Left 4 Dead/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • For a game where you have loads of firepower and three teammates backing you up, it can be really scary. Any of the following things becomes vastly scarier when your party is either low on health, or worse, you are the only party member still alive currently. It doesn't help that the levels are both cluttered and dark, making it hard to see threats. You will find yourself often taking more damage from wild fire from your panicked teammates than actual zombies.
    • The basic zombie has two modes: listless, or sprint in your direction snarling, meaning that you often don't see them coming until its too late.
    • That is still minor compared to when the malevolent AI decides to throw a wave of several dozen which start sprinting towards your group from all directions, including the one you came from, with you hearing a chorus of distant snarling long before you actually see them.
    • The Special Infected are the truly scary enemies though, and most are heard long before they are seen. They consist of the Smoker, an enemy that can strangle you with a 50-foot-long tongue, the Boomer, an enemy whose attack obscures your vision with green vomit while triggering a wave of infected that will target you specifically, the Witch, a crying girl with very long claws that can knock you down in one hit and kill you in two more, and the Hunter, who deserves special emphasis.
      • The Hunter is a stealthy zombie that slinks in a sinuous predatory manner off in the distance. If you shoot at him, he will dart past a corner out of view, only to try and sneak up on you from another path, including climbing up walls and other surfaces and need be. Eventually, he will attack you by pouncing up to 20 feet, knocking you over, and clawing at your chest.
        • You know what's makes it worse? The Hunter has no eyes. If you look underneath his hood, you can see two empty eyes sockets with dissolved skin around them. This means the Hunter tracks you by sound and scent alone, meaning you can't hide from him.
        • The sounds that it makes in the second game are even more unnerving than in the first.
        • You think the Hunters are bad? How about the Witch? She sobs like a dejected little girl until you shoot her, has fire in her eye sockets, has spindly claws for hands, goes into Unstoppable Rage when you shine your flashlight at her, and her attack is a one-shot. Even on the easiest difficulty, she takes twelve hunting rifle rounds to the NECK before even visibly slowing.
          • She is far more terrifying if your teammate shoots her. Not only is it now near-impossible to cr0wn her, but the guy who shot her is likely flailing about shooting wildly as he knows of the impending screwing he'll be in for. Worse if you're down a narrow path with no alternate route, as the witch will run into you, realize it can't get past, then promptly change her target to you (all of which happens within the span of a minute).
  • Try having a Witch spawn in a place where it's COMPLETELY impossible to avoid her, like the subway car in No Mercy that you have to go through. (They hate light, yet they're always sitting under a bright light...weird...) Looking into the eyes of one of those things when she's looking your way is fear in physical form.
      • Try this on for size: No Mercy, start of the finale. There's a stairwell ending in a ladder that leads to the final battlefield. We all could hear the Witch, but we couldn't see her. I tried to climb up the ladder, and I was obstructed. Look down andOMHMYFUCKWITCH! It didn't help that one of my friends had managed to get on the ladder over the Witch, giving me every reason to think it's not there.
      • Following the crane and dumpster crescendo event is Dead Air, I move to climb up onto the dumpster. The only sound is the alert for a Smoker near by. Suddenly said Smoker grabs me and pulls me up onto the dumpster and I realize that there is now a Witch sitting right next to me. No alerts no music, nothing. She was just there. And as soon as my teammates kill the Smoker constricting me, I stumble right into her. Someone hand me my Brown Pants please.
      • Whilst playing through the Hard Rain Campaign on Expert, after navigating through a sugar cane field, you come to an elevator that you ride up. I tread carefully through the field with only Ellis left with me to find a Witch sobbing inside the elevator. She is sitting down and will not move. The elevator is about big enough for four people, and I cannot stay in the elevator without startling her, so at this point I have two options. Stay in the field during a heavy monsoon and achieve nothing or fight the Witch. This is already a horrendous excursion, losing Nick to a Smoker and Rochelle to an earlier Witch, but I then get a message that not only infuriates me but chills me to my very core. "Ellis has startled the Witch." Now, this could be a blessing in disguise, I think, let Ellis take the claws and rescue him later while also getting the Witch out of the elevator. However, there is a problem. Ellis has wandered off into the field alone and has startled a different Witch. I can hear his screams as he is disemboweled and then the sobbing and quick footsteps that tells me the Witch has escaped. I am now alone, playing on Expert, standing in a monsoon, trapped in a sugar cane field with what may only be seconds before the AI Director spawns a horde and I am forced to fight a Witch with a desert rifle...
      • One particularly unsettling thing with the walking Witches of Left 4 Dead 2 is that noises near them are less likely to startle them but will still attract them, causing a really horrible occasion for me when I was backed into a corner with a running chainsaw, watching the Witch slowly following the noise.
  • The sound is what adds the most Nightmare Fuel to this game, in my opinion. Shortly after it was released, I got to play a 4-player mode with some friends in the same room. At the beginning of the campaign everyone was joking and spraying ridiculous pictures on the walls. By about halfway through we were doing our best to call out directions and listening like crazy for any of the special zombies. Towards the end of the campaign I distinctly recall a moment where we needed to go in a particular direction but could hear the Witch crying. In about half an hour, the four of us went from "Huh huh, boobs" to "I can hear the Witch!" "Where is she?" "I don't know! I don't know!" "Christ, I can't see her either!" "Which way is the sound coming from?" "I don't know!"
      • It gets worse when the Tank appears. You're frantically spraying lead in his general direction and you inadvertently BACK INTO SOMETHING. While his attention is on you.
      • It is entirely possible to run from a horde, close the door on them, come face to face with a Tank so close he's within touching distance, THEN HAVE THE MUSIC START PLAYING.
    • There is a Diablo 2 mod of all things that has Witches. They look like shadows in a cloud of magic and you can hear them sing from a distance. If you wander too close, they teleport to you and kill you with an invisible area effect (using a special damage type to circumvent the damage cap and kill you for sure). If they spawn in a narrow passage and block it, your only hope is to feed them a summoned minion and run past them before their AI resets after THREE SECONDS.
  • The sequel takes place largely in broad daylight, which actually helps not at all; there is a sense that if the kind of terrible things that will happen to your team regularly can happen in the sun, then you really are beyond any help. These terrible things are not limited to the zombie menace; there is a much larger sense of a genocidal authority wishing you'd take the hint from the air strikes they regularly throw at you. It features new Special Infected, which include:
    • The Jockey, which laughs hysterically as it rides you like a mechanical bull and pulls you further and further away from your friends.
    • The Spitter, a woman whose entire lower face has disintegrated as a result of her mutation, who ejects pools of stomach acid onto wherever you are hiding.
    • The Charger, who shrugs off bullets, barrels into your group and then rhythmically pounds you to death with the arm that hasn't shriveled up and died upon his body.
    • Not phased? Did we mention that the Witch now wanders around?
    • The end of Hard Rain is a freaking MONSOON. So much so that the waist-high water actually slows you down on Campaign Mode, and the weather actually reduces your visibility, covers up everything with thunder and howling wind, and the output level of your voice-chat. So you're wet, you're bogged down, nobody can hear you, you can't hear anybody else, you can't see more than a foot in any given direction, and oh yeah, there's infected itching to do you a serious unkindness. Isolation in Left 4 Dead-World is a Death Sentence.
      • To make it even worse, turn on realism mode. Now you don't even get the benefit of those outlines that tell you where your teammates are. If you get too far out of eyesight of your team you're as good as dead.
    • Dead Center, Hard Rain, and Swamp Fever all have large sections in the daylight. The Parish is the only one that STAYS daylight through the entirety of the campaign.
  • Also in the expansion pack sequel, the classic special infected are now even more heavily mutated than before. The worst victim is the Smoker, who now has six tongues, poking out from all over his body (although he still only uses one).
    • Also? The first batch of survivors apparently didn't manage a clean getaway either. Makes you wonder if the new DLC is going to have some shocking revelations or just add to the confusion of it all.
    • There's evidence that the military is crumbling. Sure, some of its members are *ssholes, but the military is in charge of evacuating whoever is left out there.
    • They're all horrible. I would go as far as to say they went too far with the Body Horror in the sequel, shifting the Special Infected over from Uncanny Valley into complete, unpitiable monsters. There is no way you will walk over the corpse of a Smoker or Spitter for the first time without thinking "Damn. That's just wrong."
  • And if all of this isn't bad enough, you can look at the infected and realize that these are HUMANS. They're not undead, they're humans who got sick, are still humans (albeit animal-like) and you're executing THOUSANDS of them. Not only that, but it makes you wonder whether you'll wind up immune, should this ever occur in reality... Because it's that, an unceremonial corpse on the street, or you got lucky. But you don't have too high a chance of getting lucky, looking at those hordes.
    • The whole human thing is exactly why the Jockey terrifies this troper. It could be argued of any of the special infected that the transformation was grotesque and horrifying to experience for both the victim and onlookers, but just the thought of somebody finding himself laughing uncontrollably and getting more and more manic as he keeps laughing...o-oh God...
    • The thought of any of the special infected knowing what they were going through is terrifying. The Boomer finds themselves gaining weight and expanding uncontrollably, the Hunter's fingernails grow into claws and their skin is covered in boils, the Spitter can't stop vomiting as her mouth dissolves, the Smoker starts exhibiting all those growths and breathes out smoke, the Charger's left arm atrophies without reason as their right grows like a cancer, the Tank's muscles expand out of control and they slowly lose their ability to speak, the Witch's hands extend into claws and she loses control over her emotions... those were all regular, everyday people like us, who may well have been aware of their transformations and in terrible pain, and unless there's a cure out there, killing them is all the survivors can do. Death is the only mercy they can get from that...
  • All throughout the Parish, you find evidence that the military was killing PEOPLE. There's strong evidence that they weren't necessarily infected, too. And there's the quarantine zone in the Graveyard level... Ruined buildings, and some particularly chilling graffiti. "If you can read this, the army left us to DIE."
  • The horror shifts to a more personal level in Versus, in which you actually play the things which blight your existence in Campaign Mode. Viewed in sepia, you await the Survivors to spring whatever trap you've laid for them. In the meantime you can consider the fact that whoever you were was just slightly less lucky than the people you are now hunting, and listen to the sounds of whatever you have become. And look at your hands. Probably the worst for this is the Jockey, who has completely normal hands...except they shake, endlessly.
  • A savvy player can predict where Tanks are likely to spawn and know when one will strike well before it does thanks to the music clues. So what happens when the music doesn't play and instead of coming after you, the Tank sits and waits quietly for you in a dark room? New pants happen, that's what.
    • Also, sometimes when you don't get the music cue, you can still tell if there's one nearby... because you can hear them breathing... Opening a door and finding a tank is there is bad, but standing in front of a closed door and hearing his panting clear as day is so. much. worse.
    • Even worse when the breathing noise doesn't even show up in the subtitles. You hear the breathing, but since the subtitles don't say anything, it may be just paranoia. You walk on, hear it again... now you're almost pissing yourself every time you walk around a corner, but again, no Tank, no music, no subtitles, but you hear the freaking noise. Eventually, you decide that it was just paranoia and move on, and wham, there it is, right in front of you.
  • Left 4 Dead had some pretty scary campaigns, but Left 4 Dead 2 has its own fair share of horror:
    • Dead Center: From the moment you walk out of the safe area and begin making your way down a burning building filled with fireproof zombies you know that this game is gonna be a lot more intense then the last one. If you're lucky you may even run into Ellis's hero turned zombie, Jimmy Gibbs Jr. in the abandoned mall at the end.
    • Dark Carnival: A Circus of Fear type place filled with Monster Clowns, need I say more? The clowns are made even scarier by the fact that they're zombies, and they draw other infected closer to you. Oh yeah, the whole campaign takes place entirely at night, too...
    • Swamp Fever: What's scarier than making your way through a swamp in the middle of the night? Making your way through a swamp filled with zombies in the middle of the night. What's worse then making your way through a swamp filled with zombies in the middle of the night? Making your way through a swamp filled with ZOMBIE MUDMEN in the middle of the night..
      • Worse than that: the swamps are deep enough to fully conceal witches. Have fun.
    • Hard Rain: This campaign starts off fairly normal, make your way through a town and get some gas, easy right? It is...until you get to the sugar mill that's full of witches. And then it starts raining. On your way BACK THROUGH THE SUGAR MILL you run into just as many witches as before...except it's raining so hard you move twice as slow and can barely see or hear your teammates.
    • The Parish: This is it, you made it down a burning building, through a carnival from hell, past the swamp filled with animalistic mud people, and across a sugar mill that was home to the local witch population, this HAS to be easier. It isn't. From bullet proof zombies in riot gear to the hundreds of corpses laying everywhere, there are way too many things that are scary and difficult about this campaign to list them all here. Have fun.
    • The Passing: A new DLC campaign. Pairs you up with the original survivors from the first game at the beginning and end. That doesn't stop this campiagn from being freaky! From along stormy streets above and to the extremely dark sewers below you'll encounter some really creepy stuff. Survivors that went out into the world fully armed... but not immune! The Witch's weddding which even the survivors agree is frightnengly weird and when you've met up with the survivors and been given your task you may decide to that room just to the right of the lift when you exit. What's Inside? The dead body of Bill! Making this campaign not only Nightmare Fuel But a Tear Jerker as well!
  • In a new Mutation, you get to play as the only survivor alive - the other 3 don't exist. To balance things out, there are no common infected, but you still have to fight Special Infected all by yourself - it's scarier than it sounds. Even worse, the survivor's dialog will still be as if the other survivors are there, giving the impression he/she is going crazy.
    • I never thought Left 4 Dead was particularly scary until I played Last Man on Earth. There was something deeply unsettling about wandering around those big, empty levels on your own, with your character constantly shouting variations on "Is anybody there?"- knowing nobody was ever going to respond. The sound of the Special Infected took on a whole new level of dread, and I came to actually feel relief at the sound of the Spitter- it's the only Special Infected which can't finish a game of Last Man very, very quickly.
      • Same here. Oh, and the AI director still goes hard on you. If you make it far enough, surprise! Tank. Although, some of the eeriness is lost when you start calling for someone and you fell of a cliff. "Hellooooooo-AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH"
      • Not only is all that unsettling, but when your character uses some of the lines that imply they're talking to other people, it makes you question how sane they'll be even if they do escape...
      • The latest mutation, Lone Gunman, is even scarier. There are no Special Infected other than Boomers, but the only weapon you have is a Magnum and the Common Infected swipes do 25 damage... it's not really about how you'll get to the safe room, it's about how long you'll survive.
      • The TAAAAANK mutations was either nightmare fuel or CMOA depending on your perspective. It's a versus game where all the infected team spawn as tanks. And if they die they respawn as more tanks. For the survivor team it's basically don't stop running for a second or you're going to die incredibly quickly. I managed to distract all four enemy tanks into attacking me until I was dead in one game, so that me teammates could get away. One of us got to the saferoom that time.
      • Headshot! is pretty bad too. You'll see zombies missing limbs, huge sections of their backs, bleeding profusely and still coming at you. Worst of all is the hitbox problems that mean they sometimes lose their head and keep coming.
  • You all seem to be missing the actual nature of the zombification. The effect of the rabies is massive pain and sensitivity, like an eternal hangover. That makes the zombies irritated, as well as attacking all sources of bright lights and loud noises. So the common infected are completely conscious, and attack you out of their own never-ending pain. In fact, their motivation could even be suicidal.
    • That could make the special infected all the more scary. They're capable of high-level thought, but attack you out of their own hatred.
    • For something a little more common, sensitivity to light and sound along with massive pain are also symptoms of a severe migraine. Nausea and vomit can occur as well.
    • If the transformation of Lt Mora was any indication, all of the infected sees normal humans as "monsters", thinking they're still normal while everyone else has turned into zombies. Now think how they see you, the player, wielding a shotgun can can completely dismember them in a few shots, coming straight at you, almost unstoppable...
  • The Spitter absolutely terrifies this troper. Not because of her attacks, or her concept art that made her look pregnant- it's the way she dresses. Look at her. A cute little top and some capri pants, a pink thong...this was a normal girl. This was a teenager, a preppy girl that suffered from bulimia. The infection turned her into...into THAT. That is what the infection could do to you!
    • It's get worse. If you kill a spitter,you can clearly see on her hand that she has a ring on her ringfinger. That means she was married. What do you think happend to her husband?
  • Until around 2004 there were in the entire recorded history of the Rabies virus(which the infection is a strain of)exactly TWO survivors, one of which was a Greek man several thousand years ago. Now thanks to modern medical science(and a quick google search) the number has increased to a whopping SIX with there being no verification for all but one of the latest batch of survivors actually having the virus in the first place.
  • Did I forget to mention that rabies can take up to 2 years before it progresses to the first stage despite it normally taking 2~12 weeks? To top all of it off the symptoms listed for rabies include anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, abnormal behavior, paranoia, terror, hallucinations, progressing to delirium, etc so the infected are probably fully aware of what's going on with the virus actively amping up their emotional state to 11 which (judging from the descriptions I've been seeing of the special infected) correlates to the behavior. Witch is Anxiety and possibly terror. Hunter is paranoia so it's trying to get you first possibly because it thinks YOU are the infected one. Tanks are obviously agression. Jockeys are hallucinations and general delirium. So on and so forth with the rest being a mixture.
  • The virus in Left 4 Dead is a mutated strain of Rabies. As in it can effect animals too. We've seen what it can do to humans now think about what the animals will look like. Zoo DLC anyone?
    • Am I the only one that thinks that would be an AWESOME idea?
    • Actually, that might be a possibillity. Inside the sound fils for the game are sounds for a zombie dog. Maybe its gonna be used for a new DLC?
      • Blood Harvest and Swamp Fever have cow corpses in them. Whatever the infection does to non-humans, it isn't pretty-- their skulls are completely devoid of flesh. *Shiver*
        • That's not the infection. That is part of rabies testing process on animals. So, it was done by (uninfected) humans. Though yes, it points to animals being one of the vectors.
      • Which leads to another distrubing implication: what if this entire situation started out as standrand test with a new form of the rabies virus on animals?
  • It is especially terrifying if the music on your game is glitching up when a Tank is spawned. I can't hear it, and when I run into an open area all I CAN hear is heavy footfalls...and then I haul ass.
  • For the comic, that yacht FULL of Witches who appeared to be in a sort of Girls Gone Wild deal. Some of them are even naked! Others are covered in the blood of the cameraman, who is currently lying dead with his torso carved open.
  • To celebrate two years since the release of the first game, and one year since the second, Valve posted some of its concept art for the new Special Infected. The Charger's art isn't all that bad, but the art for the Jockey and the Spitter are absolutely horrifying.
  • You might not ordinarily expect the developer commentary to be that scary, but one of the sequel's nodes is particularly nasty- the art department had a folder full of photos of various real-world skin conditions caused by diseases to use as reference for how to design the Infected mutations. You know, the Infected whose appearances have already spawned several entries on this page. They ended up not using any of the photo material, because it was too unpleasant to look at. Just look at a screenshot of one of the Infected and imagine catching a real disease that looks worse.
  • The Witch's musical cue in the first game. This troper always has a sort of mini Freak-Out when he hears it, because coupled with it and the constant crying it sounds like it belongs in a horror movie, not a zombie shooter! For the curious, it's this constant creepy female chorus ululating a "Do do do do DO DO DO do do do" noise and it is MUCH creepier than it looks on here.
  • Because some people have talked about mods, I'm going to talk about a custom map "One 4 Nine" takes place in the Nevada Desert, in and around Area 51. What's disturbing about it is that multiple saferooms are destroyed, however, one specific one in the first chapter has a blood pool with bones and human body parts surronding it. Later on, you find almost the same thing, but with one difference. It has parts of human faces in it. Also, the finale has you activate a huge black thing to get out. However, after you activate it, it causes the screen to switch colors, albeit very slowly.
  • This troper was especially disturbed by a scene in The Passing. You run upon a park littered with chairs and nice decorations. Then you see a witch at the very end of the chairs. Wearing a wedding dress. This leads this troper to assume that this woman, and possibly every other person nearby at the time, almost instantly became zombified during her wedding.
  • The game mostly doesn't phase This Troper, except for two very minor things: Every so often, you'll see one of the Normal Infected standing over to the side, vomiting blood. You realize these used to be normal, living people, and how much pain they must be in even if you're not shooting them. The other thing is this odd feeling of uneasy lightheadedness that doesn't kick in until the campaign's almost over. It's not the imagery or the sounds that do it...maybe I'm just one of those people who get woozy for unexplained reasons when gaming.
  • How about turning a corner and finding yourself face-to-face with a tank. No musical cues to speak of, just suddenly finding yourself staring down something that can kill you in three hits on easy.
    • Imagine this: You are playing with friends when you hear something. Your friends quite down and you realize it's a tank. Now you all know what's coming and that's it is unavoidable. The worse part is picking someone to find it and draw it back to the group.
  • For this troper, one of the scariest, and saddest levels is Dark Carnival from 2. It's not the zombie clowns, it's not the other zombies. It's the setting itsself. A whole amusement park, where thousands of people came to have fun and a good time, most probably there to see a rock concert. This was a place of fun, happiness and such. Now it's silent, foreboding. Maybe it's just me going all Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory here, but it really struck me as; joy is dead and happiness is gone. And don't even get me started about what happened to the possibly hundreds of children that may have been there at the time.
    • Eaten by their zombified parents?
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