Nightmare Fuel / ERASED

• Everything about the true culprit, a Serial Killer who preys on children.
  • The killer using the same bus the children use as hideout to dump his abduction and murder supplies, getting dangerously close to discovering Kayo at some point when he visits and she's only meters away from him.
  • The glance he shoots Satoru when the latter is apprehended by the police.
  • The killer's backstory, likening Satoru to a hamster from his childhood, which he decided to raise after it was the only one out of a batch of hamsters to survive the killer's attempt to drown them all for the sake of it. As a result of this, the killer gets obsessed with Satoru.
    • The killer's full backstory, only in the manga. As a child, Yashiro's unnamed older brother was physically abusive towards him, feeling resentful towards him because Yashiro was their parent's favorite due to his grades (at least in his head). Eventually, the older brother switched his aggression to young girls, forcing Yashiro to stand guard and placate the girls with gifts so they wouldn't tell. Yashiro, wanting to avoid the physical abuse, went along with this, kickstarting his knowledge of how to approach people. But after getting caught up watching the aforementioned hamster, Yashiro left his post as guard for too long, meaning he wasn't able to keep people away from the shed where the older brother did his work. Thus, the brother accidentally killed the current girl to keep her quiet. Yashiro, inspired by the short story The Spider's Thread, begins seeing threads over people's heads, compelling him to kill. In short, beginning with his brother, the killer's crime spree has being going on for decades.
  • In the anime, Yashiro's monologue about how Satoru has become equivalent to Spice in his mind:
    "Since I became acquainted with Spice, it's as if I could see the spider's thread. I've murdered the people who I could see were connected to it. But at some point, a boy disrupted my plans. And then I saw a spider's thread attached to the top of his head, too. But he didn't die. I named him Spice and began observing him. I'm talking about you, Satoru."
    • The way Yashiro, after pausing for effect, whispers that last line, is enough to send chills down your spine. Even worse is that considering Yashiro's personality, it's very likely that he was delivering that entire monologue to Satoru's comatose form in the hospital. And it's easy to imagine him whispering that last line right into Satoru's ear.
• Kayo's abuse at the hands of her mother, which doubles as a Tear Jerker. Of particular note are a couple of scenes where her mother attempts to strike her clearly without holding back and her "solution" to her daughter's bruises: forcing Kayo's face into a tub of ice-cold water to heal them faster, almost to the point of drowning her.
• In Satoru's first attempt to avoid Kayo's death, she is declared missing after their birthday and at the start of episode 5 there's a scene that shows her bruised corpse while her mother and mother's boyfriend wonder what to do.
• Airi receiving a text from the killer through Satoru's phone, ordering her to stay in her room right before the house bursts aflame. You're forgiven for thinking Airi doesn't survive the cliffhanger after what happened to poor Sachiko.
• At one point, Satoru sees Kayo's mother on her way to the subway, and is tempted to push her down the stairs. This is the closest we see Satoru succumbing to evil instincts and it's really chilling. Thankfully, Kenya intervenes just in time to snap him out of it.
• Yashiro revealing his true nature to Satoru. While the reveal may be predictable to some, the sudden change in his demeanor and the resulting attempted murder scene are chilling enough.
  • The scene is even worse since Satoru monologues about how obvious it was, but him refusing to believe it because he saw Yashiro as a father. Now he realizes the man he used to look up to was taking him away to kill him. There’s some dark truth to this as real life kidnappers are people that the victims know personally.
• Following the supposed death of Satoru at the hands of the killer in episode 10, the opening for episode 11 has Satoru literally erased from the sequence.
• Imagine that one day your friend (or son) is suddenly acting like a different person: talking in standard Japanese rather than local dialect, using words and phrases they didn't know before, not remembering aspects of their daily life that were second nature yesterday, and suddenly making bizarre overtures to classmates they've never spoken to before. This is what Satoru's Mental Time Travel to 1988 looked like from the outside, causing his 11-year-old self to have a major personality change overnight. We don't know how most of Satoru's friends and acquaintances took this change (or whether they even noticed it), but Kenya and Satoru's mother noticed, and while they both ultimately accepted or even embraced it, they were quite unsettled at first and didn't know what to do.
  Kenya: Satoru, who are you?
• From Yashiro's perspective, Satoru's ability to know exactly where to go and what to do in order to thwart his plans. To him, it's as though Satoru can see the future. (Which, to be fair, isn't that far off from the truth.) And in the manga, he's even more perturbed when Satoru pulls the same trick a decade later to save Kumi. His spot-on prediction of Yashiro's plan, and his counter-plan, relied on an intimate understanding of cell phones, which of course didn't exist when he went into a coma, and therefore he shouldn't have been so familiar with. Yashiro had crafted this plan specifically to exploit what he thought would be a gap in Satoru's knowledge; and he was frustrated, confused, and more than a little shaken that Satoru still managed to not only predict exactly what he would do, but respond in a way that made him think his plan was working right up until the end.