Marathon Trilogy/Nightmare Fuel



"I once boasted to be able to count the atoms in a cloud, to understand them all, predict them, and so did I predict you, but this new chaos is entirely terrible, mindless, obeying rules that I don't comprehend. And it is hungry."

- Durandal, Ne Cede Malis

Even back then Bungie knew how to scare the shit out of us.


 * The dark and claustrophobic design of the Colony Ship Marathon gives plenty opportunities for this, the first of which is meeting the S'pht compiler face-to-face in the very tight maintenance tunnel.
 * The Jjaro installation from Infinity is one big call back to the first game, now with the addition of ambient sounds that can be easily interpreted as the voice of the sleeping god struggling in its prison.
 * In the first Marathon game, when you blow up a BOB or another player, they explode into a bunch of intestines, gore, and brown mush.
 * And in the next two games, they explode into flesh-covered bones in a pool of blood.
 * Also most of the aliens, particularly the Enforcers, who, in the second and third game, pop.
 * And other aliens native to the planet fly towards you and EXPLODE on you. Not pretty.
 * In the first game, you can see BOBs trapped in Pfhor stasis pods on the alien ship. Their faces are pale and the pods are pulsating.
 * Other things in the alien ship pulsate too. It seems as if most of the ship is organic.
 * The Pfhor seem to be making artificial humans, which are called simulacrums. They run up to you and explode, and it's almost impossible to tell which one it is. The creepy thing? You're told that they're robots, but sometimes, it's implied that they're captured humans ("Innocent Colonists") who had their blood replaced with a yellow liquid (that's explosive, too) and they had their brains adjusted so that they would run towards any human with a weapon.
 * The first soundtrack you hear in the first game is scary enough, considering the dark hallways and flickering lights in the human ship, but the first soundtrack you hear in the Pfhor ship is much worse.
 * Did anyone else think the first door you went was unusually loud? It startled this one enough to jump.
 * Some of message terminals can pretty disturbing. Arther Frain message on You're Wormfood, Dude about how the station has multiple hull breaches is pretty unnerving on it's own, but when you consider that the
 * The Dream levels in general, which, among other things, includes the terminals about the Hangar 96.
 * And this. The fact that these terminals are so night-impossible to figure out is about 75% of what makes them so creepy in the first place.
 * Everything about the W'rkncacnter.
 * A meta-example: One of the scrapped ideas was a weapon that turned killed enemies into zombies. That idea eventually materialized as The Flood in Halo.
 * The mod Marathon: Evil had the Devlins, a spinney, yellow eyed, hard to see menace that liked dark places. Having one jump out at you for the first time is not calming.
 * And the Mystic Pfhor, their equivalent of the Spht'Kr. Freaky appearance as well as hellish sounds.
 * Try Marathon RED. High Octane Cosmic Horror.
 * When a terminal describes the hulks it says that due to their zero body fat they need constant feeding.