Nightmare Fuel / The Northman

• The "Vision Mead" initiation ritual for young Amleth. Apart from some quick levity at its ridiculousness compared to modern sensibilities, it's completely unsettling. With Amleth's vow coming across more as a curse.
  Aurvandil: Should I fall by the enemy's sword, you must avenge me or forever live in SHAME!
  Amleth: I will, Father, I will! My blade will not rest till it's DRUNK THE BLOOD FROM HIS OPEN NECK!
• "Now live always without fear, for your fate is set and you cannot escape it."
• Beholding the Tree of Kings, involves Amleth having to reach into his father's liver wound, crawling with maggots.
• Finnr getting his nose cut off. The slicing itself is bad enough, but it is quick and happens in dappled shade. But then we get to see the injury in broad daylight in a long take that allows us to really take in the bleeding stump head on. And Finnr returns later in the film and despite him trying to cover his injury with a nasal helmet, we get a lot of opportunities to see his nose-stump.
  • And in one scene he takes off the helmet and he is seen in a silhouette shot that makes him look like some sort of monster.
• Reintroduced to Amleth and the merry band of pillaging mercenaries he's survived with decades later, the first thing we see them do as they row their longship up a strait of the Baltic Sea is casually shoot a fisherman and his son for no discernible reason but sport.
• The Berserker Priest hyping his men up for the oncoming violence with throat-singing, backlit against the roaring bier is one third awesome, two thirds horrifying.
  "Your bear minds burn in the bodies of men
  Sons of the wolf Fenrir break free from your flesh
  Wolves will howl in the storm of Ódinn
  Warriors will fall as the Bear claw strikes
  We will fight to Valhöll!
  Til we return to human shape
  Fearless, we shall drink blood from our enemies' wounds
  Together we will rage in the battlefields of corpses!
  The Father of War commands us – Transform your skin, brothers
  Slaughter-wolves, Berserkers, become your fury!"
  • Amleth then does drink of his enemies' wounds during the battle, by ripping out a Slav's throat with his teeth before howling up at the sky like a mad dog.
  • During the climax of the ritual Amleth screams like crazy with his eyes rolling up in his head, which is terrifying on its own. But look at the others: Most of them are laughing and smiling. They are actually enjoying this.
• During Amleth's berserk rampage he kills seven soldiers like insects, the fifth one is arguably the most gruesome though. As he kicks the rim of his opponent's shield back into said defender's face, obliterating his jaw, teeth, mouth and cheeks into pulp and we linger on his corpse so we can absorb all of the juicy detail.
• Amleth's compatriots gathering the old, the sick and the very young after the raid and bundling them into the temple to be burnt alive; laughing and joking as they do so.
• Björk Guðmundsdóttir's portrayal of the Seeress is absolutely spine chilling with her purring whispers and iconic head-dress seeming to represent the expansiveness of her mental powers to see into the well of fate. In-universe her apparition and portents are enough to scare Amleth rigid.
• Heimir's mummified head, who before he was murdered, (for the temerity of insulting him and Gudrun), Fjölnir had his tongue ripped out, his eyes gouged from their sockets - and his ears cut off.
• The Haugbúi. He comes closer than any of Amleth's foes to killing the deposed prince. Or does he?
• Thorfinnr preparing to smash Gunnar's head in with the ball and his knatttre like he's playing the Hobbit origins of golf. After already knocking the child into next week.
• Come morning and we get to see the unveiling of the Sleipnir collage that Amleth so kindly provides to Fjolnir's farmstead free of charge.
• Amleth saving the slave who will be sacrificed. Then bleeding out the priest in her place through disembowelment and emasculation, suspended upside-down.
• The Mushroom Samba nightmare trip for the soldiers, when Olga has put five or six fly agarics in their stew. Especially with Amleth's bowel-loosening Kubrick Stare and Psychotic Smirk as the psychedelics begin to take affect on Finnr.
  • "The night spirits have entered their skins and are riding their minds."
• All of the "you are so hot for revenge, child born of savagery" scene. The horror of knowing your entire past is built on rotten foundations that collapse your whole reason for being.
• "I will destroy him and all that she loved. I will become a hailstorm of iron and steel!"
• "WHAT EVIL EATS THE HEARTS - OF BRAVE - YOUNG - MEEEN?!"
• The far more accurate and contextually correct usage of: "Lo there do I see my father and mother. Lo there do I see my dead kindred. Lo there do I see my master in Freyja's hall. He calls me to him." It's not a battle-creed of ass-kickery as The 13th Warrior would have you believe. It's the ritual chant of a willing female human sacrifice. In this case, Thorir's mistress.
• Amleth's vision of the Valkyrja in her swan garments; she's beautiful and terrifying, as befits the description of a corpse maiden. With eyes so blue and fathomless and otherworldly to give the Others a run for their money, coupled with the Tropey and not entirely substantiated but still intimidating carved and paint-filled dentition scars in her teeth.
• Finnr's gruesome end at the point of Draugr.
  "The cub you once hunted ate of your nose
  Now the wolf is grown
  He hungers for the rest." (shlllllllll)

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