"The horror... the horror..."
- Where to begin? A wounded Vietcong begging for water, as he struggles to keep his entrails inside him with a pot lid. The over-the-top raid on a village where schoolchildren flee from the sound of approaching helicopters, which is then spectacularly napalmed. Hysterical "civilians" grenading MediVacs. A tiger out of friggin' nowhere. An abandoned MASH with corpses left to rot in lockers. A plane crashed in the water with no explanation. The massacre of the sampan. A remote outpost with no apparent leadership (presumably being the victim of an apparently well executed VC ambush), the unlucky men stationed there being slowly driven insane by fireworks, flashing lights and haunting music. Kurtz's compound. Kurtz placing Chef's recently severed (and still-twitching) head on Willard's lap and of course the Montagnard ceremony. The film seems to be trying to show the entire Vietnam War as being this trope, and it does a pretty good job of it.
- The movie can be summed up with a single, nightmare-fueled quote: "I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving."
- The Jump Scare where Chef comes face to face with a fucking tiger. "Never get out of the boat!"
- As the PBR putts its way upriver through, they warily train their guns on a sampan floating near the bank. But the sampan is deserted, except for monkeys...and a bloody, naked, fairly-fresh corpse gruesomely lashed to the sampan's mast. The body is in bad enough shape that it’s hard to tell, but appears to be a white guy, so is probably American. A few hundred yards upstream, the distinctive tail of a B-52 Stratofortress juts out of the water. One can only hope that the poor bastard died in the crash because what they did to him afterwards ain’t pretty.
- Kurtz himself is something of this. The way he's almost always shown in the dark, and only ever partially visible, is particularly creepy, and one can only imagine how Willard must feel in his presence. Even worse still he's more than willing to decapitate an innocent man and casually drop his head in front of his commanding officer.
- The REAL Nightmare Fuel? The worst part of it all might be that many veterans and witnesses have said that this film is one of the truest representations of what the war was like.
- "There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms."
- And while Kurtz is telling this story the camera cuts back to Willard while at the background you see one of his guards as a vague silhouette in the distance very slowly moving and turning around. When you first see this it's a veritable unnerving Jump Scare, especially since it's not clear what he is doing back there? It seems as if he is catching a fly or something?
- The collective conclusion of all the terrible things Kurtz had faced in his life and what it turned him into, summarized by his final words, "The horror.......the horror". He doesn't even say it as dramatically as people would think, he's so shell shocked he's gone way past that.
- The execution of the water buffalo is genuinely disturbing to watch given that at one point it looks directly at the camera.
- Worse than that; the most disturbing bit of this scene is that the killing of the water buffalo is 100% real.
- Willard is trying to find someone in charge at a chaotic, violent battle over a meaningless bridge upriver. He's led to a soldier named Roach who is called out to the trenches to take out a wounded Viet Cong soldier with his grenade launcher. Willard asks him if he knows who's in command. Roach just stares at him and says "Yeah" before walking away, letting his silence confirm exactly what he's talking about.
- Roach himself is pretty unnerving. When the other soldiers call him over to deal with the Viet Cong, he carries himself with a completely detached air, his face expressionless save for a Thousand-Yard Stare. When asked if he needs a flare to help him find the Viet Cong, he declines, saying in a soft monotone that he can tell that the VC is close just from hearing him calling out to them. He then readies his grenade launcher with practiced ease, listens for where the soldier's voice is coming from, and fires with pinpoint accuracy. Whatever kind of person he was before coming to Vietnam is long gone; in his place is an emotionless and highly-effective killer.
- Earlier on, Willard asks a jittery machine gunner "Who's your commanding officer?" The soldier looks at him and says, "Ain't you?". It's incredibly unnerving to see an outpost of soldiers just completely break down in terms of order and coherence.
- The music that's playing at Do Long is just so unnerving to listen to; it's a perfect way to show how far gone everyone is there. Have a listen.
- The previous outpost they stopped at wasn't much better. The whole place looked ghostly and deserted, with only a handful of shell-shocked soldiers still hanging around.
- Kurtz's domain is littered with corpses and dismembered heads while his group of fanatics just waltz around; it's clear they can kill Willard's squad at any time but they just stare at them. Any reservations Chef and Willard had in killing the colonel (he is/was a highly-decorated member of the army so killing him felt awkward) goes out the window because this is not war anymore, it's pure madness.
- General release prints added an unsettling end credits sequence, in which the Kurtz compound explodes. Since this caused some viewers to misinterpret the resolutionnote , later prints use either an end credits sequence with a simple black background, or (emulating the initial, limited release) no end titles at all.
- Even the poster, with its use of red and black and a very eerie shot of Kurtz as an Evil Overlooker, looks like something out of a surreal nightmare.
