Nightmare Fuel / Mad Max: Fury Road

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

Okay, they finally got his mom's leather face off. That was creepy, and now we can see what he l—- OH DEAR GOD!

• Max's Sanity Slippage after the loss of his family is even amplified further here, where he's shown more than once hallucinating about all the people he failed to save. Not to mention hearing their voices even in the heat of the moment, which goes to show how close he is to becoming insane altogether.
  • The most troubling hallucination comes after Max attempts to return to solitude. The little girl throws her hand out at him and causes him to flinch. For exactly one frame in this scene, you can see a masked face with deranged eyes. This turns out to be a premonition that turns what would have been a fatal headshot for Max into a defensive wound.
  • The adults we see in the hallucinations are arguably worse, because they never appear again, unlike Glory the Child. One is a male biker, who turns into a male aborigine, and we never find out who they are or why Max hallucinates about them.
• The body horror Max and others endure throughout the movie, from Max being tortured after his capture to all the people with various warts and scars etc. Special mention goes to Immortan Joe and the horrific boils all over his skin before his armor covers them.
  • One particular example; the Bullet Farmer getting blinded by glass shrapnel from Furiosa hitting his searchlight, with a red flare held up by one of his goons revealing his eyes sockets are now just empty bloody sockets, and his insane scream realizing this.
• Immortan Joe might just be the scariest villain of the four films. He lords over a cultish society of brainwashed killers even more stable than Beyond Thunderdome's Bartertown, farms people for their blood and milk like livestock, owns a group of sex slaves, and will stop at NOTHING to get them back when they escape. And he looks like the bastard child of Sweet Tooth and Bane.
  • The Bullet Farmer and the People Eater have no shortage in the scariness department themselves. The People Eater is a grotesquely fat, noseless man who is likely a cannibal, while the Bullet Farmer is a man who gets so high off violence that even when blinded, he will go into a mania in which he shoots randomly at anything he can.
  • While the Bullet Farmer seems normal enough, bloodlust aside, the People Eater is not only far too fat for someone who's a survivor of an apocalypse, one of his legs is also grotesquely swollen, which is a sure sign of gout. That, along with the blood accumulation around his nose, is a telltale sign of cannibalism.
• Furiosa's implied backstory. She was taken as a slave by the War Boys twenty years before the film, presumably when she was a child or teenager. Immortan Joe does not seem to be big on gender equality; he probably does not treat his female captives well. But more nightmarish even than that is the things Furiosa must have done to rise from a captive in a savage, brutal, and deeply misogynistic society to become one of the most senior war-leaders. Whatever she's seeking redemption for... well, she must have blended in with the rest of Joe's people fairly well up until then.
  • Further implied by other bits of dialogue: When asking about the "Green Place" she says she's been that way "many times." They obviously weren't escape attempts, or she wouldn't have risen up the ranks to be an Imperator. She was kidnapped from the Green Place from a healthy mother... from the clan of Many Mothers. And her seeking redemption is not to help the poor, starving masses in the Citadel, but the prized breeders who, for the most part, live a very healthy and well-fed life already. Perhaps the wives were too young when they were kidnapped to remember, but Furiosa may have had a personal hand in kidnapping them.
• The fact that Immortan Joe's Cargo Cult proto-empire seems to be the only stable bit of civilization around. He has a fortress, a sizable army of (relatively) organized war-bands, reliable agriculture/water supply, AND at least two other settlements he conducts regular trade and supply runs with: all the hallmarks of a nascent nation-state... and all this is under the control of a VERY insane and evil dude, who is free to lord over the wasteland as he sees fit. With everyone else we see being roving nomads or bandits, it's pretty clear that Furiosa's rebellion was THE only thing that could pose a true threat to Joe's reign.
• Coma-Doof Warrior - unmasked, as seen in the Page Image.
  • The mask he's wearing to hide that just so happens to be his mother's face. Whether he or Joe made the mask varies according to the source (the former from iOTA, the latter from the artbook). Granted, neither he nor Joe had anything to do with her death, but it's still quite creepy.
  • How did he acquire his mother's face in the first place? When he was a child — a normal, healthy (if blind) child, raised by his mother in a loving environment — raiders attacked his home and dragged his mother off. Several days later, somebody dropped his mother's severed head into his lap. When Joe found him, he was nearly catatonic, still clutching the severed head. Brrrrrr.
• Whatever of these... things walking around on sticks in the swamps that used to be the Green Place are. The depressing looks from our heroes on the War Rig and the foggy. darkness night scenery don't help things.
  • According to production designer Colin Gibson, those things are the boys the Vuvalini left behind when they fled the Green Place with their daughters. Now imagine what those boys had to go through.
  • According to Melissa Jaffer, there were numerous suggestions of what the Swamp People were which was encouraged by Miller, but one theory was that nobody knew what they were. This suggests that whatever they were, they weren't human.
• Angharad's unborn baby being cut out of her while she is dying by a man displaying a butcher-like demeanor and calmness as he fiddles with the baby's corpse and the umbilical cord.
  • Also, the fact that Angharad's brutal demise is an afterthought to them and when the baby is found dead, Joe's and Rictus's one consolation is that it was at least a baby boy and it's clear that had it been a girl, the girl would have been an afterthought.
  • Not to mention that Angharad was still alive at the time of the c-section, and there might have been a possibility of saving her had they not ripped her open in a less-than-ideal medical setting. But in light of being Joe's "favorite" wife, Angharad was only seen as an expendable breeder who only had worth if she had a healthy baby boy.
• The nightmarish polecat mook with the disturbing Creepy Doll head attached to the back of his creepy black bondage mask. He's only got about five minutes on screen, but during that time, he survives being thrown off the rig, kills at least one Vuvalini, nearly kills both Max with a crossbow bolt and would've killed Furiosa if not for Max's blood transfusion. The only thing that stopped him was Keeper of the Seeds shoving a handful of bullets into his eyes, which is pretty horrible, too. Compared with how easily the heroes have dispatched every other mook up to this point, the difficulty this one guy gives them is surprisingly shocking, and disturbing. The fact that he never speaks makes it that much scarier.
• The People Eater takes notice of Valkyrie, dismounted and randomly firing a rifle in the path of the pursuing convoy. He takes aim and speeds up, and she doesn't notice him, and...
• Many people have praised Fury Road for how it depicts the horrors of sexual slavery: there is no on-screen rape anywhere in the film, and the dome that the wives lived in look aesthetically pleasing enough to make one wonder why anyone would want to leave the place if all you had to do was pop out a few kids for an evil overlord, so how bad was their situation really? Simple: IT WAS BAD ENOUGH THAT THEY WANTED TO ESCAPE BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.
  • The comic book prequel Furiosa #1 confirms this, detailing how the wives had to put up with invasive and humiliating vaginal examines performed by a rather pervy OB/GYN (and witnessed by Joe AND his sons), the threat of being raped by Joe' infantile adult son, being forced to stay up all night having sex with Joe, and having to suffer Joe's wrath if they ever dared to object to his sexual advances. When Angharad was revealed to be pregnant the stress of the situation got so bad for her that she attempted to perform an abortion on herself.
  • Any Fanservice factor that could be had from the scene of wives having their breasts milked is nullified due to Joe and company treating them as little more than livestock.
    • There's also the fact that the milked women are cradling dolls instead of actual babies. Why? Does Joe insist they go through the motions of motherhood to keep the milk plentiful? Are they trying to hold onto a memory of their children before they grew up to be Joe's fanatically devoted lackeys? Do they miss being breeders because their current status as cows is even worse? Has their treatment caused their minds to snap so they don't actually realise they're not caring for real babies? Is it just a sick joke by their overlords? Every explanation is more tragic and degrading than the last.
    • Truth in Television: It's medical. Breasts won't lactate unless the brain is psychologically tricked into thinking there's a baby to nurse.
  • Those horrible chastity belt... things the Wives were all forced to wear, likely to keep any of Joe's men from raping them and/or to keep the women from sleeping with anyone other than Joe. The rim of the loop in front is covered in hideous-looking fangs. Imagine having to wear something like that all the time, something that is a constant reminder that you are considered nothing more than property and that your sexuality is being controlled by a sadistic brute. Is it any wonder that once they had a moment of safety from the raiding party, the first thing the women wanted to do was get those things off?
  • Made a bit more disturbing when you consider The Dag and Cheedo's Les Yay, as they've been suspected to be a couple. Even with no risk of impregnation, they aren't even allowed to have each other.
    • For extra Fridge Horror, the EU reveals that The Dag often tried to protect Cheedo from Joe's advances, and was sometimes beaten for it, but other times... Remember that when talking to the Seed Expert among the Vuvalini, The Dag mentions she's pregnant with Joe's child (she just hasn't started to show yet). So the only way she could have stopped Joe from touching Cheedo...
  • Joe is fanatically determined to sire a healthy son to be his heir, and already has at least two sons he'd deemed too sickly or slow-witted to qualify. That's not counting any other sons of his who may have already died of their illnesses or in battle, or all the stillborn ones before Angharad's, in the many years he's reigned. Presumably he's also fathered an unspecified number of daughters during that same period ... but nothing is said of such baby girls' fate. At all.
• While the death of Immortan Joe is highly satisfying, it's pretty terrifying to see Joe's face getting brutally ripped off by Furiosa. Not his mask - his face. As in, there's a red, bloody mass where his face used to be. It's made all the more violent by the fact that the movie's been rather restrained when it comes to blood, so this is likely the bloodiest moment in the movie.
• Toast's plight during the climax is pretty scary, especially from an adult perspective. She's dragged away from her sisters and held captive by her abuser, and used as a human shield against the people trying to save her. Joe taunts Furiosa from his car, and you can see her flinching away, obviously terrified, when Joe shoots at Max. The scariness of it makes it way more badass when she fights back to help Furiosa, and her Spiteful Spit even more satisfying.
• The implication that the nuclear war either entirely or partially evaporated the oceans, if the Great Salt Plains are really the ocean bed. Keep in mind that even if every single nuclear capable nation expended their entire weapons supply, it wouldn't be enough to cause this effect. What the hell did they use?! Keep in mind that the only natural process that could cause this would be the Sun turning red.
  • In reality, a global nuclear war would cause nuclear winter, due to dust being thrown in to the stratosphere. This would cause MASSIVE global cooling, sending temperatures plummeting to what they were during the last ice age 18000 years ago. More and more water would be locked up in ice at the poles and in glaciers. This would cause ocean levels to drop worldwide, and hence ocean receeding from the coasts. It wouldn't cause oceans to "dry up" though. Drying up implies evaporation. Water that is evaporated doesn't just "go away", it turns into vapor. The only way that all the oceans could evaporate is if the planet basically turned into Venus (and if it did, we'd have bigger things to worry about than desert car chases).
  • The nightmares to be had only get worse. Presuming the oceans are actually gone and it wasn't just something else that wrecked the world like a tungsten rod bombardment seriously changing the topography of the world then the atmosphere in the Mad Max world is seriously messed up. Normally small amounts of hydrogen do escape the Earths atmosphere on a yearly basis but this is more than made up for by our being bombarded by small meteorites but it appears something has happened on Earth in this world that allowed water vapor to escape in larger quantities rapidly drying the world until a new equilibrium had been reached with whatever additional gas that's around which forced the water vapor out. Otherwise all the Earth's water has been trapped in the polar ice caps with temperatures being at extremes across the globe with very few moderate or temperate zones. Rule of Scary is likely in effect here, as nothing that currently exists in weapons technology can have these effects, even the strongest nuke, but since the setting relies on Humans Are Bastards, we have to assume something we did messed up the world even worse than the older movies.
• The background of the movie's setting, namely the Water Wars. Keep in mind that several arid areas of the world, including Australia and California are facing severe water shortages, and several of the world's major fresh water sources are drying up due to overuse; water wars are not outside the realm of possibility in the near future. The threat of nuclear annihilation that inspired the original trilogy seems positively quaint by comparison.