Warning: Spoilers Off applies to this page. Proceed at your own risk.
"Hear me, gods above. No longer shall I seek YOUR guidance! This path is MINE to tread...alone."
- The Magitek troops from Duscae. There's something unsettling about their red eyes and perpetually smiling faces. And then there's the mechanical scream they emit when they perform their Suicide Attack...
- From the "Dawn" trailer and its sequel, "Dawn 2.0": Luna as a child being chased through a dark house during a storm and attacked by a soldier, Caligo Uldor. All the plot about it was deleted from the final game because it was judged too creepy by the development team.
- The Naga
. If its design wasn't horrifying enough, you encounter it while exploring a dark cave, where it drops down from above, without any warning whatsoever. It then asks you in a pants-wettingly scary voice if you know where its children are. If you say no, it then screams out that it's going to make you its children; if you say yes, it accuses you of abducting its children. - The Omen trailer. Luna desperately trying to get through to a crazed Noctis as he overpowers her defenses is unsettling enough; watching her back away in terror before he impales her with her own trident is horrifying. The voiceover from their younger selves as this happens doesn't help.Noctis: "I won't let you down!"Luna: "I know you won't."
- The trailer scenes depicting Noctis' gradual degradation of strength. What seems like peaceful, thoughtful cruising at first turns into a car wreck before he follows a mysterious dog, and then he's fighting swarms of Imperial Soldiers (and even a Behemoth, complete with splattering its blood onto a wall). All the while, his True Companions are nowhere to be seen, and eventually his magic even fades away entirely, forcing him to fight a small army with his bare hands and firearms. By the end, something possesses Noctis to murder Luna as mentioned above, and he's surrounded by a hellish landscape and beasts frothing fire at the mouth that watches him do the deed. To say the anguish in his cry hurts is an understatement.
- The ambiance in most of the dungeons is much creepier, with daemons jumping on you frequently. Chapter 13 takes it up to eleven and shifts suddenly into horror, having you explore a daemon-filled fortress, alone and unarmed for the most part, and throwing jumpscares at you at a sustained pace.
- Daemons in general are terrifying, especially at night on the overworld:
- Anywhere at any time, even driving, you can hear a hellish sound, a portal in the ground opens up and out crawls a Level 30 Iron Giant—a giant, black, metallic...creature wielding a BFS. Early on in the game these monsters don't just look scary, but they are so many levels above yours that they can give you an instant game over.
- The samurai type enemies look very human with their clothing and build, but are several feet taller than your party members, and have a pale sickly appearance and undead-looking face that gives a very Uncanny Valley effect. They also tend to be very dangerous as most have an arsenal of instant death attacks.
- What's even worse is that a loading screen◊ post-Chapter 13 states that daemons result from mutated Plasmodium malariae entering other living organisms. That's right, The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You.
- Almost everything surrounding Ardyn.
- The way he keeps screwing with Noctis' mind, making him attack his friends, and just appear out of nowhere in general.
- While Bahamut tells his backstory, Ardyn◊ turns around and you can see his face turned into something pale and inhuman with unnatural eyes.
- The decorations he's set up in the throne room to taunt Noctis when finally arrives, namely, the illusory corpses of Regis, Luna, Nyx, and Aldercapt hung from the ceiling by chains in degrading ways. To make matters worse, Regis and Aldercapt both have black daemon blood trailing down their faces from their eyes.
- During the train ride to Niflheim, Ardyn takes on Prompto's appearance and makes Prompto take on his, tricking Noctis into attacking one of his best friends while also walking alongside Noctis able to engage him in open conversation. Then, after he's frozen by Shiva and Noctis shatters him, he reappears and explains that he's immortal, and mimes pointing Prompto's gun at Noctis and firing. In a few brief scenes, the full extent of Ardyn's powers become clear — he can disguise himself flawlessly, shroud others in illusions, and is immune to any lasting harm. Noctis is almost speechless but to ask where Prompto is, and barely reacts beyond a growl when Ardyn pushes him aside to walk past him, because what else could he do? Between Ardyn's power within the Empire and his own personal abilities, he could have directly or indirectly sabotaged Noctis and his friends at any turn, killed any of them without effort, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop him. Ardyn has been calling the shots all along, and even if Noctis realizes it now, there's little he can do but keep playing the part Ardyn is forcing him into.
- Poor, poor Ravus. He gets killed and brought back as an abomination begging to be killed by the party. Mind you, the abomination in question isn't just a particularly ugly daemon. It looks like it belongs in a survival horror game — its eyes and mouth are filled with black daemon blood that leaks down its face, the left side of its body is covered in skinless daemon flesh, and a visible heartbeat pulsates through its chest and a few exposed veins.
- The World of Ruin and everything in the story leading up to it. Right from the game's beginning when exploring the lore of Eos it's mentioned that nights are getting longer, but the player isn't likely to heed it much. Then, as you progress in the game from chapter to chapter, you gradually notice that you start waking up later than 6 AM, and the sun starts setting earlier in the evening than 7 PM, creating a much more oppressive feel as you have far less time to accomplish your tasks before daemons come out. While a player may or may not realize this is directly connected to what was mentioned in the Lore section, it gets worse when starting in Chapters 10 onward the characters themselves notice this, and reason that eventually there will come a time when there's no daylight at all and daemons roam free to cause mass death and mayhem with no limits whatsoever. When Noctis wakes up on Angelgard in Chapter 14, even before the player realizes that ten years have passed, it becomes clear immediately from the cloudy, blackened skies that this has exactly come to pass. When Noctis arrives in a now-ruined Galdin Quay, he even comments "Last man standing", implying he—and possibly the player as well—believes that he really may be the last human being alive after the rest of humanity has been wiped out by daemons. Fortunately, he's not, and as in the namesake of the World of Ruin, there ARE other survivors.
- The Pitioss Dungeon that you can unlock after beating the game, is pretty guaranteed to creep the ever-loving hell out of you. Why? Because the absolute lack of any sort of life in the labyrinth. There aren't even any daemons, which're supposed to thrive in the darkness. Instead, it's a bloody marathon of puzzles involving perilous pathways of thin balancing struts, constantly moving architecture, and eternally red-hot spike panels galore, with random demonic-looking statues to scare the hell out of you once you shine your flashlight on them.
- The Dungeon also shows that the devs made the Demon Wall's return come twofold. Along with the actual enemy you can encounter on a hunt or more likely the darkness-ridden world in the ending, the Pitioss pits you against one as an actual environmental hazard. Specifically, a gigantic freaking wall of rotating red-hot spikes, with a massive skull in the center, closing in and out on you. The worst part? This is only the midway point...
- In Episode Prompto you get to watch Verstael gruesomely becoming a daemon and grabbing onto Prompto as he slowly mutates, forcing him to shoot him in retaliation. If you fail to do the prompt correctly, you get a very scary zoom on Vestael face followed by a game over.
- The secret final boss fight in Episode Ignis. Ignis finds the Crystal and looks upon it with awe. Cue this suddenly playing as the camera pans around to reveal none other than Ardyn, conveniently tipping his fedora towards it. Then he lifts it up, and you get an up-close-and-personal look at his true daemonic form as he gives Ignis, and the player by extension, a Slasher Smile for the ages. His face then proceeds to eerily fade back into its more human form, further emphasizing that his appearance is nothing more than an illusion.
- The ending of Episode Ardyn. After being told by Bahamut that his fate is to be killed by Noctis for the Starscourge to truly end, Ardyn decides (or is forced to, depending on player choice) to go along with what fate has decreed for him. As he curses the world, he slowly advances towards apparitions of Aera and Somnus. And when he reaches them, he gives a horrifying Slasher Smile and stabs them to death, before covering the world in darkness while letting out the mother of all Evil Laughs.
