http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/TheLordOfTheRingsTheReturnOfTheKing

Nightmare Fuel / The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

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• The scene of Smeagol and his cousin Deagol finding the Ring. The fact that within seconds they go from cheerful chums having fun fishing to crazed maniacs trying to murder each other truly shows how dangerous and powerful the Ring is. The sound of Deagol's heartbeat getting slower until finally stopping as he's being strangled doesn't help.
  • The face of anger that Deagol makes as he's trying to shove Smeagol away is legitimately terrifying.
  • The snarling noises he makes are pretty disturbing too. It's almost as if Deagol has been reduced to little more than a wild animal.
  • Listen closely to immediately after Deagol stops moving. It's faint, but you can hear sinister laughter in the background. That's when you realize it's the spirit of Sauron laughing from the Ring.
  • Even worse: the first real look that both of the get of the Ring is it covered in mud, perhaps as unattractive as it could possibly be given what it is. And they still immediately try to kill each other so that they and they alone can be the one and only owner of the Ring, even the one and only person who knows that it exists.
    Smeagol: My...precious...
• The scene where Sméagol slowly turns into Gollum. Between his eyes growing bigger and his skin turning unnaturally sallow, combined with Andy Serkis' haunting performance, it's a chillingly effective reminder of how powerful the ring's corrupting influence truly is.
  • There's also the moment where, as voice-over Sméagol sings to himself in a way resembling an Ironic Nursery Rhyme for a horror movie, he catches and then eats a fish, raw and alive, in the cave where he'll be spending the next five hundred years.
  • Than he turns to the camera in his new form, chuckling to himself.
• When Pippin looks at the Palantír and gets mentally tortured by it, his hands almost seeming to get burned to the orb. He flails around, grunting in agony and his mouth wide in silent screams, looking like he's having a very realistic seizure — but he can't drop it. Then when Aragorn gets the Palantír away from him (only to faint from what Sauron showed him), Pippin is lying stock-still with his eyes open. It's as if the Palantir killed him. Even when Gandalf manages to get a response from him, it's initially only a whimper, and when he begins to talk it's in a threadlike, absolutely terrified voice.
  • All through Pippin's seizure, Merry is looking on, calling his name, evidently confused and scared as to why his best bud is thrashing around. His apparent bafflement suggests that only Pippin and the audience can see Sauron's terrible Eye glaring through the Palantir in flame.
• When Frodo, Sam, and Sméagol are passing Minas Morgul, Frodo suddenly starts walking towards the city as if he's in a trance. For once, it has Sam and Sméagol in perfect agreement as they both scramble to stop him and drag him back, and when he comes back to himself, he says "They're calling me".
  • Even worse, as Frodo begins to enter his trance, the camera focuses on a shot of the entire fortress and we're treated to what sounds like a bizarre mixture of scraping metal and ghostly howling, as if to emphasise the unnatural evil of the place.
  • Watch Frodo's expression as he turns towards Minas Morgul. There's a flash of terrified horror, almost like he realizes what he's doing but can't stop it.
  • What follows isn't any better: Minas Morgul lights up and shoots a pillar of ghastly light into the sky, signaling the beginning of the mobilization of the bulk of Sauron's invasion force against Gondor. The army of orcs coming out of the cursed city is led by none other than the Witch-King of Angmar, whose piercing scream reminds a pained Frodo of the time when the Nazgûl stabbed him at Wheathertop.
• The War Is Hell scenario that is the fall of Osgiliath. Having been fighting all night and well into the morning, Faramir and the Gondorian defenders are slowly being overwhelmed as continual waves of Orcs storm into the city; even worse, the Orcs are clearly shown to be enjoying cutting down injured and exhausted soldiers without mercy. Faramir, realising they've got no chance of holding out any longer, gives the order to retreat, and then things go From Bad to Worse as a screaming cry that (by this stage in-universe and to the viewers) has become the stuff of nightmares is heard...
  Gondorian ranger: Nazgûl...!
• The Dead King and his men are quite unnerving. When Aragorn says "you will suffer me" the dead king just laughs, and then you hear distant laughs as well, and a ghostly kingdom suddenly forms.
  "The way is shut, now you must die."
• When Sauron's forces deliver their first attack on Minas Tirith, they catapult the severed heads of Gondorian soldiers to scare the remaining forces.
  Gothmog: Fear. The city is rank with it. Let us ease their pain.
  • The way the brief Hope Spot the defenders had from Gandalf rallying them and the trebuchets along Minas Tirith's walls returning fire on the Orcs, smashing Mordor's infantry and catapults, is abruptly crushed with a bloodcurdling shriek as the Ringwraiths descend from the sky atop their fell beasts to lay waste to the city's defences.
• The Fell Beasts capturing Gondor soldiers and throwing them into the air to their death, as if that were nothing.
• The soldiers of Gondor being brutally smashed by the huge hammers and maces of the trolls. The movie doesn't show the state of the corpses after that, but it sure isn't pretty...
  • Imagine being in the shoes of those soldiers. The gates are about to be battered down and you're expecting a torrent of orcs to pour through. That's already a hard fight, but as soon as the gates open, the first things through are giant, armored trolls wielding maces. At that point, it's no longer a fight, just a slaughter.
• Gondor's Darkest Hour, just before Rohan arrives, is harrowing to watch. The orcs are pouring into the city, trapping the men in narrow streets, cutting them down, bashing their heads in, or ripping their throats out with their teeth (thankfully not shown in full detail.) Wargs are mauling the wounded where they lay, trolls are rampaging and the women and children are barely staying ahead of the encroaching army. All while Gandalf desperately implores the men to fight for their lives.
  Fight! Fight to the last man! Fight for your lives! Hold them back!
• The sudden entrance of the oliphants and their Harad riders certainly counts as this for Théoden and his army. The Rohirrim look utterly terrified, which is perfectly understandable since the enormous elephants were (according to Sam) believed to be nothing more than legends. Between the war paint, spiked weapons, immense size, and companies of Elite Mooks riding them doing a Black Speech Battle Chant that can be heard all the way across the field, it's the stuff of nightmares for any pre-modern general and his officers.
• The Rohirrim soldiers being brutally smashed by the oliphants or thrown into the air as if they were rag dolls.
• While the Witch-King was quite badass in both the films and books (and also the game he was in), one cannot help but become slightly unnerved when he removes his helm.◊
• SHELOB. Peter Jackson is an arachnophobe, and he used this to full effect to make the scenes with Shelob as frightening as possible. The part that was especially creepy was where she was following Frodo silently from above.
  • Equally worse, earlier when he was in the cave, you just know she was watching him, waiting to pounce.
  • Then there's the brief scene where her horrific mouth comes uncomfortably close to the camera.
• Frodo realising he's been led into a trap and struggling terrified through the web-covered caves. In panic he then gets caught in a tangle of webs with Shelob on his tail... not helped by Gollum gleefully singing.
  Gollum: Naughty little fly, why does it cry? Caught in a web. Soon you will be...eaten.
• The entire scene where Shelob stings and wraps Frodo. As scary as Shelob is when she's chasing Frodo through the cave, seeing her completely silently stalking Frodo, then stinging and wrapping him in web is terrifying. The silence in the scene makes Frodo’s immediate reaction to being stung a lot more intense; he immediately makes noises somewhere between gasps and groans, and very quickly starts foaming at the mouth. A particularly sinister piece of music starts as Shelob grabs the now fully limp Frodo and begins to wrap him in web, with it becoming even more sinister as Shelob continues to wrap Frodo. Until Sam shows up, the entire scene is building up for the audience to believe that Frodo’s journey is going to end with him becoming food for a giant spider. And whilst Sam’s battle with Shelob is thrilling to watch, it’s very clear that if he were to falter, both he and Frodo would end up being eaten by Shelob. And when Sam tears the web away from Frodo's face, it's quite unnerving to see Frodo's face has turned pale and his eyes are wide open, yet he's still completely unresponsive (especially considering that until the orcs show up, the narrative is leading the audience to believe that Shelob's sting killed him).

  • Special mention should go to the soundtrack, Shelob's Lair. Plenty of tracks for all three movies are creepy and ominous: The Shadow of the Past, The Taming of Smeagol, and Minas Morgul come to mind, but none of them quite count as "scary." Shelob's Lair, though, is genuinely frightening, so maybe skip this one if you like listening movie soundtracks while trying to go to sleep.
  • Even though Gollum is out of the picture at this point, it's still slightly unnerving to know that had he just stayed hidden for slightly longer until Shelob had stung Frodo, he would've had a very easy opportunity to steal the ring.

• The slow, yet unstoppable toll that the Ring takes on Frodo eventually gets so bad that he sends Sam away.
  • While Sam and Frodo are making their way through Mordor, the physical burden of the Ring grows with each step closer Frodo gets to Mt. Doom, to the point that the chain the Ring is attached to starts biting into Frodo's neck. By the time he and Sam get out of the Crack of Doom, you can see a very angry, very painful-looking red mark etched into the skin around Frodo's neck — eventually, you can even see dried BLOOD.
• Frodo's Despair Speech at the feet of Mount Doom is equal parts Tearjerking and horrifying. He's at the absolute end of his strength. He can't conjure up a single pleasant memory to comfort himself. He can't even remember anything but the darkness before him:
  Frodo: No Sam. I can't recall the taste of food. Nor the sound of water. Nor the touch of grass. I'm...naked in the dark. There's nothing. No veil between me and the Wheel of Fire! I can see him...with my waking eyes!
• Extended version of the Battle at Pelennor Fields has Éowyn briefly fight Gothmog just before her duel with Witch-King. She wounds and seemingly kills him... and then, just after she kills Witch-King and is lying on the ground with her arm broken and too exhausted to stand up, Gothmog suddenly raises his head and starts slowly crawling towards her, screaming in rage. The look on Éowyn's face as she is trying frantically to escape from him and especially at the very end of the scene as she tries to grab the sword lying on the ground just out of her reach makes it painfully clear that she is absolutely terrified.
• Mordor. One actually wonders how it got that way. There's the heavy implication that huge tracts of Middle-earth will look more like Mordor should Sauron succeed. Just imagine a place like Rivendell or the Shire being turned into some blasted, horrific wasteland should things go wrong for the Free Peoples. Now imagine what would happen to the people living there. Even those who manage to escape death or slavery by some miracle would have to deal with the places they once called home being warped and tainted by great evil. Really drives home the importance of the successful destruction of the Ring, doesn't it?
  • And at first, you'd simply think Mordor is rain-shadowed by the mountains Sauron raised when he chose the land for his fortress. However, the even taller Misty Mountains raised by Morgoth when the Elves first awoke do not rain-shadow Rhovanion nearly as much; Lothlórien, Fangorn Forest, and Mirkwood exist, after all.
  • When you see Minas Tirith properly for the first time, you realise that it's only about 100 miles away from Mordor. Characters we know already, like Boromir, Faramir, and Denethor, have spent their entire lives defending a city that close to the local equivalent of Hell.
• In the extended edition of ROTK, we get the Mouth of Sauron. Most unnerving set of teeth ever, with a creepy voice to boot. Contrary to the Nazgûl, he is still alive but has forgotten his actual name. The fact that his mouth is bigger than it should be goes straight for body horror.
  • Even better, his lego figure (as far as you can take the merchandise as canon) has that disproportionately wide gob of his as the only facial feature he has left.
• After Frodo tells Sam, "The Ring is mine," there's something unsettling about his smile before he puts the Ring on. Which makes sense, given that the Ring has just seized what could have been permanent control of Frodo. It's the same smirk Isildur had when he refused to destroy the Ring.
• At the same time, Aragorn's duel with the Olog-Hai captain. As he's desperately fending off Orcs, there's a roar from behind him and a colossal shape smashes its way through the Gondorian and Rohirrim ranks to reach him. As Aragorn turns to face this new foe with a look of utter apprehension, it's revealed to be a hulking troll warrior towering over Aragorn, clad in dark, jagged armour and swinging a sword as tall as a man at Aragorn's head. Aragorn just about manages to defend himself from its attacks for a time before the beast sends him flying with a backhand; Aragorn is left lying stunned in the dirt, watching as the Olog slowly advances on him, with the rest of the Fellowship too far away or distracted with their own battles to help. The Olog then tries to crush Aragorn under its feet, and is clearly pulling back its sword for the killing blow when the One Ring is destroyed.
  • Depending on how you look at it, this might be toned down from what was originally intended for this scene. At first, the idea wasn't that it was some non-descript if intimidating troll that Aragorn was going to fight in the climax of the film and of the whole Jackson Trilogy, it was going to be Sauron himself who showed up to the fight!
• Gollum actually bites one of Frodo's fingers off in his last attempt to seize the Ring for himself, leaving him with a rather grisly and bloody wound.
• We see Gollum slam into the magma of Mount Doom and slowly melt away, desperately trying to hold the ring up away from it up until the very end as he wastes away.
• The moment when Frodo and Gollum fight for the ring. There's nothing, just the fires and fumes of Mount Doom and two once peaceful creatures corrupted into murderous lunatics trying to kill each other for the ring. The Infernal Choir further makes it look like evil is absolute and all-consuming, capable of warping even pure and carefree creatures like hobbits.
• The Ring doesn't melt immediately when it hits the lava inside Mount Doom. It just sits there on the surface as the black speech engraved on it glows once more while the magma around it begins to harden and cool. It finally dissolves away after a moment, but it's a long enough beat where audiences familiar with the books are shaken, thinking to themselves "It won't go! What happens now?"

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