HIDEOUT is a horror manga by Masasumi KakizakiMasasumi Kakizaki and Im 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. 440https://i.ur.com/MsLQ8Zt.png A bunch of my former criticisms I think pretty much still all hold up. I simply enjoyed it bit more this time around. Its 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 wifes 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. 440https://i.ur.com/P84BcBC.png But anyways it turns out the husband has one final plan to try and turn around their marriage for the better. A vacation. Oh whats that? Oh no Were out of gas and were 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 440https://i.ur.com/t3Tqz4e.png ...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 hes 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. 440https://i.ur.com/g94mn3b.png Thus he figures hell just murder her hide her corpse somewhere in the woods basically lie and say she just went missing and hell go off and have a fresh start. Of course it doesnt work out like that. Number one the wife doesnt really want to be murdered. Number two the cover of the manga. https://i.ur.com/5ihuEB8.jpg Theres 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 wifes bloody conflict of trying to kill each other in the dark woods. Because I am pretty fond of Masasumi Kakizakis 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. 440https://i.ur.com/mQmS62q.png I just do not like how the old man and the son look. Their big eyes staring at them from the darkness yeah thats a creepy visual sure but its just not enough. They have to have a character or something more to them than that. Theyre just cartoon horror monsters. What age is the son ? even supposed to be? 440https://i.ur.com/Oxm7xcs.png My overall point being is that the husband is way fucking more intimidating and appealing as a serious horror character. Moreover hes actually a character. A person whose life has just been complete shit and hes been pushed to a point where he no longer feels theres anything he can do to remedy it. So he resorts to murder. Thats good. That works. 440https://i.ur.com/hdF5QLb.png What doesnt work is this old man who just keeps popping out of nowhere and attacking the husband and its supposed to be ooh scary but its 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 hes chasing shouldnt 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. 440https://i.ur.com/cHnq2ks.png 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 hes 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 mans creepy son at the readers face. 440https://i.ur.com/mkvBmnm.png 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 its just oops there he is. https://i.ur.com/Tzcd6SC.png A few lines about the island being a former battlefield isnt 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 thats just been actively hunting men and capturing women this whole time since the war ended. He shouldnt 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 wifes marriage ended up here is just as I said earlier it becomes very clear that this relationship never had any hope. 440https://i.ur.com/tRCdkEI.png 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 doesnt 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 Conclusion Ive 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 Kakizakis art and how he does darkness. As in its actually present and the entire manga isnt just happening entirely in the day despite being a horror manga. 440https://i.ur.com/z2x5LXy.png I just wish you know there was the possibility of fearing something lurking in all that darkness. End of chapter 1 yeah its just a big eyed cannibalistic old man. Thats it. HIDEOUT isnt great but you know Ive seen worse. Especially taking in account that this was Kakizakis first and only crack at horror. Which is fine because as HIDEOUT itself shows hes way more suited to doing over the top gory action than horror. BIG EYES LOOKING AT YOU FROM DARKNESS THATS SCARY https://i.ur.com/exLlBKx.png 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. Its not as bad I used to think its fine. Its just that even on this reread I couldnt stop thinking that the horror monster on the cover was just getting in the way of the actual story. 440https://i.ur.com/qkslpBx.png