Nightmare Fuel / Judge Dredd

The Comic

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

The Dark Judges

• The Dark Judges tend to evoke this, and their very existence is a prime example, being four undead, omnicidal beings with assorted nasty powers (plus the two Sisters of Death) convinced that merely being alive is a capital offense who have already managed to wipe out all life on their own world. During the Necropolis storyline they took over Mega-City One and managed to kill sixty million people. And no matter how thoroughly you get rid of them, they always manage to find a way to return.
• The Necropolis arc in general is a goddamn horrorshow from beginning to end. From Judge Kraken struggling to maintain his grip on sanity as he becomes a slave to Death's two Sisters, the city itself becoming a slaughterhouse where all the light is drowned out, and the groups of Juvies trying to escape from skull-headed Judge Mortis going after them like an undead Terminator.
  • Kraken's fate during the storyline is incredibly horrific. After the Sisters use him to open a bridge to Deadworld, he's reduced to a puppet of Death, slaughtering citizens in the name of the Dark Judges — all while being just aware enough to know what he's doing and feel the torment of each victim.
• Judge Fear's powers are this taken literally. The Face of Fear is able to actually scare people to death. He also shows the ability to detect people's inner fears without even using his face and project a terrifying aura that drives people insane.
• The Sisters Of Death have no physical presence, so they invoke this trope in order to get what they want by manipulating a person's dreams or even using their powers on them. This only works if you believe they can hurt you, but the effect is so terrifyingly convincing, only someone with an iron will like Dredd (though he learned this the hard way) or someone with a knowledge of them (Anderson figures it out quickly enough) can resist unharmed. The page image above features Nausea appearing to Yassa Povey as a stunningly beautiful raven-haired woman... before dropping the disguise and revealing a rotting hag.
• Even in life Sidney De'ath (who later become the undead monster known as Judge Death, leader of the Dark Judges) was a horror of a human being. His "family reunion" with his mother and sister after he became a Judge stands out. It plays out like a scene from a horror film, with Sidney, now licensed to kill for any excuse he can think of, hunts them down to a deserted castle and murders them both with a smile on his face. Even more terrifying is his explanation; his elderly mother doesn't understand why her son is so evil, and he screams at her that he loves her and is "doing it for her own good" before throwing her off a cliff—capping it off by noting that her cries are boring him.
• A number of the Dark Judges' recent outings have opted for straight visceral horror with photorealistic artwork. In particular, the entire "Dark Judges IN SPACE!" Story Arc (Dark Justice, Dominion, The Torture Garden, and Deliverance) features many loving shots of mutilated corpses and bloodthirsty zombies. When a woman curses one of her fellow colonists for betraying their comrades' locations, Judge Mortis rips her mouth off while hushing her to be quiet.

Mega-City One

• As if it's not enough of a Crapsack World with all the relatively mundane problems (and the aforementioned Dark Judges), the Big Meg gets about 20-30 cases of legit Demonic Possession per year. There's even a special force of (Red Shirt) psionic exorcists within the Judges to deal with such cases. During one case Judge Anderson had to cross over into a demonic Death World in order to stop a demon from unleashing Hell on Earth.
• Judge Cal's mad rule wasn't very pleasant for his subjects. At a whim he might decide to outlaw another basic aspect of life, or force you to build a giant wall, or just start executing everyone in alphabetical order. It's one thing to be at the mercy of a regular tyrant, but a clinically insane one is a whole new level. Expecting all the other judges to do something about it? Too bad, Cal has brainwashed all but a handful, though thankfully that handful was enough in the end to bring him down.
• Even the Undercity that the Big Meg is built over. In addition to Troggies (feral humans who descended from New York inhabitants), all manner of horrific and sometimes supernatural predators live down there, including, but not limited to, vampires, werewolves and (Xenomorphs). Some judges even choose to take their long walk down there on account of its general chaotic nature.
• The various ruined areas of the world make even the Undercity look like a beach resort. There's The Cursed Earth, the remnants of the American midwest and south, which is plagued by among other things, horrible mutant monsters, enormous lethally radioactive zones, violent weather that includes deluges of acid rain, plantations where the owners use slave labor consisting of captured aliens, and various townships and shanties where there are no Judges to uphold the law. Outside of the US, we have the Radlands Of Ji, which are the remains of Chinas countryside, which have an unusual amount of psychic mutations originating from them, and the Web, which are the radioactive, mutated remains of the coral reefs outside of Australia and Asia, now riddled with hideously mutated sea life and bloodthirsty pirates of all colors and creeds.
• Curse Of The Spider Woman. A normal woman who is a model good citizen (having just received an award for such good behaviour) develops a rare condition where her DNA becomes overwritten with that of a spider. Had the symptoms been detected in time, it could have been cured, but she is forced to undergo a slow and heartbreaking transformation with her mind slowly slipping away. She's eventually exiled to a treatment facility in the Cursed Earth, but comes back to kill her husband, having felt betrayed by him.
• In spite of being a Police State, Mega City One is one of the better places to live. The Cursed Earth aside, other megacities are riddled with corruption (Ciudad Barranquilla, Brit Cit), even more totalitarian (The Sov Block cities) or just lawless hellholes (The Web).
  • Guatemala under machine-rule could give SkyNet some pointers on how to deal with humans. Its people are sold to slavery, or worked to death then taken apart with their organs sold and their bones ground into fertilizer, while girls as young as fourteen are carted into hospitals and forcibly impregnated only for their children to be sold away as well. The robots feel absolutely no empathy towards humans and use them as a commodity.
  • Ciudad Barranquillia is essentially what would happen if Mega City One was functionally ruled by drug cartels, with a Justice Department up to its eyes in corruption and dirty deals. One strip has Dredd digging up a massive graveyard full of the long-dead and badly tortured bodies of people who angered the corrupt Chief Judge, including at least one pair of teenagers who were tortured for weeks then murdered for crossing their Chief Judge. Capping it all off is the fact that the guy responsible for these murders and corruption (the Chief Judge's son) gets to pull a Mega-City One-sponsored Karma Houdini by handing his old man over and taking up the position of Chief Judge instead in exchange for amnesty and closer ties with MC One.
• Luna City 1 is relatively pleasant if a bit corrupt, if not for one single problem: you have to PAY for oxygen. One story revolves around the perps of the storyline choking to death in their hideout because they hadn't had time to pay their oxygen bill. For all the horrors back on Earth, atleast you can still breathe. The city is later abandoned by many megacities, pushing the corruption rate up. Luna 1 has become a wretched hive with a decaying economy and a privatised oxygen board.
• Dredd's description of the final hours of Chaos Day are pretty haunting, with the Judges barely being able to keep the few relatively safe areas in check, most of the city blocks becoming cannibal hellholes and Judges murdered on sight, and bodies littering the streets everywhere with not even the mobile incineration units being able to keep up with disposing them. When Dredd's forces clean out one of the worst blocks, even Dredd himself (who has seen every manner of horror during his career) admits that sight was one of the worst things he ever witnessed. Out of a hundred thousand infected in that block alone, they managed to save only one little girl who hid behind the mountains of corpses.
  • At one point during the cleaning of one of the worst blocks, there's a momentary Hope Spot as Dredd finds a pair of young children huddled together against a wall. The moment he goes to check on them, both of them look up with a pair of horrific Nightmare Faces, revealing they've both been infected with the Chaos Bug as they lunge for him. He's forced to put them down.
  • Miasma Jennings' decision to release doctored footage of a rejected Justice Department plan for dealing with the infected ^note Which amounted to loading infected people onto hovercraft under the pretence of them being taken to a vaccination center, then gassing them to death mid-flight and dumping their corpses into burial pits dug after the Bug began to ravage the city; notably, Chief Judge Francisco was utterly horrified by this plan and vehemently rejected it, before reluctantly authorising its use during the final days of the outbreak, which near-singlehandedly destroys any remaining chance of the Judges containing the disease. For something written in 2011-12, it's a sober reminder of the horrific damage that fake news can cause.
  • The Statue of Justice and the Public Surveillance Unit are both destroyed during Chaos Day by terrorists, with most of the teenage or younger Judge cadets being mercilessly gunned down on-screen. Aside from the apocalyptic visuals of the Statue coming down, this prompts the citizens of the city to erupt into an orgy of violence and looting even without the Bug driving their actions.
• While many diseases that threaten us today are no longer an issue (Dredd himself is a cancer survivor, which was very easily treated), some of the diseases that replaced them are even more horrifying. Jigsaw Disease sufferers disappear piece by piece in just under a month. The Chaos Bug and the 2T(FRU)T virus turn people into Axe-Crazy Technically Living Zombies who attack without provocation, both of which can potentially wipe out megacities. Grubb's disease causes people to break out in fungus growths, with some strains being more deadly and infectious than others. One super-variant had its victims break out in seconds and explode upon physical contact, spreading spores everywhere. There's also Block Mania, while not directly fatal, causes hyper-aggression and pack mentality, leading to Block Wars that destabilise Mega City One's defences against invasion. It's worth noting that many of these diseases are man made.
• The Judges themselves, especially the more unscrupulous kind: A bunch of overgrown bullies on an authority trip and armed to the teeth, who can, at the drop of a hat, arrest you, terrorize you and threaten you and basically make your life a living hell and do so, to all of the citizens to ensure they are nothing more than a broken, spineless mass who are too scared to do ANYTHING that the Judges might take offense to. They also have zero oversight from any other organization (what little civilian government that exists only does so at their leisure), so nothing can keep them in check when they start abusing their power to keep the public under their boot. Oh and the things they will do if you ever start pointing out that they are fascist, power-hungry thugs: they'll ruin your life, frame you for crimes you did not commit to discredit you, threaten your family by taking your kids away and forcibly inducting them into the Judges (where they would be brainwashed into serving the system), and if they feel real froggy: grab you off the street, subject you to electroshock therapy to cause massive memory loss, surgically alter your face against your will, then drop you off on an alien world in an amnesiac state from which you will never recover.
  • Even worse? The Judge System is literally the only form of law enforcement capable of dealing with the sheer size of the population (pre-Day Of Chaos anyway), to the point that if the Judges were deposed, the immediate result would be violence and death not seen since the Apocalypse Wars. It doesn't help that the wildly inconsistent writing (which cant decide if it wants to be Black Comedy satire of totalitarian government, or a straight-up dystopian sci-fi) makes the system constantly swing between Fascist, but Inefficient and The Extremist Was Right. Considering the size of the system, it's entirely possible that it swings between the two daily.
    • Worse than that, a legitimate reason why Democracy Is Bad in this world? Is because Humans Are Morons. The people of Mega-City One are repeatedly shown to be, on-masse, such inherently corrupt, stupid, self-destructive creatures that they give the Judges a legitimate point when they say that giving power to the people is dangerous.
  • On that point, Dredd, well known as a Knight Templar, is one of the more upstanding judges. Many other judges fall under Rabid Cop combined with Hanging Judge, many of these cases also being Dirty Judges.
• A 2021 story titled "Savior" has an alien from a race of aliens who look like pulp-style cave-men being sent to Earth to seek help from Judge Dredd, who visited their world once in the past and made such an impression that they have deified him as a justice god. The reason is because their planet has been invaded by a particularly amoral MegaCorp, which is strip-mining their world for minerals and enslaving them to assist in the process. Dredd shows up and drives out the MegaCorp... then orders the natives rounded up and put on reservations; now that Mega-City One's Justice Department knows that this planet has valuable minerals, they're going to exploit it themselves, whilst justifying their presence as "protecting" the natives. The story ends with 'Dredd of all Judges saying this:
  Dredd: City needs those resources. Long as the cave-freaks need our protection then we're here to say. And, trust me, we'll make sure these dumb alien simps always need protecting...
• Tales from The Black Museum features nothing but this, opening with an unfortunate corrupt guard being murdered and forcibly transformed into a zombie-like guide for the Black Museum, where the tools of various serial killers and monsters are kept on display. The stories and exhibits he'll gleefully show and tell you include (among others) a man turned into a immobile but sentient mass of plant life, a Dredd-style retelling of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and a mysteriously enduring rogue heatseeker round that murdered dozens of people before being captured — the last of which is still active and tapping against the box it's contained in, just waiting for the chance to get out and kill again...

The Cursed Earth and its Denizens

• Scared of rats? The Cursed Earth gives you good reason to be; the standard Cursed Earth rat is far bigger than its ancestors, eerily intelligent, and spots venomous fangs that can kill a man with one bite. Worse, they're voracious predators with no fear of man - if anything, they regard humans as just another food source.
• One of the Cursed Earth's hazards are strange, gale-force storms filled with enormous cascades of debris that are whisked around at lethal velocity... and which are home to a flying variant of the aforementioned Cursed Earth Rat.
• Windstorms that can literally suck you up into the stratosphere, where you will certainly die from the fall, have been known to just pop out of nowhere in the Cursed Earth.
• The Black Plague! It's a swarm of millions of oversized and to some degree intelligent blood-thirsty spiders who only need two bites to kill an average human, and they straight up murder everything in their path. Which almost included Mega-City One itself. [Even heavy-duty firebombs only took out a quarter of the swarm, because the rest simply burrowed underground! Sleep tight, arachnophobes.
  • Oh, and it gets worse; as the story Tarantula! reveals, the Cursed Earth is also home to giant tarantulas, so large they regularly prey on the bisoon (domesticated bison/cattle hybrids) that Mega-City One farms out in the Cursed Earth. And then the expy of the star of the film of the same name shows up...
• Flinks. A mutant animal/vegetable hybrid that lives in the Cursed Earth and raids Munce farms, they breed very quickly with as many as a dozen generations spawned in a single day. In addition, each generation mutates and adapts with the latest generations shown becoming carnivorous. Justice Department organises annual culls of these creatures with judges being complimented by volunteer citizens and cube inmates. Dredd ends up ordering a hive of them to be firebombed. He succeeds in destroying them all. All but one, which sprouts wings.
• The Gila-Munja, a tribe of mutants from the Cursed Earth, who resemble dwarf-like humanoids with pincer claws for hands and razor sharp teeth. They're natural assassins, where others fail, they will succeed, and they consider any contract they make to be a matter of honor, which they seal by murdering a tribesmember to offer their blood as proof of their vow. They don't even bother counting the money they're paid for their killings, because they know everyone is so scared of them they wouldn't dream of trying to double-cross them. On top of that, they're incredibly fast, agile and silent, they are able to scale cliffs and walls like spiders, they have natural chameleon-like abilities that lets them blend into the background, and they WILL. NOT. STOP. In their first appearance, they were hired to kill a mob informant that Dredd was protecting. Dredd managed to keep all of the killers out of the room... only to find that the witness had died anyway, from fear.
  • And if you thought their original design was kind of goofy looking, a later story introduced a subrace of Gila-Munja that look more like xenomorphs; an Eyeless Face, spindly body, Creepy Long Fingers with the iconic poisonous claws, a whipping tail, and a mouthful of More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
• The Cursed Earth is populated by dinosaurs, which isn't scary. No, it's the fact that the Cursed Earth T-Rexes and other predators are known In-Universe to become literally addicted to human flesh, doing everything they can to get more of it, that's scary. The Helltrekkers story features a pack of Rexes tracking the convoy for hundreds of miles, through acid storms and an enormous radioactive hotspot, just to get more human meat.
  • The Cursed Earth, which was the first introduction of the cloned dinosaurs, also had the debut of Satanus, a massive T-Rex created shortly before the Apocalypse War, who became infamous for all the humans he killed even in captivity. He survived the nuclear holocaust and would become one of the most feared predators to roam the Cursed Earth, which is saying something, and facing him was so horrific that he's one of the characters Dredd has a nightmare about right before the end of the story. What's worse is that the comic heavily implies that It Can Think, and that Satanus is not only partially sentient, but even remembers his original pre-clone life in distant prehistory (which reveals that he was the son of Old One-Eye, the main antagonist from the earlier 2000 AD series Flesh).
• In one story, Dredd has to venture into the Cursed Earth to apprehend a mutant outlaw, and passes through the ruins of St. Louis. As it turns out, the city was targeted during the Atomic War, and the malevolent ghosts of it's citizens arise at night, seeking vengeance on anyone living who happens to stumble through the city, who they blame for their horrific demise, despite the war having been over for almost a century and no one alive had anything to do with it. Dredd only barely gets them to back off by vowing that Mega-City One will nuke the city a second time unless the vengeful spirits stop attacking.
• The Helltrekkers story mentioned above shows just how hellish The Cursed Earth actually is, and makes Dredd's original journey in The Cursed Earth look like a stroll on the beach. Every now and then, collections of citizens leave Mega-City One in the hopes of finding better lives in the western territories, which are a bit more liberal and far less crowded... but to get there, they have to survive the nightmarish journey. Dredd had pretty much every resource the Justice Department could offer; a massive, armored transport, robots and Judges as backup, and he was still the only survivor. The settlers only have their radwagons, which are little more than glorified campers, and whatever weapons they're able to afford. Out of over a hundred that set out from Mega-City One, only 16 people survived! Radiation, dinosaurs, disease and hostile mutants got everyone else, and this was via the route that is considered the easiest!
  • As the settlers leave, one of the Judges tells them that once they get past a certain point, they'll be considered dead until otherwise proven, and no one will come looking for them.
  • One of the outposts along the route is inhabited by friendly mutants, and offer travellers a place to rest and resupply. However, the settlers soon discover the massacred remains of the townspeople, revealing that the mutants are actually hostile raiders that lure in new victims this way, with the settlers being forced to shoot their way out.
  • At one point, another tribe of mutants are encountered, with one of them being murdered by a settler fleeing criminal charges in the Big Meg. The previously-idealistic Trekkmaster Rudd ultimately decides (with support from the other settlers) to leave the killer to the mutant tribe's mercy; when his equally-criminal family expresses discontent, Rudd points out that the entire mutant tribe is camped out on the mountain pass they need to pass, waiting to ambush and destroy the convoy if they don't give him up.
  • As mentioned above, the cloned dinosaurs that inhabit the Cursed Earth aren't just incredibly dangerous predators, they're outright addicted to human flesh, and some of them follow the caravan through the hellscape, pausing only to eat the settlers who die on the journey and buried by the road. Their craving for human meat have effectively turned an already apex predator into a Super-Persistent Predator.
  • During the last stretch of the journey, some of the surviving settlers break off from the main group since there's seemingly another, shorter route to the western territories. The thing is, unlike the mapped route, this area doesn't have any details about it other than a massive warning to stay out. We never get to see what's actually out there, but the settlers seemingly make it through, shortly after the remaining survivors. Except every single person on the rad wagons are dead! No injuries, no damage, no sign at all what killed everyone except the expression on their faces - they all died from fear. Despite the losses the others suffered on the way, they really did take the easier path.
  • While not related to the dangers of the journey itself, there's the mutant daughter of one of the settler families; they left Mega-City One so they wouldn't have to abandon her, but her mutation is very severe, as she no longer looks even close to human, instead resembling a mix of a crab and a snail that needs to be kept in a tank of water. She's still an infant too, and the veteran guide leading the settlers even wonders exactly what she's going to grow into. We never find out either way, even though her family are among the few survivors, as she scuttles off into a stream shortly after arriving in the territories, and is never seen again.

The Film

• The 60% clones climbing out of their tubes is pretty horrifying.
• The ABC Warrior is a terrifying war-droid whose design combines the scariest elements of a typical Top-Heavy Guy "big mook" and a SkeleBot 9000, speaking in a low version of a Machine Monotone. Despite this, it sounds almost satisfied when Rico informs it that its new mission is "War". Perhaps the scariest scene with it comes towards the film's climax, when Rico instructs it to tear Judge Griffin limb-from-limb, explicitly saying for it to save Griffin's head for last so he'll live through the pain of having his arms and legs ripped off. Griffin, already dangling in the ABC Warrior's grip can only scream, as the camera switches to a shot of blood raining down over the robot's feet...

The Novels

Cursed Earth Asylum

• The backstory of the story's Big Bad, Soon, is just a rollar-coaster of awfulness. The core of it is that he was created in a secret project by the Judges to bio-engineer a superior form of clone, a program that also incorporated engineering enhanced psy-affinities and genetically removing "undesirable" traits such as doubt, fear, compassion and guilt. The Med-Judges involved came to proudly call themselves "The Eugenics Division", and the project's leader, whose journal serves as the book's introduction, even directly compares their work to the insane experiments of the infamous Nazi Mad Scientist, Dr. Mengele.
  • Their first experiments with their bio-engineered clone embryos were disastrous failures... because every clone they created immediately mutated into a hideous abomination too deformed to survive.
  • Their solution? Use human surrogate mothers instead of Uterine Replicators. But they didn't just take volunteers. No, they effectively kidnapped women for the role, selecting a mixture of women in carehomes for "mental defectiveness" and ultra-violent criminals.
  • Three of the host-mothers bashed their brains out, trying to silence the telepathic screaming from their unborn children. A fourth bled to death after attempting to forcibly induce a miscarriage. A fifth died in her sleep, and when autopsied was found to be carrying a deformed embryo with two heads.
  • When the seven survivors gave birth, one artificially engineered child was stillborn — though the project's head insists it couldn't have been, the midwife asserts that the child deliberately strangled itself to death with its own umbilical cord.
  • Of the other six host-mothers who were delivered by Caesarean, three died, two went irretrievably insane, and the last — Soon's mother, a Serial Killer named Doris "Driller Killer" Davison — lasted long enough to curse the project manager for unleashing a monster on the world before she committed suicide by swallowing her tongue.
  • In the end, it was all pointless, as the six surviving clone-babies were still all horribly deformed. Soon was the least deformed, and even he had a blank, featureless expanse of skin where his mouth should be.
  • For some reason, despite ascertaining that Soon had a perfectly formed set of jaws, teeth, tongue and vocal chords, just sealed-shut lips, the Eugenics Division decided not to bother surgically correcting his deformity, and instead just feed him intraveneously for his entire life.
  • On his seventh birthday, Soon finally struck, slaughtering the entire team with his Psychic Powers — mind-controlling one woman to cut her own throat, burning another with pyrokinesis, then slowly battering the others to death. The only one he left alive was the project's manager, Dr. Joseph Swale, because he wanted to gloat about his plan to create "a new world, where more like me can be created". If Dr. Swale hadn't managed to stick him with a lucky syringe full of psi-tranq, he would have escaped to begin his rampage then and there.
  • Rather than execute Soon and his fellow failures, the Justice Department simply banishes them to Erebus, a secret asylum for lunatics, genetic abominations and sufferers of alien diseases hidden in the Cursed Earth, before proceeding to abandon them to the eternal care of robot doctors. Robots who can't realize that Soon is slowly growing immune to the Power Nullifier drugs they're using to keep his murderous desires in check...
• Our first introduction to Soon proper, he's using his telepathy to torment a fellow inmate in the Erebus asylum, driving her so insane with his telepathic assaults that she resorts to tearing the flesh off of her face with her bare hands because that's better than what she's experiencing under Soon's attention.
• The description of the biological degeneration produced as a side-effect of Soon's flawed genesis. His bones are said to be constantly reinventing themselves, spontaneously breaking, warping, and reknitting into new, unnatural shapes underneath his skin. The result is that Soon is in ceaseless pain, to the point he wishes he had a mouth so he could scream...
• Whilst preparing to battle against a pack of gila-munja, Dredd and his Hotdog Run — Cadet Judges brought into the Cursed Earth for a trial by fire — are caught in the Death Belt, a detritus-laden storm that periodically descends from high in the sky to the ground level. They're forced to remain perfectly still as hundreds of of the Devil's Lapdogs — mutant rats with lethally venomous fangs — start swarming the area. One errant twitch, and they'll be Eaten Alive.
• One of the Cadet Judges, Agnew, does get Eaten Alive — in his case, by the cannibalistic mutants known as gila-munja — when he tries to stop a fellow cadet named Kate Jenks from deserting in a panic.
• The description of the gila-munja's lair; a charnel-house filled with the remains of over a thousand human and mutant victims, ranging from cracked-bone skeletons to putrefying corpses with wounds writhing with maggots to fresh victims. The more intact corpses were clearly tortured to death, and every victim with a face intact enough to be recognizable has their features contorted in agony and terror.
• The description of Jenks' fate after the fight is over: having been failed for her cowardly abandonment of her fellow cadets, she is ordered to return to Mega-City One on her own and report for expulsion. Assuming she survives her solo trip through the Death World that is the Cursed Earth, she'll be a social outcast for life, forbidden from ever being employed by any legitimate job, and may even face brain surgery to reduce aggression and "burn out" sensitive information she learned during her traineeship as a Cadet Judge. It's almost a Cruel Mercy that she ends up being cornered by surviving gila-munja and chooses to commit suicide by Lawmaster self-destruct rather than suffer through the tortures and being Eaten Alive that she would otherwise endure.
• Soon's murder of his blind seer, Blind Mary, which comes out of nowhere and serves no purpose. He orders her to kiss him, which she does in absolute terror, unable to hide her revulsion at what she feels when she presses her lips to the taut skin where Soon's mouth should be and feels him gnashing his deformed teeth beneath it. Then Soon molds his hands into talons and begins ripping and tearing at her, carving her up for his own cruelty before driving his claws into her brain through her empty eyesockets and devouring her psychic essence. Once her husk has dropped to the floor, he nonchalantly describes her as "an appetiser".
• The graphic description of Judge Emma Chung, mutilated at the hands of Soon and then sent back to Mega-City One in a bodybag made from her own uniform that'd been lashed to her autopiloted Lawmaster. Most of her left arm is missing, save for a flap of skin hanging from the stump. One leg has "ruptured", exposing muscles, tendons and bones. Burns run the length of her body, and great chunks of hair and even scalp have been yanked off. Her remaining right hand is a broken mess; fingernails torn off, fingers ripped backwards, a finger stabbed into her palm. Her left ear and right eye have been plucked off, and the skin around her mouth has been flawed away to expose teeth, jaw and gums. The word "Fodder" has been carved into her chest. And this is what she looks like after an hour of microsurgery! Little wonder that she's braindead, or near-enough to it.
• The Nightmare Sequence of "Jonah", actually an amnesiac Judge Dredd. Running desperately as he's pursued by a hideous, inexhaustible pursuer, who shoots and throws grenades after him just to torment him. Made to run until he can't run any more, and then thrown to the ground. Forced to confront his pursuer — a vicious visage, all teeth and leering grin, as it sticks a gun under Jonah's jaw. The last thing he sees before the bullet tears through his gun and into his brain: a badge on his killer's chest, labled "DREDD".
• The Reveal that Soon eats anyone who falls into his clutches, morphing his hands into instruments of agony with which he tortures them to death before finally sucking out their blood, soul, psyche and life essence. Their blood to temporarily alleviate his own endless agony by reinforcing his corrupted essence with fresh genetic material. Their psyches to bolster and expand his knowledge and Psychic Powers. And their souls simply for the sake of collecting them. In an Imagine Spot, he contemplates these trapped souls as butterfly-winged versions of themselves pinned to a metaphorical wall inside his mind by giant steel needles, clutching at the impaling shafts and screaming in eternal agony. He's already consumed his "siblings" from the cloning experiment and is now devouring everyone else he can get his hands on to further augment his psy-abiliites.
• The fate of the three Cadet Judges who fall into Soon's hands; he shapes their living bodies into a single twisted altar of flesh and bone without letting them die, despite the incredible damage done to them. For his own amusement, he permits the altar a brief opportunity to scream... and scream it does.
• The Map of Eyes, one of the key features of Soon's war room, is made up of hundreds of sliced-up human eyes squeezed together between two sheets of glasseen.
• Soon deciding to remold his underling Novar's face to let him serve as his emissary. He shapes his hands into tangles of scalpels and then rips Novar's face to shreds — he hacks off the ears, gouges out an eyeball, mangles the cheekbones, and rips out teeth by the roots. Then he molds the ruin back together like clay, leaving Novar with a face that looks exactly like Soon's own deformed visage, save that he still has a mouth... if you can call a jagged circle in the center of his lower face with a flap of bloody skin dangling below it a "mouth".
• Soon's army comprises three major components. Firstly, there's the zombies; corpses ranging from skeletal remains to the newly dead to every stage of decaying cadaver in between, forced to walk through the sheer will of Soon's telepathic might. Then there's the Soonites; formerly human, Soon used his formidable powers to simultaneously burn their minds clean of every trace of personality and twist their genes, mutating them into hideous freaks of nature even fouler-looking than himself. Lastly, there's the gila-munja, mentioned in the Cursed Earth folder, who submit to Soon out of fear. In battle, all fight beyond their mortal limits, Soon puppetteering their bodies and forcing them to fight until totally destroyed, no matter how badly damaged they are or how much pain they feel before being put down.
• Soon's idea of home renovation; shrouding the exterior of Erebus in walls of fused human bones and rotting meat taken from his countless victims, save for that spared to erect great windmills of bones, with sails of flayed human skin.
• The very last passage of the the book; Soon has been left alive in the ruins of Erebus after Hope completely wiped away his mind. Except that, in the darkest corners of his psyche, Soon's murderous mania still lingers, building strength, vowing to seek revenge...

The Hundredfold Problem

• Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist; a Mega-City One criminal so awful that his sentence was to have his brain extracted from his body. His brain was to be installed in a urinal bot, sentencing him to an effective eternity of having people urinating into his "mouth" and being forced to drink it, but his men escaped with it before that could happen. Now he's become addicted to the sensation of being a Brain in a Jar and spends most of his time like that, taking his body only when he has to.
  • When we first meet Dennis, his office is described as being wallpapered in flayed human faces.
  • The later description of his rise to power notes that he literally murdered his way to the top, having the wives, mistresses and children of rival power-figures tortured to death to intimidate them into submitting to him.
  • It's noted that Dennis introduced two rival militant atheists to the Donut to destroy the Nandies' faith in their goddess, Korax, seemingly for no reason other than to bring about the complete destruction of the Nandies and the Overlords both.
• The B-plot of the story is that, thanks to the bumbling of an enormously stupid but well-connected employee, Dredd is shattered into 100 physical and mental fragments, reduced to bizarre caricatures of himself just because one Fat Idiot couldn't watch where he was putting his feet and so stepped on the chip containing Dredd's vital data.
• There's a scene early in the book where an obvious antagonist from later, Maraschino, subverts a character called Heidegger to become her sleeper agent. She does this by extending her fingers into long, worm-like tentacles that burrow into his brain through the corners of his eyes, the back of his throat, his sinuses and his ears. And all the while, Maraschino is cooing and acting like a sweet, motherly woman.
• The cruelty with which the humans, both the colonist "Overlords" and the deported criminal "nubugs", rule over the Donut's native population of Skysouls is made casually evident in the fact that there are multiple torture clubs — businesses that torture, mutilate and murder "Nandies" (as they call them) on-stage for the entertainment of paying human customers. It's later established that these were created by Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist, who killed any Overlord who tried to stop them from going into business.
• The description of the Donut beyond the slums of the Overlords paints a picture that is less pretty and more "Death World". Local predators included giant sabertooth tigers, insects whose venom brings instant death, killer fish, a species of thorny plant that will try to rip apart any living creature it can reach, and a species of intelligent spiders that would construct cunning traps for larger mammals so they could be paralyzed and then implanted with eggs — these last ones, the Nandies hunted to extinction. Environmental habits include random and deadly solar flares, and weeks-long windstorms where the gusts can reach up to five hundred kph.
• One of the rival atheist preachers, Reverend Dave 'No Messing' Fingers, attacks the congregation of his counterpart, Reverend Rick 'The Man' Hamfist, and begins using his powers to slowly peel strips of flesh and skin away from Hamfist's assistant, Maraschino. Protagonist MacTavish even notes in horror that she's being Flayed Alive, her life somehow prolonged even as every strip of meat and muscle is torn away and every organ ripped free until nothing but a jerking, twitching, gore-painted skeleton is left.
• The Skysouls repay Fingers in kind by tearing him apart with their psychic powers, telekinetically ripping him apart with their Mind over Matter ability.
• Korax, the Physical God of the Skysouls, telepathically viewing a small glimpse of the suffering her people are experiencing at human hands, all in the name of entertainment: a mother and her child being whipped with a metal-studded bullwhip by some drunken farmhands, who delight in striking the boy's face; a Skysoul stretched on a rack and impaled with a thousand red-hot needles for the entertainment of the death-porn watchers; a Skysoul child with a rubber tire full of gasoline forced onto its neck by human youths and then set alight... This last one is particularly chilling, because it's a very real form of execution on Earth.
• Whilst most of the unholy miracles that take place around the story's midpoint are comical, the last of them is genuinely disturbing, as it consists of every single teddy bear, doll or other cuddly toy in the city's limits being possessed by the vengeful soul of a recently executed psychopath.
• At the story's climax, Dredd confronts Dennis, only to find he has recently murdered his servant Becattini for perceived failure. The His nostrils have been slit open, his teeth, tongue and eyes ripped out, and his head cut off. His heart has been torn out of his chest and stuffed into the stump of his neck, and his feet severed. The whole mutilated corpse has also been arranged jauntily at Dennis' desk.