Nightmare fuel: 21 horrifying moments from children’s entertainment

This is the “zombie episode,” where Lazy Smurf is bitten by a purple fly, which turns him into a nasty, purple monster. He starts barking out “Gnap! Gnap!” and bites the next smurf he meets. That Smurf turns purple, starts shouting “Gnap!” and the affliction rapidly spreads until the whole village is teeming with tiny purple monsters. Papa Smurf frantically tries to find a cure, but the Smurfs helping him get bitten one by one. He eventually does find a cure, but Smurfs are being bitten faster than he can cure them. Papa finds himself surrounded by a hundred snapping, growling, purple monsters, and he runs to his laboratory for another dose of the cure, but it’s too late—they get him too. The show lets you absorb that hopelessness for a minute before a deus ex machina saves the day: The purple Smurfs accidentally set fire to the lab, and the cure-infused smoke turns the whole village blue in a matter of moments. That kind of pat ending was typical of the show, but the overall tone of “The Purple Smurfs” is far closer to Night Of The Living Dead than the show’s usual lighthearted idiocy. [Mike Vago]

For most of its short running time, Dumbo is a straightforward parable. Dumbo, a boy elephant with extra large ears, is mocked for his appearance. He befriends a mouse named Timothy, (temporarily) loses his mother, but ultimately learns that his ears, which, when properly controlled, allow him to fly, are his greatest strength. It’s a sweet, uplifting story, albeit one that isn’t afraid to get emotionally brutal when necessary. But nothing in the first 45 minutes will prepare an audience for the bizarre fever dream that is “Pink Elephants On Parade.” After Dumbo and Timothy fall into a barrel of beer, they hallucinate almost four minutes of pure cartoon anarchy, a trippy fluorescent concoction of mildly sinister elements with no real narrative connection to anything before or after it. In context, it’s a disturbing cul-de-sac that leads nowhere and tells us nothing, yet still somehow feels at one with the rest of the film: just another reminder that the world is a strange, menacing place full of grinning lunatics, and even a magic feather might not be enough to save you. [Zack Handlen]

We called out this scene , but it bears repeating, because frankly, we still haven’t fully gotten over it. The Last Unicorn, a whimsical fairy tale about love, loss, and dedication, rewards youthful attention by haunting dreams for years after viewing, thanks to an unwavering commitment to being creepy as hell. (Though as an adult, it’s mostly just weird.) Having been captured by Mommy Fortuna, a witch who runs a carnival that keeps magical creatures trapped in cages, the unicorn convinces young magician Schmendrick to release all of them. One of the beasts freed is the harpy, a violent and dangerous animal who immediately turns around to enact vengeance on Mommy Fortuna. Ripping her apart would be bad enough; what makes it truly unsettling is that Fortuna seems to embrace her fate, cackling and howling with madness gleaming in her eyes, as she opens her arms to welcome her own death. [Alex McCown]

Plenty of adult filmgoers can’t handle jump scares, so it’s a little cruel that Disney’s Great Mouse Detective inflicts them on small children. And it’s even crueler that most of them involve a creepy bat named Fidget, who’s already nightmare fodder in his own right. In the film’s scariest moment, Basil, Major Dawson, and their young client Olivia track Fidget to a toyshop he’s robbing. Fidget quickly ducks out of sight and a few moments later every wind-up toy in the shop starts playing at once—creating a melody that straddles the line between whimsical and eerie. Olivia becomes enchanted by a small baby bassinet and as she innocently pulls back the blanket to see the baby doll inside, Fidget lunges toward the camera with a yelp, teeth barred in a horrific grin. With that one terrifying jump scare, a whole generation of kids learned never to trust a quiet moment in an otherwise action-packed thriller. [Caroline Siede]

Few children’s films hit harder, or live eternally in the consciousness, like 1984’s The Neverending Story. Based on the German novel Die Unendliche Geschichte (fitting that this phantasmagoric cautionary tale is German) the story is an allegory about the fragile beauty of children’s imaginations and the importance of reading. It’s hard to say if director Wolfgang Peterson viewed this bizarre material as a warning to a generation that would increasingly become slaves to video games, cable, and ultimately social media, but the message was certainly prescient. The antagonist is The Nothing, a swirling, chaotic void that destroys everything in its wake. The Nothing is laying waste to the fictional utopia Fantasia, and the only thing that can stop the destruction is a human child’s imagination. The film never panders to its demographic and there’s no comic relief or goofy characters to relieve the creeping existential dread. The Nothing is a force of nature and not “boo” scary, but it’s unstoppable, propelled by the death of childlike wonder and imagination. By embodying every child’s fears (death, the unknown, growing up, loss of innocence), The Nothing is essentially the boogeyman that is puberty. Thanks a lot, Germany. [Drew Fortune]

Bert and Ernie’s friendship is one of the most endearing parts of Sesame Street. The pair bickers, but it’s never anything serious; in fact, their interactions work so well because they’re generally always tucked away in their own little world, insulated from outside distractions or traumatic experiences. Perhaps that’s why a sleepover visit from Count Von Count threw such a wrench in the space-time continuum. When the number cruncher can’t sleep, it’s suggested he count sheep as a way to induce slumber. However, this idea backfires in a big way: Count stays up all night reciting numbers, and emerges refreshed the next morning, while Ernie turns into a tired zombie with bags under his eyes, stuck counting sheep in an unsettled monotone voice. It’s a jarring and frightening sight, because it’s such a far cry from the normally bubbly, cheerful Ernie who adores his Rubber Ducky. Thankfully, Zombie Ernie is only on screen for less than a minute in this transformed state, but it’s enough of an appearance to have a lasting negative impact on impressionable young viewers. [Annie Zaleski]

The movie canon of Frank L. Baum’s work is full of not-safe-for-children imagery (see below), but the winged monkeys just might top the list. In Baum’s book, the monkeys are enslaved by the Wicked Witch Of The West, but in the film version, their only motivation is to serve the green-skinned baddie. Dorothy and company make it out of the haunted forest, only to have the Wicked Witch’s minions swoop down and steal Dorothy and Toto and fly them away. What’s so scary about the winged monkeys are their size. They aren’t cute and tiny, but human-sized, lumbering after Dorothy with terrifying strength. Her buddies, who have protected her thus far, are no match for them, even the Tin Man with his ax, and especially not the Scarecrow. Dorothy has no shot against a bunch of monkeys who are strong enough to pick her up and fly her away. But it’s the sheer number of them that gives the winged monkeys their terrifying power. When they first start their attack, it’s not just a couple of monkeys, but hundreds of evil primates descending upon our heroes. Dorothy never had a chance. [Molly Eichel]

Return To Oz places the audience in a fantastical utopia in ruins, with Oz transformed into a dystopian wasteland, ruled by homicidal Queen Mombi and a gang of freaky wheeler-type things. Return To Oz is wall-to-wall nightmare, a completely bummer trip devoid of candy-gloss Munchkinlands or uplifting travel songs. The grim death march begins with Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) narrowly escaping electroshock treatment before retreating to the ruins of Oz. The nightmare really ramps up when Dorothy encounters The Wheelers outside the ruins of Emerald City. Oddly reminiscent of Alex and his Droogs in A Clockwork Orange, these snarling, steam-punk baddies are evil incarnate, cackling and enjoying their amorality. The ultimate freakout is evil Queen Mombi, who is introduced playing a mandolin and oozing sweetly veiled menace. What Dorothy doesn’t know is that Mombi is a vicious psychopath with a powerful lust for decapitation. The madness reaches a fever pitch when Dorothy escapes the Queen, whose coterie of screaming human heads is a nightmare chorus of bloodlust and insanity. Yikes. [Drew Fortune]

There’s certainly no shortage of creepy Muppets out there, but few people seem to remember Miss Finch, one of several antagonists from Sesame Street’s first feature film, Follow That Bird. As much as she means well (she’s a social worker who believes that Big Bird should live with his own kind), it’s hard to shake the fact that she’s an imposing full-bodied Muppet, one who has the agitated smoker’s voice of Oscar nominee Sally Kellerman, no less. And how about her eyelashes? Tar-black and slanted into a perpetual glare, those things were surely made from amputated tarantula legs. Miss Finch reaches maximum menace early on in the film when, after Big Bird has run away from his foster family, he catches Kermit The Frog’s late-night news interview with her on a TV in the window of a hardware store. She vows to find Big Bird wherever he is, and sure enough, she drives on-camera just moments after he drops his teddy bear in the mail and starts hightailing it back to Sesame Street. It’s as if Miss Finch has burst from the television screen Big was just watching, her red van the public-television equivalent to Michael Myers’ station wagon in Halloween—enormous, loud, and shark-like in its prowling. Hell, it even comes emblazoned with a state seal on the driver’s side. When Miss Finch leans her head out the window, looks around for Big Bird, then grunts in frustration and speeds off into the night when he’s not there, you can’t help but think the overgrown canary’s in deadly trouble, even though Finch’s intentions are (supposedly) altruistic. [Dan Caffrey]

What is it about Don Bluth and cats? An American Tail’s Tiger notwithstanding, Bluth’s animation studio was obsessed with depicting felines as sociopathic, slobbering monsters in the ’80s, the scariest portrayal being Dragon in 1982’s The Secret Of NIMH. When mousy protagonist Mrs. Brisby and the klutzy Jeremy the crow first see him, it’s from a distance. He frolics in some swamp grass, playfully leaping into the air at a couple of stray birds. By all accounts, he looks like a normal house cat. But the closer Dragon gets, the more terrifying he becomes, emerging from the orange light at the mouth of a log as if ascending from the bowels of hell. His ogre-like silhouette creeps into frame, followed by a truly grotesque face that’s made up of scars, teeth, and one milky blind eye. When he roars and starts pursuing Mrs. Frisby and Jeremy through the water, they may as well be running from a T. rex. Sure, the tabby probably looks normal to his human owners, but when you’re a tiny mouse or a slightly bigger crow, Dragon looks… well, like a dragon. [Dan Caffrey]

Although Jim Henson never intended for his work to be seen as mere “kids’ stuff,” by the early ’80s his workshop had acquired that reputation anyway. That status led many a clueless parent to rent The Dark Crystal for their Muppets-loving offspring, thinking that the fantasy adventure would have the same innocent appeal of Kermit, Miss Piggy, and the gang. Those illusions were shattered with the appearance of the Skeksis, an evil race of hateful monsters whose twisted alien faces resemble a hybrid of a vulture and a lizard and who are able to suck the souls, or “essence,” from living creatures and (gasp!) drink it. Their deformed features, genocidal agenda, and disgusting table manners are nightmarish enough, but throw an army of crystal bats and the Garthim, the Skeksis’ hermit-crab-like foot soldiers, into the mix, and you’ve got a generation of kids forever scarred by the knowledge that not all Muppets are nice. [Katie Rife]

For the most part, We’re Back!: A Dinosaur’s Story is a dopey, amiable animated kids’ film about force-evolved dinosaurs brought into the modern era to make children happy. The dinos are all bright colors, rounded edges, and celebrity voices; the singing T. rex voiced by John Goodman is introduced golfing and reminiscing about his life. There’s one scary scene where the underdeveloped villain de-evolves them from cuddly plush toys into roaring monsters, but for the most part, the film is about manic banter and mildly antic little-kid mayhem. But then the good guys win and fly away from the villain, and out of nowhere, a flock of evil-looking crows swoop in and… devour him? Evaporate him? Unmake him? It’s profoundly creepy, all the more so because it’s so unexpected and unexplained. Note to children watching: This is apparently just something crows do to people who are left alone for five minutes. Oh hey, do you sleep alone, in your own bedroom? And in the dark? Good luck with that. [Tasha Robinson]

Every parent worries that their child might someday fall in with a bad crowd, but few animated films underline just how bad a crowd can get as Disney’s 1940 adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures Of Pinocchio. Not long after the Blue Fairy brings Geppetto’s marionette to life, Pinocchio is tricked into joining a puppet show run by rival puppeteer Stromboli and is led down a perilous path that ultimately takes him to Pleasure Island, a haven of debauchery where kids are drinking, gambling, smoking, and vandalizing. Sure, it sounds great, but there’s a catch: Eventually the kids are turned into donkeys to work in the salt mines. On the surface, it may seem a little silly, but it quickly becomes horrifying when Pinocchio’s new “friend,” Lampwick, begins to transform. First the donkey ears pop up, then the tail pops out of the seat of his pants, and then as he turns around to ask, “What’s he think I look like, a jackass?” he’s got the head of one. Realizing what’s happening to him, Lampwick begs for help, but it’s too late: The remainder of the transformation has already started to take place. While moviegoers only see his shadow as his body contorts, combine that with his horrific braying and you’ve still got the stuff of nightmares. [Will Harris]