alarming

"appalling conditions"

"an atrocious automobile accident"; "a frightful crime of decapitation"; "an alarming, even horrifying, picture"; "war is beyond all words horrible"- Winston Churchill; "an ugly wound"

"the awful war"; "an awful risk"; "dire news"; "a career or vengeance so direful that London was shocked"; "the dread presence of the headmaster"; "polio is no longer the dreaded disease it once was"; "a dreadful storm"; "a fearful howling"; "horrendous explosions shook the city"; "a terrible curse"

"a baleful look"; "forbidding thunderclouds"; "his tone became menacing"; "ominous rumblings of discontent"; "sinister storm clouds"; "a sinister smile"; "his threatening behavior"; "ugly black clouds"; "the situation became ugly"

"a scary movie"; "the most terrible and shuddery...tales of murder and revenge"

"a creepy story"; "I had a creepy-crawly feeling"

"the formidable prospect of major surgery"; "a tougher and more redoubtable adversary than the heel-clicking, jackbooted fanatic"- G.H.Johnston; "something unnerving and prisonlike about high grey wall"

"ghastly wounds"; "the grim aftermath of the bombing"; "the grim task of burying the victims"; "a grisly murder"; "gruesome evidence of human sacrifice"; "macabre tales of war and plague in the Middle ages"; "macabre tortures conceived by madmen"

"hairy moments in the mountains"

"the stupefying impact of the tragedy"

"a terrifying wail"