As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!
Talk about a rough day at the office...
While The Cabin in the Woods is a comedy that deconstructs the "cabin in the woods" and horror genres as a whole to humorous effect, keep in mind that this is still a horror movie.
- The diary's descriptions of the Buckners piously (and hornily, in Matthew's case) torturing one another to death are very disturbing. Especially when Patience mentions that she's writing about their atrocities with her off hand, because her family already cut off and ate the other one.
- Jules's death, brutally having her head sawn off like a tree stump.
- Holden is stabbed through the throat by one of the redneck torture zombie family members.
- The still-animate dismembered zombie arm reaching for an unconscious guy's head as elevator doors close.
- The entirety of the System Purge (aka the Carnage). Can you even imagine being trapped in a facility that houses every single nightmare creature one can conceive, and those creatures are free to roam?
- In just the first scene of The Purge alone, we see a tree spewing blood after consuming a security guard, one guy getting devoured whole by a giant cobra while another guy gets crushed in its coils, a killer robot scorpion slicing someone with its buzzsaw tail, and another guy literally getting ripped in half by gleeful "Dismemberment Goblins
◊". - Are you afraid of clowns? Bulletproof clowns?
- One of the most horrifying things contained in the cells is Kevin. Kevin is a seemingly ordinary Stepford Smiler with the power to drain people's blood. To make matters worse, it's never explicitly stated how he drains said blood...
- One poor guy literally gets his soul sucked out by a witch, and then is taken away to who-knows-where, to have who-knows-what done to him. While everyone else has really painful deaths, at least they die, and their suffering ends. That may never happen to him.
- There's one guy crawling on the floor slowly being pursued by a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl who sings an Ironic Nursery Tune to her intended victim. We also never see her face... and that's probably a good thing.
- Getting impaled by a unicorn, yikes! It's easy to forget how dangerous this childhood favorite can be.
- Tarantulas are scary as they are, imagine a 50-foot one.
- Two people held against their will are pleading for their lives as they're about to be tortured by Fornicus, Lord of Bondage and Pain and his minions, a reference to the Hell Priest AKA Pinhead and Cenobites from the Hellraiser series, one of the "throwaway" monsters given the most screentime. Like Pinhead, he is a tall, pale, bald man dressed in bondage leathers, but instead of pins, his skull has been filled with sawblades. He even holds his own puzzle box, though this one is spherical, rather than square like the Lament Configuration. What's really creepy is that you never see just what his methods are, but if they are anything like his predecessor, it would make the rest of the Carnage look like child's play. And judging from his name, it doesn't sound like he wants to kill them.
- "The Merman", with its Nightmare Face of blue, flabby skin, black eyes, and a huge mouth full of sharp teeth.
- Just before their deaths, Mission Control are looking at a whole lot of small screens which are showing various people being killed by the various nightmares/creatures. Don't look too hard at these small screens. You won't like what you see. One of them shows a man being repeatedly and forcibly vomited on (what is presumed to be a corrosive acid of some kind) by what looks like mutant hospital zombies. A man gets suffocated in a plastic bag by a crazy man. One woman, out of fear, is Driven to Suicide and shoots herself. One guy gets "operated on" note by Evil Hospital Doctors. The Doll Mask Killers tie up a group of people, pour gasoline on them, and drop a match as they leave the room. A woman is stalked by a monster she doesn't notice. A man is set on fire by a pumpkin-head creature. Another man is beaten against lockers by none other than Sasquatch.
- The Sugar Plum Fairy. She looks like a little girl in a ballerina dress... except that instead of a face, she has a hideous, enormous lamprey-like mouth (possibly inspired by Pan's Labyrinth or the works of Guillermo del Toro).
- The creepy scarecrow men attacking and tearing the security guard to pieces.
- The Kraken. Especially for people with an irrational fear of octopodes, plus the fact that they should not be making crunching noises.
- The Dragonbat, which looks exactly what it sounds like. From its general appearance to its high-pitched, screeching roars, as well as its frighteningly fast speed during flight picking up and munching on any poor soul it captures.
- It's hard to spot amidst everything else (and because the Angry Molesting Tree is in the way), but the third elevator back on the left side of the opening carnage attack is the one the non-redneck-torture-family zombies come out of. The first few tackle and pile onto a couple of the soldiers, and then several more come out to join the feeding dog-pile. And then more. And then more. And then more. That particular cubicle must've been packed to the ceiling with zombies.
- Speaking of zombies, in a Freeze-Frame Bonus, one can see a Boomer, a Witch, a Tank, a Smoker, and a Hunter from Left 4 Dead in the cells. That is terrifying in and of itself, but the question remains: Where did they and all the other zombies come from? Are they traditional zombie forces, or an example of The Game Come to Life?
- In just the first scene of The Purge alone, we see a tree spewing blood after consuming a security guard, one guy getting devoured whole by a giant cobra while another guy gets crushed in its coils, a killer robot scorpion slicing someone with its buzzsaw tail, and another guy literally getting ripped in half by gleeful "Dismemberment Goblins
- That fucking wolf head. Just as all the other monsters have triggers, it is blatant foreshadowing to the Werewolf's release. Though for a bit of Nightmare Retardant, the DVD Commentary mentions that the dust all over the wolf head is actually powdered sugar.
- And last but not least, The Ancient Ones, the evil deities who threaten to destroy all of humanity, lest they are appeased by the bloody sacrifices of innocent people every year. Keep in mind, these aren't some mindless beasts who simply feed off of death and destruction, they're purely evil beings who relish in the deaths of innocents for their own entertainment.
- When Dana and Marty finally put an end to the bloody ritual, they end up sacrificing all of Earth, and the angry gods finally emerge from the ground to obliterate the world. In the final shot of the film, we see an Ancient One's colossal arm reach out from the surface, destroying the titular cabin and killing our remaining heroes. Whatever happens after the screen cuts to black is up to your imagination.
