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Nightmare Fuel / Inuyasha

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Rumiko Takahashi in this series has really demonstrated that she can create some very creepy and unsettling entities, ranging from Big Creepy-Crawlies to red-eyed humanoid ones, as well as one of the most horrific monsters in anime and manga history.

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


  • The world is very scary for a romance manga of all things. To put it bluntly, it's a death world out there with every other villain being some sort of utterly depraved man-eating demon that would put most villains from Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Inuyasha's Bloodier and Gorier and Darker and Edgier counterpart to shame. Random fuck-off villains routinely wipe out entire villages and massacre and torture hundreds and commit every nasty crime imaginable — for a few examples, there's a demon who usurps a benevolent water deity to eat children, another who uses his granddaughter as a meat shield and kills his son for falling in love with a human, yet another who leads entire groups of humans to Rape, Pillage, and Burn village after village (with his human minions getting amazed by his identity as a yokai and amping up their heinous actions instead of being freaked out), and that's not even getting to the arch-villains like Naraku, the Infant and the Band of Seven, each of them responsible for the deaths of thousands after thousands. You know it's very bad when the first thing we see on a panel upon introducing a villain is usually piles upon piles of dead bodies and/or blood, and despite there are rapists lurking around, none of them managed to count as a Complete Monster because the non-rapists are outclassing them. Which brings to another issue; the fact that these mass-murdering yokai are literally everywhere and can kill hundreds out of the blue. Being the chief of a village and your son goes out to take a piss? Maybe when he returns he's possessed by a vicious, man-eating demon. Going to a temple or motel for a rest thinking you'll be safe? Who knows if that's actually a man-eating demon craving for human flesh who pulled a Kill and Replace on its original owner. It really gives a feeling that no matter where Inuyasha, Kagome and co. goes, nowhere is safe, and they have to be on the hit-and-run all the time, because there's always something, be it Naraku, one of his incarnations or some random yokai around the corner waiting to kill everyone. There's a reason why only three villains out of a gigantic list of mass murderers in the original manga managed to become Complete Monsters, all of them being arch-villains with practically infinite resources and two of these being split halves of the same entity. This post about Hakudoshi by one of the authors of The Neverkind Saga sums it up very nicely:
    Inuyasha has one of the most insane heinous standards imaginable, I'm serious. This is like Warhammer 40K of "lots of people doing horrible things so nobody sticks out." Hey, look at the guy who has his wolves eat an entire village of innocent people! Horrible, right? This is forgotten and he becomes a good guy with nobody even remarking on this.note  Yeah, there are about 10-15 villains at least who would be shoe ins with a saner standard. There's the Peach Hermitnote  who is a vicious cannibal and devours people by the bucketload, Taigokumaru, a bat demon who sends his soldiers to feast on the blood of villages and murdered his own son for falling in love with a human woman, there's the false water god, who usurps a benevolent deity to eat children alive, the salamnder demon who assists serial killers, Princess Abi who creates literal rivers of blood, Renkotsu, who's a smug, mass murdering prick who betrays his own 'family' and murders them for power...It's to the level where uniqueness stops being relevant since there are so many varying crimes that nobody sticks out except Naraku, who is responsible for every bad thing to everyone, to the point I was just waiting for the reveal he got little Shippo's dad killed, started the Crusades through time travel and faked the moon landing.
    • To be fair, the story does take place during the Sengoku Period, in which Japan broke down into bloody civil war for about a century. There's a reason so many of Japan's ghost/horror stories originated during this period (and it's thus a popular setting for many Japanese media); not only did a lot of people supposedly become ghosts, but the overall bad vibes of the time supposedly attracted all manner of evil supernatural beings. War Is Hell all right, almost literally in this case. And Inuyasha is set in one of its deeper layers.
  • Naraku himself is easily one of the most horrific villains ever in a Shonen manga. The reason for this isn't because he constantly spawns and deploys detachments that probably start their rapsheet of atrocities with "hundreds dead and/or tortured", he's so manipulative that he lets you fight your loved ones for the sheer enjoyment of Corrupt the Cutie, he takes Breaking Speech and Mind Rape to a level that he forces even a saintly priest like Hakushin into giving into his fears and becoming a helper of essentially Satan, or he's a yokai who took over an already evil human bandit. It's because amongst all the death and destruction he causes, he has no end goal. He only wants to kill and ruin people because he can.
    • His true body during his weakened phase, which consists in a loathsome blob of Youkai body parts and flesh. He often has them fighting against each other so that he can absorb the winner and he is not above Grand Theft Me if he's ever absorbed by one (as the Infant can testify). For this reason, he is full of Lovecraftian Super Power, full of Combat Tentacles and other Body Horror; which gets even worse once he becomes a full demon.
    • Both his giant black spider form, making his face appear inside his body and red skinned demon form, all of which make his final battle very frightening.
    • Even his incarnations are this. The least heinous ones who are practically Anti-Villains were first seen committing literal massacres and Mind Rape by the hundreds, and it goes worse from there with Hakudoshi attempting omnicide to bait Kikyo out, and the Infant killing thousands upon thousands of Yokai and humans alike and starts his rapsheet by manipulating the mass executions of innocents, driving Kagome to a Heroic BSoD and comes just about that close to controlling and killing her.
  • The Cursed Noh Mask, made from a sacred tree embedded with a Sacred Jewel shard, that feeds on people to gain a body, a blackish one made of absorbed corpses. What makes it worse than most demons after the shards is that it was awoken in the present day by being near its presence, meaning that havoc it induces will be way worse than if it were to show up in the Fedual era. And it goes on a killing spree targeting firemen and policemen as well as driving a FIRE TRUCK into Kagome's house to get the Jewel. Oh and there's no reversing of the damage it's done and the people the mask has killed are gone for good.
    • The mask is even worse in the manga where it's seen eating some youngsters and biting their head off graphically, then coming back with a huge, fat body made from human flesh and full of limbs and faces. And then it can also chase Kagome almost everywhere, and even when partially broken, it can still move on and kill. The mask's behavior was heavily altered in the anime adaptation for exactly these reasons.
  • Miroku watched his own father get devoured by the Wind Tunnel in his hand, right in front of him, when he was a little boy. All that was left was a hollowed-out crater. And he's living with the knowledge that unless he defeats Naraku, the same thing is going to happen to him.
  • The Soul Piper, while a peaceful yokai that helps dead children pass on, if one has a big enough grudge; its eyes open and the soul goes to hell. This almost happens to a one shot character called Mayu until Kagome saves her. What makes it worse that this girl's ghost died in Kagome's time, meaning it'll always exist, and who knows how many children have been sent to hell by this thing. Though it is a case of Good Is Not Nice, as the yokai only drags you to hell if you've become an evil spirit.
    • Then you remember that it's an amalgamation of dead children itself who honestly should have zero authority to serve as guide to the afterlife upon which you realize it's no better than the angry ghosts it's sending to hell...
  • Sesshomaru's true form—a red-eyed dog that is as big as a truck. While his regular form is graceful and Bishōnen, his true form is rabid, beastly and constantly drooling acid. The first transformation into it prior to the pink smoke is his face turning into a canine's complete with a Slasher Smile.
  • The Curse of the Ink episode, involved an artist who drew hellish demons in order to get what he wanted, but ends up suffering a Family-Unfriendly Death when he is aged to death
    • In the manga, The living Ink, attracted by the artist's blood, sever his arm and then proceed to devour and melt him like a blob monster. Inuyasha even tries to save him, but is just left clutching his arm.
  • The entire Gatenmaru arc, showing far you can take Humans Are Bastards and the Superpowered Evil Side to its extreme before it becomes disturbing, Gatenmaru is your human eating racist moth demon who disguises himself as a human with red lipstick and pink overcoat. Normally this would be a campy villain, except for three things, one that he prefers to eat women alive through his tongue while tasting their despair, while draining them to a husk which disturbs every sane person who watches this; and two he has a disturbing fixation to show how helpless half demons are by sealing Inuyasha in a cocoon in order to have him watch helplessly as he ate the women alive as he mocked him. The third thing is his gang, who all kill an entire village willingly and are not even terrified by how their boss is actually a demon, in fact showed even more zeal in their cruelty after this reveal, made even more disturbing in that they were humans gleefully following a bloodthirsty demon. This leads to Inuyasha giving them all a swift Karmic Death with his Superpowered Evil Side, who takes things too far as he begins to hunt down every last man in the group, even those running away.
  • The Spider Heads, while their leader is a Body Horror of interconnected limbs shaped like a web; more terrifying is their implications of being devoured and turned into a Spider Head.
  • The Worm Demon from Jineji's debut, is Body Horror-eque demon who sends its young to eat, which the villagers blamed Jineji for. Unfortunately, it is unaware of Beware the Nice Ones as the Gentle Giant tears it apart.
  • The first picture of Sesshomaru obtaining Bakusaiga is, well, frightening.
  • The Snake demon of the Orochi clan who was desperate enough to bite a piece out of Moryomaru's arm: as a result, said piece of flesh burst from his orifices and then swallowed him up from the inside in a truly horrific manner.
  • Not all scary things in InuYasha can be just demons, when Kohaku goes from shy to emotionless killer, a change so sudden that it takes both Kagome and the audience by surprise. Even more disturbing is the Sadistic Choice of Naraku in that if Kohaku remembers killing off his own family he'd likely Go Mad from the Revelation and be Driven to Suicide to escape the guilt. Naraku, you bastard!
  • The Maker of the Shikon Jewel Filler involves a radical Jekyll & Hyde involving a bull demon (who is actually a half demon priest who turns into a demon at night); the Dissonant Serenity and subtle build-up to this is very effective, to say the least.
  • Tokajin, no, not Sesshomaru's sword; rather a man turned demon sage who feeds off of a man eating tree, nourished by men he has trained to become spiritually aware enough so he can kill them. That is scary enough, but the man himself, is a plump vaguely human creature, quite unlike the Bishōnen and down right terrifying in the series.
  • The Priestess Eater, an Eldritch Abomination of a demon that lures in priestesses with a little girl in order to swallow them with the cave that is its body. Its main core is a brain mass with a single eye and several tentacles.
  • Tsubaki's demon wolf, looking even more deranged than Sesshomaru's true form.
  • The silhouettes of some of the demons that possessed Onigumo to become Naraku are unsettling to look at in episode 71 of the original anime.
  • The Nikosen, a tree monster that was once a hermit, capable of regenerating even if you cut off the head. For some reason thankfully, he's cut from the adaptation, especially with the Hellish Pupils he has.
  • St. Hakushin, an undead priest with Black Eyes of Crazy; his backstory explains that he allowed himself to be Buried Alive only to hit the Despair Event Horizon as he realized that he didn't want to die and that all of the villagers were praying for his death. The Mood Whiplash of Mt. Hakurei transforming from a peaceful mountain to a hellish peak of spikes does not help matters.
    • To make this even better/worse, what's depicted in Saint Hakushin's backstory is the entirely real, historical practice known as sokushinbutsu - now banned in Japan, for obvious reasons.
  • When Sesshomaru smells blood and the scent of wolves on the air, and goes looking for the little girl who helped him - and finds her body lying on the woodland floor, face down and empty-eyed. Sure, Rin got better, but that doesn't change the fact that she was mauled to death by wolves.
  • The Village of Demon Women, sure the Salamander demon is very Narmy in her "water lipstick face" form until she returns to being a rotting salamander; but what she has the women do is very unnerving. She implants eggs to parasite off of them and have them skin men alive.
  • Hoshiyomi in his Red Eyes, Take Warning form, when he's taken to Omnicidal Maniac levels of Sanity Slippage, had he not been stopped by Inuyasha, he would've probably destroyed the entire world with his black hole.
  • Princess Abi's Fire Birds. For one thing, they're white pterodactyl like creatures that ignite at will and an alarming screech, not to mention her mother, Tekkei, who first appears as a realistic looking red eye, later revealing to be a threatening phoenix like creature.
  • Hosenki, a skull faced Youkai with Glowing Eyelights of Undeath of the red variety and a former friend of Inuyasha's father. While peaceful, he becomes legitimately threatening as the corrupt shard he carried slowly made him darker and more violent. His One-Winged Angel into a monster made of diamonds do not help matters.
  • Zushinezumi, a rat demon who eats humans, as well as commands an infinite amount of man-eating mice; when Hakudoshi takes the rats from him, he uses it to eat entire villages. While it's terrifying by itself to be Eaten Alive by rodents, they can also multiply whenever they're cut.
  • Onigokuki, a demon slave trader who lures children with his flute to be sold to other demons. The child kidnapping and the implications of slavery should be terrifying for anyone.
  • Bone Demon and her father, the former disguises a beautiful woman, but in reality is a red eyed demon that can absorb the bones out of your body through her hand and her father is a red eyed demonic skeleton.
  • Kao, the Flower Demon. Doesn't sound intimidating right? Turns out he puts people in a Lotus-Eater Machine that makes their eyes have Tears of Blood.
  • Hitomiko, a priestess killed by Naraku and brought Back from the Dead to be his fanged puppet, which is scary enough, but then it's revealed that 15 years ago, he once suddenly to her as a little girl with the full intent to kill her just on the chance of being a threat. When that failed he reduced her friends to corpses and killed her master. It's a rather jarring action coming from a normally manipulative chess master who only kills to further his ends.
  • Just when Naraku is finally defeated, The Sacred Jewel decides to seal off Kagome in a pitch black space and the demons that make up Magatsuhi, complete with Voice of the Legion show to stop Inuyasha. It makes for a rather creepy climax, complete with an eerie soundtrack playing in the background.
  • The true nature of the Shikon Jewel itself. While it said it could grant any wish, in reality it doesn’t grant it at all at best, or it will twist for its own ends at worst. Even Miroku suggested that possessing it will bring sorrow and doom, and it’s stated In-Universe that every attempt to use it for good reasons, always backfired horribly. Not only that, but it’s revealed in the climax that it has a will on its own, and that it staged all the events to make sure it would continue its existence, by attempting to seal both Naraku and Kagome. Good thing Kagome wished its cessation of existence, which turned out to be the “true wish” that the jewel can’t pervert.

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