Count your lucky stars and hope this thing never actually breaks out of the ground.
The animators did a pretty good job drawing the scariest creatures imaginable.- Adventure Time:
- Hunson Abadeer, an unkillable, hideous monstrosity who rules the Nightosphere in a perpetual state of chaos and pain, has a One-Winged Angel form Lovecraft would have been proud of, and whose first order of business when he managed to escape was to suck up the souls of everyone in Ooo. According to the comics, he became ruler of the Nightosphere by deposing some even nastier abominations.
- The Lich, the closest thing the show has to a Big Bad. He's a monstrous necromancer/thing that looks like a rotting, horned corpse in its natural state and can possess mortals, wearing their corpses like suits. He's existed for about a thousand years and doesn't appear to age in any manner. He is also an Omnicidal Maniac who claims to be the personification of death and cannot feel empathy, seeking to destroy all life. What's most unsettling is that it's strongly implied that he Was Once a Man. Specifically, he was apparently a semi-normal person or creature who was hit by a magically enhanced warhead from the Great Mushroom War, which transformed him into the Lich. The Lich may very well have existed before even nothingness... but even if he didn't, he can provide some images of some horrible, horrific abominations from that not-time.The Lich: Before there was time... before there was anything... there was nothing. And before there was nothing... there were monsters.
- Bella Noche is "a being of pure Anti-Magic" from another dimension. It first appears as a slimy green head, and upon entering our dimension it is a giant black cube that constantly expands and neutralizes the magic in anything it comes into contact with. Attempts to stop the expanding cube only caused it to expand and mutate further. Doesn't stop Betty from defeating it by punching it in the face since its true form is really a weak humanoid.
- The strange, shapeshifting, dimension-hopping, blue monster from the flashback episode "Joshua and Margaret Investigations". It is revealed that Jake was born from a lump on Joshua's head after he was bitten by this thing. This explains where Jake's powers came from and this likely means that he is an abomination himself and doesn't know it.
- In "Orgalorg", the titular creature is an Eldritch Abomination who was banished to Earth, possibly prior to the Great Mushroom War, and was compressed into a harmless form-a form we know as Gunter. During The Lich's speech about the "monsters" before time, Orgalorg can be seem among them, indicating that he is older than the universe.
- The Catalyst Comet itself is revealed to be one in "The Comet", although it wasn't malevolent.
- The being known as GOLB that cameos in a few episodes also counts, as he appears as a cosmic destroyer that comes around every once in a while, striking fear into even Magic Man. GOLB appears to have strange geometric shapes floating around him, and those he kills (Magic Man's wife among them) are either unaffected by magic, or erased from existence entirely. "Whispers" heavily hints that he may in fact be the series' Greater-Scope Villain, as the Lich himself describes himself as "the last scholar of GOLB". In the Grand Finale, GOLB becomes the ultimate threat to the Land of Ooo. He is revealed to be the very embodiment of chaos itself, and is shown creating a lesser Eldritch Abomination out of an entire army just by releasing his Breath Weapon. He can also "digest" people by breaking them down to their original forms.
- Angel Wars: In one episode, the angels-in-training try to travel underground to avoid being detected by demons patrolling a city. While underground, they confront a monster made of trash that attempts to eat them. Unlike other monsters in the series that're implied to be manifestations of negative human emotions, there isn't even any implication about what this monster is, why it's there, or why it's acting as if it can get nourishment from eating an angel.
- Ben 10: Ultimate Alien:
- Lucubra, the main antagonist of the episode "The Creature From Beyond" and one of the breed of monstrous minions to the Big Bad of the season, Dagon. This extra-dimensional horror boasts Super-Strength, Nigh-Invulnerability, Frickin' Laser Beams, and the power to devour a person's thoughts with Mind Control as a bonus.
- Dagon. It's held behind the same seal as Lucubra, but is much worse (Gwen says compared to Dagon, Lucubra is an insect!). In the next episode, they're actually shown the Dagon, and while the audience doesn't see it (though commercials very clearly show him), Gwen and Kevin react to seeing him as if they were in pain. Just take a look.
He comes from another dimension, is referred to as an "Old One" by Charmcaster, and has enough power to match and defeat a powered up Way Big (one of Ben's most powerful aliens, if not THE most powerful).
- Centaurworld has the Nowhere King, a strange, gigantic monster resembling a cross between a deer and a wasp made of Ominous Obsidian Ooze. It's not clear what exactly it is yet, but it's rather disturbingly implied to have started off a normal centaur and is implied by its Villain Song to desire the complete annihilation of all life on both Horse's homeland and Centaurworld.
- Courage the Cowardly Dog has a few. Horst’s Box Demon is an inexplicably Bigger on the Inside Chest Monster. The episode "Muted Muriel" features a destructive giant starfish as the result of a curse. And The Spirit of the Harvest Moon is a telekinetic Demon Head that defies comprehension, save for his vehement desire for Eustace to grow something.
- DC Animated Universe:
- Superman: The Animated Series:
- The titular entity from "Unity" is a Hive Mind alien blob thing that uses a creepy preacher as its primary avatar, turning Smallville into a Town with a Dark Secret and nearly absorbing all of the townsfolk into itself.
- In the comics, Ian Karkull is a guy with shadow powers, but in this, it's like the writers didn't know if they wanted Cthulhu or Satan and so combined them. A common hood gets his hand on a tablet and reads it aloud. Bad idea. He becomes the host to a shadowy tentacled something that wants to create Hell on Earth and basically overwrites the Daily Planet with his own unreality, everyone caught within, Lois and Jimmy included, becoming possessed and transformed by the demonic creatures that live there. There's a seemingly bottomless pit in the center. In the end, Superman has to chase the dropped tablet (Doctor Fate needs the original tablet to undo it all) down this pit, and it turns out that if you go far enough, farther than the eye can see from the surface, the pit does have a bottom. The bottom has a mouth. The bottom is also rising.
- In the two-part Justice League episode "The Terror Beyond", Superman and Co. go fight Ichthultu. A giant alien monstrosity not bound by time or space going up against a group of superheroes in a work that sits firmly on the Idealistic side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism? The beatdown was the source of much awesomeness. For extra fun, said Abomination is voiced by Rob Zombie.
- Superman: The Animated Series:
- Dexter's Laboratory: The interdimensional beast "Jojo" in "Mandarker". He apparently helped Mandark write the book The Magic of Science by Mandark and Jojo, but when Mandark summons him as part of a science fair project, he goes berserk and tries to eat Dee Dee.
- Final Space:
- Mooncake is a cute flying green ball that appeared after John Goodspeed closed the gap leading to Final Space.
- The Arachnitects are giant mechanical spiders that created the universe.
- This also includes the Beings of Unimaginable Light, the creators of the Arachnitects, about whom nothing is really known.
- The Titans are a race of cosmic beings created by the Arachnitects, but distorted by Invictus, as a result of which they are trapped in Final Space.
- Invictus is an ancient, out of nowhere evil that is responsible for the distortion of the Titans. It takes the form of an incorporeal demonic head and is described as a creature of pure darkness.
- Werthrent is a terrifying, serpentine deity from another dimension who was worshiped on Ash's home planet. People who are consumed by it are kept alive in a pocket dimension in its stomach, where it feeds on their wellness.
- Futurama:
- Yivo from "The Beast with a Billion Backs", a genderless (it prefers to be referred as "shklee" or "shkler"/"shklim") Genius Loci with one eye and thousands of tentacles the size of a very large planet that attempts to romance with the entire universe. However, Yivo is a friendly cosmic horror that really only seeks to be in a relationship with somebody (or in this case, everybody). The friendly aspect may not be entirely true, due to the fact that it was using all of its tentacles to engage in a form of reproduction with everyone they were attached to. Which boils down to the fact that this creature borerline raped almost every living being in the universe.
- The Brain Spawn could certainly count. These giant flying brains were born only a few miliseconds after the universe came into existence. They despise all other lifeforms and visit planets to drain everyone of their intelligence before destroying it. When not destroying other worlds, they collect information from them to be stored in a gigantic member of their kind, and then intend to destroy the universe once it is done, so that no new information will exist.
- The eponymous Space Whale from "Möbius Dick" could certainly count. It is an enormous leviathan that is actually native to the fourth dimension, but "breaches" into ours because it breathes the vacuum of space. It also has a Mobius colon and feeds on the obsessions of the space captains who hunt it, slowly absorbing them into its own mass.
- Gravity Falls:
- An Easter Egg in the episode "Irrational Treasure" lists on the top-secret Northwest Cover-Up document that there is an enormous, evil, time-devouring baby from another dimension that is frozen in an Antarctic glacier. "The Time Traveler's Pig" reveals that the "Time Baby", as its mortal supplicants dub it, is eventually released and conquers the world... or at least establishes the Time Police.
- Bill Cipher, a triangle-shaped, two-dimensional, reality-warping demon who interacts with the dimension Earth by appearing in people's dreams. The 3-D form that he takes after breaking into the physical world in "Weirdmageddon" is an even better fit than his standard 2-D form.
- In "Weirdmageddon", we get to meet Bill's friends, who are also Eldritch Abominations: 8-Ball, Kryptos, The Being Whose Name Must Never Be Saidnote , Teeth, Keyhole, Hectorgon, Amorphous Shape, Pyronica, Pacifier, and the eye bats.note
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
- The Nergals, especially Junior. In addition to shapeshifting, he can walk through walls, freeze people in stasis, and spawn bat-like imps from his own body. His true form is so hideous that they didn't even show it onscreen until it (ostensibly) appeared in "The Greatest Love Story Ever Told Ever". Note that Junior isn't always evil. (If you don't make him angry, he can be somewhat decent.)
- Cthulhu and an Expy of Yog-Sothoth also made appearances.
- Mandy herself is often treated like and heavily implied to actually be some kind of cosmic horror.
- An episode of Hilda reveals that witches banish people to the Void of No Return for overdue library books because otherwise, the void gets hungry and starts to reach long black arms covered in eyes and mouths into the world.
- I ♡ Arlo gives us the Bog Lady, a witchy Planimal with moss hair and leaf skin, who commits herself to all life in the Louisiana swamp where Arlo was raised all his life, and insists everything goes the way they should. She happened to take an interest in Arlo most of all, as she secretly protected him ever since he first came to the swamp as a baby, and he didn't even know of her existence. When Edmée let Arlo leave the swamp for New York City after his fifteenth birthday, this infuriated the Bog Lady over losing the one thing she watched over, and thus casts a dark curse on the swamp, holds Edmée captive as bait, and lures Arlo back to the swamp to get him to apologize for leaving her and never do it again.
- Inhumanoids revolves around the heroic "Earth Corps" fighting against ancient, kaiju-like horrors from the center of the Earth. The three main antagonists are Metlar (a giant mineral-based demon who throws globs of molten rock/iron at his foes), D'Compose (a rotting zombie dinosaur who can revive the dead and turn the living into decaying zombie slaves with a touch) and Tendril (a Cthulhu-like plant-monster). Others appear in several episodes, like Gagoyle and Ssslither, while the recurring foe Nightcrawler is a Humanoid Abomination created by D'Compose from the corpse of a human enemy.
- An episode of Moville Mysteries reveals that the school janitor is a former Adventurer Archaeologist who has one these (all we see of it are red tentacles) sealed in his big toe.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- Discord is an embodiment of chaos with parts from many animals who dwells in an Eldritch Location. His powers are completely uncontrollable by anyone less chaotic than him, and have once opened a portal to a live-action puppet dimension. His powers also allow him to, among other things: break the laws of reality, Mind Rape the protagonists, bring villains back from the dead, and easily No-Sell King Sombra's attacks.
- There's also the Windigos, otherworldly creatures that feed on hatred that are apparently unkillable and are so mysterious that many ponies thought they didn't even exist. The inhabitants of Equestria are essentially held hostage by them because the second they stop being nice to each other, the Windigos come back into existence and freeze the land. They greatly resemble Ithaqua, a beast that came from the mind of H. P. Lovecraft himself.
- The Tatzlwurm is a bizarre Sand Worm-esque creature that lives underneath a massive flower at the edge of Equestria. Even Discord has no idea what it is, and when it sneezed on him he got sick. Discord, the Reality Warper who knows things he never had the opportunity to learn, is completely shocked by it.
- Ninjago:
- The Great Devourer, which was worshiped by the Serpentine Tribes. It's said that if unleashed, it'll consume the world in The Night That Never Ends.
- The Over Lord is much worse, he is an ancient entity made from darkness who is behind most of the villains in the series, including The Great Devourer herself, and The Overlord simply can't be destroyed as long as there is darkness.
- The Preeminent, the Dimension Lord (and actual dimension) of the Cursed Realm whose goal is to curse all realms, is a tentacled Oculothorax who appears as a Kaiju in the finale and uses ghost-ified houses and buildings to enhance her physical form, giving herself limbs.
- Pibby: The trailer sets up the series' main antagonist: a formless, glitchy mass that invades various worlds and relentlessly consumes anything it can touch. If someone gets assimilated into it, they become a part of it — either their face appears on its body or they become one of its minions, sporting an eerie grin and glitch-marred facial features in both cases. (Several shots depict it with a lower FPS than anything else in the scene to further indicate how alien it is.)
- The Ghost and Molly McGee has The Chairman as its Big Bad, he is a mysterious entity who is the leader of the Ghost Council and ruler of the Ghost World who forces other ghosts to be miserable and scare living people, if a ghosts fails to do their job, they will be punished by being sent for an eternity to the Flow Of Failed Phantoms. Molly defeats him at the end of season one by overriding his misery with her joy, disintegrating the undead abomination.
- The Real Ghostbusters:
- The Ghostbusters take on Cthulhu in "The Collect Call of Cthulhu". According to Egon Spengler, the infamous elder god "makes Gozer the Gozerian look like Little Mary Sunshine". Of course, Punching out Cthulhu is pretty much their job description.
- There was also the unnamed Old One from the subsequent episode "Russian About", complete with evil Cult and Tome of Eldritch Lore.
- Mee-Krah might just count. A giant of an abomination which fed on the ectoplasmic energies of ghosts. Once sated it would fall into hibernation for a thousand years. However, as it fed its body temperature would rise, destroying the environment surrounding it. Egon theorized it was responsible for the creation of the Gobi desert.
- Regular Show has one where Benson's boss, Mr. Maellard demotes him and introduces the new park manager who goes by the name of Susan. But after she fires Benson who proves to be an ever bigger slacker than Mordecai and Rigby, which he decides to get his job back after he discovers how bad it feels to be jobless, he discovers that Susan has been commanding the Park Managers until they begin to look just like her and follow her every command. And after they turn back to normal thanks to Benson, Susan's breaking point has reached a limit and then she summons a giant version of herself to crush the employees into obedience. If it wasn't for Mr. Maellard discovering the horrible things Susan is doing that shouldn't be part of the business, causing him to give Benson his job back and his car keys and have Leon drive the limo to break the heels off of Susan's shoes which forces Susan to fall into the hole where she is literally fired, then she would have killed off all the main characters of the show with the prison building she was holding.
- In Sabrina: The Animated Series, when Sabrina, Harvey and Salem are trapped inside Harvey's comic book world, they encounter an entity known as the Dreaded Dysphilia. It appears as a flying blob of fungus that erases everything in its path forever, and Harvey's negative self-esteem makes it bigger. That's right — a monster that is powered by the negative self-esteem of a teenager. What's more is that it's completely alien to the comic book world — Harvey didn't even create it.
- In the backstory of Samurai Jack, the gods, Odin, Vishnu and Ra, hunted and defeated Evil itself, a black mass of pure nothing. A single fragment survived and fell to Earth and eventually becoming another eldritch horror known as Aku, a vaguely Humanoid Abomination of pure evil with shapeshifting powers and immunity against all conventional weaponry. The only thing that can truly hurt and kill him is the divine sword that's wielded by the titular hero.
- The Evil Entity of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated is an evil annunaki, which are extradimensional beings that usually communicate by possessing animals. Nibiru spends most of the series sealed in a coffin, but still manipulates the creation of mystery solving groups and either attracts or creates the various crooks in costumes, as well as stealing and imprisoning the best parts of people that live in Crystal Cove. When released, it unleashes hell and animal headed minions on the town and starts eating the residents, swearing to eat entire galaxies and eventually the universe. Yes, the offspring of Satan and Cthulhu made an appearance on a Scooby-Doo show.
- Steven Universe has the Cluster, a fusion of millions of Gem shards, created by the Diamonds to be a superweapon that would destroy Earth. Its projection appears to be an enormous mass of faces and hands, and it speaks in millions of voices at once. Their voices entering Steven's mind was enough to painfully overwhelm him. Its true form was revealed in the official artbook as a massive, horrific creature with countless mouths and eyes, serving as this page's image.
- Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!:
- The end of Season 2 reveals the existence of the Dark Ones, beings trapped in another dimension (except for the ones buried in the cores of some planets) that would destroy all life if given the chance. They're also the Greater Scope Villains of the series, being the ones who created the Skeleton King in the first place.
- A few of the Monsters of the Week could count as this as well.
- Tangled: The Series has the true Big Bad, Zhan Tiri. It's indicated that she was human long ago, and spending millennia in the Lost Realm turned her into a huge demonic monstrosity with a vaguely goat-like head, glowing eyes, and a lower half full of tentacles. She also has shapeshifting abilities and can turn into anything, including a blizzard that nearly wiped out the entire kingdom of Corona. Even while trapped in her Enchanted Girl form, she could still invade people's dreams and, as shown in "Once a Handmaiden...", can apparently send people disturbing visions when they touch her.
- The final episode of Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic has a man try to release a soul-devouring Made of Evil monstrosity that he claims is the source of every culture's apocalypse myths, with a testament to its power being the destruction of Atlantis.
- Retcons to the Transformers backstory turned the planet-eating Unicron into an Eldritch Abomination, not only giving him the power to move between dimensions and universes, but also insinuating that a piece of his dark soul inhabits all of the Transformers since the beginning, meaning that any one of them could turn into a servant to his apocalyptic hunger. His first appearance in Transformers: The Movie shows how abominable he is when he devours a throwaway planet in all its gruesome detail in a way that reeks of a Cosmic Horror Story. Shots of his bizarre pseudo-biological inner workings make his strangeness even more pronounced.
- He does not eat planets for sustenance — he gets that from hatred and strife, and will exist so long as these things do. No, he eats planets because he's offended by existence. All of it. So he's trying to eat it. All of it. Every dimension. He's already devoured approximately 20% of all known existence in The Multiverse and is eager to continue his binge. When he's done, space itself as we know it will be eaten. He apparently once destroyed reality itself, and the only reason that anything exists at all is because he missed a couple of fragments and fell asleep, allowing them to rebuild.
- In Transformers: Prime, Dark Energon is revealed to be Unicron's blood. This is a substance that makes anyone that uses it hear Unicron's thoughts, gives them a serious power boost, causes feelings of intense nausea and illness upon first contact (though eventually it is possible to build up a resistance), almost kills a human (Raf, to be exact), and resurrects dead Transformers as mindless berserkers, allowing living ones with enough Dark Energon to control them unless Dark Energon is mixed with something such as synthetic energon. If his blood can do that...
- Dark Energon isn't the only version of Unicron's blood that did horrifying things; Angolmois (From Beast Wars II. Dark Energon is basically Angolmois by another name, though the makers of Transformers: War for Cybertron say it's pure coincidence.) is liquid chaos, causing completely random and often puzzling effects. In the comics, it made someone into a Herald without them even realizing it, mutating them into monsters that frothed green and granting extreme amounts of power.
- The Swarm in Transformers: Generation 2 was born from a long-lost ritual of Transformer reproduction that their god Primus never intended them to retain, and is obsessed with destroying all mechanical life in the known universe.
- The big reveal of Transformers: Armada is that the Mini-cons are created from Unicron's cells. Keep in mind how powerful they are, especially when brought together. Earth-Shattering Kaboom power in the right combination, and this magic, pretty 'song' they do. It's all part of him.
- The Vok from Beast Wars, a race of incomprensibly powerful beings who's motives are very mysterious and who rarely show up and have technology that baffles the Autobots and Decepticons. They supposedly serve the One and have an interest in Earth and humanity seeding Energon on the planet for them to use and are apparently related to or were the Swarm.
- The Elder Gods, a race of cold, alien, and evil intelligences that exist in the non-spacetime of swirling anti-matter "outside" our universe dwarfing even Unicron in terms of power, their limitless abilities are kept in check only by their inscrutable motivations and indifference to the affairs of lesser beings that exist in what we so arrogantly call "reality". Also, H.P. Lovecraft once encountered them, which inspired him to make them the basis of his novels.
- From the Transformers G1 cartoon we have Tornedron created by Primacron after Unicron betrayed him. Composed entirely of energy, Tornedron is a being capable of taking any form it chooses and can feed on all manner of energy from anything in the known universe, and is capable of splitting its form into numerous pieces to hunt multiple prey at once, and then reforming.
- There's Hytherion, also known as the "Beast of Time", who is a hyper-dimensional creature of immense power and destructive potential, capable of traveling freely throughout the Multiverse. Composed of interdimensional matter, Hytherion's feeds on time itself, is known to have devoured entire universes,(apparently it's function is to consume weakened and damaged universes, preventing their chaos from spreading further into the multiverse), is normally invisible and intangible to lower-dimensional beings and it is prophesied that a version of Megatron will lead the creature to destroy Earth one day.
- There is also the D-Void, a mysterious dark entity that resides within the shadows of A dead, lifeless universe and is the personification of it. A mass of eyes and black tentacles, this creature seeks to devour all life on entire worlds in order to satiate its hunger, but is unable to leave it's own Universe without outside help. It is described as being an unbelievably powerful being with the capacity to return the spark to a deceased Transformer, control the minds of robotic beings and drain energy from Cybertronians to feed on them.
- The Trap Door is full of these things (including the main character's employer). Some of them really quite nightmarish. It's an 80's British claymation kids' show.
- Going into more detail on said employer, we never, and we mean never get a good look at what it is. He’s called “The Thing Upstairs” and it’s a total mystery on what he even looks like. From what we can gather he has a booming deep voice, wings, teeth that constantly fall out, and is possibly one of the most disgusting, hideous things you’d ever have the misfortune of seeing. At one point we get a Freeze-Frame Bonus when lightning strikes one episode and we see a part of him and it’s just a mass of rancid, rotting flesh. Bear in mind that’s just a brief glimpse of a part of him.
- Wander over Yonder:
- The Black Cube of Darkness is essentially Exactly What It Says on the Tin — a floating black cube that speaks in Latin gibberish and is capable of sucking out your soul. His first appearance gives no explanation for its existence and none of the characters even address it directly, which makes it all the more hilarious. The Season 2 episode "The Black Cube" goes into much more detail about him and his life.
- A giant space demon known as Tormato appears very briefly in the episode "The Funk", in which it proceeds to skewer several planets on a spike and barbecue them.
- Ms. Myrtle the Eternal Turtle definitely qualifies. She's a planet-sized, elderly tortoise with the power to destroy the universe on a whim. She is also implied to be in control of the Galaxy's very fabric of existence. Thankfully for everyone, she's fairly pleasant (if a bit bad-tempered), and a close friend of Wander's.
- An episode of The Wild Thornberrys set in Africa has Eliza and Darwin venture into a forbidden patch of the jungle where a demon, monster, or something even worse supposedly dwells. The seemingly supernatural events that occur throughout the episode could be regarded as Eliza simply hallucinating from panic and fear... until the very end.
- X-Men: The Animated Series has the Spirit Drinker. (It exists in the comics, but the animated version fits the bill better.note ) Trapped in a spaceship that was then launched into deep space was the only way the Shi'ar could get rid of it, and when the villains of the week tried to get their hands on the mysterious cargo, they, and the X-Men, find themselves up against a terrifying and constantly re-forming Energy Being with three tongue-tentacles that will steal your soul (causing the lovely image of the soul's owner appearing in its shifting not-flesh begging you for either help or to run and save yourself.) When Jean tried to read its mind, what she saw was so horrible that she was left in actual, physical agony because its mind was just that repellent (you could've taken it as a simple predatory animal until then, but no — It Can Think, and you don't want to know what it thinks. Also, it's quite capable of strategizing.) It's as solid as it wants to be, can melt through walls, need only get a brief tongue-hold to earn its name, and gains strength with each new victim — if it had gotten out of the tunnels and into the city proper, it would've been unstoppable. The list of things that scares Lady Deathstrike is very short, but this earned a place.
