It is highly recommended that you have read the first chapter/watched the first episode before looking at this page, and possibly watch/read the entire anime/manga, because as a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked. This is your last warning, ye who dares to seek this page...
Wait, what's wrong with this? note
School-Live! is a HEALING ANIME, so why would it have a Nightmare Fuel page?
Well, apart from the Zombie Apocalypse, that is.
- THE ENTIRE PREMISE. The happy, carefree school life we see through Yuki's eyes throughout the first episode is all in her imagination. Her school is in ruins, all of her classmates save for Kurumi, Miki, and Yuuri are either dead or undead, they're barricaded in what's left of the school, and they have no way of knowing when or if help is coming. Yuki's mind simply couldn't take the reality of the situation, so she coped with it by going completely insane.
- The youth of the protagonists is terrifying in itself. They had an adult protector at first, and so they at least had someone to co-ordinate and guide them, and who would take on the worst of the responsibility. But when she makes the ultimate sacrifice, causing massive distress to the very children she shielded, the girls are forced to not only act like adults, but adults who had been through serious military training. If Megu-nee had survived, it's likely she would have shouldered the worst of the Shoot the Dog duties, morale boosting and leadership...but no, the children have to do it themselves.
- The setting is incredibly lonely. In most of these scenarios, there are at least vague hints that life is going on normally elsewhere. But the girls have reached the point where they're not aiming for rescue or escape — they're just trying to survive. That would suggest that they don't really envisage a truly "safe" place they can escape to...or even imagine an end to the nightmare they're stuck in. No wonder they cling to Yuki's brand of false hope. The claustrophobia of living where they do really hits home when you realize the significance of the desk barricade — and what it keeps out.
- Episode 1: The shots of the real school. There are signs of terrible things having happened in the past wherever you look: blood on the shattered windows, classrooms emptied so the desk can be used for barricades...and that message in red on the blackboard, although whether that was a real or delusional thing isn't clear.
- In the closing minutes of the episode, we see just how close the girls are living to the threat. You can see a sports track full of zombies from the roof garden, the shattered windows offer no protection if one of those creatures found a way to climb up, and there's a zombie right behind the barricade.
- Episode 2: Kurumi's first kill with her trusty shovel was the upperclassman she was in love with.
- There's also the sequence where the girls find out that there's a zombie in the library during their Test of Courage. The fact that Yuki has no idea what's going on, coupled with the vague and indistinct looks the viewer gets at the zombie itself...
- Episode 3: Most of this episode is a flashback to the day of the outbreak, following Megu-nee as she meets up with the girls and attempts to be the authority figure that they need. We see fleeting glimpses of news reports, and hear part of a panicked phone call from one of Megu-nee's fellow teachers, who is trapped by zombies without hope of escape, before the call suddenly goes dead. Also shown is Kurumi killing her upperclassman with her shovel in full view of Yuki, Yuuri, and Megu-nee, which is probably what started her Sanity Slippage. As for the rest of the details? We don't know.
- The frighteningly realistic transition from normal-if-kind-of-sucky day for Megumi, to game-changing chaos. She starts her day by having her confidence undermined by her mother, then gets lectured about being too friendly with her students by the vice-principal, then has to stay at school to have one of her students retake a test. One video message later and her mother is probably dead, her entire school is either dead or the walking dead, the city is in ruins, she has no access to the outside world and she's the only adult left standing to protect a small group of young girls that just happened to be in her general vicinity. She was probably in the loneliest position of all the group: everyone else had someone to rely on, but as the sole adult, she could only rely on herself.
- Episode 4:
- Miki's friend Kei gets tired of merely surviving day by day in the mall. Miki tries to dissuade her from going out to look for help, and initially succeeds. However, a few days later Kei decides she wants to go out to look for help, and leaves the safety of the room they were in, promising to bring back help when she finds it. That's the last Miki sees of her, as the next survivors she runs into were Yuki, Yuri, and Kurumi. At the end of Chapter 30 and Episode 12, as the girls leave the school for the final time, Miki sees a female zombie wearing a school uniform and sporting a hairstyle very similar to Kei's, putting an end to What Happened to the Mouse? regarding her after she left.
- Between this episode and the previous one, we see just how badly the outbreak was handled. The morning starts out with some sinister incidents, noted by Megumi at the school, and later by Miki at the mall. By the afternoon, all hell has broken loose. At the mall, every escape route is blocked when the electricity cuts out — there don't seem to be any normal stairs, and there's an elevator full of dead bodies. How incompetent did the folk in charge have to be that every single citizen, save for four young girls and a young teacher, were the only ones to escape death or zombification? The zombies don't move quickly, and infection is, as far as we know, only transferred through biting — if it was airborne, the speed of infection would have made sense. There was time to do something...but instead the whole town was wiped out. Which leads to a terrifying thought: the manual at the school suggested that someone in power expected something like this, and yet the populace was caught completely off guard. Was the infection spread deliberately, as some kind of experiment?
- The manga version of Miki and Kei's stay in the mall may be even more nightmarish because there originally were adult survivors with them, and mostly competent ones too. It's implied that they survived about a couple of weeks quite fine. Then their leader was bitten, and the guy dealt with it by hiding the bite, having something of a last dinner with the survivors, and then it's implied that he set their refuge on fire in an attempt to kill everybody before he, or anyone he could bite, could become a danger to the rest. Miki and Kei just survived because they awoke in time and barely escaped the fire.
- Episode 5:
- Yuki goes from her happy-go-lucky Genki Girl attitude to suffering a massive Heroic BSoD upon glimpsing one of the zombies Kurumi accidentally let out. She has Dull Eyes of Unhappiness, and has to be led everywhere as she's incapable of doing anything at all during those moments. And pretty much every moment the girls were running away from the zombie horde afterwards.
- Yuki later has a Flash Back of being surrounded by other students, including the girls she talked to in the first episode. They then slowly morph into zombies, and the classroom also starts to change from a normal one into what it really looks like.
- Kurumi and Yuri discussing the zombies in the theater room she accidentally opened. They talk about how it was barricaded from the outside, meaning someone inside was a Zombie Infectee, then turned and essentially killed everyone inside. Including children...
- The theater room in freakin' general. There's something unbelievably creepy about a whole room full of zombies silently watching a projector showing nothing but a white screen... a projector that had been running for who knows how long... And when Kurumi opens the doors, every single one of them turns to look at her in unison.
- Episode 6:
- Miki's Wham Line to Yuki in the music room asking her who this Megu-nee was she apparently kept talking to, while Miki only saw Yuki talking to herself. The music starts to slow down and die, and the room changes from a clean typical high school music room into the reality that they were stuck in. Yuki also has a disturbed look in her face as Miki accidentally and unintentionally snaps her back into reality during this scene.
- The scene of Megu-nee's Heroic Sacrifice. Just imagine being in her shoes: you're dead and you know it, in absolute agony (just look at Kurumi's howling in episode 10 — and Megumi didn't have anyone to soothe or tend to her), cornered by shambling monstrosities, and knowing that it's only a matter of time before you join them. Meanwhile, behind the door you're trapped against, you can hear one of your young charges screaming desperately for you as her friends tell her to leave you to your fate...yet you daren't answer her, for fear of breaking your own resolve or traumatizing the poor child further. You know the best thing you can do for her is die. Then you hear her run towards the door and start rattling the doorknob...which is brushing against your shoulder every time it moves. It says a lot for Sakura-sensei's devotion and courage that she was able to resist fleeing back through the door.
- Megu-nee died alone. No one was there with her as she turned and lost her mind, and as far as we know, no one even read the diary she left behind. Out of necessity, she hid herself far away from the girls she gave everything to protect... she spent her last hours (days?) in the dark, holed up in the basement by herself, writing for as long as she could, slowly losing herself. There's a heartbreaking shot of her open diary in several episodes, in which the writing devolves into scribbles that are illegible save for Yuki, Kurumi, and Yuuri's names, and the word "LIVE".
- Episode 7:
- While recalling the car ride home, Yuki's mind starts getting a little hazy, and Megu-nee starts blending in with the other girls in her recollection of the event.
- Episode 8: The girls discover a manual that reveals that a biological weapon is the source of the zombies, and the school is explicitly designed as a safehouse. Which means that the nightmare they're living in was deliberately engineered by somebody in a laboratory. Worse, the manual's existence proves that somebody half-expected this kind of thing to happen, but the information was kept (literally) under lock and key. If its contents were more widely known, the disaster that the School Life Club has to live through could have been made less devastating — or prevented altogether.
- Episode 9:
- At the end of the episode, Taroumaru runs into someone in the basement, and begins growling at them. It turns out to be a zombie Megu-nee. The camera focuses on her briefly before the credits roll.
- Episode 10:
- It downpours during the episode. Yuuri then relates to Miki that it just happened to be raining like this on the day they lost Megu-nee...
- The girls go off in search of Taroumaru. Kurumi spots dog prints on the desks, and finds out where he went... A now zombified Taroumaru then attacks her.
- Kurumi explores the basement a little further, to find the zombie responsible for Taroumaru's zombification. She then finds zombie Megu-nee, and hesitates to attack due to her bond with her. Unfortunately Megu-nee doesn't quite reciprocate those feelings, and bites her.
- The fact that Megu-nee has a particularly murderous grin on her face when she attacks Kurumi is nothing short of horrifying.
- Kurumi's Nightmare Sequence later in the episode is quite possibly the most horrific thing in the series so far. She sees herself in an empty classroom with zombies pawing at all the windows, alone save for a normal Taroumaru... who growls at her and zombifies when she reaches for him. And then she hears soft scratching at the door, and Megu-nee's voice begging her to open the door because she's "hungry"... Even worse, this last part was not a nightmare, but a flashback. That actually happened, some time after Megu-nee was bitten but before she turned completely.
- The elementary school in the manga. Someone (presumably one of the teachers) had the ingenious but grim foresight to hang "help us!" messages around the kids' necks... so that even if they were zombified, anyone who encountered the zombies would know to check for survivors at the school, if they were at all able to do so. When Kurumi chances upon one of the zombies, she reads the message, kills the (child) zombie and brings the note back to the group. An increasingly unhinged Yuuri demands an immediate rescue effort, leading to Kurumi, Yuuki and Yuuri creeping into the dark, empty elementary school at night. They see footprints that they hope indicates that the survivors are still there, and follow them. They open a door to find a barricade much like the one constructed at their own school, and Kurumi thinks she can get through, with Yuuri entreating her not to scare the kids... but then a large number of zombie hands appear, grabbing for Kurumi. Yuki slams the door, and even the courageous Kurumi knows that it's insanity to go on. It can be supposed that this particular survivor group, for all their ingenuity, did not have the School Life club's luck. Extra creepy points for the fact that the school until that point was empty, and seemed relatively safe until they opened that door...so, presumably, the zombies beyond the barricade are all former survivors who were turned in the place they were supposed to be safe, probably because of an infectee returning to the group (perhaps one of the teachers couldn't bear to euthanize a child). And all the while, the formerly reliable Rii's behavior is becoming more erratic, turning hysterical when Kurumi demands that they go back, making the whole thing even more nightmarish.
- You know something is very, very wrong in the manga when the characters start excessively sweating and their eyes dilate. For example, whenever Rii breaks down or when Yuki kills a zombie. It's something between a Tear Jerker and being nightmare fuel.
- Naturally the zombies are scary, but early chapters have them as being cartoonish, shadowy beings while the anime censors them by shadowing them heavily. Later chapters do away with making the zombies blob-like and have them drawn more realistically than the moe characters. One particularly frightening zombie is Megu-nee. It's so wrong seeing her decomposed like that.
- The Humans Are the Real Monsters theme is beginning to creep in with the introduction of Ayaka. You can see why the opposing club finds her so disconcerting. Her small smiles at utterly inappropriate times suggest that she's enjoying the tragedy around her. She shows a complete lack of compassion towards a girl who had to kill her own boyfriend (and, possibly, the father of her unborn baby) after he zombified, coldly asking her what she thinks she's doing when the girl is understandably shaken. She also takes quiet glee in condemning the the other club for this incident, deciding, without any reason or proof, that they were the ones responsible...and she is clearly looking forward to seeking "retribution" against a group of people who have basically left her and her group alone. Heaven knows what will happen when/if Kurumi's infection becomes known...
- In chapter 45, we see her threaten an unarmed person who actually tells her that she'll give Ayaka what she wants. That's not enough for Ayaka — she wants this person to experience "losing something that she loves" (in this case a library, apparently). The sick satisfaction on Ayaka's face as she declares that her captive has been "caught" suggests that she isn't really taking such extreme measures to ensure her group's safety — she sees it as a game that she's currently winning. We might be seeing a new version of The Governor here, ladies and gentlemen. And considering how they were, it isn't by any definition imaginably good.
- Chapter 47 shows that she's even worse then she first appeared. While the rest of the Melee Fight Crew might have once been decent people before the apocalypse, Ayaka's initial reaction when she first encountered the zombies was utter joy at being able to do whatever she wants now, even ranting to herself that the other students don't understand that this new world is for people like her. Flashbacks reveal that she was way too happy about killing her zombified classmates and teachers, and that she also once accompanied another survivor who presumably offered to team up with her... before killing him for no reason other than the fact that she can.
- She becomes even more despicable in Chapter 48, revelling in the fear and shock of the other survivor group and the School Life Club, especially Yuuri, when her Melee Fight Crew rounds them up. Once again, it's all about Ayaka and her "game" - anyone else is expendable.
- And as Chapter 50 shows, she's equally as excited to kill her own allies once they turn out to be infected, as it gives her an excuse to kill someone again, and she gives off a chilling Psychotic Smirk upon finding out that Takahito is infected.
- Takahito, the leader of the Melee Fight Crew, isn't much better then Ayaka despite being far less psychotic. This is a guy who went from a popular and well liked student at the University to a cold, remorseless killer who is willing to do anything to keep himself alive, including brutally murdering several of his own group by locking them outside with several zombies so that he can preserve food for himself and the remaining MFC, and also violently beating anyone to death who might be infected. Plus he's the one who came up with the MFC's ruthless rules to begin with. To top it all off, he turns out to be infected and somehow managed to hide it from the rest of his crew, so on top of being a very despicable human being he's also a hypocritical coward who ultimately wouldn't follow the rules that he put out.
- The way that Takahito ultimately meets his demise is rather disturbing too, even if it's really hard to feel any sympathy for him. First he gets infected by the Airborne Virus, which has been shown with previous victims to be a very slow and painful death. He starts hallucinating his dead teammates who he had betrayed and killed earlier, showing that his sanity is taking a turn for a worse, and he's also shown to be in horrid pain thanks to the virus's effects. Eventually he runs into Ayaka again, who proceeds to murder him by pushing him into the same pit where his zombified former teammates are and then burning him alive, with the implication that he might also get eaten by the nearby zombies as he's burning. It's certainly not a good way to die.
- We get a glimpse of Zombie-o-vision from Kurumi's perspective as they slowly succumb. Their sight narrows to tunnel vision, going dark and blurry at the edges, and they find it more difficult to think, as the zombie urge to attack humans gets stronger. And they realize that it's happening. Which has horrific implications for the general level of awareness that the zombies have. The fact that this is happening to the club's most efficient fighter adds an extra level of horror - if they can't fight against the infection, who can? And how well will the club fare against a zombie with combat experience, especially given their understandably terrible track record against zombies that used to be people they cared about?
- In chapter 45, it looks like Kurumi's borrowed time is nearly up. Her dreams become increasingly horrific, she has trouble keeping memories straight, she've taken to cuffing themselves to the bed when she sleeps in case she turns overnight...and, in the last scene, we see her drawn with her face shadowed, like the zombies are drawn, yet she still wields her weapon with intent...
- The death of Takashige, the MFC member who was chasing Kurumi. Sure, he was trying to murder her in cold blood, and and he absolutly deserved his gruesome demise given both that murder attempt and the atrocities he and the rest of the MFC committed, but imagining it from his perspective is frightening: He tried to kill someone that he knows is infected because of how unnaturally cold she felt when he grabbed her, and then confirms his suspicion by hitting her and seeing her not react to the pain. Then Kurumi bangs her shovel on the gate right in front of him, making a really loud noise that attracts a very big amount of zombies right to him. The zombies walk right past Kurumi as Takashige is left trying to fight them off, and he's reduced to begging her to save him as he's eaten alive by the zombies. Kurumi's reaction and the fact that we don't see Takashige's violent death just makes it worse.
- The Zombie Virus and its effects were already horrifying enough, but you think that at least the cast should be okay as long as they aren't bitten by a zombie or stabbed by one of the MFC's zombie blood-filled needles. Nope. As it turns out, there is a very likely chance that the Virus is Airborne and can infect people at random except for those who are immune, which not only explains how Kougami and Takahito were both infected despite never getting bitten, but also how so many people in the city died and became zombies within only the first couple of days. And it's worse because those who are immune could still get infected once the virus mutates past the immunity, so possibly any of the characters we know could randomly get infected at any point!
- The extras at the end of the manga volumes add to the nightmare fuel of the series. Volume 1's student handbook mentions the history of Megurigoaka including how half the city was wiped out in mysterious circumstances in the 60s and given its current name. There is also the mention of the city possibly trading with the West Indies (where the zombie myth comes from) in its past. Volume 4 details Megu-nee's feelings over the situation and gives the hint that there could have been another member of the School Living club had things gone differently at the school's roof. Volume 6 is a log of various radio announcements with one that sounds like Kei made it after escaping the mall and before she zombified.
