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The Matrix
So much for that phone call...
- The interrogation scene (pictured) when Agent Smith makes Neo's mouth melt itself shut, causing him to panic understandably to where they shoot in the tracking bug.Agent Smith: Tell me, Mister Anderson… what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?
- Neo himself thought it was a nightmare. When Trinity sucks out the "bug," his reaction is "Jesus Christ, that thing's real?!?"
- This scene gets worse as the tracking bug is literally and figuratively a centipede-like bug, that comes to life from the click of a button and just uses its tendrils to squirm and crawl into Neo through his exposed navel, his sealed mouth blocking his presumed screams of terror/pain (as one can see the tendrils poking and squirming around his belly).
- Agents in general are terrifying. Implacable, inhumanly powerful, and capable of possessing and overriding anyone still plugged into the Matrix. This last bit, we get to see several times throughout the franchise, watching various people in various outfits morph gruesomely into a man in a nondescript suit and sunglasses, regardless of whether or not they were a man before, or for that matter wearing sunglasses. And in the rare instance when someone manages to kill an Agent, they release control just before the body dies, leaving the human they were behind. Most of the time it's a cop or security guard, but on at least one occasion we see a lady who just got back from grocery shopping, right before that person gets taken over by Agent Smith.
- Neo's first entry into the real world. And then the explanation of how it works… and how humans are fed… and how people jack in to the Matrix… and how mention that our bodies could be taken over by evil unstoppable programs at any second.
- Speaking of Agent possession, during the scene when the Agents are chasing down Neo, there's a little girl who watches what was probably her mom...suddenly turn into some guy in a suit and sunglasses. The people that Agents assimilate are somebody's loved ones and they could possibly get killed in brutal ways by a Zion operative.
- What about that part just before Neo fully wakes up? Yes, it's obvious they're pulling him out when he took the red pill and they've put him in a chair to get ready for it, but then comes the incredibly freaky part where Morpheus points at a mirror that just repaired itself, and when Neo reaches out to touch it... it turns gooey and starts to assimilate his entire body. And THEN, he starts screaming like all hell and you can hear it like the sound is glitching out; AND the camera goes down his totally engulfed throat. Metaphor or otherwise, who else was scared out of the room by that scene alone?
- Then there's the incomprehensibly surreal and traumatic horror
Neo experiences immediately after. Just imagine, from his perspective, what he's witnessing: First he comes to in a daze, emerging from a viscous red-pink slime with all kinds of cables plugged into his nude body. Then he discovers the billions of other people still asleep in their pods attached to seemingly bottomless, cylindrical skyscrapers with large electric bolts firing between them in a presumably freezing, dark landscape. Suddenly, a huge, menacing spider-like machine hovers directly in front of him and starts choking him as those cables he's attached to painfully snap off. Then, out of nowhere, his pod opens from behind causing him to slide down a "water park chute from Hell" into to a sea of what is possibly a mixture of liquid human remains and sewage as he helplessly flails to stay afloat.note Finally, a blinding light shines from above with a strange mechanical claw of some kind lifting him up to safety aboard to where his new cohorts are. Neo's first awakening into real world was essentially a (thankfully) brief, hellish fever dream the likes of which no one could've ever had. Don Davis' haunting score throughout the scene just intensifies every second of it. - The Fridge Horror that people before Neo might've awakened from the Matrix to have the same thing happen to them… only no one was there to help them.
- Then there's the incomprehensibly surreal and traumatic horror
- The dèjá vu scene. The moment Neo points out what he just saw, the entire group freezes in their tracks. It's not clear (at first) what changed during the glitch, but it's definitely clear that something has just Gone Horribly Wrong. Namely, that the windows and doors have been blocked by brick walls and Agents are on their way.
- The Sentinels. They're giant mechanical monsters whose only purpose is to hunt and kill humans. They can't be reasoned with, their attacks can't be stopped, and they are very hard to destroy. It's even worse in Reloaded.
- In the Battle for Zion in Matrix Revolutions, seeing the Sentinels slash Captain Mifune's face to the point where he's barely recognizable after they've swarmed him en masse. when we see thousands of them drilling to Zion - they look like huge bugs crawling around a gigantic hive.
- "He's gonna pop!" can be quite scary for any emetophobes. Rumor has it that this wasn't actually in the script, Keanu Reeves just had food poisoning.
The Matrix Reloaded
- Smith becomes everything that is already scary about the Agents up to eleven. You thought an Implacable Man who can curbstomp anyone that isn't Neo was bad? Now imagine him with the ability to overwrite the code of anyone plugged into the Matrix. This gets takes to truly terrifying levels when he possesses the rebel Bane and retains control of him in the physical world. The fact that both Neo and Morpheus both come close to suffering this fate is genuinely chilling.
- When Morpheus and Trinity are forced to flee onto the freeway at the end of the second act, the characters briefly discuss that the freeway is extremely dangerous and even Morpheus had told Trinity that it was tantamount to suicide. It quickly becomes apparent why: hundreds and hundreds of cars traveling at high speeds, full of drivers who could at any moment turn into an Agent and shoot you or try to ram you with their vehicle. Semi-trailer trucks and other heavy vehicles that Agents can commandeer to simply smash their way through other cars to get at you. And the highway is a long stretch with intermittent exits, so once you're on it, you're stuck on it until you can find a way off, which you'll want to do quickly because there's no phones on the freeway to provide an exit. Within the Matrix and under the authority of Agents, freeways are death traps for Zion operatives just by their nature and there's any number of ways you could die in a split second.
The Matrix Resurrections
- The Bots. They're no stronger or faster than the average human plugged in the Matrix and compared to Agents they are quite weak...but they appear as human and unintimidating as the next guy, and when their "swarm mode" is activated... Imagine, you are a runner attempting to leave the Matrix and literally everyone around you is trying to kill you, and no matter how many Bots you kill there are dozens if not hundreds more just around the corner and they just. Keep. Coming.
- Now remember that some of these Bots look like children.
- Moments before escaping the Matrix for a second time, Neo reaches through a mirror and into... his therapist's living room. The Analyst stops as he sees him, appearing genuinely shocked and concerned, and tries to talk him back into "reality." Neo is confronted with one more awful lie telling him that this is All Just a Dream, but put yourself in Thomas Anderson's shoes in that moment. Is this really happening, are all my suspicions, my dreams, my desires being confirmed, are they coming true? Or am I standing in my therapist's living room at 2:00 a.m. in my underwear, completely lost in a power fantasy, about to do something that I will really, really regret? Is this the end of the first act of The Matrix, or is this the first five minutes of The Sixth Sense?
- We only see clips of Neo and Trinity's revivals from within the Anomaleum, but from what we can see, the process was not pleasant.
