TV Shows That Gave Us Nightmares As Kids

Parents nowadays are too diligent to let their kids happen upon some of the scary stuff we saw on TV as kids. That's not to say that our parents didn't care, but just in general, moms and dads today are a bit more neurotic. Go back and watch some of the television you enjoyed as a kid, you might be surprised to rediscover the stuff networks like Nickelodeon, CBS, and NBC geared toward the younger demographic. There's a rich tradition of kids' shows serving up nightmare fuel, and with this feature, we're paying respect to some of the most memorable entries in that creepy subgenre.

Basically, The Nightmare Room served as the WB's version of Are You Afraid of the Dark? with a splash of The Twilight Zone, and it was occasionally just as scary as either. Some of the episodes were truly terrifying, like one episode in which a frequent liar is told by his evil twin that he'd die in two days. Many of the episodes dealt with ghosts and haunted things, but the really scary stuff involved kids being told they were going to die (in one instance, by a diary that predicted the future). The Nightmare Room was always a bit scarier than AYAOTD, but it wasn't watched by as many kids. Fun fact: The Nightmare Room was narrated by Uncle Phil (James Avery). Unfortunately, the show proved short-lived, only lasting one season.

Remember reading the Goosebumps series and getting too scared to keep turning pages? Goosebumps had quite a few scares in the television show, too. The creepiest part of the series' concept was Slappy, an evil ventriloquist dummy that was basically like a sinister version of Pinocchio. Slappy was always looking to enslave someone, usually the child that brought him to life by uttering a phrase he kept in his pocket. As if that wasn't scary enough, the doll's body was created out of coffin wood by an ancient sorcerer that gave him his powers. He served as the frequent baddie in Goosebumps—like the Joker to Batman.

There were quite a few Ren and Stimpy episodes that gave us nightmares as kids. That might seem ridiculous, but the show had a lot of creepy imagery, and at the time that wasn't common in kids' shows. For one, we had no idea what the hell Ren actually was (a dog? A rat? A weasel?), and that alone was enough to give us an uneasy feeling. Also, you'll notice some weird stuff going on in the show, like extreme close-ups of Ren's bloodshot eyes, talking bugs, Ren with no eyes, and Stimpy breastfeeding. It was all pretty weird for kids, which led to quite a few restless nights. Not that the show wasn't great—because it was—but going back and watching it now, it still feels more like a drug-infused animated odyssey than kids' entertainment.

Not long after Tim Burton's comic-horror masterpiece about the "ghost with the most" arrived in theaters, the cartoon version of Beetlejuice made the leap to TV screens, both on Saturday mornings and in afterschool timeslots. While the movie focused on two ghosts (played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) trying to get a living family out of their house (including Lydia, the goth teenage daughter portrayed by Winona Ryder), the cartoon centered on the relationship between Beetlejuice and Lydia. That meant making excursions into something called "the Neitherworld," which was more or less the realm of the dead. Spooky and unsettling, it was a checkered land of monsters, physical impossibilities, and dead things. Think Wackyland from the old Warner Bros. cartoons, crossed with Purgatory.

This Cartoon Network original series was seen through the eyes of a little purple beagle dog. Already a skittish little guy, poor Courage had to constantly deal with actual monsters and evil supernatural beings (and the nearly dead old couple that watched over him were never much help). The show ramped up the surreal and spooky factor by occasionally changing up the visual look of Courage's world with live action, clay-animated, and computer-generated sequences. Courage was rightfully terrified of blue blobs and trees with human faces...and so were we.

This recurring series of short segments, which ran during Captain Kangaroo in the '70s, was supposed to teach kids good habits, like why it's important to exercise and that vegetables are healthy. But creator—and Slim Goodbody portrayer—John Burstein went about doing that in a questionable way: by wearing a form-fitting, flesh-colored unitard. While that certainly made some of his outside parts a bit more visible (that unitard was tight), the costume was decorated with realistically rendered pictures of the inner workings of the human body: organs, bones, veins, blood, guts, everything. Ostensibly, the idea was that kids would learn about the organs and thus be no longer able to take them for granted, but he wound up looking like a serial killer who glues his victim's organs to his body. Amazingly, Burstein still tours schools with his Slim Goodbody character. More amazingly, schools let this guy in the door.