The Punisher: I looked in the devil square in the eyes... and I blinked.
Spoilers Off applies to all Nightmare Fuel pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
- Dr. Connors visibly mutating into The Lizard in the first episode.
- The Neogenic Nightmare arc seems to have been written with the express purpose of traumatizing children. Let's see what it featured:
- Michael Morbius becoming a genuinely creepy vampire. As if that isn't bad enough, instead of sucking blood using his fangs like most vampires, he drains plasma through small suckers in his palms instead (oddly enough, this change was one of the many, many mandated by the network to make this show less startling). He later ends up as a giant bat monster.
- Herbert Landon dropping in a serum designed to kill mutants himself mutating into a giant, four-armed monstrosity. Spider-Man and the X-Men eventually stop his rampage across Manhattan and "cure" him, however half of his body is still visibly mutated. In one way, it reveals the ugliness inside a man who was a rather handsome figure with a very loathsome prejudice against mutants.
- Spider-Man himself mutating into a hideous, vicious, terrifying man-spider. The change doesn't happen until the very last minute of the episode, but it's still a horrific scene, with Peter's gloved hands mutating into distorted claws before he starts Hulking Out. The Reveal of the new Man-Spider is like something out of a horror movie, with the Punisher, who had been chasing Peter along effortlessly for most of the episode, suddenly finding himself effortlessly manhandled by a towering arachnoid horror. The Oh, Crap! face as he grabs Spider-Man's torn, discarded mask and holds it up, realizing what this thing was. And then there's the very last shot of the scene; Man-Spider, lit from behind so he's just a silhouette, with the only features distinguishable being his huge fangs and six glowing blood-red eyes, leaning down in an Eat the Camera shot...
- Man-Spider himself is a pretty horrific concept. A hideous six-armed hulked-out humanoid spider is bad enough, but he's implied to be even stronger than the regular Spidey, he has organic webbing and so can web you from six hands at once, he spits Hollywood Acid, oh, and his human brain is implied to be degenerating. Meaning he may reach a point where he starts treating humans as prey...
- Silvermane aging backward into a baby. Especially horrifying is when he reaches his little boy age, at which he actually starts yelling "Make it stop! Someone please, make it stop!"
- And later on, the Vulture, with his youth-draining tech, sucking the youth out of people, lastly Spider-Man... and also absorbing his mutating DNA, causing him to sporadically turn into the Man-Spider himself, but retaining his full intelligence and power of speech, and then later seemingly permanently being trapped as the Man-Spider for the rest of his life. Sure, he brought it on himself, but still. Fortunately for him, he's cured by an off-screen plot device...
- Peter's recollections of his own origin story. He has a dream in which first his limbs turn red from the spider bite, then he mutates into a Drider, gets flushed down the drain by Aunt May while screaming for help, then washes up in the river, having grown to monstrous size, and is chased by the army who shoot missiles at him.
- There's something subtly disturbing about the storylines involving Hydro-Man — his sheer relentlessness combined with the fact that anything Peter does to him will only stall him for a few minutes is bad enough, but then he dies because Mary Jane tricks him into spending so long away from water that he evaporates, and Spider-Man just has to say that water is so common that it's possible he'll come back one day, which means a) it's possible that he's still sentient in his evaporated form, b) he might return having learned from that defeat, rendering him genuinely impossible to get rid of. And then he does come back. And it turns out that he and the current Mary Jane are both clones of the originals, and they both just disintegrate into water.
- More overtly disturbing is the fact Morris Bench is defined in this series as Mary Jane's former Domestic Abuser, whom she dumped for being a Control Freak who tried to run her life. And this is the exact same mentality he maintains when he appears; an obsessive, vindictive, controlling stalker who feels Entitled to Have You is scary enough. Add in his vast power and watching him chasing after Mary Jane becomes terrifying.
- His assault on the police station in his return is effectively a PG version of The Terminator. Except he doesn't bother with "I'll be back."
- Spider-Man's reaction to him watching Mary Jane fall into one of the portals, presumably to her death. He's out to kill Green Goblin. It's not black suit Spidey, being controlled and crossing the lines. It's Peter Parker, having watched the woman he loves seemingly die right before his eyes, and wanting to kill the man responsible, literally pushing him toward a portal that threatens to suck him in.
- Not to mention Mary Jane's fate herself. She spends the rest of the series falling through a wormhole with no escape. And seeing as obvious weeks and months have passed and it still shows her falling, she obviously cannot die in there.
- Though Word of God states that if the series wasn't cancelled, we'd learn that she ended up in Victorian London.
- While he may have been significantly toned down, Carnage was still pretty terrifying. In fact, back when he was just known as Cletus Kasady, he was specifically quoted to have committed crimes too extreme for even tabloid newspapers to print.
- As the police force are about to storm Kasady's hideout, Lt. Lee gets a warning from the Chief that perfectly establishes the kind of man Kasady is.Chief: Terri, you like your job? [...] Kasady loves his.
- As the police force are about to storm Kasady's hideout, Lt. Lee gets a warning from the Chief that perfectly establishes the kind of man Kasady is.
- A lot of people remember how over-the-top Spider-Man got after being taken over by the symbiote, but the first part of "The Alien Costume" shows how scary a downplayed symbiote!Spider-Man could be.Rhino: All right, I give up. I'd rather go to jail than to be a snitch.
Spider-Man: Who said anything about jail?
Rhino: Huh? I-I don't get it.
Spider-Man: You will. [shoots a webline at a metal door and reels it in] It's like this, I'm through with not getting what I want!
Rhino: What are you doin'? I told ya, I-I-I give up!
Spider-Man: That's funny. I give up, too. [lifts the metal door above Rhino] I give up trying to be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
Rhino: No...! No, you can't!
Spider-Man: Can't I...?- The costume acting on its own accord and knocking Shocker over a ledge and down to his death with a tendril. Peter is horrified.
- Narm Charm, Chewing the Scenery and Memetic Mutation aside, the scene where symbiote!Spider-Man gives chase to Shocker can be downright terrifying in the latter's perspective. To see that humble, quippy lighthearted hero who stopped you non-lethally, now wearing all-black, having resorted to one brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown after another, and screaming your name at the top of his lungs out of a lust for your blood is downright horrifying. Not to mention, this is a man with spider-esque powers, having gone Drunk with Power: you? You're just a guy with vibro-shock gauntlets.Spider-Man: GET BACK HERE, SHOCKER!! SHOOOCKEEERRRRRRRR!!! YOU CAN'T ESCAPE ME!!! I'LL CHASE YOU TO THE ENDS OF THE EAAAAAAAAAARTH!!!!!!!!
- Venom makes his grand debut in TV in this show, and even though he does have his funny moments and eventual Heel–Face Turn, he turns out just as he did in the comics: terrifying on a personal level. Putting aside how much more powerful Venom is and how he outquips Spider-Man in his disturbing Evil Sounds Deep voice, his effect grows afterwards. After his first encounter with Venom, Peter continuously hallucinates him everywhere, from a billboard to a magazine, and as his influence continues, Eddie goes as far as to threaten Mary Jane and Aunt May, try unmasking Peter, and also even visit Aunt May just to track down Peter again. And once Spidey retaliates by defiling his hideout, Venom flips the hell out and is completely single-mindedly set on killing the spider.Eddie: No... NO! YOU DARE—!
[turns into Venom and smashes through a wall]
Venom: GAAAAAAH!!!!! We'll crush you like a WORM...!- His transformation, though seen in shadows, is terrifying, along with the implications of the union between the symbiote and Eddie.
- When the Green Goblin retakes control of Norman Osborn in Goblin War. We only see a shot of Oscorp in the middle of the night, with Norman Talking to Themself. As he tries to keep his Goblin personality from taking over, his desperate screams pass into a fit of Laughing Mad.
- Spider-Carnage. He happens to be one of the darkest Spider-Man villains ever made and it's not hard to see why. Imagine a Peter Parker who has lost everyone he loved and found out he'd been cloned and was led to believe he was a clone, having gone so insane with rage and grief he decides to fuse with the Carnage symbiote, become a deranged cackling maniac working with the Kingpin (who describes Spider-Carnage as too evil by even his standards), Hobgoblin, and the Green Goblin to destroy New York and take over the world. The New York of his world is literally a wasteland on fire and Spider-Carnage actually plans to set off a chain reaction that will eventually destroy all of reality and actually succeeds. The Beyonder actually intervened and used almost all of his power to reset time just for the chance he could be stopped.
- When not a Tear Jerker, Spider-Carnage's Heroic Sacrifice is terrifying. He attempts to fight the Carnage symbiote's power, screaming and apologizing before just shrieking for forgiveness, mindlessly opening an imbalanced portal to kill himself. One hell of a way to wrap the show up.
- Spider-Carnage: FORGIVE MEEEEEEE!!!!! FORGIIIIIIIVE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- 'The Haunting Of Mary Jane Watson'. Easily one of the spookiest episodes of the show
- The plot involves a former actress named Miranda Wilson who went missing during the filming of an action movie. Due to MJ and Miranda looking alike, MJ is cast as her replacement to film the remaining scenes. The creepiness begins when MJ witnesses a vision of her own abusive father, which later leads her into a series of catacombs underneath the film studio, through a series of dank caves and rocky passages until she reaches an underground lab... where we see it was nothing more than an animatronic, in all its disturbing glory, with wires and pistons protruding from across its body
- We then meet Miranda Wilson, who fills us all in on her story: she was badly injured when a stunt went wrong, leaving her face badly scarred. She fled into the sewers and found her way to the catacombs, which doubled as the hideout for Mysterio. He wanted to help her repair her face, so the two began concocting this twisted scheme to make it happen
- Miranda's scars themselves are pretty scary, being pure grey and looking almost mechanical, like cybernetics were grafted onto her skin, but they go completely unexplained. Even her eye is solid black with yellow lines running through it. All we know from the show is that, whatever damage she sustained, it cannot be undone
- Their plan involves using a machine to transplant Miranda's mind into MJ's body, and while it's easy to assume MJ's mind would be put into Miranda's body, no explicit mention is made of this... was Miranda really going to kill MJ just to achieve her goal?
- Mysterio and Spider-Man arrive to save the day, revealing that the machine Mysterio built was actually a giant ruse. It was never going to work, but he did it because it made Miranda happy. He loved her, and wanted her to be able to enjoy something in her life... but in the end, it isn't enough, and she triggers a self-destruct mechanism to destroy the hideout, and her too. Mysterio even willingly stays with her. It's revealed in a later episode that Mysterio canonically died in the explosion. That's right, this episode not only featured at least one confirmed death, but it's unlikely Miranda made it out either, meaning there was also a suicide.
- The first appearance of Scorpion aka Mac Gargan has a rather dark second half. After Mac goes mad due to the mutation, he decides to kidnap Jameson and drag him to a power plant where Mac intends to change himself back uncaring of how much destruction it causes to the city. And we see an possible outcome to what could’ve happened if Jameson hadn’t stopped him.
