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Nightmare Fuel / The Last Unicorn

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The Last Unicorn is a classic, beautiful film well worth the frights and scares — for adults.

  • The transformation of an oak tree into a huge, fleshy-looking woman who smothered a character's head in her bosom while shrieking incoherently into an oncoming storm of thunder and lightning.
  • Most of the encounter with Mommy Fortuna's freak show and the aforementioned owner's gruesome death at the claws of a shrieking harpy with a skeletal vaguely human face and sagging wrinkled breasts.
    • After Celaeno kills Mommy Fortuna, it turns on her son and assistant Rhuk. While devouring the latter, you can clearly see Mommy Fortuna's stiff, unmoving corpse with a frozen, screaming expression on her face!
  • A giant fanged bull made of fire that threatened to trample the herds of beautiful unicorns.
  • The mad king Haggard and his rotting, dilapidated castle. He is The Dreaded in his kingdom and outside of it, because he embodies dread. In the book:
    Haggard: You are losing my interest, and that is very dangerous. In a moment I will have forgotten you quite entirely, and will never be able to remember just what I did with you. What I forget not only ceases to exist, but never really existed in the first place.
  • An animate skeleton with burning red eyes, who screamed and howled with unnatural fury at the main character as she tried to escape said castle.
    • "UUUUUNNIIIICOOOOORRRRNNN!!! UUUUUNNIIIICOOOOOORRRRRNNN!!!" Dear. Lord.
  • The Unicorn's initial horror at being locked in mortal flesh: "I can feel this body dying all around me!" She's literally capable of sensing her body aging, feeling each individual cell running down and dying, feeling her death of old age coming closer with each second. Think how you would feel if you could actually feel your death coming, no matter how far off it was. Humans can already feel that, but we're used to it. She isn't.
    • During her stay at Haggard's castle, the Unicorn's struggles between her humanity and magic seems to take a serious toll on her psyche. She goes from forgetting why she's at the castle to forgetting Lir entirely. By the time Haggard confronts her on the tower, "Amalthea" doesn't seem to remember that she was a unicorn at all. What's a worse fate for the Unicorn: losing her entire identity and becoming an amnesiac woman with no past or the tragic fate that is knowing regret?
  • In the film, the clock is already rather nightmarish in its appearance (covered with or even made out of dragon scales, carved with grinning gargoyles and other creepy statuary). But thanks to being broken (by Haggard, during a previous tirade? Something about being angry he could not keep time from passing, if memory of the book serves correctly), the warped and dissonant way it keeps trying to chime the hour while the gears creak and catch is rather unnerving.
  • In the book, Lir becomes angry at not speaking to the Unicorn at the end, and vows to find her - in that moment, he resembles Haggard. Schmendrick fortunately talks him down out of his foolishness.

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