History NightmareFuel / Animorphs

* The TV series gives us such gems such as Marco attempting to morph into a rat for his first time, and getting stuck halfway, resulting in [[http://i.imgur.com/7I2aC77.png this.]]
* ''Animorphs'' gave us the nightmarish puppetmaster Yeerks, the Taxxons, insane-with-hunger giant centipedes (who are also cannibals and will eat themselves if they are injured/hungry enough—and they're always hungry), and the Hork-Bajir, benign but enslaved bladed lizard men (who started out as mooks but turned out to be really sympathetic), as well as [[PainfulTransformation morphing]] in general and the terror at getting stuck in animal form—or, worse, between forms—in particular.
** In one book, we get to see how a Taxxon thinks—which is basically a never-ending, overwhelming sense of fear of starvation. Oh, and Tobias attempts to ''eat'' his friends while in this morph. Not fun.
** In the same book, there's also the sheer claustrophobia and single-mindedness. It's like you can never get out. Way to drive home the hopelessness of the Taxxons' situation.
** And then we realize that there are some Andalites ''who got stuck that way''. Forever. Arbron, at least.

* Remember that fight scene where Marco's bone breaks through his skin? Or the one where Jake struggles with smashing a Hork-Bajir's head against the wall while his tiger intestines fall out of his body? The only fight that isn't described in explicit detail is the one where Visser Three ''eats Elfangor alive''. Because hey, this is a kids' series, after all.
** The fights got more graphic after the first couple books. It's as though the author wanted to censor out the worst of it, then realized that the series was already horrifying to kids anyway.

* Another insect-related example: All the books have fight scenes that are gruesome on various levels, but there's one that takes the cake: ''The Forgotten'', book eleven, has Rachel falling unconscious on top of an ant hill in the Amazon rain forest in bear morph. They then start [[HorrorHunger eating her alive.]] Jake and the others are, of course, horrified when they see this. And when Rachel wakes up and demorphs, she screams the entire time.
* And the fate of [[spoiler:David, the sixth Animorph. He turns against the Animorphs, so the team decides to trap him in rat form and leave him on an island with dozens of other rats. People boating by months later could ''still'' hear him mind-screaming]].
** Not to mention that Rachel and Ax are forced [[spoiler: to wait the two hours with him to make sure he's stuck.]] As Rachel said, you can't block out thought-speak, and she notes that she would hear his screams and pleads and threats every time she fell asleep.
** His environment and how he's forced to adapt to ''eating garbage'' in #48 ''The Return'' are disgusting.
*** The nightmare-within-a-nightmare ordeal endured by Rachel in the same book, though she eventually [[spoiler:figures out it's all a hallucination caused by Crayak]].

** The fate of Saddler, Jake and Rachel's bratty cousin. It's never explicitly stated, but strongly implied that [[spoiler: David put the already suffering boy out of his misery to take his place and [[TearJerker have a family again.]]]]

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** The alternate future Cassie’s description of how the Yeerk raise human kids in “The Familiar”. They warehoused them because they weren’t useful as hosts and made them strong feeding them lots of vitamins and running them on treadmills. They punished them for acting like normal kids. Eesh

** In one particularly terrifying moment, Loren and Elfangor enter an Earth portion of the new dimension and see a [=McDonald's=] that Loren inadvertently created with her memories. Elfangor suggests that Loren get something to eat to recover her strength, so they go inside...and see that the guy behind the counter is a young man whose ''entire face'' is essentially made of pulsating acne, which is described in [[NauseaFuel loving detail]]. It turns out he's based on an actual employee that Loren knows at her own local [=McDonald's=], but since the thing she notices the most about him is his bad skin, the Time Matrix responded in kind. What makes it worse is that Acne-Face is essentially a StepfordSmiler who, despite his horrific skin condition, mindlessly acts like a perfect fast food worker.

* In ''The Andalite Chronicles'', during the Time Matrix sequence, Elfangor and Loren walk into a [[ItMakesSenseInContext Mickey D's]] and see someone who's face is practically ''made of acne!''
** That whole sequence in general--given three conflicting instructions on where to go, the Time Matrix splits the difference by generating an AcidTripDimension that's a mishmash of its users' memories of Earth, the Andalite homeworld, and the Yeerk homeworld.

** The implications of the Yeerk going about your life for you. Have a husband or boyfriend? Do a lot of casual hooking up? Anything in between? Well, your Yeerk is going to go on with it. Which means you don't get to decide when you have sex anymore, or how, or who with.
*** Forget sex. Your body will be forced to kill people, or worse, force another slug into their head. You will betray everyone who ever loved and trusted you. And there's nothing you can do about it.

* In ''The Underground'' it's revealed that Instant Maple & Ginger Oatmeal drives Yeerks insane. The Animorphs' first encounter is when a host throws himself out a window trying to commit suicide. Later on the Animorphs shoot open a barrel of oatmeal in a Yeerk pool, and it's implied the Visser will simply let the thousands of Yeerks affected die.

[[WakeUpGoToSchoolSaveTheWorld Wake up, go to school, save the world...]] [[Literature/{{Animorphs}} by morphing into different animals]] and fighting a violent maniac, [[EliteMooks walking salad shooters]], and [[HorrorHunger giant cannibalistic centipedes.]] WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids Seriously, ''Animorphs'''s motto might as well be, "Scaring small children since 1996."

* In #31, Jake orders Ax to torture Chapman. Ax still is still an adolescent like the other Animorphs. To make it worse, throughout the night he can hear Melissa Chapman crying for her father. It is such a terrible experience that Ax tells Jake will will never do anything like it again, saying <I will gladly fight this Controller and even, in fair battle, kill him, but I am not a torturer.>
** Ax is so furious at Jake for making him do this, that for the first time in the ''entire'' series, Ax coldly refers to him as just "Jake", no prince title.

* A little earlier in ''The Andalite Chronicles'', there's a passage that's not outright nightmare-inducing, but more chilling and sinister: while Elfangor works to clear away the Time Matrix from the rubble, he slowly realizes that their escape from the Taxxons and Yeerks was entirely ''too'' lucky. He then has a flash of insight: the other three people on his ship, who he'd thought were themselves, have been taken over by Yeerks and are waiting to ambush him. He turns out to be right... [[spoiler: One of them is Alloran, who is no longer himself, but now "The Abomination". That's right: Elfangor has created his and the Animorphs' worst enemy through his own actions.]]

-->'''Ax:''' <''In a matter of speaking. [[HorrorHunger One half of it is consuming the other half.]]''>

* A little earlier in ''The Andalite Chronicles'', there's a passage that's not outright nightmare-inducing, but more chilling and sinister: while Elfangor works to clear away the Time Matrix from the rubble, he suddenly realizes that their escape from the Taxxons and Yeerks was entirely ''too'' lucky. He then has a flash of insight: the other three people on his ship, who he'd thought were themselves, have been taken over by Yeerks and are waiting to ambush him. He turns out to be right... [[spoiler: One of them is Alloran, who is no longer himself, but now "The Abomination". That's right: Elfangor has created his and the Animorphs' worst enemy through his own actions.]]

--> Jake's face seemed to open up, to spit open into a complex mess of valves. I think I would have thrown up, seeing that. Except that I, also, had no mouth.
--> Then, suddenly, his stomach exploded. It just exploded outward, guts flying everywhere. Eight huge spider legs appeared, like something in him was trying to crawl out.

* Visser Three. Sure, he's a bad guy and he's an egomaniac. But it gets worse. It gradually becomes clear that his AffablyEvil personality is only a masquerade which does little to hide his psychopathic tendencies. He's a violent nutcase who flips out at little-to-no provocation and will often execute his own subordinates, or ''torture them for weeks'', for no other reason than the fact that he's pissed off, which is pretty much all the time. ''And'' he's got a variety of morphs hand-picked for the fact that they can kill you in the most grotesque ways possible (one of them can shoot acid, for instance). For Christ's sake, the guy has a personal collection of torture instruments from all over the galaxy ''for entertainment''.

* The ending of the last book where [[spoiler:Ax ''[[BodyHorror smiles]]'' at them.]]

** When the Ellimist was talking about the origin of his battle with Crayak, he told the gang that Crayak was expelled from a far-distant galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago by an even more powerful entity. Also much like Sauron.
** The scariest thing about Crayak? His introduction. Jake experiences the Yeerk dying in his brain, and, just like that, is pushed face to face with something so awful, so utterly evil, that it nearly breaks him... with no explanation. None. Ellimist hasn't even shown up yet, and Jake won't know what it is for a very long time. He mentions having awful nightmares about it in ''The Attack''.
* The Howlers [[spoiler: are [[PsychopathicManChild literally children]], and believe their constant mindless killing of other races is actually a game, ''and they enjoy it.'']]

* The One. [[spoiler: Aximili]], of all individuals, being reduced to just another tiny part of an unbelievable being's consciousness is already creepy as all get out, but then there's the mouth...

* Marco exhibits some slightly Machiavellian tendencies, especially in the later books. He often talks about "the straight line". It's a personal philosophy of his; there is a straight line from A to B, the simplest way to do it, ultimate efficiency. Sometimes following this line forces you to do some things that you'd rather not (like kill your family), and thus, you diverge from the line. But the line is still the line, and for that ultimate efficiency, it must be followed through (to the hilt, so to speak). This philosophy led him to [[spoiler:plan in detail—and execute to completion—a plan to throw his own mother off a cliff to kill the alien in her head]]...

* Any time a controller manages to briefly reassert control can come off this way. In #2, Chapman and his wife are nearly ''tearing themselves apart'' trying to fight off the Yeerks to protect Melissa.
* The Yeerks themselves. An alien slug forces its way through your ear canal and wraps itself around your brain—then takes over controlling your body while you are trapped helplessly in your own head.

** One of the worst things seen about the Yeerks really drives home how horrible it would be to be a controller. In the Yeerk pool, the humans whose Yeerks are feeding in the pool are put in cages. Most of them either cry, scream, curse, or rage at the guards, but some just sit there in silence, and wait to be called back, because they have literally lost all hope of ever being free again.
** On occasion, the Yeerks encounter a species that they can't make controllers out of. These species are simply [[FinalSolution enslaved and worked to death]].
* The [[{{HiveMind}} Nesk]], plain and simple. A race of aliens attempting to colonize Earth in the time of the dinosaurs, they are capable of forming into [[WormThatWalks any size and shape by acting in tandem with each other,]] allowing them to operate stolen machinery and wage war with other creatures. WordOfGod said they survive [[NukeEm their cataclysmic defeat at the hands of the Animorphs]] as modern-day ants.

* The animorphs' ages are never specified until near the end of the series. Those violent battles, having their limbs torn off, being forced to kill innocents, watching the people around them being puppetted by alien invaders? They started when they were ''thirteen''.

* The TV Series gives us such gems such as Marco attempting to morph into a rat for his first time, and getting stuck halfway, resulting in [[http://i.imgur.com/7I2aC77.png this.]]

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' gave us the nightmarish puppetmaster Yeerks, the Taxxons, insane-with-hunger giant centipedes (who are also cannibals and will eat themselves if they are injured/hungry enough—and they're always hungry), and the Hork-Bajir, benign but enslaved bladed lizard men (who started out as mooks but turned out to be really sympathetic), as well as [[PainfulTransformation morphing]] in general and the terror at getting stuck in animal form—or, worse, between forms—in particular.

** ...''and Rachel killed Tom.''