Justice League (animation)/Nightmare Fuel

• The Justice Lords' Superman's Psychotic Smirk after he killed President Luthor, all with creepy background music.
  • What he says to Batman and Wonder Woman right after makes it a LOT worse. I'm great!
• Being a homage to the Cthulhu Mythos, "The Terror Beyond" is stuffed to the gills with it. The Screamers, oh god, the Screamers! It only gets worse when you realize that the Screamers are basically Y'golonac, Lovecraftian God of Rape and Sexual perversion.
• Brainiac bursting his way out of Lex Luthor.
• Near the end of "Maid Of Honor", when Vandal Savage, who was in ground zero for an asteroid hitting the Kasnian royal palace, confirms his immortality by breaking out of the rubble, still healing from the blast with him still resetting his bones and screaming in a mixture of rage and indescribable pain?
• Doctor Destiny and Ace of the Royal Flush gang are especially fun cases in this regard. Their common special ability: Mind Rape. Which is to say, they are in themselves Nightmare Fuel in episodes that use Nightmare Fuel as a plot point.
  • Joker revealing Ace's origin and her powers (she can alter your perception of reality by looking at you), while her eyes stare at you.
  • Then there's the scene where Ace shows the Joker that no matter how crazy you are, there's always an even lower depth to plumb...though seeing the Joker Hoist by His Own Petard was simply priceless.
• Speaking of Doctor Destiny, in the episode "Only A Dream":
  • The ending where Doctor Destiny has gotten everybody but Martian Manhunter and Batman to go to sleep. They show each of the heroes going to sleep, while playing a toned-down music box in the background. Finally, you hear Doctor Destiny softly chuckling. Not an Evil Laugh, just a... chuckle. Worst of all, Superman goes to sleep, and Batman calls him moments later, trying too late to warn him. End of episode.
  • ** What about what Doctor Destiny did to his wife? She left him to be with another man, but upon getting his powers, he paid her a visit and unveiled his costumed, skull-faced appearance. Whatever he does to her, she is left screaming in a sleep no one can wake her from. She dies not too long afterwards.

Penny (wife): You're crazy, John.
John: You know, I never liked that name, it's so ordinary, I'm someone with a destiny. Oh, I like that: Dr. Destiny. *clothes turn into spooky robes* And now that I'm a doctor *face falls off revealing a skull* I think I'll perform some surgery.

• • Destiny looms over the Flash when he enters his dreams, and says these chilling lines.

Flash: I get it, I'm dreaming, all I have to do is close my eyes and I'll... *closes eyes nothing happens*
Dr. Destiny: Wake up?

• • Hawkgirl's nightmare deserves mention. Green Lantern, the Flash, and Superman all have nightmares relating to their powers. Hawkgirl has the much more relatable fear of confined spaces, which Doctor Destiny exploits by burying her alive. The terrified screaming from the otherwise tough Hawkgirl doesn't help. She breaks down and cries in fear, begging for anyone to help while Supes, GL and J'onn are right outside the locked dream door unable to go through, an unsettling reaction she never quite matches later on in the series. Prompting a Heroic Willpower moment in GL (which is good, as his powers are driven by willpower).
  • The cannibalistic kids in Flash's nightmare? I know that they had nothing to do with the nightmare per se, but it was so out of nowhere... They got to be even scarier than the context of the scene. Good thing he has superspeed. Or not.
  • Superman accidentaly destroying Metropolis and snapping Jimmy Olsen's spine in his nightmare should also count. Not to mention accidentally frying Lois with heat vision at the very beginning. Both horrifying and heartbreaking.
• J'onn being tortured by the Nazis. We don't actually see what happens, but we can definitely hear the screams...
  • Well, actually, that was probably him faking it, since he replaced the torturer easily enough. Shapechanging, super strength, phasing... he's equipped for this. Doesn't make his screaming any less creepy. Seriously, something about J'onn's voice makes any screaming, real or faked, kind of scary.
• Though it doubles as a CMoH, the end of "Hereafter". The particular alternate future, 30,000 years older and more insane version of Vandal Savage encountered in this episode had destroyed almost all life on Earth except himself allowing him 30,000 years to think about what he has done. He wants Superman to use his Time Machine (that Savage could not use himself) to rectify his mistake, despite his knowledge that in doing so, his current self would cease to exist, while the mainstream and canon Savage would live forever. The character of Vandal Savage hits two birds with one stone: simultaneously ceasing to exist and living and living and living until no one and nothing is around to care that he still exists... Either that, or stopping the evil plan that had resulted in the apocalypse in the first place resulted in the actual death of the mainstream and canon Savage... which is unsettling in and of itself.
• One of the scenes in the Justice Lords episode, "A Better World", has the League visit the alternate Arkham. Many villains, particularly Batman villains, are acting very much out of character. Then, you notice two small dots on all of their heads. Then, you recall what Alternate Superman did to Doomsday. Oh, and Scarface's dots are on the dummy, not on the ventriloquist.
  • And of course, the first person who is revealed to have been lobotomized by the Lord Superman is the Joker; who is now the secretary of Arkham Asylum. I dunno about anyone else, but hearing his voice and seeing his appearance to be so calm, almost serene, it really drew an unsettling feeling considering we're used to seeing him as a psychopathic, murdering clown. Who woulda thought one way for Joker to be scarier was to calm him down??
  • Flash's scene with Poison Ivy - Ivy's a real unpleasant fanatical piece of work, in the DCAU and without, but seeing her like that... content, calm, friendly, and humming as she cuts the the buds off of flowers... Seems just fundamentally wrong. Creepy, you might call it. Especially when you think about Ivy's obsession with plants—she nearly goes into conniptions if anyone so much as touches one of her plants. For her to go so far as to actually be "hurting" plants... it's so thoroughly not her. And when the head of the robot clone of Justice Lord Superman (It Makes Sense in Context) falls behind her, she just continues on with her work.
• At the end of "For the Man Who Has Everything", Wonder Woman puts Mongul's Lotus Eater Machine on him. Right before the episode ends, we get to hear painful screaming and horrible destruction, presumably all from Mongul's fantasy. And Superman wasn't the only one screaming.
  • This episode deserves mention for when the plant is put on Bruce - we get to relive the moment his parents were shot (in black and white too to give it a proper Film Noir feel), but in his dream his father fights the criminal and continues to punch him. But as Wonder Woman tears off the plant, we see Bruce's father be overpowered by the criminal, zoom in on a child Bruce's face turning more and more horrified as we finally hear a combination of a tearing sound and a gunshot when the plant is removed... it's truly horrifying. Made worse in that when the plant attaches to him, we see the only genuine, contented smile Batman ever has in the entirety of the Justice League run.
  • Wonder Woman falling victim to a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by Mongul was pretty unsettling to watch. We have seen Wonder Woman take a beating on Justice League before but this episode in particular makes it worse than the others. For instance you had Mongul coming close to actually killing her. She had to crawl to Bruce to save him from the plant because she could hardly stand after the beating she took from Mongul.
• The end of "Kid Stuff", in which Mordred gets rid of all adults. It's reversed when Mordred is tricked into turning into an adult himself, and his mother Morgan Le Faye notes that the spell giving him eternal youth is now broken, leaving him only with eternal life. As if simply thinking about the ramifications of this isn't enough, the last shot of the episode shows Morgan tenderly wiping the drool from the mouth of a glassy-eyed old man.
• Really, the nightmares started from episode one. However narmy the Imperium may have been, its attack was anything but.
  • For that matter, there's a certain shock to seeing what appears to be an ordinary guard dog start walking straight up a wall as it transforms into something entirely different.
  • J'onn getting multiple large, writhing alien tentacles shoved violently under his skin (including the skin of his FACE) is pretty gruesome.
• The episode "Dark Heart". A planet being devoured piece by piece, the inhabitants mostly being able to do nothing as they see the wave of machines sweeping towards them.
• Darkseid describing what he's going to do to Superman while he's writing on the ground in pain from the Agony Matrix. Specifically, Darkseid pulls out a kryptonite knife and tells Superman that he's going to carve out his heart and place it on a pike as a trophy.
• A rather small one, but the Justice League women being pitted together in Grudge Match. Huntress and Black Canary manage to free Fire and Vixen pretty easily, but then they find out they have to fight Wonder Woman (who could match Superman in terms of power). Their reaction is entirely justified. During a rather brutal fight, a few of the league girls come frighteningly close to a bloody death. Hawkgirl almost smashing Vixen's head with her own mace, for example.
• The vision the Question sees while being TORTURED is pretty chilling.