Teens/kids in anime tend to be excluded often from violent deaths in most anime. However, in horror series like Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, death is something no one is safe, especially the main character. You learn this fact quite early on in the initial few episodes where our first lead—as Higurashi no Naku Koro ni has several main leads—dies near the end four. Keiichi Maebara, after brutally killing his “friends” who have succumbed to madness, ends up also facing death but not from another person. Instead, Keiichi goes into a telephone booth and begins to claw and shred his own throat as if there were worms inside. After several minutes of this brutal self-mutilation, our lead dies from blood loss and thus ends his main role. Fans of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni know that the series then restarts and puts various other characters into the lead spotlight but Keiichi’s death starts the series off right with being the most gruesome sucidide probably seen in anime.

Love hurts as the old saying goes, but tell that to our main lead of School Days, Makoto Ito. Say what you will about this extremely controversial series but Makoto faces a terrible death when his girlfriend Sekai Saionji goes ballistic—for reasons we won’t spoil—and stabs him in the gut. There are two versions of this sick murder one being a scene with black blood rather than red—as a means of censorship—and then the original ending where Makoto spills all of his internal cherry juice on the floor of the dining room. Whether you praised Sekai for killing the lecherous lead or not, you can’t deny that dying from an unexpected knife is pretty unsettling. School Days could be a slasher film with how nasty that death ends up being...not to mention the next death that follows after Makoto’s in the series.

Ousama Game was chock full of violent and insanely detailed deaths. Characters died from spontaneous human combustion, suicide, exploding and the list goes on. All throughout these deaths, one character remained as calm as he could even though he had faced this hell once before. Nobuaki Kanazawa had survived an earlier Ousama Game where friends of his in one class were forced to obey an unknown “king” or die as punishment. Despite his original victory—if you want to call it a victory—Nobuaki wasn’t lucky twice and died from having his throat sliced by a knife of a crazed girl named Natsuko Honda, who also happened to be the sister of Nobuaki’s girlfriend from the first game! One could read into that final action from Natsuko in a dozen different ways, but all we saw was our lead survivor Nobuaki losing from a last minute knife attack. Moral of the story, be careful if an insanely cute girl comes at you with a knife.

One death seems pretty bad for a main lead right? Well, for Subaru Natsuki in Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu, try dying a dozen or so times from various deaths. We have Subaru dying from being gutted by a female assassin, death from a cute maid who was also brandishing a mace, death from suicide, death from an unknown force squeezing his heart and the list goes on. Subaru has died a lot in Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu and from our minds, not a single death wasn’t gruesome in some form or another. Though one of the worst deaths hands down was dying by staring at a full powered Puck...Subaru lost his head on that death and we had to watch the ending credits play over his corpse...

Our list of the 5 Scariest Moments in Anime Involving the Lead Character Dying has had some messed up and violent deaths. Yet at number 1 on our list, we have to look at the four episode OVA of Corpse Party: Tortured Souls! Our class of ill-fated souls faced death almost every second in this OVA series based on the original Corpse Party game, but the worst death—and most messed up—is the final death of the series. Satoshi Mochida alongside his friends/classmates Naomi Nakashima and Ayumi Shinozaki had finally survived the nightmarish Heavenly Host Elementary School to try and repeat the same spell that put them in this damned place and it seemed to work. That is until our two females stand once more in their original world but with Satoshi absent...well not all of Satoshi was gone. Both girls were holding onto each of his arms but the rest of Satoshi was left trapped in the school to most likely die from blood loss or the ghosts laughing at his failed return. Corpse Party: Tortured Souls had some nightmare inducing deaths but to end the series on Satoshi’s death was truly a blow to the psyche.