Nightmare Fuel / Archer

There's a reason why Crocodiles are Archer's SECOND-biggest fear.^note Number one is Alligators

In General

• Cheryl's entire FAMILY, the Tunt dynasty; an entire family line of nothing but slavers, genocidal racists, robber barons and pedophiles. Hell, Cheryl is likely the NICEST of them, not counting her brother who's still a bit of a dick. The Tunt ancestral mansion is honeycombed with secret passages that her ancestors used for their creepy and insane hobbies such as searching for runaway slaves to sell back to their owners (in 1890, on top of thinking that the Underground Railroad was an actual physical railroad), terrorizing the servants and "checking in" on the children.
• Krieger's overall Mad Scientist persona is mostly played as Laughably Evil but it's occasionally shown that, yes, Krieger IS dangerously unbalanced and being friends with a mad scientist is NOT fun. He constantly tries to use his co-workers as guinea pigs for his insane ideas, drugs them, takes their blood, unleashes his unholy experiments on them, and that's just the people he likes! It's also hinted that he kills his holographic AI girlfriend whenever she annoys him too much, then just reboots her so she won't remember it. That's not even touching that the current Krieger might not even be the real one, he might've been replaced by one of his clones in season 5. There's evidence for both.
• The disgusting Se7en-style building Krieger lives in, because he spends all of his salary on his private experiments.

Season One

• "The Rock" does a pretty good job of demonstrating how terrifying Malory is when someone crosses her. How? It turns out ISIS doesn't have cleaning ladies anymore because they tried to form a union... and Malory's response was to sabotage the elevator and kill them all.

Season Two

• Len Trexler's "modified Ludovico Technique" reprogramming in "A Going Concern".

Season Three

• In "Space Race: Part I." The General's explanation of why space travel is important, and what will likely happen to Earth in the next 200 years.

Season Four

• The bikers in "Midnight Ron". To elaborate, Archer and Ron hitch a ride with what appears to be an ordinary, if shirtless trucker, but the camera then pans to reveal that he's wearing women's lingerie and high heels. When the truck comes to a stop, Archer and Ron find themselves surrounded by bikers in S&M gear and woman's clothes on the apparent set of "some unspeakably rapey snuff film".

Season Five (Archer: Vice)

• The crocodile attack in "The Rules of Extraction." While the series has had bloody moments before, seeing two unconscious men literally getting dismembered by a trio of gigantic raging crocodiles is pretty damn horrifying.
  • Archer's description of crocodiles also counts:
  Cyril Figgis: Why are you so scared of crocodiles?
  Sterling Archer: Gee, I don't know, Cyril. Maybe deep down, I'm afraid of any Apex Predator that lived through the KT Extinction.
  Cyril Figgis: The...?
  Sterling Archer: Physically unchanged for a hundred million years because it's the perfect killing machine: a half ton of cold-blooded fury with the bite force of twenty-thousand newtons and a stomach acid so strong it can dissolve bones and hooves.

Season Six

• Throughout "Edie's Wedding", Barry's downright insane behavior. The final part of the show ends with him seemingly dead, only for one eye to switch back on and him to laugh maniacally.
• Archer's Tranquil Fury in Sitting is pretty much the ultimate example: Sterling Malory Archer's default setting has always been half assed and even with that he's done some amazing and terrifying things. His setting while he was about to go Papa Wolf? Quadruple ass. Good thing it was all an act but think of what would have happened had Archer followed through...
• Ray's fight-to-the-death with a carnivorous plant, in the aftermath of which he lost his right arm and starts to laugh maniacally.
• Lana's reaction to finding Katya's robot vagina in Archer's sink at the end of "Reignition Sequence", which also doubles as funny. While it's very entertaining to see Lana freak out, it's also the most furious we ever see her in the series, and it. Is. Terrifying.
  • Then the next episode picks it up. . . with Lana waking up in a convertible with Archer, driving through some unrecognizable countryside, wearing only a trenchcoat with lingerie underneath. Imagine being royally pissed at your significant other for presumed cheating, blacking out, then just waking up in that situation. "Fear for your life" wouldn't be an inappropriate response.
• The depths of Cheryl's hatred of children shown in Drastic Voyage. It's pretty creepy how much thought she puts into hurting them.
• Cyril's out-of-nowhere "Freshmaker" rant in the same episode about Ray's new robotic hand coming alive and going on a killing spree.
• In the season 6 finale "Drastic Voyage," Nerius only has one hour in its miniaturized form before it reverts back to its original size. Unfortunately they do not make it and end up killing the patient and everyone else in the medical theater at the time.

Season Seven (Archer: P.I.)

• Archer's flashback to Prep school in the season 7 episode "Deadly Prep". The way he recounts a really traumatic act of bullying to one of the bullies; who had completely forgotten about the encounter; he speaks very softly and haltingly, and you can just tell the incident still scars him. Also doubles as a Tear Jerker.
  • And the fact that the encounter he describes could very easily have been fatal, and it wasn't the only one. These boys didn't just terrorize and bully Archer, they made him fear for his life. May go some way toward explaining Archers' "utter contempt for his own mortality," as Ray puts it.
• In "Motherless Child", Barry returns to force the gang to find his biological mother. As incentive, he reveals he kidnapped Malory and locked her in an underground bunker in a desert and will suffocate in twelve hours when the gasoline air pump runs out of fuel. A combination of You Wake Up in a Room and Buried Alive.
• The hollowed out heads Krieger has of each member of the team in his freezer in " Motherless Child". The gang are all considerably creeped out as well.
  • And the closet of robotic team members he has a little later. Do we even want to know what he's planning with them?
  • Barry chooses the copy of Cyril's face so he can meet his biological mother. It doesn't fit right and looks creepy as hell.
• In "Deadly Velvet" Archer has seemingly been shot to death and is floating in a pool, when a second Archer comes into view, wounded but alive, leaving everybody believe that the Archer in the pool is one of Krieger's robot clones. Then Archer kneels down and starts to propose to Lana... and then he starts convulsing; his eyes bulge and his head shoots sparks. A detective panics and shoots him dead, and his face pops off, revealing circuitry underneath. That's when everybody realizes the real Archer is the corpse in the pool.

Season Eight (Archer: Dreamland)

• The opening of Dreamland, "No Good Deed", has Archer in a coma, with it not be determinable by the doctors as to when (or if) he'll wake up.
• The last scene of "Ladyfingers". Seeing Dutch laugh maniacally on his new robotic limbs is about terrifying as in "Edie's Wedding".
  • It doesn't beat "Waxing Gibbous" where the cast arrives at Trexler's mansion looking for the ransom money, only to find it seemingly abandoned and dark. After a brief search, they notice that the floor is covered in blood, and hears Trexler crying somewhere further into the mansion. Rushing after the sound, they find a weeping Trexler surrounded by 13 horribly mutilated corpses, presumably the remains of his bodyguards, positioned in a gruesome diorama of the Last Supper (partially pictured above), with Dutch walking out of the shadows, hands dripping with blood.
    • The buildup to this scene is wonderfully suspenseful and a perfect example of Nothing Is Scarier.
    • The next episode shows that Dutch has gone completely Laughing Mad, and spends a few moments gleefully smashing apart the corpses (including smacking a head right off the shoulders), before he goes after the others. They briefly manage to get away, only for Dutch to get ahold of a halberd from a suit of armor and goes after them again.
    • Near the end of the episode, Dutch gets thrown off his motorcycle and Archer runs him over not once, not twice, but three times, all while near-maniacally raving about an interrupting cow joke and then devolving into a furious tirade and shouting "typical" over and over. While funny, it's clear that Archer has had enough crap and is nearly leaning off the deep end after days of no sleep trying to find out the cause of his partner's death..
• Dutch getting graphically mauled and killed by Krieger's Cyberhounds during "Auflösung".
  • Followed by Zirk killing the hounds himself, including an extended shot where he pulls one dog's jaw apart cutting away just as the dog's jaw breaks.

Season Nine (Archer: Danger Island)

• "Disheartening Situation" has terrifying encounters with the island's carnivorous wildlife - Siegbert Fuchs is nearly devoured by an enormous snake and the gang has to shoot and stab their way through multiple waves of Komodo Dragons.

Season Ten (Archer: 1999)

• Funbeak's introduction in "Happy Borthday". A screeching Robotic Psychopath spitting lightning from its wings? Even Archer looks like he's about to shit his pants.
• "Dining With the Zarglorp" features Krieger bludgeoning his duplicate robot head to death while screaming "I! Am Not! A MURDERER!" the entire time.
  • The crew spends most of the episode trapped in the stomach of a space monster with a ship captain who suffered a similar fate. She turns out to be a Serial Killer with a massive ego who manipulated her crew into suicide in order to eat them, and tries to do the same to Cyril.
• Through most of "Road Trip", the gang is stalked by a giant alien dinosaur-like creature that is highly intelligent and has camouflage abilities. It's essentially the Indominus Rex.
• "Cubert" started off as standard (albeit stranger-than-usual) sci-fi plot, then abruptly swerving halfway through into a Psycho-esque descent into…reality? Unreality? Surreality? Whatever you called it, Archer freaking out bad due to him starting to realize this world is fake.
  • One of the most terrifying moment in that episode is when Lana is trapped in the medical bay with a crazy Archer as the latter starts to fling her around before gagging her with a magazine with the intent to kill her ala Alien. And if the crew didn't stop Archer, he surely would have!
• "Robert DeNiro": There's something profoundly spooky about Woodhouse's posthumous cameo, not least of which is hearing him speak^note  albeit with generic pre-recorded lines when the Archer fanbase is well aware by this point that his voice actor had passed away a few years before.

Season Eleven

• Season 11 Episode 8 has a bunch of throwaway gags suggesting that Archer never left his coma. Luckily Word of God confirmed that he did leave the coma, but he was suffering severe PTSD due to the unrealness of this particular scenario.

Season Twelve

Season Thirteen

Season Fourteen

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