Beast Wars/Nightmare Fuel

"Mmmmm... Is that fear you are feeling, Maximal? Mmmm, yesss... My spark -- it feeds on terror. Let it grow... Let it consume your circuitry. Feel it, yesss, feel it! FEEL THE FEAR!"

—Rampage, Transformers: Beast Wars

• Transformers: Beast Wars is a very violent show, exploiting the Mecha Mooks loophole as far as it can. Characters are bashed up, blown apart, shot, stabbed... This is not a show for children under ten, having been written with an eye towards not boring those who grew up on the original Transformers and were at that point in their teens and twenties.
• Rampage was supposed to be scary, but, especially in his debut episode, he might have proven a bit too scary for some younger audiences, coming across as basically Hannibal Lecter as a Transforming Mecha.
• I remember Blackarachnea and Silverbolt coming across Tarantulas's arm hanging from a tree. Freaky shit. Then they laugh about some stupid pun, and are immediately attacked by the scariest Transformer ever (ok, maybe Unicron ties him). The fact that he was a failed experiment created by the Maximals (not the Predicons, the bad guys) added another freak facet. To top it all off, he was invincible and insane, and murdered and ate an entire colony of Transformers.
• Tarantulas, from the same series, was also quite creepy. He's The Mad Hatter without the whimsy, and very much a sadist, which is hinted at with this exchange:

Cheetor: This is a dumb plan, web-face. I don't have any real blood, just mech fluid.
Tarantulas: Oh, my filters will adjust. It's the act I enjoy more than the nourishment.

• • It doesn't help that the above scene had rather uncomfortable sexual overtones, what with the young Cheetor being bound-up and spreadeagle and Tarantulas crouching over him menacingly.
  • Toss in good ol' arachnophobia, and the fact that Tarantulas will probably duplicate a nightmare you had as a kid, and he becomes freakin' terrifying.
• Transmutate, the malformed, mentally stunted, childlike being from the episode of the same name was deeply unnerving. The fact that she was then blown up by the two Transformers who were trying to protect her didn't help...
  • Proving once again that this is a subjective trope. Many fans actually saw her as The Woobie.
• Cheetor's dream in Feral Scream is pretty disturbing, particularly what Cheetor transforms into in said dream.
  • Cheetor's roar echoing across the landscape in the dead of night freaked me out particularly. I always find the sounds of distant animals unnerving.
• There’s a scene in the episode "Bad Spark", right after Megatron finds Rampage in and heals him. He says “Using an Energon blade on any other spark would have destroyed it.” Then he holds up Rampage’s spark in a box like contraption, which, he then squeezes causing Rampage to yell in pain. Then Megatron process to force Rampage to join the Predacon ranks and all well doing a creepy bad guy laugh.
• There was a scene where Megatron goes to the Ark to steal his ancestor's (That would be G1!Megatron's) spark. Instead of cutting it out like he did with Rampage, he does something even more horrifying. He uses a tentacle like appendage to rip his ancestor's spark out.