Nightmare Fuel / Killing Floor

I'm going to sing, they love it when I sing.

Terrifying moments in Killing Floor.

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General

• The main menu. You are introduced to images of specimen you will encounter in the game either staring at you ominiously...or making an attempt to attack you through the fourth wall.
  • Special mention goes to the Siren. Whereas the other specimens have splash screens of them just glaring menacingly at you from a short distance, the Siren is right up to the screen and has a full blown eyeless Nightmare Face (now serving as the page image).
  • While most of the music isn't scary, the main menu theme certainly is.
• This Paranoia Fuel-inducing line that shows itself when you try to exit the game: "You can run. But they'll find you before dawn".
• The main game itself pingpongs between this trope and Narm, especially with the Hillbilly Horror event. Most of the specimens just make pained groans, which given their deformities and injuries, are completely justified.
• Solo mode. Unlike Co-op mode, when you at least shoot the monstrosities with your teammates, here you are completely alone (sans the Trader). Levels become much more desolate and uncomfortable to play since you don't have anyone to cover your back. Especially on Hell on Earth difficulty.
• The original mod was even bleaker and darker than the final game. Monsters also look arguably even more terrifying and closely resemble the biological clones, with blood, scientific stickers and other features. Bloat was originally skinny for example.
• Specimens are capable of talking if you listen to them very closely. While most of their speeches have raspy or otherwise inhuman voice, the Siren sounds the most... human out of all other enemies. Her lines do not really help; they might make you feel sorry for the condition the Sirens are in. Until you remember than they might be called such for a very good reason.
• Sometimes when you die, Clots and Crawlers will start devouring your character's dead body for some time. It is common to see them piling-up on fresh meat they got. Gorefasts on the other hand simply keep slashing their prey even after it has been killed.
• On many maps, there are messages written with blood like "Look at us", "Come all ye faithful", "Murderers", "We are" and so on. It could be either surviving Horzine workers expressing their guilt at creating the Specimens army... Or it could very well be that Specimens themselves were the ones who wrote them. Just think about it for a second.
• If every member of the party is dead, you will get a blood splatter on your screen and a message: YOUR SQUAD HAS BEEN WIPED OUT. If you are not experienced in the game or playing high difficulty, prepare to see this message many times.
• The Fleshpound's body battery glows yellow when he is calm, and even then he hits pretty hard. But if you stay in his field of vision for 10 or more seconds without hiding from him or attack him, he roars as his battery glows red, and in this state he becomes outright terrifying. It is not uncommon to see him outright plowing through fellow monsters to tear you apart. And sometimes he performs a critical attack which may one-shot you.
• Speaking of the rage mode, Scrakes have one nasty and scary quirk. Whereas Fleshpounds and the Patriarch calm down after successfully landing a single hit, the Scrake does not. He will keep furiously swinging his chainsaw until he is put down... or until he kills your entire team.
• The Specimens themselves are not exactly pretty. Case in point:
  • Both Clot and Stalker share the same Barbie Doll Anatomy, with Clot in addition having several surgical stickers across his body, bloody mouth and the creepy yellow eyes.
  • Bloat is, well, bloated so much he pukes constantly and explodes in a shower of gore and bile if not killed in the head. On some official art, he is depicted with completely white eyes whereas in the game itself he has those close to the human ones.
  • Siren deserves the most focus here - she is put in a straightjacket, has a lot of tugs over her body and has her eyes gouged out. The fact that her voice is the most human out of the bunch (aside from probably the Patriarch himself).
  • Husk has been fried to a crisp, has a fireball launcher mounted into his arm and talks in a very distorted voice.
  • Scrake seems to have had the least amount of Body Horror performed on him - aside from a chainsaw embedded into his hand and something that is behind the surgeon mask. The sequel would show his face in full glory. Oh, and despite the lack of body damage, Scrake's overall look gives the vibes of a Deadly Doctor, which he was designed to be in the first place by the Horzine scientists.
  • Gorefasts are especially hideous to look at, with their lower jaw missing, one of their arms being put on a blade of the other one and themselves seeming to be completely skinned. The hisses they let out are just as horrific.
  • Crawlers are... something that has become a fusion between a human and an insect - indeed, their screeches are bad news, and with their leech-like mouths they look like a mixture between a spider and a lamprey.
  • Fleshpounds, whoo boy. Having their arms turned into blenders and having their eyes mostly concealed behind an iron fold, these folks also have a battery inserted into their chests. If it glows yellow, you should be simply cautious. But if you annoy a Fleshpound too much and see the glow become red, you have only two options: either firing at him from all cylinders and hope he gets killed before he gets you... or run like hell, not that it will help much considering that it's almost impossible to outrun one regardless of difficulty you're playing on.
  • Finally, the Patriarch himself has seen better days. Compare the portrait of his one can find in the Horzine office building and whatever he has become. A rocket launcher and a minigun fused into his arm, a large tentacle protruding from his chest and one eyeball hanging out from a socket - and worst of all, he is fully capable of speaking and coordinating his attacks, showing that for all horrors that his underlings are, Kevin Clamely is the threat that should be taken seriously at all times.

Maps

• Every map has at least one unique detail which makes this map creepy.
  • Biotic Lab: An underground complex which serves as Ground Zero for the outbreak which ravaged the entire England. There are corpses of scientists scattered across the whole building, locked doors in many places and specimen incubators, which are still operating. The map description mentions that the laboratory became such a hellhole ten hours after the outbreak, and it's implied that some people are still alive down there, having locked themselves up.
  • Farm: A large, open countyside location which contains farmhouses and barns (the latter have massacred cows hanged upside down). Not to mention that the map takes place at night.
    • You can actually see several trucks scattered across the road with human remains in the shells. The description mentions that this is the aftermath of an evacuation attempt Gone Horribly Wrong.
    • You can find human remains and skeletons scattered in many places. It can be easily assumed that entire families (children included) got eaten by the monsters.
  • Manor: The description puts it best. Your helicopter has crashed near an abandoned mansion with a odd, bleak green fog outside, and the specimens have heard the sound of disaster... And you can also find a human skeleton in one room. Someone might have been living here for some time before getting murdered by Specimens.
    Of all the places to crashland...
  • Offices: The outbreak reached the cityscape. The description mentions that this is the main Horzine building in London. Police forces were called to deal with the threat...and failed. You can actually see the crashed cars and burning wreckages from the windows...
    • The level also takes place during rainstorm. The sudden thunder sound may startle you a couple of times.
  • Western London: This map takes place in the London streets. You are presented to burning cars, scattered human remains and burning houses left and right... The fact that this map is taking place during the day does not help much.
    • The police station. One of the trader points can be accessed by 2 paths: the first one involves going through the depot itself. It starts out fairly well-lit (some lights flickering aside), but as you go through the building and right into the darkness, you eventually come across the dark armory with blood splatter on the wall where the armory keeper should have been and then go to a stairwell leading to the jail. It is very dark, so you need to constantly keep your flashlight on (not much of a problem if you have a basic shotgun with attached flashlight, however). The second path (much shorter) takes you right through the parking lot (with the stairway descending into the darkness). Most likely you will need to use both paths when fighting monsters.
    • And also when spectating the game, if you fly into a bugged part of a large construction pallet just near the bridge, the whole screen will quickly fade to red, all while shaking and producing some sort of black static. Thankfully, spectating to another player or merely going back to the direction you came from solves the problem.
  • Foundry. You can see many corpses of Horzine workers either lying motioness or hanging from above. Some corspes miss a limb or two, some are headless and some other have their eyes torn out and mouth frozen in a silent scream, implying the last agonizing moments of poor people who were just working here. Makes you wonder what did specimen do to them. And on many other subsequent maps, you will encounter such bodies everywhere.
  • Crash. You somehow managed to call for rescue... only for their chopper to go down in the middle of an Abandoned Area. To quote the map's description.
    You watched in horror as the back-up called for went down in the middle of a suburban storage facility. K&M Shipping Inc. The place is run down — seemingly poorly maintained even before the outbreak. The hordes will no doubt smell the scent of burning flesh coming from the crash-site if the initial explosion didn't already alert them. There's no time - search the crash-site for survivors, and hope to God that the wreck is salvageable.
  • Bedlam. An abandoned asylum decorated with Halloween props and corpses of asylum staff. The description makes it worse by stating that DJ Skully organized a party in this asylum, and when the specimen arrived, they massacred almost everyone in the building. Skully managed to reveal the asylum's location to the rescue team - and, once again, they are Late to the Tragedy.
  • Hospital Horrors. The entire level is nightmarish, with lots of burned, dismembered and otherwise mutilated corpses. But the scariest thing is the nursery room. When you see dead bodies that are unusually small, you realize that not even children were spared from the specimen wrath. There is even one near a children tricycle!
  • Wyre. This level consists of two parts. The first part is a forest with an eerie orange fog, which may be painful for the eyes of the players. The second part is not any better - it is a Horzine bunker, where Stalkers were created and cloned. There are even some of their bodies (in all their glory) lying on the operating tables. And some of these are flickering.
    • It is also possible to get lost in the bunker (if you are not familiar with the map, that is) and become specimen food.
  • In Ice Cave you can see that not only is the Christmas verion of the Patriarch (Robo-Claus) a Bad Boss towards his elves (you can find some of them frozen solid right in the tunnel walls, with agonized expressions on their faces), but there are also skeletons of children strawn in some places. Finally, there are human corpses dressed in elven attire, all but saying that the Robo-Claus took over the Santa's Workshop (and then the Ice Cave) by force.
  • Suburbia: What used to be a trainquil and peaceful American suburbian town quickly turned into a nightmare as the Specimens somehow managed to invade America. Worse still, the description states they were smart enough to avoid large population centers and instead opted to ransack smaller towns with less resistance.
  • Mountain Pass. A wide map which takes place in the mountain park. The premise describes that the police was searching for an escaped Horzine scientist before the contact with the entire area went dead. After your squad is sent, the helicopter crashes (once again), and the pilot (the only soldier that feared that the mission would go south due to the fog) dies. You are left completely alone in the middle of the place... and the crash attracted the specimen too.
    • Apart from that, we don't know what happened to the scientist the police was searching for. You can find a crashed taxi with blood on it's doors, surrounded by three police cars, which may or may not reflect the scientist's fate.
  • Hellride takes place in a scary ride attraction, with the heaven part of the tunnel having angel cutouts with faces that outright scream Uncanny Valley and the hellish part being, well, hellish. And that's not even speaking of the segment with starry walls and ceiling - and a lot of bodyparts strawn around the whole room.
  • Hillbilly Horror. The premise alone is horrific enough, with the Horzine's nukage spill causing a family of rednecks to mutate into hideous monsters, right before Horzine's attempt at cleaning up the mess goes south. But the opening trailer for the Hillbilly Horror 2012 event shows us that the cannibal family had been hunting not just regular humans, but other Specimens as well. We get to see them eating alive a bound and screaming Clot right before he is killed with blunt force trauma from a hammer. And since this level takes place somewhere in the United States (as shown by road signs, cars and the scenery in general), this means that either a) the Specimens found another way to get overseas or b) some of them are from the horde you have to fight in Suburbia (another map taking place in the United States. In fact, some elements of both maps seem to be strangely similiar).
  • Hell needs no explanation, with the entire place being riddled with terrifying architecture and with absolutely no explanation about how you got there.
    You awake to find yourself in an unfamiliar place. The hot air burns your eyes and your mind reels as you try to comprehend the landscape before you. The growls of nightmarish creatures echo on the hot winds all around you. Will you fight or be consumed?
  • There are fan-made maps which feature the pitch black version of the official maps. Yep, your main source of light is gone, and you have to wander through the dark corridors with your flashlight while watching it's battery charge and having no idea of where will the monsters come from. The Firebug and Commando usually benefit the most on such maps, and even they might not be able to fully take on tough enemies or avoid getting swarmed by smaller ones. And if you happen to see the yellow light in the dark hallway turn red, you know you are in trouble.