Nightmare Fuel / The Secret Saturdays

"I don't think that's a guy in a rubber suit!"

The Secret Saturdays, at first glance, is a lighthearted adventure romp about a family of scientists and their animal pets. However, this show does not pull its punches.

UNMARKED SPOILERS AHEAD. Read at your own risk.

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• V.V. ARGOST.
  • First off, he has an insect theme, is a Villain with Good Publicity, a sizable body count (including 43 Secret Scientists), and tries to kill Zak several times. And succeeds! (Although Zak does get better.)
  • As if that weren't enough, when they find his lair, they discover various "mementos" from the tourists he killed, akin to a Serial Killer. Even Van Rook is horrified when he realizes that Argost was hunting people for sport.
  • Argost also killed Zak's smoke mirror counterpart, Zak Monday. Granted, he had it coming, but Zak Monday's screams as Argost absorbs his power and the close-up of the moment he closes his eyes are still incredibly disturbing. Our first onscreen death, and it's a child.
• The first few times we see Munya transform. The amount of Body Horror involved is terrifying.
• Italian chef Pietro "Piecemeal" Maltese is Horror Hunger taken to a new level. He had his jaws surgically modified so he can bite into anything. Why? So he can eat the world's rarest and most elusive animals. Animals like Fisk.
• From the first season comes "The Owlman Feeds at Midnight." Town with a Dark Secret? Yep. Brainwashed cult that feeds people to an owl monster? Yes. A kid getting kidnapped and almost eaten? Yep.
  • The Owlman itself is an Eldritch Abomination that looks like a sick parody of a humanoid owl, is permanently silhouetted with glowing red eyes and has a perpetual Slasher Smile on its face. Not to mention it's an incredibly fast, stealthy, and airborne Lightning Bruiser that easily managed to snatch up Zak while high in the sky on his family's airship.
• Everyone from the Monday family. No compassion, no sense of morality, constantly at each others' throats.
  • Drew Monday gets a special mention. She's able to fool Zak into thinking she's his real mother, and then switches to gleefully trying to kill him when her cover's blown.
    Drew Monday: You have no idea how tiring it was to pretend to care about you.
  • Komodo Monday is also fairly unsettling, considering he can talk. Even moreso when it's revealed that he's the one calling the Monday shots.
• Eterno. A man cursed with a body made of salt, eternal thirst, and a touch that prevents him from ever quenching it. If his touch doesn't freak you out, then his dry and voice like somebody was rubbing sandpaper together that shows you just how desperately thirsty he is, will.
• Dr. Lee merging Zak, Komodo, and Fiskerton into "Zaskermodo" in the episode "Ghost in the Machine."
• "Where Lies the Engulfer" is made of pure Nightmare Fuel - the titular creature is less a cryptid than a predatory Eldritch Abomination that murdered an entire town and aims to do the same thing with the protagonists. The whole town is covered in crazy people rooms left by the previous residents attempting to warn others of the danger of the water. Of note, at one point they find someone's last will and testament.
• Doc led an assault on Weird World that ended up killing 43 Secret Scientists at the time - presumably, Doc's friends. He's felt responsible for their deaths ever since, and goes berserk when he thinks history has repeated itself when his family is presumed dead during a second Weird World assault. "Once More the Nightmare Factory," indeed.
• The Antarctic Cryptid is nothing less than horrifying. It's an utterly behemoth with six snake-like heads, twelve mouths with at least two forms of cryptids living inside its body. Zak had to get swallowed in order to fight Argost in its stomach to defeat it.
• Zak being Kur ended up injecting a lot of parental worries into the show. You just found out your son is the reincarnation of an evil snake god, and all your family friends - some of which used to babysit for you - have now decided that the "greater good" includes freezing you in cryostasis until "a solution can be found" - so, indefinitely.
  • The flip side is just as bad - the naga, a race of genocidal snake people, are now dead set on turning your son toward the dark side by massacring humans in his name. He clearly blames himself for their actions, and spends much of his time second-guessing whether or not he's the bad guy after all...
• Though a Hero Antagonist at first, Tsul'Kalu is presented as a Scarily Competent Tracker and Implacable Man seeking vengeance on a child for accidentally destroying one of his sacred sites. He's only stopped because Doc takes responsibility for Zak and fights him in single combat in Zak's place.
  • The visions he shows Zak are not Zak's fears, but Tsul'Kalu's. Visions of Zak embracing his role as a destroyer of humans. The last of these features this hypothetical future Zak ordering cryptids to tear a man apart "because [he's] human."
• In-Universe, Kur is feared as something of an evil god, worshiped by an Always Chaotic Evil race of Snake People known for being the "scourge of the ancient world," of which there exist no "happy, heroic tales." At the beginning of the series, its purported world-ending ability of being able to control the world's cryptids seems like silly, schlock adventure show fare, but as the series continues and one becomes aware of what controlling the world's cryptids means - an efficient anti-aircraft network in the atmospheric jellyfish, the destruction of the Kumari by wrangling their sea serpents, as many spies as there are cryptids (we see bunyips, which are capable of getting into darn near anything, used in this capacity), and control over creatures capable of summoning intense blizzards, digging massive underground tunnels, spitting acid - heck, the naga and their forces alone were enough to contend with Manhattan for a while - it becomes horrifically clear that Kur being capable of wiping out all human society and genocide on a global scale is not only feasible, but relatively easy.
  • Furthermore, the show's symbolism make comparisons between Kur and Shiva, the god of destruction. Kur itself was, at the time of the show's airing, believed to be the world's first depiction of a dragon, which guarded the netherworld and whose slaying caused the Primordial Sea it was holding in check to rise. We now know that, among other uses (such as "mountain" or "land" - Sumerians referred to Sumer as Kur-Gal, "great land"), "Kur" refers to the netherworld on the whole - still not entirely comforting.