BioShock 2/Nightmare Fuel

• The fact you're called Subject DELTA implies that, even with all the screwed up stuff you learn about your past, there were 3 more before you.
  • In one of Alexander's Audio Diaries, they mention that they were currently testing Subject Sigma. Its implied that Delta may be the only one with sanity and considering later events, it is implied that Alpha Series Big Daddies are still being made. Makes it something of a relief that you actually get to play Sigma, huh?
• Amusement park animatronics are naturally creepy already. So what about damaged, vandalized, abandoned ones that spew propaganda? Hell, even Ryan himself said he was creeped out by them.
• Sofia Lamb.
  • "This is not your daughter. Her name is Eleanor, and she is mine." There is no love in this voice. No affection. Merely possessiveness. Lamb sees Eleanor solely as something belonging to her, to mold and shape as she sees fit. And then she tells you to remove your helmet, put a pistol to your temple...
    • With a plasmid that you probably have used in the previous game.
    • And that you'll probably use in this game still. Hypnotize Level 3.
    • Don't think of it in terms of Big Daddy/Little Sister. Think of it as a father watching his daughter watch him commit forced suicide. Cements monster status for Lamb immediately.
  • The fact that Lamb used her psychiatry sessions not to comfort vulnerable and needy people, but rather to Mind Rape them into believing they were horribly selfish, "cure" them of their "selfishness", and get them to join her creepy Utopian cult is utterly evil, and utterly terrifying. More than one diary talks about how the speaker was so awful before Doctor Lamb "cured" them, but now they can serve the Family and do some good...
  • The fact that she is just waiting next to Eleanor when Delta finds her in Persephone, prepared to smother her own daughter just to stop him. This pretty much drives home the fact that she doesn't see Eleanor as a daughter; as something to care for as a person. She sees her a tool to be used as she sees fit and for nothing more and no-one else, and is fully prepared to nearly kill her if it means she's denying her to someone else.
  • Her demeanor, which seems so cold and detached in comparison to Ryan. He at least showed passion in keeping "his" city, whenever he communicates with Jack. Sofia just seems cold and uncaring, speaking to Delta like he's just some especially troublesome organism on a lab table that won't stay still.
    • The novel makes it clear that Lamb was like this before coming to Rapture, but it wasn't until she had access to desperate people incapable of escape that she started thinking about a 'revolution.' At first you chalk up Ryan's hatred of Lamb to her being a Dirty Communist, but then you realize the utter disconnect between her terrifyingly soothing public face and her utter lack of empathy for anyone, from her followers to her daughter. Lamb emphasizes 'caring for everyone equally' to the point where she does feel the same thing for everyone: Absolute indifference to their status as humans, concerned only with how they can advance her Greater Good.
• Early in the game the player comes across a photo reading "Rapture's best and brightest 1952". Who's on it? Tenenbaum, Cohen, Alexander, Ryan, Lamb, and Suchong. Tenebaum looking nervous and childlike, Cohen looking oddly warped, Alexander distant and unfocussed, Ryan glaring at the camera, Lamb smiling calmly, and Suchong utterly indifferent. In other words it perfectly captures everything that makes each character scary. Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words.
• LAMB IS WATCHING
  • And now here is another take on that...
  • And she is. BOTH of them. And if you've been bad, well....Eleanor wants to be exactly like her daddy.
• Being able to overhear the conversations that the Splicers have with each other, often the perfect balance of lucid and deranged:

Male Splicer 1: "Canned beans! (laughs stupidly) We're gonna be rich!"
Female Splicer: (sarcastic) "Oh yes, if you like filth and slime, it's positively divine!"

Male Splicer 2: "Well la-ti-da, princess!The next time you're eating out of the garbage, you think of me!"

Female Splicer: "A lady has to have some standards! (begins sobbing).

Male Splicer: "We got plans for you, sweetheart"
Female Splicer: "Unhand me at once!"
Male Splicer: "Paid good money."
Female Splicer: "I ain't no hooker!"

Male Splicer: "He he he."

Female Splicer: "(Screaming) HELP!"

• The Baby Jane splicers are big on the above, mixed with Tearjerker when you realize she was an actress forced into prostitution, veering around to Fridge Horror (in light of the prostitution) when you've got a Little Sister with you.

"Why would you bring a kid?!"

• • Whenever her delusions about audiences and gofers weren't making This Troper laugh, they were unnerving said troper immensely. Granted, this is while the splicer is attacking you, but that doesn't make whatever they're reliving any better.

"You sick bastard!"
"I've got my limits!"
"You're hurting me!"
"This wasn't part of the deal!"
"Get away or I'll scream!"
"Help! He's in my room!"
"Call me a whore? How dare you!? I'm an actress! I... I am..."

• The Big Sister! No matter how many times they signal their presence with that high pitched scream, it never loses its effectiveness. You'll still be madly scrambling about, trying to set up a perimeter for their imminent arrival.
  • It doesn't help that you can often look out the windows and see them swimming around, seemingly stalking you.
  • It's even worse than that. Later in the game we found out that while her sanity might've been impacted, Lamb's Utopian project wouldn't change Eleanor physically, because Little Sisters aren immune to the negative effects of splicing. That means that under the armored shell of every needle-bearing assassin sent to make you pay, there's a perfectly normal-looking teenage girl who has been driven mad by the programming they were under for most of their childhood, and kept under Lamb's control by another round of programming before being put in her suit, and forced to do Lamb's bidding. And you can't save them. They're too far gone. You can only frantically riddle them with bullets with the knowledge that it's you or her.
• There's Ryan Amusements, an Objectivist-themed amusement park meant to "educate" kids about the dangers of the outside world. Even Andrew Ryan himself thinks the Nightmare Fuel is overdone, noting the Uncanny Valley quality of the figurines. There are giant hands that would be sitting around, ready to represent whatever Ryan didn't like. Ryan animatronics that you can whack the head and arms off and the torsos continue to twitch around. The last one is mangled and strung up hanging from the ceiling.
  • • It's sickening once all the farmer's limbs are taken off, and once the animatronic starts, the farmer's headless, limbless body is just...jerking around.
  • Perhaps most disturbing is the audio diaries. Apparently, once the populace started to revolt against Ryan, he had many parts of Rapture quartered off, one place being the park. You come across a series of audio diaries from a teacher leading a field trip when the park was closed off. You get to follow along as she and all the students slowly die of starvation.
• Siren Alley. The brothel area has its multitude of dead hookers pinned to the walls and ceiling with speargun ammo.
  • The end of the level when the place starts to flood and Lamb chimes in to add another layer of creepy to things.

"Subject Delta, I want you to commit this moment to memory for me - this howling, brutish slog through the dark. This is who we are. Look, Delta, this is the world for which you strive. You... alone... among the dead.

• In a certain area of the game where you're told, specifically, EVERYONE DIED OF DROWNING, you come across a disjointed audio log from a shy little boy who has a crush on a Little Sister. It's heavily implied he was killed by her Big Daddy, or drowned when the place flooded.
  • It's even worse because, before Fridge Horror sets in, that's about the happiest audio diaries you come across.
  • Add to that that another audio diary from the boy's mother (and yet another one on the website) imply her husband and the boy's father was taken away to be made into a Big Daddy...it's possible.
    • You discover the fate of the father in a diary in the cells of Inner Persephone. He... escaped.
    • At one point, you can find a 'Present to the yellow-eyed girl', presumably from the above boy. It contains a single rose. Tear Jerker indeed.
  • Cohen's Collection. Listen carefully when you start up the gathering event in the area. You can hear Cohen laughing...
• Gil Alexander's fate.
  • When confronted with that... thing, you have the option of either fulfilling the person it used to be's final request for euthanasia, or letting it live, after it promises to "go outside." Now imagine that swimming around in the cold, lightless depths of the Atlantic...
    • It's worse, from a psychological aspect, when you actually have no idea which is the 'good' option. Then you either walk out of there and live with the guilt of having let that thing continue it's reign of terror, or you kill him... and get that image burned into your mind for awhile. If you let him live, later on when you go through the eyes of a Little Sister, you'll find a statue of Delta pulling a man out of a sea-monster's mouth.
• The fate of Mark Meltzer, who went to Rapture looking for his daughter Cindy who was kidnapped and turned into a Little Sister, and he wound up being turned into a Big Daddy so he could be with her. Then you wind up killing him near the end of the game, but you can still save Cindy.
• Seeing Rapture through the eyes of a Little Sister. The fact that everything is beautiful and sunny, with rose petals across the ground and butterflies floating around only makes it THAT. MUCH. WORSE.
  • Especially when you get short flashes of how it actually looks.
  • The rose petals are blood stains on the floor. Also, all the walls and ceilings seem to be covered in the same stuff as a padded cell.
  • Really doesn't help that you get to listen to the echoes of creepy laughter every few seconds if you decide to hang around long enough to harvest ADAM and collect items.
  • Or that they see the Big Sister armor as Tiara (the helmet), pretty dress (the suit) and silk glove (the weapons). When I grow up I wanna be a princess!
  • The silent splicers.
  • The little sister's always see this...every second, a perfect world where no one get's hurt and nothing is scary. This is due to the conditioning they went through. When you rescue a little sister, you remove this perfect dream world, throwing them permanently into a world of sheer horror, death and destruction. When you don't, the little sister's see nothing but their daddy there, ripping out the very thing keeping them alive. Their last thing they see is the one they trust most of all murdering them, most likely staying in their perfect little dream world.
  • According to Gil Alexander's audio diaries, when the original Little Sisters grew up, their programming started to decay, and they became feral and insanely aggressive: in other words, picture the first option mentioned in the entry above... and inflict it on a teenager who has spent years happily wandering her own dreamworld, and by now has enough ADAM-induced superpowers to be extremely dangerous. After suddenly experiencing the real world after a decade of comfortable hallucinations and learning that everything there is trying to kill you, going insane is horrifyingly understandable.
  • When you find the Big Sister suit and reality intrudes, you can hear drilling and someone screaming. For all we know, that might be Sinclair!
• Almost the entire endgame in the Persephone penitentiary facility. You find out a ton about the experiments that each Little Sister experienced, including some wonderful audio logs which reveal, in succession, how they feel pain, due to one jumping from a balcony and breaking her legs, and how they had to re-break her legs and reposition them a ton of times because of the Little Sister's healing factor, to how they tested blocking the pain receptors and had the Little Sisters chew their own tongues off out of ignorance. Gah!
  • The Pediatric Wards where the cribs are all surrounded by monitors with the terrifying image of Dr. Lamb staring down at them.
  • The Recreational Therapy paintings. Big Sisters, looming figures with bright red faceplates. Corpses floating in water. A person just screaming in anguish and terror. Rapture in the first game was bad enough, but imagine living through that for ten years and you have a feeling how much of a mental wreck the Splicers must be.
  • Hell, even the loading music for Inner Persephone is unsettling. Appropriately it is an old Artie Shaw song called "Nightmare."
• Even if you've been a paragon of virtue, Eleanor is still terrifying. She's every bit as aggressive as any other Big Sister, and, in between slicing up legions of splicers, can be heard to shout things like "This one died alone and afraid! Stand in our way and you'll get the same!"
  • Just think: not only was Sofia prepared to smother her daughter, she was standing there, waiting to do it. And she waited until Delta was there and would have to watch.
  • The Little Sister Training Facility is pretty unsettling in its own right, once you find out how the little sisters are trained. There are two buttons on a wall in that area. One of them is labeled with a picture of a Big Daddy, and the other with a picture of a normal person. Pressing the first gives you a free bag of chips, the latter shocks you. This is the EXACT same method that is used to train lab rats. These little girls are LAB RATS, nothing more.It's as chilling as it is tragic.
• Using a fully-upgraded Hypnotize on Sinclair in his Big Daddy form. He brokenly pleads for death while fighting the mind control. Listening to him beg in that horribly strained and desperate voice is horrifying. Having to hear anyone do that...
• The Spider Splicers. Dear mother of God and all her wacky nephews, the frigging Spider Splicers.
  • Especially the one in the movie theater area of Dionysus Park. You find yourself in a totally abandoned toilet block. No splicers anywhere to be seen, full of food and health packs...and one gene tonic. By now, you're pretty certain that nothing is coming for you, so you take the tonic, and nothing happens... Until you're halfway out of there, and a Spider Splicer just DROPS on you.
  • Another thing: don't. watch. Marble Hornets. and then play this game. The Spider Splicers might just look like everyone's favorite tall, slender stalker...
    • They also look like the Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth.
• The lovely little "unstable teleport plasmid".
  • Doesn't help that the statues look like more of Cohen's work, or that, if you listen carefully, you can hear what sounds like someone taking a picture of you when you take the gene tonic.
  • Just hear it? If you turn around after grabbing the tonic, the camera flashes in your face before you immediately teleport back... Urgh. And the ambient sounds in that room are ever so creepy. What sounds like wind and gentle breathing...
  • Now, take a step back, imagine you're not a hulking brute loaded up like super soldier with plasmids and gene tonics, and able to withstand extreme underwater pressure. This thing starts teleporting you around. Sure, some of the scenes are interesting... and then, suddenly, you find yourself at the bottom of the ocean. Alone. With no breathing apparatus. -Shudder-
• The inner thoughts of splicers, still trying to convince themselves life is normal or that Lamb will cure them. Or the fact they might actually know what has happened to them.
  • In the last level there are several splicers that are so forgone they just rock side to side, trapped in the flooding ruins, waiting to die. There is also a doctor teleporting around his dead patients, convinced he can still save them.
• What happens if you harvest a Little Sister instead of rescuing her: the little sister will squirm in your arms, crying and begging you not to hurt her. Then, the screen goes black...and you're holding the poor girl's slug which had been implanted in her stomach. The worst part is that the Little Sister simply doesn't know why her supposed protector betrays her.
  • And now, You can see it yourself.
• Everything that terrified you and made you feel sorry for the Little Sisters gets so much worse in this game when you remember one simple fact These Little Sisters are girls who were kidnapped from the surface.
• If you harvest Little Sisters, whenever you adopt one, she'll say things like "Daddy...? You're never gonna hurt me, right?", "Daddy's home! I've been good! Promise!", "Daddy isn't angry, is he?", "I'll be extra quiet! I won't make you upset!", "Where are we going? Daddy?"
• Seeing the picture and the Model of Gilbert Alexander...one for the Uncanny Valley feel of it, the other because it's a demonic fetus...Thing...
• While the passive state of the Insect Swarm plasmid is less horrifying in this game (honeycombs on your glove, instead of having to watch bees crawl through your flesh), the effects have been appropriately ramped up. Now you get a swarm of angry bees with a smarter, more aggressive AI actively seeking out targets across several rooms. When they're not burrowing into corpses to lie in wait for the next hapless Splicer to come into range, that is...
• "Daddy, Big Sister doesn't want you playing with me..." OHGODSHE'SONMYHEADGETHEROFFGETHEROFFGETHEROFF!
• Evil Eleanor. You just let psychopath, packed full with Adam, loose on the world. Only things important for her are her "survival and joy". By joy she means ripping people apart. Now, think back on how easily she dealed with splicers, who had superpowers themselves and do the math.
• Sadly, even the GOOD Ending where Delta is practically an Angel and gets to live on in a sane, happy and super powered girl, the reality is that Delta was a guy now in a girl's body.....his own daughter's body....
  • May count as Crowning Moment of Funny and Ackward too when Eleanor realizes this the first time she has to go to the bathroom....gonna need therapy alright.