"It is an unlucky soul who finds themselves the recipient of the Owl's Kiss."
- The film greets us with the shot of a squirrel dropping out of a tree, splattering on the pavement and when seen through Sam's eyes, comes back to life and snarls at the viewer.
- Everything about the Owl's Kiss. It's disturbing. It walks with its pelvis pushed forward and legs stretched awkwardly forward in the direction it walks. The fact that Sam sees it for the first time on Comic Man's security footage adds to the creep factor.
- Also, when Sam breaks into Comic Man's house after he's been found dead, the amount of blood soaked on his bed is enough to make you squirm.
- The enigmatic Pirate, who first appears in Sarah's apartment. He later appears after Sarah has just vanished off the face of the Earth, being handed a box of her possessions that he runs off with. He also makes one last appearance in the limousine that the Shooting Star actress steps into. In every appearance, he never talks and we don't get a good look at his face, which makes him seem uncomfortably mysterious.
- In Sam's first nightmare, he comes across what appears to be Sarah bent over a man's body in the middle of a path. Except when she turns around, she's actually a man in Sarah's clothes who's eating the remains of the body. Then the man starts barking before the body splits into two parts that shoot off in opposite directions.
- The Songwriter, an elderly composer Sam meets who claims to have written pretty much every hit song in the music, film and TV industries over the last century—and at least one Beethoven piece, for that matter. His craggy, liver-spotted face is also unsettling to look at, in large part because he's played by a younger actor wearing loads of old age makeup.
- The Songwriter's speech about how he's been pulling the strings of anyone who bases their identities around popular music can strike pretty hard.
- Sam ends their confrontation by repeatedly pulverizing the old man's face using Kurt Cobain's Fender Mustang, which we see in unflinching detail. And if you look closely at what remains of the Songwriter's face, you may notice that he doesn't appear to have a skull.
- When Sam walks home one night, he sees a shadowy figure in the distance that scares the crap out of him. Since this same figure never appears again we can assume he's just a hallucination, but nonetheless, the figure's silhouette just looks...off.
- Millicent getting shot and sinking beneath the titular lake, echoing both Sam's favourite Playboy cover and the film's poster art. The look on her lifeless face is likely to haunt you.
- Sam himself, if we're taking an honest look at his behavior and lifestyle: he's an aimless, unemployed young man who spends most of his days getting high and ogling his scantily clad female neighbors through a pair of binoculars. He seemingly has no ability to read the room or casually chat with others, following Sarah's former roommate into the women's bathroom and going on long, unprompted rants about conspiracy theories, his hatred for the homeless, and his masturbation habits to both his friends and complete strangers. When given the opportunity to confront two of the preteens who vandalized his car, he mercilessly beats them and doesn't even bother to wash the blood off his hands before falling asleep. While you can argue his killing of the Songwriter is in self-defense, he spends several seconds bashing the old man's face to a pulp. Neither is he able to provide a consistent excuse for why he's carrying around dog treats despite not owning a dog, suggesting that he might be the Dog Killer.
