That guy just got decapitated.
Unmarked spoilers below!
- In general, just how scarily elaborate some of the murders are: The tricks used, the form of killing the victim(s), and just how brutal some of the methods are. In real life, these kind of crimes would most likely go unsolved.
- During early 400 or 500 episodes of the anime, most of the victims in the murder are left dead with their eyes wide open. Mind you, just the thought of locating a corpse is scary enough as it is but to be leaving corpse with their eyes open adds more eerie to the viewers. Real life wise, it leaves a bad impression when someone dead had their eyes and mouth open so it is necessary that anyone who found the dead people ensure that their eyes and mouth are left closed. Though, for the recent ones, with certain exception for one canon case that needs it to be like the manga to make it understandable, the dead victims had their eyes closed to reduce the fear of children watching the show. Though the manga remained uncensored most of the time.
- This woman's face
◊. Most people have seen the numerous dead bodies in this series without flinching, but this picture of a woman BEFORE death ...Just look, even though she's a bit demented, she KNOWS she's going to die. That expression on her face is nightmare fuel enough. - Just... how the events began, from Ran's prespective. She has a fun little day with Shinichi at an amusement park, but things get worse when a murder happens. It's thankfully quickly solved and the day could be somewhat saved, when Shinichi decides to run after two suspicious guys, non-chalantly saying that he'll be right back... and then he doesn't come back. He's just... gone! He's not at home, he's not dropping by your place or any other place he's known to be at... she can't find him. Just imagine if one of your friends suddenly disappeared like that. While Shinichi eventually "returns" and tells her he's just off solving cases somewhere, think of the anxiety she must have been going through until she finally got a proper "reason" for his disappearance.
- It is impossible to talk about horrifying things in this series without mentioning the roller coaster murder case from the very first episode featuring decapitation and High-Pressure Blood. Yes, this episode is the only one where the blood was censored white, not black, even in Japanese. Just look at the picture at the top of the page. You know it's messed up when Vodka of all people was flabbergasted.
- To celebrate the series' twentieth anniversary, there was a one-hour anime special re-telling and expanding on the first episode itself. While the blood was darker, like explained above, in exchange there was more blood and it flowed from earlier - with Ran getting several blood stains on the left side of her face, in example. YEOWCH.
- Sunset Mansion. Ever wondered what it'd be like to see heroic characters murder one another? They all live and are unharmed (save for the Hercule Poirot knockoff who was actually one of the two villains and was killed by the other one), but Hakuba and Kogoro with guns is something one doesn't want to think about. One has to note, though, if we believe in the Non-Serial Movie The Fourteenth Target, Kogoro is actually a top-notch pistol marksman.
- The 'Mountain Villa Murder' case, anyone? As in the one where the killer chops the victim to little bits and smuggles them into the forest one-by-one under his shirt, and attacks Ran/Conan with an axe in the middle of the night?
- The Killer's 'Madman' persona is pretty scary on its own. A figure in dark rain gear, his face and hands covered in old bandages, with a crazed look in his eyes and maniacal grin? Brrr.....
- How the victim was found wasn't much better. The victim's friends find her apparently lying on the ground. When one of the dudes tries to lift her up, her head falls off. AAAAAHHHHH!!!
- Also, the case that takes place immediately after Heiji Hattori's introduction case — the one where Conan and his three elementary school-age friends are stalked around the library by a psychopathic, drug-smuggling librarian who has no problem whatsoever with strangling them because they know too much? Not to mention his face during the whole time he was stalking them... in the dark.
- The Rich Bitch Reika Yotsui's death in Billionaire Birthday Blues is simply made of this. She was actually bound and taped up inside a bathtub, with the cover placed over her....while it gradually filled up with water... and drowned her. And it happened in the span of hours, specifically to make Reika experience a slow and terrifying death, and it shows when her corpse is found with bulging eyes and an open mouth... meaning she was trying to scream for help for a long time, yet nobody could hear her. *shiver* She is a massive Asshole Victim, but still.
- In the manga, Shinichi's mental description of what's happening to his body while he shrinks sounds rather unpleasant.
- Not that it's much better in the anime either. His train of thoughts as he shrinks for the first time is by the lines of "I feel like my bones... are melting away! MY BONES ARE MELTING AWAY! MELTING AWAY!!".
- It really doesn't help how desperate and terrified he sounds. In the dub, he sounds like he's about two seconds away from having a mental breakdown over his impending death.
- Gets worse in the "Episode ONE" special. This audio has Shinichi's pained screams and gasps, desperately pleading for the pain to stop.
- Gets worse in the "Episode ONE" special. This
- It's sort of worse when you think about the mechanics of the process, knowing the poison is named for apoptosis. Apoptosis is a mechanism built into the DNA and is essentially cellular self-destruct, a way to combat potentially mutated cells. When you think about it, this poison is forcing every single cell in his body to kill itself all at once, quickly spreading through the entire body. Everything is dying and the heat is causing the chemicals to evaporate and the body to erode all by itself, all while the heart is beating out of control trying to keep the body alive. The whole body broken down piece by piece, cell by cell. One has to wonder if, for those that the stuff would have killed, if the poison would have left ANY cells intact, or whether it would have kept going until only a tiny shred of the body remained, along with already-dead cells like hair and nails. They said it was untraceable in an autopsy, but if the toxin doesn't level off on its own, it might not leave something to do an autopsy on. Not to mention that the gas coming off the body might be rather noxious if it contained more than water. Shudder.
- Even a regular poison would have been horrifying given the circumstances, since Shinichi had already realized that Gin was a cold-blooded killer. Now, the same cold-blooded killer has attacked him from behind and forced a pill into his mouth. This is also worse in the "Episode ONE" special. In the original, it simply showed Gin placing the pill in Shinichi's mouth before pouring water into it. In the "improved" version, Gin makes sure the pill is close enough to the throat to swallow by shoving his bare fingers into Shinichi's mouthnote .
- Massacre Night, if you do not know how the villain went about what they did, then you might be a little jumpy, because that can be done in real life too. The spelling out of Massacre Night and everything made the killer sound like a demented serial killer. And the characters are all stranded up in a blizzard.
- The Mermaid Island case: Heiji and Kazuha, dangling off a cliff, Heiji only hanging on with one hand... and she stabs his other hand with an arrow to make him drop her so he can still save himself. It goes into massive awesome when not only he refuses to drop her, but manages to hold on until they're saved.
- A Cursed Mask Coldly Laughs. There's just something deeply unsettling about getting killed with your throat slit by a knife, but it gets even worse once you consider the knife stabbed the throat. As in, it was pushed forward.
- In the movie Phantom of Baker Street, there's Jack the freaking Ripper. He's introduced as a shadowy figure who runs around, brutally murdering young women and who comes out of nowhere, terrorizing everyone. Then, it's revealed that he's this gangly man with horrifying claw-like hands and the most insane laugh imaginable, which he lets rip while shouting how his bloodline will survive on Noah's Ark. Oh, and he murdered his mother and kept murdering others because he simply likes it. Remember that Conan and friends meet Jack in a virtual reality game, which means none of Conan's gadget are useful and the adults outside the virtual reality are unable to give any help. Furthermore, most of Conan's friends are already eliminated from the game, and Ran, the only one capable of defending herself, is incapacitated by Jack. It takes Ran jumping off the cliff while her hands are still tied to Jack's leg to stop the infamous serial killer from killing Conan.
- Imagine getting ready to visit a very dear friend (or better said, his grave). Then, you get knocked out in your way there. And when you wake up, you're caught in a Death Trap where you're Bound and Gagged on a plank placed in the middle of a construction site, with a noose around your neck so you'll get yourself hanged if you roll over... and if you don't, you'll either dehydrate/starve to death or freeze to your doom... and unbeknownst to you until later, there's a time bomb under the plank itself. And for worse? A camera has been installed over the trap itself, sending your completely helpless image to your friends and your girlfriend who are at the other side of the country, desperately trying to find and save you. And you don't even know what have you done to deserve this. Poor, POOR Takagi. (Who, for worse, was caught up by mistake!) Thank God he's saved in the nick of time.
- If anything, Aoyama has topped himself in chapter 915. Remember the aforementioned first murder through decapitation? Well, 915 finishes with some poor Red Shirt from Nagano Police being also decapitated on-screen, thanks to a noose tied up to his neck and with its other end tied to a vehicle that then goes off a cliff, taking the poor guy with it and cutting off his head in its way down. It even crosses into Tear Jerker because we see the poor sap, who had done nothing utterly terrible or wrong until then, crying Tears of Fear as his death nears... (That one gets subverted in 917, but we didn't know that in these moments.) Aoyama, what the HELL.
- Episode 91 (94 in the dub) "The Bank Robber Hospitalization Case" - a man is being forced by a gang of bank robbers to murder one of their ranks who has been captured by the police after a car crash. To make sure he complies, they threaten his young daughter. When he tries to talk to the police hanging out at the hospital, he's approached by a security guard, who turns out to be a member of the gang sent there to keep him in line. The sheer paranoia and hopelessness of the scene in question, especially when the poor man slides down the wall, his legs having given out from terror, is bone-chilling.
- Partly Fridge Horror in the episode 829: A man who have just committed a murder is visited by a boy in the middle of the night who acts like he can read the mind of the man. Upon being exposed by the boy, he realized that he have met the child before... and that the child looks unaged from when they met 10 years ago. While we as viewers know about Conan and the context of the story, the store owner have no idea. To him, the child is like a ghost taken from a horror movie.
- The two-part flashback story (921-922), telling how Ran and Shinichi met in preschool, is absolutely terrifying when it's revealed that in Shinichi's point of view for the flashback had their teacher was trying to groom Ran to trust him exclusively so he could kidnap her, because his Delicate and Sickly wife wanted to raise her as a Replacement Goldfish for their runaway daughter. This included slipping her sleeping pills at nap time and planning for his brother-in-law to sneak in through the bathroom window and take her, while the other children slept. Mind you, Ran was still a 4-5 year old girl and sleeping pills are meant for adults who had trouble sleeping because of stress. She is still a kid who is growing up and who knows what will happen to Ran's health on the long run if she was induced to sleeping pills. Thankfully, Shinichi and his dad solved the case in time!
- Also, do note this incident happened when they are in pre-school. Again, pre-school! Just how scary can crime be for Detective Conan that it occurs even on this early stage of life for children. It's quite the grim reality that even though you are a kid and was supposedly safe in a place for kids to gather under trustworthy teachers/adults, it does not mean that you are safe from what a certain of them are plotting behind the scenes.
- Although corpses are not that uncommon in this manga, the corpse's gaze in chapter 932 is very unsettling. The victim hid himself in a cupboard to trick his friends into believing that he could vanish out of a locked room, like a zombie. It worked out a bit too well. When his friends came looking for him, they also moved the cupboard the victim was hiding in, so he couldn't get out by himself and starved to death in that cupboard. His friends later found him in a huddling position next to his bed and his head tilted to the side. One of his friends said it was "almost as if he was asking us what had taken us so long." Thanks for that, Aoyama.
- When the culprit of the campfire murder is outed in 989, he takes Ayumi hostage and threatens to stab her (then speculates on taking her off a cliff in a Murder-Suicide). How does the Cute Clumsy Girl Rumi Wakasa handle this? First, she walks up to him and gently asks him to let her go. When he gets agitated and refuses, threatening to stab Ayumi again, she just fucking tells him to do it and offers to do it for him. It allows Kuroda to sneak up on the culprit and take him down, but Jesus.
- The series has always been more grounded in reality than its predecessor, which featured a Ridiculously Human Robot and actual witchcraft. As of File 1008, that just might be going out the window. The boss of the Organization is revealed to be Renya Karasuma, a man who was established as having been 99 years old when he died... 50 years earlier. There's just something very unsettling about a possible supernatural element being introduced in a manga that has been extremely grounded since it began.
- Episode 505, from the viewpoint of the episode's killer. She murdered her ex-boyfriend and manages to snag Eri as her alibi. She's confident she'll get away and even mocks the police as she watches them shortly after the body is found. That smug confidence is almost immediately shattered when Conan starts dropping hints left and right that she is the killer. For Conan this is just another day at the office, but from the killer's viewpoint, she's being cornered by a child of all people. It's hardly the first time we've seen the murderer of the episode become unsettled by Conan's deductions, but it's almost unsettling how easily Conan riles her up without even meaning to.
- The "Red Woman" Murder case plays like a mix of supernatural and slasher horror. Sera is asked to investigate bizarre happenings at a rental villa, which tie into a grizzly murder case several years ago where a woman stabbed her husband over and over in a fit of rage, splattering the whole room red and dying her white coat crimson. How does this all tie into what's happening at the villa? Because somebody's been playing pranks on the residents, all of which involve the color red. Oh, and a friend of theirs was supposedly killed by the Red Woman, found stuck at the bottom of a swamp for over a week. For extra creepiness, the eponymous Red Woman is implied to have died as remains in the swamp thought to be hers were recently found. The anime somehow makes the backdrop for this particular murder case even more freaky by having a woman dressed in red clearly stalking Conan and the others, watching events unfold from outside the villa, and disappearing whenever the camera angle passed over a tree.
- While there are plenty of brutal murder cases throughout the manga and even in the anime filler episodes, probably one of the most torturous of the lot is the one that occurred a year ago in Files 587-590. Tango, the victim's son, was found in the pond with his hands and feet bound and his mouth taped shut, having died to drowning. While not the most painful way to day, the murderer set it up so that Tango had to stand on the tips of his feet to barely keep his nose above the water and promised she would let him go if he kept it up for an hour. Not only did the murderer have no intention of keeping him alive, but as Conan pointed out, Tango was a body-builder and because muscles are so dense, they have trouble staying afloat. While certainly not one of the goriest murders, it is definitely one of the most sadistic of the bunch.
- The 29th episode in the anime. In 1996, it's about a programmer who is able to create a program specifically to remotely access his boss's thermostat and repeatedly raise & lower it without even entering the house. It sounds mischievous, almost like the real offence would be Gaslighting, but said boss has a heart condition and the repeated temperature fluctuations cause him to die of a heart attack in his sleep. Just the very concept that someone is able to do this to you without even being inside your house. Unlike other murders, he didn't need to even set something up - he was able to do this completely remotely. While it sounds like a ridiculous premise, it falls into Realism-Induced Horror in The New '10s and The New '20s when "Smart homes" and remotely-accessible devices (such as appliances and yes even thermostats) became more commonplace.
