Given its subject matter, it should come as no surprise that this film has plenty of nightmarish stuff.
WARNING: Spoilers Off applies to Nightmare Fuel pages.
- The Liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto. It's truly just indescribable. The fact that it goes on for 15 minutes non-stop makes it even worse.
- Then there's the footnote when the soldiers return at night to find any Jews who managed to hide. One accidentally steps on the keys of the piano he hid in, alerting the soldiers to his presence, and from then on, it's just a hail of repeated gunfire throughout the buildings, all with the garish Soundtrack Dissonance of one of the soldiers playing Bach on the very same piano.
- Really, any scene involving Auschwitz.
- Specifically the scene where the women accidentally get sent to Auschwitz. They're all stripped and sent into a shower. Earlier in the movie, one of them tells the others she heard that Nazis would send Jews into showers and gas them to death. The looks on all of their faces, afraid that they are about to die, is just devastating. Luckily, they live, and were sent to an actual shower.
- The reality was even worse. The men were also sent to a camp by mistake (Gross-Rosen) because the list with their names had never been received. They stayed there for a week or so until the whole mess got sorted out, and the clerk who had made up the list had to re-create it from memory.
- As the women get back on the train to leave, we get to see people lined up, and smoke coming out of a chimney. Just to remind us of how lucky those women were.
- The soft-spoken officer at Auschwitz, going down the line of women asking questions like "How old are you, Grandmother?" in such a nonthreatening way one of the Schindlerjuden dares to speak up about there being a mistake? That is Dr. Josef Mengele, in one of the few reasonably accurate fictional depictions of the infamous war criminal, conducting a 'selection', meaning he wants to know their age to know if they're worth keeping alive for labor. The quiet, amiable efficiency as he decides who lives or dies is almost creepier than Goeth's overt sociopathy.
- The ashes pouring down from the sky out of the furnace chimneys; It's horrifically easy to mistake for snow, before you remember where these poor souls are.
- The title card for Auschwitz simply reads "Auschwitz" and nothing else. The filmmakers trusted the audience to know exactly why that name should be horrifying. In some screenings, it was not uncommon for the title card to be met with a silent Oh, Crap! rippling through the audience.
- The buildup is even more terrifying. At first, the women are happily discussing what they will eat at the new factory. Then, one of them notices children playing in the snow, and one of them giving the train the throat-cut gesture. Right away, both she and the audience realize something has gone horribly wrong.
- Specifically the scene where the women accidentally get sent to Auschwitz. They're all stripped and sent into a shower. Earlier in the movie, one of them tells the others she heard that Nazis would send Jews into showers and gas them to death. The looks on all of their faces, afraid that they are about to die, is just devastating. Luckily, they live, and were sent to an actual shower.
- Amon Goeth. An extremely sadistic SS officer who gets worse the more we see him during the film. To showcase how terrifying he is, a close-up of his face becomes scary when you wonder if he's going to murder someone or not.
- His Establishing Character Moment where he snipes several people who are walking around the Plaszow camp's field from his room's balcony, wearing only a pair of pants. It is implied that this is something he does regularly after waking up in the morning.
- Ralph Fiennes' portrayal was apparently so lifelike that when Mila Pfefferberg (a survivor who had personally encountered Goeth) asked him to do his Goeth performance, a single line of his was enough to cause her to shake uncontrollably. There's an even more terrifying version of this story where he appeared before her in the full SS uniform on the movie set when he met Pfefferberg, and merely looking at him caused her to shake because, apparently, he looked just like Goeth.
- Goeth lining up several Jews and then walking through the line, shooting them in the head at random with his sidearm. When the gun jams just as he's about to shoot one of them, Goeth stops just long enough to angrily remove the jam and then shoot that Jew before carrying on with his spree.
- Goeth beating up Helen, the Jewish maid he was tempted to sleep with. Even worse considering how he feels disgusted with himself feeling sexual attraction towards someone he considers of a lower race, yet he decides to punish her for it because of her status.
- Goeth's execution, not from the act itself, because rather than appreciate how screwed he is and plead for undeserved mercy he is absolutely bored by his impending death. This man, this thing, as if we needed more reminders of how inhuman he is, is just as callous about his own mortality as he was about so many others.
- Always remember that the movie's depiction of Goeth is a sanitized version of the character. The real Goeth was a complete psychopath who committed atrocities like letting his dogs tear prisoners apart, sniping playing children, personally killing about 500 people, and more. It got so bad that the Waffen SS dishonorably discharged him out of disgust for his actions. Let's repeat this: Goeth's atrocities were so bad, that even his fellow nazis were revolted by it.
- The completely realistic depiction of people getting shot in this movie. No Pretty Little Headshots; when someone gets shot in the back of the head, blood gushes EVERYWHERE. During the liquidation of Krakow, one man gets shot in the back of the head point-blank with a rifle and... let's just say there isn't really a back of the head any more.
- Rather than people just dropping when they are shot like most movies, here they uncontrollably thrash around for a split second after getting shot. Again, this is actually what would realistically happen if someone were to get shot in the head due to the very abrupt brain damage.
- The truckload of children waving happily as they are driven away as their parents run screaming and crying towards the cars.
- Another scene shows a carload of people expressing relief at being sent to what they were told are better accommodations. One woman looks out from the gaps in the car's hull and sees a young child making a "slit-throat" gesture to them as they pass by.
- The incineration of the 10,000 Jews killed at Plaszow and the Kraków Ghetto scene. It's so horrific, it borders on traumatizing for the viewers.
- The huge piles of corpses being burned.
- The body of the young girl in red being added to the burning pile. Schindler had seen her earlier wandering through the ghetto while it was being cleared out and people were being shot dead all around her.
- Not to forget the SS guard
◊ who was screaming maniacally and then smiling and shooting at the bodies being burned. Especially jarring considering from Schindler's point of view, just seeing his own countrymen to succumb to this uncontrollable and pure madness. - The poor Jews being forced to dig up and help burn the bodies.
- What was Amon Goeth doing this whole time? He was complaining about how his superiors couldn't find a better way to get rid of the bodies. It doesn't take much more to show what a sociopathic monster he is.
- Probably the most disturbing thing about the Nazis is just how human they are. Many of them come across as average, everyday people who enjoy life like everyone else... yet they are casually doing unspeakably horrible things to the Jewish People. They treat everything they do as though it is just everyday office work and complain about bureaucracy & unnecessary paperwork; they attend galas, have social gatherings, talk business, and play music. It all seems normal until it is considered that they are deliberately tormenting and murdering innocent people for little (or more accurately, for no) reason. They commit horrible atrocity after horrible atrocity, but they never question or bat-an-eye at their actions, and still come across as fairly normal people while off-duty. By showing the Nazis as human, it actually makes them and their actions more terrifying.
- The fact that all of this actually happened.
