As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!
"If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness."
Come and See makes the viewers do exactly what the title says — to come and see the horrors of war. And it's not pretty.
- Starting with a small one which serves also as Nausea Fuel: the bird's eggs Flyora accidentally tramples on. The bloody and smashed embryos (they already have feathers and paws) are soon food for flies.
- Glasha, though really beautiful, manages to get very creepy at some points. First, there's something unsettling in the closeup of her face which often shows a Psychotic Smirk or a Kubrick Stare. Then there's her Dissonant Serenity and Ophelia-like attitude: she's among a bunch of Shell Shocked Veterans and she's as flirty and blithe as she's like on a school trip and her casual allusion about her people being all deported to Germany. After she casually mentions that Kosach has bad dreams and suggests he will die soon. You wonder if she's really insane, or lacks of empathy or simply she's so absorbed by the things she's dreaming about (love, flirting, have fun) to escape the horrible reality she's living in.
- Then there's the scene in the woods where she dances a Lyubov Orlova song to Flyora that manages to be rather creepy if you watch her expressions and listen at the Shell-Shock Silence beyond the song.
- The ultimate Fridge Brilliance could be if she's really the personification of Flyora's subconscious as some have wondered: it would have been no coincidence that she disappears after Flyora's family died and he goes to search for food with the partisans and gets to see the true horrors of war. The Blithe Spirit she is, she's the personification of an innocence that will soon be lost.
- Speaking of flies: Flyora's house is strangely deserted, flies are eating the food in the table and you only hear their noise...
- The naked corpses of peasants stacked behind the hut. Now we know what happened to Flyora's family...
- They're only seen for a shot that lasts about a second and cuts abruptly. Somehow, this makes it even more horrifying.
- Flyora and Glasha sinking in the swamp, which then turns into a lake. You'd think they were going to drown.
- Yustin, the old man at the start, is doused in petrol and burnt alive by the Nazis.
- Flyora's Shell-Shock Silence after a German artillery bombardment; even the viewer can barely hear anything.
- The twin sisters' dolls on the floor, assaulted by flies.
- Many close-ups show us Flyora's metamorphosis from a naïve, young boy to a creepy, shell-shocked child that no longer seems to be human. It's telling that after enduring one absolutely horrific Trauma Conga Line after another, by the end of the film, Flyora has become completely unrecognizable: not only has his hair turned grey, but his eyes appear to be made out of glass — to the point of now resembling an uncanny, unholy fusion of Dull Eyes of Unhappiness, Creepy Shadowed Undereyes and Black Eyes of Evil — and are frozen into a perpetual Thousand-Yard Stare, his physique has become gangly, ragged and frail, his skin is now pale and corpselike, and his entire face is marked by horrible wrinkles and dirt, making him look like a grotesque old man.
- The disturbing sequence of the villagers making a scarecrow with a skull (probably from a dead Nazi) and a stolen Wehrmacht uniform as a life-size clay model of Hitler.
- The sudden shooting of the cow, with all the bullets through its body. You also can see its fear with the close-up to its eyes.
- And of course, the scariest and most famous scene of this movie is the carnage of a village of peasants by the Einsatzgruppen. All the villagers are locked in a shed with only few windows inside. The SS-Obersturmfuhrer calmly tells them that whoever manages to escape through the window is free but cannot bring any child with them: when a woman manages to escape with an infant on her arm, the baby is taken away from her and thrown back into the shed and the shed is set on fire with dozens of screaming people (men, women, children and elderly), while the woman who escaped earlier is dragged away by her hair by a portly German soldier and brutally gang-raped. Flyora himself manages to escape through the window but is taken by a Nazi who poses for a photo with his fellows pointing a gun to his head (true to their word though, they leave him alive after taking the photo, but judging from Flyora's utterly broken Thousand-Yard Stare, he probably wishes they hadn't). The soldiers proceed to drink and sing while watching people burn to death.
- The blond SS-Obersturmfuhrer who speaks to the villagers through the barn window is pretty much Nightmare Fuel incarnate. He first appears to be calm and impassive, but when he's later held at gunpoint by Partisans, he reveals his true nature. The utter, defiant hatred is apparent in his eyes as he tells the partisans they're sub-humans who don't deserve to live, and that the massacre was justified. While he rants, he stares directly into the camera with a haunting, bug-eyed gaze."Your nation doesn't deserve to exist. We will fulfill this objective. If not today, than tomorrow. If not today, then tomorrow!"
- The blond SS-Obersturmfuhrer who speaks to the villagers through the barn window is pretty much Nightmare Fuel incarnate. He first appears to be calm and impassive, but when he's later held at gunpoint by Partisans, he reveals his true nature. The utter, defiant hatred is apparent in his eyes as he tells the partisans they're sub-humans who don't deserve to live, and that the massacre was justified. While he rants, he stares directly into the camera with a haunting, bug-eyed gaze.
- The fate of the blonde girl who bears a strong resemblance to Glasha (likely intentional). Flyora, after having reached his fellow partisans hears the noise of a flute, and sees the girl in a catatonic state, blowing in a pan flute, her legs covered in blood, her eyes looking completely dead. Flyora then repeats Glasha's earliest lines: "to love... have babies..."
- One particularly creepy element that’s rarely talked about is the Nazi spy-plane that pops up from time to time. It’s scary for three big reasons.
- The first being that it always pops up whenever something bad is about to happen, almost certainly like a bad omen for the characters. The seemingly jet black appearance doesn’t help.
- The second is that when it does appear, it always gives off the feeling that Flyora is being watched constantly and as if it’s stalking him. This movie managed to make an airplane frightening.
- The third one, and probably the biggest, is how it sounds. You’d expect it to sound like a normal airplane right? Nope. While you can hear plane sounds, the way that it’s mixed in the sound design makes it sound like an otherworldly spacecraft. A prime example is the scene with Flyora and Glasha in the woods. Even before it appears you hear it, changing the tone of the scene completely. As Glasha playfully chases it while Flyora tries to stop her, the droning then fades out to normal airplane sounds as the paratroopers descend and Glasha’s face quickly turns to horror as she and the audience realize what’s happening.
