This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.
David F. Sandberg made his fame with horror movies, and though
SHAZAM! is the most lighthearted film in the
DC Extended Universe by a long shot, it does display some of that influence.
- The trip to the Rock of Eternity is this if it wasn't for the fact the Wizard is a good guy. First off everything around the person gets dark and cold, and everyone besides them disappear. The place they're in starts moving and speeding at a ridiculous speed and when they arrive and open their doors, they see a weird cave with horrifying demonic statues. To make it worse, they are then put to a test which they fail and then get kicked out of the lair after a speech of how unworthy they are. Thaddeus's reaction speaks for itself for how terrifying it actually is.
- The brutal car accident young Thaddeus Sivana and his father and older brother are victims of. They barely dodge a truck, only to be struck without warning by an oncoming car in a Wham Shot. The sheer Soundtrack Dissonance that plays certainly doesn't help matters.
- Dr. Lynn Crosby touches the door to the Rock of Eternity that Sivana just opened using the symbols of the Seven Deadly Sins... then suddenly (and horrifically) dissolves in ashes right before Sivana's eyes. And Sivana isn't even remotely bothered by this, having finally found what he searched for decades whatever the cost.
- The demons known as the Seven Deadly Sins are the stuff of nightmares, even though their rampages are all covered with Gory Discretion Shot due to the film aiming at a broad audience. They're first unleashed by Sivana on the board of Sivana Industries, then on his father.
- The massacre of the Sivana Industries board is pretty brutal, and the board members' only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This includes a security guard terrified when he sees the board members pounding on the glass walls before being yanked back to their deaths.
- The first victim gets his head bitten off. We are spared the blood and shots of the headless body, but the bite itself? Onscreen.
- The fact that we never actually see the massacre is scary in its own right, considering that it's left up to audiences to imagine how the demons kill their victims. One female director in particular tries to run, but is cornered by Lust, which...yeah. Probably best not to imagine, then.
- Sivana killing his own brother and father at that. They absolutely have a responsibility in his Start of Darkness, but what he does to them is Disproportionate Retribution at its most terrifying.
- The alternate, deleted version
of the massacre is terrifying in its own way. Sivana instead visits his the company Christmas party at his family's mansion, which is bustling with guests, musicians and waitstaff. After his brother tells him he's not invited, he boasts about his new powers, twists his arm with audible cracking, and disintegrates him on the spot. He then starts levitating and uses his powers on the whole mansion, and it cuts to the exterior as light flashes repeatedly as screaming can be heard. It cuts back to the mansion empty aside from the numerous piles of dust on the ground, as Sivana brags to his father's now-unoccupied wheelchair. It's slightly less gruesome than the above due to the more fantasy-esque deaths (as opposed to the Sins presumably ripping everyone apart) and heavier use of Gory Discretion Shot, but probably clears the former in terms of sheer body count. - At the Rock of Eternity, the Wizard shows Billy a brief simulation of an older Champion going on a rampage. Though it's animated crudely through magical sparks, there's a moment where a woman runs right up to the camera and screams just before being totally obliterated.
- Sivana targeting Billy's defenseless foster family after interrogating Freddy.
- Later he holds them all hostage and he knows exactly what four words he has to say to get Billy to cave to his demands. "Kill the little girl." It's unsettling how dangerously close one of the sins comes to killing Darla as a result of this.
- When the foster family is trying to escape Sivana at the Rock of Eternity, Pedro opens a door and an alien plant/tentacle comes out and tries to grab him. He promptly closes it.
- It's much worse as that monster is a cameo from The Mist.
- During the big fight, Billy briefly turns into his regular form to escape a death grasp, but Wrath breaks the ice he was standing on, causing him to slip head first into freezing cold water. Just as he managed to get himself out, his head is grabbed by Sivana, unfazed by Billy's human form, who sadistically dunks Billy's head underwater, pulling his head up a few times only to dunk it straight back into the ice cold water. As Billy is drowning, you can hear him frantically trying to call out 'Shazam' to transform, but it doesn't seem to work underwater, and screaming the transformation name only accelerates the few precious breaths he has left. If Mary wasn't there to distract Sivana, Billy would have likely drowned.
- It would have been easy for Sivana to just directly attack Billy now, while he was in his regular form, kill him while he's unable to call out to his powers, but he seems perfectly fine with making Billy suffer with his death, even pulling up his head a few times just put it back into the water.
- Dr. Sivana hearing a creepy Radio Voice in his prison cell. It turns out it's Mr. Mind, a Venusian worm who looks like an oversized caterpillar, but that has never stopped him from being one of the Shazam Captain Marvel's greatest enemies.
- The scene itself is one big Mood Whiplash of a mid-credits scene. It starts out a fun, playful (even feel-good) end credits full of Shazam doodles, then cuts to a dreary cell where Sivana has descended into madness trying to remember the sequences to teleport to the Rock of Eternity. Mr. Mind's mysterious voice calling to Sivana only serves to exacerbate how unnerving this is.
- In a deleted scene, the Shazam family take their seats at the Rock of Eternity. However, Mary notes that the seventh seat is left vacant. Darla says it won't matter who will sit there as they'll be a part of the family and she'll love them. We know exactly who that seat is for but the fact the family has no clue what or rather who is coming for them is quite foreboding.
- What doesn't help the unsettling foreshadowing is the tonal shift in the music when it cuts to the empty throne.
