As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
How shall I complete the wall?
Would you like to call the cops?!
Do ya' think it's time I stopped?!
Why are you running away?
Do ya' think it's time I stopped?!
Why are you running away?
— "One of My Turns"
At this point, Pink Floyd had established themselves as one of the creepiest bands out there, and The Wall manages to be the pinnacle of how disturbing they can get. The film adaptation only manages to add to how disturbing it is, with Deranged Animation galore courtesy of political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.
- "The Thin Ice", which starts innocuously enough - the sound of a baby crying, followed by Gilmour's vocals. Then Waters starts singing and the song begins to take on a darker tone. That's when the guitar solo starts... and any semblance of innocence vanishes.
- In the movie, this song is accompanied by images of mortally wounded soldiers intermingled with a lovely scene of Pink getting washed away in his pool as he starts to bleed out, clawing violently at his face.
- From "The Happiest Days of Our Lives": "But in the town, it was well known when they got home at night, their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives!"
- "YOU! YES, YOU! STAND STILL, LADDIE!"
- "When we grew up and went to school / there were certain teachers / who would hurt the children any way they could / By pouring their derision / upon anything we did / exposing every weakness / however carefully hidden by the kids." - this really happened back in their day (and still does, to a lesser extent).
- "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" is accompanied by some pretty scary visuals in the movie.
- Marching schoolchildren enter a strange machine... and leave as putty-faced things with hollow eyes and mouths.
- Some of the eye holes also look like they have scorch marks streaking out of them.
- The meat grinder. They were getting ground up like Play-Doh.
- And of course, there's the student revolution. The children start by throwing things and flipping over their desks, but then they start smashing the school and everything in it with hammers. Before long, the school is on fire, and the kids are about to throw the teacher onto the fire. Granted, it's not actually happening, but still.
- Marching schoolchildren enter a strange machine... and leave as putty-faced things with hollow eyes and mouths.
- "Goodbye Blue Sky", particularly the images seen in the music video. It starts with a soothing guitar riff, then the terror sets in. "D-D-D-DID YOU SEE THE FRIGHTENED ONES? D-D-D-DID YOU HEAR THE FALLING BOMBS?"
- "Look mummy, there's an aeroplane up in the sky."
- A dove being gorily torn apart by a giant black metallic eagle from its remains.
- And not just any eagle, either; it's the German War Eagle, representing the Third Reich.
- The metallic eagle grabbing a bit of ground that actually bleeds.
- The metallic eagle summoning a humongous demon with white, glowing headlight-like eyes that morphs into a towering factory that spawns out bombers.
- The Union Jack (British flag) on a post falling apart and becoming a bloody cross.
- The soldiers having skulls for heads.
- Humanoid Gollum-like creatures wearing gas masks running for cover.
- Anything else becoming a cross.
- Blood dripping from the bloody cross (which used to be the Union Jack) trickling down into a storm drain.
- The message of the song itself counts, too; that even though events in the past are past, they can remain as scars on the body or mind even in the present ("The flames are all long gone, but the pain lingers on...")
- The animated sequences for "Empty Spaces" and "What Shall We Do Now?".
- The two animated flowers seen at the start. The female (which looks like a vagina) quickly snatches the male (which looks like a penis) in its jaws and becoming a flying, pterodactyl-like creature.
- A city turning into the wall.
- A sea of beings with the same featureless faces as those in the school.
- The screaming face emerging from the wall.
- Everything the wall passes ends up becoming corrupted/destroyed. Including flowers into barbed wire, a church into a neon casino spewing out neon cubes, and a baby that briefly turns into a vulture skull humanoid before solidifying as a man in a uniform that gorily bashes in the skull of a man minding his own business.
- Pink during the song briefly changes his simple features into a screaming humanoid monster with wide, white pupiless eyes which serves as a large inspiration for Eva-01's berserk state.
- It might not be clearly evident, but the song that plays during the hotel trashing scene is "One of My Turns". Key words: "One of". This could indicate that this all has happened to someone else before.
- "One of My Turns" describes the decline of Pink's marriage in rather excruciating detail. "Day after day, love turns grey, like the skin on a dying man." "I feel cold as a razor blade, tight as a tourniquet, dry as a funeral drum!" Then he goes through one of his "turns" — a psychotic break where he goes berserk.
- On the topic of that scene: Bob Geldof actually did cut his hand during filming (more specifically, when tearing apart the closet doors, though it was his left hand, not his right as presented in the film), and the screaming he does at the end of the scene is clearly genuine.
- Worse still: Bob hurled a real wine bottle during the scene. It almost ended badly for poor Jenny Wright (the groupie).
- Pink screaming "TAKE THAT, FUCKERS!" at the top of his lungs after throwing the TV out of the hotel window is utterly disturbing, hammering home the fact that he's snapped and indicating that things will only continue to go downhill from here.
- While the entire album is creepy, two tracks stand out. Most of "Don't Leave Me Now" sounds extremely disturbing; think of a funeral dirge with a guy lamenting the collapse of his abusive marriage and you'll get the idea. And then you have "Is There Anybody Out There?", which is reminiscent of something you'd hear in a horror movie. Thank God it turns into a nice-sounding guitar melody.
- The creepy-as-all-hell mantis/butterfly/flower/vagina monster thing that the shadow of Pink's wife turns into near the end of the "Don't Leave Me Now" sequence.
- "Goodbye Cruel World". Despite not actually having anything to do with suicide, the lyrics certainly make it seem that way, especially if they're taken out of context from the rest of the album. Fun fact: The trope of the same name uses an excerpt from this song as part of its introduction.
- "Hey You" starts with a frail, haunting guitar riff accompanied by a few notes played on a fretless bass and a Fender Rhodes electric piano. The song gets more and more desperate in tone throughout, right up to its climactic end with Roger Waters wailing at the top of his lungs. Also notable is the line directly preceding a reprise of the song's intro: "No matter how he tried, he could not break free — and the worms ate into his brain." This is easily one of Pink Floyd's darkest songs.
- How about the version of "Comfortably Numb" in the film, which adds anguished screams over the final guitar solo, coupled with Pink's skin slowly rotting and sloughing off before showing him tearing it all off to reveal his new, fascist persona.
- "Run Like Hell". "With your empty smile and your hungry heart / Feel the bile rising from your guilty past / With your nerves in tatters / When the cockleshell shatters / And the hammers batter down the door / You better run!"
- In the film, "Run Like Hell" is accompanied by the incredibly disturbing sights of everyone in attendance (some of which are clearly children) all moving in sync as they all perform Nazi salutes before donning the same masks as the children from "Another Brick (Part 2)". Then, the newly invigorated fascists March out and begin to commit acts of violence and hatred out on the streets. As the cherry on top, a trio of people are seen in a silhouette having been hanged and left on display for all to see.
- Similarly, "Waiting for the Worms":"Waiting to put on a black shirt!
Waiting to weed out the weaklings!
Waiting to smash in their windows
And kick in their doors!
Waiting for the Final Solution
To strengthen the strain!
Waiting to follow the Worms!
Waiting to turn on the showers
And fire the ovens!
Waiting for the queens and the coons
and the reds and the Jews!"- The ending, too. Not to mention the marching hammers, to the cry of "HAMMER! HAMMER!".
"Would you like to see Britannia rule again, my friends?
All you have to do is follow the worms!
Would you like to send our colored cousins home again?
All you have to do is follow the worms!" - And "In the Flesh", the song that directly precedes these two:"Are there any queers in the theatre tonight?
Get 'em up against the wall. ('gainst! The! Wall!)
There's one in the spotlight,
He don't look right to me!
Get him up against the wall. ('gainst! The! Wall!)
And that one looks Jewish!
And that one's a coon!
Who let all this riff-raff into the room?
There's one smoking a joint!
And another with spots!
If I had my way,
I'd have all of ya shot!"- Roger Waters may be mocking racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, et cetera; but it could easily be taken out of context.
- The film version of "Stop" is shot at a creeping pace with very little background noise. Adding to the disturbing nature of this scene is Pink hiding away in a bathroom stall while mumbling the lyrics to the song, with echoes to fill in the silence, which really just goes to show the depths of insanity Pink's mind has reached up until this moment, since remorse hits him hard.
- The animation that accompanies "The Trial" in the movie also qualifies. Pretty much everything in that sequence counts here due to it representing the dark and demented subconscious of Pink.
- Pink's wife definitely qualifies. She first appears as a frilled snake who manifests from the wall that then becomes scorpion like creature, impales Pink (now a rag doll) with her tail, and then morphs into a gaunt unnaturally proportioned parody of a woman with elongated limbs, a heart shaped head and flaming hair which manages to be inherently wrong to look at.
- Pink's mother is even more frightening. She first flies out of the wall as an airplane, then morphs into a talking labia, grabbing Pink with an umbilical cord. Afterward she reforms as her normal self, but still looks plenty creepy, like the love child of Ursula the Sea Witch and Pain (for good reason) and at the end of her verse, she transforms into the wall itself. Rule of Symbolism is in full-effect here, and it's not pretty...
- The School-master is pretty creepy too, with his sickly grey skin, constantly moving tufts of hair, Magnifying glass-like eyes, hammer shaped head and creepy marionette motif.
- The judge is probably the most nightmarish of all. He starts off as a giant worm, and as his verse begins, he transforms into a giant talking pair of buttocks, complete with a judge's wig on top and a pair of backwards facing legs. What makes it all the more frightening is how the animation manages to make it look vaguely like a human face, as the rectum is the mouth and the scrotum is meant to look like a chin. It's not as tame as it sounds. And having a dual octave deep voice, which adds to the already tense situation.
- His segment of the song also reprises the guitar riff from the end of "Waiting for the Worms" - y'know. The song about performing genocide on the people you don't like. Combine that with the judge himself being referred to as Worm, and his presence becomes even more unsettling.
- The Prosecutor (the only character besides arguably the Judge who doesn't represent anything real) is tame and almost comical by comparison, being portrayed as a flamboyant Large Ham who's more of a flashy showman than a lawyer, but he's still plenty creepy, with his ugly, vulture-like proportions and the Nightmare Face he randomly flashes at the audience at the line "...was caught red-handed showing FEEEELIIINGS!"
- And yet, the worst of the bunch would probably be Pink himself — portrayed as nothing but a tiny, naked, pink rag-doll with empty eyes (possibly eye sockets) and a mouth that gapes open in a permanent scream about 90% of the time. Really shows how broken he's become and how little control he has over his life at this point.
- Or how about "The Trial" itself?
- "TEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAARRRRRRR DOOOOOOOOOWWWWNNNNNNN THE WAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!"
- "TEAR DOWN THE WALL! TEAR DOWN THE WALL! TEAR DOWN THE WALL! TEAR DOWN THE WALL! TEAR DOWN THE WALL! (...)"
- "Outside the Wall", the calm and peaceful ending to the album/movie, hinting that Pink has finally accepted the help of others, ends with 'Isn't this where...' Put the album on repeat. "In the Flesh?", the first song on the album, ends his sentence: "we came in?"
- This likely symbolizes the beginning of some other, unidentified person's wall rather than Pink starting to rebuild his own.
