The original Scooby-Doo cartoon is objectively terrifying!

Today, I use an objective scientific formula to answer the one question we’re all wondering… what is the scariest episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? From horrifying monsters, spooky locations, and startling jump scares, there’s one episode that stands out as truly scary! It’s not just a children’s cartoon. I mean, it is, but Scooby Doo is actually terrifying and I can prove it!

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Scott Niswander
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— SOCIAL MEDIA —

— CHAPTERS —
0:00 intro
1:20 quick Patreon plug
1:52 the formula for very real objectivity
3:12 scary monsters
12:09 spooky places
17:45 aaaaahhhhhh!!!
25:42 and the scariest episode is…
33:04 the most important part of the video

— MORE VIDEOS —

— SOURCES —
The Philosophy of Horror - Noël Carroll
Liminal Spaces - Lost in Unknowable Loneliness of Modern Architecture
Liminal Spaces (Exploring an Altered Reality)

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Home of the popular Comic Misconceptions series, NerdSync makes video essays and in-depth analyses about nerdy pop culture. From comic books and superheroes, to Scooby-Doo and other classic cartoons, host Scott Niswander explores fascinating topics that range from history, philosophy, culture, and art. NerdSync makes fascinating, complex ideas a little more accessible through the heroes and villains from Marvel, DC Comics, and beyond! Subscribe for new videos every other Friday, you wonderful nerd!

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[tulokthebarbrarian]

If Scooby is canonically an alien possessing a dog, I think it's not a logical leap to assume the laugh track is a group disembodied ghosts who follow the gang around and really like puns. In this essay I will-

[privatedadbod]

It’s not that scary, but Backstage Rage will always be one of the best reveals only because they go to check on the puppeteer, and they shake him, and get all spooked with Fred saying “he’s a puppet too.” Like can you imagine you meeting someone, and it turns out that a unknown entity was controlling a human sized puppet all that time!?! (yes I know he was the phantom, but still) To this day every time i see it I get goosebumps from that part. Also the Elias Kingston thing I think was more psychological since he “aged” Uncle Stuart.

[ODISeth]

The locals who built the robot just gaslighting the fuck out of the Mystery Inc team is so creepy cause it breaks the Scooby formula hardcore

[nicko]

I think I remember being unnerved by Charlie. Every other monster was human under the costume, but Charlie was inhuman, and it showed: he didn't act like someone trying to be scary, and that ironically made him scarier.
This was a really fun video!

[beretperson]

For a minute i thought you were going to say the true way to determine the scariest episode objectively was to measure how much Shaggy and Scooby had to be bribed with Scooby Snacks during the episode

[rickw]

I always thought the miner 49er was just funny because it’s literally just Hank with a hat and a beard. Personally I always thought The Backstage Rage was the scariest. The Puppetmaster was so scary to the gang that even Velma says “I don’t like looking for clues anymore” and the gang tries to leave the mystery early, but is forced to solve it after being locked inside the theatre. The image of the doorman being a puppet was pretty shocking to me as a kid. and the atmosphere and constant lurking of the Puppetmaster too as he just hunches in corners watching the gang and dropping sandbags and set pieces seriously trying to hurt them is always creepy.

[tyrant-den]

The simple fact that Charlie absolutely CAN *kill* was terrifying. I know I had at least one nightmare about him growing up.

[cmeeds]

The scariest part in Scooby Doo for me was in the creeper episode, they go and see the hermit who yells “come back!” over and over again. That gave me nightmares.

[Confuzed]

NerdSync is slowly turning into a Scooby-Doo channel and I’m totally okay with that.

[Arty_Verse]

"Coin, coin" will forever haunt my childhood that mummy was geniunly terrifying to me as a child I couldn't re watch that episode for the absoloute longest time because of how terrifying the mummy saying "coin" was to me. And I grew up with horror being my favourite genre and yet nothing had scarred me as much as that mummy

[MasterJack]

"Take it from me; a coward" I am crying

[emmaclarke]

"A Night of Fright is no Delight " was the scariest episode for me when I was a child. The design of the ghost was scary, with the red eyes and rattling chains. But, the fact there was two of them and their laugh was the most terrifying sounds I ever heard as a kid. I literally had nightmares from these guys but I would still watch the episode because I love Scooby-Doo. And that scene when the walls were closing on the gang like a Saw trap, always gave me goosebumps.

[kennbashaw]

When I was a small child in the 70’s, the episode “What the Hex is Going on?” genuinely scared me so bad. Not the ghost of Elias Kingston… but the uncle who gets older and older until the gang finds a skeleton wearing his clothes. Runner up was the episode “Vampire Bats and Scaredy Cats” when the phone rings and turns the girl into a vampire terrified me.

[samuelstanley]

For me, the scariest episode was "A Clue For Scooby-Doo", the Captain Cutler episode. The atmosphere surrounding him was genuinely creepy. There was even a scene where Fred, Daphne, and Velma find a corpse in a diving suit (!), who is just sitting at a desk underwater, which is itself creepy just by thinking about how it came to be in that position. And then the ghost locks them inside of it! So, now they're trapped in a locked room with a corpse, underwater, with a finite supply of air. Yeesh.

At the least, I think it's the best mystery in the original show. Who could have seen that twist toward the end, when they realize who the true culprit was the entire time? Perhaps you could do a second video like this, to determine which mystery in Scooby-Doo was the most, er, mysterious.

I don't know about using "jump scares" as a criteria. I think things like atmosphere or the crimes the villains commit should be considered more important. Fore example, Charlie doesn't intentionally set out to harm anyone, whereas the ghost clown hypnotized Shaggy into getting inside a cage with an actual lion.

[NerdSyncProductions]

*CORRECTIONS*
I realized while editing that I got some of the episode numbers wrong. I was going off how they are listed on the Boomerang website, but that isn’t the order they are listed in on Wikipedia. For some reason, a couple of episodes are mixed up, and I don’t know why. Either way, I hope it’s easy to figure out which episodes I’m talking about as I typically say the name of the episode and/or show clips from them. No idea why no source seems to be consistent.

Also, that's Snow Ghost actually does have a fun jump scare. I didn't catch it when I was first watching through the show, but it's one of the better ones, tbh. So I feel bad about not including it in the finalists, but it still wouldn't have beaten out the actual winner.

[thetwistedsamurai]

So, fun fact: I VIVIDLY remember the Charlie the Robot episode being the first episode I ever saw of the original Scooby Doo show, and I was pretty young, too. I was very easily scared at that age, but that episode didn’t really scare me so much as it deeply unsettled me, for all the reasons you listed. Charlie is a very unsettling character.

[flyguy]

I think the backstage rage is the scariest episode. The puppet master is legitimately creepy, and the way he messed with the gang with puppets is very unsettling.

[mothersbasement]

This is Snow Ghost erasure! One of the best jump scares in the entire series happens just 3 minutes into that episode. Made 3 year old me scared of windows for a while.

Otherwise, fantastic Scoob analysis!

[Lisa_Flowers]

my childhood self feels SO incredibly vindicated by Charlie winning because that epsiode 100% scared me the most. The Space Kook is a favourite but his laugh is too hilarious for me to find him scary, and I misremembered Miner 49'er as Miner 69'er and that robbed him of all spookiness in my eyes lol

[jdpragmatic]

What’s interesting is that our top 3 scariest episodes,
Backstage Rage
Spooky Space Kook
Foul Play in Funland
, all have a villain that plays very well on one of the oldest primordial fears of man:
The fear of the Unknown.
In this case, unknown origins and unknown motives.

Phantom Puppet Master:
Origins: there is no indication as to what he is or where he comes from. The doorman doesn’t give us any backstories about “The Phantom of the Theatre” or something like that, he doesn’t even indicate that something is amiss. All he gives is a confused look as the gang walks out abruptly. There’s not even indication to the gang that there even IS a phantom. Through dramatic irony, only we the audience see that there is a mysterious figure causing things to happen. It’s only after they notice odd things and catch some glimpses of him that they realize.
Motives: Sure he’s running a counterfeit operation but it’s only made clear he’s the one doing it at the third act of the episode. During the second act we see him trying to scare the gang, playing an organ, and bringing Vikings and Pirates down from the sky, not much to indicate that HE is counterfeiting money. Then there’s the moment when the doorman slumps over revealing its a life size puppet. As a kid watching for the first time, I thought the phantom actually TURNED THE DOORMAN INTO A PUPPET. My mind began racing trying to explain it. Does he have magic powers? Does he turn his victims into puppets!? Are Scooby and the gang his Next Puppets!?!? The unknown factor terrified me.

Space Kook:
Origins: All we get is one farmer saying, “there’s a ghost spaceship and a ghost spaceman out there and I don’t know what it is or where it comes from.” There’s no legends or stories about this Kook to explain it existing.
Motives: Again…nothing, we don’t know why it’s here, what it wants, or what will happen to you if he catches you. We get a moment where multiple doors open revealing multiple Space Kooks and we still don’t know why there’s an army of them. Our minds start to wander, Invasion? Extermination? Subjugation of the Human Race? We just don’t know.

Charlie the Robot:
Origins: No legends, no stories, no indicators, he just looks like a masked man in a work suit. We’re not even sure he is a robot at first and Shaggy even describes him looking like “A man from Mars” at one point. We the audience might think he looks like a robot…well okay but what kind? Terrestrial? Extraterrestrial? Something Else? There’s no way of knowing until the end of the episode.
Motives: it depends on his programming and how it was affected when he was sabotaged, which we Don’t Know. The first time the gang encounter Charlie in the hall of mirrors while the park is running properly, he just stands there looking at Shaggy and Scooby. What’s he analyzing? What’s he calculating? What’s he processing? He could be thinking who these guests are or he could be thinking these are intruders that need to be captured. Later when the park goes crazy, Charlie goes crazy with it. Now we definitely don’t know what’s going to happen to the gang if he catches them. We see him tear up a stuffed wolf thinking it’s Scooby and walk through a brick wall like it was paper, for all we know he could smash their skulls, crush their necks, throw them off the peer, there’s no telling.

While villains like The Creeper, Mr. Hyde, Ape Man, Captain Cutler, Miner 49er, and The Mummy are given clear origins and motives up front, these 3 are left up in the air for the audience to keep guessing until the end.