Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
- Andy's escape by crawling through a tiny sewer pipe, dealing with the horrific smell and biting rats for 500 yards. Red actually points out that his mind rebels any time he tries to think about it, and can't help pondering what might have happened if he had found the end sealed with a grate, with no way to go back.
- Going to prison for a crime you didn't commit and having to endure the likes of The Sisters is bad enough, but Andy also has to deal with a corrupt warden who wants Andy under his thumb, and is hell bent to break his spirit.
Apt Pupil
- Get face-to-face with non-cartoonish and insidious Nazi evil.
- Todd Bowden was a pretty normal kid, with a paper route and reasonable grades. The poster child for all-American boyhood. There's just that obsession with concentration camps that you've got to watch out for.
- In the scene where he burns a cat alive in his oven to stave off nightmares, Dussander mentions getting a dog for the same purpose. Later, he goes to an animal shelter and leaves with a puppy. There's no dog at his home the next time we see him.
- Similarly, the scenes where Todd kills homeless people to stave off his nightmares.
- The description of the effects of PEGASUS gas on a group of prisoners in one of Dussander's stories. Fate Worse than Death indeed..."They began to twitch all over and to make high, strange sounds in their throats. My men... they called PEGASUS the Yodeling Gas. At last they all collapsed and just lay there on the floor in their own filth, they lay there, yes, they lay there on the concrete, screaming and yodeling, with bloody noses. But I lied, boy. The gas didn’t kill them, either because it wasn’t strong enough or because we couldn’t bring ourselves to wait long enough. I suppose it was that. Men and women like that could not have lived long. Finally I sent in five men with rifles to end their agonies. It would have looked bad on my record if it had shown up, I’ve no doubt of that - it would have looked like a waste of cartridges at a time when the Fuehrer had declared every cartridge a national resource. But those five men I trusted. There were times, boy, when I thought I would never forget the sound they made. The yodeling sound. The laughing."
- Todd making Dussander dress up in the Nazi costume. At first, it has the crotchety old man grudgingly humoring the boy walking in place to the boy's prompting to "face right" and "march", but then he gets into it. He starts moving his arms, his steps become more brisk, his face becomes a blank slate and he gives the Nazi salute without prompting. At that point, Todd and the audience know that he's back in the Third Reich and that old evil inside him has woken up.
- The mundane banality of evil that the book explores, the mix of boredom, sadism and cruelty that every person carries with them and what motivated regular working men and women to oversee the destruction and butchery of millions. It can happen to anyone, come from anywhere. The main character isn't some cliche evil bastard, he's a normal kid who succumbed to the darkness every human has in them. And like a rabid dog, he has been irreversibly tainted by what he has done, and has to be put down.
- The ending. After Todd gruesomely murders his guidance counselor after being confronted about Dussander and his true identity, Todd goes fully off the handle. Feeling rejuvenated, he goes out to a populated area to embark on a five hour killing spree before being taken down by the police. None of it is described in detail.
- When Todd begins to have nightmares that cause him to act out in his sleep, his father thinks that he's experiencing normal puberty and talks humorously to Todd's mother about his own first Erotic Dream. Todd's first such dream ends up being about raping a captive Jewish girl with a device that electrocutes her in a torture experiment, something that horrifies even him when he wakes up.
The Breathing Method
- Dr. McCarron's terrifying and sadly prophetic nightmare.
- Four words: "Thank you, Dr. McCarron." Six more: Mouthed from the mother's severed head. Leave it our buddy Stephen King to come up with a climax that's both heartwarming and bone-chilling at the same time.
