As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
The book
- The Nothing is the ultimate Nightmare Fuel. It is not a tangible force like a natural disaster nor a creature in the conventional sense, but rather it's the metaphysical concept of the lack of imagination, which in a world created by imagination, is horrifying. It slowly and gradually at increasingly faster and faster rates, destroys the entire world of Fanastica until there's almost nothing left but an empty void.
- The way it inexplicably draws in anyone who gets too close to it. There are no words to describe it, as demonstrated in the first chapter. Atreyu can't even look at it without his mind rebelling at the non-sight. It is, quite simply, something that cannot exist, because it doesn't.
- Most worse than G'Mork or even the Nothing itself, is the force behind them, The Manipulators. They're only described through their monstrous goal to drive the people of Earth mad by replacing fantasy with lies and delusions born out of Fantasticans (Fantasians) who have been erased by the Nothing, and to let them do what they want. What they actually are, Fana is never elaborated, making them somehow more terrifying than the concept of The Nothing Itself whose nature and purpose is knowable. The fact that the Nothing rather than being a product of human's increased lack of imagination but a deliberately cruel act is more frightening than if it had been just The Nothing on its own.
- The Sphinx Gate. The movie version simply blasted you to charcoal. This one hits you with every riddle ever known to man. You simply sit there in an And I Must Scream state until you die of exposure or thirst. And it does this completely randomly.
- G'mork. He's a lupine survivor of a lost world, left without a home, and is working with the Nothing's creator to destroy Fantastica so it can at least have the human world as its only home- out of spite of not having a home of his own anymore.
- Some of the illustrations
of G'mork paint him as an out-and-out wolf harbinger of extradimensional origin of the Nothing, and generally give the movie version a major run for its money in being straight-up terrifying.
- Some of the illustrations
- Ygramul the Many, a myriad of predatory wasp-like insects acting as one being, most of the time forming a big spider but changing into multiple forms when hunting its prey, or into a huge skull with a single eye when talking to Atreyu.
- Our hero Bastian's progressive descent into becoming a tyrannical nutcase toward the end of the book.
- The City of Old Emperors. While a city of nonsense may sound funny, it's not. Former humans are trapped in Fantasia with no memories of who they are, or what they are, engaging in endless, nonsensical tasks over and over forever. Truly a World Gone Mad.
- The insane shlamoof creatures have quite the Monster Clown and Big Creepy-Crawlies vibes going on. Towards the end, it is revealed they have been pursuing Bastian for quite a while.
- Uyulala's death and the songs she sings while she knows she is about to die are both this and Tear Jerker.
- Xayide's Family-Unfriendly Death, as she's crushed to death by her own mechanical giants.
- Xayide herself is one of the creepiest characters in the book as she is able to easily manipulate Bastian (he was already going mad with power, but she certainly pushed it) and the implications that she planned to make him Childlike Emperor so she could rule Fantastica from behind the scenes.
- Xayide's armored soldiers. They are merely metal suits that move by themselves. When asked about it, she explains that because they are empty, they move by her will as she is able to control everything that is empty. It's implied that they might have been living creatures once.
- Xayide herself is one of the creepiest characters in the book as she is able to easily manipulate Bastian (he was already going mad with power, but she certainly pushed it) and the implications that she planned to make him Childlike Emperor so she could rule Fantastica from behind the scenes.
- Yor's Minroud is an in-universe example. It's a mine where dreams are found, isolated in a landscape of eternal winter (particularly cruel considering the previous chapter was set in an area of perpetual summer) and tended by a single blind miner. The thought of having to work there, in the dark, is enough to make Bastian, who still has all the gifts of Fantastica including fearlessness, shiver in dread.
- Smerg, the European-style dragon created by Bastian for Hynreck to fight. Everything about this... thing just screams Body Horror and Bizarre Alien Biology at their worst. For starters, it has the head of a crocodile, a pair of bat-like wings, the body of a mouse, complete with short forelimbs, and the legs of a grasshopper. If that's not enough, it has the heads of elderly humans (a woman and a man respectively) in place of eyes.
