HIDEOUT is a horror manga by [Masasumi Kakizaki](Masasumi Kakizaki
) and I’m going to come right out and say I did not think much of it the first time I read it. The original score I gave it was a 45 out of 100.

A bunch of my… former criticisms, I think pretty much still all hold up. I simply enjoyed it bit more this time around. It’s a really simple horror series, with a really simple plot. And one of my frustrations with it the first time around was it should have been allowed to just be about this husband and wife’s relationship. Which to be honest, the more and more the manga progresses, the clearer it becomes that it was never going to work out.

And also both the husband and the wife are pretty terrible and flawed people.

But anyways, it turns out the husband has one final plan to try and turn around their marriage for the better. A vacation. Oh, what’s that? Oh no! We’re out of gas and we’re in the woods! Guess we better start walking! You go ahead in front of me, dear, I just need to fetch my big ol’ wrench from the car real quick…

...what? I need it to fix the car. Yeah... fix the car... oh wait, I said we were out of gas not that the car was broken. HEY GET BACK HERE

So yeah, turns out this manga is about a husband at the end of his rope as he no longer has any option to work things out with his wife as her family made it clear that if they divorced they would see that they would wring the husband out for everything he’s worth. Which already is quite little as he is a writer and he has been in a deep slump for quite a while for a multitude of reasons.

Thus he figures he’ll just murder her, hide her corpse somewhere in the woods, basically lie and say she just went missing, and he’ll go off and have a fresh start. Of course, it doesn’t work out like that. Number one, the wife doesn’t really want to be murdered.

Number two… the cover of the manga.

There’s someone else in these woods other than them. Unfortunately. To be quite honest, I would have liked this more if it had just been a husband and wife’s bloody conflict of trying to kill each other in the dark woods. Because I am pretty fond of Masasumi Kakizaki’s art and how satisfyingly dark everything is because of course the bulk of the manga is either in the woods at night or the dark weird underground tunnels they end up stumbling upon. And the cave.

However, I would have been plenty fine with a monster or some other hostile character in the woods. If they had a design that I liked and thought was either creepy or genuinely intimidating.

I just do not like how the old man and the son look. Their big eyes staring at them from the darkness, yeah that's a creepy visual sure, but it's just not enough. They have to have a character or something more to them than that. They're just cartoon horror monsters. What age is the son (?) even supposed to be?

My overall point being is that the husband is way fucking more intimidating and appealing as a serious horror character. Moreover, he's actually a character. A person whose life has just been complete shit and he's been pushed to a point where he no longer feels there's anything he can do to remedy it.

So he resorts to murder.

That's good. That works.

What doesn't work is this old man who just keeps popping out of nowhere and attacking the husband and it’s supposed to be ooh scary but it’s just not. The old man is just not scary. Especially not after the fourth or fifth time he pops out of nowhere with his machete. I mean if you want just a purely visually scary monster man with a machete to work the character he’s chasing shouldn't be on equal ground with him. If the person the monster is chasing turns around and actually fights the monster, it should be at the goddamned end.

The only thing more frustrating than a dumb horror character is a dumb horror monster character. I mean, he does have a reason why he wants to keep the husband alive, but iunno... break one of his legs or something! Keep him from running away or fighting back!

The sole reason why the old man kept beating the murderer husband is because he kept ambushing him. He might look creepy but he’s also old and frail.

So sure enough at the end

I mean hell, the first chapter literally waits until the very end to throw the image of the old man's creepy son at the reader’s face.

So you pick up this manga because the cover is of a creepy man doing the Pennywise thing and like tearing through the cover and instead you start getting invested in this marital conflict happening in the woods, and then in the second chapter it's just oops there he is.

A few lines about the island being a former battlefield isn’t enough foreshadowing… could have easily just included moments where the husband would stop because he thought he heard something else moving around in the woods while he was chasing down his wife. Or something. Especially if the old man really is supposed to be an old holdout from WWII that’s just been actively hunting men and capturing women this whole time since the war ended. He shouldn’t literally just pop up from nowhere...

Another criticism I remember having is that I thought Masasumi Kakizaki was just trying way too hard. Every new flashback showing of how the husband and wife’s marriage ended up here is just… as I said earlier, it becomes very clear that this relationship never had any hope.

Before I get into full on spoilers, I should note that even Kakizaki straight up says in his afterword that the process of doing this manga was a way to “detoxify” himself. Because before he started doing this manga he wanted to go into an actual cave for research purposes and he ended up fucking himself up pretty bad. So I think that just resulted in an even more downer of a manga than perhaps he originally intended. While it doesn’t excuse anything, it is nice to hear from the source himself essentially say “yeah I just felt like doing something pretty fucked up and bleak.”

Anyhow, full spoilers time!

Spoiler, click to view

Their relationship could have just easily crumbled apart and worsened after their son died. But that apparently wasn’t enough.

The knife had to be twisted and the wife had to have not wanted kids to begin with. But not only does she feel the need to say that her freshly dead son was an accident, she also really felt the need to pin the blame completely on the husband and the husband alone in front of both of their families at the son’s funeral.

Like it very quickly turns from them both being pretty bad to I think Kakizaki is trying to get me, the reader to fully side with the husband who has decided to just wipe his hands of the entire marriage right after brutally killing her somewhere in the woods. Both sides being awful works a lot better than trying to lift one up by pushing one into the dirt.

“Look! The husband really was trying to work hard to make enough money to cover their expenses which the wife was selfishly adding to, and even trying to make the relationship work after their son died! The wife was solely just being a bitch and that’s why I had a bayonet go through her face and because how awful she is you should be applauding right about now.”

...Honestly, having the old man kill her rather than the husband do it is a whole bag of worms on its own. It honestly feels like it was done to try and like further exonerate the husband. Well, he wasn’t the one who killed her! Sure he intended to but... and then the ending…

While I still don’t think it’s a particularly good ending, I have kind of turned around on it a bit. As nonsensical as it is seeing the husband turn to the old man’s weird wrinkled son and going “you’re my son, Jun! Even though you look absolutely nothing like him at all!” the point is supposed to be that it doesn’t matter because he’s just completely gone sanitywise.

Back when I first read this, the ending really annoyed me. Why choose to fucking take over the old man’s tunnel base? Old man’s dead, his wife is dead and he didn’t even have to do it himself, he could literally just leave.

And mayhap this just shows how pessimistic I’ve grown over the years since I first read this, but I can kind of appreciate the true bleakness of the ending. The husband knew there was no fresh start waiting for him if he left. Considering you know… while he could have maybe gotten away with his wife “disappearing”, he did still kind of murder the absolute shit out of her asshole parents before they went on the vacation to begin with.

Even before they ended up stumbling on the old man and his kid’s HIDEOUT, deep down he probably knew that there was no magical fresh start waiting for him after he left his wife’s corpse somewhere in the woods. Because he clearly probably loved his wife before she pinned the blame of Jun’s death entirely on him and then told him straight up she didn’t actually want to have a kid anyways and just wanted to use the husband as a credit card.

And even then he would also still have to live with the fact that yeah, Jun’s death was his fault. ~~Not entirely though. The wife could have just also not gone off shopping or at the very least made sure the husband had heard her and would actually watch after Jun.~~

So yeah, I like the bleak ending of the father just rejecting returning to the outside world and choosing to remain in his HIDEOUT with his brand new “family.”

...But I would have liked it more if it had just ended there rather than going on to deliver the old cliche horror ending… “now I have become the monster!”

Eh.

#Conclusion#

I’ve read this manga twice now and both times I did not find the “monster” of the manga scary or creepy even in the slightest. However, this time I honestly appreciated pretty much everything else more since I already knew the “monster” was a dud. The gritty over the top violence, the overly depressing tone, the fact that there are no good characters to side with, and as I said before I really do like Kakizaki’s art and how he does darkness. ~~As in it’s actually present and the entire manga isn’t just happening entirely in the day despite being a horror manga.~~

I just wish you know there was the possibility of fearing something lurking in all that darkness. End of chapter 1, yeah it’s just a big eyed cannibalistic old man. That’s it.

HIDEOUT isn’t great, but you know, I’ve seen worse. Especially taking in account that this was Kakizaki’s first and only crack at horror. Which is fine because as HIDEOUT itself shows, he’s way more suited to doing over the top gory action than… horror.

BIG EYES LOOKING AT YOU FROM DARKNESS! THAT’S SCARY!

Yeah… but there should be something more… the old man should have had a character or should have actually talked but instead he just kidnaps women and… eats men. Eh.

HIDEOUT is a 6 out of 10. It’s not as bad I used to think, it’s fine. It's just that even on this reread I couldn't stop thinking that the horror monster on the cover was just getting in the way of the actual story.