Remember Kids, messing with Nanomachines can lead to this!
As lighthearted and action-packed as the show is, the series revolves around any living creature on Earth turning into monsters at random due to being infected by a global contamination of nanomachines. In Generator Rex, everyone is a ticking time bomb. You, your family, that cute Cheerful Child down the street, your pets, the squirrels in your backyard, your plants... Anyone, at any give time, for no apparent reason, can turn into a horrific monster and possibly go on a rampage, possibly forcing the authorities to put them down permanently or rely on a reckless teenager and hope he doesn't find you're incurable. The only reason humanity in the show hasn't lost their minds out of fear is probably Too Bleak, Stopped Caring.- Already Generator Rex has demonstrated this, in the first episode, to list off, The Evos when they're not particularly dormant, the henchmen to Van Kleiss, and Van Kleiss, especially when Van Kleiss dies, and then he resurrects himself, graphically, it's already quite frightening, and it's barely out. There's also visible death shown on the show besides Van Kleiss as it's revealed he slaughtered a whole army of Providence agents sent to rescue Rex.
- Almost all of the E.V.O.s seen so far are heavy on freaky design and some are straight up Body Horror. And a good number of those E.V.O.s look like Eldritch Abominations (see: Weaver's fate in "Frostbite"). The transformations into becoming an E.V.O. are not pleasant in the slightest.
- Providence, the organization made to deal with E.V.O.s, isn't very pleasant either. They have a strict "Cure, Contain, or Kill" policy and before Rex it was just the latter two, mostly the Kill one. The Kill option extends to nuking entire cities off the map and they don't treat their own staff highly since they have a strict We Have Reserves policy that makes any Providence mook expendable and they're shown to die in droves.
- Before they found Rex, Providence just gathered all the EVOs up and let Dr. Holiday's former boss put them through a disintegrator. ALL EVOs got this treatment, so more than a few former humans probably died there. Some of them might have been children.
- Providence even has an EVO jail known as a the Bug Jar, which is actually the entire city of Kyiv, Ukraine after a large concentration of unstable nanites funneled into the city, turning the majority of its inhabitants into mindless EVO beasts.
- Also, it’s shown even before Black Knight’s leadership, there is corruption amongst their ranks—-one agent is an informant for Van Kleiss, Weaver and his men have been selling Rex’s offloaded nanites to Van Kleiss as well. And then it’s revealed a Providence guard got bribed by Hunter Cain to help him escape.
- The Big Bad, Van Kleiss. He's vampiric in his nature and appearance, which may not necessarily be frightening, serves to make him more unnerving than he already was. He's rather creepy in his own right given his powers, giant mechanical hand with needle fingers, voice, and personality. And the scene where Van Kleiss fed off of Rex by stabbing into his abdomen was painful to watch. He gets worse over the series and eventually gains the power to create E.V.O.s at will by touching anyone other than Rex.
- The first episode also showed Van Kleiss has a garden full of the mutated figures with looks of agony on their faces which are mentioned to be the remains of his victims and minions who failed him, a fate which he tried to inflict on Noah and Bobo.
Noah: I don't think these are statues! - Van Kleiss' relationship and intense focus on Rex becomes even creepier when you realize he's also the one who killed his parents and constantly goads him with promises to reveal more about his past in exchange for allegiance. To kill an amnesiac boy's parents is awful, but to manipulate said boy with promises of information about family he killed personally makes Van Kleiss' actions towards Rex even more sickening in hindsight.
- Breach. Everything about her from her creepy pale-skinned mismatch four-armed appearance to her unstable mental state just makes her a case of walking Surreal Horror. Any Providence mook sees her as The Dreaded and tremble in fear of this Monster Girl. Not to mention she can liberally make portals anywhere and to places across the planet or other dimensions. Including a horrible personal dimension where she keeps things like Evos and people like toys, and she wants to collect Rex!
- In the episode "Breach" (which is a nice Silent Hill type of episode) there is a Creepy Child, E.V.O., that Rex meets, she ends up turning into a huge blob monster out to kill Rex. The much more subtle horror was to look how devoted that girl was to Breach's 'world'. The girl was either damaged from the start or Breach broke her mind to what it was when we saw her.
- Everything Breach said in that episode should also qualify, especially "I give nothing... Never. I take." What's really creepy is the fact that this the same voice for sweet and kind Starfire from Teen Titans.
- The bunny suit in Breach's schoolhouse.
- This song
in particular sounds a lot like the background music used when Van Kleiss introduces himself and when he twists his head in a way that was not meant to be. - Rex's nanite overload in "Frostbite" is also pretty horrible... metal tumors that move start bursting at random from all over his body, notably his face.
- Weaver's transformation into an Evo due to being exposed to a silo of activated nanites is pretty horrifying especially when it shows tentacles sprouting from his back and his body contorting into a giant cancerous mess.
- One episode has a Providence agent being eaten alive by E.V.O-mutated fish. No Gory Discretion Shot, either; No punches are pulled in telling you that man is fish-food.
- One episode is about how the new military/government branch after the big bang met our hero. During the episode, the group goes up against a giant machine/mecha, one that utterly destroys half of the high-tech, monster-killing machines they brought with them and the men manning them. Turns out, after finally hurting the thing, that the mecha was controlled by none other than our Hero. The really bad part? He's a kid that unfortunately has suffered repeated cases of amnesia and has no idea when the next memory loss will happen. Now combine that with the previous. Try watching the show now without looking at Rex like a ticking time bomb.
- Rex's amnesia is pretty terrifying. His brain can reboot at any time without warning. Imagine waking up one morning and having no idea who you are, or who any of your family are. Your whole life just gone. It's a frightening thought.
- Even worse: he isn't always the same person. At least one of his previous reboots was a real jerkass.
- In "Plague", the nanites are causing nearly every living creature to sleep due to nano-mutated virus, staying asleep while E.V.O.s and White Knight (who is already quarantined) remain unaffected. According to Holiday, people would eventually die of thirst and accidents are happening all over the world which only Rex can apparently stop.
- Van Kleiss' fate when he is sent back in time. After being sent back to ancient Egypt by Breach, Van Kleiss spent the better part of 4,000 years inside of a small container, completely aware, unable to move and occasionally leaving to fix his machine, and praying that Breach, who'd been trapped as some swirling energy mass, didn't catch him because then he'd be erased from existence. That's a pretty horrible fate. It's even shown later that the experience left Van Kleiss ultimately deranged and helpless. Turns out he was faking in order to make everyone think he was no threat. Still, that had to have been a hellish experience, no matter how much he deserved it.
