Nightmare Fuel / Wreck-It Ralph

For reference, this guy's at least the size of an SUV.

It's not surprising some scary bits are gonna get covered. Why? Well, let's see... it's directed by Rich Moore, it's a Disney movie, and it's about Video Games. Oh, the potential, not to mention one of the most monstrously evil villains in animated film history as the main antagonist.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• The Cy-Bugs in general. How they can adapt to just about anything simply from eating things. Anything. And these guys eat a lot of things. Every time they eat something, start visualising it merging.
  • The merging aspect is perhaps the most horrific part of their biology for the characters who have to deal with them, especially if they eat a sentient being. Nightmare Fuel, And I Must Scream, and Tear Jerker all in one.
  • The way that they swarm and crawl around once they've invaded Sugar Rush is just nasty. If you're an entomophobe, expect to cover your eyes a few times during this film.
  • All those thousands of Cy-bugs you saw in Sugar Rush were bred by one, within one night.
  • The cry the Cy-bugs make when they are killed.
  • The bright colors of the Cy-Bugs that almost overrun Sugar Rush made them look creepier, which is pretty close to real life: Bright colors for some mollusks, arthropods, reptiles, and others usually means they're poisonous.
  • What's also scary about the Cybugs in Sugar Rush is that, yes, they do look like ridiculous candy coated Cute Machines but they are just as violent as the ones in Hero's Duty.
• If you die in any game other than your own, you're gone. Your home game will suddenly be without a major character. If you are the hero or the villain, (i.e. the center of the entire game), that's a quick ticket to "OUT OF ORDER" for the game. Ralph's wanderlust could have doomed his entire home game, especially if he had managed to get himself (or Felix) killed.
  • It's arguably even worse with a minor NPC character. Yes, they won't affect the game in any meaningful way, but imagine if that poor soul had loved ones?
• The whole flashback as Felix describes Turbo's story, especially at the end when the arcades are wheeled out. The angle and music make it look like a funeral march, and considering these arcades are virtually individual worlds with sentient inhabitants, it's very possible it is (depending on if the characters died or escaped).
• Markowski, the soldier from Hero's Duty. After only a week of being plugged in, he's completely shell shocked and petrified out of his wits by the thought of fighting Cy-Bugs. He's walking into walls and reciting a Madness Mantra, the sight of a tiny insect is enough to make him scream in terror. A normal playthrough is clearly hell on Earth for him — and yet that's exactly what he'll be forced to do, over and over and over, until the day his game is unplugged.
  • It's implied that he's programmed to act this way, but if anything, it makes it even worse, since it means he has no choice at all with how he acts.
• The Fungeon, Vanellope's cell, is a Monster Clown-filled Circus of Fear! Complete with "Glitch-Proof" chains and posters on the wall saying "Bad Girl" and "Someone's Been Naughty."
• Sergeant Calhoun's tragic backstory, although it's partially Played for Laughs. Her fiance was eaten by a Cy-Bug at the church on their wedding day because she forgot to do a perimeter check.
  • It gets worse: when Felix accidentally sets her off by calling her a "dynamite gal," she is immediately with flashbacks of all her dates with her fiance. He was trying to be nice but it made her Freak Out.
• Turbo. Just... Turbo. His attitude, his demeanor, and his seriously creepy-looking physical appearance. The gray pale skin, large sunken yellow eyes and teeth make him almost look like a zombie.. He's responsible for destroying two entire worlds, and all because of his ego.
  • The scene where he is attacking Vanellope (by attempting to beat her with a rod), and his true form is revealed. All the closeups of his glitching, screaming face (with pale skin and yellow teeth) are quite intense, and very jarring compared to what King Candy had been like up to this point. Vanellope is pressed up against her seat in sheer terror and who can blame her? It doesn't help that his first line after The Reveal showed he's a lot more than an Attention Whore...
    Vanellope: What the-? Who are you?!
    King Candy/Turbo: I'm Turbo, the greatest racer ever! And I did not reprogram this world to let YOU, and that HALITOSIS RIDDEN WARTHOG TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME!!
    • Him trying to beat Vanellope to death with a car part alone is nightmarish and shows how vulnerable she is to danger before The Reveal.
    • During this breakdown, as his face glitches there is a single frame where he cracks a sadistic Slasher Smile and stares directly at YOU while giving a thumbs up as if to say, "Oh, yeah! It's ME!"
    • ... And right after that line, he flips her car over and tries to ram the poor little girl headfirst into a stalagmite dividing a fork in the road. If you hated smashing into those things then, you really gotta hate them now.
    • Turbo trying to beat Vanellope is even more horrifying considering that they're supposed to be lovable characters in family-friendly racing games. Just imagine the characters from, say, Mario Kart doing this. Thank goodness no child was playing Sugar Rush at the time, because that would probably scar them for life.
    • Ralph and Felix's reaction to seeing Turbo on the large screen. It's been established that they are both well aware of what Turbo did and what kind of person he is. Their horror and shock at seeing that not only did The Dreaded of the arcade survive his game being unplugged all those years ago, but has been hiding under everyone's noses in a game he rewrote is almost palpable. The music does not help!
      Felix: Is that...?
      Ralph: No way!
  • Turbo's appearance as the King Cy-bug. There's also the very idea that he is insane and resolute enough to pull one up on the Cy-bug assimilating him and assimilate IT instead. As he said, his new form is unstoppable and he can take over any and all games as he wants.
    King Cy-Bug: Because of you, Ralph, I'm now the most powerful virus in the Arcade! Ahahahaha! I can take over any game I want! I should thank you... Buuuut it'd be more fun to kill you. HAHAHA!
  • "Let's watch her die together, shall we?" This is probably the most nightmare-inducing line in the entire movie. Think about it: Ralph has known Vanellope for not even two days, and she's like a little sister to him. And now Ralph is being held hundreds of feet in the air by a monstrous King Candy/Cy-bug hybrid and forced to watch one of the only real friends he's ever had get eaten alive by an army of Cybugs.
    • To give an idea of just how terrifying that line is, a Cracked.com article argues that the plot of Wreck-It Ralph shares many similarities to the movie Taxi Driver... and uses that line as proof that the animated kid's movie is actually the darker of the two.
      After all, Taxi Driver doesn't include a scene in which a helpless, panicking little girl is about to be eaten by giant insects while the villain grabs the hero by the hair and forces him to watch, saying, "Let's watch her die together, shall we?" We're trying to imagine Scorsese going over that scene with the Taxi Driver cast, and Harvey Keitel saying, "Jesus, Marty, can we change that? This shit will give people nightmares."
  • Turbo's death by incineration is bad enough, but when he finally dies, notice how he does not stop screaming in fear until he is completely gone. The fact that he knows he is flying straight into the boiling Coke geyser and is helpless to stop himself from doing so doesn't help.
    Turbo/King Candy: Go into the liiiiiiiaaaaaaahhhhh—

• King Candy's Imagine Spot of Sugar Rush being unplugged. Because Vanellope's a glitch, she wouldn't be able to escape with the rest of the characters, and he imagines her pounding on the barrier keeping her in the game, screaming in terror as Sugar Rush collapses around her.
  • Not to mention that exact scenario almost happened scene for scene (too close for comfort).
  • It also demonstrates how damn aware King Candy is of the morbid situations he creates for other video game characters for the sake of his own self obsession, especially with how dark and thorough the whole Imagine Spot is and how King Candy indirectly details the repercussions of all his past actions with fake concern he knew to be expected from a good guy; he even knows what the term "going Turbo" means, meaning that he's very well aware of what the consequences his actions cause and how everyone sees his past alias for what it really is. Add to that how gleefully sadistic and murderous a bastard Turbo proves to be towards characters that try to steal his spotlight, it suggests he wasn't just apathetic to dooming other game characters to deletion in his actions: he outright took cruel enjoyment thinking about it.
• Although this scene is unanmiously considered to be a massive Tearjerker, but Ralph smashing Vanellope's kart into pieces can actually double as Nightmare Fuel. Think about it: Vanellope can clearly see Ralph using his brute strength and menacing posture to crush the kart, which would definitely be severely unsettling and horrific for any kid to watch (it's comparable to seeing a masked burglar attempting to break into your home). And not only that, Ralph is showing off the very job he had been doing as the bad guy for the past 30 years right in front of Vanellope's very eyes, which she wasn't familiar with whatsoever.
• The flashback of Turbo invading the usurping racing game. Note that unlike his Sugar Rush invasion where he pragmatically disguises himself to function in the game, here he just spazzes the game, distracting the players and (accidentally) glitching the racers. It's unknown if the characters in Road Blasters died or not from this. It's even creepier after getting a video game perspective of Turbo doing the exact same thing to Vanellope as he did the racer.
• A more subtle case but the flashback of King Candy in the Sugar Rush code banks getting rid of Vanelope's data. Basically the bastard has located the equivelent to a kid's life support and is just viciously ripping out its wires and trying to throw it away, Slasher Smile and all. It's the first onscreen sign how unfettered he is against someone who takes his spotlight, especially since Sour Bill makes clear he was trying to delete, ie. kill her by doing such.
• The movie puts unsettling emphasis on characters whose psyches are completely wracked from being stuck as a (usually) unchangeable program in a video game. It's creepy how vindictive or bitter some get towards other characters simply for being other bits of the program at their expense (Gene for example, obsessively getting Ralph ostracised by everyone in Fix-It-Felix, out of petty spite for simply being the part programmed to throw him off the level building every game) while other characters such as Turbo just seem to completely and utterly lose their mind and even find ways to reprogram and destroy the game, in a way of rebelling against the creators.