Fahrenheit 451/YMMV

• Death of the Author: Later in life, Bradbury claimed that the book is really about how much television sucks. Shallow television programs, used to placate the masses in the absence of deeper reading material, is certainly an element of the story, but the more popular reading is to view it as one facet in a larger critique on censorship. At one college Bradbury visited, the students attending the reading outright told him his interpretation was wrong.
  • But then, it cuts both ways. "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them," as Mark Twain said it, which presumably includes the man who won't.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Mechanical Hound.
  • Clarisse's getting run down by rowdy teenagers.
  • The Book Lady's death. Beatty's death.
  • Faber's Heroic Sacrifice against said hound.
  • Montag coming home to find Mildred unconscious from a drug overdose (and the uncaring doctors coming in to pump her stomach).
  • Heck, the entire premise counts.
  • From the movie (during the scene of the old lady burning her own house so the firemen can't arrest her): "Nine elevenths are ninety-nine, nine twelfths are a hundred and eight, nine thirteens are a hundred and seventeen, nine fourteenths are a hundred and twenty-six..."
• Complete Monster: The evil government is this.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Bradbury green-lit (and helped write) a text-adventure "sequel" to the book of dubious canonical status. It was VERY unwieldy to play, as a lot of plot advancement involved having to type literary quotations verbatim...with a mediocre parser system. It had a lot of pointless ways to die for something as simple as crossing the street during certain times of day, and ended with Montag and Clarisse as Doomed Moral Victors if you managed to win.
• Special Effect Failure: The "jetpacks" in the film are very shoddy. Apparently they couldn't afford real helicopters.
• Squick: Besides the Family-Unfriendly Death, there's also the scene in the novel in which Millie gets her stomach pumped after an apparent suicide attempt. This one is specifically called disgusting by the narrator.