Hino Horror 10: Death’s Reflection
Posted: October 22, 2008 Filed under: Hino Horror 2 Comments »Okay. That Faust review took it out of me tonight. Let me do this one short and sweet and on-theme for this month.
This volume was more shoujo Hino, which is still vaguely disturbing and wrong. I liked the stories in this volume a lot better than in “Ghost School,” though, even though it had a story very close to the title story from last volume where a class of seniors disappears in the middle of lunch one day, appear as apparitions occasionally, then reappear as rotting corpses after graduation day. It’s not… REALLY close to the Ghost School story, but the classroom full of rotting corpses is a hard image to shake from one story, let alone two.
Even better than that, “Death’s Reflection” was the best story in the volume and had by far the most memorable image. Three girls smoking see a reflection of a hanged woman in the bathroom mirror at school, and after spreading the rumor, the bathroom is closed down (because a teacher really did hang herself in there years ago), and the three girls now have a private smoking room. Except the teacher in the mirror doesn’t really like that. Let’s just say one girl meets her end by first vomiting cigarette butts, then having a geyser of them coming from the stump of her neck after decapitation in place of blood. It was really amazing.
“Cutter X” is a good creepy stalker story, and is very close to something you might find in a Kazuo Umezu short story collection.
And the last story, “Curse of the Black Hair,” might remind you of a Junji Ito story. Specifically, the Junji Ito story “Long Hair in the Attic,” which is also about killer long hair.
I liked this volume a lot, much better than the last, though I still don’t think it’s among his best work. It’s… perhaps his best shoujo work though, how about that?
[...] and Fruits Basket, and a couple of teens chime in as well. Connie checks out vol. 1 of Faust and vol. 10 of Hino Horror at Slightly Biased Manga. At Boys Next Door, Cynthia reviews vol. 11 of Love Mode, Romantic [...]
Nice article. Thanks. :) Eugene