Horror stories need to follow one immutable rule: show no mercy. This goes for any demographic you write about, and in my opinion, nothing ruins a horror story faster than an ending that wraps everything up too neatly. Sadly, Hideshi Hinoof Mystery Detective Agency: Graveyard of the Dead Dolls It was in doing so that the members of the titular club planned a trip to Tokyo Disney to end its tale of horror. If this had been a more Scooby-Doo story in the first place, the ending wouldn’t be as shocking, but since the rest of the book is really scary, it feels like Hino thought a creepy ending would be great for his middle graders It’s too much for a female readership – the series is in sigh, a women-oriented magazine. That’s too bad, because Hino deserves his reputation as a master of horror comics.
Despite the disappointing ending, we can easily see that here. This is a solid entry in 1986 horror, with art that mimics the basic girl The comic style at that time was just twisted so Make it disturbing. The story follows a middle school occult study club, which has gained a reputation for solving supernatural crimes thanks to its unusually beautiful club president, Fuyumi. While her beauty attracts attention, there’s more to her than meets the eye: her father is a leading mysterious scientist, and when she takes the club on a tour of his private museum, new member Chiko is struck by a cursed Possessed by a spirit that grows hair. Things escalate quickly – Chiko starts having horrific nightmares featuring the doll and some of its terrifying friends, to the point where the poor girl can barely cope. She’s afraid of falling asleep and can’t figure out her dreams, and she ends up asking Fuyumi for help, both as an upperclassman and as someone known for being able to solve such problems.
Fuyumi was more than happy to help, and she quickly gathered the club and her library of information from her father. She sincerely wants to help Chiko, and the other members of the club are always good enough to follow her lead, and eventually the group travels to the Death Doll Cemetery to find out why the dolls are causing trouble for Chiko, and the answer is a bit like a dark riff on Toy Story repeat. Kids, remember not to abandon or throw away your toys. The idea of a doll cemetery has appeared in one way or another in many cultures, and it’s likely that Hino would work with a Buddhist temple version, such as the Doll Funeral at Joganji Temple, which was designed to rest the doll’s soul. Other cultures may have different versions. The dollhouse tombs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States are an interesting example of this way of incorporating dolls into the afterlife.
Hino has been a staple of the Japanese horror scene for quite some time, and he has an uncanny ability to draw crumbling, broken, knife-wielding dolls and make them downright terrifying. I’m not scared of dolls, but these dolls, with their missing parts and bulging glass eyes, have the potential to appear in my nightmares chasing Chiko through town armed with rusty nails and knives. It almost doesn’t matter what their motivations are; They were horrific, as only broken and abandoned things can be. The fact that Hino doesn’t use a lot of gray tones in his art certainly helps too – things are either a deep, unforgiving black, or they’re not. This strong contrast helps reveal the disturbing nature of the doll, while Fuyumi’s otherworldly, over-ripe beauty adds to the work’s mysterious nature. This is a story that is good at letting our own imagination fill in the blanks.
There were some real issues going back to 1986, mainly shaming the timid overweight character Day; people repeatedly told him how stupid he was to be afraid of things when he was so big, because apparently in the 80s people equated courage with size. He’s also ashamed of himself for being a boy with fears, and there’s a small racist image in the museum chapter. But mostly, this is a good, truly creepy story that desperately needed a different ending. It’s not necessarily a sad or scary ending, but talking about a guy peeing on Space Mountain after fighting a bunch of stabbed killer dolls just doesn’t work, and this ending undoes a lot of what happened before.
