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Nightmare Fuel / Batman: The Animated Series

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"I shall proceed to step two..."

Moment pages are Spoilers Off per site policy. You Have Been Warned.

As one of the most chillingly dark and mature cartoons for children, it is NO surprise that this interpretation of the Dark Knight’s adventures contains moments so nightmarish they can only be described as terrifying.


  • That chilling moment in the opening credits when Batman himself, looking like a massive thing made of the very shadows itself, swoops in front of the fleeing bank robbers, and narrows the white eyes on his mask in cold Tranquil Fury... we the audience get to feel the sheer horror racing through the hearts of criminals who come face to face with the mythical figure of the Batman.
    • Made all the more chilling by the final shot of the opening with Batman's gargoyle-like profile silhouetted by a roaring flash of lightning... shiver.
  • Clayface is certainly a terrifying character already. His introductory episode "Feat of Clay" was bad enough. It all starts with a man being held down as you see chemicals poured on his face, while he thrashes, screaming. It gets more fun when you see him rip chunks off his face to throw at people, and watch him mutate in all sorts of demonic shapes. Oh the nightmares.
    • NOTHING says "Don't Do Drugs" like seeing Matt Hagan forcibly overdosed and left in the backseat of his car in a back alley. He starts to melt. His friend finds him later and when Matt regains consciousness, he sees his face in the car's rear-view mirror and just screams...
    • At one point, he infiltrates a Renuyu infomercial taping as an old woman, exposing everything the company's hidden about the product. When he reaches the last line - "Why don't you tell them... about me!" - he warps into Clayface. The sudden vocal shift makes it particularly scarring.
    • How about his first "death"? When Batman tried to reach out to Clayface by showing him all the people he was when he was human, Clayface starts horrifically morphing into each and every one of them, including Bruce Wayne, before accidentally electrocuting himself trying to break the TVs. JESUS.
    • And then there's the end, when Batman realizes that Clayface faked his death. The very last shot of the episode has Clayface disguised as a woman, laughing at how he has fooled everyone... and while still in disguise, "her" eyes transform into his yellow pupiless ones. It's creepy.
    • In "Mudslide", Clayface pulls Batman inside his body in order to smother him to death. Batman is seen struggling to get out (at one point, a clay-covered silhouette is visible), and Clayface spends the whole time describing how his struggles are getting fainter and his heartbeat is growing weaker.
      • And how does Batman escape this? He shoots his grapple gun through Clayface's head.
    • Clayface's whole terminal illness, in which he's slowly melting, is very disturbing, especially since it ends with his apparent death.
    • There's a follow-up episode "Growing Pains" which introduces us to Annie, an amnesiac teenage girl, scared by a man who's stalking her... she's actually a drone of Clayface which somehow gained sentience out of his substance to act as a "lookout" to see if it was safe for him to come out of hiding. Just imagine being lost, stalked, and then learning you're not even a real person. And if this wasn't enough, Annie, after she acquires a self-identity, tries to escape and ends up befriending Robin has to sacrifice herself to save Robin from Clayface, and we actually see Clayface forcefully reintegrate her into himself; the only thing dulling the shock is that any of the implicit Body Horror Annie suffers as she is unmade is obscured by Clayface's own body. This is both nightmarish and a massive Tear Jerker, and was considered by many to be one of the darkest episodes in the series.
    • Also, how are we introduced to Annie? By her being harassed by bikers. Who were catcalling her and acting like they just found a fresh prey. Had Tim not intervened, it's pretty clear those guys were about to gangrape a teenage girl.
  • One word: ManBat.
    • The scene where Langstrom, creepily calm, explains that he's addicted to the Man Bat formula and then transforms right in front of Bats. The episodes Animation Bump doesn't really make things less nightmarrific.
      "It's in me, Batman!"
    • Made even worse by the soundtrack, which sounds suspiciously like Night On Bald Mountain.
    • There is a followup episode where someone has managed to duplicate the ManBat formula, and all clues point to the reformed Dr. Langstrom. Fridge Horror kicks in as you realize Kirk truly has reformed and is starting to wonder if he is simply unaware of his Enemy Within. Even worse, it turns out the new ManBat is his wife, who had absorbed some of the formula through a wound she took when she helped her father clean up a broken vial - he's the one who reconstructed the formula. That episode launched Kirk straight into Woobie territory.
    • And then there's his wife's transformation in that episode. Her screams that grow more inhuman as it goes on aren't only terrifying in their own right, but also give a hint as to how painful the transformation must be.
  • Anything to do with Scarecrow. As befitting his name, he is terror incarnate, exposing people to their greatest fears which end up terrifying the audience as well.
    • "Never Fear". When Bats discovers Scarecrow is giving people chemicals that makes them dangerously fearless (the opposite of his usual MO), he starts snooping and gets himself captured. He excuses his actions by pretending to be a common thief - which doesn't stop Scarecrow from giving him a dose of the stuff, causing him to jump into the water with a mess of crocodiles. They pounce, he goes under, and we see a huge cloud of blood swirling up through the water as Scarecrow walks away smugly... guess who was actually bleeding, though.
      • Later on, we see that Batman has become so fearless that not only is he pulling off even crazier stunts than usual, he has also lost his unwillingness to kill people, essentially transforming into a murderous, psychopathic vigilante. He tries (but fails) to kill Scarecrow and some of his henchmen, so Robin has to stop him.
    • Scarecrow gains a new leitmotif in this episode - a deep, guttural choir that chants like a cult summoning an eldritch evil to our plane of existence. It helps Scarecrow, with his new appearance resembling an undead corpse, come across as a far more sinister, inhuman threat.
    • The scene in the Scarecrow's first episode, "Nothing to Fear", when he gasses the dean of Gotham University, who then looks at his hands and sees nothing except for their bone structure.
    • At the beginning of "Dreams in Darkness" episode, Batman inhales a new type of Scarecrow's hallucinogenic gas, which doesn't seem to have any immediate effect, but later it results in a string of delusions which grow progressively more disturbing and more realistic. The whole thing is basically played out like psychological horror movie.
      • It starts innocuously enough — Batman is working at his computer in the batcave, when suddenly he sees a reflection of Joker in the screen, coming at him from behind. He stands up and rushes towards the intruder... only to find out that it's just Alfred.
      • Later, though, when he's driving towards Arkham, he suddenly sees an apparition of Robin standing right in front of Batmobile and frantically extending his hands towards him. This results in Batman going off-road and crashing. Cue next scene, he's in Arkham, strapped to a gurney while raving about Robin and trying to warn him that "Joker's got a bomb". Does it ring any bells?.
      • While imprisoned in Arkham, Batman has a nightmare involving the death of his parents. He walks out of his cell into a twisted version of dark alley where they were murdered and sees them going into a pitch-black tunnel. Batman runs towards father and mother, deprerately trying to warn them not to go in there, but the alley distorts around him, pulling him away from his parents. They disappear inside the tunnel, which then turns into a barrel of a giant gun, slowly rising above the ground (and the red coloring of the dirt pouring out of it gives an impression that it's blood) and aiming at Batman. Bruce screams in anguish when it fires, enveloping him in blinding light and flames.
      • The second nightmare sequence, which occurs in the caves below Arkham, is arguably even worse. Batman sees a bright light, out of which a phantom Joker comes out, letting out a satanic shrieking laugh which makes the ground tremble. What comes after is a giant apparition of Penguin which rises from the ground and suddenly lets out an inhuman screech as its head gets ripped apart inside out, revealing Two-Face's head underneath. Two-Face throws his coin (which turns into a giant circular saw mid-flight) at Batman, before melting and reshaping into Poison Ivy. Whose arms then turn into green tentacles, pulling Batman into an abyss where he's devoured by a giant Scarecrow. What makes it worse is that phantoms of both Robin and Alfred appear next to Ivy and just watch the whole thing. When Batman begs them for help, they're completely unsympathetic and claim that it's for his best.
        Batman: Robin... Alfred... you've got to help me...
        Nightmare!Robin: [smiling derisively] It's too late for that, Bruce. You've lived in darkness too long.
        Nightmare!Alfred: [slyly] Yes, do come along, master Bruce. It's time to go home.
    • The Scarecrow is generally unnerving at best, but there's one particular shot (currently the page picture) of him in "Fear of Victory", seen through the eyes of a Mook dosed with his fear chemical, that looks like all your childhood nightmares condensed into one snarling visage. When next we see the mook, he's curled up under a prison cot, unable to do more than shiver.
      Mook: (reads Fear Toxin-tainted telegram) "BOO!". Hey, is this some kind of joke?
      Scarecrow: It's no joke, I assure you. It's the fear of victory. And the agony of... (the Mook makes a grab for him, removing his "Mister Lucky" disguise) ...THE SCARECROW!
      Scarecrow: So now, you understand Step One in how I fix an athletic contest. (the Fear Toxin-laced letter starts to take effect on the Mook, scaring him out of his wits and causing him to stumble backwards into a nearby pile of haybales) I shall proceed to Step Two...
      Mook: (breaking down in utter terror) No... NO! GET AWAY!
      (Cut to the Mook's POV, where we see Scarecrow laughing viciously as he approaches, his face morphing into the form shown above with a roar)
    • In the original BTAS, the staff were overall not satisfied with Scarecrow's appearance, feeling that they failed to make him look sufficiently scary. So when it came to redesign the characters for The New Batman Adventures, they radically altered his design. What they ended up with was, as they described it, something that looks like a hangman's corpse come to life, wearing eerie southern preacher clothes with a Leatherface-like mask. On top of this, they also changes his voice actor to, Jeffrey "Dr. Herbert West" Combs, who instead of playing the characters as a Large Ham, went in the opposite direction and spoke in a raspy, almost gentle whisper. Despite making a full appearance in only one episode, he's still considered one of the most memorable versions of the character, just for how absolutely terrifying he is.
      • His first redesign, with that snaggle-toothed grin and those unblinking eyes bulging out of the black holes of the mask, isn't that pleasant to look at either, especially when enhanced by the fear toxin.
    • The scene where Batman is walking through Arkham Asylum to Scarecrow's cell, and passing Joker, Ivy and Two Face on the way, sitting in their bare cells, submerged in their own little worlds. Joker and Two Face don't even look up when Batman passes, Joker playing with a deck of cards and Two Face staring at his coin. Then there's Joker's laugh when Batman notices that the Scarecrow in the cell is a fake. Did he know the whole time?
  • In "Lock-Up", Lyle Bolton is Arkham's newest head of security, and does a pretty good job of it. Maybe a little too good. Upon his recapture, the Scarecrow lamp shades that even he's afraid of Bolton. The brutish guard makes no effort to hide any trace of sadism in his voice. During his testimonial, the other Arkham inmates are simply too scared to testify against him because their abuser is sitting right there. And when they do find the nerve to speak out against him, they list all the myriad of horrible, inhuman treatments he puts them through. (Ex. Scarface's punishment was to be left hanging over a bucket of termites.) Enraged that they told on him, Bolton charges after them, intent on silencing them once and for all. If not for Bruce Wayne "accidentally" tripping him up, there's no telling what he'd have done.
    • Not even the presiding police can stop him, he's like a human juggernaut of ruthless strength, able to effortlessly cast them aside like mere children. Guess that shows why the inmates were so afraid to testify: it would be like provoking a wild beast out of its cage.
  • "House & Garden" features Poison Ivy with a husband & kids that turn out to be plant-based clones she created. We find this out when several pods in her basement hatch babies, who, while calling for "Mommy" grow into hideous monsters in a few seconds. Sadly, this was the closest Pamela could get to being normal. No wonder she got so bitter later on. (See below) Even Batman himself backs away with a look of pure horror upon discovering what's going on.
    • Midway through "House & Garden", Dick gets kidnapped from his college dorm room. After leaving the scene, Bruce is driving home, reflecting on this and the recent attacks on the rich men of Gotham. That's when he's attacked from behind by a mysterious being that we can't see very well. Bruce nearly loses control of the car as the figure makes his ransom demands. It then escapes and Bruce stops, gets out of his car and looks around...but clearly can't see any sign of who (or rather what) that being is or where it went.
    • They top this with a later episode, "Chemistry", in which a man is revealed to be one of Ivy's creations when she rips off his skin. Later, Robin sprays the plant-guy with defoliant, which causes him to melt slowly and graphically, including his eyeballs falling out and floating off. Bruce's new wife turns out to be another plant-person when her legs turn into vines... and the last we see of her is her face staring out of the porthole of a sinking ship as Batman flies away.
    • "Eternal Youth". Ivy turns people into trees and says that the initial layer is just an exoskeleton and it would take months for them to fully transform. The figures themselves, including and especially Alfred, are nightmare-inducing in their own right.
  • Ra's al Ghul's Psychotic reaction after being put into the Lazarus pit, and nearly throwing his own daughter into the pit!
    • If there's one Evil Laugh on the show that's more unnerving than Hamill's Joker, it's David Warner's Ra's al Ghul after a dip in the Lazarus Pit.
  • The end of "Showdown". In this episode, Ra's al Ghul and his League of Assassins kidnap a resident from a Gotham rest home, and leave a tape for Batman, on which Ra's Al Ghul relates a story about how in 1883, his plan to take over America was thwarted by none other than Jonah Hex, who was seeking to claim the reward for Ra's' lieutenant, Arkady Duvall. In the end, Hex captures Duvall and turns him over to the authorities. After this story concludes, Batman and Robin catch up with Ra's and his still-unknown captive... who turns out to be an impossibly aged and senile Duvall. Ra's explains that Duvall is his son, that his longevity is due to bathing in the Lazarus Pit as a young man, and that his mind was completely shattered by his 50-year sentence of hard labor. Even though Duvall was cruel, arrogant, and completely loathsome in the flashback, that's still pretty rough, especially when you consider the chances of many of us in this day and age living to extreme old age and ending up like Duvall can't be ignored, and that it's already happening/has happened to many people.
    • That such sentences really are handed out in real life is disturbing itself - they are 'worse' than a life sentence, as Ra's explained: "Nobody expected he would complete those years". For someone with an extended lifespan, they're probably worse than execution.
  • "See No Evil". A psychotic man used an invisibility suit to secretly trick his daughter to leave with him. The man in question was an ex-con whose wife had divorced him, and judging by the restraining order and her violent reaction to his company, he was most likely abusive. He becomes invisible in order to pose as his daughter's imaginary friend, steals expensive jewelry for her, and finally attempts to kidnap her - but is then exposed. Bats intervenes, and the episode ends with the little girl telling him that she and her mother are going to move away, "somewhere Daddy will never find us" - it's not just scary, it's a Tear Jerker.
    • Parents watching the show might start to get chills as early as his first visit, where the girl's "imaginary friend" picks up her toy and starts luring her to the open window.
    • You want something even scarier? The original climax had the invisibility suit in danger of exploding, endangering Kimmy. This is one of the few times you can be glad for Executive Meddling.
  • In "Moon of the Wolf", the thought of Romulus presumed to be trapped as a mindless Wolf Man because he was prevented from getting the antidote because Professor Milo dropped the antidote when werewolf-Romulus got all snarly at him.
    • This is lessened slightly if you've read the Neil Adams comic it was based on. Romulus moves to Alaska where he makes a living as a hunter and trapper, except three days out of the month, when his wolf form runs with the wolf packs.
    • A brief segment ending with the mad scientist threatening the guy with, "If you want the antidote, you're going to do everything I say."
      Anthony Romulus: You fool! There's not telling what the werewolf might do!
  • The Mad Hatter starts out as a sympathetic loser, but by the end of the episode in which he is introduces, he gains a creepy stalker crush and the ability to turn anyone into a mindless puppet. And Alice winds up in a different outfit than she started with...
    • "Trial" has an instance in which Jervis blames Batman for his lack of a relationship with Alice. When called out on this and told he could have respected Alice's wishes, he snaps and screeches that he'd kill her before he'd let that happen.
  • "The Underdwellers" features the Sewer King and his underground child slaves. In practice, the guy isn't so much a "king" as he is a verbally abusive dictator, who treats dozens of homeless runaway kids like garbage - constantly refusing them food, making them live in deplorable conditions, and yelling at them at the top of his lungs if they so much as talk or make any noise whatsoever. When they're insolent (or whatever this guy considers insolence), he throws them into an extremely brightly-lit room and leaves them there for hours. Of course, these kids are utterly petrified of him, and steal food and valuables from people on the streets to bring to him. And the creepy part is how this is just what we see of this guy during the events of the episode. How long were those kids even down there? What else did this dirtbag do to them? Thankfully, Batman took him down; in fact, Batman was so enraged that he was trying to prevent himself from crippling the guy on the spot - or break his one rule - and made the Sewer King acutely aware of that.
    Batman: I don't pass sentence; that's for the courts! But this time... this time, I am sorely tempted to do the job myself!
  • What happens when Bane gets a little too much venom. One would think his almost cartoonish expression would dull the horror. It doesn't.
    • The storyboard subtitle for this scene was "BANE IS PISSED!"
      Bane: YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME! I AM INVINCIBLE! I AM BAAAAAAAAAAANE!
      • Bane accidentally overdosing on Venom is nightmarish for a number of reasons. The panic in his voice when he realizes he can't control the dosage anymore, the way his eyes bulge until the lenses of his mask pop out, the way his muscles keep bulging bigger and bigger as he screams for help. It really gives one the feeling that if Batman hadn't been able to yank his venom cable loose, something very bad would've happened to Bane.
    • Even worse, you can hear Bane's heartbeat as he starts overdosing. It gets louder and faster as the scene goes on, only abating when Batman pulls the plug.
  • "Joker's Favor" has Charlie Collins, the poor guy who inadvertently insulted Joker for cutting him off in traffic. He kept changing his name and moving, but the Joker never lost him, blackmailing him to do his dirty work.
    Charlie: You think you own the whole road? Why for two cents I'd...
    Joker: There's your two cents. Now. What were you going to do to me?
    • In particular, the moment when Charlie is yelling at him in traffic and the Joker slowly turns and just grins at him, followed by the calm, easy way the Joker starts following him. The image of the Joker in Charlie's rear-view window, smiling and waving, is the stuff of nightmares.
    • The plight of Charlie Collins in this episode is almost Kafka-esque in how surreally terrifying it is. Imagine driving home one day only to get into a random road rage incident with the most infamous, dangerous and readily identifiable psychopath quite possibly on the planet. That's the kind of misfortune that could get you to thinking the universe is out to get you. On top of that, nothing he does lets him get away, the Joker easily follows him wherever he tries to run, to the point that he keeps track of him changing names and addresses.
    • In the same episode, Joker sprays Gordon's honor ceremony with a paralysis gas, then pins a timebomb to his tuxedo. Everyone gets to watch the clock tick down while being able to do nothing about it.
    • Joker's comeuppance has shades of this too mixed with a moment of Awesome - you've finally pushed someone so far that they're willing to commit a suicide bombing just to kill you.
  • In "The Man Who Killed Batman", Sid the Squid thought he killed Batman was thrown into a coffin by the Joker and being lowered into a vat of acid.
    • Hell, Sid's ordeal is almost as bad as Charlie Collin's mentioned above. You've spent your whole life as an insignifigant, no-name nobody, only to finally luck into what you thought you wanted, only to discover yourself beset at all sides by people FAR more dangerous and vicious than you could ever imagine to be. Not only does every lowlife in the city now gun for you to build a rep, the Joker, the single most dangerous man in the city, sees your achievment as a personal insult, and wants to kill you brutally. You have nowhere to hide, and no one to turn to.
  • Anything with Joker is horrifying, from disguising himself as a harmless party magician so he can kidnap the mayor's son to the creepy, horrid smiles his victims wear.
    • Especially the first time they show the effects of Joker Venom in "The Laughing Fish". Not only does the poor guy have what's best described as a laughter induced seizure, but his eyes bug out to about twice their normal size and his mouth twists into a horribly wide rictus as the unwilling laughter gets more and more terrifying, sounding almost like Freddy Krueger.
      • It's especially bad when you consider what the Joker Venom represents. The writers were told that they couldn't just kill people on a children's show. Something about traumatizing youths. Anyway, the writers decided that, instead of just shooting/stabbing/blowing up/drowning people, as he usually does, The Joker would attack them with a sort of nerve gas that made them laugh uncontrollably (and ostensibly painfully), and then freeze in to a wide grin. It can be assumed that anyone who was afflicted by the Joker Venom, we didn't see alive later, or at least hear about surviving, DIED. Otherwise, the Joker Venom wouldn't be so big of a deal. You'd get hit with it, take an antidote, and move on. But when you think of it as similar to, say, Mustard Gas (not in overall effect, but in lethality), then it gets a bit more serious. Thusly, The Joker maintains a staggeringly ridiculous body count.
      • The more you think about it, the more Paranoia Fuel this situation generates. To give a bit of background: The Joker attacked the guy in the first place because he explained that Joker's Joker Venom-afflicted fish (creepy in their own right) couldn't secure a copyright. Such logic works on Joker as well as you think it would. The guy even explained to Batman that it wasn't even his fault that Joker couldn't get a copyright; he was an ordinary pencil pusher. And Joker still comes after him. In the words of the comic that the episode was adapted from: fail to conform to The Joker's mad logic, and you've just dug your own grave.
      • It gets worse. The Joker had Harley spray Francis with the first part of the gas before Francis actually refused Joker's request for a copyright. The Joker KNEW of the possibility of NOT getting a copyright for the fish, and he just wanted to kill off the pencil-pushers anyway.
      • In Mask of the Phantasm, the corpse of the mob boss the Joker killed, the discovery of which sets off a bomb that the Phantasm barely escapes.
      • When he is captured by the Phantasm and realizes she is going to kill him, Mark Hamill laughs so hard he turns the horror up to eleven. Shown here.
      • "Beware the Creeper" is mostly funny, but the scene where the Joker has attacked Jack Ryder with the Joker Venom, causing him to fall helplessly to his knees while pleading "help me!" in between horrible forced laughter is terrifying.
    • In "Beware the Creeper". It may not be much but Joker's paranoia and weirded out fear of the Creeper is understandable. Imagine yourself in Joker's position for a moment: You're trying your hardest, concentrating on your favorite past time of taking on the Bat. When, surprise! Surprise! You tangle with someone or something that barely looks human. Crouched down, lurking, nearly invincible and persistent and zanier than yourself! It may be Played for Laughs but seeing the Joker actually cringe in uncomfortable fear and actually call someone else (besides himself of all things) a lunatic is a bit jarring.
      • Part of it is the Joker knows he's crossing lines. Joker causes chaos and mayhem because he enjoys hurting people. The Creeper, while well-intentioned, doesn't seem to grasp that he's not in a Looney Tunes cartoon, and that people can't just shrug off explosives or being tossed off a cliff. And even worse- from the Joker's point of view- the yellow psycho seems impervious to his own chaos!
    • As mentioned above, the Joker goes to the mayor's house disguised as a party clown. However, he doesn't go to kidnap the mayor's son. His original intent was to blow the garden up with dynamite, along with the mayor's social circle and the children attending his son's birthday party. If Bruce Wayne hadn't been a guest at said party and overheard the party clown's familiar laugh...
    • Why does the Joker try to blow up a kid's birthday party? Because the mayor stated in a press conference that he considered Batman in the same category as criminals like the Joker. That is how petty the Joker of BTAS is.
    • In the chaos that follows the explosion, the mayor and police forces are scrambling trying to figure out where the Joker is and what is his next move. That's when Bruce Wayne asks the obvious question: "Mayor, where's Jordan?"
    • And then there's the time he had a creepy robot clown driving his boat that emitted a cloud of laughing gas all over Gotham. It seemed pretty innocent until it was established that lengthy exposure to said gas would result in untreatable insanity. Which really hits home when we see Alfred —- Bruce's surrogate father -— afflicted by the gas.
    • "Mad Love" is this. Practically because of the abusive relationship between Joker and Harley. It stands out as being a Truth in Television made episode since there are actual people like that out there that abuse their loved ones. It can also count with some Tear Jerker thrown into it some too.
      • The first time, the Joker's line "You have WHO tied up WHERE?!" is pretty funny... but watching it again and seeing the murderous rage in Joker's eyes? Brrr.
      • Batman's laugh. Kevin Conroy seldom gets to do this as Batman, and when he does, he cracks out the nightmare fuel. In fact, the laugh he makes is so creepy, that it actually comes down in terms of utter goddamn scariness as being completely satanic, enough to even scaring Harley so much that it sends a shiver down her spine, and to a lesser extent, make the viewers feel as if their skin is crawling from the extreme fear.
    • One shouldn't watch Mask of the Phantasm and Return of the Joker together. For the first time. Right before bed. You'll have nightmares about being stalked and chased by the Joker.
    • The Joker’s answering machine message from "The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne."
      Joker: AAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Boy, did you get a wrong number. Leave your message at the sound of the shriek~!
      Unknown Man: No… please… DON'T! AAAAAUUUUGGGHHH!
  • The Hand of Fate in "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?" was inexplicably frightening.
    • A giant disembodied hand that will randomly whisk you off into the sky if you make the slightest mistake? While you're on a sadistically short time limit? To a kid who's watching this? Yeah. Freaky.
    • The Riddler's first appearance. It's oddly animated compared to the rest of the episode, which gives it an unnerving effect.
    • By the end of the episode, Riddler is still at large, much to the dismay of his target, Daniel Mockridge. The last scene is Mockridge, alone in his dark bedroom, fearfully locking the door and cowering in bed with a shotgun. It's implied this is the norm for him now.
      Bruce: How much is a good night's sleep worth? Now there's a riddle for you...
    • You think that's scary? Riddler's second appearance What Is Reality? has him sending a computer to the GCPD and trapping Commissioner Gordon in the Virtual Reality world it contains. The entire VR world is very surreal and the landscape is an omnious shade of red under a dark sky and the worst part? The Riddler is in complete control of this place, imagine being alone in a computer realm where Riddler is able to bend and warp everything at will! That is pretty disturbing right?
    • How do we witness the Commissioner getting captured? First the door to the computer lab locks up by itself the moment Robin leaves and the stairway Gordon is on turns into The Riddler's arm as he appears as a gigantic version of himself and grabs him in his hand! When Batman returns he sees that Gordon is staring blankly and unresponsive. In other words, The Riddler basically captured the Commissioner's SOUL!!! Leaving his body in a vegetative state!! Riddler warns Batman that simply disconnecting Gordon would be fatal since Gordon is spinning at high speed in the VR world. He also said he'd give Gordon's heart another FIFTEEN MINUTES!!! Had Batman not rescued him in time, Gordon would have ended up in a permanent coma or even dead!
    • Riddler's VR world in general is freaky. When Batman enters, he is walking through a seemingly endless corridor of doors. The first door he opens has question marks that start shooting at him and another has a train that comes out and runs the shooting question marks over! The door Batman has to enter leads to a chessboard where he has to move like a knight. Goodness knows what might have possibly been in the other doors...
    • At several points, Riddler appears as a huge floating head and hands and at the start of the chess scene turns into a creepy smiling moon!
    • To say nothing of those creepy looking tendrils that grab at Batman when he decides to cheat through the puzzle box by breaking it. We only see the ends of them but we don't see the source of them!
    • Riddler's fate at the end of the episode. He has burnt his mind out after Batman tricks him into losing his control of his VR world by splitting his focus in too many places after duplicating himself in an attempt to outnumber Batman who did the same, resulting in "Riddlerville" falling apart and when the computer short circuits, we hear the Riddler unleashing an unsettling scream of pain. When Gordon is freed and he, Batman and Robin track him down, Riddler is staring shocked at the screen. This episode ended with Riddler becoming a vegetable!!
    • The fact that Riddler was able to hack into so many computers, the lock on room 101's door AND THE GCPD'S SECURITY SYSTEM all in one place is nothing short of unsettling...
    • "Riddler's Reform" shows what would happen if Riddler decided to stop all the games and just kill Batman once and for all: He tricks Batman into a building, seals all the exits, then blows it up. If Batman hadn't found the safe, or if the safe didn't withstand the blast, Batman would be dead.
  • Batgirl's dream sequence death in "Over the Edge" was particularly traumatizing, as she falls from a high rise, onto her father's car. Made even worse by a censorship edit that put the camera inside the car with Jim Gordon as his daughter hits his hood.
    • Batman's implied change of policy in this episode.
      Bane: A fight to the death?
      Batman: It makes no difference now.
  • "Avatar". The immortal Egyptian queen, who at first looks beautiful to Ra's, then turns out to actually look... well, like a bazillion-year-old mummy woman should.
    • Earlier in the episode, when Batman finds Ubu stealing the scroll Ra comes up behind and attacks Batman with a cobra which Batman catches in his hand. When Batman sees it he was shocked then the cobra bites him! As Ra and Ubu walks away leaving Batman to die! Batman is lying there in pain from the cobra bite! It's a good thing Batman had an antidote in his utility belt or otherwise he would've died then and there!
  • Two-Face. He starts off seeming like a normal nice guy, then his second personality takes over and he spends the rest of the series chaotically basing his every decision on coin flips. Then there's the burn scars , which are somehow a thousand times scarier because they aren't realistic. They took artistic liberties and made them sky blue, swelled up his lips on one side and made them hang open, and gave him that freakishly enlarged, yellow, blind eye.
    • When Harvey Dent saw what happened to his face. His poor girlfriend wasn't the only one who screamed.
    • The ending of "Judgement Day", with Harvey in his prison cell, playing out a trial in his own mind:
      The Judge: Order in the court! In the matter of the people versus Harvey Dent, how does the prisoner plead?
      Harvey: (with a shell-shocked look in his eyes) Guilty... guilty... guilty.
    • In the origin episode of Two-Face, Rupert Thorne is trying to blackmail Harvey Dent (with the information of his split personality, pre-accident) into looking the other way, and offers him a trade. Harvey is getting visibly more and more pissed as Thorne details the trade, and then suddenly goes completely calm. "There's just one problem." And then his face turns to sadistic evil incarnate and in his creepy, psychotic criminal Two Face voice says, "You're talking to the wrong Harvey." He then proceeds to kick the crap out of Thorne and his goons. It's not creepy due to gore or torture, but the sudden switch from Harvey Dent to "Big Bad Harv", and the lighting and way his face contorts, is 100% pure grade-A horror to younger viewers.
    • Before that, when the therapist is trying to reach the Two-Face alter:
      Therapist: Big Bad Harv?
      Big Bad Harv: (Beat, as his face twists into a snarl) Speaking.
    • Everything creepy/nightmarish about Two-Face's character is just turned up to eleven when you remember that he's voiced by Richard Moll, whose last TV role at the time was as the bumbling Bull Shannon on Night Court. Talk about complete opposite characters!
      • In an interview in Wizard Magazine at the time, Richard Moll said that everyone on the crew in the voice recording studio, who not only had gotten used to his smooth cheerful voice from his previous episodes but all knew him as the giant teddy bear bailiff Bull Shannon, were legit frozen into stopping all work for a few minutes the first time he spoke lines in his gravelly demonic Two-Face voice. The crew were terrified. By the biggest teddy bear in Hollywood.
      • A Moment of Awesome for Moll, but still terrifying nonetheless: near the end of the first Two-Face episode right as Harvey is looking at himself for the first time while Grace is walking down a hall to see him, he lets out a long, horrific scream offscreen. One can only imagine the face he was making.
    • Also during the scene with the therapist, when she's attempting to talk to him at one point lightning strikes, and the flash that appears over his face is the scarred Two-Face side. It lasts only a split-second, but it's enough to get burned into the viewer's mind and get a good subliminal scare.
    • Before Bruce learns that Harvey has been seeking help for severe anger problems, he jokes to Harvey that if Harvey didn't marry Grace (his fiance) soon, he'd maybe just steal her away. A few minutes later, Harvey gets the bad news that the judge has thrown out a case that Harvey had spent months preparing. Harvey gets angry and Bruce, like any good friend, goes to ask him what's wrong. Harvey turns on Bruce and Grace has to stop him. That implies that Big Bad Harv didn't think Bruce was joking when he made that comment earlier. Seeing how he reacted when a criminal made fun of him earlier in the episode, what would Harvey had done had Grace not been there?
    • When he had the plastic surgery in "Second Chance" to get his face repaired. There's a brief moment where it seems he's going to go under the knife on camera.
  • In "The Demon Within", Jason Blood says that Klarion turned his parents into mice, and then we get a close-up on his snarling pet cat. Nothing is stated outright; the audience are left to draw their own conclusions.
  • Mr. Freeze has such moments. There's the title card for "Deep Freeze" wherein a mostly silhouetted Mr. Freeze ominously stares right at you with the piercing red glow of his goggles.
    • Also from Deep Freeze is the ultimate fate of Grant Walker. Wanting to be immortal like Mr. Freeze, Walker allows himself to be subjected to a procedure that gives him the same condition before engaging in a plot to nuke the rest of the world as part of his plan to create an ocean paradise. When Freeze turns against him and destroys his lair, Walker winds up frozen in an iceberg at the bottom of the ocean, unable to move or die. The only thing he can do is scream futilely within his prison.
      • Fortunately for him, he is able to escape in the comics, though it is only after the iceberg melts over the span of two years.
    • "Cold Comfort" is a pretty disturbing episode in itself. After being accustomed to Mr. Freeze as an Anti-Villain who just wants to see his wife healthy and alive again, he's become even more emotionless and cruel, in addition to being hellbent on destroying everything Gothamites hold dear just because he can no longer be happy. Then there's the revelation that his condition has destroyed most of his body, rendering himself just as a living head in a robotic suit. Not to mention when Batman tries to ambush Mr. Freeze as he pilots his craft, only for the latter to suddenly whirl his head 180 degrees to fix him with an enraged glare.
    • Not to be missed is Ferris Boyle - when Batman sees what he did to Nora (re: cognizant that she was dependent on the machines Victor was using to keep her alive, he orders them removed, pretty much to spite him for "misappropriating GothCorp funds"), then causing the accident that leads to Fries needing to live within his suit, Batman - the epitome of The Stoic - lets out a horrified "My God!" This is all the more impactful when you remember that, for an animated kids show in the '90s, this is effectively a Precision F-Strike, meaning that the traditionally conservative and overcautious censors looked at this and AGREED that it was an appropriate reaction.
  • "Vendetta" is just as bad. The episode introduces Killer Croc, so we're greeted to an unfamiliar set of cold, reptilian eyes staring at us on the title card.
  • Such is the power of the show's horror that it extends to the damn activity center based off of it. Never mind the creepy ambiance. Never mind that all the games set in Gotham pit you against such pleasant fellows as Two-Face and the Joker (the game set in the sewers implies that Killer Croc is there, making it even worse). Never mind that all that can be heard in Wayne Manor is that damn clock. If you try to continue a game, you'll first have to confirm whether or not you actually continue it or start a new game—on a blood-red screen of the Joker staring right at you, taunting you with the knowledge that whichever choice you make, you'll never catch him. Oh, and every time you exit back to Gotham, both he and Two-Face laugh at you from off-screen.
  • "Heart of Steel"! To count the ways: HARDAC is a cold, emotionless A.I. created by a scientist who wanted to eliminate the pain of loss after the death of his daughter. Its plan is to "replace" humanity with robots. To this end, he starts by replacing key figures in Gotham, like Gordon and the Mayor... the robots, when threatened can move in positively insectile ways, and while the animators may have wanted to make their movements inhuman to illustrate the fact, their success means we have horror on the screen. All that, plus, the interesting little scene where Batman and Barbara collectively hurl Harvey Bullock into the bat signal.... thankfully, it was a robot replacement, but for all they knew, that was the real Harvey Bullock and they just killed him.
    • The robot Rossum accidentally getting hit with Randa's stungun when Batman ducks out of the way. Its scream as it dies will haunt you.
    • The follow-up episode "His Silicon Soul" introduces the Batman duplicate isn't anymore pleasant.
      • On the subject of the duplicate, at the beginning of the episode, we have no idea at all that it's a duplicate right up until a mook shoots it, only for said mook to get an "Oh, Crap!" moment upon seeing a hole full of circuitry in its stomach. And later, when the real Batman shows up, the mook, traumatized from his encounter with the duplicate, exclaims, "Keep him away, man! He ain't human! Get it away from me!" And then after Alfred also discovers that the Batman is a duplicate, he escapes into the Bat Cave, ignoring the duplicate's pleas for help, and activates the knockout gas. Then it appears right behind Alfred, unaffected by the gas, and takes off the gas mask Alfred is wearing, forcing Alfred to breathe in the gas, which knocks him out.
  • "Baby-Doll" revolves around a washed-up actress with dwarfism who takes revenge on her former castmates. She continually switches off between the child voice she did on the show and her real, "adult" voice. This continues to be creepy throughout the entire show until the climax in a hall of mirrors at a carnival, where she sees herself in a funhouse mirror showing what she probably would have looked like as an adult without the condition. She rages at the Dark Knight for foiling her plan, shouting, "Why couldn't you just let me make believe?!" and sports a deranged face as she blasts the fun house mirrors down before breaking down and crying. It perhaps goes without saying that this was an episode written by Paul Dini.
    • This is a great example of a creepy episode that also ended up being a tear-jerker episode, as mentioned above. The last time the actress says, "I didn't mean to!" is just so tragic; no matter what she just did over the last 20 minutes, it's hard not to feel sorry for her just then.
    • The entire premise of how Dahl attracts her victims is terrifying. The story opens with victim Brian seeing a lost little girl in obvious distress. When he goes to comfort her and find someone to help her, he's attacked. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished indeed.
  • Any episode that had the Ventriloquist and Scarface. Not outright terrifying, but subtly disturbing, given it's a man who starts being terrified by a puppet he himself voices. Plus, some of Scarface's 'deaths' were just creepy, even if it WAS a puppet. Giant fan as a wood-chipper anyone?
    • The reveal that the new crime boss is a dummy even gives Batman a jolt with just how thoroughly, fundamentally sick Wesker is.
    • It's worse if you were among the minority that weren't fully aware that he was a puppet.
    • The worst part is that its ambiguous as to the extent Wesker is aware of Scarface's true nature. Some versions has him be a slave to a dominant alternate personality that expresses itself through the puppet, others has Wesker essentially faking the whole thing, with his mild-mannered regular persona being an act, and others imply that the Scarface entity might actually be its own being, a supernatural manifestation born from the wood the doll is made of, which was once the hangman's tree of the asylum... And no one knows which one is true, save maybe Scarface himself.
      • Whatever the association between Wesker and Scarface, a particularly frightening fact emerges when Batman's computer analyzes their voices; the computer recognizes them as two entirely different people. Not one guy doing two voices, two entirely different people talking to one another. Again, no explanation is ever offered why that is.
    • How about Scarface almost making the Ventriloquist commit suicide?! Wesker's schizophrenia is so bad that when Batman tricks Scarface into thinking that the Ventriloquist has been feeding him information, he tries to kill him, forcing Wesker to get into a gun struggle with his own hand! Even henchmen Bugsy and Rhino seem at a loss for what to do.
    • When Batman breaks into the gangs hideout at night, he enters through Scarface's opulent bedroom. The dummy is laying alone in bed, and its eyes suddenly snap open. Nothing else happens, it's just a very creepy moment.
    • The death trap in his introductory episode, he ties Batman above a pit full of creepy mannequin arms with sharpened nails.
  • There's also something deeply unsettling about watching the normally cool and collected Dick fly off the rails in "Robin's Reckoning" as he attempts to kill Tony Zucco.
  • "The Forgotten", where Bruce is captured by a slave camp, and the attack has left him with amnesia. The episode itself is pretty tame on the nightmare department, except for a particular dream sequence. The still disguised Bruce Wayne stumbles into a room full of mirrors, when all of a sudden he hears his own voice laughing. This leads him to stand before a mirror where the pre-amnesia Bruce Wayne is Laughing Mad. With absolutely no warning, the laughing Bruce turns into the Joker, whose arms break through the mirror and pull Bruce in. They emerge from a skyscraper's window, plummeting towards the ground. As Bruce screams, the Joker is still laughing.
  • As this review notes, "Critters" is actually a seriously creepy episode.
    • Especially notable is the goat, which walks into Commissioner Gordon's office to deliver a ransom message. It talks, but its voice almost seems more like some kind of organic recording.
  • Maxie Zeus. In the original comics version he was mostly a weird but relatively harmless d-list villain left over from the Silver Age. This cartoon, like it did with Mr Freeze and The Riddler, turned him into a very real threat in the form of a mentally unbalanced man who imagines himself to be Zeus of Greek myth, with all the wildly unpredictable behavior that entails, and who also has access to a large amount of financial resources AND a personal weapon shaped like a lightning bolt that he can use to fry anyone who displeases him. The worst part is that its implied that the real Maxie's personality is still intact, just suppressed by his Zeus persona, which is shown when his secretary briefly manages to break through to him. In the end, he's locked away in Arkham, which his delusional mind imagines to be Olympus.
    Maxie: At last, mighty Zeus is home.
  • The climax of "Perchance to Dream" where Bruce is trapped in his mind thanks to an invention of the Mad Hatter's which gives the dreamer/victim what they most desire. In Bruce's case, his parents are alive, he's engaged to Selina Kyle and somebody else is Batman. At the end, he realizes that he's trapped and unable to wake up... until he realizes that his mind can't imagine his life if he were dead. The Mad Hatter confronts him, saying "What if this is real?" Bruce coldly responds "Then I'll see you in your nightmares!" Before hurling himself off the church bell tower. Yes, Batman was prepared to commit suicide and if he did die, he'd haunt the Mad Hatter from beyond the dead.
  • Penguin’s bloodshot eye. Since it’s the one he wears his monocle over, it’s magnified to look HUGE. Also, since the lower half of his face was covered at the time, it’s near IMPOSSIBLE to ignore.
    • In the same episode of the aforementioned eye in "The Mechanic". Before that scene, Penguin on purposely sends Arnold Rundle on a 'permanent vacation'. Having Arnold sail towards a raging whirlpool. Even though the audience doesn't see the aftermath. The implications of Penguin actually killing someone in an episode is pretty dark, considering, the scene was somewhat Played for Laughs with a hint of Dark Humor.
    • The fact that the Penguin will kill or attempt to kill anyone who insults him. "Birds of a Feather" is proof of this. He still tried to kill Veronica even after she admitted that she genuinely liked him.
    • In "I've Got Batman in My Basement", he knocks out Batman with poison gas, follows some kids home along with his henchmen, breaks into a house and proceeds to smash the furniture in an attempt to find a bejeweled egg, and then tries to gut an unconscious Batman with his umbrella. Breaking and entering was bad enough, but Batman was very close to DYING in this episode had he not regained consciousness and fought Penguin. Also, Penguin sends a VULTURE he poached after the kids and Batman.
  • "The Grey Ghost":
    • While mostly a tribute to Adam West and his version of Batman, there's a certain terror involving the true identity in the Mad Bomber and his maniacal Loony Fan behavior, as well as when Batman confronts him, considering the way he acts like a Psychopathic Man Child. He's even beating on a Batman action figure when the real Batman shows up to apprehend him. It's especially disturbing considering how harmless he looked before...
    Bomber: You see, I need the money. To buy more toys. I love toys... They can play songs. They can dance. They can even eat money. OH BOY can they eat money. All my money! And then... I remembered something else a toy can do. They can carry a bomb! They can hold a city for ransom! Oh the power of the toy!
  • The comic adaptation introduces Jason Todd, complete with his "death" and turn to villainy. What's extra eerie is that he looks very similar to the Joker.
  • The episode Torch Song introduces Garfield Lynns aka Firefly. Lynns is a pyrotechnic expert/ex boyfriend for the pop star Cassidy and from the very beginning, we get strong Stalker with a Crush energy. After she fires him, he sabotages the pyrotechnics display, nearly resulting in Cassidy, her band and those watching her show getting burned to death. When the police go to his apartment to find him, they find a creepy Stalker Shrine of promotional materials and half-lit candles. He even manages to severely injure Batgirl during her quest to find his hideout. It Gets Worse when Lynns kidnaps Cassidy and plots to flood the sewers with a flammable gel and escape with Cassidy during the chaos. Fortunately, Batman saves the day just in time...but not before Cassidy is left with a severe case of pyrophobia. The guy is a very big If I Can't Have You….

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