Nightmare Fuel / Chernobyl

Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned!

"What will happen to our boys?" This.

"You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before."

— Valery Legasov

Despite the fact it's a drama miniseries about a real life event, Chernobyl is never the less described as a horror series, perhaps even a Cosmic Horror Story, in terms because of said real life events. And by god, does it warrant this page.

---

The Series

Trailer

• The trailer makes extensive use of a truck broadcasting "Vnimanie, vnimanie..." ("Attention, attention...") to signal the evacuation of Pripyat.
  • What's more disturbing? Many witnesses to the real tragedy have said, upon seeing the series, that the events shown were completely accurate to what happened.
  • The announcement itself has a calm, detached tone to the speaker's voice, as though making an announcement that the cafeteria will be serving carrots instead of peas for dinner. Granted, it's being done to keep the citizens from panicking, but the severity of the disaster makes the voice seem... inhuman.
• The trailer won the 2019 Golden Trailer award for "best horror/thriller", even though Chernobyl is technically neither a horror series nor a thriller.

1:23:45

• At 1:23am, Lyudmilla is making tea in her apartment, oblivious to the bright light coming from Chernobyl in the background. Then the light gets brighter, signaling an explosion has taken place, and she doesn't notice until the shockwave hits seconds later. When the camera pans back to the power plant after the explosion, there is a brilliant blue light shining straight up from the location of the explosion, like a spotlight. It's not a spotlight. What you are looking at is air ionized to luminescence by radiation, due to the reactor being exposed to the open air. What she is staring at is — for those working at the plant that night, and the firefighters rushing to put out the fires — the very maw of hell on Earth itself.
• Some residents of Pripyat, including children, gather along a bridge to watch the distant fire, unaware that the thing burning is an exploded reactor core. And then, the wind picks up and all these flakes of ash begin falling like snow, collecting onto their hair and clothing, while their children start to play in that ash. To the viewers, fully aware of what's happening, this seemingly innocent scene is more terrifying than most slasher films. The next we see of them, they're all in the overflowing hospital, all with radiation burns. Including the same man and his infant son from the earlier scenes. He even begs Lyudmilla to take his son away from him, but she has no response and is instead horrified as she walks away to find her husband. To quote the epilogue crawl, it's been reported that nobody from the bridge survived^note Thankfully, the events surrounding the Bridge of Death have been proven to be nothing but an urban legend..
• After Perovozchenko sends Gorbachenko to find others and get them out of the building, someone passing by pauses just long enough to vomit blood on his chest before stumbling away. Gorbachenko gets distracted by Kudryavsev and Proskuryakov on their way to the reactor room, but such a small moment emphasizes just how nightmarish the entire situation already is for everyone trapped inside.
• Kudryavsev and Proskuryakov are sent to Reactor #4 to manually lower the control rods into the core, only for Yuvchenko to tell them that the rods and the core don't exist anymore. Upon entering the ruined reactor hall, the two men find themselves staring into the gaping, flaming, hellish maw of what used to be Reactor #4. They quickly realize just how FUBAR the situation really is and hi-tail it out of there. A Youtube comment summarized what they were facing well:
  Staring right down the barrel of a high-energy particle machine gun that's sending a trillion x-rays, gamma rays, and neutrons a second straight through you and turning you into swiss cheese at the molecular level. Some of the neutrons even transmuting the very elements you're made of.
  The dispersing kinetic energy of the molecules they throw around in their path is so high it translates into enough heat that you can feel it all inside of you.
  One minute in an environment of 500 sieverts per hour. Enough for a lethal dose. Except it wasn't enough. Two of them actually go back and spend the rest of the night running around the reactor opening water valves in a futile sacrifice to try and put out the fire.
  You can't put out the fire. That dispersed kinetic energy coming from the very decays inside the fuel and graphite is enough to keep them glowing red-hot. No amount of water will. In fact after being spent, these materials usually spend up to a decade in an adjacent cooling pool before they cool down just enough to be able to be transported.
  • Another commenter managed to summarize it even better with utterly chilling brevity:
    When you're staring into the fire that just killed you.
  • To add another layer to this: the radiation firing out of the core would take less than a minute to cause a fatal dose — and when you add in the billowing smoke, carrying with it a lot of intensely radioactive particles? Kudryavsev and Proskuryakov are doomed just by looking at it and breathing in the smoke for a matter of seconds.
  • If you pay attention, you can see Kudryavsev and Proskuryakov's faces turning red in the few seconds they are there.
• The same thing (red face) happens on screen to Vasily Ignatenko when he climbs to the top of the rubble pile to put out the fire. This also happens to Sitnikov — ordered to report on the damage by Fomin (after Dyatlov, who originally wanted to go himself, vomits on the table and is hospitalized) with an armed guard forcing him to go — when he looks into that core from the roof of the vent block building. When Sitnikov turns his face towards the camera to show the reddened skin, he does it with a pained expression — making it plain that he knows full well he's already dead.
• The dispatch calls made to the surrounding firefighting departments. The horrifying thing is that's the Real Life calls made the night of the explosion.^note It's why, during an English-made production, the dialogue switches to actual Russian. What you're listening to is the actual terrified panic in the dispatcher's voice...
• At one point in Episode 1, a firefighter picks up a piece of debris out of curiosity. Unbeknownst to him, this is a piece of graphite from the core, one of the most radioactive pieces there were. Within minutes, the poor guy is on the ground screaming in intense pain, his hand horribly burned from the radiation passing through his glove. Worth noting this has been condensed for the sake of fitting events into a TV format — in Real Life, while the pain and swelling depicted is accurate, it took a few hours for the damage to become apparent, rather than a few seconds.
  • The view of the destroyed reactor core in Episode 1. Kudryavsev and Proskuryakov enter the refueling hall, which minutes ago was a large clean white room with all of the maintenance equipment in it, the floor of which housed the 2,000 ton lid of the reactor. They enter the hall after the explosion...and it is an absolute hellscape, billowing smoke obscuring almost everything and among the dust and debris, the open reactor, burning away below them. If ever there was a physical depiction of Hell, at that moment the two plant workers saw its mouth in Reactor #4.
  • The pump room for Reactor #4 isn't spared either; Yuvchenko goes to look for Khodemchuk, who was working in the pump room when the explosion occurred. He finds Degtaryenko lying injured near the pump room's entrance, and sees the pump room behind him, which is in such ruin the pumps themselves have been dislodged from the ground, and there is so much rubble from the collapsed ceiling the floor isn't visible.
  • Although not mentioned much in the series, the Real Life fate of Valery Khodemchuk: He was most likely in the southern circulating pump room when the explosion occurred. Either he was incinerated immediately in the blast or was caught in the rubble. Try not to think about the horror of that second option...
  • While it's no less tragic, it's agreed upon that because of his location in regards to the explosion, Valery Khodemchuk's death came about by being instantly crushed in the explosion. It's even implied on the show when Yuvchenko enters the pump room.
• This video shows the various radiation levels of places in and around the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Standing next to the open reactor itself would be enough to give you a lethal dose in 30 seconds. Room 712 (where Akimov and Toptunov opened the valves to let water into the now burning reactor core) had enough radiation to kill a man after a 1/2 hour exposure. Akimov and Toptunov spent 2 hours there. They knew going in that they'd be dead men walking out of it.

Please Remain Calm

• As the helicopter carrying Shcherbina and Legasov approaches Chernobyl, the former orders that they fly over the reactor to get a good look at the damage. The latter tries to warn about the intense radiation that they will be subjected to if they do. Shcherbina tells the pilot to obey him or he'll be shot. Legasov retorts that if he does, he'll be begging to be shot within a day.
  • Just Legasov's tone as they see the smoke coming from Chernobyl is unsettling. A simple but horrified "What have they done...?".
  • Legasov's response when Shcherbina presses him for a solution after the true scope of the disaster becomes clear.
    Legasov: You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before.
  • Later, a helicopter flies directly over the reactor to drop sand on the core, and the two men watch as it falls out of the sky. While the crash itself was caused by the chopper striking a crane, the incident was caused by the radiation interfering with communication with the ground, and from the look on Legasov's face, it was obvious that even if the pilots didn't crash, they were dead men. This was based on actual footage that was captured.
  • The crash itself is depicted as sounding less like a standard low velocity crash from that height and more like a splash when the copter hits the ground. That's the radiation-induced metal fatigue doing its work, rather than, say, terminal velocity. Now, imagine the crew inside basically having the structural integrity of water balloons because of the intense gamma exposure. They died fast, thankfully.
• In order to gain an accurate reading of the radiation levels being emitted from the destroyed core, Colonel General Pikalov volunteers to drive into the plant in order to record the data. When he returns, he reports that the Roentgen levels coming from the core are far, far higher than the 3.6 Roentgen stated by Bryukhanov. It's 15,000. It's high enough that everybody at the plant is in danger, and with every passing moment the area that is contaminated with radioactive particles is growing. And growing.
  Pikalov: It's not three Roentgen. It's 15,000.
  (Legasov closes his eyes in dismay)
  Bryukhanov: Comrade Shcherbina...
  Shcherbina: (to Legasov) What does that number mean?
  Legasov: It means the core is open. It means the fire we're watching with our own eyes is giving off nearly twice the radiation released by the bomb in Hiroshima. And that's every single hour. Hour after hour, 20 hours since the explosion, so 40 bombs worth by now. Forty-eight more tomorrow. And it will not stop. Not in a week, not in a month. It will burn and spread its poison until the entire continent is dead.
• The worst case scenario described by Ulana to Gorbachev, of what she thinks could happen if the radioactive lava melts into the plant's underground levels and comes into contact with the water tanks, sounds downright apocalyptic. The scenario is so horrifying that even Charkov, the normally unflappable KGB spook, is momentarily shocked into jaw-dropped silence at it.
  Ulana: When the lava enters these tanks, it will instantly superheat and vaporize approximately 7,000 cubic meters of water, causing a significant thermal explosion.
  Gorbachev: How significant?
  Ulana: We estimate between two and four megatons. Everything within a 30-kilometer radius will be completely destroyed, including the three remaining reactors at Chernobyl. The entirety of the radioactive material in all of the cores will be ejected at force and dispersed by a massive shockwave that will extend approximately 200 kilometers and likely be fatal to the entire population of Kyiv as well as a portion of Minsk. The release of radiation will be severe and will impact all of Soviet Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Byelorussia, as well as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and most of East Germany.
• Three men — the Chernobyl Divers — volunteer for a Suicide Mission, and wander through heavily irradiated water on their way to manually open a gate to drain the water when their flashlights go out, all while their Geiger counters are reading so much radiation that they're not merely clicking. They're screaming.^note  In Real Life, despite everything they went through? All three men lived. Two were still alive when the series was filmed (the third, Boris Baranov, died of a heart attack in 2005).
• After signs of the disaster have been detected in other nearby countries and news have begun leaking, Shcherbina hears that children have been warned to stay indoors in Frankfurt, which is a thousand miles away. At the same time he watches local children in Pripyat going about their normal business, unaware of the danger.
  • The children in Frankfurt were far enough away that they were never in any danger from the accident. The children in Pripyat? If you read the part about radioactive iodine above, you'll have some inkling of what they're in for. What's a good vector for radioiodine to enter the body? Contaminated milk. Guess what the children of Pripyat were drinking? Fortunately, thyroid cancer is one of the easiest cancers to treat, with a 99% success rate, so, really, there's nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. The children are fine. Just fine.
  • Per the 2008 UNSCEAR report into Chernobyl, about 160 people are known to have died from thyroid cancer as a result of the accident. Many of them were children.

Open Wide, O Earth

• The final stages of acute radiation syndrome. As Legasov points out, their bodies are so far gone from internal and external hemorrhaging that even morphine doesn't work because the veins are so damaged they can't inject it and the blood wouldn't be able to carry it.
• Vasily screaming and crying in agony from the pain of his radiation exposure is very very hard to watch.
• Vasily's condition deteriorates as the episode goes on, going from a little sunburnt at most, to blistered all over, until finally we see him in his last hours, pictured above. Every inch of his skin is just a wet patchwork of yellow, black, blue, and red. His mouth, eyes, and nose are black. Open wounds are bleeding all over his body. He's essentially a long-dead corpse that's still breathing.
• We see Toptunov turning red, Vasily turning black and yellow, and even Dyatlov pale, white-haired and emaciated. But Akimov is kept offscreen. Later, Khomyuk mentions that by the time she met Akimov, he had no face left. Yeah, you've heard that right. An instance of Body Horror was apparently so extreme that HBO — no stranger to Gorn — was unwilling to show it. Think about that for a minute.
• And yet, despite all the horror involved, the creators actually chose to leave out some of it for fear that it would look exploitative. According to the real Lyudmilla, Vasily spent his last two days vomiting parts of his internal organs, and his arm's muscles became dislodged from the bone when she raised it.
• There's something very unsettling during the funeral of Vasily and the other ARS victims. Their bodies are so irradiated that a traditional burial or cremation isn't possible due to contamination risks. Instead, the bodies, still in plastic mortician bags as they're basically skeletons holding human sludge at this point, are put in lead-lined wooden coffins nailed shut, which are then put in zinc coffins welded shut, which are then put in a mass grave filled with several feet of concrete. Knowing that even in death, these people are still a danger to everybody for centuries at least due to all the radiation they soaked up, to the point that they can't even have a proper burial and must be disposed of like toxic waste... Radiation is the gift that keeps on giving^note In particular, even almost 40 years after the event, Vasily's firefighter uniform is still so radioactive that even being near it exponentially increases someone's cancer risk.

The Happiness of All Mankind

• The later shots of the evacuated city of Pripyat. Its quiet stillness is unsettling, combined with the harsh realization of the nightmare just miles away unfolding. In Real Life, even today the Ghost Town is an undeniably spooky place to visit, especially at night.
• The scene with the "bio-robots". It takes place in real time and we already know 90 seconds on the roof will give you a lifetime dose of radiation and a little more than that means death. We see the conscripts lining up and wearing pitiful outfits, mostly rubber with some home-made leaden armor. The bell goes and they madly rush out to the roof, and we watch one in particular struggle to lift up a few heavy chunks of graphite with his shovel. All their Geiger counters are going berserk the whole time. After 90 seconds, the bell rings again and they all run inside, except that one conscript, who trips and gets his foot stuck under a chunk of graphite. Precious seconds go by until he manages to break free using his shovel. He runs towards the door, stumbling and falling into a puddle of water, but eventually clambers inside. He takes a second to catch his breath and then looks down at his rubber boot. There's a tear in it. He's not mentioned among the fallen, either, but given the radiation levels on that roof...
  • Special mention has to be given to Reactor #4's wreckage, visible briefly when the camera follows said liquidator as he dumps graphite over the rail, taking care not to look over the edge. The camera gives us a brief glimpse of the interior of the ruined reactor, visible from above in the daylight. Even with sunlight above, the visual is horrifying; twisted lumps of metal can be seen everywhere, the reactor's lid is a tangled mass of bent control rods reaching up to the sky, and the entirety of what is visible is dominated by its wrecked remains. All while the Geiger counter in the background is basically screeching from the immense levels of radiation.
  • Three words: "You are done." They're directed at the poor soul from above who got his boot torn on the graphite.
  • A blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment (2:52 of this video) shows the luckless conscript less than a foot away from what looks like a fuel rod, still largely encased within its graphite.
  • While briefing the Liquidators, Tarakanov shows footage of the working area. That is actual footage of the cleaning crews.
• Combined with Tear Jerker in episode 4: The garbage truck dumping a whole mass of dead dogs and cats into a mass grave, the result of the liquidators being forced to purge all the wildlife in the area so they can't escape the containment zone.

Vichnaya Pamyat

• In the opening, we see the citizens of Pripyat going about their daily business. The Ignatenkos are chatting with a neighbor, with Vasily playing with their kid. Then we see, in the store window's reflection, Dyatlov walking by on his way to work. The music seems to take a darker tone like he is the Angel of Death.
• Episode 5: The disaster is shown, in all its horrifying glory, from the slow build up of Toptunov and Akimov's genuine concerns over something being amiss, Dyatlov refusing to listen to anything they say...and then everything goes to shit.
  • To begin with, the safety test goes up in smoke when the reactor stalls out due to xenon build-up. Rather than shut the reactor all the way down as they're taught to do, a royally pissed-off Dyatlov demands that they continue the test anyway and raise the power back up by any means necessary, including turning off almost all of the checks needed to stop the core from overheating (for perspective, this is like trying to fix a car that's not accelerating properly... by disconnecting the brakes and stomping on the gas pedal). And when Akimov tries to stand up to him...
    Dyatlov: Raise the power.
    Akimov: No... I won't do it, it isn't safe!
    ...
    Dyatlov: Safety first. Always. I've been saying that for 25 years. That's how long I've done this job, 25 years. Is that longer than you, Akimov?
    Akimov: ...yes.
    Dyatlov: Is it much longer?
    Akimov: ...yes.
    Dyatlov (turning to Toptunov): And you with your mother's tit barely out of your mouth?
    Toptunov: (silence)
    Dyatlov: So if I say it's safe, it's safe, and if the two of you disagree you don't have to work here, and you won't. But not just here, you won't work in Kursk or Ignalina or Leningrad or Novo-Voronezh, you won't work anywhere, ever again. I'll see to it. I think you know I will see to it. Raise the power.
  • It's not an idle threat either. Dyatlov's position was such that he could, theoretically, blacklist them from the USSR's nuclear power plants as well as fire them. Which means they'd not only lose their flats in Pripyat (one of the better company towns in the USSR, built exclusively for the plant workers and their families), but could also be unable to find work in their profession anywhere else in the Soviet Union, and would likely have to switch careers entirely.
  • But the AZ-5 button is supposed to shut down the reactor if the safety test goes awry, right? Wrong, oh so wrong. As it turns out, the Soviets knew there was a flaw in the RBMK reactor and kept it from everyone, even as someone as bullheaded as Dyatlov. Legasov put it best...
    Legasov: Chernobyl Reactor 4 is now a nuclear bomb.
  • Not a nuclear bomb in the conventional sense, mind — rather, the water inside the reactor boiled to produce steam, and when the pressure grew too high, it blew apart the core, lifting the massive Upper Biological Shield with it. To elaborate further, the AZ-5 button was effectively the impromptu bomb's detonator because the boron control rods (which absorb neutrons, and slow the reaction) had tips made of graphite, which moderates neutrons and thus increases reactivity, and therefore the power output. (When they were inserted, the high pressure inside the core damaged the rod channels and jammed them in place, with only their graphite tips actually inserted. One guess as to what happened next...) When a prosecutor asks the reason, Legasov gives a small tirade ending in a simple answer:
    Legasov: It's cheaper.
  • And once AZ-5 was pressed, the power shot up from 200 megawatts to 33,000 (over ten times the output the reactor was designed for) and led to the core exploding, but not before we see the lid covers (each of which weighs 350 kilogrammes, about the weight of a Grand Piano) start jumping and clanging randomly due to the pressure buildup (all while we see Perevozchenko horrifyingly stare at the lid covers and begin sprinting towards the control room, with Legasov tragically commenting there's nothing he can do to prevent the disaster at this point), only for it to immediately explode upwards, opening the core. And it becomes worse as Legasov describes oxygen entering the core, ending the chain reaction with causing a bigger explosion, all while the scene shows the graphite control rods flying out of Chernobyl and the eerie radioactive blue light rising out of the burning crater.
    Legasov: At long last, we have arrived: 1:23:45 — explosion. In the instant the lid is thrown off the reactor, oxygen rushes in. It's combined with hydrogen and super-heated graphite. The chain of disaster is now complete.
  • When Legasov announces that the reactor hit 33,000 megawatts before exploding, the entire room is completely and utterly silent. It's as if you can see the exact moment that everyone, even Dyatlov, realizes that yes, RMBK reactors do explode. In reality, much like the 3.6 roentgen initially reported as the radiation level, this was merely the highest amount of power that the meter could display; indeed, Legasov acknowledges that 33,000 megawatts couldn't have been the actual power output given how far the deadly combination of terrible reactor design and a tyrannical Pointy-Haired Boss calling the shots had caused things to spiral out of control. Estimates done in the years since indicate that at the moment of actual explosion, the power inside the reactor was on the order of 300,000,000 megawatts - in other words, 300 terawatts. As a fair comparison, this is about seventeen times the amount of power used across the entire planet.
  • For less than a second at 1:23:44, we get to see Valery Khodemchuk doing his job at the circulation pumps when, all of a sudden, the pressure buildup makes some of them blow their lids. As he looks at the pipes in confusion, we know that in the literal next second, he will die in the explosion, with his body so far deep in the facility that it can never be recovered (and still rests there today, since the pumps are still completely inaccessible).
  • Note one thing too after the lid is thrown off: Dyatlov is shown to be terrified the minute the first explosion is felt, the complete sense of dread and realization that shit did go wrong...and then when the second explosion happens, he's shown with his head hung low, arguably unable to process the disaster and the eventual lead to him sending others to their deaths due to his own refusal to accept the reactor exploded.
  • The background status panel, which lights a section when one of the 200+ lid covers is removed... lighting up entirely, showing the lid is GONE.
  • The actual explanation of how AZ-5 caused the explosion takes a full three minutes. As Legasov narrates, it actually took place in five seconds. The amount of time from Akimov making the best choice he could and pushing what should be the stop button to an explosion that destroyed countless lives and endangered even more was 5 seconds.
  • The tangled-up mess of control rods, lit up by the eerie glow of the core as it begins to burn up, looks like nothing less than the birth of a dark god or the opening of the gates of Hell. Or, considering the insane amount of radiation at this moment, Death itself. You thought the inside of Reactor #4 was scary in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? Reality was scarier.
  • The script's description of the second explosion is horrifying.
    CATACLYSM
    
    —as the true power of the atom is finally released. In an instant, the building becomes a VOLCANO. Nuclear forces explode up and out, and turn NIGHT INTO DAY.
    
    A PLUME OF DEBRIS is sent ROCKETING 1,000 METERS INTO THE AIR, as if shot from the center of the earth itself.
    
    A HAILSTORM of BURNING GRAPHITE comes raining down from the plume... and as the last bits of deadly debris clatter back to the surrounding roof and ground...
    
    ...a thin BLUE LIGHT materializes in the air, shining straight up and down between the open reactor and the sky, piercing through the choking black smoke.
    
    The BLUE LIGHT widens... a color we were never meant to know... a glowing column connecting the earth and the heavens. A trillion atoms set free. Death, the destroyer of worlds.
• Legasov's arrest by the KGB.
  • After his testimony in Episode 5, Legasov is brought by the KGB to a kitchen storeroom that has a floor drain in the middle and is left alone with nobody speaking. Legasov almost immediately sits down and despair of what he dreads to be his fate.
  • The room itself is incredibly eerie, tiled in a hideous green geometric pattern that looks straight out of the Overlook Hotel.
  • Charkhov describes Legasov's punishment not as a command, but as a fact — as though he can shape reality by speaking the words. Which, in effect, he can.
    Charkhov: You will remain so immaterial to the world around you that when you finally do die, it will be exceedingly hard to know that you ever lived at all.
• Arguably the biggest NF of the entire show isn't just the fallout of Chernobyl, it's the fact everyone refused to acknowledge or accept how fucked up the situation was. Dyatlov is obviously a big example of someone who was in heavy denial over the disaster and refusing to see that yes, the core exploded, but you also have Fomin, Bryukhanov, and arguably all of the Soviet government, who would rather hide and play off the idea that there was no way the reactor would have exploded. It becomes more clear that the true horror of Chernobyl's disaster wasn't just that, but also those who wanted to lie and cover their own asses.

General

• The music of the entire series. If it is even present, it consists of mostly Scare Chords and metallic grinds which sound like something from Silent Hill, and those rare times that seemingly hopeful music appears, it is in scenes that are definitely not hopeful (like the bridge scene above), somehow making them even scarier.
  • Who ever (Hildur Guðnadóttir) decided to give the radiation a damn Leitmotif deserves an Academy Award.^note Which she actually got for the same year's Joker. There are no Academy Awards for television, but she slayed at the Emmys and Grammies all the same. It is nothing more than scratchy noise, and you first hear it when the plant workers look into the exposed core for the first time, but any time after it, it is haunting, and usually plays over the regular score when characters on screen are getting exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.
  • One particularly eerie track is Waiting for the Engineer which plays most prominently when Legasov first reads the report on the initial explosion and when Lyudmilla hugs Vasily in the hospital. It starts off with an ethereal, ghostly melody before transforming into, as a commentator accurately put it, something like the sound of a growling, furious beast. Both in and out of context of the show, it sounds like the kind of music that would play during a Nightmare Sequence.
  • Throughout the series, radiation is represented as noise. Scenes such as the immediate aftermah of the core's explosion are accompanied by a terrifying, otherworldy chorus of high-pitched buzzings and scream-like sounds. It reinforces the feeling that through the unleashing of the core's radioactivity, mankind has opened a gate to hell itself.
• Overall, the scenes actually featuring the destroyed reactor are absolutely terrifying. It's often only seen in quick glances, to remind you that for the people there, looking at it for more than a second or two meant acute radiation burns, poisoning, and death. With its opened maw, the twisted remains of the control and fuel rods looking more like tentacles than bits of metal, the ominous buzzing sound of the music whenever it is seen, and the absolutely hellish things it does to people who so much as look at it unprotected, the show makes Reactor Number 4 seem more like an Eldritch Abomination trying to claw its way into our world than something man-made. Suddenly, this makes the premise that nuclear radiation can even alter the reality itself, as shown in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro 2033, doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore.
• The fact that what you're looking at on screen actually happened for real, somewhat as portrayed given the necessity for dramatic license, that it ended hundreds of real lives and uprooted countless more. It left huge swathes of land uninhabitable, and spread a cloud of radiation that made it as far as Western Europe (where it potentially was a factor in numerous thyroid cancers, hence the iodine pills, which weren't distributed en masse everywhere), necessitating such things as having to dispose of millions of freshly harvested vegetables and litres of fresh milk from dairy herds who had potentially eaten contaminated grass before it got into the human food chain. And that it's still happening now, under the Chernobyl New Containment the remains of the exploded reactor are still radioactive and will remain so for the foreseeable future, and the surrounding area will remain unfit for human habitation for decades. And it all happened because of some very poor decisions made all across the USSR's nuclear industry.

---