Moments pages are Spoilers Off. Read ahead only at your own risk! You Have Been Warned.
- Pulaski and especially Tenpenny are pure Nightmare Fuel. They are sadistic and sociopathic Dirty Cops who blackmail the gangs and can do what they want without fear of the consequences. What makes them exceptionally nightmarish is that, unlike most criminals in the series, they don't have a Freudian Excuse behind their actions. Heck, they don't even have redeeming or sympathetic traits.
- And of course, what makes them even more horrific is that unlike the criminals of previous games, they have the full protection of the law and abuse that authority. Tenpenny and Pulaski make it clear that they can do these horrible things to CJ, his friends and his family and get away with it, because they are cops.
- The way Tenpenny deals with the gangs doesn't help. He's essentially a mob boss in uniform, and his actions are in no way productive
- This also grades as real-life nightmare fuel, because Tenpenny and Pulaski are members of C.R.A.S.H. (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums), the anti-gang task force that Los Angeles instituted in The '80s and '90s. Very little of their actions needed to be exaggerated, because based on testimony from former members and victims, this is basically how a lot of the C.R.A.S.H. officers behaved.
- In general, all the urban legends that the game has: serial killers with chainsaws, the killer of the hut (and indeed, is quite chilling if you get to these huts abandoned overnight in the game), Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, UFO, ghosts, etc.. Just go at the night only to places where supposedly there are such legends and tremble.
- Then there's the wheelchair located in Fisher's Lagoon. It's just...sitting there. In a place a wheelchair has no reason to be.
- The wilderness in general can be quite creepy, especially at night. Mainly because of a heavy dose of Nothing Is Scarier. By the time you're dumped in the countryside, you're used to there being at least some kind of background noise going on at all times, whether it's the honk of car horns or civilian chatter. But get far enough out into the woods, and... nothing. Just an eerie silence. Then a thick fog rolls in or thunderstorm takes place, and even though you know they're not really in the game, you can't help but be reminded of all the urban legends listed above.
- Picture this: You hit a six-star wanted level a few minutes ago, and decide to head to the wilderness to wait out the wanted level. You're driving around the woods in your car, when suddenly, and out of nowhere, a Rhino Tank emerges from the trees, the soldier within hell-bent on seeing the charred wrecks of you and your car being crushed beneath the tank's wheels.
- The ghost cars, especially the ones in the Back-O-Beyond. It just rolls down a small hill, completely battered with no driver, and then promptly glides to a halt. No explanation for why it is there or how it got there, miles from any road in the middle of the woods. It isn't malicious, it gives you a free ride, but man is it creepy. Word of God confirmed that "ghost cars" and every other empty turned off car spawn without the handbrake applied, causing them to roll down hills if they don't spawn with a driver inside or on flat terrain.
- The sheer Mood Whiplash of "The Green Sabre." By the start? Grove Street are ready for what looks to be the Final Battle with the Ballas. By the end? Their lieutenants (Ryder and Smoke) have revealed their Face–Heel Turn, their leaders (CJ and Sweet) are in their Darkest Hour, and their enemies (Tenpenny, Pulaski, and the Ballas) are at the height of their Near-Villain Victory.
- Even if she provides some comic relief in the game, Catalina is Nightmare Fuel personified, especially in her casual dialogues with CJ. Just think of Trevor Philips as a female version, but without any redeeming qualities.
- Toreno approves of Catalina, and thinks CJ should have stuck with her, as she was "going places". Catalina is a murdering sociopath with absolutely no boundaries, morals or restraints, so of course a black ops operative like Mike Toreno would see her as useful.
- The death of CJ's mother is a kind of Tear Jerker and Nightmare Fuel in the video "The Introduction".
- In fact, it gets worse in the mission "High Noon", where Pulaski says that his mother "had most of her face hanging off". And if that weren't enough, he states that Tenpenny and the cops were mucking around with it.
- The death of one of the foremen of a San Fierro construction crew in the mission "Deconstruction", where he is buried alive in cement by CJ. In a porta-potty after it was tipped over by CJ, no less. Because supposedly, he and others were harassing CJ's sister.
- After threatening CJ into compliance, Mike Toreno eventually reassures him that if Sweet so much as gets touched, a Prison Guard will go home to discover that his wife and daughter have been murdered. It really goes a long way to show how connected he is, how he really isn't a "good guy", and how much you don't want to get on his bad side.
- There is a Let's Play of San Andreas written in the POV of CJ, and his description of Toreno
is not only nightmare fuel, but you can easily imagine that this is exactly what CJ is thinking. Toreno might look like a pudgy, middle aged white guy, but he is a killer far worse than anything you'll find on the streets of Los Santos. Toreno is a government agent, an authority figure so far removed from CJ's social group that he might as well be from another planet, and he ends up pulling CJ into various government faction conflicts, where he's forced to fight against CIA operatives doing their own little wars. It's disturbing because all you've ever fought for is Grove Street, your own little piece of Los Santos. Toreno? He's a shark, and you're an amoeba. You get a glimpse of some international horror far beyond your scope."Toreno wasn't the Devil, but he might as well have been. He was a relentless asshole who would do what it took to get what he wanted done, no matter what the consequences. I knew now why I had been so scared of him, I'd known motherfuckers like that in the past, people who just didn't give a fuck about anything but what they wanted. Guys who wouldn't even blink before blowing your brains out, blowing they friends brains out, fucking killing they MOTHER if it got them what they wanted. You couldn't reason with them, couldn't work a deal, because if you was in-between them and what they wanted, they just put you out the way in the fastest way possible."- Not only is he far out of CJ's league, but to everyone else's as well. Suddenly all of those big time gangsters, Mob bosses, drug dealers, pimps, serial killers, and other criminals look very puny compared to a guy like Toreno and the sort of "work" that he gets up to. Even the genuinely intimidating Pulaski and Tenpenny look like a pair of minimum wage mall cops when compared to a man like Toreno and the kind of power that he has at his disposal.
- As if it wasn't enough, dialogue and mission details heavily hint that Toreno is not even a government agent, but most likely works for some nebulous, international secret group and only pretends to work for Uncle Sam just to be on the safe side. Suddenly, The Truth's ramblings about the Illuminati and worldwide conspiracies cease to look that crazy.
- To put it into perspective, CJ, a gangbanging One-Man Army who is shown to be almost fearless, is utterly terrified of Toreno, calling him the actual Devil and actively expressing fear of death whenever Toreno sends him to do his dirty work. When Toreno leaves CJ piloting a stolen military jet to blow up some supposed spy ships, CJ's shown to be utterly terrified and expresses how he's going to hurl from the stress.
- Speaking of which: When Toreno reveals himself ("Highjack"), he gives CJ quite the Shut Up, Kirk! speech. One implying that even he's afraid of some of the stuff he's working against.
- There is a Let's Play of San Andreas written in the POV of CJ, and his description of Toreno
- In the motel-shoot-out scene, if you avoid entering the actual motel and run off into the city, it is abandoned, In fact, the entire map is abandoned. No cars, no bikes, no motorcycles. Not a single luxury. Except, about ten miles north, in the middle of a country road, a dead cop. No, really.
- Out in the desert near Las Venturas and the desert air strip, there is a hole in the ground. The hole is filled with bodybags. And a pickup truck is parked nearby. Thankfully, there's no one in it.
- The various creepy abandoned settlements in the deserts around Venturas. Imagine the nuclear test site from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull without mannequins.
- The PC and Mobile version may occassionally encounter the infamous Red Fog or Hellish Sky during rainy weather at evening, giving a bizarre bloody atmosphere that surrounds the entire state of San Andreas.
- There's combine harvesters in the farmlands, and whenever someone gets on the business end of that harvesting, a thick mist of red with some kibbles and bits flies out the back vent. In the mission where you have to steal one, there's entire groups of violent redneck farmers put in your path specifically to do this.
- Near the end of the game right after you kill Big Smoke, Tenpenny now willingly intends to kill CJ and left him to die by burning down the Crack fortress by shooting one of the engines of this building is pretty harrowing, CJ would have burned alive painfully if he had never escaped unscathed.
- Near the finale of the game, the whole state of Los Santos broke a massive riot with evacuations, gunfires, car explosions everywhere and all pedestrians fighting among themselves.
- One can simply enable riot cheats sending the whole San Andreas into a state of emergency. The riot is even more terrifying if you have the FOOXFT (everybody has weapons) cheat enabled. Now, instead of simply fighting CJ and each other, pedestrians are attacking with anything from baseball bats to shotguns to rocket launchers. It starts to feel less like a riot and more like a real life warzone. At any possible moment CJ could find himself under attack from a rocket laucher wielding pedestrian, which will almost certainly result in death given how destructive they can be.
- Not to mention the police dispatcher that you can hear in any emergency vehicle has specific lines for it and they do sound really serious unlike in the normal situations where they are otherwise humorous, considering all the angry rioters, women screaming, explosions, gunshots and the distress from the officers desperately trying to keep things under control. But that is not just that when it comes to radio; even radio hosts Julio G and Sage have their own reactions to the chaos, with the former being more empathetic for the Los Santos civilians and the latter celebrating it.
- Finally, the riots in Los Santos are based on the very real 1992 L.A. Riots after the beating of Rodney King. The absolute chaos that ensues? It actually happened.
- Not even the radio is immune to this. In the first act, the obligatory "talk show" radio has a segment where an actor has a drug-fueled psychotic break and murders the DJ in a fit of paranoid rage. All live and on air.
- While it's a game engine mechanic rather than intentional horror, there's something very disturbing attached to the "St. Marks Bistro" mission late in the game - namely, a partial rendition of Portland from GTA 3. It only exists to provide scenery for the mission, and is only visible for the last part of the level, but the map itself still exists in the games files, and can be reached, albeit with difficulty. Somewhere out there, in the skies above San Andreas, is a Ghost Town version of the Liberty City the players know.
