Nightmare Fuel / Madagascar

• Alex's first real roar. Each one gets louder and more savage. It's haunting Foreshadowing to the dilemma the group faces in the movie's later moments.
• Seeing all the dead human skeletons in the crashed plane is enough to make anyone uncomfortable. Said skeletons constantly flung around and played with like toys both detracts from this by being hilarious and cartoonishly inappropriate and adds to it for pretty much the exact same reason.
• Alex's growing Sanity Slippage as he becomes a true, wild, hungry lion is used for a lot of laughs, with him envisioning the others as talking steaks and the famous "You're biting my butt" line, but it doesn't change the fact that there's still a portion of the movie involving watching the protagonist helplessly descend into a savage state where he wants to hunt down and eat his lifelong friends purely out of instinct from being a carnivorous animal trapped on a wild island. It doesn't help that as he grows more feral, his mane grows dishevelled and he gains crazy eyes and sudden extending claws, as well as pulling off a deranged grin. Maurice sure points this out.
  Maurice: Your friend here is, what we call, a deluxe model hunting and eating machine! And he eats steak. Which is you.
  • After going savage and forcing the other animals to flee from him, Alex isolates himself within the perpetually dark badlands where the Fossa live. The look of their domain is already pretty unsettling, but we get to watch him suffer from a freaky nightmare hallucination in which his spiky, barricaded area becomes his zoo enclosure, and a pleading Marty becomes a cheering crowd of steaks.
  • When Marty confronts the now-feral Alex, there's a brief, terrifying moment where Alex gives into his instincts and abruptly lunges at Marty, who barely dodges out of the way in time.
• Alex drifting through the ocean inside of a tiny crate, floating away from his friends. The sequel makes this a lot harsher with the reveal of an almost-identical childhood experience being how he got separated from his family and ended up in a zoo to begin with, making it more than likely the poor guy was probably suffering from a lot of subconscious and repressed trauma during the whole ride. Yeep.
• The Fossa being almost entirely savage and gibbering carnivores in a cast full of coherent and largely anthropomorphised animals definitely sets them apart from the rest of the trilogy's characters in an unsettling way, even if they still get a fair amount of goofy moments.

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