Nightmare Fuel / The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

• From the prologue during the war, Coriolanus and Tigris spy a starving man eating the remains of a corpse, gathering the rest for his family.
• Thanks to a brilliantly unnerving performance from Viola Davis, Dr. Volumnia Gaul is every bit as terrifying as her literary counterpart. From happily cooking up Panem's many mutts in her laboratory to her genuine belief that the savagery often seen in the Games is merely humanity stripped to its core, this sociopathic scientist easily stands out as one of the greatest monsters the Capitol has ever produced.
• Arachne’s death. After taunting her tribute one too many times, Brandy breaks the glass bottle and stabs it into her neck before the Peacekeepers gun her down. It's the look of absolute shock and terror on Arachne's face as she bleeds out that sells it.
• Clemensia’s fate. Upon being bitten by one of Dr. Gaul's snakes, she's carted off while screaming in pain, never to be seen again. Special mention also going to that while the book revealed she survived—while also mutated as a result though—and that Gaul's associates inoculate her shortly after too, Clemensia's fate here being ambiguous now opens up the possibilities of the bite causing her to be either bedridden, comatose or dead for the remainder of the story instead.
• The bombing of the Hunger Games arena. Just like in the book, it comes out of nowhere and leaves a massive amount of devastation in its wake.
• Jessup ends up going rabid from his bat-bite, going from Lucy Gray's ally to chasing her through the arena like a maddened beast before Coriolanus thankfully intervenes.
• The Game. While the previous film’s Games were also brutal, there’s something a lot grittier and darker without the pampering and preparation. Because they are caged like animals from the Reaping to the Games, there is no training. The desperation leads to a lot more brutal kills, with more Tributes going for blood right from the get-go. And there are fewer places to run, hide and strategize.
• Coriolanus beating Bobbin to death while escaping the arena. He had already successfully knocked him back, and unlike the tributes he has the option to run away to safety. Once Bobbin hits the ground, though, Coriolanus decides to finish him off.
• When Dr. Gaul unleashes her Rainbow Snakes upon the remaining Tributes, all hell well and truly breaks loose as the arena is overwhelmed by a rainbow of destruction. Wovey and Reaper being completely engulfed by the cascade of serpents makes for a particularly chilling sight, which is almost reminiscent of the siafu ant scene from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
• Sejanus’s hanging. The poor boy goes from at least trying to go out with his head held high to desperately begging for Snow’s help, though Snow can only stand there stone-faced as the friend he betrayed meets his untimely end. The Jabberjays repeating Sejanus' final cries for his mother on a loop makes the already horrific scene that much more haunting.
• Coriolanus going completely berserk in a fit of rage during the climax, screaming Lucy Gray’s name and wildly firing his gun at the flock of Jabberjays singing “The Hanging Tree”.
• If his final conversation with Dr. Gaul didn't seal the deal, Coriolanus fatally poisoning Casca via slipping rat poison into his morphling makes it clear that he's well on his way to becoming the ruthless tyrant we're familiar with. The camera briefly lingering on the dean's corpse after he kicks the bucket does not help.
• Highbottom's revelation that the Hunger Games were just some joke he scribbled up while he was drunk in college one night; he never intended to even present the idea, let alone seriously argue for it's implementation, but Snow's father presented the plans without his consent and somehow actually convinced the leadership of the Capitol to go through with it. All the horror seen throughout the series was born out of some guy writing nonsense in his journal while wasted. It's like the concept of Disaster Dominoes taken to it's most insane and horrific conclusion.