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Subjective
NightmareFuel: Western Animation TV
Say hello to Vampire Joker, kids!
"Mmmmm... Is that fear you are feeling, Maximal? Mmmm, yesss... My spark — it feeds on terror. Let it grow... Let it consume your circuitry. Feel it, yesss, feel it! FEEL THE FEAR!"
— Rampage, Transformers: Beast Wars

Anime doesn't have a complete monopoly on scary cartoons...

Western animation, even if it is for kids, can be very scary as these will prove. Disney has its own page. For some reason, its become a popular fad in the 2000s.

Examples:

  • HBO's Brain Games featured a lot of surreal animation but the truly scary part was the end with the disembodied voice saying "Brain Games is now over," with sniffling...I always changed the channel beforehand.
  • Galaxy Goof-Ups: a late-70s sack of Hanna-Barbera crap where Yogi, Huckleberry Hound, and some awful new characters were incompetent space cops. That was bad, but not scarring. However, almost every episode, sometimes more than once, the characters would visit a nightmarish, anti-gravity space disco. Alien panty shots, characters dancing on the ceiling, a duck dancing in a giant energy-woman's hand, shape shifting aliens whose faces changed constantly as they danced... All set to awful Hanna-Barberra children's novelty music. The worst part was that it was gorgeously animated. Granted, repeated animation sequences are always better done, but the disco was really going the extra mile to expose children to the most vivid physics-warping hedonistic space nightmare they possibly could. Good going, guys!
  • Wolves, Witches and Giants and Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids were both frequent sources of the stuff. Take it from us.
  • Dungeons And Dragons had some things stick in this editor's mind. Most notable was an episode where the villain caused interdimensional portals to appear under kids' beds and his minions dragged them through to perform slave labor for him — complete with terrified parents trying to keep their kid from disappearing through the rift.
    • On the other hand, when Bobby, the youngest of the featured characters, is snatched, the other kids and their new ally force the portal open and dive in after the kidnapper with a determined look that promises a world of hurt for anyone who tries to stand in their way.
    • Don't forget where one of the characters got turned into a bogbeast.
      • Eric must've failed his saving throw against Polymorph!
      • This was 1e—there were a lot of things that could horribly alter or kill you with no save at all. Oh, wait, that doesn't help...
    • And of course the fun moment in “Quest of the Skeleton Warrior” when Hank’s face starts to melt off.
  • Transformers: Beast Wars is a very violent show, exploiting the Mecha Mooks loophole as far as it can. Characters are bashed up, blown apart, shot, stabbed... This is not a show for children under ten, having been written with an eye towards not boring those who grew up on the original Transformers and were at that point in their teens and twenties.
    • Rampage was supposed to be scary, but, especially in his debut episode, he might have proven a bit too scary for some younger audiences, coming across as basically Hannibal Lecter as a Transforming Mecha.
      • I remember Blackarachnea and Silverbolt coming across Tarantula's arm hanging from a tree. Freaky shit. Then they laugh about some stupid pun, and are immediately attacked by the scariest Transformer ever (ok, maybe Unicron ties him). The fact that he was a failed experiment created by the Maximals (not the Predicons, the bad guys) added another freak facet. To top it all off, he was invincible and insane, and murdered and ate an entire colony of Transformers.
    • Tarantulas, from the same series, was also quite creepy. He's The Mad Hatter without the whimsy, and very much a sadist, which is hinted at with this exchange:
      Cheetor: This is a dumb plan, web-face. I don't have any real blood, just mech fluid.
      Tarantulas: Oh, my filters will adjust. It's the act I enjoy more than the nourishment.
    • It doesn't help that the above scene had rather uncomfortable sexual overtones, what with the young Cheetor being bound-up and spreadeagle and Tarantulas crouching over him menacingly.
    • Toss in good ol' arachnophobia, and the fact that Tarantulas will probably duplicate a nightmare you had as a kid, and he becomes freakin' terrifying.
    • Transmutate, the malformed, mentally stunted, childlike being from the episode of the same name of Beast Wars was deeply unnerving. The fact that she was then blown up by the two Transformers who were trying to protect her didn't help...
      • Proving once again that this is a subjective trope. Many fans actually saw her as The Woobie.
    • Cheetor's dream in Feral Scream is pretty disturbing, particularly what Cheetor transforms into in said dream.
      • Cheetor's roar echoing across the landscape in the dead of night freaked me out particularly. I always find the sounds of distant animals unnerving.
  • The Mighty Heroes. Directed by Ralph Bakshi, this series had a penchant for extremely effective openings with genuinely frightening supervillains, such as the Monsterizer, who turns people into mindless monsters, or the Raven, with his plastic blaster that entombs people in a sheath of greenish plastic. Only when the over the top fireworks call for the Mighty Heroes to action starts with a brassy anthem is the tension relieved as powerful opposition to the villain reveals itself.
  • Also in the 1970s, there was an episode of Dynomutt Dog Wonder in which some supervillain's Weird Science ray gun made Blue Falcon — who was a human being, not a robot — melt into a blue puddle. That Dynomutt restored him a couple of scenes later did not do much to mitigate the big whopping nausea-inducing dose of Body Horror, nor did the Laugh Track.
    • The one where the villain used TV signals to turn humans into blimps wasn't pretty, either. Especially when, after Blue Falcon figures out what's causing it, Dynomutt decides to see what the TV news says about it...
  • Many, many of the Harvey Studios cartoons contained prime nightmare fuel. 1 series concerned a cat who was always trying to catch and eat a community of mice, only to be foiled by a particular mouse named Herman. All well and good, cats do chase mice. But in one cartoon, the cat catches several mice, ties them to a stick, and starts roasting them alive; to make it worse, the cat and the mice were Talking Animals of the most human-like sort. This was not atypical for Harvey's output. They bypassed Cats Are Mean and went straight for Cats Are Sadistic.
    • Indeed, any and all Cats Are Mean cartoons or films can be fairly upsetting to cat-lovers.
  • Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer. This troper was unable to finish this movie until they were about ten because of the Abominable Snow Monster of the North. That thing had way too many teeth! And it can dwarf a mountain.
    • Plus the horrible 'danger close' music they play when he's just implied to be lurking in the area.
      • He becomes Nightmare Retardant once you figure out that he is implied to only be evil because of a tooth ache. Once he's defanged, he's ,"A humble BUMBLE".
      • Because of a toothache? they pulled out all of his teeth! And then Yukon pushes him off a cliff. Now that is nightmare fuel.
    • This troper's mother just said she didn't quite understand what Nightmare Fuel was—then we watched one of the obscure sequels to Rudolph. The Big Bad is a monster made of ice—specifically, a giant, fanged face with fiery green eyes and huge, jagged fangs, not unlike the Nome King from Return To Oz, rendered in eerily off-timed stop motion. Mom understands now.
  • One editor was terrified of this "Cosmic Clock" segment from 3-2-1 Contact which combined bizarre music with the disturbing sight of a constantly mutating landscape and a city that just disappears. While it's true that the sequence is chiefly concerned with showing changes in geography, our science textbooks usually avoided illustrating the impact on living things so graphically.
    • Especially creepy to think that shortly after they screened away from that kid, he would've become a rotting corpse....
  • The Groke from the Finnish-Japanese Moomins animated series was to many children horribly, horribly traumatizing.
    • Another Moomins example is the lead character's transformation into a hideous ghoul by a wizard's magical hat.
    • This troper found the silent, menacing, barometer worshipping Hattifatteners far, far more creepy than the Groke.
  • The Time Squad season one episode "Every Poe Has a Silver Lining." Where do I start? The fact that Poe is shown as an insanely cheerful manchild that would make Pee Wee Herman look normal (at least until the end where he goes insane and succumbs to depression after the Time Squad criticize his cake), the eerie "ice cream truck from hell" music playing when Poe decorates the burned-down forest (though there was some Nightmare Retardant when Poe gives a party hat to a moose and says, "There you go, crispy moose! It's party time!" — not enough to dilute the rest of the Nightmare Fuel, in my opinion), Larry the robot's morbid description of the cemetary, or the creepy monologue near the end as the camera pan shows that Poe's once cheerful living room is a wreck and Poe has become the disturbed, depressed man we all know from high school English lit class?
  • It wasn't just the Scare Em Straight safety films that were prime purveyors of Nightmare Fuel in schools; even the "kiddie entertainment" films were a rich source of it from time to time. This editor remembers having to watch a stop-motion adaptation of "Frau Holle", which featured an evil stepsister being sucked into a magical realm. She passes by an oven filled with animal-shaped cookies that want to be let out. The stepsister refuses to do so, and the animals then burn to death while screaming in agony.
  • The Walrus from an episode of "Pingu". Compared to the cartoony look of the penguin hero, the Walrus looked disturbingly realistic. The white of its eyes, its deep whispery voice, and its smile only served to burn its horrible face into the mind of unsuspecting viewers. Luckily, it was all just a dream. It ends with Pingu crying in his mother's arms. Apparently, this episode has been banned in some countries, and the Walrus is sometimes even redubbed (Warning: turn down your speakers, the opening is loud).
    • Honestly, that's still just about the scariest thing I've ever seen. According to The Other Wiki, it isn't shown on TV anywhere except Japan anymore.
    • Another episode that qualifies but is somewhat underappreciated compared to the Walrus one ("Pingu's Dream") is "Pingu Runs Away". In it, Pingu runs off into the night and imagines that he sees scary faces in the snowdrifts, and one of them moves! I was terrified of the episode and had nightmares about it as a child, and I still am/do. To this day, no other piece of film has fazed this troper even slightly; not Antichrist, not Cannibal Holocaust, not I Spit On Your Grave, not Irreversible, not Pink Flamingos, not Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom, not Vase De Noces, not Urotsukidouji, not La Blue Girl, not Cool Devices, not Night Shift Nurses; but I'm still unable to watch that episode. Children's television shows can be powerful...
      • That episode's been banned in most places too.
  • The Robot Spy from the Jonny Quest episode of the same name: a round, black spider-like thing with one big, creepy red eye and a decidedly unnerving set of spindly legs. It also happened to be practically invincible, relentlessly plowing through everything the military threw at it in the episode's climax. That thing had to give a few kids nightmares... and inspired at least one writer for the 1990s remake as a result.
    Lance Falk: I'm sure the readers out there remember that supremely cool giant spider-eyeball thing. It gave me nightmares as a kid and I loved it!
    • And let's not forget the title character of the episode The Invisible Monster. It leaves huge footprints, emits a weird ululating howl, makes trees explode by touching them, and drains living creatures of their Life Energy. The scene where it almost got Hadji scared this troper as a child.
    • There was also the Mummy in “The Curse of Anubis,” especially the horrible shot where the Thing is looking in the window and one can see the rotting corpse under the slipping bandages.
    • And the Gargoyle in “The House of Seven Gargoyles.”
    • And both Turu and the wheelchair-bound Deen in “Turu the Terrible,” sinking in the tar-pit.
    • And von Dueffel in “The Devil’s Tower,” laughing as he throws grenades at the Quest team, then screaming, “Nooooooo!” when one gets caught in the wing of his plane.
    • What really disturbed this troper, though, was the screaming of the eponymous “Sea Haunt,” when the Doctor and Race are driving it back using acetylene torches. Face it, Jonny Quest was fueled by Nightmare Fuel.
  • The cartoon Halloween Is Grinch Night consists of a concentrated display of surreal Nightmare Fuel and a flimsy plot that sets it up.
    • The "Spooks' Song" sequence. The monsters would be mild to moderately creepy on their own, but coupled with the music, they're suddenly the scariest effing things ever. It starts about two minutes in.
  • Square One TV featured a creepy series of claymation segments about an army of orange "positive" warriors facing off against an army of blue "negative" warriors. First, there was the fact that each soldier was just a cone of clay with an Uncanny Valley face and a disconcerting flag jutting out of their head. Secondly, the fights consisted of the cones crashing into each other, then swirling screaming into claymation non-exhistence. Thirdly, and perhaps the kicker, the shorts would always pause right before the battle started, thus freezing the horrified faces of the outnumbered side, just before the destruction began... quite a macabre way of teaching -9 + 4 = -5.
  • Sesame Street's animated shorts were occasionally very memorable. If you want to know why this troper had so many nightmares about cars when she was little, it's because you DON'T cross the street...ALOOOONE.
    • '''Beware of the box!'' It will devour you and leave nothing but your voice behind.
    • This troper used to be terrified of the "Baker" skits. These were the ones that opened with big brightly colored animated numbers zooming out of black backgrounds at a hundred miles an hour as grating, hyperactive pseudo-psychedelic rock played and a chorus of kids basically just screamed numbers at you. Most of the skits themselves were pretty whimsical, but the music and much of the animation was just too freaky.
    • And while we're talking about counting-related weirdness: how about this rubberband-faced horrorshow. The primitive computer animation/sound effects and the fact that the disembodied face's voice sounded like a stoned Rod Serling didn't help matters.
    • And who could forget the infamous "Yo-Yo Man"? [1]
    • Wanton city destruction, there's no way that preschoolers could ever find that unsettling. Admittedly sometimes scare tactics are necessary, but come on! This troper feels that this went waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over the top.
  • Invader Zim was, right from the start, a profoundly disturbing series, including but definitely not limited to Zim ripping out a kid's eyes, or Dib drawing a picture of Zim being dissected while conscious and screaming at his now-exposed organs.
    • There was a substantial amount of subliminal messaging, featuring a bloody and downright scary picture of GIR. And subliminal messaging is downright petrifying to some people, let alone subliminal messaging involving a cute, bloody, creepy version of the most popular character from the show... (Even as This Troper types this now, tears begin to well up in her eyes.)
      • If you are talking about the Bloody GIR image that Vasquez hid in some episodes, Your Mileage Definitely Varies. This troper actually loves that image, as it stands as a testament to the dark humor of Vasquez, and how he was able to successfully get it into the show. Not to mention that GIR was never actually intended to be cute in the first place(see GIR Goes Crazy and Stuff).
    • The episode where Zim stole everyone's internal organs, and turned into a bloated bag with organs spilling out.
    • And the episode "Bolonius Maximus," which was had both Zim and Dib turning into slabs of meat.
      • Actually, they turned into bologna, which is still pretty creepy.
      • It was meant to be a parody of the 1980's remake of The Fly , even down to the scene where Zim asks the computer if he absorbed the bologna.
    • And of course, the episode Bad Bad Rubber Piggy. Zim throws rubber pigs into Dib's past, replacing seemingly random objects in ways that cause Dib to have horrible accidents, progressively crippling Dib and making him more grotesque in the present, until he dies in the past and his father builds a superpowered robot body to protect him. This troper had nightmares on and off for a month, and experienced an elevated heart rate as he edited the page to include this, seven years later.
    • This troper has to agree that while the Halloween episode was creepy and the nightmare version of Membrane◊ was the worst of the lot, the 'real world' version of Ms. Bitters out-performs them all. Professor Membrane can be creepy in his own right.
  • The direct-to-DVD Bender's Big Score contained a gem called "Everybody Loves The Hypnotoad". Imagine 20-something minutes of a grating electronic grinding sound. Now imagine it interspersed with things such as gunshots and a random jump in volume. This editor cried.
    • Speaking of which, the DVD Commentary has the crew noting that in retrospect, the ugly nudist aliens ended up being a little too creepy, especially how having flaps to cover everything that needs to be covered ends up letting you see their saggy asses from the front.
    • Bender's Game: The scene with the Morks. Why? Let This troper put it this way: Think of your hero. For clarity's sake, think of your celebrity hero. Think of a character that hero played, one that made you really smile. Now imagine one of your favorite TV shows doing a direct-to-video movie where that character, for the sake of a joke, is turned into a grotesque monster. Hell, an army of grotesque monsters. Now imagine the main characters of what used to be one of your favorite TV shows slaughtering them. Not a nice thing to look at, is it?
    • If the episode "The Sting" doesn't cause you to cringe forevermore at the sight of furry bumblebee bodies, there's something wrong with you. A solid week of nightmares was the result of one of the best-written half-hours of my life.
    • The episode "Insane in the Mainframe" deeply disturbed this troper. Fry is sent to a robot insane asylum as the human asylum is full. He's unable to eat or sleep, exposed to gamma radiation and painful electrical shocks, and stuck for most of the day in a tiny cubicle with a criminally insane, knife-wielding robot. To make it worse, nobody seems to want to help him, the governer refuses to listen to the Planet Express crew, and Bender (who's also stuck in the asylum) is enjoying himself immensely and doesn't bother to help his friend. By the end of the episode, Fry has lost it, and believes that he himself is a robot.
  • The animated Fingerprint Farm segment of British children's show Playdays used to freak this troper out frequently. It was literally made with someone's fingerprints and there was the disembodied hand called Farmer Hand. The scary thing about it was not just the themesong but also the cow and owl characters. At the end of the ending song the owl would hoot "Twit too toodleloo" in a spooky ghost-like manner - but it was the cow who starred in his worst nightmares and made him afraid of cows.
  • This version of A Christmas Carol was produced by legends Richard Williams and Chuck Jones, and remains the only version of the story to win an Oscar. So why isn't it shown on network TV more often? Because it is chock full of Nightmare Fuel. If the slack-jawed Jacob Marley doesn't creep you out, the "demons" living under the Ghost of Christmas Present's robe will. This adaptation is very true to the spirit of the original book, which contained a lot of eerie, spooky imagery which tends to get toned down in other adaptations.
  • Mr Meaty, for sure. There's just something ''wrong'' about those puppet designs.
    • Parker turns into an incredible hulk-like beast in one episode, and in another one (a 2 parter) there's Chip the robot.
  • The Fairly Odd Parents Halloween special is quite full of this stuff. Also that sadistic dentist and that equally as creepy son. And then there's the episode Timmy's 2D House Of Terror where Timmy wished that everything was like a horror movie so that it would scare Vicky and her family out of his house.
    • In the episode "Dream Goat", Timmy starts having surreal nightmares as a result of his guilt.
    • Tootie could be this. She's an extreme Stalker With A Crush on Timmy who has dolls of him, taps his phone calls, stalks him, ect. This is scary considering she's like 9-YEARS-OLD!
    • Also that one shot of the emaciated, skeletal-looking gerbil corpse in the episode "That's Life", accompanied by a Scare Chord. This troper refused to watch that episode when she was little. *shudder*
  • In 2 episodes of the 2006 Biker Mice From Mars series Stoker changes into an aggressive, insane rat-like creature called Stoker Rat by the light of the sun due to the effects of radiation.
  • The 1960-ish Woody Woodpecker Show is presented by Walter Langts himself who interract directly with Woody for time to time. The Nigtmare Fuel come to the fact than Walter have a forced smile stuck in the face during all the show, even when he reprimanded Woody. The cherry in the nightmarish sunday is that at the end of the show Mr Langts concluded by saying Bye Now WHILE POINTING THE DOOR like he chase off the audience. How rude of him.
  • There was one episode of Extreme Dinosaurs that featured the heroes investigating the appearance of some kind of dinosaur-like creature that was terrorizing miners. A blind miner tells them the legend of the creature, how it was a miner who fell down a shaft, and came into the lair of a giant, Cockatrice-Dragon-Apatosaurus thing, that attacked him to protect its eggs. He escapes, wounded by venom from its mouth/scratch from a claw, and is able to make it out of the mine. Right as he does though, the full moon appears, and he turns into a human version of the same monster. Terrified this troper and his sister so much that we immediately stopped watching.
  • Watch Out For The Munchies! Who knew teaching kids about exercise and good eating habits could be so unnerving?
  • The episode of Extreme Ghostbusters where one of the main characters gets turned into a grinning clown creature scared this troper to no end.
    • The episode with the banshee unnerved me. Why? The banshee was clearly a GOOD ghost (like Casper), yet the Extreme Assholes still treated her as if she was evil, zapping her and banishing her to the Containment Unit. That's the equivalent of seeing the Men in Black blowing up Alf with their Bigass Guns.
      • 1) The Banshee was evil, but her sister (who she bullied into compliance in brainwashing/youth sucking) was good. 2) The G Bs stopped attacking the good ghost (Siren) the second they learned she wasn't evil (it took a while to figure that out, what with all the brainwashing she had been doing). 3) After they caught the evil sister, Siren willingly entered the trap as it was the only way to undo the damage her sister forced her to do, despite protests from the team.
    • There's also the one where they visit an old lady who turns out to be a demon that possesses Peter so he'll open the containment unit. There's another where Slimer is befriended by a thing that appears in the form of a Creepy Child. And the Transformation Trauma-riffic episode where our heroes become "allergic to ghosts".
    • In another episode of The Real Ghostbusters Egon is bitten by a chicken-like ghost and turns into a werechicken. In another episode everyone in the city got turned into insectoid mutants including Janine who became an insect queen.
    • The insect queen part scared me because of the weird, womb-like mutation egg Janine was trapped in, from which she broke free from, gasping for air, and screamed in terror because the front of her torso from (apparently) neck to groin had turned into chitin. also, she begins to look like a praying mantis at one point, which she's just about coping with, but she apparently still has eyelids. eww.
    • The entire Extreme Ghostbusters pilot. If you have to ask for specifics, you've never seen it.
  • There was an episode of GI Joe where the Joes had to stop an older woman who was using a machine to steal the faces of pretty girls to restore her lost youth. As if that wasn't creepy enough, after the Joes destroy the machine, the old woman covers her face with her hands and starts wailing "My Face! My Face!" We never find out exactly what happens to her face, and the final shot is a birds eye view of the Joes consoling the model for almost getting her face stolen while the woman is kneeling in the alone, sobbing, and covering her face.
    • There's also the scene in the Faked Rip Van Winkle episode "There's No Place Like Springfield", where Shipwreck's friends and family turn out to be Synthoids trying to pump him for information, and his neighbors start to melt in front of his eyes.
  • Freaky Stories. Several episodes, including the accidental eating of defecation via gas-siphon, and a visit to the weiner factory.
    • This troper also remembers being freaked out by a few of these tales, one sticking out being an episode where a couple buys a mansion and finds they have a barrel of wine the previous owner never got rid off. Said couple enjoys the wine profusely, until it runs dry... And they open it up, finding a mummified corpse. As a lot of episodes are based on urban legends, but often slightly softened because it's aimed at a younger audience, it can also be very unnerving to encounter the same story you remember from years ago with a much different, much gorier ending.
    • This troper didn't find all of them all that horrifying, but had nightmares about one of them; a musical version of the urban legend about the escaped madman with the hook hand, and the couple in the car who find his hook attached to their car door after they've driven away from the lover's lane. The fact that it was sung rather than told made it all the creepier, and the tale gives her the creeps to this day as a result.
    • This troper was terrified most by the telling of the urban legend about the recently escaped psycho killer hiding under the bed of a fearless little girl who's home alone. She hears a strange howling sound and lowers her hand by the floor and recieves a reassuring licking from her dog. After a few times she checks what the noise is and finds it's her dog, locked in the basement. She looks out the window and sees the maniac running away, yelling "Humans can lick too." In most versions of the story the dog is killed and the line is written in it's blood. However, the fact that a maniac would hide under a little girl's bed and do nothing but lick her hand a few times is possibly creepier. I've been terrified of what's under the bed ever since, to the point of always used a bed that's resting directly on the floor.
  • This troper recalls being completely freaked out, as a child, by the classic The Electric Company skit Silent E, to the point where she would routinely scream and hide behind the couch on sight of the little git. The best she can figure now is that it had something to do with the 'silent' thing.
    • This troper is glad she's not alone in this. She thinks it has more to do with the fact that he turns a man into a mane and a cub into a cube. Think about it...
    • Heaven help you if you've a twin.
    • Tom Lehrer stikes again..
  • In October 2005, Cartoon Network released The Batman vs. Dracula, and with it, vampiric Joker into the nightmares of millions. Even though the blood is actually coming from a vial in a blood bank, there's still a scene where a shelf falls over and covers him in it, while he freaks out and tries to lick it all up off the ground. He's also constantly wailing, and once crushed and ate a cockroach. There's some other fun stuff too:
    • Before he became a vampire, Joker appears to die in a rather disturbing way.
    • Never mind the way Dracula dies.
    • Don't forget Penguin's first encounter with Dracula.
    • Or that one scene where a Gotham citizen is ready to turn in for the night due to the city's new curfew and catches sight of the back of a white haired girl in his window. Even though this troper knew what was about to happen, that didn't stop her from shrieking-loudly-when the scene played out exactly how she knew it would.
    • The entire thing made even my mom scared when we watched it. She, my sister and I spent most of the night huddled together with wide eyes and gaunt faces.
    • The series prior has Ragdoll, I guy that can contort and stretch in all ways imaginable, and even some that aren't. There's the Paranoia Fuel of a guy that can literally hide in any nook or corner. Also there's the nasty things he's subject to like getting smack around a clock tower where he repeatedly smashes into parts spine-first, or getting crushed between 2 gears. Finally there the scene where he's not wearing his costume and suddenly wrapping his arm all the way around himself to grab a drink.
    • The hallucinations that Spellbinder causes Batman to experience are pretty freaky.
  • Almost every single one of the Purple and Brown shorts on Nickelodeon including the Halloween special where the 2 of them become zombified. And the christmas special where they get sucked into a christmas present box at the end.
  • Although the cartoon itself is hilarious, the opening and closing credits of Count Duckula acted as a childhood source of Nightmare Fuel for this troper.
  • Justice League didn't have too many of them, but the ending of "Only a Dream" is bad. Lets just say that I saw it around 1:00 in the morning, and did not go to bed for hours afterwards, trying to get it out of my head.
  • In the For The Man Who Has Everything adaptation, while I've never truly read the comic, the effects of the Black Mercy are kinda scary, you have to see what you don't want in order for you to escape, that has to be bad, but what I felt was the scariest part was when the Black Mercy was on Mongul, while we never see what's going on in Mongul's head, the sounds you hear in his head (screaming, destruction...) can disturb This Troper.
  • The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy has a large number of this, plus gross-out humor.
    • There's the so-called Christmas episode. Bad Santa? More like blood thirsty Santa.
      • This must be the first time a show's Christmas special is scarier than its Halloween Episode, which is quite mild.
    • This troper found the episode where Billy and Irwin accidentally turn the Life Hourglasses of Mandy, Grim, and themselves upside down, and they all revert back into their pre-birth states and disappear at the end, to be creepy.
    • Nergal Jr. You don't want to mess with that kid. His "true form" is truly horrifying. There's also the shot of his tentacles coming out from weird fleshy holes in his back and head.
      • The episode where Nergal Junior takes over the teacher, and gives the class bully a fanged grin that slowly grows wider than her face? Bring My Brown Pants.
    • The episode Little Rock Of Horrors with the Audrey II-like space rock that required Billy to get it human brains. Also Dream A Little Dream, which had scenes based on the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence from ''Fantasia'' but not as scary.
    • In the episode "Chocolate Sailor", Billy turns completely into solid chocolate after eating too many supernatural chocolates. If that isn't enough, Billy even begins to eat himself, saying to Mandy that "...it's not that painful" at one point, and continues to do so, reducing himself to "his big, chocolate head" near the end of the episode. At the episode's climax, the Chocolate Sailor gives Billy the antidote, but with a twist: it's in a box of assorted chocolates and Billy has to pick the right one. Since Billy is pretty much stupid incarnate (the antidote bar is called Antidote), he eats the whole assortment and promptly explodes. The episode ends with Mandy and Grim eating hot fudge sundaes, with them saying Billy is in a better place. The bottle of hot fudge syrup they have then says "I like chocolate!"; basically implying that they scooped up Billy's remains and dumped them into a chocolate syrup (and to add that Grim and Mandy are eating hot fudge sundaes...
    • It was the Cthuluh episode that truly scared me. The rest merely annoyed me.
      • How about the fact the real Cthuluh (the one playing golf is really one of his Star Spawn) shows up and eats Billy that the end, meaning they failed at stop him
      • The Monster Clown episode.
    • The wishing skull episode. Especially Pudd'n part (shudder)w hat really drove that one home is how realistic the bunny was drawn.
      • "Of course I forgive you, because I love you... And I love you, to death." *shudder*
      • The character of Pinface considering his voice is done by John Kassir (you know him as the voice of the Crypt Keeper in Tales From The Crypt.
  • Teen Titans had quite a few instances, or whole episodes, of Nightmare Fuel:
    • Raven sucking Doctor Light into the magic shadows within her cloak; when he's pulled out at the last second, his face is ash white and all he can do is curl in a ball and say, "So dark. Make it stop. Please, make it stop." The fact that in a later episode, all she had to do was snarl at him and he immediately went into Terrified Surrender Mode doesn't ease the imagination of what might have happened under that cloak.
    • Later in that episode, though, there's a truly freaky Journey To The Center Of The Mind. The worst part: the cute little demon birds with the Glowing Eyes Of Doom singing "Turn back!" over and over in their sweet, childlike little voices. Beast Boy acknowledges how creepy this is, but decides that hey, he'd know if they were dangerous...
    • One word: Slade. The guy combines apocalyptic visions, vicious mind games, implied pedophilia, and one of the creepiest voices in Ron Perlman's repetoire.
      • "That's nothing compared to what I'm going to do to you." This becomes even more terrifying once you're old enough to put a more adult spin on that...
    • Starfire going through alien puberty in "Transformation" and the scene in the same episode where she meets the lady who looks like the benevolent DC character White Witch - but who turns out to be a bug-like monster who eats young Tamaranians going through said alien puberty.
      • Actually, she only eats those going through the Chrysalis type, still doesn't help though.
    • Beast Boy turning into a monster that resembled Beast from Disney's Beauty And The Beast in the episode Beast Within due to a mutatation inducing chemical.
    • The episode where monsters ran amuck in the tower and they were all creations of Raven's.
      • That episode was kinda cool, actually. Especially if the people watching remembered the season one episode mentioned first, with the journey into the mind. Made it pretty obvious for a bystander to clue in on what was going on.
    • Raven-centric episodes seem prone to this. This troper, despite being in his 20s, was massively creeped out by Kardiak, a giant heart with metal tentacles that eats children. I can only imagine what it did to the kids watching...
      • This troper thought she heard the sound of a heartbeat for hours after watching that episode.
    • Since both Slade and Raven tend to inspire this, what could beat that scene in "Birthmark" where Slade is sent by Raven's demonic father for no other reason than to torture her about her destiny to cause The End Of The World As We Know It? Which he does by shredding her clothes and then tossing her unconscious body off a roof? "Oh... and a happy birthday."
    • For me, it was Mother Mae-Eye, when I was younger, that was one of my favorite episodes, but now, watching it again, I start to think "What were they thinking?", not out of disgust, but because, watching it again, it's actually a pretty creepy episode, zombie cookiemen, the menacing, hopeless music, what could actually be in the pies (They're red, think about it), and there's the Mean Green Mother herself, who is difficult to explain, but scary none the less, think Wicked Witch of the West, give her Mind Control, and then make her a giant, it's creepier than it sounds.
      • I actually felt kind of bad for her near the end where she was sucked into that hole-thing and screams "Nobody loves me!!!"
  • Men In Black: The Series had some pretty creepy stuff, like the hideously mutated recurring nemesis Alpha.
  • The 7th life of Garfield: His 9 Lives is about a "guinea pig" cat in a secret lab. If you don't get scared during the escape... you will during the Painful Transformation.
    • The book had a much nastier story, in which he turned into some type of psychotic feral smilodon cat and killed a nice old lady.
  • Aside from the occasionally creepy "groupthink" vibe common in cartoons during The Eighties, The Smurfs had their share of creepy adventures. Like the episode where the Smurfs were being turned into evil purple versions of themselves that could say nothing but "G'nap!", and bit each other on the tail to spread the infection. Or the Christmas Special where they rescue 2 children and Gargamel from an evil wizard, who conjures a wall of fire around himself, the kids, and the Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, only to fade away screaming in defeated despair under the Smurfs' repeated singing of a sappy holiday song.
    • As a little kid, the "G'Nap!" episode scared me to no end.
    • According to this site, in the original French comic, the Smurfs turned black. No, really. Try wrapping your mind around all of that.
      • Even I remember the 'G'nap!' episode. Horriffically well. That creeped the heck out of me at the time. Worse was the ending. Papa Smurf had been bitten. The only reason anyone was cured was cartoon physics, with the fire spreading the antidote as a gas rather than diluting and burning it on the ground. Otherwise they'd all still be that way.
    • There's also the episode All Work and no Smurf, in which overworked Smurfs begin to transform into various inanimate objects. Talk about And I Must Scream.
      • Actually they still had mouths and spoke, which arguably makes it worse.
    • And then the episode where Brainy Smurf gets turned into a monstrous Werewolf-Smurf creature from a scratch from a magical plant.
  • Brett's transformations into a car in Turbo Teen were somewhat creepy and painful. The guy's hands and feet turning into wheels and his face stretching and becoming the gril of the car.
  • "I'm Todd McFarlane, and this is Spawn. So turn out your lights."
    • Um, Spawn, definitely not intended for kids. Anything nightmarish about Spawn was put there on purpose.
  • Consider Captain Scarlet (either version, but especially the old one). In almost every episode, at least one person is killed so they can be replaced by a Mysteron "clone". Crushed in garage car-lifts (while cheery music (turned up loud, no less) plays from the garage radio), strangled with robot hands, brake lines cut. And then we see the dead body duplicated by the Mysterons. At the time, I was too young to understand the plot points for this very adult TV show, and it was shown as part of a cartoon lineup to boot! For true nightmare fuel, watch the end-credit sequences, where Captain Scarlet is subjected to ten different death-traps.
    • It gets worse when Fridge Brilliance kicks in-he still feels pain. Not only that, but he may never die, meaning he's doomed to watch everyone he ever cared about whither away, until he is alone.
  • New Zealand tv channel Maori TV has a cartoon titled The Monkey King which features almost quite a lot of this stuff- there's a part before the end credit which is sort of a music video-like song sequence done in maori language and features such scenes as a cute little puppy turning into a monster dog and a spooky "dragon spirit" floating around.
  • Grimm's (sic) Classic Fairy Tales was, unsurprisingly, a television series based on the folktales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The episodes were more faithful to their printed sources than Disney films were, censoring none of the cruelty and very little of the violence and sex, which was strange for a program on Nick Jr. Appropriately for the title, subtle instances of Grimmification were also common. As such, these episodes were sometimes even scarier than the Disney films:
    • The titular character in "Mother Holle" magically dumps a dark, sticky substance and a live snake onto the lazy stepsister, who is ridiculed by the family cockerel upon returning home.
    • The protagonist of "The Six Swans" is sentenced to be burnt at the stake for allegedly eating her infant son, the prince. Her brothers rescue her, but not before she nearly meets her fiery death.
    • Satan himself bargains with the protagonist of "Bearskin." Yes, he lets the soldier know who he is.
    • "The Marriage of Mr. Fox" was already inappropriate for children, being centered around Mr. Fox's suspicions of his wife's infidelity. Not only was this theme retained entirely in the cartoon adaptation, but Mr. Fox was accompanied by an equally vulpine imp that only he could see and referred to as a "demon" throughout the episode. At the episode's end, when Mr. Fox questions the fox-thing's identity, it replies, "I'm the real you!" If anything, the cartoon is less family-friendly than the original version.
    • The witch in "Hansel and Gretel" is evil enough to evoke video-game boss battles, gradually becoming less and less human until she transforms into a skeletal, bipedal, sword-wielding goat-woman with bat wings. That's something you won't find in any other version of the story, along with the magic bird that leads the children to the witch's house in the first place.
    • The confrontation with the fiendish creature at the end of "Puss in Boots" is rather unsettling, involving a lit fireplace and monstrous shape-shifting in a manner evoking small glimpses of Hell. Plus, the overall Moral Dissonance (especially when Puss wins the battle) becomes evident when one applies Fridge Logic.
    • Villains' tendency to be casually cruel to the protagonists and supporting characters is widespread throughout the series, particularly in "The Bremen Town Musicians," with its scenes of inhumane treatment of animals.
    • One particular episode trumped all the above examples. "The Spirit in the Bottle" opens with a little demon alone in the dark, trapped in a bottle, shouting for help. Then there's a segue into the protagonist and his father entering a forest to chop wood, which seems innocuous until the young boy wanders off, releases the trapped demon, tricks his way out of being eaten, and gets a magic cloth as a reward for freeing the spirit. The cloth turns metal into silver. From there, the story takes a drastic turn from the original, becoming An Aesop about realistic expectations and handling money carefully. How is this Nightmare Fuel? Well, the boy's father's dying wish is for him to throw away the magic cloth, which he refuses to do but does by accident. When he runs to the tree where he found the spirit to beg another cloth from him, he falls into a hole. Then there's a scene of another young boy and his father entering the woods...and the episode ends with the protagonist trapped in the bottle, screaming for help.
    • The one that got this troper was an cartoon to go with the poem The Duel. It was just unbelievably creepy, the narrator softly reciting how the cat and dog killed each other while the clock ticked in the background.
  • Danny Phantom episode "The Ultimate Enemy" has the creation of Dark Danny. It's not the scene that's freaky (though it has its Squick moments), but the part when Dark Danny before he kills his human half gives off a face past the disturbance scale. Oh, if looks could kill...
    • Don't forget right before that, Danny's evil half claws Vlad's ghost form right out of him and then fuses with it. Dark Danny did some pretty disturbing stuff to his enemies.
    • This troper was a little disturbed by one of Dark Danny's quotes. After Jazz said "You're not Danny!", Dark Danny casually replied "Well, I was, but I grew out of it."
      • Or maybe Dark Danny himself should count as his birth and actions are creepy. Don't forget him fighting the ghost box while inside it.
      • Not to mention Dark Danny turning around head first, with a horrible cracking noise as his neck does things it clearly was not meant to do.
    • And then the episode where Danny accidentally releases Technus from the "Level 0" glitch, then attempts Form Duplication to fight him, resulting in nothing short of unadulterated Body Horror, least of which being mouths for eyes and eyeballs on ends of tongues.
  • Dexters Laboratory has this in some episodes such as Dexter turning into a clown in the episode The Laughing. In an episode of one of the newer season Dexter gets improved vision, but as a result of this everything looks warped and weird including his family who look like monsters.
    • One episode started off with Dexter and Deedee flushing their dead fish down the toilet, later the ghost of said fish comes back to haunt them. The ending parodied the classic ending from Michael Jackson's Thriller.
    • The episode Jeepers Creepers Where Is Peepers? featured Dexter and Deedee's magical friend Koos Koos working together to save Peepers (another magical being), in one scene we see a rather disturbing graphic look at Peepers as he is having his energy sucked off.
    • There was also the episode ''Dream Machine''. The title alone pretty much sets you up for an entire episode based around Nightmare Fuel. The worst part is the ending, in which Dexter suddenly comes to a realization that he's living in a nightmare because Dee Dee is smarter than him, at which point his clothes come off and he ends up stark naked in the middle of a laughing crowd. Afterwards, he gets taunted by a bunch of laughing Dee Dees and the episode ends with him falling endlessly, screaming for Dee Dee to wake him up, but she happens to be asleep. Let's just say this moment is scarred in This Troper's childhood memories forever.
    • There's the Chicken Scratch one too. And the Bus one. Although the guy lurking at the back of bus which was quite a nice, jolly big guy.
    • Deedeemensional, also scares this troper, as all the disgrace that leads to the time travel is never solved.
  • The kid's series Rolie Polie Ollie. Seems like a cute, innocuous series about a world of robots with a 50's sitcom flair...until you realise that every object in their house - including the headboards of their beds - has a life of its own, and has eerily silent, watchful eyes.
  • The Neogenic Nightmare arc of Spider Man The Animated Series seems to have been written with the express purpose of traumatising children. Highlights include:
  • Speaking of Spider-Man, the recent animated series The Spectacular Spider Man has featured a shocking array of Nightmare Fuel:
    • Episode 2, "Interactions," shows off the origin of Max Dillon, aka Electro. His origin? Electrocuted while trying to repair a supercomputer, hurled into a fish tank and then savagely fried by a bunch of genetically altered electric eels.
    • Episode 3, "Natural Selection," features Curt Conners turning into the Lizard. A fair percentage of the transformation taking place in the stereotypical 'shadow on the wall' fashion... but the vast majority of the transformation is shown onscreen. His head distorts and at one point rapidly implodes into a lizard shape as his body painfully morphs into the creature itself. And this is after Curt's limb regenerates itself by shooting out of his stump like Tetsuo's arm in Akira.
      • Of course, then the Lizard goes on to try and eat numerous civilians in a subway... and almost succeeds several times.
      • What's worse is that there are stretches of time where Spider-Man's outside the subway car and Lizard's inside, where we don't see anything of what he's doing...granted, he's not covered in blood or anything the next time we see him, but still...
    • Episode 5, "Competition," features Flint Marko being forcibly turned into the Sandman. Let's just say that watching molecules of sand pierce his flesh (leaving dents the size of BB-gun rounds), turning into sand and then exploding in a sandy mess is more than enough to freak out younger viewers.
    • Episode 6, "Market Forces," where we get our first look at Tombstone. Just the character design is freaky, with the bleached white skin and shark's teeth. The fact that he beatdown Spidey inside of five seconds didn't help.
    • Episode 8, Reaction, when poor Otto Octavius, probably the most sympathetic character on the show (Especially after we saw the way Norman treats him), is stuck inside some sort of nuclear reactor-type experiment as it threatens to explode. Not only does this give a line that makes this editor depressed as hell (As the reactor explodes, Otto falls to his knees next to the door, head in hands, and whimpers out "I've been good..."), but as electricity rains down, striking the good doctor, giving us plenty of creepy X-ray shots as he shrieks in pain. Poor Doctor Octopus.
      • Otto is the perfect source of slightly off his rocker-woobie-ish related fear. For instance, third episode in the second season, Otto has had the tentacles completely removed, and is either being a really damn good actor or is actually regretting all the things he's done, and is in a mental hospital with Electro who has also started being an utter dick to him. At the end of the episode, he's re-recruited into the world of supervillainy by his own disembodied tentacles breaking another hole in the hospital (First one being caused by Kraven) and is dragged screaming from the hospital to god knows where. Otto being my favorite character in the show, this episode really hit a worrying nerve.
      • His tenticles are EVIL PARRASITES THAT MAKE THE SYMBIOTES JELOUS.
    • One word: Venom. Anyone disappointed by the movie version will be glad to know he's returned to his proper level of freakiness. When the face opens to reveal Eddie, it's not a simple receding of the symbiote matter that forms the mask: The head opens grotesquely wide, and the flesh of the mouth pulls apart, with Eddie's face revealed beneath (and pink flesh in strings still connected to it.) Later, when Spidey webs Venom's mouth shut, Venom's chest opens to become a second mouth, whose teeth are no friendlier than the one on its face. Once he gets de-webbed, both mouths speak. And his voice is the most effective version yet: Two voices, apparently by the same actor, speaking (one in Eddie's normal voice and one in the symbiote's more bestial one) but at slightly different rates, not always overlapping exactly... really brings home the "two Ax Crazy villains in one out to get Spidey" factor.
      • This troper died a bit on the inside when he shouted his trademark line, "WE ARE VENOM!". Didn't help at friggen' all that lightning struck as soon as that scene ended.
      • Unlike Dusknoir's one I found his second mouth to be Bad Ass rather than terrorfying. Heck Venom's awesome as ever. Still they should call it the "Spooktacular Spiderman" instead.
      • That's the thing, it was, but I usually wake up to watch SSM, making it still dark in my tiny house, and with the lightning and the rain and the symbiotes, it made a pretty freaky episode. Seems to happen every time I watch SSM. I blamed Norman Osborn.
      • But the version of Venom in Spider Man The Animated Series had some of the same effects (with more tongue), and nervous Peter starting to imagine Venom appearing everywhere he looked.
      • This troper considers the Symbiote's effects in season 2 to be Nightmare Fuel, since both John Jameson and Eddie Brock were once normal people, and once the Symbiote got a hold of them, they were reduced to crazed, power hungry psychos. The idea that once the Symbiode gets on you, you will never want to get it off and can never live without it.......
      • You know how the voice of the Symbiote is different in everybody's head? Yeah, that's actually the same voice actor voicing the Symbiote (Example: When Peter has the suit, the Symbiote has Peter's voice, just somewhat more psychopathic), this can become somewhat unsettling, as the idea of this could be that the symbiote wasn't just trying to eat every bit of rage, but also to take over the wearers life, which kind of is what it's trying to do...
    • And don't forget the final episode of season 2, when Norman Osborn admits that he twisted Harry's ankle, framing him as being the Green Goblin and sending him to a mental hospital, just to throw Spidey off his track. Imagine the effect of that on younger viewers...
  • The original 60s "Spider Man" had some true Nightmare Fuel moments during the "psychedelic" period of the series, most notably the "Evil Infinita From Dimentia Five"
    • Which,incedentaly,was a recycled epsiode from the Rocket Robin Hood series(which was also done by the animater Ralph Bakshi).Oh and one more thing;If,by any chance you ever visit that place,one rule:DON'T STEP ON THE RUGS!!!!!
  • The I.M Weasel episode "Who Rubbed Out Cow and Chicken," which featured the teacher after having the left half of her body erased from existence.
    • In another, a time travelling Weasel and Baboon accidentally alter the history of Onion Rings so that the preferred cooking method is now to cover one's face with onions and dip your head in boiling oil. The rings are then peeled off the scalded face with a "schriiiip" sound effect.
  • Cow and Chicken featured an episode where Chicken caught cooties by kissing a girl. The symptoms of cooties were described to him in bone-chilling detail, to his obvious distress, and he was eventually thrown into the "cooties room", a blackened pit containing cootie victims exhibiting the disease in varying stages. Most were severely atrophied, several had lost their eyes, all were groaning in agony. As a sensitive child, this troper was horrified.
    • Then there's the episode where Cow gets a dream catcher in which we later see a ghostly milkman milking Chicken, Flem and Earl.
    • When they showed that Cow and Chicken's parents were just lower bodies.
    • The laughing puddle episode.
    • There's the episode where the titular characters go to a video game arcade, where Cow only plays the game Squirt the Daisies while antagonist he Red Guy invites Chicken to play some virtual reality games. The games prove to affect Chicken in the real world if he does them wrong, but that's not the worst part. No, the worst part is where Chicken finds himself in Squirt the Daisies, and said daisies turn into monsters and start attacking him, complete with a demented version of the normal, cheerful game music. Though Chicken gains a means to fight them and Cow helps, they are soon overpowered and cornered, only saved by the fact The Red Guy has run out of quarters to keep the game going. Having watched it and been horrified as a child, this troper saw the ep again in a recent April Fools Day marathon only to find it still makes her reach for a night light.
  • While a majority of the villains in Codename Kids Next Door were mostly goofy, some of their plans were pretty sick and disturbing at times:
    • First, there's a villain named Chester, whose plans have included disguising your typical wallet-and-lanyard-chain-child-labor-sweat-shop as a summer camp; a flu shot that turned children into moose whose antlers would then be sawed off to make fudge popsicles out of (which probably didn't help kids who were scared of shots to begin with); a seemingly innocent fast-food restaurant a la McDonald's that made Numbah 3 into a literal Kiddie Meal so she could be "picked up" by his real clientel: sharks; and an episode that involved him mind-screwing Numbah 1 with a machine that he built while doing time in prison.
    • Grandma Stuffum, a villainess with satanic food, in her debut episode literally cooked up an army of alive "homemade meals" that jammed themselves down the throats of the helpless Kids Next Door and rendered them immobile and stuffed to the point of pain. What's worse was it seemed that was just the appetizer had it not been for the army of hamsters that saved the day.
      • She was a literal Lethal Chef. She even had a giant sandwich monster.
    • Then Heinrich, who in one episode was going to throw a live pet bunny into a chocolate vat just to make (and eat) a actual chocolate bunny (he was even going to kill Numbah 2 and Numbah 5 by throwing them into said vat, saying that he'd like to try a chocolate-covered KND operative.)
      • Don't you mean "she"?
    • Finally, there was Nurse Claybourne, who in one episode, injected hapless kids with the a digusting representation of the Pinkeye virus and then used the crust that formed due to the sickness as a topping for her crumble cake (...and you're better off not knowing what the rest of the cake was made out of...).
    • Then there's Father himself and Grandfather. Operation Z.E.R.O. also has the old disgusting zombie-like creatures the latter turned everyone into.
    • Operation Doghouse had the weredog student Valerie. There's also the weredog teacher. Not to mention that the house she lived in was basically a haunted doghouse.
    • Mr. Wink and Mr. Fibb, two recurring villains who spoke in a Creepy Monotone and were human men with walrus tusks and horns
  • The Powerpuff Girls has had more than a few episodes with this:
    • One episode featured a zombie magician called Abra Cadaver who was killed when a little girl caused him to trip and fall into an iron maiden (which makes you wonder how the girl felt). He tries to do this to Blossom (since she looks like the girl), but somehow is switched, and re-killed with his arm hanging out of the iron maiden.
      • What did it for this troper was the Fridge Logic that made you realize the fact that, when the theater was abandoned, they left the iron maiden there, with the magician's dead body still in it. Nobody came to remove it, and the magician was never buried. It was just left there to decay with the theater itself. It gets worse when you think about how the people of Townsville probably walked happily passed that theater everyday, with the dead body still sitting on the stage.
    • This Troper's 10-year-old sister once listed all the episodes of the PPG that deeply creeped her out. What did they all have in common? The featured Big Bad was the entity known as Him.
      • The cartoonists knew what they were doing. Every time he appears it's accompanied with a Scare Chord.
      • He's a little too much like Tim Curry as well.
    • THE NIGHTMARE EPISODE. Those toys...
    • The Roach Coach episode, where the girls fly into a giant swarm of cockroaches.
      • And let's not forget the scene with the guy who merrily takes a bite out of a hotdog... and then occurs a discolored closeup on his distorted face as hundreds of roaches crawl out of his mouth.
      • And don't forget the horrific crunching noise right before that. Ugh.
      • This troper actually thought that scene was funny BECAUSE it was terrifying. I guess the part leading up to it with the man happily ordering the hot dog was what made it so funny to me, or maybe I just have a sick sense of humor.
    • When the Broccolorian Aliens invade, the children of Townsville find the only way to fight them off is to eat them alive. The bit with the head Broccolorian begging for his life before being devoured and having his scepter smashed is especially creepy.
    • In another episode, the girls recreate their origin to produce a deformed, mentally limited sister named Bunny. And just when you get over her weirdness and start to like her, they pull the worst Downer Ending in all of cartoon-dom.
    • Frick, just Him. Just his voice is enough to freak this troper the heck out.
    • The Bad Future episode in its entirety. The Professor desperately trying to recreate the girls. "I just sat there waving goodbye" Ms. Keane. Ms. Bellum mourning the Mayor. The Creepy Monotone townspeople. The girls being blamed just because they flew a bit too fast. The fact that Him was the main villain is just icing on the cake.
      • Powerpuff Girls. You did this.
      • Then there's the part where he turns into a big demonic monster.
    • The climax of "Knock it Off": Creepy. As. Hell. Especially earlier in the episode during the production of knocked off PP Gs, Dick (the one behind the whole idea) actually manages to make a perfect copy of Buttercup. But rather then sell it, he orders it to be destroyed for being too perfect WTF doesn't even begin to describe it.
      • And then the ending. Oh god, the ending. As the Powerpuff Girls are confronting Professor Dick about the Chemical X he's using to make knockoffs, Dick swallows the Chemical X in an attempt to hide any evidence against him. This results in him turning into a really creepy monster (complete with a fake out and a horrible transformation sequence of course). As the girls are trying to fight Professor Dick off, Professor Utonium arrives at Dick's lair and challenges Dick to fight him instead of the girls. As the Professor gets beaten up (almost looking like he's near-death!!!), he tells the girls that he loves them. At this point, all the Powerpuff Girl clones (who were also fighting with the real Powerpuff Girls) turn to Professor Dick and say in complete Creepy Monotone that he never said that he loved them. Utonium and the Powerpuff Girls escape as the clones both take down Professor Dick and burn down his evil hideout with all of them still inside. Quite honestly, it's probably one of the darkest endings to an episode this troper ever saw.
      • It gets worse. The professor running to find the girls only to keep finding the twisted copies and the fact that Dick drains the girls, almost killing them. What's more, I swear I remember that, during the shot of the factory collapsing, you can hear Dick's moans of agony.
    • As much as this troper liked the "Substitute Creature" episode, the inserts of the manga-like images were pretty damn unnerving, looking like something between Uzumaki and Sin City. Incidentally, the dialogue in said inserts was full of Narm.
    • This troper was freaked by the girls' nightmare in the cooties episode. After hearing one of their classmates has "cooties," they become scared that they'll beinfected (something Mojo uses to his advantage). It's actually kind of funny, until they have a nightmare about tiny versions of said classmate popping out of their skin...all over their bodies.
      • "Buttercup! You've got something on your.....aaarrrmmm....aaaarrrgghhhhhh!" The horribly distended voice makes it worse.
    • The first thing that ever really, truly scared this troper in her whole life was the episode where Mojo Jojo steals the Anubis Head and two gems and runs around turning ESSENTIALLY THE WHOLE WORLD into dogs! She had nightmares that Mojo Jojo would come to her house and turn her into a dog, whereupon her mother would throw her out onto the streets.
    • Dream Scheme. The point of the episode where the girls give the sandman nightmares really freaked me out as a kid...In fact, it still does.
    • Uh, hello? Twiggy, anyone!? A giant radioactive hamster on a rampage!? Augh.
      • Don't forget the ending to the episode, in which the Powerpuff Girls punish their classmate Mitch Mitchelson (the kid who caused the mess in the first place) for not taking care of Twiggy and turning her into a monster by having him being chased nonstop by Twiggy on a giant hamster wheel (so basically, if he stops running, Twiggy will probably maul him, eat him, or both). Geez... don't screw with the Powerpuff Girls...
    • And then there was the one episode where a new kid had an imaginary friend who was causing trouble. The girls try to fight him, but fail (because they can't see him) and he taunts them but writing his insults on a chalkboard. The fact that you can't see him, but his words appear make it seem like some horror movie.
    • Moral Decay. A bunch of the supervillains with teeth broken by Buttercup get together and show off those teeth when they're called by Bubbles and Blossom for the sole purpose of BUTTERCUP HAVING THE SAME THING HAPPEN TO HER. Cut to them at the dentist, Professor looking stern, and right after, a mangled tooth smile from Buttercup. Even worse, this made it into a commercial! It's just not something I'd like to see before sleeping, even today.
    • "Divide and Conquer" had the Ameoba Boys gaining the ability to split themselves into copies of themselves and proceeding to steal all of Townsville's oranges. This apparent act of Poke The Poodle turned out to have unexpected repercussions on the rest of Townsville when the Mayor called up the girls to tell them what the Ameoba Boys have done, telling them that the entire city has come down on a case of scurvy. As we see a montage of people suffering the disease, Bubbles describes the situation in the most anvilicious way possible: "If we don't do something quick, the neighborhood and Townsville will get yellowish flaky skin, spongy purple gums, and painful swollen joints!"
    • Mojo Jojo's trip through the fifth dimension in "Get Back Jojo".
  • One episode of Samurai Jack - Episode 15, Jack's Tales, has Jack encounter a family of metal-eating robots. The robots, in a fit of hunger, rip each other to shreds, and the insides of the robots look just enough like human flesh (and it's pretty graphic how they do it) that this definitely qualifies as Nightmare Fuel.
    • Then again, Aku himself suits this. Especially in his first appearance in the pilot.
      • He would be if he wasn't such a Large Ham
      • What about the two-parter explaining his origin? Apparently he started ot as this freaky monster inside the earth that would send large, deep cracks through the ground. The cracks were filled with him (but looked like a tar-like substance) and he absorbed living creatures to get stronger! What did it for this troper was when a man calls out for his dog, goes to the back of his house, and sees one of the cracks filled with Aku-goop, and half the dog's leash sticking out. Doubles as a Tear Jerker when we hear the man's anguished and horrified screams.
    • Zombie Episode anyway or how about the one dealing with the Egyptian Jackals from hell that can't be killed?
    • Oh god the Haunted House. The Haunted House.
    • Demongo. The guy who stole essence.
    • The episode "Jack and the Ultra-robots" is worth mentioning, especially the second city. Mutilated robots with horrific faces strewn about, some of them on pikes, and oil EVERYWHERE.
  • The Camp Lazlo Halloween episode "Meatman." This has this Lets Meet The Meat trope personified literally in the form of Meatman (originally a clump of meat that Lazlo, Clam and Raj made into the shape of a person) but becomes very monstrous half way through the middle. It also didn't help that Meatman could transform himself into anything, including both Lazlo and Raj at one point; also making him the embodiment of Paranoia Fuel.
    • To begin with he was just a lump of mystery meat giving to Lazlo and Co by Chef McMuesli as revenge for the time they unleashed locusts into his garden. Meatman started out with a happy face but then got slightlier stinkier and had a slightly sad expression on his face, he's at his worst when he's really really stinky and when he has that creepy almost Jack Nicholson-like smile on his face.
    • Don't forget the ending. Shudder
    • Oh, you mean the ending where the whole thing is just a story, one of the fellow campers points out there's something wrong with Lazlo's nose. So Lazlo attempts to pick it off....and his Entire nose comes off in a large chunk of raw meat. The other campers start to laugh uncomfortably....but Raj, Clam and Lazlo...just laugh...'Maniacally....'
  • Transformers Animated is disturbingly full of these, especially in Season Three when the writers apparently stopped taking their medication.
    • Blackarachnia, from the Transformation Trauma of her backstory on up through her vampire-style fangs and hissing. Let's not even start on causing all Detroit's organic life (including Sari) starting to wither and die when she tried to use the key. She looks even worse with her helmet off.
    • There's also the episode where Lockdown first appeared, which was just creepy in general. Ripping parts off of conscious bots is not a pretty thing.
      • He doesn't rip them off. He removes them with surgical precision so he can use them later as his own, which makes it even worse.
      • Don't forget it's established that Transformers do feel pain in this episode.
    • Then there's the fact they threatened to take Swindle apart and auction the pieces, all while he was fully aware and conscious, and also unable to move or protest.
      • Just threatened? When Swindle, frozen in vehicle mode, was taken away by the Muggle authorities, the Autobots don't say word one and so nobody but them knows he's not just a vehicle. Thankfully, he got better and didn't seem to have any adverse psychological aftereffects.
    • And of course, there was Lugnut being eaten by All Spark-charged nanobots, and then being, you know, cut in half.
      • Wreck-Gar, for a second there on the barge. [Usual cheerful voice all the way through] "I am Wreck-Gar! I dare to be stupid! [Eyes turn bright red] I will destroy the whole city!" It was... very different from the other times he's casually lapped up other people's suggestions. Best seen in context.
    • And poor Wasp. Wasp's speech pattern and appearance were a shoutout to the loveable but luckless Waspinator from Beast Wars — except that Waspinator wasn't originally a mentally normal if slightly dickish person. The years that Wasp spent imprisoned for treachery against the Autobots apparently were horrible enough to completely warp his mind, and this is from the good guys. Then he tries to get his payback by switching places with Bumblebee, Face/Off style. Not only do you get to watch Bumblebee's horror at being trapped in the likeness of the enemy, you get to watch Wasp remove his face. Yay! But much worse was Ax Crazy Wasp's creepy behavior through the whole scene, with that childlike, playful, way-too-calm voice he uses as he's doing it. This is what you feared was in your closet as a kid...
      • And then in a later episode (this guy seriously has no luck), Wasp is transformed into the hulking technoorganic Waspinator. It's mercifully offscreen, but you can hear his screams and see his hand pounding at the glass of the chamber door. Later in the episode we have another Beast Wars shoutout turn disturbing. Yes, he does say ''Waspinator has planzzzz" while trying to pull himself back together, but he's sparking and leaking everywhere as he says in the most menacing of buzzing voices, hilarious dismemberment becomes horrific.
      • You gotta hand it to the writers, they took the chew toy of Beast Wars and played him as shockingly straight as possible.
    • Poor Blurr got one of the most brutal moments in the show when he gets caught between an Advancing Wall Of Doom and gets crushed into a metal cube. The former is made even worse by Word Of God saying that the animators forgot to add his still-beating spark in the cube, which would mean Blurr as the cube was ALIVE THE WHOLE TIME, and thus possibly CONSCIOUS at the time.
    • Sari, after learning of her semi-robotic nature decides to use the Allspark Key to take a level in badass. At first it works...but then she completely loses control of herself and comes all too close to graphically killing her best friend Bumblebee. Why does the universe hate you, Sari?
    • Then there's Blitzwing, who is so funny that he doesn't seem scary at all... until you realize that he's a completely deranged, out of control, overpowered war machine, who gets double the weapons when he's at his craziest. And let's not get started on the way he laughs. And let's not ask what "servo salad" is made of.
    • Protoforms are like baby or fetal Transformers. Starscream's clones require protoforms to create. There were what was likely dozen of clones in that room. Megatron destroyed them all.
      • And, speaking of Starscream's clones, let's not forget that at least the first two were for all intents and purposes suicide bombers. Made with stolen 'babies'. Yeah.
  • This troper can remember a stop-motion cartoon she saw years ago. It was set in a somewhat Holland-like landscape (it was flat and had a windmill, anyway) inhabited by people who looked kind of like the puppets from Camberwick Green, and started off creepy enough simply by being stop-motion. What pushed it into Nightmare Fuel territory was these sort of... robotic creatures with nuts-and-bolts for heads, that marched around very jerkily destroying everything (including the windmill). They were defeated when it rained, causing them to rust. It was a very, very long time ago, so she apologises for her vaguely remembered description, but it gave her nightmares for years. The fact that the cartoon of Animal Farm came on afterwards probably didn't help.
    • You're thinking of George Pal's "Tulips Shall Grow".
      • George Pal's Puppetoons were pure, undiluted terror. For over ten years this troper thought the aforementioned short was an awful nightmare, along with what she could remember from John Henry and the Inky-Poo: the machine slowly pounding down the tracks, firmly but inexplicably associated with death in her mind, and the graveyard scene. It was finding that these nightmares were real that got her into the Nightmare Fuel business to begin with. Just as bad, but (thankfully?) banned are the Jasper shorts.
  • One episode of ReBoot when an unstoppable virus that turned everything to stone swept over the show's setting had this troper paranoid for weeks, to the extent that he actually started planning what to do if it happened, and worried it was occurring if the radio so much as went staticky. Admittedly, he was about ten at the time.
    • In another one Enzo got rebooted as a zombie that had an eyeball hanging out of the socket.
    • Hexadecimal in general was pretty creepy, what with the instant switches to masks which don't move when she speaks.
    • How about the bit in the episode "Painted Windows", where Bob wound up pulling off Hexadecimal's mask? Hex wound up clutching whatever was behind it, screaming in horror as she tried to contain whatever energies were trying to escape. Then the mask starts talking to Bob, taunting him for removing Hexadecimal's Power Limiter and dooming Mainframe to be caught in a massive explosion.
    • From the same episode, the nulls with Bob's face crudely copied and pasted on; there's just something about thier movements that's unnerving.
    • "Game Over". Two words that changed the show forever: USER WINS.
    • Jesus H. Christ on a bike, how could you people forget the effing WEB CREATURE?!?! That thing is the reason that This now much older Troper still has problems with dark places and things hanging from the ceiling. If you'll excuse me, I'll be hugging my pillow....
  • You can make any fan (or just viewer) of the 80s cartoon Inhumanoids soil himself with just one word (6:37 into the clip): "DECOMPOSE!"
  • Despite being the king of animated Family Unfriendly Violence, usually Tom and Jerry is devoid of the stuff, but occasionally there's a running gag in the series, where Tom will be convinced of a plan, only for it to backfire on him spectacularly (and violently). Tom's battered head will then appear out of a corner and say in a ghostly and disturbing manner, "DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT!" This gag gave this troper nightmares for years.
    • Here's a clip.
    • His line comes from an old radio program, the name of which escapes me at the moment. No, the line wasn't the name of the show, but it was its catchphrase.
      • I believe that it came from the debunking of propaganda during World War II, as in "Hitler says that he has us on the ropes - _don't you believe it._
      • This Troper thought he remembered this gag, with Tom speaking in faster, Doggie Daddy-style voice. Checking it on You Tube, I had to check at least two different videos just to make sure it wasn't tampered with: it is, by far, the creepiest and most unsettling gag I've ever seen in a Golden Age toon.
    • Let's not forget the whole Heavenly Puss episode, which actually has been considered 'one of the scariest cartoon episodes'. 'Satan' Spike's Evil Laugh (or his mere appearance, despite being just a 'modified model' of Spike the Bulldog) is really sending chills to the bone, and of course Tom just getting the 'bad end' by getting sent there was real frightening, especially when kids are watching. Kids, whatever you do, if you see a Tom and Jerry cartoon entitled Heavenly Puss, take my advice: Change the channel or turn off your television. Just don't watch it. You don't want to suffer lots of Nightmare Fuel like this troper did when he was a kid...
      • The ironic thing is the whole episode was just a dream of Tom's. Now let's hope you don't dream of this version, happening to YOU.
    • Then there's the episode where Tom says to Jerry in a sinister voice..."Now I have you in my power".
    • There was one where Jerry was freaking Tom out by juggling bottles marked "Nitroglycerine" that don't actually contain it. Then, in the middle of the juggling, a fake bottle lands on a shelf is replaced with a real one. This eventually ends with an explosion and Tom & Jerry in angel form. This troper is still uneasy about nitroglycerin, even now that popular perception has changed.
      • That was a Looney Tunes short featuring Sylvester and a Hungarian mouse. You're mistaking it for a short called "The Missing Mouse", where Jerry impersonates a white mouse that accidentally swallowed an explosive. The short ends with a radio announcement that said the explosive had gone inert just as Tom encounters the real white mouse. He tries to kick it out of the house (literally) and it goes off, destroying the neigborhood. It even ends with Tom giving the "DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT!" line, which is even creepier when given amidst mass destruction.
    • This troper is still uneasy by any of the Tom And Jerry animated by Chuck Jones. There is something evil and sadistic lying beneath the facial expressions and situations in these cartoons. But I never got that feeling from his work for Warner Brothers. eh.
    • The 13 shorts produced by Czech director Gene Deitch all have an eerie quality to them due to character actions often being performed at high speeds, spacey, ghostly sound effects, mumbled dialogue, and heavy use of reverb. One of the worst offenenders placed Jerry in an old castle, sadistically targeting Tom for mad scientist experiments.
    • The Hanna-Barbara era also gives us "Blue Cat Blues", an oddly depressing short which begins with a despondent Tom sitting on a railroad track, determined to end it all. The short shows in flashback how his unfaithful girlfriend drove him to this state. The worse comes at the end, when Jerry, similarly betrayed by his love, joins Tom on the tracks. Fade out as we hear a train approaching...
    • There was an episode where Tom teams up with an identical cat. It ends with Jerry "making" Tom "grow" an extra pair of arms. And then an extra pair of legs. Then an extra head, which rotates in a circle with the original head. Jerry promptly has a nervous breakdown.
      • For those who don't like Jerry it might be a Karma Houdini backlash instead— the other cat is Tom's Different As Night And Day cousin, who's scared to death of mice. Jerry spends the show scaring the cousin every chance he can (and occasionally getting pounded when he gets Tom by mistake), culminating in Tom and his cousin posing as the aforementioned monster cat as Jerry tries to scare him.
    • One of the Mousketeer shorts ends with Tom getting executed by guillotine because he couldn't keep the Mousketeers from stealing food. Tom is offscreen at the time, but that doesn't keep us from seeing the blade fall. God! And then Jerry and his young ward just walk away with their stolen food.
  • The Nazim Tulyakhodzayev-directed short cartoon of Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is filled from beginning to end with Nightmare Fuel, but one bit in particular that sticks in this troper's mind is the extremely disturbing scene of the family, having been reduced to ashes by nuclear radiation, being poured out of their beds by the house going through its morning routine. This is especially creepy in the children's room, where the little girl's doll is buried by the growing pile of her ashes. See the whole creepy thing here
  • This◊ scene from the Chowder episode "The Moldy Touch" — it's Chowder's reaction to being asked if he wants to "try for a billion".
    • Not to mention 0:40 and 8:39 in this otherwise-harmless episode (though the latter is obviously an intentional parody).
    • Chowder's teeth at the end of the "Lollistop" episode.
  • The Animated Adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's The White Seal: The first scene with the seal hunters — a faceless, hooded mob with red eyes who chase the seals onto the killing grounds by waving giant rattles in unison to the most foreboding music. This Troper sort of mentally "checked out" after that scene, barely noticing the rest of the plot.
    • Oh yes, that was terrifying. There's also the adaptation of Rikki Tikki Tavi. Nag and Nagaina are pretty much the entire reason that this troper has a deep phobia of snakes.
  • Cubix: Robots For Everyone featured an episode where Corrupt Corporate Executive Rashka revealed her true form by going through a very terrifying transformation sequence.
  • An advertisement for Cartoon Network's Robot Boy shows a frazzled mother waking up at 3 AM to tend to her crying newborn. When she picks him up, she pulls down his diaper and flicks a switch on his back to the "Off" position. Sure, she's happy he's back to sleep, but try convincing your son that you can't just turn him off if you feel like it.
  • Back in The Nineties on Cartoon Network, there was a segment in the commercial break called "Cartoons That Never Made It", which were fictional examples of, well, Exactly What It Says On The Tin. One of these was Frothy Dawg, a cartoon about a cute little rabid dog and his cute little rabid friends. Sounds funny, huh? Well, this troper was enough of a geek to have actually read science textbooks, and she knew how horrible rabies really is. She found this segment disturbing, and frankly Dude Not Funny.
    • And this goes for any cartoon that has used a rabid dog (or a fake one) for humor, really.
  • This troper found the episode of Gargoyles in which Goliath is trapped in the Hotel Cabal, an Illuminati owned building filled with traps designed to drive anyone trapped inside insane and impossible to leave without one of the special keys, pretty terrifing as a child, especially as, although Goliath of course escapes, the last image of the episode is of the episode's villain Mace Malone desperately seeking an exit having been trapped in the hotel without a key. To add fuel to the fire, it was later confirmed that he died of dehydration in the hotel.
    • Speaking of Gargoyles, this troper has mixed feelings about the "City of Stone" episodes. On one hand, casting a spell via almost everyone's favorite entertainment medium that turns New York City into a sculpture garden is incredibly eerie. On the other hand... Elisa looked pretty hot as a statue. There, I said it.
      • You forgot that Demona spent a couple hours every night taking a mace to random humans in the street.
      • I had managed to block that out. And it wasn't a mace. She went around with a laser. I particularly remember one bit where she's walking down the street, chatting with the statues, and then she leaves the frame without hurting anyone. Then she blasts them from offscreen.
      • This troper thought certain on first viewing that one of her victims had been a well-along pregnant woman! It turned out to be the way some now-stone items were being held that gave this impression, and even without it, damn. But that initial belief just made me cold inside. Further fuel : What happens when the semi-smashed bodies are found, and some of them resemble people in missing persons' reports?
    • "Future Tense", anyone? Okay, so it's All Just A Dream, but still... many main characters are cruelly and casually killed. Matt Bluestone and Bronx are vaporized out of existence.
      • Don't forget Broadway's horrible eyeless sockets.
      • And Alexander Xanatos' burning brains exploding out of his eyes.
    • The episode "Upgrade". The pack's horrible cybernetic mutations—particularly Hyena's arms and legs extending and her looking like a horrid 4-legged spider with a human torso and head. This Troper is 20 years old and it terrified her.
  • Toxic Crusaders, all about people hideously mutated by chemical or nuclear accidents. Enjoy, kids!
    • Well, considering that it's a cartoon about the Toxic Avenger, a character from a series of R-rated Troma films...
  • There was actually an attempt to turn the trippy adult-themed comic Swamp Thing into a kid friendly show. They did not succeed.
  • Wicked which was quite similar to Toxic Crusaders only with animals being mutated and the villain being Appleman.
  • This troper has always been quite disturbed at the thing where the heart pumps out of a character's body to describe when a character has been smitten or something. Y'know, that whole thing from Tex Avery to the Jim Carrey version of The Mask.
  • The Pirates Of Dark Water. The Big Bad is a sentient black blob that can warp people and destroy everything it touches. And it's trying to engulf the world. (Also, the episode where the old woman tries using the Dark Water in a youth potion and winds up being consumed from the inside is probably the most disturbing thing this troper has seen in a kid's show.)
  • Thomas The Tank Engine. Because the early episodes were written by a railway enthusiast, the train accidents were pretty realistic, and there was the recurring threat of the old-fashioned steam engines being turned to scrap. In addition, the behavior of troublesome trucks is frequently almost suicidal. The trains-with-faces are a bit creepy in and of themselves. In fact, you could probably go on and on about this show, but a few specific examples are...
    • Henry's accident in "The Flying Kipper". Adding to this was when one of the modelers' hands briefly appeared.
      • I thank John Logie Baird nightly for the fast-forward button on a remote. A TRAIN SMASHED INTO HIS FACE OH GOD.
    • "Percy Takes the Plunge".
    • In the episode "Trucks", some troublesome trucks, attached to the top of a hill by a cable, snap loose and roll down the hill yelling, "hurrah, hurrah," and then smash into Peter Sam and are completely destroyed (Peter Sam is badly battered himself, and is left for a while surrounded by and covered in debris).
      • It's even worse in the original book illustrations, where you can see the trucks' anguished expressions as they're torn apart.
    • Episodes taking place at the shadowy Other Railway, where engines are scrapped, which is lined with faceless diesels and broken-down steam engines.
    • This editor will never quite get over seeing Henry being bricked up inside a tunnel for, "always and always and always," for being disobedient. The worst part? The story ends with Henry still trapped, alone in the tunnel as we're told by Ringo that "he deserved his punishment." Those sad eyes peeking over the wall still keep me awake at night.
    • The episode with the bees. Helped to kick-start my phobia of stinging insects!
    • In one of the movies (can't remember which), the engines have nightmares about what happens when they are no longer deemed "useful", and some of their dreams are very surreal and disturbing... particularily Percy's.
      • That would be Calling All Engines. Percy dreams he's used as a roller coaster. And, for whatever reason, he has massive bloodshot eyes in his dream, which is kinda creepy.
    • The Uncanny Valley-esque faces were enough to creep out this troper from childhood (and still do today).
    • "Toby and the Flood". To this day this troper is still nervous around dams.
    • The newest Thomas special Hero of the Rails has one of the characters falling apart while running for his life. And it doesn't help that's he's screaming in agony as all his parts go flying off of him, and all Thomas can do is yell for him to keep running. It's the train equivalent of bleeding to death.
      • Not to mention that the new CGI animation now lets us see him squirming and wincing in pain as it happens. Say what you will about the new series being toward aimed to children...
    • Come to think of it, most of the "dark" or "Halloween" themed-episodes were pretty creepy. In particular, "Percy's Ghostly Trick," "Duncan Gets Spooked," and especially "Haunted Henry". THE CROSSING DOORS CLOSE AND THERE'S NOBODY THERE AND HENRY PLOWS THROUGH THEM AND ALMOST FALLS OFF A CLIFF AUGH.
    • Honorable mention goes to the "ghost train sequence" in "Percy's Ghostly Trick". If the jerkily animated ghost train doesn't scare you, the horror-movie soundtrack will...
      • This troper remembers being scared shitless whenever he heard that music being played.
    • Don't forget Stepney Gets Lost! The entire smelter's yard scene in particular. "This engine's not for scrapping!" *meep*.
      • That episode is possibly the worst ever made. The kicker? Stepney is supposed to have been preserved, and we NEVER SEE THOSE DIESELS RESPONSIBLE GET PUNISHED. This troper is actually surprised that the Bluebell Line (where the real Stepney has resided since 1963) didn't take legal action against the writers.
      • And the Mood Whiplash arguably makes it even more terrifying as the first half of the episode is just about Stepney enjoying himself at the quarry, and on the way home he takes the wrong line and then ends up in the locomotive equivalent of Hell.
    • There's also the episode where Thomas is hired to take a dragon decoration to another town on Sodor for a festival. Percy is downright scared of it and from a kid's point of view (this troper's in particular) the dragon was scary, and the music that played whenever it appeared didn't help. That also reminds me of one episode where one of the trains (I forget who) is forced to stay in the railyard overnight due to everyone going off duty before he can get on his way. The atmosphere and creepy music there are also fuel-worthy.
    • S.C Ruffey's fate in "Toad Stands By". No way that having Oliver essentially draw and quarter one of the characters could ever traumatize children...
    • The episode "Percy Runs Away" when Percy forgets to tell the signalman to let him switch tracks and thus suddenly realises that Gordon is hurtling straight towards him. The looks of absolute horror on both the trains faces still makes this troper wince.
    • Smudger's fate in Grandpuff, which was to be turned into a stationary generator. What makes it worse is Duke's nonchalant response of "You can see him behind our shed. He'll never move again.". And what really makes it horrifying is that you can see that Stuart and Falcon are just as disturbed by this as the viewers. *shudder*
    • Diesel 10's original voice was apparently far too sinister for a children's film, so all the lines had to be redone without his Russian accent. Despite this, his face and giant claw are still terrifying.
  • This troper used to be scared of the company endings (showing who made the show) for Muppet Babies. It was for Marvel Productions where a different colored spider man would come on screen. I used to always hide when it was just about to come on, since I used to think that Spiderman would come out of the screen and try to kill me. I was just a kid when I used to watch it, so I was pretty scared of it for a while.
    • Well, I've never heard of that particular Vanity Plate, but I always used to be scared of Spider Man and Batman too. Mostly because I was absolutely terrified of spiders as a young child and nobody ever bothered to explain to me that Spidey and Bats were the good guys...
      • Now that you mention it, there's a Turkish movie where Captain America and Santo have to fight an homicidal Spider-Man and his gang of bikers. Really.
  • In the 1970s, there was a children's program on U.S. public television called Zoom. It was mostly inoffensive, but one episode featured some amateur animated films by child filmmakers. The one that still sticks in this Troper's head 30 years later was something to do with nutrition; it featured jittery, terrified talking paper collage vegetables in a garbage disposal, complaining bitterly that a child's refusal to eat them had brought them to this ghastly fate through no fault of their own, waiting and waiting for the horrific moment when the memorably nasty-looking blades would start spinning and puree them all.
  • The Flumps terrified this troper as a child. There was that creepy tuba music, and then they'd just appear over the top of that wall... I can't remember anything that actually happened in the show, because the title sequence freaked me out so much that I had to leave the room.
  • My 3-year-old son is terrified of Numberjacks in which computer animated numerals are problem solving superheroes.
  • Some episode of the Alf cartoon feature some sort of Wicker Man-esque agriculturally driven human (well, in this case, alien) sacrifice involving people being pounded into the ground with giant flails while farmers chanted "Touch bottom soil!" at the top of their lungs.
  • For some reason or another, one plot in Stunt Dawgs required convincing someone else that were witnessing a vision of Hell. It was a long time ago, but I vaguely remember this plan may have actually been executed by the good guys.
  • Beetlejuice the cartoon has some pretty frightening moments, arguable more of it then in the less-child-friendly movie.
    • As a little kid, every time the theme song started, I either ran out of the room or changed the channel. I couldn't even watch commercials for it.
    • The very Uncanny Valley CGI/Stop-Motion commericals with that announcer, Barry-Me-Not, who seems about ready to pull a Deal With The Devil shtick. Or rip your face off.
      • The worst of those for this troper was when he was advertising for a "night-light." We see images of a figure tossing and turning, unable to sleep, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, while Barry-Me-Not asks "Do you stare at the ceiling all night?" and then says "Does the ceiling stare back at you?" while we cut to a black screen while large white eyes with black dots as pupils slowly open. This troper was terrified to look at her ceiling for months after that! And since I remembered it, the fear's back.
    • BJ's Monster Clown rival Scuzzo is a gruesome beast.
    • When Lydia borrowed BJ's funny bone for a comedy act, everyone in the audience literally started to crack up - large gaps appearing in their heads, and Lydia could not stop it.
    • Or how about the time Claire sabetoged Lydia's audition for Romeo and Juliet, and Beetlejuice decided to take revenge by possessing her on opening night, she looked really gruesome with wild eyes, and BJ's signature rotten teeth.
    • The episode where Beetlejuice contracted "cabin fever" had BJ's attack of claustrophobia, and the disturbingly surreal sequence with BJ's old "Salvador Dolly".
    • And let's not get started on the series of nightmares Beetlejuice suffered in the episode where he met the Edgar Allen Poe.
      • Oh Ye Gods, let's not get started on that!
  • Some of Terry Gilliam's cartoons for Monty Pythons Flying Circus can be quite jarring with their grotesquely doughy people and almost marionette-like animation. Conrad Poohs (and his Dancing Teeth) is definitely an example of Nightmare Fuel.
    • This troper thought it was funny, but it scared her Norwegian Elkhound (the Tsundere one) because it probably looked like biting, bared teeth to the dog.
  • The 2000s series of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, being much darker than the '80s-'90s one, has many examples.
    • Baxter Stockman, full stop. Every time he fails, we see him more and more mutilated - just imagining what he went through between every of the earlier apparitions is enough to shiver (apparently, he had one eye removed with a drill). At some point, he is reduced to a brain in a jar, with only an eyeball and the spinal column. Thought it can't get worse? After living some time with various robotic bodies, with the help of Bishop's technology he creates a new body for himself, but it rapidly decays, starting with a finger falling off; he tries to self-repair some parts, but in the end he looks like a zombie. He snaps (I'm surprised it took him so long), and dies at the end of the same episode. Then his body is recovered, and the brain put in a robot, again. At that point, he screams in desperation why they didn't let him rest in peace. I've rarely (if never) seen a cartoon character, good or bad, put through such living hell.
    • Leatherhead's flashbacks of Bishop's experiments on him.
    • The first serious face-to-face confrontation between the Turtles and Shredder, ending with Leonardo cutting Shredder's head off. And after they leave, the body gets up and recovers the head. Granted, it is shown only in silhouette, and later we get to know the reason of such resurrection, but the first time it was quite disturbing.
    • The episode where Bishop's cyborg/clone becomes this universe's version of Rat King. The masses of marching rats and the cyborg's madness make this on eof the darkest episodes.
    • The mutant outbreak during several episodes of the fourth season, which generates some really monstruous creatures running New York's sewer system.
    • Related to this event, the mutation of Donatello. Watching the genius of the group turning into a savage monster is... not nice.
    • The episode where the Turtles confront some Ancient Evil around whom, apparently, New York was founded. They battle zombies and skeletons of ancient victims, are forced to confront their greatest fears in horrible nightmares, and finally the monster himself shows up - his name is never stated, but he's obviously Cthulhu, not powerful as the original, but still Nightmare Fuel incarnated.
    • When Donatello is transported to a dystopian future where everything went wrong, we see how Shredder perpetuated an even more nightmarish punishmnent on his minions: Stockman is always a brain in a jar... grafted on the shoulder of a wheelchair-bound Hun.
    • Honestly, anything involving Bishop is pretty much pure Nightmare Fuel.
    • Turtles Forever, has a bit of Nightmare Fuel, mostly concerning Shredder wanting to destroy the universe, now, the goal may sound generic, but by destroying the original universe quite a bit, he erases every other TMNT universe, leaving it nothing but an almost eternal white wasteland, scared now?
    • The 2003 Shredder. Let's face it, he is pretty darn scary. Even when he's just an Utrom.
    • The Mirage Turtles are just effin' scary in general.
    • "Yes. Mutation. It's a real horror show."
  • One episode of Tale Spin had pilots replaced by robots. This troper was terrified of Baloo's nightmare, where he's literally rebuilt as a robot.
  • My Little Pony: See, with some shows, there is at least some informed consent going in; you'd expect Are You Afraid Of The Dark? to deal in Horror Tropes and probably be genuinely scary. But there is not a child alive who could have possibly tuned into something entitled "My Little Pony" and expected to have to "BEHOLD THE POWER OF DARKNESS!!!"
  • The otherwise cheesy and non-threatening animated series Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi featured short live action skits at the beginning. During one such episode, Ami and Yumi are in a sushi bar, ordering something, until all of the sudden a fat man jumps out, rips off his clothes and starts dancing around in a red loincloth. It's brief but disturbing none the less. Since these segments are shot in Japan, I'm guessing that such my considered "amusing" over there. I also suspect that the US Producers may not have had input on these skits, simply editing preexisting footage of the duo. Not to mention that by this point, near the end of season 2, ratings for the were record low. The scene may not have been censored as they thought very few people would actually see it.
  • This troper has always been somewhat disturbed by the cavalier treatment of cybernetic implants in Western animated series, especially Merchandise Driven ones. While a shiny mechanical arm screams "buy me" to an impressionable 7-year-old, the rather squicky subtext that is inevitably glossed over is either that the character suffered a horrendous injury that resulted in an amputation - or simply had their limb torn off - or the character willingly had their own flesh mutilated to install all those sparkly (and painful, as Ed Elric can attest) upgrades. Ewww. Bonus squick points if the part in question happens to be an eye.
    • This is actually adressed in the Star Wars prequels, where the trauma of having his limbs replaced with cybernetic implants (combined with his already existing Padme-related trauma) is enough to turn the wisecracking teen Anakin Skywalker into the sinister Darth Vader.
    • Also, this point is what causes mild-mannered John Corben to become the evil villain Metallo in Superman: The Animated Series.
  • In the two parted special episode of Cat Dog where they go on a quest to find their missing parents, there's this one part where they come across a desert with a bunch of people gathered there. The reason? To reclaim their abducted family members from aliens ! And the way it was done was downright disturbing even for a cartoon where the protagonists are a two headed animal of completely opposed species. The probed and mutilated corpses of the unfortunate victims are loaded unto a conveyer belt and are reclaimed like baggage in an airport. One scene shows a little kid claiming his grandma's lifeless body like nothing was wrong!
    • This troper was more disturbed by the halloween special where Dog is turned into a vampire.
    • And what about the episode in which Cat crawls down into himself via Dog's open mouth looking for something? If not Nightmare Fuel, that was definitely a Mindfuck (made no less so by the bit where Cat inexplicably comes out of his own mouth).
    • No one's mentioned "The End" yet? The whole episode was mildly creepy, but it was the very end of the episode that scarred me. First, let's go over the backstory of the episode. Cat and Dog are convinced that the end of the world is coming after reading a certain book that tells them of an omen: a skull-and-crossbones-shaped cloud. It also offers advice: They must warn everyone. At the end of the episode They find that the end isn't really coming; That book they read was just a bunch of bull. They think that everything's fine...And all the sudden, the camera looks up into the sky. That's when the skull shaped cloud morphs into a twisted, evil, version of the book's author!
  • When she was small, this troper saw an episode of Scooby Doo where everybody was hypnotized when they visited the circus. The villain turned out to be a previously unmentioned, disgruntled hypnotist who'd been fired from the circus. This was probably just an easy out for the writers, but to my young impressionable mind, the message seemed to be, anytime, anywhere, your loved ones could be turned into mindless zombies. A lesson which took over a year of sleepless nights to be overcome.
    • For this troper, the most terrifying part of that episode was the culprit's costume - pretty much the granddaddy of the modern Monster Clown. Joker and Pennywise had nothing on him!
    • Another episode of Scooby Doo, Spooky Space Kook, detailed with the gang's van breaking down near an abandoned airfield. They are then beset by what appears to be an alien ghost. The alien ghost would fly around in a space-suit, with his fishbowl visor flashing bright red in rapid pulses with a disembodied skull seemingly floating inside, cackling madly (and of course, they always did a close up of that cackling mad alien skull). He even had an "alien ghost ship", a decrepit brown ship with broken sections slowly pulsing in an eerie purple glow. All within the lovely scenery of a truly decrepit old aircraft boneyard. Aliens and Ghosts are bad enough, but an Alien Ghost? A match made in hell.
      • Later, when this troper was older and something of a nerd, she rewatched it and thought that the "alien ghost ship" looked kind of like a really messed up Sputnik, which led to the disturbing notion that it was being piloted by LAIKA's ghost...
    • When this troper was about five, she saw an episode of Scooby Doo which was set up to make the gang think there were vampires running around. The power went out before I could see the demasking. Cue five or so years of vampire nightmares.
    • Is this troper the only one who remembers, about ten or so years back, when Cartoon Network aired short clips that put teh Mystery Gang in teh exact same situation as the kids in Blair Witch Project? The characters were animated against blakc-and-white live-action footage of dark, dense forest...And this little "campaign" or whatever the hell it was went on for months. It aired for MONTHS, I tell you! And was genuinely scary.
    • Two Words: Zombie. Island. There's a reason this movie is beloved even by those who don't like Scooby. That being the animation, which is both beautiful and DOWNRIGHT TERRIFYING. Other choice picks include: the scene where all the zombies collapse, the freaky green light that seems to control all the hauntings, and the revelation of the real villains. Not only are they terrifying, but it's a pretty decent emotional gut-punch, too, as probably the most likable character in the movie was guilty as well.
      • Especially those two native island women who turned out to be werecats.
      • This Troper has a friend at school, she mentions when she was a kid, she was terrified of Morgan Moonscar, thinking about it, he is kind of scary, but not enough to traumatize me from when I was younger.
    • Not quite on the same level as Zombie Island, but Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost was almost on the same level animation-wise, and, while not nearly as traumatizing, was also nightmare inducing. The real witch was scary when you're seven. As was Ben Ravencroft getting drug into the afterlife by his ghost ancestor.
  • Whether you know it from Shadow Raiders or War Planets, the Beast Planet's mere concept is terrifying- an Implacable Man Planet Eater. It cannot be stopped, destroyed or turned aside. You can only delay the inevitable by running. Even at the end of the series: Planet Reptizar. Doomsday.

  • This troper liked the show AAAHH!!! Real Monsters and never thought the monsters themselves were scary, but it contained a scene that caused lasting psychic damage... there's this monster hunter named Simon, and Icarus somehow falls into his brain and controls his behavior. Naturally, no one believes Simon when he says he has a monster in his brain, so he gets some sort of brain scan to prove it. Icarus had just managed to escape before the brain pic was taken, which resulted in Simon being thrown in an insane asylum. The last scene is of him in a straitjacket in his padded cell yelling that the monsters are now out of his brain. GOOD FUCKING GOD. This troper developed a lasting fear of insane asylums (wherein all words associated with it; mental hospital, nut house, etc) gave her the shivers. Add in Paranoia Fuel to that as well, that monsters could tickle your brain, and for years I made sure to always have both ears covered when I slept.
    • Ah, for this troper, the biggest Nightmare Fuel came from Krumm and his eyes — or, rather, his father Horvak and his eyes. See, Horvak lost one of his eyes in the Revolutionary War when it was fired out of a rifle. Not so funny when you remember that they can see everything their eyes see, and while they're clearly resiliant enough to just roll them around the ground and such without getting irritated by all the dirt and grime, that still had to hurt... a lot. And a lot of Krumm's focus episodes involved him putting his eyes through the wringer, or temporarily losing them... Eye Scream at its 'finest'. Liked the character, hated seeing him get the spotlight just because of that.
    • For this guy it has to be the episode where the monsters went through a molting stage.
    • For me it was the end of the ghost house episode when the ghost lets it's presence be known.
  • Didi, under the influence of the madness poison in The Adventures Of Tintin, mostly due to his voice actor's excellent performance in Creepy Monotone.
    • "Lao-Tzu said, you must find the way... I found it. I can help you find it, too... All I have to do is to... cut off your head. Don't Be afraid... It's a very sharp blade."
  • The creepy, logic defying, eerie sounding ex-host of Nick Jr known as Face.
    • This troper absolutely loved Face when she was younger, but just remembered him again... Oh God WHYYYYY would you put something like that on after EVERY little kids' show?!?!
    • This troper sometimes thinks of him at night, and quickly has to find something else to think about. It's an effect that has only been matched by one character- Gel-arshie.
  • This troper recently discovered Super Jail!, a little piece of Adult Swim. It's gorgously animated, it's pretty funny, and the main character, the Warden, is the most adorable megalomaniac sadistic bastard ever. Only one teeny tiny little problem. Adding to the show's bizarre humor, it has a 30-60 second long fight scene near the end of every episode. Now, this troper appreciates a good fight scene, but dangit man, with all the organs, eyeballs, and other gore spilling everywhere combined with the bizarre circumstances of the fight make it a nightmare fuel party on drugs.
    • The fights are closer to 4 minutes.
      • The end of the Dream Weaver episode of Superjail. Not just one specific part, everything about it.
      • And then the creators truly outdid themselves with the acid trip fight scenes in the Season 1 finale. Words cannot describe the sheer amount of chaos and "WTF-ness" that happens in just a few short minutes.
      • This troper is a HUGE fan of The Warden, but she has to admit that the scene in the pilot episode where The Warden's petting a dead corpse of a fluffy, pink bunny (singing to it and "comforting" it no less) then starts having a psychotic breakdown (his voice becoming more insane and the petting more like mauling), finally ripping the skin clean off the dead bunny which he then proceeds to wear as a hat for the rest of the episode and goes back to his cheery nature a little TOO much. Oh, and David Wain (the voice of The Warden) happens to be a comedian.
      • When Jared starts taking D.L. Diamond's hallucinogenic drugs and the cheerful acid trip landscape turns into a series of horrors, such as a man whose long hair turn into snakes that eat his face. Also, in another episode, one of the Doctor's creations, some kind of giant scorpion/human/whatever hybrid that kills itself with its stinger, used to tear its own skeleton out of its skin!!!
  • One episode of Rescue Rangers has a lengthy sequence of a panicked Dale being chased by a swarm of giant bees whose sting will turn him into a mindless zombie. And there's no aid coming from his friends—because the bees already got them all.
    • They were mosquitoes, not bees; the episode in question was 'Chocolate Chips'.
  • Most things on Kablam.
  • This troper remembers a short-lived Disney animated series called Nightmare Ned, in which the majority of the episode was the nightmare that the titular character was having this week. HOW did this make it on a kids' channel?!
    • I remember that too! Except I just saw commercials for the video game, and it still freaked the heck out of me.
      • That cartoon holds the position of being one of the few (and possibly first) things that actually did give this troper nightmares.
    • This troper's best friend often liked to play the video game version. The one level he seemed to have trouble on was the operating room level where the beaver-like mutants take out Ned's internal organs.
  • This episode of Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog. For the faint of heart, it involves a Xanatos Gambit placed by Dr. Robotnik's Mad Scientist cousin Warpnik in an effort to free him from the Warp of Confusion, a surreal world full of fish that fly around without water, a robotic jaw as the entrance, and other horrors. The madness begins at 1:20 in.
    • The fact that Warpnik looks like a Dr. Suess character on even more acid also adds to the creepiness.
  • Sat AM Sonic The Hedghehog features Robotnik's Roboticizer: Living things go in, robot slaves come out. Who are completely aware of everything that happens to them and that they're forced to do. 'Nuff said.
  • The Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends special Destination Imagination features a villainous imaginary friend called World; named as such because he controls a world within a toybox. He is basically floating eyes and a mouth, who can become anything and anyone within his world...and he can switch at will, so when he's cornered as one thing, he becomes another. In the end, when the prospect of his only friend Frankie being taken away from him becomes clear, he goes completely insane, tearing apart his world in a nightmarish sequence that ends with nothing left but whiteness...and then the heroes have to face him in the form of a monster made up from the leftover debris. The whole thing is just creepy, damn it!
    • That's not even the scariest part! If you decide to go through the scene frame by frame one of the images that flashes on the screen is a picture of Frankie in a tiara. I know it doesn't sound scary, but the fact that it was put in subliminally doesn't make it any less creepy.
    • What could make it even worse is that World is a little reminiscent of Dark Heart from one of the Care Bears movies, who is plenty Nightmare Fuel himself.
      • Your Millage May Vary. I found hiim to be adorable except in monster form which was the most AWESOME THING ON THE SHOW!
    • Two words: putty zombies. Dear Christ, those things were creepy as hell.
  • In an episode of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, the family was visiting a military base whose pride and joy was an organic, brain-like computer its scientists were working on. It basically looked like a giant blob of brain mass in a glass tube. This troper doesn't remember all the details, but at some point, the computer gains a malicious sentience, breaks free from its containment, and starts terrorizing the base. One particularly disturbing scene is the soldiers talking to the General over walkie-talkies, and we find out it's the blob barking orders by mimicking the General's voice. It does this by growing the General's head and a pair of lungs out of its writhing mass. This troper shutters just from remembering it.
    • Another one involves the group visiting a castle to check out paranormal activity. Boy howdy, they get more than they bargain for, as the castle literally sucks Hadji and Race into another dimension and tries to turn 'em into monsters (you can clearly see it when they find Hadji in Quest World). What's more is the story behind it being a black pearl and the final battle with a grotesque giant head, all that was left of the individual who was corrupted by it.
    • Oh, and let's not forget an episode which takes place in an underwater lab. The experiments end up waking some very deadly creatures who go rampaging all over the sea and killing scientists. What is particularly disturbing is the ending, as the heroes and remaining staff find a sub and are on the verge of escape after briefly knocking out a few of the creatures who had them cornered. The head scientist, though, persists in trying to study them and want to take one of them along. The creature however wakes up just as he is trying to pick it up and...well, you can imagine. It is not shown of course (being a kid's show) but the looks on the heroes’ faces as it happens before they escape pretty much tells the story.
    • How about the one where Jessie gets brainwashed by Jeremiah Surd to try to take out the Quest team? Jonny and Dr. Quest end up going into her mind to break Surd’s hold on her. When in there and when they find Jessie's subconscious, Surd has her believing that she's solving all the problems in the world and he separates the father and son, placing them in their worst nightmares. For Jonny, it's having his father berate him for not being as smart as Jessie. For Dr. Quest, it's being in a graveyard with the heads of Johnny, Jessie, Race, and Hadji coming out of tombstones and Johnny telling his father that he let them down, "just like he let down (Johnny's) mother". What's even worse is what Jessie does to Surd in the end: Surd, who is wheel-chair bound, had used Questworld to be able to walk and move again. Jessie, on learning that he had tried to make her kill her dad, stripped Surd of his ability to move in Questworld forever, leaving him vulnerable in both worlds. Her reasoning? "No one takes control of my mind. Nobody." OUCH!
    • How about the episode with the old ship whose crew and passenger inexplicably disappeared in a green mist? If my memory serves correctly, it's never revealed what actually happened.
  • What disturbed this troper about the Super Mario World cartoon: an episode where Koopa uses "chickadactyl" eggs in a fast food restaurant, and everyone who eats them begins to transform into a chicken - one part at a time, gradually losing sentience. Bad enough on its own, but his ultimate plan is to *eat them* after they've transformed. This is the sort of thing one might expect from a horror movie, not a dumb cartoon based on Mario.
  • My Gym Partner's A Monkey has this in a few episodes. One episode is the one where Adam gets his "special protected title" removed and we get to see what the animals in the school look like when this happens.
  • The incredibly disturbing Canadian short "To Be" from the cartoon network show "O Canada" about a scientist who invents a teleporter that worked by creating a new copy of someone then destroying the original. A girl in the audience begins to question the scientist on how it works, first getting him to show the the destruction of the person who is teleporting, the scientist himself. Eventually she gets him to delay the destruction of the original by 5 minutes, effectively cloning the scientist, needless to say when the five minutes where up, neither one claimed to be the original. So, instead of living and let living, they decide their fate by game of chess. This troper can barely watch it today, which is truely mind boggling when you consider that "O Canada" was a kids cartoon.
  • The Mighty B. The titular character is trying to avoid a shot at the doc's office. The doc and nurse believe she might be hiding in the waiting room. So they flip up a trapdoor to show ten or so wailing, frightening children. No WONDER she doesn't want a shot.
  • In an episode of Ren and Stimpy called Stimpy's Fanclub, Ren jeoulous of all the attention Stimpy is getting plots to kill him in his sleep we see him as a giant head and a pair of hands talking in a demonic voice in the darkness and imagining sawmarks going around Stimpy's neck, he then suffers a severe headache and starts shrieking in a horrifying manner.
    • In another one called Hermit Ren, Ren has hallucinations of freaky monsters standing over him as he attempts to sleep and there also is a dried up corpse of a man who he believes is talking to him.
    • In one called To Salve or Not To Salve features a scene where Stimpy buys a super powerful vacuum cleaner that Ren tries to avoid being sucked into, it ends up ripping off his skin, and sucking out his blood and organs until he's a shrieking skeleton clinging to his brain and eventually being sucked inside.
    • Pretty much any episode of Ren and Stimpy had this to some degree.
  • This video from one of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVDs seems to be a parody of nightmare fuel in children's TV.
    • Speaking of ATHF... the end of "Fry Legs". That is all.
    • The evil TV in "The Cloning" always freaked me out. Imagine if you were in Shake's position: You're watching TV, when the screen suddenly shows a weird, static-y video of you. Walking around aimlessly, with a distant, distorted laugh track playing in the background. Then your counterpart turns, makes eye contact with you and in a creepy, eager voice says "I'M IN YOUR HOUSE!"
  • There was an episode of Batman Beyond that had a man who got trapped in a pit that was being used to dump radioactive waste. Years later he develops the ability to manipulate the soil and brings his daughter down there to see his withered, skeletal remains. He was by far the most disturbing part of the show. Other episodes had a man who only got half a dose of what was supposed to give him a morphable body (and winds up a barely human blob being fed through a tube and kept in a glass tank) and a guy who got covered in super steroid patches, hulking his body out to grotesque proportions.
    • Also of note is the shapeshifter Inque. She spends most of her time as a cool, dangerous-bordering-on-scary villainess with — by all accounts — a Fetish Fuel moment for every creepy one. Along comes the climax of her debut episode, where she goes in for the kill by ramming herself down Terry's throat. ACK.
    • Um, does no one remember the episode with the guy who can phase through walls, and at the end he loses his powers and drops through the floor and just keeps going, strongly implying that he's going to just keep falling through any available surface and eventually burn up in the Earth's core? Ye gods.
      • Clearly Bruce needs to brush up on his gravitational physics; a frictionless body would actually start yo-yoing through the center of the earth, first surfacing on the opposite side in about 42 minutes. And then returning to his starting point in another 42 minutes. Etc. Forever. Not really that much better than holing up in the earth's core, I suppose, though you do get more interesting scenery.
    • The first few episodes of Season 2 are particularly nightmarish. In the episode "Lost Souls", an old man has digitalized his soul to be able to run his company from beyond the grave, but soon goes mad and takes over the circuitry in Terry's batsuit, prompting Terry to have to fight the suit with only his own agility and wit. This in itself is pretty exciting, but when he manages to drive a metal spike wrapped in an electric chord through the suit, we see the ghostly face of the digitalized soul stare wildly into the air, it's voice growing more and more high-pitched as you can hear it progress backwards as it speaks, complete with images of a brain and a skeleton flashign on the screen, it is is horrifying for this Troper.
      The Soul: "500 megs... a thousand kilobytes... pi squared... 2+2 equals four... me first! I wanna play! One potato, two potato... Mom... mama..."
  • The Ed Edd N Eddy episode Rock A Bye Ed had this as it's central theme. To start off there's Ed nightmare about Johnny. Ed is in his happy place, which unfortunately does not share the same grid co-ordinates or plot location as his sister's. Sarah just wants to quietly watch TV while Ed wants to play. Something has to give, and soon does for unable to stand the noise of her brother's persistent bat and ball any longer Sarah uses her ultimate weapon - she tells mom. Now telling Mom would be bad enough but can you imagine Ed's shock when she turns around from her dishes to punish him and he's confronted not with her familiar face but that of little Jonny 2X4 perched on top of her body! Surely it's the last word in freakiness! However even that's not enough as Ed finds himself quickly made victim of a kangaroo court where the jury consists entirely of his heavily biased little sister, his uncaring Jonny-faced mom is the judge and his punishment is to be thrown into the horror that is the Kanker Pit. Its definitely looking bad for Ed.All this is enough to make anyone scream which is just what Ed's doing as he wakes up in bed seconds later to realise it was all a horrible dream.
    • There's also the episode where Ed dons a monster suit and believes that he IS a monster and starts acting out a scene from a horror/sci fi film he's seen.
    • "Evil Tim has beckoned you all!"
    • Ed may be lovable but he ain't so lovable when he's in a bad mood as demonstrated in the episode Little Ed Blue.
    • One particularly charming example from Rolf:
      Rolf(After singing particularly happy lyrics to a song from his country): But if your chores be never done, your feeble arms too weak to toil. Yeshmiyek will surely come and throw you in her pot to boil.(He then continues the cheerful singing as if he didn't even say the above.)
  • In one episode of Henry's Amazing Animals, The titular Henry (a gecko) looks at a mirror and walks past it, but the reflection stays there, and then gains purple/red coloring and says "CREATURES OF THE NIGHT!" in a deep, almost satanic sounding voice. This Troper hated passing mirrors after seeing this.
    • Glad I'm not the only one who was disturbed by that.
    • Ditto for this troper, who really enjoyed that show when she was younger (And would still like to see it again).
  • This troper was disturbed when he was shown this video of David Versus Goliath at the age of 5. Goliath having gallons of blood coming out of his head as he writhes in pain and falls over was not what I was expecting.
    • The above video is ten times more terryfing with the manic laughter of the uploader, and that gets doubled when you learn, SHE IS A SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHER!
    • Something tells me that this 'teacher' shouldn't be anywhere near children if she laughs at bloody deaths.
  • Batman The Animated Series: I saw "Feet of Clay" for the first time at age 14, and I had nightmares. 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.
    • When this troper was about four or five, she was watching some Warner Bros. video her family had rented, and one of the previews was for Batman The Animated Series. At one point, the trailer showed a short clip of the Joker, and that short glimpse of him just intensified her pre-existing fear of clowns and people in large animal suits.
    • Another memorable moment from this series comes from the episode "Mudslide" wherein 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.
    • Clayface's whole shtick of slowly liquifying to his death could be disturbing enough to qualify as High Octane Nightmare Fuel. Especially since it doesn't end well.
    • Crossing into Uncanny Valley was the episode House and Garden when Poison Ivy creates children out of plants. First, Batman and Robin end up in her basement, saving her "husband" who was in a huge vat of water, and then they hear children saying, "Mommy...mommy," they turn, and see children coming out of the plants. It's hard to explain on the page, but holy crap that was scary...
    • The Scarecrow is unnerving at best, but there's one particular shot of him in the episode "Fear of Victory" that looks like all your childhood nightmares diluted into one look.
    • The Scarecrow himself was actually kind of cartoony during his first incarnation in TAS, but his redesign when it became part of The New Batman/Superman Adventures is bonechilling. The fact he's voiced by Jeffrey "Dr. Herbert West" Combs, that just goes beyond the pale.
    • Kirk Langstrom's transformation scene in "On Leather Wings". Mostly because of how well it's animated. It looks like something out of a werewolf movie, and combined with the sound of his laugh degenerating into a hypersonic bat screech, the whole sequence tends to stick in the mind.
    • Speaking of werewolves, when I was little, I happened to be channel surfing one day and watched a brief segment of "Moon of the Werewolf," ending with the mad scientist threatening the guy with, "If you want the antidote, you're going to do everything I say." I never watched the show again for fifteen years...
    • ...When I did, I learned too late that one shouldn't watch Mask of the Phantasm and Return of the Joker together. For the first time. Right before bed. I actually had a nightmare about being stalked and chased by the Joker. I wish I was making that up.
  • "Makes you want to laugh... doesn't it Artie?"
  • Jay Jay the Jet Plane would be just another Tastes Like Diabetes preschooler show of dubious intelligence if not for the Uncanny Valley faces on all the animated members of the cast. The eyes, the soulless eyes...excuse me, I'm going to curl up in a corner and cry now.
    • No kidding. While this troper was an adult by the time Jay Jay premiered, and as such wasn't scared, if I were a kid and saw that...Goddamn. You look at faces that seem human, except they're devoid of expression, and see they're on the heads of planes, and you can almost imagine that some demented evil genius/Sid Phillips transplanted them violently.
  • This may be Squick (and feel free to correct me if it is), but the episode of American Dad where they repeatedly administer various chemicals to Steve by violently jamming a needle into the side of his head. The last one actually gets stuck in there and they have to wiggle it around to get it out. Not fun for people who don't like needles.
  • From Batman The Brave And The Bold: One episode features an alternate universe with evil versions of DC heroes and good versions of the villains. One of the primary characters is the Red Hood. While it's never stated outright and we never see Red Hood's face, it's made very obvious that Red Hood is a good version of the Joker. The flashback sequence where he sees his disfigured face for the first time is terrifying (and awesome in a way, because he overcomes what his counterpart could not.)
    • From the same series, Miss Manface. Yes, it's for real, and it's exactly as bad as it sounds. Shudder...
  • The Animals Of Farthing Wood, on several occasions. Most notably for This Troper was the shooting of Mrs Pheasant (including a glimpse of her dead body being held by the farmer). In the next episode, Mr Pheasant sees his dead wife plucked, cooked and plated, cooling on a windowsill. Shocked by this sight, he does not see the farmer return to shoot him as well. Adder bitchily reports to Tawny Owl that Mr Pheasant has also been cooked for the farmer's dinner. Gah!
    • Don't forget the butcherbird's larder. That scene scared the living daylights out of this troper as a kid - not to mention that it's fairly gruesome for a U-rated cartoon, what with all the blood dripping down the thorns, and the total aversion of Infant Immortality...
  • There's an episode of Back At The Barnyard where Otis upsets the grave of a bunny to set up a funhouse. The bunny's ghost is understandably pissed and proceeds to make the barnyard animals' lives hell, including possessing Pig and making him to attack the other animals.
    • It sorta becomes less creepy when Pig resists the bunny's control through his love of pie.
      • Well you know Pig, he's a Big Eater and very stubborn when it comes to dessert, especially pie.
  • Transformers third season "Dark Awakening"... I'm like five years old at best and Optimus Prime is missing half his face and part an arm and that was years before I saw the beginning of the episode which I am sure would not have helped much.
    • What about what happens to Scourge when he tries the Matrix on for size in "The Burden Hardest to Bear?" [Shudder]
  • PLAY SAFE!!! PLAY SAFE!! It's probably a better example of Scare Em Straight, but damn.
    • This troper saw this at age 15, and it's still pretty damn creepy. Those shrieking trains shall haunt my dreams for eternity.
  • The "Messages From Outer Space" segment of Cartoon Planet freaked this troper out as a kid.
  • The opening credits of Thundarr The Barbarian had the moon getting ripped in half and an entire city being wiped out by a giant tsunami.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars had the episode "Lair of Grevious". This episode was had a much darker tone compared to others, with the very nasty fight with Grevious that has the Jedi chopping his legs off, while he crawls on the celling, a Clone Trooper getting INCINERATED in a lava pit (Ala Temple of Doom) and Grevious' horrifying "Pet" which mauls another Clone Trooper to death.
    • Fairly new, but in the 'Cargo of Doom' episode from Season 2, there's a scene where Cad Bane tortures a Jedi using electricity. The entire sequence: Bane's coldness, the Jedi's death -complete with tongue sticking out-... and what really sealed it was the emotionless Battle Droids. That was pure nightmare fuel for this 22 year-old troper.
      • There's also this "vision"that Anakin has of his future. Brr.
      • I'm actually going to go out and say this is actually scarier then his transformation into Darth Vader, and this vision was about him becoming Darth Vader.
  • The Arthur imagination/dream sequences (you know what I'm talking about), while probably innocuous enough, both scare and scar me to this day. They were probably designed to demonstrate the horrible and overactive imaginations of young children. And they worked. Really, really well.
    • The episode where Arthur and Francine get stuck in the library never fails to give me nightmares, even to this day.
    • The loads of Furry Confusion can also be scary if you look at it.
    • The episode where D.W.'s parakeet dies. The dead bird just looks so... DISGUSTING. I shudder to think of it even to this day.
    • The one where DW insults Arthur and he melts (in a dream) scared my brother so bad he couldn't watch that episode for years.
  • This Troper has very vague, yet haunting recollections of a Russian (Soviet?) children's cartoon wherein the bad guy's arms and legs were chopped off at the climax of a chase scene (?). He survived, but was then wrapped up in a sheet of some sorts, fell into a nest and was "adopted" by a large bird as a "baby".
    • That sounds like Radiohead's music video for Paranoid Android, five minutes of some of the worst Nightmare Fuel I have ever seen in my life. shudder
  • Tutenstein. Just... Tutenstein. I know use of X Just X is frowned upon, but the fact is that it's pretty much Exactly What It Says On The Tin - zombie King Tut, which is an inherently morbid concept. Should I even go on? It's about a fictionalized, even younger version of King Tutankhamen, who has risen from the dead as a mummy. He's kind of Ugly Cute, but the fact is, he's an Undead Child, constituting a protracted, incomplete Double Subversion of Infant Immortality. The poor thing is effectively ten years old but Really Seven Hundred Years Old and his body parts sometimes fall off, and actually really scary-looking. And if one is Genre Savvy, one will realize that Undeath Always Ends, which you'd think would count as a Mercy Kill. It's all just... very creepy and morbid. And if you still doubt it's Nightmare Fuel, it did in any case give me nightmares. When I was about fifteen.
  • An episode of some claymation show featured a variation of The Frog Prince. The princess kissed the frog and he turned into a prince. She kissed him again and he fell apart into chunks of clay. She pieces him back together very badly as in piles the chunks together and kisses him...it again and it turns into something else. Of course, given that this troper lives in an Asian country that plays Japanese shows more than half the time on the television, this could be in the wrong section.
  • The new Green Lantern: First Flight film features a surprising amount of nightmare fuel for an hour-long movie. Spoiler tagged since it just got out. First there's Sinestro torturing an alien woman by repeatedly forcing her to use some sort of drug orb. Then there's the chase through hyperspace where several Green Lanterns are vaporized when they hit the edges of the tunnel. Next an alien gets sucked into space through a hole in his ship the size of a basketball (they show it, too, and it isn't pretty). Then Kanjar Ro has his midsection blown out by Sinestro, and if that weren't bad enough they make a point of showing the hole in more detail later. After Sinestro predictably turns evil, he vaporizes a ton of Green Lanterns. They almost avert the nightmare fuel when the Guardians save the airborne and suddenly powerless Lanterns from a sudden meeting with the ground, only to blindside you when it starts raining rings from all the Green Lanterns caught in space without life support (Sinestro makes this perfectly clear). For a superhero movie, they managed to stuff a lot of disturbing stuff in.
  • For some reason he could never understand, this troper was terrified of the coin-operated robot in the Wallace and Gromit short "A Grand Day Out". By the end, when the robot is pounding on the duo's spaceship, trying to get in, he screamed and ran from the room. Nowadays, he finds the robot (and its wish to go skiing) hilarious, but still...
  • The episode of The Magic School Bus where the kids think Ms. Frizzle is a vampire and she wants to eat/convert their parents, particularly the ending segment when a creepy shadow that turns out to be Liz is stalking the Producer through the castle. Also, the sound episode, because the "music" itself is rather scary-sounding and the kids are getting separated from each other inside of a very strange house.
    • Also on The Magic School Bus, Arnold takes off his space helmet on Pluto and his head freezes solid. Although he escapes the very bad scenario with a cold, I knew what would really happen...
      • Another episode that frightened this troper is the one about the immune system, particularily when the Bus is attacked by antibodies. Also the microorganisms themselves are a little creepy-looking...
      • At the end of the haunted house episode, when the Producer is doing his usual "What you saw in this episode vs reality" bit, the last complaint the caller has is "There's no such thing as a ghost.", to which the Producer responds "I wouldn't be so sure about that..." and then his swivel chair spins around to reveal that THERE IS NOBODY THERE. This troper couldn't stand to watch that episode at night.
      • And don't forget the episode where everyone is at Wanda's house, and they got shrunk and have to escape only to find that Wanda's mother put an alligator in the bathtub! When Wanda almost falls into the tub... *Shudders*
  • The "The Dawn Is Your Enemy" card at the end of Adult Swim. The creepy music makes it even worse.
  • This troper is surprised that the Bold King Cole episode of Felix The Cat hasn't been mentioned yet. There's a large ugly fat guy, who never shuts up. It pisses off ghosts living in the hundreds of paintings in the walls. So they jump out of the paintings and grab him, sing the creepy ear worm "You talk too much, you talk too much, you never shut up, you talk to much" as they take him into the castle's torture chamber. Then they strap him to a table, stick a breath mask on him, and they make this diabolical machine with two iron balls pound the "air" out of his stomach. Then they force him to listen to himself as torture.
    • This troper could have sworn she did, since it scared the ever-loving bejeebus out of her when she was a kid. The audio is such bad quality, as is the case with a lot of old cartoons, that she couldn't make out the lyrics to the song and thus had no idea what the moral of the cartoon was. It was just a confusing mess of creepy, squicky torture. See it yourself here.
    • Obviously not as bad as that one was the first, original episode, in which Felix is named Tom. He kills himself at the end. By putting a gas pipe in his mouth. Even worse, think about this. It was shown in movie theatres. Damn, Felix.
  • This troper was very, very unnerved by Owlman in The Secret Saturdays episode "The Owlman Feeds at Midnight". Hell, that entire episode was chock full of Nightmare Fuel, from the brainwashed cultists to Owlman's nest full of human skulls and bones.
    • This troper was a little disturbed by the thought of what happened to Zak and Komodo Monday, after Zak Saturday trapped them back in their alternate-dimension world. Considering how much the Mondays like revenge, and how mad the other Mondays must be at Zak and Komodo Monday...well...
  • As a series with a base in monster-fuelled horror, Mighty Max had lots of nightmare fuel to go around. Many of the episodes opened with some poor person dying at the hands (or whatever) of the episode's monster- for example, the very third episode, the first to use this, opens with some nameless, terrified kid, struggling against his bonds on a sacrificial altar as Faceless Mooks, revealed later to be giant snakes in cloaks, bow and dance all around him, before a Gory Discretion Shot pulls to an opening in the roof through which the moonlight is shining as the kid gives an agonized scream, accompanied by a horrific sizzling sound. The monsters themselves could be rather frightening, such as a Hive Mind of grotesque parasites that took over human bodies and multiplied faster the more victims were around, or the undead eyeball of the Cyclops.
    • One of the most memorable was "Spike", an evil, hulking, Implacable Man of a Blood Knight with Super Strength who scared Norman (a good Blood Knight who was himself Made Of Iron and possessed of Super Strength) spitless. We were shown that this was because Spike attacked Norman's village when Norman was a kid, murdered his father, and would have killed Norman himself if he hadn't tripped and fallen off the cliff. He survived ten thousand years frozen in ice, then broke free and came after Norman again. Oh, and his face was stuck full of branches from when he was knocked off his feet and fell face-first onto a tangle of upraised branches- not only did this not slow him down, he snapped one branch in half and drove the loosened half up his nose until it was wedged there to prove his point that it didn't hurt. Watch his episode here.
    • Let's not forget the Body Horror Corpus (which, literally, means "Body"), a giant chemical blob that assimilated human beings. While the episode thankfully showed it from afar most of the time, whenever the camera went in close, you could see it was actually comprised of dozens of human beings melting into one grotesque whole.
    • For those with coulrophobia, "Clown Without Pity" must have been the scariest episode of all. Not only is Freako the Clown a born Monster Clown, his Circus Of Fear is staffed with hideous mutants and freaks... all of which were children changed into their grotesque new forms by his magic.
    • This troper is arachnophobic, so you can imagine her joy when the Series Finale implied Norman, of all people, was horribly killed by a Giant Spider. If even he couldn't deal with such a monster, how would a little girl be able to hold up...?
    • Don't forget about the episode with the vampire/fly lady who shot acid out of her tongue and her basement was filled with bloodsucking maggots.
  • British puppet show The Magic House was another strange mixture of this trope and Tastes Like Diabetes sweetness. While the show was generally tooth-rottingly saccharine, the characters, living household objects like a teapot and a kettle, looked quite unnerving, with their rubbery faces, large unblinking eyes and permanent smiles.
  • The Trap Door is quite the supplier of this trope, but what do you expect from a claymation show set in a Haunted Castle, which revolves around the Monster Of The Week?
    • 'Don't Let The Bed Bugs Bite' had a Nightmare Sequence, where protagonist Berk had to go down the titular trap door to rescue his friend Boni. Berk ends up surrounded by an array of monsters, while Boni moans helplessly for his friend in the distance.
    • In 'Nasty Stuff', Berk created a potion that kept turning him and his friends into frightening beasts. Boni's form at the end is especially creepy.
    • In 'Boo!', Berk ended up being haunted by several multicolour ghouls who rose from the walls and screamed at Berk, all to stop him dumping rubbish down the trap door.
    • What list of Trap Door Nightmare Fuel would be complete without mentioning the Splund from the episode of the same name? This creature is what this trope is made of, with a voice that sounds like that of Satan himself, his habit of licking the air like a lizard, and one of the most fucked up laughs ever. Fortuneately, the way he was defeated was a Crowning Moment Of Funny.
    • 'The Big Red Thing' ends with the titular monster about to attack Berk and friends, with its roar echoing over the end titles. The fact this was the last episode almost made you worry about the poor blue blob.
  • Go take a look at Candle Jack from Freakazoid. Then come tell me he isn't sc
    • Oh yeah, he's really scary. Just don't say his name, you know what happens if you do.
  • In Ben10, there can be quite a bit of Nightmare Fuel, ranging from the Transformation Trauma (Not Ben's, those are actually kind of cool), and Vilgax, but the most Nightmare inducing creature on Ben 10 has to be Ghostfreak, in the first season, he's one of Ben's forms, but when Ben used Ghostfreak, he became more sadistic (Most cases, anyway), but in the second season, he escaped from the watch, and then tore off what was previously his flesh, in order to appear in a form that not even The Ghostbusters would want to screw around with, he also possesses people fairly often, giving them cracks on the eyes, and he's got an entire force consisting of an Alien Wolf, Frankenstein, and Mummy.
    • And Zombozo, dear god Zombozo, he was a zombie vampire clown that fed off the laughter of children until they've shriveled up, and when Ghostfreak killed him, he explodes into confetti.
    • And top it off, he's voiced by John Kassir, known for being the voice of the Crypt Keeper.
  • ''The Killing Of An Egg'', an animated short that was occasionally aired between shows on Nickelodeon. A fat bald man sits down to eat an egg, and as he taps on it with a spoon, a tiny voice keeps shouting "hey-a who is it?". Then he eventually crushes the top of the egg, as the little voice screams. However the man himself starts hearing knocking sounds outside, as someone is destroying his house from the outside in presumably the same manner. It's really the animation style that edges it from "darkly comic" to nightmare fuel.
  • The episode of Captain N The Game Master that took place in Kevin's body. My god, that was nasty. First off, Kevin is dying of some disease that exists only in Videoland, not the real world, so his body can't fight it. That's pretty disturbing in itself to someone who doesn't like Medical Horror, not to mention the fact that Kevin could easily die from a simple everyday (to Videoland citizens) virus, but now his friends have to shrink down and enter his body. Not surprisingly, his organs are portrayed as grotesquely as possible. Inside Kevin's stomach, his stomach acid proves to be a threat to everyone, and they have to escape. Oh yeah, and did I mention the villain, who is inside his body intentionally causing him to slowly die, who rides around in a vehicle that itself resembles organs? Or the "spirit" of Kevin, strapped to a table inside his heart, slowly dying? Seriously, this is some messed-up stuff to show a little kid! My 9 year old self wants revenge on whoever wrote this episode.
    • Here you go, watch this and experience the terror for yourself.
  • Where does Inspector Gadget keep all those gadgets?
  • Sally Cruikshank's cartoons often qualify for this trope, together with Mind Screw. "Don't Go In the Basement" isn't quite as bad as it sounds, but "Quasi at the Quackadero" is deeply unsettling, especially when a cow, pig and chicken look into a mirror that shows the future and shows them as hamburgers and hot dogs. Not to mention the title character's And I Must Scream fate.
  • The Garfield episode where he goes on an eating binge and gets so big he crashes through the roof of the house. Also that episode where Garfield and John swap bodies.
  • The Perils Of Penelope Pitstop has plenty of dangerous situations, as the title suggests (specifically, Death Trap after Death Trap). It's always Played For Laughs, which sufficiently defuses things most of the time. But in the show's animation style, the titular character’s eyes are illustrated as smallish black ovals with huge whites, making her seem not quite like a living human. Eep.
  • The episode "DW's Name Game" from Arthur features a scene where the title character MELTS after hearing the ultimate insult. Never mind the fact that it was all just a dream, this troper's then-4-year-old brother was so frightened that he refused to watch any episode of Arthur for months.
  • In one Hokey Wolf segment of The Huckleberry Hound Show, a witch tries boiling cute little Ding-A-Ling Wolf alive in a cauldron.
  • Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go hasn't been mentioned yet?! As just one example of one episode, there is a secret society worshiping the bad guy who you can see the organs of, and two of it's main members are a sweet couple who had been around for 4 seasons before this came up. Don't get me on Valina or Wonder Fun Meat World.
    • Oh yes Wonder Fun Meat World. Their strange meat causes odd rashes and is addictive. Then they're mascot is really a Cosmic Horror who eats humans and can stand up to the Super Robot.
    • The Skeleton King, I promise you, The Skeleton King, he can be really scary sometimes, usually when he's mistreating his servants.
  • For a bona fide Dead Baby Comedy, Family Guy doesn't have too much in the way of Nightmare Fuel. One of the few exceptions is when Stewie produces some crudely made clones to serve as his and Bryan's servants. First off, the clones have slightly misshapen faces and talk as though mentally disabled. But the real Nightmare Fuel comes when Bryan's jaw pops off. Stewie notes that the clones have only a given amount of time left before his clone strolls into the room with an eye dangling out of the socket. Then all of a sudden they disintegrate into puddles of pink slime, with quick Raiders of the Lost Ark-style shots of their flesh melting off their skulls.
    • You're forgetting the scene in Miley Cyrus episode where Peter falls into Chris' log trap and gets his head smashed in between two logs, blood spurting and everything. Next scene is Peter sitting at the table with his head still mangled.
    • And the post-apocalyptic episode where Stewie mutates into a head with octopus arms, then lays a bajillion eggs, which hatch into MORE Stewie heads with octopus arms, that take over the town.
    • This Troper has a fear of sharp objects, and still can't watch the beginning of Stewie beating Bryan in "Patriot Games", when he smashes a glass on Bryan's head, leaving shards of glass sticking out (some very near his eyes).
    • And then in the episode "Stewie Kills Lois," Stewie starts mocking Brian while slowly tilting his head to one side. And it just doesn't stop... His head keeps on slowly rotating until it's turned a complete ninety degrees, and all the while he keeps that same creepy smile and voice. Sure, it's Played For Laughs, but it doesn't stop it from positively disturbing.
  • The episode of Big Guy And Rusty The Boy Robot where a "fusing" ray strikes Rusty's gradeschool teacher against the wall, fusing her into it so she looks like a distorted—and completely inanimate—life-size wall plaque, arms splayed to the side in terror. Presumably she got better. This Troper clicked away quickly.
  • The King Of The Hill episode The Man Who Shot Cane Skretteberg has Hank experience a very disturbing nightmare sequence where he, Dale, Bill and Boomhauer are, one by one, getting hunted down by giant versions of the antagonists for the episode. Nighmare fuel by it's self, but it gets worse when we see a giant crowd of people, including Bobby, with thier faces getting all freaky like.
  • This troper saw the old cartoon Balloon Land at around age 6, and was absolutely terrified of the "Pin-Cushion Man", who would murder the happy balloon-citizens for no reason. Fortunately, Tom Servo managed to turn him into Nightmare Retardant when he (the Pin-Cushion Man) appeared in one of the episodes.
  • Avenger Penguins featured an in-universe example of Nightmare Fuel when the villain Caractacus P Doom created a machine that turned the penguins' dreams into nightmares. Some of these nightmares were quite unnerving too, like when Bluey's innocent Star Trek inspired dream gets invaded by 'Bad Shapes', warped aliens that make people look as deranged as they are.
    • Then there's 'Surprise Fate', where Doom springs an insane woman called 'Annabel the Animal', who eats anything black and white. He not only wanted her to eat the titular penguins, but to videotape it so he can watch the penguins get devoured over and over again. The fact that the latter part of the episode spoofs Psycho doesn't help matters either.
  • The mammals in the fridge in Dinosaurs. Please tell me I'm not the only one. They horrified me as a child. I wouldn't even listen to their song on the "Dinosaurs Big Songs" album.

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