footsteps when you walk—this usually happens when Lisa speeds past you with a shriek, indicating that she's right behind you now^note or maybe when the radio tells you to turn around right now. Turn around, expecting to get jumped... nothing. Then five seconds later, right when you exhale— BOOM! Horrible twitching corpse in your face.
  • In addition to sometimes attacking you, there is one loop in which she will stand in the middle of the hallway, impeding your progress. If you dare to get close to her, the lights go out, and when they turn back on, she is gone, and only cockroaches remain where she stood.
  • If you look up at the balcony above the front door after the window suddenly falls, sometimes you'll see Lisa looking down at you.
  • Sometimes you can also find her standing in the window or behind you in the bathroom mirror. Worst part? When you look around you in the aforementioned scene, she's not there.
  • As you move around the house, you may notice that the shadows you cast are... odd. Strange, but nothing to be alarmed about. That is, unless you hack the game to lock the camera in place even as you move. The cause? Fucking Lisa, hovering directly behind you and following you every step of the way. From the moment you get the flashlight in the bathroom she's there, following you, always in arms reach. It just goes to show that sometimes you're better off not looking behind you.
• The eyes that replace every picture in the home after looping through the house several times. On top of that, the looping eyes are accompanied by the entire hallway turning red, your vision blurring, and your character suddenly sprinting through the hall. The Unexpected Gameplay Change can be rather jarring.
• When you first start up the game, you're greeted with the sight of two giant cockroaches stuck end to end. Not so much Body Horror if you know how cockroaches mate. But then it just becomes Squick.
• As per usual for the series, disgusting bathrooms, complete with peephole.
• The refrigerator hanging from the ceiling near the door. There's sounds of a distressed baby coming from inside and blood dripping down. Back when refrigerators had lever-latch mechanisms to hold their doors shut instead of the modern magnetic gasket system, a perennial news (and horror) story was that of a kid who'd been playing around a derelict refrigerator, gotten trapped inside, and died there.
• The voice of the murdered son (who sounds a lot older than ten) that appears after the teaser, and how unfazed by his own murder he seems to be. Even worse for those that paid close attention to the fetus in the bathroom after looking through the peephole... that voice comes from the fetus in the sink, with the mouth moving in time with the words, strongly implying that the father had murdered his family because he believed his wife had an affair, with said fetus being the result. Plus, he announces his desire to return, along with how he plans to bring his "new toys" along. Listen closely. During that part of the sentence, the voice changes to a more menacing, gruffer one. It also switches from the sound of over a radio to that of someone right next to you.
  Fetus: You got fired, so you drowned your sorrows in booze. She had to get a part-time job working a grocery store cash register. Only reason she could earn a wage at all is the manager liked how she looked in a skirt. You remember, right? Exactly 10 months back.
• The radio that replays the broadcast of the murdered family, even when it's off. Plus, after looping through the house several times, there's a voice that speaks to you while the original broadcast is going on. The second voice sometimes says an ominous number, or "Don't trust the tap water" or "Look behind you. I said, look behind you."
• Even the mundane stuff in the halls is creepy. Discarded alcohol bottles, piles of pills and candy on one cupboard... Not the kind of house a mentally-healthy person would live in.
• The talking paper bag. It is describing the situation you currently find yourself in: "I walked. All I could do was walk." The second part it mentions, "finding a me that wasn't me, walking in front of myself" doesn't happen to you... but this might be Kojima breaking the fourth wall, describing a third-person game like most Silent Hills. "The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you?" Hideo Kojima, making standard video game conventions creepy, somehow.
• The sounds of a man crying are really creepy.
• The peephole in the bathroom on its own is scary enough. But when you're in the bathroom, if you line yourself up properly, you can see light shining through it. Later on, when the house starts falling apart, you discover it was hidden behind one of the now fallen pictures in the hallway, meaning while you were in there earlier, someone or something else had been looking through it. Worse still is the dialogue that plays when you look through it. The dialogue from the radio during this scene is:
  Radio: I got a message for all you folks out in radio land. Now's the time for action. Our society is rotten to the core. I'm talking to all the fine, upstanding folks got their welfare cut, got their jobs pulled out from under 'em. Yeah you! You know what to do! Now's the time! Do it!
• After you escape from the trippy red hallways, you enter the hallways once more and everything seems fine, right? Suddenly the camera gets all screwy and then a distorted, deep voice rings out with the numbers "204863". This goes on for a quite a while, not helped that along with this, scary music begins to play along with sounds of a baby. Then suddenly, the screen glitches out completely with tons of sentences in different languages without any rhyme or reason.
• The graphical glitches that occur in the teaser can really mess with a player's head. One of them may even result in a black screen with the "Fix this bug before the final game comes out!", in various languages.
• If you look at the walls near the loop door, you can find handprints. They look like they might be dried blood, too.
• One of the photographs in the hallway is of a happy husband and wife. One of the puzzles in the game involves the woman's right eye getting poked out, which is creepy enough, but when you do this, her other eye becomes small and completely black. There's also an blink-and-you'll-miss-it difference with the wedding photograph between certain loops. In the loop when you have to poke the woman's eye out, right next to the line "Gouge it out", you can see the man's finger is pointing at the woman's eye, as if he was telling you to do that. Before you entered this loop, the man was not pointing that, which means the photograph has changed between the loops!
• Even the radio message of how the family is murdered is creepy, especially since it's more realistic. The creepiest part is the description of how the daughter was killed: she hid in the bathroom, and her dad coaxed her out, saying it was all a game, and then shot her.
• The graffiti on the walls. "There is a monster inside of me", "I can hear them calling me from hell"... The letters on one wall's graffiti can even move to a different place when you're not looking.
• Even the game's subtitles can mess with you. While the subtitles say that the dad hung himself with a garden hose, a muffled voice can be heard saying that he hung himself with an umbilical cord.
• The TGS trailer for the game's concept is not interactive, but it does give us a taste for what kind of horror we would have been in for. And boy, would we have been in for a lot.
• In the black room where the game begins (and where you respawn when you "die"), close inspection of the walls reveals that whoever we are, we've been looping for quite a while.
• If you understand Swedish, the Swedish-speaking demonic radio is pretty disturbing. This is the rough translation:
  "Close your eyes. Let your ears listen to the radio. Do you hear my voice? Can you hear your own soul's scream? Let us choose. My voice that tells the future. Or your tortured mind. Well, what do you choose? You can choose. Your life, your future. Wise as you are you might already have discovered it. Yes, the radio drama from 75 years ago was true. They are here on our earth and they monitor and see all. Don't trust anyone. Don't trust the police. They are already controlled by them. That's the way it has been for 75 years now. Only our best will prevail. You have a right. A right to become one of us. So, welcome to our world. Very soon the gates to a new dimension will open. 204863. 204863."
  • Something even worse about that broadcast is the music that plays. Here is the full audio file that plays, music included. Notice how strangely upbeat and jovial that music is compared to how horrifying that voice is? And how distorted and broken the whole thing sounds despite that? It isn't as outwardly terrifying as the voice or what it's saying, but it is definitely more haunting.
• The soundtrack to the playable teaser is mainly just several different Drones of Dread that feature strange sounds interspersed throughout. Glitchy, broken audio plays at points that sounds something like Morse code or a busted phone line. Pounding sounds that seem to come from far away and can only be described as metal upon metal. It goes on and on, and it just gets worse and worse. Here is a taste of
• Leave the game paused for too long, and Lisa immediately gets you as soon as you unpause.

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Look behind you.
I said, look behind you.