Ah, it's good to be back. Thank you, everyone.
That's one element from the novel I hoped to keep intact: the visercal and, as you rightly put it, raw nature of the moments of violence and horror. It requires a certain...grotesque practicality in designing and showcasing your monsters. Levi growing human nails into beastly claws isn't especially remarkable or unnerving. After all, our nails grow naturally anyway and some might see growing claws as, at the very least, a novelty. Certainly there are some appeals from an outside perspective to an Eliform vampire who can 'think' their extremities into different parts, fly, and have some measure of supernatural physicality irregardless of body mass.
But having the claws grow over the human nails serves a dual purpose of visual overtaking of the human condition, and provides a far more uncomfortable picture and imagined experience for the audience. Something growing in a place with no room for it, where it doesn't belong. It's not even remotely within your control, there's nothing to bargain with, satisfy, or master. In some ways it's a more universally repulsive and wretched state than vampirism: we've seen adult vampires perfectly at ease with their horribleness and even reveling and benefitting from it. Lycanthropy is different: even the most vile of predators would suffer under such a curse, because it brings constant and inevitable cycles of pain as well as total loss of control that cannot be bargained or negotiated with. You're a slave to the moon, and few among the psychotic, the vicious and the destructive are willing to give up control and freedom.
When I originally envisioned the nail-clipping scene it was actually a bit more graphic: Levi's wolfish hands would be growing and extending out through the tips of his fingers instead of just growing keratin. So Milton would come back to find severed fingertips in the basin - yuck! But I realized that would introduce some logic problems (does Levi have to cut them off every cycle, the difficulties of working and handling objects without fingers, etc) I wasn't too keen on working around, and it was too directly brutal besides.
I was inspired for the consequences of Levi's manicure - and the still twitching bits left in the sink - by the scene where Oskar is disposing of Eli's bloodied clothing and later (or sometime around this event) spies some blood in the shower where Eli washed himself. The blood is still wriggling. That was deeply unsettling while also being light-handed, and so I've since applied that trait of being somewhat 'alive' down to the most basic attributes to all my forays (current and future) into LtROI's world.
I do apologize if these bits are hard to read, though. If necessary I can tone future sequences down or perhaps post a 'PG-13' edition and a separate 'uncensored edition for each chapter. But if you're all here then that offer is probably unnecessary, heh.