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  TheGruesomeGoblin

  75/100
  How meta of Hideshi Hino. This manga's literally a Panorama of Hell...

  

  Starting out your horror manga immediately with a close-up of a face like that is a pretty good move...

  A 1983 horror manga by Hideshi Hino, the Panorama of Hell was a kind of shocking read. As I of course did not know all the background information what with everything Hideshi Hino went through in his real life.

  I started reading this and I was immediately met with a very strange and immediately off-putting painter character talking about how he's started work on his magnum opus. The Panorama of Hell.

  And to paint it, he's willing to drink hydrochloric acid because after all, he does all of his paintings in blood...

  

  I figured it was just going to be your typical horror manga. I actually even thought it had a pretty good set-up. A painter looking to paint paintings of hell is obviously on the look out for just absolute horrible scenes of gore and just humanity being awful... hence, he's going to be telling the reader horror stories.

  And for a while, that's pretty much all this manga is. Our painter friend shows us around his house, introduces us to his family, points outside to where the guillotine is located and the local beheadings happen...

  "That's pretty cool, right? I love watching these as I paint!"

  

  Horror's supposed to disturb. It's supposed to make you uneasy. Gross you out or disgust you. And to give credit where credit is due to Hideshi Hino, it's been a while since I've so quickly felt uneasy towards a character in a horror manga. Or rather towards the whole setting. Why the fuck are there fireworks going off to accompany beheadings? Or rather, why is happening right outside of the guy's house?

  Is this whole thing literally taking place in Hell itself???

  

  Probably.

  I've always been of the opinion that if your horror manga's entire purpose is going to be gore and just being as disgusting as possible, you really gotta go for it. And holy shit does Hideshi Hino go for it.

  There's just so much gore and awfulness.

  

  The stand out example that I will probably remember forever being the Hell Tavern where the painter's wife works. All of her customers are the recently dead who had their heads chopped off by the guillotine. But oh no, how are they going to eat their meals! Which is just their own severed flesh. They have no heads which means they have no mouths!

  That's okay. The matron of this place will just cut a nice little hole in each of their necks. Now they have mouths again!

  

  Not gonna lie, I kind of legitimately cringed. You can show me dozens of drawings of people getting beheaded at the guillotine and it's nothing. But cutting a hole in a throat... let alone, they're already headless corpses...

  Genuinely was unpleasant to see. Which was nice.

  And then... then we get to the real shit.

  

  This is not the first time I've read a horror manga and it suddenly incorporated World War II into it. But as I mentioned at the start, this part sort of also takes on an autobiographical tone to it because Hideshi Hino and his family really did flee Manchuria.

  

  Plus, the stuff about his grandfather and father... hell, when you get down to it, all of this crazy ass gore and fucked up shit is coming directly right out of Hideshi Hino's head.

  The man may as well as be the painter character himself--oh, now I get it.

  

  This is really when this manga fully seized my interest. Don't get me wrong, the over the top depictions of Hell and gore early on were fun but... the painter literally sculpts a statue of the mushroom cloud rising from Hiroshima and douses it in blood and starts praying to it for misfortune to happen.

  And the painter himself said that he believes the mushroom cloud to be his true father because as it was rising it sent a light bolt over to Manchuria to cause his mother to have an immaculate conception.

  Holy shit.

  

  I actually became really fond of the Hell Painter character. He's just so unbelievably evil and crazy. The ultimate hell painting he decides he wants to see is

  total nuclear armageddon. And to achieve it, he's willing to sacrifice his entire family.

  

  This man's insanity is so powerful that he transcends the boundaries of the manga itself to attempt to murder the readers. When the axe suddenly came out of the page and almost went right into my face, I freaked the fuck out.

  

  But no seriously, I can only feel respect for Hideshi Hino for having the gall to even attempt this sort of ending. Because the character has just completely and utterly descended into insanity I was genuinely invested in what he was saying and then all of a sudden he turns around and looks at us. The reader.

  Like the character is literally saying everybody who reads Hideshi Hino's manga is going to die.

  

  I love this. I love everything about this. More horror manga need this sort of energy.

  ---

  Conclusion

  I can't say Hideshi Hino is my favorite horror mangaka, but I'm definitely warming up to him.

  

  This manga has one of the best endings for a horror manga I've seen in quite a while. It's a sufficiently gory and horrible depiction of Hell whether or not that's actually where the manga actually is supposed to take place. And to top it all off, you have the autobiographical angle to it and while I'm sure some of it was exaggerated...

  

  The guy definitely is a rightful owner of a "yeah that's why I do horror" card.

  I give the Panorama of Hell a 7.5 out of 10 or 75 out of 100.

  
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