Be careful walking the streets at night. I've heard that there's a Hell Baby on the loose...

A 1987 horror manga by Hideshi Hino, Hell Baby is a story about how in life you just may end up receiving a raw deal. For instance, you’re born with a twin sister. However... you're quite different compared to your sister...

Your twin sister is a perfectly normal and healthy newborn. You however on the other hand have been dealt the card of being a Hell Baby. This of course means that you look absolutely nothing like your twin sister. Your body is misshapenned, you are quite ugly, and also you bear a mouthful of razor sharp demonlike teeth. So, to put it shortly, unlike your twin sister, you are absolutely nothing like what your parents expected or hoped for you to be.

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Stories like this often take a rather predictable turn where of course the parents (or maybe just one of them and not the other) basically float out the idea of “well, why don’t we just keep the good one? You know, the one that doesn't want blood?”

And of course that immediately and purposely earns the ire of the reader/viewer towards the parent/s. Like obviously maybe the Hell Baby wouldn’t have become the Hell Baby if it wasn’t literally dumped in a junkyard as literal garbage.

However, this manga kind of pleasantly subverted my expectations as

~!the father doesn’t actually immediately abandon the Hell Baby. Rather, he only abandons it upon the revelation that it literally only feeds on blood and was raiding the hospital’s blood supply. The conclusion the father reached was to kill her for she would only be shunned and hated among human society. And would also most likely start killing animals and potentially other humans to feed off of.

But the father couldn’t bring himself to do it. Whether it was cowardice or mercy, it’s debatable, considering he did still dump her in the junkyard. Still, if the father had been a typically awful horror character completely lacking humanity, the rest of the manga would fallen right on its face.

!~

For a manga that is so clearly meant to just be gross and nasty, I was pleasantly surprised that there was still an attempt at a plot. Though you of course still get plenty of the Hell Baby roaming around the junkyard and drinking blood from dead animals. As she drinks the rotten blood from those decaying corpses, she gets a bit stronger and progresses to hunting the animals herself.

And eventually, a strange voice calls out to her and pushes her towards venturing into the city where her destiny awaits. Hell Baby going to the big city is quite fun because as was inevitable, she of course begins hunting humans and it’s a big old gory mess.

Obviously, the moment when the Hell Baby starts murdering and eating people it becomes quite harder to try and sympathize with her

especially when she beheads the boy

but I actually really liked this manga’s ending.

Some people died really brutally, the stray dog and crow population of the city decreased dramatically, and the horror was resolved satisfactorily while concluding the Hell Baby's character arc in a nice way considering how monstrous she got towards the end there with all the... you know.

Murder and cannibalism.

#Conclusion#

This is my first Hideshi Hino manga and I gotta say, I was pleasantly surprised. To be honest with you, I stayed away as long as I did because I didn't think his art style looked very appealing. But as off putting as she looks, I actually really grew to like Hell Baby.

If you want a good old gory horror manga about a creepy cannibalistic baby, Hell Baby's got you covered. If you want a story about a child abandoned by her parents simply trying to survive in a junkyard while feeling some sort of mysterious yearning tugging at her heart, Hell Baby's got you covered there too.

I give Hell Baby a 7 out of 10.

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