"Guns, tanks, bombs, they're like toys against them!"
- The war machines, especially when first seeing the film as a young kid. The minimalist, hauntingly simple manta-ray design with the pulsating noise of the sensor-head and the booming sound of the Wave-Motion Gun. When the Marines attack, the Martians are just calmly sitting there, the sensor arms swaying back and forth as they identify and lock onto targets. Then, they open fire with all of their weapons...and they never miss.
- Every single time they charge the heat ray, the pulsating noise gets faster and faster, right up until it fires. Anything and everything in front of them gets one Oh, Crap! before they're simply erased.
- On top of that, one simple line from General Mann:
"Once (the war machines) begin to move, no more news comes out of that area." - The entire farmhouse sequence after the meteor crashes into it. In the dark and desperate moments that follow, the "eye probe" would have been creepy enough, but then Forrester and Sylvia are surprised by one of the Martians themselves, whose inhuman look has more in common with an Eldritch Abomination than the goofy Rubber-Forehead Aliens you'd expect of 1950's sci-fi movies. More than one retrospective reviewer has confessed to childhood nightmares about the probe and/or the alien.
- Pretty much the majority of the last third of the movie. The air raid sirens, the frantic evacuations ahead of the war machines, looting and rioting, and a kid with a dog eating from an abandoned mell-o cream cart are just a few of the events foreshadowing the dreaded finale... the destruction of Los Angeles and the inexorable march of the war machines. The hero spends most of this time in a seemingly hopeless search for Sylvia and the other scientists, evading the war machines as they destroy everything in their path. He finally ends up in a church, with a large number of parishioners all waiting for the inevitable end as the Martians' engines of destruction draw ever nearer. In the end, even in the 1950s, this is a sci-fi horror movie, and looks the part.
