Resident Evil 2/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The themes for Birkin's various forms are often considered some of the most frightening music in the series.
  • Experiment room, anyone? It doesn't help that it's filled with three Lickers, gruesome failed experiments, and dead Umbrella soldiers that look like HUNK.
  • The introduction of the Licker. When you enter that room in the police station and whatthefuckwasthat you glimpse a skinless, man-sized thing padding across the outside of the window like a gecko. You look back and... nothing there. Your paranoia approximately doubles, ready for you to meet it for real a tad later.
    • We do not talk about G.
      • Too bad, seeing as this is a Nightmare Fuel page and the G-Virus doesn't create zombies - it creates the unholy spawn of Satan and some kind of devastating cancer - trying to kill the damn thing is preposterously risky, as the G-Virus was meant to have regenerative properties and every one of those is stages of the same mutations brought on by fighting it without eliminating it. You'll notice that that second one there? His head has started deteriorating and being replaced with a new one - that's his face you'll notice on the left side of his chest if you look close enough. That new head, as seen in the third stage, looks like a freaking devilish skull, and starting there, it starts developing multiple limbs, all tipped with foot-long sickle claws, and More Teeth Than the Osmond Family until it finally hits the last form, a shapeless toothy blob of flesh with corpselike arms sticking out all over it. It also creates embryos it launches into live humans' mouths once it gets an opening, which then develop inside said humans until they're finally developed and bursts out of their chests and rapidly grow into something like this (or, more famously, this). It just gets worse and worse when you hear its theme music. Or, for that matter, if you remember that, like most of the main boss monsters, it Was Once a Man (albeit a truly vile man), an Umbrella scientist with a fellow Mad Scientist for a wife and an Ill Girl kid, both met through the game in which it appears, who injected it into himself both in an attempt to save himself (again, its regenerative properties) after surviving a machine gun spray and to keep Umbrella getting ahold of this thought-to-be masterpiece of his (it in itself was obviously not as planned). Instead he ends up turning into a mindless abomination against all that is holy with nothing on its mind but planting chest-bursting embryos inside living targets and devouring corpses... though before his conscience completely degenerates, he does have enough connection to his former self to scream out his daughter's name a few times, which she misinterprets as her daddy being attacked by the monster lurking in the sewers, that monster little does she know actually being... you get the picture. Yeesh.
  • Police Chief Brian Irons was horrifying. It's bad enough that he accepted bribes from Umbrella (meaning that there was nothing stopping them from continuing to experience on Raccoon City's citizens, but then he moved through the police station, killing off survivors so that they couldn't leave his "beautiful city," even if said survivors were his fellow cops, (and then later wrote a diary entry about how beautiful the pained face of one of his employees was) but his love of taxidermy and stuffing the mayor's daughter as a trophy?! Even his introductory scene implies something is wrong with him.
    • The novelization implies that the "stuffing" wasn't just in the taxidermy sense...and that it was done after she was killed.
    • The manhwa version of him shows that even as a child he enjoyed hunting and killing animals. He even graduated to endangered species. Small wonder Amy-Chan was freaked out by him (even though she wasn't aware that he wanted to stuff her).
  • The police station's first floor music in RE 2. Discordant piano, dissonant string chords, and a sudden loud noise 2/3 of the way through the track. Possibly creepier is the library music, made even more dissonant by the fact that there aren't any enemies or traps in the room.
    • The only music in that game that wasn't unGodly scary was the finale music, which was actually pretty epic.
  • Three words and a hyphen: Two-Way Mirror.
    • Walk into a room, totally quiet and completely free of enemies, but with that damn two-way mirror that you can't help watching. Then, when you grab one specific item in the room, a licker crashes through the mirror and attacks! Even if you know it's coming, it doesn't help.
  • "Zombies are Inside!" To clarify, you need to get a key from a generator room in the back of the police station. At first the room looks fairly typical; a typewriter, some ink ribbon, and a box of handgun bullets. Oh, and a door to hell. You see that window next to it? That's where the quote comes from. Opening the door gives you probably the biggest scare in the game, as two zombies enter during the loading screen! Which then attack you! And the music! After that the game tells you "It's too dangerous to go outside!" Really?! Still think your "safe room" is safe?
  • Two words: Mr. X. AKA Tyrant T-103. Its theme music alone will terrify you, and there's the paranoia that it may smash its way through the wall any moment.
    • Which he does at one point. And unlike Nemesis, there is no forewarning to his appearance, but when you hear the characteristic Scare Chord, you know its time to haul ass.
  • The blood-sucking, poison-spraying, giant moth, and its lair, the eggs on the walls and ceiling with maggots dropping out of them, and the music.
  • This one's a bit of a stretch and a minor example,but one of the files you pick up, named "Secretary's Diary B", Has Brian Irons's secretary saying that she "found out what the chief has been hiding all along" and that if he finds out, her life is going to be in serious danger and the next page says it got late and that she's just going to take that day at a time... and then we turn to the next page.The last page is ominously blank. Since every other diary up to this point has been written in to the very last page, we can deduce that Irons got her before she could finish writing... Now you see, this wouldn't be that scary if this wasn't freakin' BRIAN IRONS we were talking about.
  • The zombies in the remake are actually scarier than in the original. They're smart enough to know how to open doors, and they're more resilient.

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