The 10 Darkest Moments in Kids’ Cartoons

I sometimes think there was a printout of my face tacked up on the writers’ room wall of my favorite childhood shows, and every day the head writer would point at it and ask, “How do we most effectively traumatize this kid?” That’s how tailor-made some of these nightmare fuel cartoon moments feel, so deeply, specifically disturbing that someone must have had it in for me. As I grow older, I realize that other cartoon watchers can relate; many creepy sequences appear to have traumatized an entire generation. Eerie hauntings, gross-out moments, shockingly unexpected deaths, these are the 10 darkest moments in kids’ cartoons. If you still have nightmares, you’re not alone.

“Return The Slab”

Someone, please give this man his slab back so I can go back to sleep, because I don’t think I’ve shut my eyes since this episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog aired in 2000. Courage is famous for its nightmare-inducing moments, from the eerily realistic Spirit of the Harvest Moon to the wet-your-pants horror of the perfection-obsessed bugle monster in the series finale. And while all of these spirits live rent-free in the brain of pop culture, King Ramses may be the only one who’s actually taken out a mortgage. What is it that makes Ramses so scary? What isn’t it? His spindly figure. His haunting voice. His weird CGI body uncannily superimposed over a 2D desert landscape. It all adds up to a cacophony of terror that makes me wanna take Ramses’ slab and smash my TV with it.

Arnold Takes Off His Helmet In Space

Space is a horrible place. Crushing gravity. Cosmic voids. Incinerating supernovas. And of course, sub-zero temperatures. The Magic Schoolbus showed us the horror of that last quality of the cosmos in the very first episode. On a field trip around the Solar System, the kids’ final destination is Pluto, where class-know-it-all Arnold decides to take off his space helmet to demonstrate the chilling effects of Plutonian cold on the body — freezing his face in the process. While the Virgo in me deeply empathizes with anyone willing to go to those absurd lengths to prove a point, my inner child is still traumatized by the ordeal. Sure, Ms. Frizzle and the gang were able to rush Arnold to safety before he kicked the bucket, but child-me thought I had just watched a kid die horribly before my very eyes. The most enduring lesson The Magic School Bus ever taught me was that some traumas just can’t be worked out, no matter how much therapy I get.

Wormy’s Close-Up

SpongeBob SquarePants has a surprising amount of scary moments. Squidward’s hallucinatory trip into the “Fly of Despair” on the Flying Dutchman. Squidward’s existential crisis in a void at the end of time. Squidward’s guilt-induced mental breakdown when he blew off work to finish some fake “errands.” But when SpongeBob introduced his pet butterfly Wormy to Bikini Bottom, Squidward wasn’t the only one left traumatized. Whenever a character crosses paths with this seemingly harmless animated lepidopteran, the show quickly smash-cuts to a horrifying close-up of the bug’s freaky face. Did I expect my favorite childhood show to jump-scare me like that? No. Will I ever recover? Probably not.

The Lich

There are monsters, and there’s the Lich – a being so existentially mortifying that he deserves a separate categorization entirely. The primordial embodiment of evil in Adventure Time‘s universe, the Lich is a cosmic force of destruction that has existed since before the beginning of time. How do we know that? Because he tells us. As the Lich narrates the history of the cosmos to the King of Ooo, he casually mentions he’s been around since “before there was nothing.” After manifesting in the physical world at the end of the war that nearly wiped out humanity, he’s dedicated his un-life to destroying every living being in the cosmos, one of them being Finn’s adventurer hero, Billy. We later see the Lich wearing Billy’s skin like a horror movie serial killer. This macabre fashion choice, along with his skeletal face and Ron Pearlman’s voice, makes him an icon of kids’ TV terror.

Bloodbending

Genocide. War. Totalitarianism. For a kids’ show, Avatar: The Last Airbender covers a lot of disturbingly adult ground. And while Aang’s discovery of Monk Gyatso’s skeleton or his run-in with Ko the Face Stealer were traumatizing enough, nothing quite tops the terror of the forbidden technique known as bloodbending. Invented by a waterbender bent on avenging herself against Fire Nation oppressors, the technique allows the user to manipulate the blood in a victim’s body, turning them into a human puppet. And while watching the bloodbender Hama turn people into life-sized action figures under the full moon was horrifying enough, the most terrifying aspect about this forbidden bending style is its implications. Can a waterbender also bend stomach acid and melt a person’s organs from the inside? Can an earthbender collapse a skeleton by bending the minerals out of bones? Can an airbender suffocate a person? As we later learn in The Legend of Korra, the answer to this last question is a horrifying “yes.”

Chocolate Boy Hits Rock Bottom

The chocolate-obsessed comic relief of Hey Arnold!, Chocolate Boy’s addiction to all things cacao was always played for laughs… until it wasn’t. Over the course of one harrowing episode, the audience sees just how far Chocolate Boy will go for a taste of the sweet stuff, including digging through dumpsters, eating ants, and performing humiliating dances at the request of his school bullies. An exploration of drug addiction through the eyes of a child, Hey Arnold for a moment turns into an after-school showing of Requiem For a Dream. While Chocolate Boy manages to thankfully break his addiction, watching a poor little kid hit rock bottom in search of sweets is both terrifying and heartbreaking.

Queen Angella’s Sacrifice

For three seasons, the only casualties on She-Ra and the Princesses of Power were mindless robot drones deployed by an evil tyrant, quickly defeated by a happy-go-lucky group of magical teens. When the show killed off the mother of one of those teens during the season three finale, the narrative took an adult turn. Queen Angella’s implied death-by-reality-dissolving portal was a heavy blow to the show’s characters and fans alike, marking the moment when She-Ra proved that victory over evil would come at a steep cost. From then on, the show embraced a darker, more cerebral tone, showing the psychological toll of the conflict on both heroes and villains alike. Even on the magical planet of Etheria, people die in war. Sure, it’s the human condition, but for a kids’ show to point that out? Traumatizing.

Lorna’s Transformation

Skeleton villagers. Opera-singing monsters. Fathers crazed by grief. Over the Garden Wall was chock-full of dark things. But the darkest of them all came in the house of Auntie Whispers, who, judging by her freaky voice and features, seemed like a textbook evil character who was imprisoning her niece, Lorna. When the adolescent adventurers Wirt and Greg attempted to free Lorna from Auntie Whispers’ mind-control bell, they learned to their horror that looks can be deceiving. Never will I forget the stomach-dropping moment when, free from Auntie Whispers’ magic bell, the dark spirit inside Lorna takes over the teen’s body and attempts to devour her would-be saviors. Poor Auntie Whispers, she was only trying to help.

Mojo Jojo’s Beatdown

The Powerpuff Girls were wrong for this one. Over the course of the episode “Candy is Dandy,” the girls are rewarded with sweets every time they save Townsville, developing a Chocolate Boy-style candy addiction in the process. Rather than try to go clean like Chocolate Boy, the girls instead strike a deal with their nemesis Mojo Jojo to repeatedly bust him out of jail and imprison him again for another sweet reward. Eventually, Mojo Jojo decides to steal the girls’ candy jar for an evil-doing change of pace, and the girls give him a horrifying beatdown in return. Just look at him. His bones are broken. His teeth are gone. His face is pummeled. His brains are hanging out. Traumatizing. They massacred that poor chimpanzee over what? Some candy? The Powerpuff Girls were the real villains in that episode. Homicidally immature.

Jack and the Haunted House

One of the darkest episodes in kids’ cartoon history, Samurai Jack‘s “Jack and the Haunted House” is a better horror movie than 90% of whatever’s playing in theaters. After arriving at a dilapidated feudal manor, Jack sees freaky visions of its murdered former inhabitants. Through mind-numbingly scary hallucination sequences, the audience learns that a dark spirit killed the entire family; not even the children were spared. The horror reaches a fever pitch when the spirit takes Jack’s soul to a hell dimension, imprisoning it alongside the souls of countless other victims. Many kids’ cartoons pit their heroes against monsters, but few make that monster the literal devil. When it comes to being frightening, this demonic beast gives Adventure Time‘s Lich a run for his money.

(featured image: Cartoon Network)

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