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The Japanese don't hold a complete monopoly on mind-warping animated horror...

Just because you can watch cartoons for grown-ups or kid's cartoons unsuitable for children doesn't mean you won't get scared.

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Please do not simply add a link to a video of a scene you found scary. Try to describe what goes on in the scene too. Film and TV examples also need to be separated.

  • The mini-adaptation of The Mysterious Stranger in The Adventures of Mark Twain is known for being one of the creepiest things ever put to film. A meaningful, accurate adaptation? Yes... and it will haunt your nightmares.
    • Some cable network airings of the movie edited this segment out altogether.
  • The high points of the 1939 short Peace on Earth.
  • And then Hanna-Barbera did a Nuclear version, Good Will To Men in the 50s.
    • Thankfully, that one seems to have taken... and please, dear God, do not let that statement have Hilarious in Hindsight become attached!
  • Wonder Showzen is really scary. From the initial warning that this show isn't some happy little Sesame Streetwith horror movie trailer music/screaming in the background, to its creepy little opening involving footage of someone chucking knives at a little girl and creepy, jerky animation with pictures of nuclear explosions among other things. And don't even try and ask about the sketches (which is even more disturbing since these are real children between the ages of 5-8 saying and doing some of the stuff that's on this show)...
    • In one scene, they torched an actual beetle and showed its death throes.
    • There was an episode where, for no reason, they showed a time lapse shot of a dead fox decomposing.
  • Xavier: Renegade Angel has its fair share of disturbing moments
    • Suring "Signs from Godrilla" when Xavier comes to a small town where the inhabitants rush over to him, cheering and lifting him up into the air like they're happy to see him...just before suddenly eating him alive.
    • "Sand Madness". While walking through the desert, he comes across a freakish mollusk-thing MADE ENTIRELY OF TV STATIC which raspily calls out "Feeed meee..." Xavier's response? TEAR OFF HIS OWN FACE and give it to the mollusk, whose model promptly adopts the skin of his face. Its return at the end becomes ever worse, whereupon Xavier opts NOT to feed his face to it, only for it to turn towards the viewers and call out "Will yooouu feeed meeee?" As the camera zooms in until the only thing left on your TV is just static. * shudder*
    • In season 2's "Damnesia Vu," Xavier is trapped in a limbo dimension that leads to a various number of parallel worlds - where he keeps dying in grotesque and disturbing ways (i.e. vaporized by a child molesting Transformer, eaten by a monitor lizard, becoming a sun god and committing "sacricide"...)
  • The opening Earthshattering Kaboom in Titan A.E.. It's not so much the explosion itself as it is the fact that so many people were left behind on Earth that is scary.
  • Fantastic Planet. A race of giant aliens (Draags) keep humans (Oms) as pets in a trippy alien world straight out of a Salvador Dali painting with melting poisonous blobs and Everything Trying to Kill You. The worst was the shrieking Om-eater...
  • They dumped her body into the molten light...
    • These two men go into a woman's house while she's sleeping and kill her, take her heart, and dump her body into a pit. The woman comes back for revenge, swearing to kill them both. The two men try and hide from her, but they are told it is useless. The woman, who is now a giant abomination from the pits of hell, does indeed track them down and kills them. Although they had it coming, the way it's done is absolutely terrifying. The woman then looks to the viewer, and THE WAY HER EYES ARE BLINKING IS GUARANTEED TO HAUNT YOU FOREVER. The video is done in a Rob Zombie like art style, making it all the more freaky and nightmare inducing. And this is just the abridged version, so click that link at your own risk if you want to see all the details. Oh, and sweet dreams...
  • King of the Hill is probably the least likely place you'd ever expect to find this trope. That's normally true, excluding the episode where Luanne's boyfriend Trip Larsen tries to butcher Luanne and himself so they can become food products. Luanne escapes, and before reaching the end of the conveyor line, an electric shock is administered to Trip's head curing him of his schizophrenia. But before he can enjoy his new-found sanity for more than a few seconds, the machine jams a large metal spike through his head (off-screen) and Trip gets processed into food (presumably). Though terrifying, this does give us the hilarious Peggy Hill quote, "Trip had a mental breakdown and is now a sausage."
  • In the short film Rejected, the animated universe begins to break down. The drawings are aware of this and try to escape. It ends with one stick figure desperately pounding on the edge of the paper he is drawn on in vain.
  • Even by the standards of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the Halloween episode "The Shaving" takes the gold medal. The opening scene features a really creepy Eye Scream. The actual episode features a "harmless" monster named Willie Nelson (he likes juice!) whom Master Shake tries to help become scarier. The Nightmare Fuel appears with less than a minute to go before the end credits when we see what's in the attic... Dozens of bloody corpses piled like cordwood and hanging from the ceiling. Turns out the juice he drinks? It's human blood. Which he then gets by ripping Carl's arms off.
    • The closet as seen in "Video Ouija" and "Dickesode" are some of the scariest moments. * shudder* "Frylock: I told you this closet is not to be opened! It is a horrible horrible place in there!"
    • What happens to Santa Claus after Eggzilla burns him alive. Brr.
    • "Global Grilling". Shake buys a dangerous grill that burns a hole in the ozone layer, brings the temperature up to 242 degrees, melts the icecaps, and leads to the invasion of Mucous Men that conquer the planet in 12 years time. Luckily, that was All Just a Dream that Shake had.
  • Seeing Adult Swim's Korgoth of Barbaria just minutes before sleeping produces the most gory nightmares ever fathomed. Never again...
  • Adult Swim seems to be the supreme ruler in all of this: their newest cartoon, Superjail has great animation, a kick-ass opening song, is more colorful than a box of Crayola crayons, is quite humorous, and its main character, The Warden, is an adorable megalomaniac, Psychopathic Manchild (imagine Willy Wonka running a prison facility). Then... near the end of each episode, a four- to five-minute-long fight scene takes place, amounting to what can only be described as "candy-colored ultra-violence on some of the most illegal hallucinogens/ weed you can imagine."
    • One more Adult Swim entry: Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil has a literal nightmare generator, disguised as calming sleep music, where The Devil himself comes to two main characters in their dreams with a fake accent, finds out their fears, and then tries to kill them through the dreams.
  • Drawn Together. Sometimes it crosses the line a time too many, and becomes High Octane Squick. A few examples:
    • Wooldoor accidentally shooting a truck driver, then trying (and failing) to tell the news to the driver's family...while wearing his skin.
    • The meat made out of Clara's forest friends flopping along to her song.
    • A crazed mall cop taking hostage and killing a random woman. For that matter, there are a lot of scenes where random bystanders are horrifically mutilated and/or killed with no further comment, which are very unsettling in general.
    • The candies made of the body parts of Wooldoor's relatives.
      • Which was a VERY thinly disguised Holocaust reference.
    • What Foxxy hints happened to "Timmy".
  • Dead Space Downfall is so full of Gorn and Family Unfriendly Deaths, one can completely lose the desire to sleep. Among the most disturbing deaths are Shen's and Alissa Vincent's.
  • What A Cartoon Show. Tales of Worm Paranoia. Considering it was done by some of the staff who worked on 'Ren and Stimpy, it's not really surprising.
  • The late-night Cartoon Network series O Canada contained a barrage of this kind of Nightmare Fuel. Between the creepy noise/ sound reverb, freaky visuals, and either no dialogue or the equivalent to "Sim Speak", what made O Canada even worse was that it was shown in the wee hours of the morning. Possibly even the last thing you saw before going to sleep. Yeah...
    • O Canada wasn't a series-it was a block of Canadian animation, from, obviously, multiple Canadian sources. Think about that for a little bit now.
  • The Invisible Monster from Jonny Quest. Created from a lab accident, you can only see it by the footprints it leaves. Everything it touches either dies or violently explodes. On top of that, it makes a creepy high-pitched wailing sound. Combine that with ominous music every time it's around, and you have the scariest episode in the series.
    • Plus The Movie Jonny quest vs the cyber insects. The bugs are kinda creepy, but not really on the level of nightmare fuel; but then Dr. Zin kills all of his human assistants! Thankfully, two of them are off-screen -then the last one is turned into a human popsicle and crashes to the floor into several pieces.
  • The Maxx is much, MUCH scarier in its animated form than as a comic. Like the bit of Deranged Animation that happens when The Maxx exits through the wrong door in Julie's subconscious... Some of the moments speak for themselves on the main page.
  • The Animatrix, a series of animated shorts based on The Matrix trilogy, not only had some quite disturbing material, but half of it couldn't even be understood unless you were crazy or an art major.
    • The two-part story of the machine/human war - The Second Renaissance - is particularly brutal. A humanoid android "woman" is beaten to death by a crowd of human men. She is beaten, stripped of her clothes, and eventually her synthetic skin revealing her robot body. All the while she screams, her voice becoming more machinelike with each blow.
      • What makes that scene a lot worse is what the woman is screaming. "I'm REAL!"
      • The scene of the human woman having her head crushed by her once-peaceful robot servant.
      • There was the battle scene where a soldier has the front of his mecha unit ripped open by a Sentinel robot, which coils its tentacles around his torso and rips him out, leaving his arms and legs strapped into the mecha. The worst part is way the man is screaming "God help me! GOD HELP ME!!!" right up to the last moment.
      • The last scenes where people are being surgically operated and experimented on by machines while awake.
      • Real-life It Gets Worse: the kind of brain surgery that the machines do during that sequence? Something similar is done to remove blood clots, protruding bone, and aneurysms from the brainpan, and just like what the machines were doing, the patient has to be awake for the procedure.
      • All the disturbing imagery in The Second Renaissance is made even worse when you learn that most of it is based on real-life occurrences. For instance, there is a sequence where a human soldier shoots a restrained and helpless robot in the head point-blank with a pistol. Sound familiar?
        • One the worst parts was that - judging by the obvious bias in the supposed "historical record" - the Machines are just as prone to arrogance, self-righteousness, and all the other human failings as we are. It's like the human race quadrupled in capacity for terror, Three Laws be damned! The other option is that preserving the human race in the pods is actually the Machines' idea of keeping the human race safe...
    • There was a short about a track-star who almost, almost managed to break out of the Matrix... But at the last moment his muscles snapped, confining him to a wheelchair in a catatonic state. We're never told if the Agents had something to do with it (they were aware of him) or if it was simple human failing, but it was possibly the most haunting entry in the anthology, and the realistic-yet-exagerated animation didn't help.
  • The Secret of NIMH. Several. Like the sequence of flashbacks to the rats' lives at NIMH - from the genetic experimentation to the sight of many mice falling to their deaths in the air ducts during their escape, there is at least one part during that sequence will ultimately scar a child for life.
  • All Dogs Go to Heaven
    • The Charlie goes to Hell sequence.
  • When the Wind Blows. Period.
    • Oh God, yes. First, it's a cartoon about a very nice retired couple who could be your grandparents, pootling along with life while the doomsday clock reaches midnight, trusting in the advice of the government to survive World War III by stockpiling peanut butter and hiding in the cellar until civic order is restored. Then they survive the bomb and are heartbreakingly oblivious to their slow grim fate. As if all that isn't bad enough, it's drawn in the same style as the charming and happy Christmas institution The Snowman. Imagine a much-loved animation that the whole family can gather round at the holidays, like How The Grinch Stole Christmas or The Muppet Christmas Carol. Now imagine those characters, or ones who conceivably live in the same world, slowing dying of radiation poisoning with no-one coming to help because there's no-one else left alive.
  • Clayface's condition in Batman the Animated Series. Mobsters catch the guy, give him an overdose of a "youthening serum", and he slowly melts to death over the course of two or three episodes, his condition painfully worsening until he is finally washed away by rain.
  • Re Boot: The Medusa Bug (from the eponymous episode in the first season) spawned a city devouring plague that threatened to petrify a city and doom its residents to death by energy decay. The fact that nothing could stop it made it scary, the fact that there was nowhere to run made it terrifying, and seeing the woman who unleashed it laughing as it consumed Mainframe made it even worse.
    • At least Bob was immune & got Hexodecimal to reverse it w/a Victoryisboring speech. He actually congratulated her on bringing "peace & quiet" to Mainframe. She let out a Big No upon the realization that w/ everything petrified there would be no audience for her mad antics.
    • The end of "Game Over", in which Enzo's Beginner's Luck finally runs out, leaving Mainframe without a Guardian and everyone presuming him (and AndrAIa and Frisket) nullified. Beware of everything following the computer's announcement of "Game Over".
    • End Prog. Its the end of the world and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Everything falls apart as the system voice says "Warning, System Crash" over and over with an alarm noise constantly going off. Everyone dies as everything fades to black.
  • The The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack character Dr. Barber. Here's an explanation: being in a show that is Courage the Cowardly Dog combined with The Ren and Stimpy Show, he's one of the scariest characters there. Plus, he's involved in most of the Nightmare Fuel scenes of the show-- like the freak-out scene from K'nuckles and His Hilarious Problem, Fish Heads, and K'nuckles is a Dirty Rat.
    • The episode "Fish Heads" has the K'nuckles and Flapjack selling hundreds of fishheads for various purposes such as toothpaste. Then, when Doctor Barber gets a hold of the two's fish heads, he creates a giant hair...fish...thing which was supposed to give everyone perfect haircuts, but instead gave them horrible haircuts. That's not all. It's a lot scarier in action.
    • Gone Wishin' has the mermaid which decays over time from K'nuckles wishing, and then her horrifying transformation sequence.
    • This moment which is pictured above.
    • Two Words: She's Here.
  • Paul Berry's Sandman movie. It's a claymation story about a child who was going to bed in his room, his mother was downstairs and then the titular Sandman, portrayed as this evil birdlike creature appears and is sneaking into his room. The tension keeps building, the kid knows that the Sandman is there, and is scared stiff. Just as the kid just gets over being scared and is starting to fall asleep, The Sandman (in the traditional fashion of a Jump Scene) swoops down and STEALS HIS EYES! It was when the boy opened his eyes after closing them to sleep that the Sandman ripped them out of his head. And then he feeds them to his babies.
  • Down and Dirty Duck was an adult animated film produced by Roger Corman to cash in on the publicity gained by another X-rated cartoon (Fritz the Cat). The animation company was Murakami-Wolf, who, among other things, did Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1987, the dental hygiene cartoon in Two Hundred Motels, and The Point, which is itself an example of regular Nightmare Fuel. Willard Isenbaum, a borderline You Suck everyman whose naive virgin exterior hides a very broken and misogynistic sexuality, is hijacked by a talking, tattooed duck and taken through some adventures in low-budget animated filth. The animation is something like Yellow Submarine meets Mothlight.
  • Cat Piano. To make a long story short, a demented psycho kidnaps (or catnaps) singing cats from a nearby cat town and uses them in his dreaded "cat piano" - where cats are confined in cages in a hellish organ. With each note struck, a sharpened nail would pierce each cat's tail, forcing a note from each pitch from their screams to create "music". The remaining cats raid the mansion where the psycho performs his twisted symphony upon thousands of cats, and tear him apart until he slips on his own blood and falls out the window to his death below.
    • Made worse by the fact that the "cat piano", or Katzenklavier actually existed. It was created by a German physician in the 1700s for the purpose of treating patients who had lost the ability to focus their attention.
    • Cause if wailing cats doesn't get your attention, nothing will.
  • Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic - A short film for the video game Dantes Inferno, where the famous poet, Dante Alighieri of the middle ages, is rehashed into a troubled crusader who must save his love, Beatrice, from hell. Like in the Divine Comedy and the video game, the animated short follows Dante as he travels through limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery to rescue Beatrice from the hands of Satan. This short shows the levels of hell in all their sin-filled glory. For example, in one scene Dante explores limbo, where unbaptized babies go. There he finds out his wife had a miscarriage as he clutches his malformed fetus which crumbles away into dust. Then he gets attacked by hideous monsters that look like babies with claws for hands! Dante killing the hideous monstrosities with his scythe is extremely disturbing, and that was only the first level of hell! Doesn't help that it's made from the same producers of Dead Space: Downfall.
    • Made from? OH GOD, THAT MAKES IT WORSE!
  • From the Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy's Big Picture Show; Eddy's brother. He seems to be many of the fears of Domestic Abuse, especially since he got away with beating up a young boy, and for no reason, either.
  • The short film "Butterfly", which Keane's music video for "Bedshaped" is taken from, is beautiful, sad, and one of the freakiest things you'll ever see. Every time a character is angry it looks demonic, and the scene towards the end is intensely disturbing. However, the scariest bit is the Boy's drunken hallucination as he stands in front of a poster of Jesus on the cross. As he watches, the cross is suddenly empty, with Jesus standing in front of it. He starts to move forward in a manner reminiscent of a Japanese horror film, pouring blood everywhere and smearing it over the perspex covering the poster. The Boy screams and eventually runs off, as the viewer resists the urge to do the same.
  • Moral Orel's mental breakdown in the episode Grounded. As a result of having his friends do a bloodletting, Orel is banned from going to church for a month. As a result of fear of damnation because he is not going to church, Orel slowly begins to go insane. By the end of the first week, Orel to turn his room into a Room Full of Crazy, drawing a church on the wall, along with numerous Bible verses. In week two, he constructs a cardboard church whilst muttering "Church church churchy church, which is then taken away. On the second Sunday, Orel finally has a mental breakdown, wearing the remains of the cardboard church, and believing that he is a church. When his friend points out that there's no cross on the cardboard steeple, he finally steals a cross from a store sign on the roof, and is struck by a bolt of lightning (as it was very cloudy). After becoming convinced that God is trying to kill Orel because He misses him, Orel becomes suicidal, trying to electricute himself and having near death experiences. In his third NDE, Orel sees himself praying (which consists of the backmasked phrase "I am a church", before seeing a Mind Screw montage relating to himself and church. The episode concludes by him promising to his dad that he'll never attempt suicide again, and then leads to the events of the horrific Nature two-part episode.
    • Add some Fridge Horror to that: Orel's "I am a church" vision was an epiphany that Faith is a personal relationship between the self and God, and his father beat that enlightenment out of his son's memory out of pure spite.
  • The Fairly Odd Parents: The episode "Timmy's 2-D House of Horror". While this particular cartoon sometimes has episodes that unintentionally scary, this particular episode almost certainly qualifies as Nightmare Fuel. Timmy deliberately wished for 3-D glasses that would show horrific images so that Vicky and her family would move out of the Turner's home. These images included severed arms in the food and spaghetti and eyeballs. As the purpose of this episode was to show the most frightening images to Vicky's family, the producers HAD to know it was frightening for children and adults.
    • In the episode "Lights Out", Timmy wishes everything to be dark for 12 hours after Poof's crying keeps him up all night. This causes Cosmo and Wanda to become 'Scary Fairies'. Not only do they look scary,they're out to get Timmy, and do various things to kill him. And that picture isn't even their scariest form. Sleep easy.
  • Space Ghost Coast to Coast had the episode "Girl Hair" which features Santa Claus transforming into an Eldritch Abomination known as "Bizarro Santa."
  • The British short animated film A Short Vision (which was essentially a depiction of the end of the world through what appeared to be an H-bomb attack).
    • The bit that really made it Nightmare Fuel was the fact it was shown on the Ed Sullivan Show (at the time, probably the most-watched television show in the US) with Mr. Sullivan not kids to leave but advising parents to reassure them it was "just a fantasy--it's all animated". (Just a "fantasy" with scenes like people's faces melting off and their eyeballs boiling in their sockets a la Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
    • Adding to the Nightmare Fuel--Ed Sullivan premiered the film on the same month the first successful test of the H-Bomb occured, and noted that this was meant as an anti-war piece (though emphasizing the animals that got nuked, not the humans). In other words, not only was this Nightmare Fuel, but a remarkable example of Getting Crap Past the Radar in Joseph Mc Carthy-era "Red Panic" America (in which there was a very heavy emphasis on "we will survive" portrayals of nuclear war).
    • The warning was strengthened considerably when A Short Vision received a repeat screening on the Ed Sullivan Show (this time finally warning parents to have children leave the room). Yes, this was shown twice--despite the fact that multiple producers had warned Ed Sullivan the film was too "grim" to be shown on American television.
  • X Men Evolution episode 25 (Mindbender) in which Mesmero appears. There was no blood, no ultra violence, no huge fights... just him kidnapping and brainwashing a bunch of innocent kids ( Jean, Kitty, Evan and Kurt), using them to set off his Evil Plan to wake up his master Apocalypse and slipping unnoticed under their caretakers' watch. And he starts this by entering the kids's dreams and turning them into nightmares (poor, poor Jean Grey). Watch it here, with the Latin-american dub conveying the feeling almost as well as the original... URGH.
    • Blind Alley wasn't much better. Scott gets stranded in a desertic town as Mystique's revenge for him derailing her Evil Plan without his visor, completely unable to even open his eyes or he'll blast everything on sight into nohtingness... DOUBLE URGH.
  • The opening for the old French educational cartoon called Once upon a time... man. You follow the evolution of the human race, then its technological advances, and the end of the sequence shows the Earth exploding after a rocket blasts off, killing a number of potential survivors who were running to it in panic. Bonus points for the music it's set to. See for yourself.
  • Zombie Ezekiel from Total Drama World Tour. Here's what happened: After spending numerous days inside of the plane, Ezekiel ended up having green skin, having bloodshot eyes, and lost his ability to speak. Several episodes later he looked even worse, with all of his hair gone and is shown in a complete feral state. During the finale after he retrieved the million, he ends up falling into the volcano extremely graphically as he is slowly consumed by the lava, in an homage to Return of the King. After that he is presumed to be dead by many fans, is launched out of the volcano while screaming in pain as his skin is completely burnt by the lava (although he is still shown to be alive), wasn't seen resurfacing after crash-landing on a boat, and it could be currently assumed that he will never recover from his experience.
  • Regular Show
  • If you were an 80's kid and grew up in either Latin America, Europe or Turkey, you will probably remember a French-Japanese cartoon called Clementine. But if you don't remember the entire series, you will certainly remember two things about it. One being the catchy opening song and the other, the scary, nightmare indulging villain: a demon called Malmoth. He was a humanoid fire demon with a permanent Nightmare Face who was so obsessed with the titular character, a 10 year old handicapped girl, that he wanted to kill her to keep her soul forever. And whenever his human minions failed their mission, he punished them by turning them into worms, rats and other ugly animals with human heads to boil them alive. He also had the creepiest theme music ever. Here you can find some of his best moments, in french though. And this was a kids show, by the way.
  • The Chupacabra from Jackie Chan Adventures. Holy geez but that thing is freaky.
  • That episode of Beavis and Butthead where Beavis cuts his finger off on a tablesaw. Right before then, he and Butthead already cut up everything conceivable, including the phone and the first aid kit. And when the finger is finally reattached, it isn't fastened. Instead, Beavis is told not to use it at all. Guess what happens to conclude the episode!
  • A short film from Rodrigo Blaas. Who knew Pixar's people were capable of this...
  • The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes. All of them, especially since the main point of these episodes are meant to frighten viewers on purpose.
    • One in particular... the school staff decide to start killing and eating the students at the school, and get to the point where they're deliberately trying to get the kids to fatten up and overall be better for eating. A few of the kids realize what the teachers are doing and try to escape... Well, that was all very unsettling and creepy and downright terrifying.
Cquote1

 Skinner: I'm going to enjoy devouring you, Bart Simpson. Yes... I believe I'll start, as you've so often suggested, by eating your shorts.

Cquote2
    • "NOW HOW BOUT A HUG?"
  • Life in Transition.
  • The Faceless Hunter, from Batman the Brave And The Bold. Holy hell, this thing is a monster. He roams the universe, finding worlds that his master, Starro can conquer, by attaching horrible mind-control probes to their faces. He's a physical god, can teleport, turn invisible, and has a terrifying arsenal of traps and weapons. He spends most of the series tracking, defeating and mind-raping the various DC heroes. And if you can't be posessed by a Starro spore? He'll horribly kill you. It get's worse though. How and why did he become Starro's herald? He asked Starro to destroy his homeworld, because his people were pacifists. It's pretty bad when a world-conqueror makes you look good by comparison. And the creepiest John Di Maggio voice imagineable doesn't help matters.
  • Batman Beyond
    • "Lost Soul". First, the Batman suit is taken over by the cyber-ghost of a dead businessman. But wait, that's just so he can use the suit to be able to put his cyber-soul into the very meatspace body of his grandson. But that's not the HONF, oh no. That comes when Batman defeats the cyber-ghost, still in the Batman suit, causing his "program" to be wiped out, slowly. The cyber-consciousness get degraded, his mind devolving from teen, to kid (reciting basic arithmetic, no less), to infant, and then... gone.
    • "Earth Mover". The dessicated, rotting and still alive corpse of a man who was buried in a cave-in along with toxic waste who managed to learn to control the earth.
  • The Red (or Green? It's not really either.) Death from the film adaptation of How to Train Your Dragon. It's pretty scary-looking, and it has the other dragons in some sort of trance. They're all forced to bring food for this monster, and if it doesn't, it eats them! Giant monsters have never really stopped appearing in film and TV, but this was the first one in a long while to REALLY capture the sense of awe and primal fear that something that huge, malevolent and unstoppable would really invoke.
  • There was a short film from the 90's called "Not Without My Handbag". It was clayamation from Aardman Studios, the same people who made Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run. There was a whole VHS tape of perfectly innocent, kid-friendly shorts, and then this one, terrifying four minutes about a little girl's aunt who dies, get's dragged to Hell by the Devil, and then returns as a corpse... zombie... skeleton... THING, to reclaim her handbag, which she had left behind.
    • There's another Aardman short that had one of the most disturbing endings of all time, the short is called, "Stage Fright", the ending of the short consists of a corrupt theater manager strangling a poor woman, a theater backdrop coming down crashing on the bad guy's HEAD, an organist turning into a rather demonic thing that drags the guy to, well, you know, and saying in a deep voice: "GOING DOWN" and the theater starting to collaspe, leaving the fates of the woman and a guy with trained dogs ambiguous, as the last we see of them is exiting the theater into a bright light.
  • The vein transplant scene in the I Am Weasel episode IR Plant Life. *shudder*
  • In The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Ghost", Gumball gets posessed by Carrie and turns into this horrible Smeagol-like cat-demon that eats everything in its path.
  • Robot Chicken has quite a lot of this. For instance,in one sketch where a scared child tells his mother there are monsters in his closet. Her eyes tun red,and with a sinister tone of voice she says,"I know." Shiver..
  • In Rango, Rattlesnake Jake is easily one of the most terrifying villains (animated or otherwise) to grace the silver screen in recent years.
  • Heidi's Song had the disturbing dream sequence when she meets all the various goblins & odd creatures living around the mountains. See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY2a6rzZMC0 The rats in the cellar were also frightening as a child.
  • The Wonder Hospital is a trippy animated short film about a little girl with a crooked nose wandering into this mysterious hospital and is convinced that they can fix her nose after seeing their before/after ads, and goes through a the hospital to reach her surgery room, seeing all sorts of unsettling sights and characters before she gets operated on by bunch of puppet doctors. The twist ending is that they don't fix her at all, they make her look worse, and the worst part is that you don't get to see what her face actually looks like from the front, only from the behind, and to top it off you can hear her bones clacking and her muscles stretching around inside her messed up face.
  • This video: In it, four teens break into a swimming pool after hours on what seems to be a double date. The couple who are together jump in, while the girl paired with the other guy is shy. The couple start getting handsy on the far end of the pool, and the girl jumps into the pool after splashing the guy with a drink, then freaks when SOMETHING starts poking out of her stomach. When she climbs out, the guy comes to check on her when the couple walk up. The boyfriend's left arm has turned into a huge tentacle, which is now buried between his girlfriend's legs and is actually visible sticking out of her skin ALL THE WAY TO HER THROAT. The shy girl runs, and the tentacled boy knocks over the other one with the tentacle; while in mid-air, the girlfriend sprints forward and opens her mouth, when her upper torso splits into a massive pair of jaws, clamping down onto his genital area and killing him. The shy girl runs, is unable to get out the way she came, and is trapped between the tentacle boy and the girl, who has now merged with the other boy, so she leaps back into the pool. Sinking down, she touches bottom, which isn't solid, so she moves through it to the other side. Emerging into the dark, she looks up and into the light that appears, which causes her eyes to explode and fire/lightning blasting from the sockets. She falls over dead, and the camera pans up to show an Eldritch Abomination so massive, the damned thing has RINGS LIKE A PLANET. And this is all a music video for a song by a French band.
  • She Ra Princess of Power: Horde Prime. Shown as not much more than a voice and a giant robotic hand, but that's enough.
  • In the Superman Theatrical Cartoons short "Jungle Drums", Lois Lane is being burned at the stake by a bunch of natives. While this is happening, the color palette switches to a hellish mix of red and black with strange silhouettes of the natives dancing and playing drums. It's not-too-subtle hell imagery at it's scariest.
  • HBO's Babar, based off of the famous book series, aired from 1989-1994 and while most of the series offers "slice of life" morality lessons, complete with anthropomorphism, the first few episodes of the first season are quite depressing for a 7 year old or even an adult (despite the fact that, as Babar tells these stories in flashback, you know he survives and all will be well).
    • The pilot episode, "BABAR'S FIRST STEP", in which a viewer is introduced to the merry elephant tribe before Babar grew up and "civilized" them, in which Babar's blissfull times of playing in ponds with other baby elephants and his mother are ended by a hunter with a rifle. He gets no name...he is "the Hunter". The elephants don't know what the sound of his rifle blasting means, and the elders assume it is a "monster". Babar's mother is eventually shot while the herd are fleeing the Hunter, complete with Babar being thrown from her back and screaming for her in the mud after she is shot, and then getting to watch her make a last, desperate attempt to cover their escape by charging the Hunter; she is then shot and falls over on screen, close range. This is complete with sad music, an elephant funeral, AND getting to watch baby Babar wail and try to snuggle with his (dead) mother. Much of it is depicted here [1], from about 1:40 in to 4:20. It is so bad that it even provides Babar's own Nightmare Fuel in the first half of episode 2, "CITY WAYS", when the death of his mother is replayed in his nightmares, complete with a spooky storm outside. Thankfully, the Hunter dies a deserving death in episode five.
    • The episode "The City of Elephants". Halfway through the episode [2], starting around 2:11, Babar has this twisted nightmare where he gets confronted by "The Beast of Misfortune", a giant red elephant that laughs/growls etc. in a very deep voice, and "The Beast of Haste", a small white ghost elephant thing capable of contorting itself into various shapes.
    • Here is an explanation on what's really so twisted; a door forms on the end of the Beast of Misfortune's trunk, that same beast's head going THROUGH a floating window, the Beast of Haste contorting itself into a spiral around Babar as he falls into the other beast's mouth, the Beast of Haste being split into an army of six mini-Beasts, and The Beast of Misfortune...SLOWLY...MELTING... AWAY as Babar chases away the beasts. It just looks so wrong.
  • Wolves, Witches and Giants and Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids were both frequent sources of the stuff. Take it from us.
  • Dungeons and Dragons
    • 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.
    • 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...
    • The fun moment in "Quest of the Skeleton Warrior" when Hank's entire outer meat layer starts to melt off.
    • Right here around 3:00! Maximum fun!
    • The kids once accidentally summoned Venger's master, which manifests as the top half of a giant green face with slit-pupil eyes above the cloud layer, and as a cyclone of absolute hellfire from there to the ground. Might not look so threatening in a cartoon, but imagine seeing something like that yourself and doing anything other than crapping your pants and curling up into a whimpering ball. Now imagine that it's following you, and can appear anywhere in the world within seconds, and you've got a taste of what Dungeon Master and the kids went through.
  • 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. [3]
  • Jonny Quest
    • The Robot Spy from the 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.
    • 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 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.
    • The Gargoyle in "The House of Seven Gargoyles".
    • Both Turu and the wheelchair-bound Deen in "Turu the Terrible", sinking in the tar-pit.
    • 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.
    • The yeti in "Monster in the Monastery".
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The episode of Extreme Ghostbusters where one of the main characters gets turned into a grinning clown creature.
    • There's also The Real Ghostbusters episode 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 Body Horror-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 is scary 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 coping with, but she apparently still has eyelids. Eww.
    • The episode of Extreme Ghostbusters with a Pied Piper character who led the ghosts out of the city. It turned out that he was also a ghost and when he didn't get his payment he attempted to lead the children out of the city as well, and into the sea. The musical riff that the piper plays was scary too.
  • There was an episode of G.I. 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.
    • The appropriately named "Nightmare Assault". If the nightmares aren't enough, it averts Never Say "Die".
    • "Bazooka Saw a Sea Serpent" was another one. Giant robotic sea monster with flat-yellow glowing eyes that eats ships and turns their mass into more girth, so it keeps getting larger. The appearance was scary enough, but then you see that the humans eaten by the monster get turned into slaves that are worked so hard that they collapse in a dead sleep in the brief moments that ever-vigilant shock-prod tentacles let them have a "coffee break". And then an attempt to stop the thing fails and it turns from a Cobra-controlled monster into an uncontrolled monster, some laser-eyed Godzilla serpent that wants to eat EVERYTHING, just a blind malicious hunger in the shape of a giant robotic snake. By the way, did you know that a little boy can memorize how long it takes to fast-forward past an episode of G.I. Joe on a multi-episode VHS tape so he doesn't have to ever look at the screen?
  • G.I. Joe: The Movie is filled with nightmare fuel. Everything about Cobra-La was freaky. Golobulus, Pythona, Nemesis Enforcer, their plan to mutate all of humanity. Then the origin of Cobra Commander and his slow mutation into a snake.
  • Freaky Stories. Several episodes, including the accidental eating of defecation via gas-siphon, and a visit to the weiner factory.
    • The episode where a couple buys a mansion and finds they have a barrel of wine the previous owner never got rid of. 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.
    • One episode is 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.
    • 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 is another scary moment. She hears a strange howling sound and lowers her hand by the floor and receives 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.
  • In the For the Man Who Has Everything adaptation, 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 was one of the scariest parts 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...) are disturbing.
    • Well you'd think Nothing Is Scarier... Until you realize that A) the Black Mercy shows you your perfect life, and B) Mongul is the one that created War World. So all of those horrible noises, as expected, are most likely him overseeing an eternal war on the entire known universe... And winning. Gruesomely.
  • 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.
    • According to this site, in the original Belgian comic, the Smurfs turned black. No, really. Try wrapping your mind around all of that.
      • The ending to the 'G'nap!' episode. 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. They still had mouths and spoke, which 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.
    • Whatever you do, don't say "Kaplowey"! It'll make whatever you're pointing at vanish. People included. (At the end, using the word on the magic scroll that empowers it reverses the effect and things begin reappearing...but a) who knows what dangerous things it might have been used on? and b) sooner or later the scroll will reappear too!
  • 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. For true nightmare fuel, watch the end-credit sequences, where Captain Scarlet is subjected to ten different death-traps.
  • 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.
    • One of the scarier episodes was a 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.
  • The Neogenic Nightmare arc of Spider-Man: The Animated Series seems to have been written with the express purpose of traumatising children. Highlights include:
    • Dr. Connors visibly mutating into The Lizard.
    • Michael Morbius becoming a genuinely creepy vampire. As if that wasn't bad enough, instead of sucking blood through his fangs like most vampires, he drained plasma through small suckers in his palms instead (oddly enough, this change was one of the many, many mandated by the network to make this show less startling). He later ends up as a giant bat monster.
    • Spider-Man himself mutating into a hideous, vicious, terrifying man-spider. And later on, the Vulture, with his youth-draining tech, sucking the youth out of people, lastly Spider-Man... and also absorbing his mutating DNA, causing him to sporadically turn into the Man-Spider himself, but retaining his full intelligence and power of speech, and then later seemingly permanently being trapped as the Man-Spider for the rest of his life. Sure, he brought it on himself, but still. Fortunately for him, he was cured by an off-screen plot device...
      • There was always something subtly disturbing about the storylines involving Hydro-Man - his sheer relentlessness combined with the fact that anything Peter did to him would only stall him for a few minutes was bad enough, but then he died because Mary-Jane tricked him into spending so long away from water that he evaporated, and Spider-Man just had to say that water is so common that it was possible he'd come back one day, which means a) it's possible that he's still sentient in his evaporated form, b) he might return having learnt from that defeat, rendering him genuinely impossible to get rid of. And then he did come back. And it turned out that he and the current Mary-Jane were both clones of the originals, and they both just disintegrated into water. Yikes.
  • The original 60s "Spider-Man" had some true Nightmare Fuel moments during the "psychedelic" period of the series, like the "Evil Infinita From Dimentia Five" which, incidentally, was a recycled episode from the Rocket Robin Hood series (which was also done by the animator Ralph Bakshi). If,by any chance you ever visit that place, one rule: DON'T STEP ON THE RUGS!!!!!
  • 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 out 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
  • 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!"
  • 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.
  • Toxic Crusaders, all about people hideously mutated by chemical or nuclear accidents. Considering that it's a cartoon about the Toxic Avenger, a character from a series of R-rated Troma films...
    • It was softened by the sheer ridiculousness of their acceptance to the mutations. Still, Melvin's transformation into Toxie is rather frightening, especially as he screams to the people nearby for help as his skin seems to melt.
  • 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.
    • Mutant League. Just the opening itself is freaky since it's one of those openings that shows how it all begin and we see the main character's skin melted off, turning him into a skeleton man. Seriously, was Quentin Tarantino working on this show between movies?
  • 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 one of the most disturbing things in a kid's show.)
  • Martin Mystery had lots of creepy stuff like Martin being possessed by the alien creature Gastromo and being turned into something that reminds one of The Exorcist or the episode where the shadowy creatures capture almost everyone on Earth
  • There is a mystery show called The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest where the mystery of one episode revolved around a story in which a man who accidentally killed his wife while they were fighting by pushing her down some stairs, which broke her neck. He then buried her dead body IN THE WALL, to hide his crime. They showed her corpse in the end when it was found.

There was also the bit at the end, when the man is shoved into the wall by the ghost and boarded up inside for some time. They get him out alive, but he's completely insane by then. Cheers!

  • The all-but-forgotten 80s cartoon Sectaurs shows people graphically mutating into mutant lifeforms in the opening sequence. Maybe its a GOOD thing that it only lasted 5 episodes.
  • The Beavis and Butthead Woodshop episode. For those who haven't seen it, it involves B&B using a woodcutting machine to cut everything in the classroom. After running out of objects, Beavis then cuts his OWN finger in half and starts bleeding profusely. Even worse, there's no first aid kit as they sawed THAT in half.
    • It was bad because right from the start you know something like that would happen. Beavis stares at the spinning blade, and whatever passes for a brain compels him to stick his finger in the saw...gaah!
  • Code Lyoko has its moments. XANA-possessed characters can be particularly creepy, and many examples of XANA trying to murder the protagonists (like electrocuting Jeremie) can induce nightmares.
    • XANA Jeremie's "NOT LOGICAL! NOT LOGICAL!" after the kids decide that he's the fake Jeremie because he doesn't understand that Jeremie would virtuatlize himself to save his friends.
    • Most ways that XANA tries to kill Jeremie can cause Nightmare Fuel. Jeremie gets electrocuted by one of the power sources for the supercomputer, as well as getting electrocuted by the Specters. Also, when he discovers that the one Franz Hopper is actually XANA in disguise, XANA gets pissed at him, possesses him, and proceeds to suffocate him while Ulrich can do nothing but watch.
    • "Ghost Channel" (the episode with the XANA Jeremie Logic Bomb), the scene where he screams and then tries to kill the characters.
  • If you were an eighties kid and grew up in either Latin America, Europe or Turkey, you will probably remember a French-Japanese cartoon called Clementine. But if you don't remember the entire series, you will certainly remember two things about it. One being the catchy opening song and the other, the scary, nightmare indulging villain: a demon called Malmoth. He was a humanoid fire demon with a permanent Nightmare Face who was so obsessed with the titular character, a 10 year old handicapped girl, that he wanted to killed her to keep her soul forever. And whenever his human minions failed their mission, he punished them by turning them into worms, rats and other ugly animals with human heads to boiled them alive. He also had the creepiest theme music ever. Here you can find some of his best moments, in French though.
  • From Archer, Len Trexler's "reprogramming."
  • If Nox of Wakfu isn't busy being depressing, there's a good chance he's invoking this. One of the creepiest parts of the series is the beginning of Episode 24, where he puts on a cute little puppet show showing his family and their death in a disturbing, childlike manner.
  • Already Generator Rex has demonstrated this, in the first episode, to list off, The Evos when they're not particularly dormant, the henchmen to Van Kleiss, and Van Kleiss, especially when Van Kleiss dies, and then he resurrects himself, graphically, it's already quite frightening, and it's barely out.
    • This show deserves to have this trope expounded upon:
      • Almost all of the E.V.O.s seen so far are heavy on freaky design and some are straight up Body Horror. And a good number of those E.V.O.s look like Eldritch Abominations (see: Weaver's fate in "Frostbite").
      • In the episode 'Breach' (which is a nice Silent Hill type of episode) there is a Creepy Child E.V.O. that Rex meets, she ends up turning into a huge blob monster out ot kill Rex. The much more subtle horror was: Look how devoted that girl was to Breach's 'world', the girl was either damaged from the start or Breach broke her mind to what it was when we saw her.
      • Everything Breach said in that episode should qualify, especially "I give nothing... Never. I take." What's really creepy is the fact that this the same voice for sweet and kind Starfire.
      • THAT BUNNY SUIT in 'Breach'
      • The Big Bad, Van Kleiss.
        • He's vampiric in his nature and appearance, which may not necessarily be frightening, serves to make him more unnerving than he already was. He's rather creepy in his own right given his powers, voice, and personality. And the scene where Van Kleiss fed off of Rex was painful to watch. Ugh.
        • ALSO This song in particular DSL Rb 1 e 7 JDQ sounds a lot like the background music used when Van Kleiss introduces himself and when he TWISTS HIS HEAD IN A WAY THAT WAS NOT MEANT TO BE, MAN!...You're welcome.
    • Rex's nanite overload in "Frostbite" is also pretty horrible. Metal tumors that move. Brrr...
      • One episode is about how the new military/government branch after the big bang met our hero. During the episode, the group goes up against a giant machine/mecha, one that utterly destroys half of the high-tech, monster-killing machines they brought with them and the men manning them. Turns out, after finally hurting the thing, that the mecha was controlled by none other than our Hero. The really bad part? He's a kid that unfortunately has suffered repeated cases of amnesia and has no idea when the next memory loss will happen. Now combine that with the previous. Try watching the show now without looking at Rex like a ticking time bomb.
        • In Generator Rex, everyone is a ticking time bomb. You, your family, that cute Cheerful Child down the street, your pets, the squirrels in your backyard... Anyone, at any give time, for no apparent reason, can turn into a horrific monster and possibly go on a rampage, possibly forcing the authorities to put them down permanently.
  • Ruby-Spears' Mega Man cartoon has quite a few instances of this.
    • The image of Rock/Mega on a lab table as a Terminator-esque endoskeleton in the intro is a little unnerving, even though it only shows up for a few seconds before dissolving into an image of Mega from that same position but with his "skin."
    • And there's the first nightmare in "Mega Dreams"; while the idea of Gutsman and Cutman pretending to be a couple may amuse you, that moment comes after a shot of a stuffed dino with what looks like blood on its muzzle.
    • In the first episode, "The Beginning". In a flashback detailing Rock and Roll's creation, Dr. Wily had them strapped to an operating table, ready to reprogram them. This involved him taking a drill to their heads. While they were still conscious.
    • One small detail in "Curse of the Lion Men" that can be Fridge Horror is that later—Protoman, who quite values his free will, is the one to flatly announce that Tar is their leader now after the latter brainwashes his group and Roll.
    • Also in "The Beginning", Wily warned Light not to follow him after he kidnapped Rock and Roll. If he did, Iceman would freeze him. And Cutman would slice him up.
    • In "Brain Bots", Wily places Megaman in a Death Trap. The trap consists of a Descending Ceiling with spikes. Unlike some death traps, Mega was bound to the floor as it descended. What pushes this into Nightmare Fuel is what Wily said about it; he uses it to recycle robots he no longer needs into scrap metal. Meaning he's done this to HIS OWN ROBOTS. What makes it worse is that some robots, like Fire Man and Star Man, were only in one episode and never seen or mentioned again...
    • While the episode involving Megaman and other robots "devolving" may be ludicrous (robots don't turn into caveman-like robots), it was still freaky seeing their gradual transformation.
  • Dinosaurs
    • The mammals in the fridge .
    • The Downer Ending borders on nightmare fuel. In the span of an episode, the world has been thrown into an ice age. The world is dark and cold, and will be for "tens of thousands of years." We last see the family alive and grasping at futile optimism...picturing them, along with countless other sentient dinosaurs, slowly watching the power die away, the food run out, the question of suicide...
  • 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.
  • While there's already a page for Justice League, this fits the DCAU as a whole. The portrayal of Darkseid in the DCAU is often seen as the definitive portrayal of his character outside of comics and for good reason as he is a terrifying character. Not even just because he's the only one who can take Superman at his full power but because of how relentlessly evil he is. Other villains such as The Joker and Lex Luthor had reasons that you could like them whether it be because how funny The Joker was, or how suave Luthor was, etc. Darkseid was not that kind of villain, being just the absolute embodiment of evil.
  • The Animals of Farthing Wood: Several of the main animal characters were killed off during the journey: shot by hunters, cooked as meal, run over by a car,... Highly traumatic since it seemed to be a general TV series about cute talking animal characters from the start, but actually the makers strived for realistic death scenes.
  • The Little Engine That Could is a cute half an hour kids' film based on a short story. With the exception of a short 20 seconds segment towards the end that features a creepy talking cliff that sounds like some sort of demon from the depths of hell. Even if you don't remember the film, you're likely to remember the nightmares that thing gave you.
  • Cat Dog: The dentist episode. As well as the movie the Great Parent Mystery where Catdog encounters an alien invasion, get eaten and almost digested by a sea monster, among other horrors.
  • Hey Arnold:
    • "Part-time Friends". Arnold and Gerald work together at a flower shop with Gerald being the boss since the owner injured her leg and appointed him as the temporary manager. After Arnold gets into a fight with Gerald and says that he doesn't want to be friends with him, Arnold's Grandpa tells him about a similar incident that happened to Grandpa himself when he was Arnold's age. Arnold then begins to have a nightmare dream where he and Gerald are old, still former friends, and can't remember what they were fighting about. The dream takes a turn for the disturbing when it cuts to the old, withered, corpse of Arnold's Grandpa who's still alive where he says something along the lines of "Well, what did I tell ya, Short Man?" while some ominous music plays. He then proceeds to laugh in a really, creepy way, only for his jaw to crack and fall off his skull.
    • There was one episode where Arnold and the gang are telling scary stories. Arnold's tale is called "The Headless Cabbie" which involves a cabbie driver picking up a woman who wants to go to the park because she's lost her little dog (she even gives the cabbie a scarf since it's late at night and he won't be cold). As the cabbie drives through the park, he hears barking, and the lady says that's her dog. The cabbie keeps driving, the barking continues, he doesn't see the little dog, but the lady keeps imploring him to go faster and faster, sounding and becoming more demonic. The story reaches its climax when the scarf gets caught on a tree branch, and since the cabbie is going so fast, the scarf winds tighter and tighter... until it finally cuts his head clean off. Not surprisingly, Harold (one of the guys that was hanging out with Arnold and co. at the time) is traumatized by the story.
      • The ending of that episode is pretty scary through implications. The crew decides to take a shortcut that same night through the street, all the while Harold worries that they'll see the ghost of the decapitated cabbie. As they follow the route the cabbie took, more and more elements of the story starts to show up. They see a hook-handed man past a bridge, find a little terrier dog, and - in the big scare climax - hear a cabbie riding up to them, with a woman cackling evilly in the carriage. The kids then learn that everything had a rational explanation. The hook-handed man was actually seen in shadow holding a watch display and the cabbie driver was just Ernie (a tenant at Arnold's boarding house) taking a job for extra money, and the creepy woman laughing was just Mr. Hyunh... laughing creepily for the heck of it. As they leave though, a woman approaches the tenant explaining that her dog has gone missing and she wants to know if he can give her a ride to find it. Ernie agrees and also accepts the scarf she offers him...
    • The town and the school flooding in "The Flood". Worse still, all the kids are trapped in the school.
  • Donald Duck's hunger-induced nervous breakdown in Mickey and the Beanstalk.
  • Jimmy Two Shoes: Heloise during her more Ax Crazy moments.
  • Rocko's Modern Life: Mr. Bighead's vision of Heffer, Mrs. Bighead, and Rocko as devils in "Cabin Fever". "Are you okay, Mr. Bighead?" *shudder*
  • The ending of "Interview With a Campfire" from All Grown Up! When the kids are watching their video at the end it goes crazy and shows that their 'friend' from the camp was actually a GHOST the entire time! it also doesn't help that said ghost had red eyes and a very demonic, scary appearance. *Shudder.*
  • Amon in The Legend of Korra. Many adult fans have admitted to being terrified of him. In episode 4, A Voice in the Night, he even serves as extreme Nightmare Fuel for the main character.
  • My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic is not to be confused with the older My Little Pony cartoons. While most episodes feature relatively mild problems as the main plot, some episodes are truly scary. Discord, for example, is a reality warping spirit of chaos who is implied to have ruled over the world for a prolonged period of time in the distant past, and even non-villain characters can be scary, like when Twilight Sparkle goes insane in Lesson Zero.
  • A video tape called something like 'Night-time tales' and despite the name, it's terrifying. It's a compilation of short stories but the one that stood out was a story about some sort of 'Nightmare Man' who came into people's dreams like Freddy Krueger. It was animated in really crazy neon-on-black colours and ended with the Nightmare Man being trapped in his own bad dreams for all eternity. The last shot was the man kneeling over in the fetal position and it had really creepy music.
  • As Told by Ginger: The "And She Was Gone" poem. Many fans of the show felt it to be rather depressing and scary. (In addition to being awesome).
  • Phineas and Ferb is generally a very tame, kid-friendly but still all-age-inclusive show, with humor that has very little bearing on Nausea Fuel or anything like it, which only makes it's occasional dips into Nightmare Fuel all the more worse. Take the "Smile Away" reformatory from "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted" for instance. Combine Adult Fear with Crap Saccharine World, give it a nice dash of the Pavlovian Treatment from A Clockwork Orange (Yes, they actually made it look exactly like that), and have it be run by a Complete Monster that is a Knight of Cerebus, and that's the basic idea of the place. Oh, and this is all centering on two completely lovable little boys. And it's accidentally their sister's fault they're there.
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