"Too late".
With all the demons and monsters running around there is quite a lot of things (some of them straight out of the Bible) to terrify the viewer.Warning: Spoilers Off applies to this page. Proceed at your own risk.
Season 1
- Duke Hastur, while bumbling a lot of the time, can be genuinely terrifying. Unlike Crowley, he's perfectly willing to hurt people permanently for petty reasons, like when he burns the Satanic convent down just to send the message that the Order is dissolved.
- Special mention to the telemarketer scammers, where he terrifies the woman who set him free over the phone (addressing her by name, despite the fact that she hadn't introduced herself, and noting that he really should thank her and alllll her friends) before emerging as a swarm of maggots from her electronics and mouth that fills the entire office and reduces the workers to bare skeletons. That their deaths (and the deaths of those on the highway) are implied to be undone doesn't even lessen the sheer horror.
- War's Establishing Character Moment: walking into a peace agreement between three opposing factions, subtly sparking off discord, and walking out as everyone attending kills each other.
- All the Horsemen, bar Death, fit this, each being a personification of evil. Death is only partially this because he is part of the natural order and not man-made. He is just doing his job, no more and no less. That doesn't make him any less terrifying.
- Even the absurdity of the situation can't keep Crowley yelling at and then removing a defective plant from being quite chilling, with David Tennant seeming to slip back into Kilgrave mode.
- Adam briefly going full-on Reality Warper, including taking away his friends' mouths and contorting their faces into smiles while they're still clearly terrified of what he's doing. The scene where Pepper – until now fiery and unshakable – starts voicelessly crying while desperately pointing to her erased mouth is particularly harrowing.
- It's subtle, but any moment where Gabriel's pleasant-if-smug veneer drops and the power-hungry shark that lies beneath shines through. Major props to Jon Hamm.
- Ligur's death by holy water. Okay, Hastur's shrieking adds an edge of Black Comedy, but melting into oblivion — fully conscious throughout the process! — does not look like a nice way to go. No wonder Aziraphale was so terrified of this fate befalling his friend.
- The M25 being consumed by hellfire is genuinely scary, as unlike in the book we get to see it from the perspective of a young couple who are trapped in their car by the traffic jam- the man gets out to take a leak, only to start chanting "Hail the Beast, devourer of worlds", a chant which is taken up by everyone else in the thousands of cars trapped on the motorway as it erupts into hellfire beneath them.
Season 2
- On the Realism-Induced Horror side of things, Lindsay's texts to Nina, if you pause to read them all, are genuinely pretty upsetting, full of manipulation and guilt-tripping. This, combined with Nina's other comments about the relationship (including saying at one point that she doesn't think Lindsay even actually likes her), imply it might be emotionally abusive. At the very least, it's unhealthy and toxic, to the point that when Lindsay dumps Nina, it's a relief.
- Hell's punishment for Nazis: their heads are placed on the body of a fly and then fed to a Giant Spider. After passing through the spider's digestive system and being excreted, they're reconstituted into a fly and the whole process repeats itself. The harsh, jerky animation Furfur uses to explain this to the group of Nazi spies is also very creepy.Female Nazi: For how long?
Furfur: Let me check for you. (flips through a notebook) Eternity.- How do the Nazis return to Earth? As classic, brain-eating zombies. While it sounds goofy, the reality is rather creepy.
- The Archangels' planned Armageddon 2.0, which from the looks of it seems to be finishing what the Horsemen were trying to do by starting a nuclear sequel and setting Earth ablaze. The serenity of all the angels as they discuss planetary genocide as the path to paradise, ending with "Amen" shows how they're just as bad as the demons.
- In the season finale Gabriel's memory is restored by him letting the "container" fly crawl directly into his pupil.
