YMMV / Atun-Shei Films

• Nightmare Fuel:
  • While the writing and documentation in the epic, hour-long "A Defense of Puritanism" is largely sober and factual even when discussing dark episodes like King Philip's War and the Salem witch trials, the psychedelic and constantly shifting imagery can be very creepy, to say nothing of the frequent disorienting Jump Cuts and Scare Chords.
  • The sheer brutality of the violence in the episode on Hannah Dustin — both her testimony of what she was subjected to, and what she later inflicted upon her captors (including the kids who were with them). And in general, the fear of living in New England in the late 17th century.
  • In "This Hotel Has A Dark Secret", Atun-Shei stays at a hotel that used to be an asylum run by eugenicist Joseph DeJarnette and goes through its dark history. Especially chilling is "Mendel's Law", DeJarnette's real-life pro-eugenics poem.
    This is the law of Mendel, and often he makes it plain
    Defectives will breed defectives, and the insane breed insane
    Oh, why do we allow these people to breed back to the monkey's nest
    To increase our country's burdens when we should breed from the good and the best
    O, you wise men take up the burden and make this your loudest creed
    Sterilize the misfits promptly. All not fit to breed
• Tear Jerker:
  • "The Witchfinder-General Visits Salem, Massachusetts" has the titular Fish out of Temporal Water discover all his friends and family are long dead.
  • The sad tale of Julie, the octoroon mistress of Père Antoine Alley who died of a Tragic Dream and supposedly still haunts the place (from "Julie the Naked Ghost: A New Orleans Folktale").
  • Atun-Shei's criticism of Gettysburg for its Bloodless Carnage.
    Atun-Shei: "When some pimply 17 year old from North Carolina got his guts torn out by shrapnel, and felt the world go dark as he stared at a patch of grass and shat himself, he did not hear Randy Edelman's rousing score in the background. He just. Fucking. Died."
  • Atun-Shei remembers being part of a Pickett's Charge reenactment, seeing just how far away the Union line was, and crying as he imagined what it must've been like for a real soldier to make that long walk to their death. He eventually made it to the Union line and saw a Union reenactor who was also teared up. They shook hands and the other man said "I'm glad you're here."
  • His video on the Upstairs Lounge, a gay bar in Louisiana that burned down in The '70s due to a Homophobic Hate Crime with dozens of people inside who were mocked after their deaths by the public. The way he goes into detail about how pedestrians could see the bar's patrons desperately trying to squeeze their way through the iron bars guarding the windows while their friends burned to death around them is just... so awful.

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