Nightmare Fuel / American Dragon: Jake Long

"The worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself."

The Magical World is not all Fairies and Unicorns, even for a heroic Dragon...

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• The Nyx. Imagine being a relatively normal girl, but every night when the moon reaches the center of the sky, you uncontrollably turn into a winged, snake-like monster with an insatiable hunger for souls.
• The Kelpie.
  • It’s the #2 Threat to the Magical Community for a reason. Once it bites its target, it slowly drains their essence, absorbing their powers, and leaves only a lifeless husk as it kills and replaces them to get close to even more victims. So, basically, it's a Serial Killer. Who's targeting the teenage protagonist. And it almost gets Lao Shi.
  • Just the way the Kelpie’s feasting is described is chilling:
    Silver: He (the Kelpie) won't actually eat you. He'll just slowly drain your essence with his icy cold bite, sending your soul into eternal darkness, and leaving your lifeless husk of a body behind.
  • The Kelpie's shriek. It's like the roar of a wild animal and the scream of a young child overlapping one another...
• Yang Jake in "The Doppelgänger Gang". He was easily able to overpower Jake due to him being weakened by making so many doppelgängers at once. And when Jake tried to reabsorb the other doppelgängers, Yang Jake beat him to it, then set his sights on absorbing Jake himself to take control. And he almost succeeded. Who knew Dante Basco could be so terrifying? Also... those eyes...
  • The scene in which Yang Jake reveals his intentions for Jake can be seen as pretty creepy. Yang Jake slinks into the room on all fours and then shoots up to tower over both Jake and Fu Dog, coming off almost like a predatory animal.
    Yang Jake: There's still one Jake I need to reabsorb.
    Jake: And what Jake would that be?
    Yang Jake: The original.
  • Just the atmosphere of the final battle of that episode in general. It happens on an abandoned carousel that just suddenly turns on, complete with Creepy Circus Music.
• As deserved as it was, the destruction of the Huntsclan, where all members are hoisted into the air, kicking and screaming, by their glowing Birthmarks of Destiny and zapped out of existence. It could almost be considered merciful that The Huntsman himself was unconscious when meeting the same fate.
• Jake’s dream in “Half-Baked” is pretty scary, grim, foreboding and quite terrifying, as it starts out with a serene scene alongside Lao Shi and Fu Dog. But then it turns nightmarish and unnerving, branches trying to capture Jake as he follows Rose through the dream version central park as the whole scenery turns progressively darker.
  • The Krylock Demon from the same episode is bad enough all on its own, but its venom truly takes the cake. If it’s injected directly into a body, the result is almost instantaneous death, and that is the pleasant effect. When consumed, the venom instead mutates the victim and turns them into human-Krylock hybrids which become so savage that they will attack anyone, including relatives, with stinger tail, scorpion claws, xenomorph tongues or acid-spit.
    • Imagine a parent that ate one of those venom-laced muffins in a car with their children.
    • The rabid Krylock-clown hybrids were in a tent filled with children. ‘Nuff said.
    • Brad was almost eaten by one that he was planning to kiss (the fact that Brad's into it and asks if he has to pay extra for being in its/her mouth afterwards is a count of nightmare fuel all on its own). Him not getting dissolved by the acid spit is a miracle.
• The way the Avimetrus dies onscreen in “Young at Heart” is gruesome, continually sucking its own youth and then turn from young and healthy into old and decrepit over and over before it explodes, covering Jake and Haley in its guts. Doubles as dodging the radar for graphic death.
• The "Bite Father, Bite Son" episode has three Strigoi Vampires advancing on Jake in his Dragon Form, which is scary in itself. That they proceed to weaken him and then beat him up is worse, and then continue to do it when Jake reverts to human form.
• "The Academy" gives the audience the Octo-puss, a cute little adorable kitten one moment, the next it is a ferocious, at least 15 feet tall octopus-cat hybrid with a Sarlac mouth and tentacles that wants to eat people.
• The Huntsclan’s activities are a veritable factory of this and loads of Paranoia Fuel. Their murderous tendencies and genocidal aspirations aside, their other activities are downright creepy. They have eavesdropped on peoples’ phone calls since at least the 80’s, have people stationed in hospitals to acquire new members from amongst the newborn children whom they yank of their parent's arms and have bases spread across the globe, filled to the brim with weapons. It's deeply disconcerting to think of how much they knew about regular people, how much hurt they caused and could potentially cause on a global scale.
  • The Huntsclan Academy. Simply arriving to the school says it all: Students are forced through a training scenario which not only includes the danger of being torn apart by animals, flamethrowers and a Drill Sergeant Nasty that uses a whip and verbal smackdowns to drive the students through the obstacle course, all while the new students are to recite the purpose of the Huntsclan: Destroy all magical creatures. The academy has a large arena for watching any misbehaving students fight a Kraken, most likely to the death. And then there is the students themselves, an army of tykebombs whom consider casual socializing to a be discussion on how best to remove dragonblood from clothes, while more serious stuff like infighting amongst the students can break out over anything from who to take to the prom to rumors (with the teachers as collateral damage). The chances of multiple deaths of students suddenly seem mind-blowingly high.
• What if the gorgons had decided to bide their time in Furious Jealousy and Jake had kept getting bigger? He barely won with help as it is, imagine if he was even fatter.
  • Not to mention this is one of the few villains who was able to not only defeat Jake, but his grandfather as well by turning them to stone! If his friends hadn't been able to defeat the gorgons, the heroes of this show would be stone statues.
• Sara, the chipper half of the Seer Twins, can often come off as creepy due to her powers showing her nothing but awful events to happen in the future, which she copes with by being as cheerful as possible. The bigger issue is she has no problem revealing terrible things to others in a cheerful tone. Such as the following:
  Sara: Hi, you're cute. Wanna know the exact time and day you're gonna die?
  Sara: I just get visions; horrible, disturbing visions that haunt my every waking moment. Not to mention my nightmares.
• According to Word of God, the creators planned to have Technical Pacifist Dragon and Cool Teacher Sun Park fight on top of a volcano with Rose in the episode Homecoming, which would have resulted in Sun's death at Rose's hands, however the scene was cut for being too dark. Considering how dark the series could already get, one could only shudder at how dark the death scene of one of the series' most kindest characters might have been for the creators to deem it excessive.
• Rose's state during "The Love Cruise" after Jake shot her with Cupid's arrow. She knows all of Jakes secrets at this point and is capable of exploiting them, if she'd decided to lay low and avoid detection, she could've done more damage to his family and the magical community, than only slaying him.
• It's subtle and easy to miss, but in "Act 4, Scene 15", Spud is on his laptop, helping Jake find the Huntsclan's tomb. He then tells Jake he found something on an urban myth website; a photographer went into a cave on the outer edge of Central Park, and was never seen again. All that was found was his camera… with a photo of the Huntsclan insignia on it. It's strongly implied that the Huntsclan murdered this poor man who was unlucky enough to stumble upon their tomb, just to keep it hidden.
• In "Being Human", Chang manages to corner Jake while he's preparing for graduation and is completely alone. This would be unsettling enough normally but Jake happens to have lost his powers at that moment, which he realizes in a moment of sheer terror right before being spirited away by Chang.