Higurashi no Naku Koro ni
##Possible spoilers ahead!##

Hirugashi no Naku Koro ni, or 'When the cicadas cry' in English, is an awesome anime. It's hard to pin down a genre, because it spans from horror to murder mystery to supernatural to plain old fashioned gore. You'll find out why in a sec.

Basically, the anime is split into chapters, and each chapter is known as an 'arc'. Each arc is a whole new alternate storyline. For example, the first 'arc' starts off introducing us to the chracters and the setting. Keiichi (the main protagonist) is new to the town and is getting to know everyone and make some friends etc. A storyline goes on to unfold which ends up involving lots of murder and death, and everyone (including Keiichi) dying pretty much, over the span of about 3 or 4 episodes. After this, a new 'arc' begins. Everyone is alive again, Keiichi is alive and new in town (again), he starts making some friends (again), but this time a completely different turn of events unfolds and although he dies again, it's in a different way and it's for a completely different reason. I tend to only watch one arc in a sitting, watching multiple arcs in a row can be very confusing and hard to adjust to, especially when you're watching a character who you just watched get murdered having a nice chat with his murderer.

This anime contains a lot of gore, and more importantly, explicit violence. And it's a lot more realistic and cringe-inducing than Elfen Lied. While Elfen Lied was, in gore terms, 'every person who gets ripped in half spurts out 6 million gallons of pure blood', this is actually realistic gore Same goes for the violence, Higurashi goes into a lot more detail, and shows you everything blow by blow. Elfen lied was 'oh, wow, he got torn limb from limb!', this is 'holy crap, did he just brutally murder two little girls with a baseball bat?' Some of the stuff they do is downright twisted. Here's an animated gif of one thing. Warning: not for the faint of heart:
Click!

It's also a very thought-provoking anime. If you watch it casually, you'll lose track of what's going on and end up sitting there thinking 'wait, what? I'm bored', but if you actually watch it in-depth and let it work your mind a bit, it's extremely rewarding. As well as that, it has a few moments that are psychologically jarring as well. Can you imagine a little girl appearing behind you with a hatchet and a blank expression on her face?

Anyway, overall, I highly reccomend this anime to anyone who can handle its intensity C:

Here is a COMPLETELY LEGAL link to watch the first episode subbed online, no downloading required whatsoever.
You'll see underneath the video there are a couple of buttons to go to the next / previous episode, and a list of all episodes on the right C:

P.S: I haven't seen the dub of it, so I can't say how good / bad it is.

hmm I'll look into it, the thing is I'm usually not so into gore XD
the storyline of Elfen Lied was acceptable so it made the gore less important, the storyline is everything to me XD
(that and it has to be well animated)

it sounds rather interesting

I disagree with this. In my opinion, Cicadas has much better animation on the serious parts, it uses some really good effects to emphasize things and really draw you in. It only goes cartoonish on the bits that are lighthearted / humerous, but I'm sure many will agree that it's almost a 'tradition' for anime to have bits like that. Besides, cartoonish things such as the classic 'sweat drop' can help to portray feelings better.

This video acts as a good example. Ignore the fact that it's a badly made AMV, just focus on the animation / art style >_>