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Nightmare Fuel / Anime & Manga

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Junji Ito really has an eye for Body Horror.

Unlike cartoons in the west, a great deal of anime is intended for mature audiences; it might be because of the occasional swear or gratuitous blood and/or suggestive ecchi content, but quite a few people think it's because of any of these soul-destroyingly terrifying scenes. Plus, anime meant for kids can be intentionally freaky in its own right, since Japan has different standards for what's appropriate for fiction aimed at children than in North America. Manga is often filled with just as much (or more) Nightmare Fuel that is not in the least diluted by not being animated. In fact, in many ways, it can be worse.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.


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Miscellaneous Series:

This section is in alphabetical order by series. Before you add examples here, check the index above and make sure the series doesn't already have its own page. No Hentai examples, please, as per wiki rules.
  • .hack//SIGN: The song "Aura." It's about a girl who is kept in a vegetative state by a corrupt and jealous mother-figure.
    • If you are near to the dark
      I will tell you 'bout the sun
      You are here, no escape
      From my visions of the world
      You will cry all alone
      But it does not mean a thing to me
  • 7th Garden has many, many examples:
    • Vyrde. A nice, funny and beatiful lady who says she is the Devil... And when her mood swings go on the other side her Ax-Crazy behaviour and rage, coupled with her powers, will show she actually is. And what's worse, she has a legitimate reason for her anger and vendetta against the angels, and to consider the world, that she calls the 7th Garden, as her own propriety that was stolen from her.
    • Awyn's heavily suppressed anger from his father's frame-up and execution and his mother's death by illness because they couldn't pay the cures. It's so great that Vyrde was impressed... And she's loaning him her power.
      • Why Vyrde was impressed with Awyn's anger: it's causing him to develop an Ax-Crazy split personality... Just what Vyrde actually is to the "Devil".
    • The Angels' behaviour. They manipulate people in power to have innocent villages destroyed, have people commit serial murders, start revolutions eerily reminiscent of the worst of The French Revolution and turn innocent children against their own friends in the name of making the world their garden... And for boredom. Oh, and Vyrde used to be one of them before they had a Face–Heel Turn and did her something that should have killed her, instead of turning her in what she's now.
    • The truth about the whole setting: the 7th Garden is actually an incredibly advanced simulation of the past of the world (with all characters save for the Angels and Vyrde being advanced AI that, with few exceptions, simulate historical characters and normal people without knowing it), a world that is dying off due an environmental collapse, with the elites living into underground shelters and the rest on the surface, exposed to the pollutants that are killing the environment. Vyrde, real name Maria, and the various angels were among the underpriviliged, with Maria's elder sister inventing the simulation so that they could live into a heaven, but for reasons still unknown the friends turned on them and sold the world to the elites, killing Maria's sister and getting her imprisoned in the process before taking the guise of Angels and starting to intervene on the Garden to reproduce world history exactly up until to a certain point, so that the elites will be able to turn themselves into data and live into it forever. Then Maria broke out of jail, and entered the 7th Garden with the avatar of the Devil to try and take it back... Except her thirst for revenge allowed her Ax-Crazy split personality Vyrde to come out, and Vyrde is taking over.
      • And on top of that, Uhl, the leader of the Angels, is continuing the simulation past the point where Cattleya's technology, that would eventually cause the environmental collapse, for reasons still unknown.
  • Apocalypse Zero. The big lady in episode one who kidnaps a young couple, rips the boyfriend's face off when kissing him, eats him alive, and later on throws up the decayed body of the boy... who isn't even dead yet! The girlfriend, on the other hand, gets caught up in the giant lady's hand and squeezed to the point where her ENTRAILS ERUPT OUT OF HER MOUTH as if she was a living tube of toothpaste... also she was pregnant.
  • While the original Battle Royale novel was filled with this, the manga's even worse. Let's put it this way: If Kazuo Kiriyama is on panel, let's hope you weren't planning on sleeping anytime soon.
    • Not just Kiriyama. Look at any picture of one of the kids when they snap. Jesus Christ almighty. Examples include Kaori Minami's "pizza face" breakdown.
    • Hirono's face as she drowns in the manga adaptation. She was strangled half to death and then pushed down a well, and as she dies she experiences a hallucination where she's saved. As it ends, the next page fills with her swollen face, bug-eyes bloodshot, and an utterly ghastly Joker-grin.
  • The ninth Black Jack OVA in its entirety. Especially once you reach the halfway point, wherein you get to view the most horrific Fan Disservice you will ever see. And don't get us started on the blood-spewing tumor shaped like a mutated human face.
  • Blue Gender:
    • If the Blue kill a human, but aren't hungry, they store the body in a cocoon... after compacting it to be as small as possible, complete with loud sounds of bones breaking and joints being dislocated.
    • The slaughter of the refugees in episode 6. Instead of going with a Battle Discretion Shot, you get to see Choppers crushing civilians underfoot or slicing their limbs away, as well as the Maneater slashing at a mother and her child, or crushing a man in its jaws.
    • The Clincher: the power-sucking Blue from episode 11, specifically what it does to the Axe-Crazy soldier who decides to attack it. The thing knocks him to the ground, leaps on top of him, and its tentacles coil around his head. You can hear him scream, but you have no idea what it's doing to him. Later, it reappears, and the tentacles have grown into the soldier's head.
  • Destiny of the Shrine Maiden has a very famous scene that can be taken as being horrifying. While most of the show really comprises of Moe lesbians and mechas, there's one scene in Episode 8 that either horrifies viewers or turns them on. It's the scene where Chikane actually rapes Himeko. As the series went on, you found out her reasoning, but still.
  • In Divergence Eve, there are many moments like this as the series progresses however, the most gruesome moment happens towards the end of the series, when Luxandra can't get her Rampant Armor to move, and then resulting in Luxandra getting eaten alive by a Ghoul, kicking, screaming for her life.
  • Doraemon would be one of the last anime you would think of that would have this trope, but surprisingly, the 2014 reboot had an episode where Noby / Nobita messes around with a gadget that changes dates. Of course, he uses it too much and it causes the Earth's axis to be thrown out of wack as it heads towards the sun! Thankfully, this was All Just a Dream because it was a doomsday simulation by Doraemon to teach Noby a lesson.
  • Dream Hunter Rem: This being an anime about dreams and nightmares, expect lots of this.
  • Durarara!!, the whole 'Saika' the slasher tsundere storyline. Ranging from the chat posts "I", "must", "cut", "mother", "mother", "mothermothermothermothermother..." to the lovely horror that is Saika's theme song called Kokoro wo Shibaru Ai no Kotoba
  • Ergo Proxy always was a little on the creepy side, but the episode "Ophelia" topped all of the other episodes.
  • There is a manga out there called Fetus Collection. It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Google at your own peril. If you decide to fall for the Schmuck Bait, here's a synopsis of the manga: "A suicidal girl enters a little group of sick women that made abortion a grotesque art. With usual Kago sick humor and nonsense."
  • Fushigi Yuugi: Genbu Kaiden is Darker and Edgier than the original Fushigi Yuugi and it SHOWS. It's especially terrible when Takiko succesfully summons Genbu, then starts being consumed by him as she makes her wishes and, as a result, is subjected to heaps of Body Horror...
  • Full Metal Panic!: Gauron actually wanted to kill Sousuke when he was eleven. It also gets even creepier when one realizes that their countless encounters are most likely not entirely coincidence and that Gauron is heavily implied to be stalking him, actively choosing missions / jobs that would put him in a position to see his "precious boy."
    • Tampering with the janitor's fish will lead to very bad things.
  • Geno Cyber, just the whole thing. From children being disintegrated by gunfire in a ridiculously gory fashion, people being torn to shreds (organs and all), to giant worms erupting from people's bodies, this series is pretty screwed up. Especially the hospital scene in Episode 1. There is more gore in this 5 minute sequence than the whole of Elfen Lied.
  • The final volume of Getter Robo Go, starting with the revelation that the Humongous Mecha Shin Getter Robo (or rather, its power source) is sentient. Particularly what happens to Gai. He's so scared of the machine that his mind breaks and he becomes trapped in nightmarish hallucinations. When he tries to blow the machine up with a missile launcher, cables extend out the machine and eat him alive until his grinning face is fused into the side of the robot. That scene, and again where Shin Getter absorbs its pilots, the villains, the villains' fortress/mecha, and a good chunk of the North Pole before flying to Mars, imply that being absorbed brings enlightenment and takes people into some kind of heaven though.
  • The UFO Robo Grendizer manga. Probably not surprising since it has the same creator as Devilman, but it's supposed to be a robot manga for kids! Particularly when the villains kidnap all the children from Planet Freed, suspend them by ropes from their UFOs and then drop them from 3000 feet in the air. In graphic detail.
  • Grave of the Fireflies:
    • Two plucky kids starve to death. Slowly.
    • How about their mother after the air raid? Bloody bandages all over her body. Then it cuts to her face; the eyes and mouth are just pools of blood, and the rest of the face is covered in bloody bandages. Then, when she dies, the flies and maggots somehow make the whole thing even worse.
    • Hell, you could put the entire movie in this section. Which would you rather watch: a fun action epic, or a nightmarish and depressing drama about non-heroes?
  • The Haruhi Suzumiya chapter, Endless Eight, the group is going Groundhog's Day on the last two weeks of summer vacation. Sounds familiar? Rika suffered through just over 100 years. Nagato says they've been through those same two weeks 15,498 times, which comes out to 594 years and a little over 5 months. And she remembered every second of it. Small wonder she looks bored.
    • Asakura in the fourth episode alone is already scary. But, for the love of god, listen the way she says "You think it's a... joke? Huh. You don't wanna die? You don't want me to kill you?" It's really creepy, and you just realize that behind that happy-go-lucky facade, there is nothing.
    • In the movie, just when Kyon is starting to realize that something is off about the world, he happens to turn towards the door just as someone walks in. There before him stands Ryoko Asakura, back from hell with a casual smile on her face. Kyon has never been so abjectly terrified before.
    • That's not even the worst part. Just as Kyon is about to shoot Yuki, Ryoko appears from behind, successfully backstabbing Kyon! And then she goes on about telling Yuki that she's there for her while touching her face in a rather interesting way. And she was spinnin' around like a happy child with a bloody knife in hand. Yuki's expression explains all.
  • Heroic Age:
    • Cerbius, the Silver Tribe's Nodos, which looks like a combination of a skeletal human and a giant insect. A little disturbing on its own, but when it goes into Berserk Mode, it turns into a horrible, shrieking thing combining insect, demon and the monster from Alien. Cerbius's screams will haunt your nightmares. They don't sound like anything an Earthly creature would ever produce.
    • Frenzied Nodos in general are this trope: frenzied Bellcross is perhaps worst, considering he's The Hero. Up to that point, Bellcross had been an unstoppable force of good. Then he takes too much damage, Turns Red, and enters Berserk Mode. Suddenly, his power is amplified to hundreds of times his usualnote  and he becomes an even more unstoppable force of pure rage. He begins destroying everything: hostile fleets, friendly fleets, Deimos, even himself, as his body rips itself apart under the strain of its own power. What's truly frightening about it is that there is nothing anyone can do to stop him: a Nodos is already practically invincible, a frenzied Nodos is even moreso. And the Frenzied state is contagious; any Nodos that attempt to restrain a frenzied one are likely to suffer it themselves. Belcross is proven to be the strongest Nodos, when frenzied for long enough just moving causes colossal energy rings capable of wiping out several thousand ships, and that is when they are at there weakest and they will only get stronger until he just ... gives out.
  • If the front page cover of the manga Hideout of some corpse-like figure ripping through the fourth wall to get you doesn't frighten you, then this closer pic of the same Nightmare Face peeking out of the darkness will.
  • Several scenes at the beginning of Iczer-One, but particularly the one where Nagisa Kano's schoolgirl friends suddenly have strange mechanical faces with an eyeball in the middle.
  • The manga Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit (lit. "Death Papers") is both this and Paranoia Fuel. In order to help the civilian population learn the value of life, and thus become productive, valuable members of society, children are inoculated with a special vaccine. This vaccine protects them from every disease known to Man, true, but one vaccine in thousands contains a special device that will cause a heart attack between the victimcitizen's 18th and 24th years. It doesn't matter how you've lived your life up to that point —if you've wasted it, if you're happy and successful, if you're a horrible criminal or a saint loved by all. You will die. There is nothing you can do to prevent it, no one to plead to, no one to save you. Your fate was sealed when you were a child, and the only mercy you get is a 24-hour notice immediately preceding the activation of the device (and heaven help you if you're not home to receive it.) Maybe you'll receive your ikigami in the morning as you go to school. Maybe it will be in the middle of the night after a hard day at work. Or maybe during your wedding?
  • In Ikki Tousen, whenever a character with a Dragon within him/her gets their bodies hijacked. It's epecially bad in the case of Gentoku Ryuubi, a normally super cute and kind girl who becomes the embodiment of chaos and destruction whenever she's taken over by the most destructive of the Dragons themselves, complete with Glowing Eyes of Doom and a Slasher Smile...
  • The Inuyasha manga had a lot of horrifying moments. For example, the entire Noh Mask arc had some serious Body Horror going on. The scene later in the manga in which two children clutch their parents' severed heads is pretty bad, too.
  • Kaze to Ki no Uta:
    • The series has many of them, since it involves explicit rape as this, but the one scene that stands out from the rest is when Bonnard kidnaps and rapes an underage Gilbert. The scene is very squicky considering that Gilbert was about nine years old.
    • Everything Auguste does is this in spades, especially when he rapes a young Gilbert. The worst part about it? Auguste is his father who was posing as his uncle.
  • Kemonozume by Masaaki Yuasa loves this trope, from the Gorn and the horroristic opening of episode 6 (involving cannibalism) to anything that has to do with Ooba Kyuutarou.
  • This example from The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service needs some explanation: There's a type of snail parasite that takes up residence in the poor creature's eyestalks, enlarging them to thrice their natural size. It pulses and throbs in order to attract attention from birds,so that it may be eaten and continue its life cycle inside the bird. One story in volume 4 shows what happens when it crosses over into humans - Eye Scream, Body Horror and Squick in one well-drawn, nauseating two-page spread.
  • Koharu from Koharu no Hibi. Behind that sweet cute exterior she's really a Yandere for Akira. And boy is it creepy.
  • The end of the first episode of Le Chevalier d'Eon. The plot of the series is about to pick up as Lia possesses D'Eon for the first time. Cut to the Queen in her chambers talking to a little girl who has a high pitched voice. Turn to face the mirror and she only has a skull for a face! After this, we get a close-up as she says, "Won't this be fun, Marie?" It becomes less creepy later, but it just comes out of nowhere.
  • Left Hand of God, Right Hand of the Devil, by Kazuo Umezu. In one particularly gruesome story, a mentally unstable father lures three hikers into a lone cabin in the middle of the woods, beheads one, and forces the other two to keep eating, no matter how full they get. In the finale of the picture book, he draws a cake, topped with the heads of the two hikers, writing that "The girls who loved cakes become a cake themselves, and they lived very happily." Happily ever after, indeed...
  • Normally The Legend of Koizumi isn't scary, but when Josef Mengele appeared he was made of this with a side serving of Squick.
  • Life (2002) can be quite unsettling. It features graphic depictions of someone cutting themselves, but that's just the beginning. There are scenes of graphically sliced wrists that are just Nausea Fuel but the warped "demonic" look of Manami's face sometimes.. For someone who is a normal high-school girl, Manami is dangerously close to being more than just a bully. When she bullies, she goes all out.
  • Legend of the Blue Wolves:
    • Captain Continental for one. Also, his rape of Jonathan, all those grunting noises and the screaming...
    • The ending where Leonard turns into a monster and Jonathan has to kill him.
    • Although he completely deserved it there's also Captain Continental's Groin Attack at the hands of Leonard which also possibly ends up killing him.
  • Lucky Star has Keroro and Tamama's cameo as tadpoles in the OAV. The two initially start out relatively normal, for them anyway, and then suddenly there's a close up as their faces transform into the equivalent of unholy monsters, both clawing and biting at the screen.
  • Macross Frontier:
    • The Viktor Vajra drone. 30 meters high, capaple of vapourising cruisers, with huge claws and jaws... and no brain to speak of.
    • In just the first episode, Alto's partner is seized by a Vajra mecha and reduced to chunky salsa in its bare hands. We don't see the body (but sometimes that's even worse), but we do see a lot of blood coming through its fingers.
  • The part in Oh Great!'s Majin Devil involving the giant spider monster that passed himself off as human. Results in a really horrible, horror-laden scene where a teenage girl gives birth to an overgrown spider creature in the school restroom, which then lunges at her squealing "Mama!"

  • Redda of Mon Colle Knights wears a creepy red death mask that covers his sexy Bishōnen face and loves spending his time driving people to suicide and especially subjecting things to transformations in disturbing, gruesome, and splooshy ways. One part of his Evil Plan traps Rockna within the neck of Dread Dragon, and suffice it to say, thanks to him, she was actually this close to getting slaughtered in a horribly disgusting way. And that's not all, the way he creates the Doomsday Dragon in order to resurrect Oroboros by reviving Dread Dragon and having Oroboros give it a Chest Burster itself is truly enough to freak the audience out]]. Nevertheless, the Gag Dub toned him down and edited some scenes.
  • Most (if not all) of Mononoke, what with the room of dead babies and the shamisen playing fish-person who makes you live out your worst nightmare.
  • MPD Psycho: There is at least one instance per chapter (there are 14 volumes (9 in English), but it drops off for psychological trauma in later chapters), but one of the stand-out moments of horror for the series was when the protagonists investigate a case where a serial killer was using the brains of his victims like grotesque flower pots. Made even better by the fact that up until he buried them, the victims were still alive while the flowers were growing.
    • How about the First Chapter, where the main characters girlfriend is mailed to him in a styrofoam box missing all her arms and legs? Oh, and she's still alive.
  • Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse, episode 2: the cast of characters introduced in the previous episode start to drop like flies. The first victims, lost to laser fire, are the lucky ones: not so lucky are Izumi and Kazusa, who are devoured by the BETA. The graphic nature of their deaths would not be out of place in Attack on Titan.
  • My Lovely Ghost Kana:
    • When Broken Bird Utako is introduced she is first heard as quiet sobbing coming from the apartment showers. After a frightening (for her) first meeting with Daikichi and Kana, they find she had been living on the streets before moving into the apartments and she becomes their new friend. Then Daikichi gives us this little expository gem, "Apparently while looking for work, she was led to an office and made to sign some contract written in some foreign language she had never seen before. And she hated it because she feared the big men and the cold showers and the dark little room..." Thank you for that gut-punch, Tanaka-san. (Fortunately it is never expanded upon because we really do not want to know and her life turns around for the better.)
    • Kana's description of her "life" after her suicide, sinking into the walls and thinking and wondering. And thinking. And thinking, until she lost all sense of who she was and where she was. Then at last she pulled herself together, left the walls, and wandered all around her deserted, rotting apartment, looking to see if anyone had come, until she gave up and went into the wall again. She spent years like that, all alone, trying not to go mad.
  • The Running Man segment from Neo Tokyo (1987) is pretty unsettling in its own right. The slowly accelerating heartbeat you hear in the background at the beginning, the dark character designs and the idea of telekinesis to kill off other racers don't help either. Top it all off with the ghosts of previous racers he murdered haunting him and Zack Hugh undergoing a Super-Power Meltdown and the picture is gruesomely perfect.
  • Noir: The interrogation scene in episode 8 is very disturbing, mostly just because it just implies instead of showing. That and the screams are some of the most realistic-sounding screams in anime.
    • Altena is creepy in the way she acts throughout the series and the way they imply how she raised both Chloe and Kirika by mind raping them, plus add in both her flashbacks they really show how screwed up she is and how she came to have the beliefs she held.
    • Also Kirika, while definitely very Moe and someone you just want to hug, whenever she goes into noir mode, especially near the end of the series, she becomes very creepy and scary; those eyes of her she has between episode 22 to 25 are a very scary sight.
  • The manga Parasyte, by Hitoshi Iwaaki. Parasitic, shapeshifting aliens come to Earth and take over human bodies, played for all the Body Horror it's worth.
  • Pikadon, a short film about the Hiroshima bombing. It's obviously quite graphic, and certainly a Tear Jerker, but the lack of dialogue, music and animation style really vamp up the creepy factor.
  • Volume 2, Episode 4 of Presents, "Whatever Your Heart Desires." A girl ends up getting whatever present she wants, and due to her greed, selfishness, and paranoia, it ends up killing a boy who loves her. Where this goes above and beyond is that we never find out how or why this is happening. Kurumi doesn't appear once in this story, and beyond using presents, it doesn't seem at all like her usual tactics.
  • Project K: Everything about the Colorless King. Also when he threatens to rape the very young Anna to get Mikoto to open his eyes in reaction so he can possess him.
  • Pumpkin Scissors, where at one point the man with the flamethrower was part of a crew who were told that they had protective fluid in their suits, to keep them from getting fried by their weapons. They didn't. He goes on to be trapped inside the suit, unable to leave without dying, and apparently is cold, except when burning people. And then there's the scene where it actually shows those soldiers getting out of their suits, only to have their skin burn and peel off in large quantities, all the while they scream in pain]].
  • Master Happosai in Ranma ½. He's an incredibly powerful martial arts master who sexually harasses every woman he can get his hands on, and who is living indefinitely in the home of former students who are too terrified to kick him out. He also regularly harasses and molests his students' daughters, the youngest of whom is sixteen. His character is played for laughs in the series, but imagine what it must feel like to be a young teenage girl who has to witness your father cower helplessly before a man who victimizes you at every turn in your own childhood home, sometimes even sneaking into your bedroom at night.
    • Episode 59 of the anime has Happosai use an incense to split Ranma's male and female forms. The female side becomes evil and tries to make the male half the same, by seducing him. As the female side continues to corrupt the male side, Ranma's appearance becomes disturbingly more haggard and sickly. And by the end, female Ranma takes over him and has him corner an injured Akane. Akane begs Ranma to fight off her influence. Cue Ranma making a Nightmare Face as he prepares to kill her. Thankfully, Shampoo comes in to save the day, driving the evil side off in the process. But that was definitely a close call for Akane.
  • Rozen Maiden has a scene when a half-completed (sentient) doll burns away in flames.
  • Robotech had dozens of Eye Catch segments for it's commercial breaks, and most of the major characters voiced over at least one eyecatch. The most creepy of them all was one by what is probably the voice of a bioroid terminator against a scene of one of Dana's nightmares (a cadaverous hand reaching out to grab her). The two parts of the voiceover were: "Robotech will return...and so will you.". When coming back from commercial, "Robotech is back...and I'm watching you." Make of that what you will.
  • Mostly anything involving the Peacemakers in Scrapped Princess. Particularly the giant black blobs they summon that eat people alive.
  • Shakugan no Shana has a chilling part of the nature of their world. If your power of existence is devoured by a Tomogara and you get turned into a "torch" by a Flame Haze, you become just a shell, a.k.a. an Unperson and will eventually disappear, with no one remembering you existed. Even worse is that this may have already happened, several times in fact to people they knew.
  • Shaman King: The anime has a couple of sources. The worst two come in the form of Faust VII's introductory episode, and the end of Yoh and Hao's first clash at the Great Spirits. The former has Faust phase his hands through Manta's body and reach at various internal organs, and all because Manta had said that he didn't think it possible to bring back the dead. The latter shows Hao doing worse to Yoh: He pulls Yoh's soul out and eats it. Instances were played, in full, in the English dub, despite 4Kids dislikes violent/creepy sequences. As horrific as the anime version of Faust and Manta is, the manga is even worse. There, Faust vivisects Manta alive. To full view of the reader. Just because he was curious how someone as small as Manta looked inside.
  • Sgt. Frog: In-Universe, Fuyuki's skill in telling ghost stories is apparently unmatched — Natsumi and any other listeners become terrified out of their minds. We don't actually get to see more than a couple fragments of what he's actually saying, though.
  • Shadow Star:
  • Speed Grapher has rather a lot of this thanks to the effects of the Euphoria virus. Those who are infected with this virus without dying are granted powers based around disturbing sexual fetishes, and the way several of them transform when they get particularly "excited" is bloody freaky to say the least.
  • Tales of Vesperia: The First Strike had some frightening moments of its own that would give its viewers the creeps for years; First off, take a look at the black and red tentacle monsters that are attacking several civilians that were just near the bridge to Shizontania. Then wait until you see one of the guildmen get dragged along the grass and killed along the way, and then see for yourself a tentacle monster in control of Lambert and two other dogs attached to its edge. And if that isn't bad enough, just wait until you see a rain of human blood from another of the guildmen falling on Hisca and one of the other knights. And Hisca's appropriate reaction to the blood spilled on her get-up and her body is truly frightening indeed. Bonus points for doubling as a Tear Jerker in the end when Yuri is forced to pull off his Shoot the Dog moment of killing Lambert and the other dogs along with the tentacle monster in order to protect Hisca and the others.
  • The latter part of Texhnolyze gets pretty disturbing. The show's second major villain is insane with borderline- Psychopathic Manchild tendencies; and he first convinces the citizens of Lux to discard their biological bodies to become cyborgs, arming them with Death Rays which kill anyone unfortunate enough to get hit by them]], and then later he kills Ran, the series' resident Mysterious Waif, and puts her head on one of his statues. As if that isn't enough, he also reveals that the reason for his insanity was because his family was selectively inbred. Oh, and the cyborgs? The source of power for Texhnolyze is ultimately shut down, so they end up frozen in place, unable to move at all. And at least a few of them are still conscious at the time.]]
  • Tokyo Tribe 2.
    • A particular scene from the first episode has an incredibly gruesome anal rape and death. This would not be so bad except for the astonishing amount of blood, the horrible, horrible imagery present, the fact that the guy raping the other is easily twice his height and four times his weight plus the sound.
    • Some of the content in later episodes isn't much better. Two episodes after the event, said fat guy's BishōnenCasanova son (who is thinner than he is) splits a gangster's face open by slicing his face twice with a knife. Sure, they may have cut away before it got really gruesome, but still, it deserves to be up there.
  • Anything penned by Tsutomu Nihei qualifies and then some. The man's really really good at communicating Body Horror across a visual medium and he has tendency to waltz right through the Uncanny Valley.
  • Toriko, a cooking/fighting manga manages to come here during the Ice Hell/Century Soup arcs. Why? Bogey Woods and Tommyrod. Bogie Woods has 4,000 bones and 4,600 joints, capable of twisting and contorting himself in inhuman ways. But one of his most common techniques is 'lodging', where he enters a human and uses it as a 'shell', controlling it as a puppet from the inside. And he has nothing on Tommyrod, who can rapidly grow and launch a variety of deadly bugs out of his mouth, a mouth that is filled with razor-sharp teeth.
    • Oh, and they're just two members of the Bishokokai, the Big Bads of the series. And it gets much, much worse. Granny Chiyo...has the most disturbing smile when she stabs Master Chin...
      • Her method of fighting, which involves completely removing all the flesh off the bones on parts of her opponent's bodies faster than they can perceive. She's so fast she completely removed all the flesh off an opponent from his armpits to his hips so fast he didn't even realize it'd happened until she pointed it out to him.
  • Vampire Princess Miyu. Loads of Body Horror, Transformation Trauma, mind games, Miyu's creepy giggling from the OAV, etc.
  • Violence Jack:
    • While a bit over the top, has some pretty gruesome imagery, along with some of the most truly despicable villains ever put into a 1980s anime.
    • The manga is even worse. In the first chapter alone, you see tons of elementary-school-aged children die in brutal ways (they were all trying to escape their crumbling school during an earthquake) and people burned alive by an erupting Mount Fuji. Also, the fates of Miki Makimura and Ryo Asuka (aka Satan) from Devilman. Miki had been brought back to life and both characters are now limbless and forced to be the Slum King's sex slaves. And that's what Satan wanted.
  • Vision of Escaflowne has some in the second episode. When the cloaked Zaibach guymelefs attack, they aim their extending claw weapons at a handful of guards who don't know what they're up against. A frame later, and they're all legs with metal claws where their torsos used to be.
  • Welcome to the NHK ends what's a pretty silly two-episode plot on MMORPG addiction by dramatizing the main character at 50 years old, still mooching off his parents and addicted to the same MMO. Still having done nothing with his life, his elderly parents write his life off completely before the story fast forwards, they die, and he's done for.
  • Ys:
  • Yuki Yuna is a Hero: As a price for using their Magical Girl powers, the young heroes incur physical disabilities, lose their memory, and use of certain senses. The more they use their powers, the more they lose. One veteran magical girl is quadriplegic in a hospital bed, missing several limbs, and unable to do anything but stare off into the distance. They can never die, even if they attempt suicide.

Alternative Title(s): Manga, Anime

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