Nightmare Fuel / God Loves, Man Kills

• Stryker in general. He's not an immortal Social Darwinist like Apocalypse, just an ordinary person whipping up hate, but his being so realistic is what makes him scary.
  • The flashback to how Stryker came to hate mutants. His wife gave birth after a car accident, and one look at her caused Stryker to see the infant boy as a monster, and he killed him with a knife. When she asked about what happened to their child, he broke her neck. When he learned about mutants, he realized his son was a mutant and felt his wife birthing one was a message from God that mutants were the work of the devil, and that he was chosen to lead the fight in exterminating mutants.
• The brutal murder of Mark and Jill— young children— and their hanged corpses on the school swing with "MUTIES" written crudely on it are frighteningly similar to the lynchings of blacks that were carried out in the century after the Civil War, especially as Mark and Jill are themselves black. Incidentally, in 1981, the year before God Loves, Man Kills was published, a 19-year-old black man named Michael Donald was murdered by two KKK members in Alabama.
  • Anne makes sure to tell them that the Purifiers killed their parents already. It's unclear whether their parents were also mutants or if they were murdered just for the crime of having mutant children.
• The brainwashing of Xavier with nightmarish visions of the X-Men crucifying him.
  • After one of the failed attempts, we learn that he has been subjected to the attempts for the past fifteen hours.
• When the captured Purifiers refuse to talk, Wolverine debuts what would be one of his signature moves. Putting his fist under the guy's face, he pops the rightmost claw, then his left. "Wanna go for three?"
• When the guy still won't talk, Magneto volunteers. The man snaps "I'm not afraid of you, mutie!" and we get a close-up panel of Magneto, mostly in shadow, giving him a chilling expression that cries out "oh?"
  • Cut to a panel of Magneto using his powers to create a torture rack that stretches the man out, complete with circled manacles on each finger and toe. The narration indicates Magneto had to do this for a while before the Purifier talked...and then he did it to the other three.
• As much as an Asshole Victim Anne is for her lynchings of Mark and Jill, when the machine starts attacking mutants, Anne starts to bleed as well, revealing she's unwittingly been a mutant this whole time. Despite being Stryker's most loyal follower up to this point, the Reverend wastes zero time personally murdering her in front of the whole crowd by shoving her off the stage and dropping her on her neck while explicitly noting he's casting her into the Abyss as a "mutant hellspawn". It is chilling how homicidally bigoted Styker is.