As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!
"I am so sorry for what your daddy passed down to you."
With Beau Is Afraid written as more of a surrealist black comedy than an outright horror movie, it certainly isn't meant to be as scary as its predecessors. However, in true Ari Aster nature, it's not without its disturbing moments. After all, he did describe it as a "nightmare comedy."
- Beau, out of water and missing his keys, props open the door to his apartment building and runs across the road to grab some water. As he struggles with the unsympathetic cashier, he keeps anxiously looking back towards to his building door, worried that someone will sneak into his house. And someone does. And then someone else. And on and on until every single person on the street piles into Beau's apartment building and locks the door before Beau can get inside. Not the most overtly sinister event in the movie, but if you have social anxiety or paranoia, then you know how this scene feels.
- The very idea of not being listened to your whole life and being blamed for everything is enough to make people snap.
- The crazy naked homeless man that stabs random people passing by. When Beau goes near him, there’s a dead man lying bloodied on the sidewalk.
- Jeeves tries to kill Beau among the group of traveling performers, killing some of them in the process as well when he throws a grenade at them and hurls a knife at one of the actors onstage.
- While she was insanely annoying and cruel to Beau, watching Toni kill herself by chugging paint straight out of the can is very disturbing, especially when Grace finds her and Toni’s eyes are blood-red and almost rolled back into her skull.
- In the Orphans of the Forest's play, the angel wears an open-mouthed mask that falls right into the Uncanny Valley. Other characters' masks only get creepier in Beau's imagination.
- Beau discovers his mother has basically been watching him the whole time, and planned everything so meticulously just to test if he would even care about her, despite him literally doing his best to make it to the funeral in the insane extraneous circumstances, unnerving to say the least.
- Beau is forced into the attic of Mona’s house, where he meets his real father — a gigantic penis-shaped monster. It lets out an unearthly screeching sound and has sharp appendages.note
- Beau's unnamed twin brother had to spend over forty years locked up there, with only that thing for company. Good god.
- If you listen closely, it actually gurgles Beau's name and calls out for him, saying, "Beau! My boy!"
- Worse, if you listen closely, this is a slowed down audio excerpt from the scene in the play where old Beau meets his three sons as adults. The implications here are horrific.
- The sheer absurdity of it can Cross The Line Twice and make one laugh...until it shifts back into pure horror when it stabs Jeeves through the head.
- The Trial. Taking place in a gigantic sold out stadium, where everyone can judge Beau. Anyone who has ever had the feeling that everyone around them is judging them negatively knows how this scene feels. Worse, his public defender is so far away from him, and the Judge, and at one point has him just abruptly tossed off his podium onto a cave rock. And it doesn't matter what the outcome is- Beau's mother has seemingly already judged that he is guilty of everything she accuses him of, and Beau dies a fiery, horrific, waterlogged death.
