Nightmare Fuel / Castlevania (2017)

"What have you done to my wife?!"

What else is there to say? After all, Castlevania is based on a video game franchise where you are constantly battling frightening monsters left and right.

Warning: Spoilers Off applies to this page. Proceed at your own risk.

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Season 1

Witchbottle

• The animated series gives us something the games never have before: the full fury of Dracula on the warpath. Blood and stillborn demon fetuses rain from the sky and a cathedral bursts into flames. Then Castlevania rises from the ruins. All the windows open, and a horde of demons spill out, tearing the populace to pieces, sparing nobody. Heads impaled on stakes stuck on the roofs and battlements of besieged towns, with entrails strung between them like festive ribbons, and people waking up to find their family members torn to pieces right next to them. Even babies aren't spared by Dracula's hordes.
• Lisa's burning at the stake. We even see her charred corpse crumble into ash after it's over. Such a bright, vibrant woman and she's sentenced to a gruesome, painful death. And the worst part is that countless numbers of innocent men and women like her really were killed this way.
• When Dracula projects his face in the cathedral demanding to know why Lisa was killed, it fluctuates between his normal face and an utterly terrifying Nightmare Face, pictured above, whenever his anger spikes.
• A bit of a lesser example, but the scene when Dracula decides to take revenge on humanity, but not before giving a warning to the woman who came to mourn Lisa's death to leave and not look back.
  Dracula: I do this last kindness in her name, she who loved you humans and cared for your ills... Take your family and leave Wallachia tonight. Pack and go, and do Not. Look. BACK. For no more do I travel as a man.

Necropolis

• Trevor cutting off someone's finger and ripping someone else's eye out just by using his whip... yeah, his victims are both corrupt priests, but still...
• When Trevor sneaks into the town, the aftermath of the last nightly attack by Dracula's hordes is still visible: heads impaled on sticks everywhere, the streets liberally decorated with human entrails, and the survivors dumping a mountain of corpses in a dried riverbed.
• When the demons are leaving Gresit in the morning, one of them has a baby in its jaws.
  • And immediately after that, there's a brief scene of a woman screaming while standing in front of an empty, bloody cradle.
• Gresit looks like hell. If the demon carrying a baby in its jaws isn't enough to freak you out, it will surely be the heads on pikes adorned with entrails, the piles of bodies in the dried-up rivers, or the fact that the clergy is just as frightening as the monsters.

Labyrinth

• The Stone-Eye Cyclops. Its modus operandi is to turn its victims to stone and feed off their terror until they are either shattered or die of fright. Even killing it was nightmarish, as Sypha watches the creature's other victims, who weren't so lucky, fall apart as their stone bodies return to flesh with pieces missing.

Monument

• Blue Fangs and his demons killing the Bishop in his church. Not just for the act, but for making him realize the depth of his errors by stating God is ashamed of him. Even for a guy like him, that's just cold.
  Blue Fangs: Let me...kiss you.
• The actual fate of the Bishop is hidden behind a Gory Discretion Shot. The show usually has no problem showing the horrific actions of the night hordes, but what happens to the Bishop is so awful it deserves to be unseen. Later, we see his body, revealing that his face was half-eaten. A kiss indeed.
• The priest with a missing finger's death scene, in which he is stabbed and impaled from multiple angles by angry townsfolk. It is true that he is an Asshole Victim and absolutely no one sheds a tear but the way he dies is still horrifying. Most of the gory moments in the show are caused by Dracula's monsters, but in this scene, it is caused by mere hate-filled people.

Season 2

War Council

• Lisa's pleading with the Churchgoers who are taking her away. She's not pleading for her own life. She's pleading with them because she knows if she is killed, that Dracula will unleash his wrath upon the world. She knows what he is fully capable of and how angering him to such a degree could threaten the entire world. THAT is how great Dracula's rage is and how much power he has under his control.

Old Homes

• Alucard talks about Dracula's "vision" for the world:

Alucard: Oh, the world will still be here, Belmont. Trees will still grow, birds will still sing, animals will still hump away in the undergrowth... But you won't be here. And you won't be here. None of you. The sun will still set, but you will not see it rise. There will be only Dracula, and his war council, and the hordes of the night... He writes in great books, you know? He hews the covers himself from oak and wraps them in the preserved skin of the people who he hated most. And he writes plans, I've seen them. Ideas for darkening clouds and making them as permanent in the air as the frost of the north. Great strange flying machines that pull shrouds across the sky to block out the sun. Imagine it; a world without humans under endless invented night. And Dracula in his castle, his revenge so horribly complete that there is nothing left to do but look out over a world without art or memory or laughter and know that he did his work well. That he did it all for love.

• The scene where Hector uses his powers of devil forging. It turns out that while the demons were summoned from hell, they needed vessels to inhabit and Hector uses his power to alter the dead bodies of the people they killed into the demons that have been attacking the citizens of Wallachia by infusing the remains with magic and demon souls.
• Isaac killing his abusive master by gouging his eyes in a flashback.
• Dracula's reaction when Carmilla questions why Lisa was never turned into a vampire. We catch the shocked faces of Dracula's generals. Dracula's eyes turn red while he asks her, "What did you say?" in a seemingly even tone. But he's truly livid at the invasive question. And when Carmilla continues her questioning by disrespecting the couple's union, mockingly referring Lisa as a "pet", there's a good shot of Dracula slicing his throne in barely restrained anger. Carmilla was very lucky Dracula didn't decide to murder her right then and there.

Shadow Battles

• There's a VERY good reason Dracula is the most dangerous and powerful vampire alive; Godbrand questions his plans for the humans, and what will happen if they don't leave any alive to feed from. Not satisfied with Dracula's insistence that the blood he has stored in the castle will suffice, he continues to press Dracula until he snaps and tears into Godbrand with a short but brutal speech that leaves the normally loudmouthed Viking sweating nervously before he hauls ass out of the room. And all without raising his voice above a threatening whisper.
  Dracula: I will not be questioned by YOU. I have told you how it will be. The humans will die. You. Will be taken. Care of. Little Godbrand... little vampire... little parasite. Little boat weevil, who delights in making noise and pretending he is important and dangerous. Are you going to continue questioning ME? Are you going to FIGHT ME, Little Godbrand?
  Godbrand: ...No.
  Dracula: Then why are you still here, making your little noises? Get out before I slit you up the middle and bite out your heart.

Broken Mast

• Godbrand and the other vampire generals descending on a harmless town to feed. It is nothing less then a complete and total slaughter with sheer glee on the Vampire's faces as they proceed to butcher the entire town to the last in various gruesome and sadistic methods.
• A particularly telling shot reveals why Alucard is sickened by the Belmont Hold, aside from merely "It's like a museum dedicated to the extermination of my kind." The cabinet he walks away from as he says this contains several vampire skulls, and front and center is one that could only belong to a child. The Belmonts showed no mercy or nuance to their hunting.

Last Spell

• Dracula recounting a time when he was much more of a Blood Knight, setting fire to a town and using the chaos to corner his victims, ripping the hearts out of many of them, having his underlings drag them kicking and screaming for him to disembowel, bite, and stake them...And keep in mind that, while we've seen plenty of absolutely shitty humans thus far, Dracula - who has no reason to downplay his hatred of them - only says they disrespected him. He may have spared the women and children, but that really only means they come back to a horrifying sight...
  • And while this is Dracula reminiscing about how he used to take joy in all the little details of such slaughter, he's also noting how he used to have restraint and a sense of justice, warped though it may have been. Dracula has become The Unfettered, and if it wasn't for his profound depression, he'd probably have scoured all of Wallachia of human life by now.

For Love

• The long-awaited fight between the heroes and Dracula slides into this territory very fast. Even with Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard all working together, it's clear the very instant the "fight" starts that Godbrand was absolutely right. Even in Dracula's blood-starved condition, they don't stand a chance; he stops Alucard's opening attack with two fingers, Sypha's fire magic doesn't even faze him, and he looks almost amused when Trevor resorts to punching him to get him away from Sypha. Trevor manages to get in a lucky hit with the Morningstar Whip, which has been established several times to instantly kill every other vampire he's used it against. It doesn't kill Dracula, but it does bring him to his knees... Then Dracula gets pissed and stops holding back. It takes all three of them just to survive his next attack, and even though Alucard gets him on the defensive, he turns it right back around and the ensuing beatdown becomes horribly one-sided. If it hadn't been for the fight spilling into Alucard's childhood bedroom, the sight of which causing a massive Villainous BSoD and making him realize he's trying to kill his own son, Dracula would have WON. It's enough to make one wonder how the hell Trevor's ancestors survived fighting him at his peak.
  • They didn't. If this follows the games, none of Trevor's ancestors besides Leon were nearly powerful enough to take on Dracula. Any of them that tried died horribly.
  • Alucard stakes Dracula... which doesn't kill him, or at least not at once. Even as he withers, his eyes rot and the flesh sloughs off his bones, Dracula still reaches for his son. Then Trevor arrives and cuts off his head, and even that might not have done the job. Sypha burning him to ashes might either just have been disposing of his remains, or what was needed to actually finish him for good.
    • When Sypha ignites Dracula's remains, what appears to be the amalgamation of thousands of screaming souls pours out of his body in a pitch-black cloud.

End Times

• Isaac's fight against the bandits at the oasis. At one point he uses his scourge to strip the flesh off an unfortunate bandit's entire face. And then he starts resurrecting their bodies as undead mooks.
  • His monologue after killing the bandits makes it clear that he’s done playing second fiddle, and is ready to become a threat all on his own:
  Isaac: (speaking to the bandit leader’s corpse) I simply don’t have time to deal with shit like you every time I want to sit down and take a drink… and, I am a Forgemaster… so I don’t need to. I could have an army of my own… I might like an army.
• If you needed any further proof that Carmilla is an unrepentant, backstabbing monster, then how about when she chains Hector up by the neck and beats him into a bloody, terrified pulp, laughing like a maniac the whole time? For all the effort she makes to come off as a Machiavellian mastermind, there's a sadistic, unhinged psychopath lurking right beneath the surface.
  • Carmilla's stated proclivities combined with Hector's good looks and naivete lend an extremely uncomfortable undercurrent to her interactions with him. It's not hard to read her constantly violating his personal space, calling him vaguely intimate nicknames like pet, and collaring him as more than just enjoying power over someone. The likelihood of Carmilla taking advantage of Hector is high. Thankfully, as Season 3 reveals, she's never touched him. Unfortunately...

Season 3

Investigators

• Sypha's glee at hunting and killing monsters is a bit unsettling to see, even bordering Blood Knight levels of glee.
  • Trevor's fight with the werewolf, from caving its kneecap in to breaking its Adam's Apple.

I Have a Scheme

• Prior Sala and his followers are incredibly creepy and speak with a Creepy Monotone that anyone can recognize as unhinged. They have taken to a certain kind of symbol; they've carved it in their church and wear sashes emblazoned with it. Saint Germain realizes quickly that it is in fact the alchemical symbol for sulphur, which as he points out, philosophers use to denote Hell. When he hears this and realizes they are literally wearing Hell on their sleeves, Sala is delighted.
• Isaac's devil forging can be extremely unsettling: one stab from his knife and the victim not only dies, but their body instantly transforms into a demon. When he takes on the Genoan soldiers, he stabs several of them in rapid succession, instantly creating new night creatures for his army. Imagine how terrifying it must be fighting with someone who can transform you or one of your comrades into monsters in a blink of an eye, and turn the fight against you.
• The flashback to where we see Cho fight a samurai, if you can call it a fight, which demonstrates how utterly outclassed normal humans are compared to vampires in a one-on-one duel. The samurai can't even touch her as Cho weaves around, almost mocking him, a look of serene calm on her face as she coolly, methodically takes him apart. At the end of the scene, right before the samurai can commit seppuku, Cho seizes his knife and casually throws it away, before delivering the Coup de Grâce and burying her fangs in his throat, with a look of humiliated agony on the man's face.
  • Looking at it closely, Cho robs the samurai of every single traditional show of honour in their culture. She breaks his armor, cuts his chonmage top knot, shatters his sword, lets his defeat be witnessed by an audience, and finally, as he attempts to regain something by dying through honourable seppuku, she takes his tanto and robs him of even that. It truly drives home how sadistic Cho is that she won't even allow her enemies the token respect of an honourable death.

The Good Dream

• Isaac's conversation with a particularly well-spoken demon among his forces veers into this around the end. While he recalls his mortal life as one would a faint dream, the bug-eyed demon reveals that he was once a philosopher in Athens during a time of persecution by Christian authorities, and he bitterly recounts being hunted down and executed for the "crime" of asking the wrong questions about the nature of God and religion.
  FlysEyes: I was... betrayed, Forgemaster. I was hunted. I was tortured. I... lied for my life, in a church, before a judge. I gave up others so that I may live. I became a sinner.
  Isaac: And?
  FlysEyes: And... they killed me anyway. I woke up in Hell, because this world is insane. And... I learned something about sin.
  Isaac: What did you learn?
  FlysEyes: I learned... to like it. Yet here I am, back on the surface of the Earth. Strong and free, in a world where thinking... is considered something that should be tortured and murdered. (grins unnervingly) Thank you... for my second life. I intend to use it well, and make wonderful new dreams... of it.

Worse Things Than Betrayal

• Saint-Germain discovers the dark secret inside the priory being kept at all costs by Sala's cultists: One of Dracula's night creatures crucified... and still alive.

The Harvest

• Despite the heroes' efforts to save the village of Lindenfeld, they are too late to stop the ritual to open a portal to Hell, leading to ALL of the innocent villagers being killed and having their souls absorbed by Dracula's demon.
  • It cannot be understated how horrifying this sequence is. We're shown the innocent folk just minding their own business, one family sitting down to dinner and happy. Suddenly, the rune carved onto their house outside glows red and the entire house immediately bursts into fire, burning everyone alive inside to a horrible, screaming death. No warning. No build-up. Just instant suffering.
• Isaac's entire battle against the Magicians' slaves.
  • It's shown that each and single one of them is reduced to a living puppet, forced to toil away forever for their master with one of them having their limbs fall off from too much work.
  • They are still very formidable enemies with some brainwashed knights managing to kill a large demon with teamwork.
  • The biggest moment is when suddenly all the slaves begin levitating in the air and combining into one large sphere of human bodies, becoming the boss Legion from the games.
  • Legion is already a horrifying enough in the games, more often than not consisting of an outer "shell" made up of hundreds of corpses, all protecting a single monstrous core-like creature. Here, not only is it comprised of nothing but human bodies, all of them are still technically alive. Granted, they're beyond salvation, but it's still no less disturbing to think about. It's made somehow even worse when it begins attacking Issac and his minions by launching small masses of human bodies at them at a high speed, effectively turning them into living ammunition.
• The episode's final shot shows a glimpse of Hell in all its twisted forms: desolated wastelands, woods with tortured-looking trees, landscapes containing post-apocalyptic visions, and finally, a small ruin with Dracula and Lisa embracing each other for all eternity.
  • The Hell we are shown seems to follow Dante's Inferno rules, as the "trees" mentioned above seem to be made of people probably the Wood of the Suicides, whereas the name obviously indicates, the trees were the souls of those who took their own lives.
• You'd think the love scenes between Lenore and Hector, as well as between Alucard, Sumi, and Taka, would be tender and romantic. However, they're scored to the same tense soundtrack as the battle scenes. It's a warning sign something is about to go wrong, and boy is it ever...'

Abandon All Hope

• Just before Saint-Germain was able to change the Infinite Corridor's connection, we see Dracula noticing the corridor and reaching out. He was moments away from reviving and it's unknown if Lisa could have come with him.
  • Alternatively, some have considered that he may have been attempting to close the door or push it away, now that he's finally reunited with Lisa even through all of their suffering. If that's true, then the moment becomes a possible Tear Jerker for fans, and makes the idea of reviving without his wife Nightmare Fuel for him.
• Hector's fate, once again. Every bit of Sex Slave subtext that went into the way Carmilla treated him is straight text with Lenore, which leads to Hector being effortlessly manipulated, with a ring placed upon him that enchants him to be unable to even attempt rebelling lest he feel incredible pain. Worse yet, Lenore, the one woman he thought he could trust, outright states her intent to sexually abuse him for quite some time. While he didn't get a happy ending in Season 2, this is a whole new level of disturbing.
• After having some suspicions, Trevor and Sypha discover that the Judge, a man they had trusted and come to care for, was in fact a ruthless Serial Killer of many, including children. Notably, this, combined with the slaughter of Lindenfeld, breaks Sypha.
• This is hammered in even further by Trevor when he tells Sypha that for the past few months they've been living her life, and now that everything's gone downhill? They're living his.
• Alucard's fate summarizes his entire season and the time since season 2's finale: the reality that someone can be just one friendship, one Hope Spot away from either recovery from depression and despair, or a complete mental and moral breakdown of one's own identity.
• The final shot of the season has Alucard impaling the duo's corpses on the entrance of this castle vertically (that means anus to mouth). Thankfully they are already dead, but crossed with Tear Jerker, he becomes even more of a hermit disillusioned with outside companionship and starts emulating his own father.
  Alucard: (bitterly) Well... I suppose I could have put up big signs all over the place. "Do not enter." "Danger of death." "Abandon all hope." Heh... That sort of thing. But this seemed to work well enough... for dead old Dad.

Season 4

Murder Wakes It Up

• Trevor and Sypha spend six weeks since leaving Lindenfeld running into numerous groups of vampires, Night Creatures and some nasty humans, including:
  • A Vampire making human sacrifices inside a church, using a spell that, according to Sypha, was unfinished and wouldn't have worked anyway.
  • Some crazed humans beating adults and sacrificing children in front of a statue of Death. During their rescue effort, Trevor is nearly choked out by one of them, but Trevor fights back by gouging his eyes out.
• When we first see Alucard, more corpses are displayed on spikes outside of Dracula's castle, not just Sumi and Taka's (who have both completely rotted in the sun). Though the fact that they all belong to Night Creatures or vampires, judging by their inhuman appearances at least, makes it a little less awful.

Having the World

• Carmilla's plan has evolved from securing enough humans as permanent livestock to a mix of World Domination and full-on genocide on a global scale, just to spite Dracula and all the other Vampire Lords. She explains this to Lenore, after if she asks if her scheme will make her happy, whose expressions switch between fear and concern.
  Carmilla: I was in Dracula's Castle. I went there to see what I could get out of it. Get some more power for myself, some more security for us. What I found was him and his people just fucking it up. And I saw that I could take the world away from him and have it for myself! The World, Lenore! Will I be happy when I've done that? I don't know. I don't know if I even care. But I will have everything that they had and they will all be dead. I will have the world I want, Lenore. And that... That will be enough. Having everything will be enough. Having the world. And all of them being dead.
  Lenore: Was this what it was all for?
  Carmilla: What on earth did you think this was all about?

Walk Away

• Striga's battle against the villagers raiding her army's encampment is nothing short of a massacre. Striga's dark armor and ferocious fighting style as a Berserker make it all the more unnerving.

You Don't Deserve My Blood

• Seeing the normally composed and posturing Carmilla undergoing a feral Villainous Breakdown as Isaac's army invades her castle and destroys her troops is pretty unnerving. Especially when she makes a pool of blood while frantically hacking away at Isaac's minions.
• Carmilla's demise is one of the coolest scenes in the season, but also one of the more unnerving. As her body disintegrates before exploding, the pose she makes with her sword in her breast, combined with her skeleton showing, almost makes her look like Death.
  • Also, with the position of her Tears of Blood she sheds just as she kills herself, it brings to mind her iconic mask in the games for a brief moment, which adds to the nightmarish quality as she vaporizes into nothing.

The Endings

• Death finally makes his appearance, and this is one of his most chilling appearances yet: even discounting his ghoulish skeletal countenance, he is no longer a loyal ally of Dracula, but a Greater-Scope Villain and Manipulative Bastard who only wants Dracula back so he can sate his hunger for death, and plays a lot of people, particularly Saint-Germain, for suckers in his grand scheme.
  • There's also how his plan is supposed to end: Dracula trapped alongside his beloved wife in an artificial body, driven to even more insanity than before. In his state, he could very well bring about unimaginable slaughter as Death intends. Good thing Trevor stops it in time...
    Death: It's so beautiful. Let go, Dracula. Go insane. Bring me everything I need to thrive. Murder the world, just so I don't have to be hungry anymore.
  • Speaking of his plan, Trevor implicates that Death had been among Dracula's council for a very long time, something that Death doesn't refute with how possessively he describes Dracula as his treasure and important to his omnicidal plans throughout history; however, remember that once Dracula met Lisa, he was more than content to turn from being a heel to be with her, which goes against everything Death wants and needs. It is heavily implied then that Death, using his various powers and manipulations, may have had Lisa's death arranged specifically to motivate Dracula to go back off the slippery end and bring carnage on a scale unimagined, something he intended to have repeated with the Rebis that Saint Germain made by twisting that same love again to his advantage, all so he wouldn't go hungry anymore. Given how much evidence is on the plate, it's safe to say Death's plans just to keep himself fed have intentionally caused all of the pain throughout the entire series in one way or another whether people knew it or not. There's evil, and then there's that.
• The Rebis itself is nightmarish just to look at. Assembled from several corpses, it has the bits and pieces of man and woman intermixed, with a man's arm attached to half a woman's torso. Its face in particular is horrific; the flesh on it is sewn together in such a way that it looks more like bandages than flesh. When the souls of Dracula and Lisa are fused into it, the face starts contorting into their faces, tearing through its own flesh as needed while they scream in agony and confusion. This was the fate that Death wanted to subject Dracula and Lisa to. Hell, even the main trio are absolutely horrified of this abomination.