Don't be fooled by the happy butterflies in the cutesy animated opening credits – behind the unassuming red door lives a sinister cult of puppets ruled by a donkey overlord and kept in check by a grotesque 'dog' called Furryboo.

The MOST unnerving thing about Cow and Chicken, the names of both a cow and a chicken respectively, is that they were born to human parents. The OTHER unnerving things about Cow and Chicken were its questionable antagonist Red Guy who looks like a giant red scrotum and Cow consistently rubbing/referencing her udder and making some horribly grown up comments about her "teets". Eugh.

OK so this one was supposed to be scary, and CBBC really knew how to give kids the heeby-jeebies. In The Demon Headmaster, brothers Lloyd and Harvey Hunter along with some school friends fought the powers of their evil headmaster, who hypnotised pupils into submission with his v. creepy eyes. The peak of '90s special effects and some seriously creepy casting to boot.

Widely regarded as one of the most loved kids' TV shows of all time, we beg to differ: Rosie and Jim was low key TERRIFYING, and not just because the poor kids had been kidnapped and held hostage on some old bloke's boat. The jerky puppetry, staring lidless eyes and Rosie's inexplicably middle-aged voice? Weird.

The pilot episode of this Australian offering saw the Twist family move from their metropolitan existence into an old lighthouse (past a cove called Suicide Leap) where they soon learn that their dunny is haunted. The last episode sees Princess Arial from the Island of Dreams arrive to bring the Gribble and Twist kids home with her. Everything in between is an eerie, disturbing blur.

The graphics, the sinister dungeon-master Treguard, the claustrophobia-inducing dungeons: Knightmare was, well, the stuff of nightmares. You could say it didn't quite nail the laugh-out-loud, soft-play aesthetic of other kids' gameshows like 50/50 or Get Your Own Back. This was the one show we definitely weren't in any hurry to go on.

Few kids' TV shows had villains quite as scary as the goblins in Noddy. Before Noddy became computer animated in 2002, he and his Toyland pals were animated in stop motion which made Sly and Gobbo all the more terrifying – and that Clockwork Mouse was a pretty shifty character, too. Even PC Plod was corrupt. The moral of the story: trust no one in Toyland.

It had all the makings of an enchanting tale of woodland creatures working together to overcome the threat to their homes that the evil human characters had inflicted – a noble message for kids. Instead it was a TOTAL blood bath averaging one savage death per episode that blew Bambi out of the water (and through the head, then impaled on a tree stump).

So we've been traumatised by pretty much all of the creepy puppet characters from the '90s, but these weird orange troll things take the cake. Consisting of a cast of two inoffensive human characters and two terrifying humanoid "Riddlers" called Mossop and Tiddler, if the scary AF theme tune didn't freak you out enough (it wouldn't have been out of place in Mordor, tbh) then Tiddler's tragic tale of her entire family's suspicious deaths when she was a baby should do the trick.