A series about locked room murder mysteries is expected to be somewhat scary. But sometimes, Jonathan Creek goes that extra mile.
Heavy spoilers below.
- The Grinning Man: The water tank. There are likely several people swearing off baths forever because of that scene.
- The picture of said "Grinning Man" himself is very strong Nightmare Fuel.
- The Three Gamblers: An evil old man is killed after a drug deal goes wrong. He gets six bullets in the head, and is dumped in the cellar of an abandoned house nearby; they put a wardrobe in front of the door. Terrified that the old guy will still come back for revenge, one of the killers insists on going back to check he hasn't moved... only he has, crawled to the top of the stairs and apparently clawed at the door, despite being very dead. And looking it. He was dead, but the cellar had flooded, and the body had floated to the top of the stairs, and still looked creepy as hell.
- In Jack in the Box, it turns out the murderer actually bricked himself up at the crime scene then committed suicide. Meaning that every single time Jonathan and Maddy investigate the murder scene for clues there was an unseen dead body right behind the wall.
- Also, the murderer turns out to have been the man who was let out of prison at the start of the episode thanks in no small part to Maddy getting involved in his family's campaign to clear his name — and that he actually had committed the murder that led to him going to prison in the first place. Meaning that Maddy, a journalist who's dedicated to exposing injustice, has helped a murderer get out of prison and kill again.
- In the 1998 Christmas special, Black Canary, the backstory involves a magician who died during a rehearsal when some equipment spectacularly malfunctioned and she got sliced in half by a table saw ... lengthwise. Gruesome, but it just seems like your run-of-the-mill sort of gruesome — until you really think about the concept of lengthwise. From the bottom up. Maddy sums it up best: "I'm gonna have to sleep with a saucepan between my legs!" Even worse, later there are several flashbacks to this incident, which show that the poor woman was conscious and screaming for far too long.
- To make it worse, there are hints that her twin sister deliberately sabotaged the trick so that she could kill her and take her place.
- To make it EVEN WORSE, it could have been a genuine accident which the sister decided to exploit. However, since she later dies, the family has no way to ever find out the truth.
- To make it worse, there are hints that her twin sister deliberately sabotaged the trick so that she could kill her and take her place.
- The Eyes of Tiresias, a woman is having nightmares about people who are eventually murdered. At first nothing special, just your average Jonathan Creek episode. Then we get to see one of her dreams, in which a one-eyed man stabs her to death with a sword. Firstly, the amount of blood is really creepy, but then he turns around and has an actually pretty horrible looking mask on. It can really shock you when you're not ready for it.
- The stalker in Danse Macabre. Initially his presence is only mildly unsettling - until he chops the head off of the corpse of his obsession.
- Made even worse at the end of the episode — it turns out he's flying back to States with a package (heavily implied to contain that head). After seeing that scene, you will be REALLY glad for all those X-ray machines at the airports that ensure people can't bring severed human heads to planes anymore.
- Mother Redcap manages to combine Nothing Is Scarier with Realism-Induced Horror in one fell swoop. First, there is the terrifying tale of the pub where people would drop dead in sheer terror after seeing something through one of the rear windows. Then comes the reveal that the victims were actually being electrocuted to death by a trap set up by the landlord. Both the legend and the truth manage to be equally disturbing.
- Gorgons Wood is one of the grimmer episodes of the already-dark fourth season especially after the midpoint with the introduction of the disfigured prostitute and her violent pimp, and the uncle-niece Incest Subtext component of the plot becoming clear.
