User blog comment:Umbrello/Childhood Nightmares: TV/@comment-4849011-20150126004332/@comment-4849011-20150127014230

I remembered a couple more things.

I'm a big fan of Batman:The Animated Series. It's one of the best cartoons ever made, but there were a couple episodes with scenes that disturbed me. The episode that introduced Talia and Ra's al Ghul opened with Batman versus two of Ghul's henchmen. When they realized that they were going to lose and be captured, they purposely gassed themselves (for the record, the gas was released by them making choking motions to their throats). Batman put on his protective mask and went to investigate. They looked unconscious, and when Batman unmasked them they were staring blankly. In the next scene someone explained that they had used the gas to "erase their own minds". That's disturbing enough, but it's even worse when you consider they did it to themselves. There was another episode (I think it was called "Home and Garden") in which Poison Ivy had plants that sprouted human-plant hybrids. They started out looking like human babies, but then they grew rapidly and eventually turned into humanoid plant monsters. I mentioned these two moments on a B:TAS messageboard years ago, and everyone who responded to my post had the same reaction: the first one didn't bother them much, but they were freaked out by the babies growing into plant monsters.

There were also scary moments on The X-Files, but since most of the ones I'm thinking of occurred during my teen years, there's only one I can think of that applies. There was an episode in which someone was haunted by the face on Mars (you know, that rock formation people went gaga about years ago). He was so disturbed that at the end he committed suicide. Like the painting Umbrello described, I kept seeing that face in my dark bedroom.