The Marvel Cinematic Universe has offered fans the best in action and adventure from the original Iron Man to its What If…? series. The studio has also sprinkled in a lot of humor and fun Easter eggs for comic book fans. However, there were also a few moments where Marvel went darker than some fans might have expected and threw in some scary moments.

This makes sense in movies like Doctor Strange, which had a strong history of horror in the comics, but there were also very scary moments in movies with Spider-Man and The Avengers. From scary monsters to nightmare scenes and straight-up horrific moments, the MCU has terrified its fans several times over the years.

10 Thor In Surtur’s Captivity (Thor: Ragnarok)

While Thor: Ragnarok remains known for its humor and cool factor, the entire movie opened with a scene straight out of a horror monster movie. Thor was in what looked like Hell, trapped in a cage with a skeleton, awaiting his judgment.

His captor was Surtur, the demon that Ragnarok prophesized would destroy Asgard. Surtur was a giant fiery demon that Thor had to defeat to survive, and it all ended with him trying to escape the realm while several demons tried to kill him. However, Hemsworth played it for laughs, which lessened the fear factor in the end.

9 Vulture Threatens Peter Parker (Spider-Man: Homecoming)

Sometimes a scary scene doesn’t involve any sort of horrific monsters and brings the fear through a perfect performance and a creepy situation. In Spider-Man: Homecoming, Peter Parker was a high school student who was going to a school dance with his sweetheart, Liz.

What he didn’t know when the evening started was that Liz’s dad was the murderous Vulture. When he drove Peter and Liz to the dance, he turned and made a clear threat to Peter, and Michael Keaton’s intense acting made this a shockingly scary scene in the MCU Spider-Man movie.

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8 Broken Ultron Crashes The Party (Avengers: Age of Ultron)

In Avengers: Age of Ultron, the team worked to try to stop Hydra agents and then ended up battling a monster created by one of their own. This was Ultron, who Tony Stark created to help stop threats that the Avengers couldn’t. Ultron ended up being their next big threat.

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The first appearance of Ultron was one of the scariest moments in the first two Avengers movies. The team was partying and then the robot entered the room, looking horrific, misshapen, and almost broken. He was a walking Frankenstein monster that threatened the lives of all humanity.

7 Thanos Takes Vision’s Soul Stone (Avengers: Infinity War)

When Thanos attacked Earth, half the Avengers were there to fight him, while the other half were searching for his base in space. With the team split up, neither had a chance. There were plenty of scary moments, but when Thanos finally got a hold of Vision, it was terrifying.

Scarlet Witch believed she’d already killed her lover to save the universe, but Thanos reversed time and then ripped the Infinity stone right out of his head. Vision lost all his color and fell instantly dead. The MCU created a second scary moment in WandaVision when she saw this dead Vision once again.

6 Kaecilius Kills The Librarian (Doctor Strange)

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is coming, with iconic horror director Sam Raimi leading the way. He replaces another horror director, Scott Derrickson, who helmed the first movie. With such a history of horror behind the camera, it makes sense this franchise would include terrifying elements.

While there are scary moments in the movie, including the final battle with one of Doctor Strange’s main comic book villains, Dormammu, the opening was the most disturbing moment of the movie. The sorcerer Kaecilius and his followers went into a library to steal pages from the book of Cagliostro and decapitated the librarian to get them. The moment was sudden and violent and set the tone very well.

5 Thanos Kills Loki And Heimdall (Avengers: Infinity War)

When Thor: Ragnarok ended, it seemed that Thor had saved his people and led them to safety. He had rescued as many Asgardians as he could, and it was time to take them to a new home on Earth. Then, Thanos attacked.

It was shockingly violent and very scary. He killed two of the original Thor trilogy’s best characters, the honorable and mighty Heimdall and the treacherous but lovable Loki. He choked Loki to death after the God of Mischief finally had his redemption moment and he slaughtered half the Asgardians that Thor had just saved. It was an unnerving sign that bad things were coming for Earth’s mightiest heroes.

4 Doctor Strange Destroys The Universe (What If…?)

The newest addition to the MCU is the animated Disney+ series What If…? This created a new situation from each of the MCU movies, imagining that something different happened to the characters. With Doctor Strange already a horror-themed movie, it made sense its episode would be scary.

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This saw Strange not lose his hands in his origin-story accident, but lose the love of his life, Christine Palmer. Strange then decided to try to go back and change the past, and by doing so he battled himself and ended up destroying the entire universe in the bleakest and scariest ending of any MCU release.

3 Mysterio Creates Zombie Iron Man (Spider-Man: Far From Home)

Nightmare scenes are one of the best ways to throw off an audience and present some of the scariest scenes in movies. In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Mysterio was trying to break down Spider-Man and he pulled out all the stops.

Peter spent much of the movie mourning the loss of his mentor, Iron Man. That gave Mysterio the idea of bringing in a zombie Iron Man, rising from the grave and coming for Peter, the scariest moment in any Spider-Man movie.

2 Dinner With Wanda And Vision (WandaVision)

There were a lot of bizarre moments in WandaVision and it was basically a horror series by the time it ended. This included a moment where Wanda saw the dead Vision from Avengers: Infinity War and the reveal that Wanda was keeping an entire town of people captive.

With so many frightening moments in the series, the scariest was actually a small dinner scene. Wanda and Vision were having dinner with Vision’s boss and his wife. The boss began to choke and his wife grew frightened, begging Wanda to stop. It was the moment that the viewers realized something was very wrong and it was one of the MCU’s most distrubing scenes.

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1 Tony Stark’s Nightmare Vision (Avengers: Age of Ultron)

The scariest scene in the MCU was one that almost came true. This scene was from Avengers: Age of Ultron and is what pushed Tony to help create the robot that he hoped could save lives. This was a vision that Wanda created while trying to stop the Avengers before she turned good.

Her visions showed the members of the team parts of their greatest fears, and Tony’s was that all the Avengers would die and he couldn’t stop it. The moment convinced him to build Ultron and foreshadowed the Thanos invasion, showing that nothing he could have done would save everyone.

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About The Author


Shawn S. Lealos
(830 Articles Published)

Shawn S. Lealos is a senior writer on ScreenRant who fell in love with movies in 1989 after going to the theater to see Tim Burton’s Batman as his first big screen experience.

Shawn received his Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma with a minor in Film Studies. He has worked as a journalist for over 25 years, first in the world of print journalism before moving to online media as the world changed. Shawn is a former member of the Society of Professional Journalists and current member of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. He has work published in newspapers such as Daily Oklahoman and Oklahoma Gazette and magazines such as Vox Magazine, Loud Magazine, and Inside Sports Magazine. His work on the Internet has been featured on websites like The Huffington Post, Yahoo Movies, Chud, Renegade Cinema, 411mania, and Sporting News.

Shawn is also a published author, with a non-fiction book about the Stephen King Dollar Baby Filmmakers and has begun work on a new fiction series as well. Visit Shawn Lealos’ website to learn more about his novel writing and follow him on Twitter @sslealos.

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