The Summer Hikaru Died Episodes 1 & 2 Review: A Masterclass In Small Town Horror

By Elijah Gonzalez | July 15, 2025 | 9:50am

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The Summer Hikaru Died Episodes 1 & 2 Review: A Masterclass In Small Town Horror

For a long time now, horror anime have been cursed. For every rare Shiki that wrings tension out of its setting, there are countless more that utterly collapse under the difficulties of maintaining scares through animation, something that takes both skilled direction and a substantial amount of resources to pull off. For those reasons and more, there’s enough failed Junji Ito adaptations alone to fill a graveyard.

In that context, it’s even more impressive what CygamesPictures has done with The Summer Hikaru Died through its first two episodes, capturing the discomfort of coming-of-age as a queer person in a small town with its gossiping neighbors, overbearing sun, body horror nightmare creature, and all.

The story begins with a cold open as Yoshiki and the rest of a rescue party look for Hikaru, Yoshiki’s best friend, who has gone missing in the mountains. As Yoshiki sprints through the darkness, he breaks through foliage with an intensity that suggests the closeness of his bond with the missing person. Then the camera cuts to Hikaru, bleeding and alone, as he calls for someone, anyone. Then an undulating, amoeba-like being encapsulates the screen, engulfing him.

Cut to July 2021, six months later, and Yoshiki and Hikaru are at the local convenience store, looking for something to cool down from the summer heat. And then, as they sit on the park bench outside, Yoshiki starts to ask Hikaru about that day six months ago. Sweat pours down their faces. The camera cuts to ants swarming around what’s left of a sugary drink. Hikaru’s answers are unconvincing. A shadow comes over everything and then Hikaru finally asks something he’s been thinking about for six months: “You’re not Hikaru, are you?”

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The thing that looks like Hikaru doesn’t deny it and admits that the real Hikaru is dead. While it has his memories, it’s not him. It’s inky red and green form emerges from his face, and Hikaru’s body begs Yoshiki to keep this secret because of how much fun it has had living as a human. It hugs Yoshiki and tells him, seemingly quite genuinely, that it wants him to keep this secret. So it doesn’t have to kill him, that is.

This is the rapid-fire first five minutes of The Summer Hikaru Died, and while that seems far too early to have this kind of dramatic reveal land with any semblance of emotional impact, it does thanks to excellent execution and efficient dialogue that puts us inside Yoshiki’s headspace.

As for the visuals, CygamesPictures once again doesn’t disappoint. Coming off an anime adaptation of their parent company’s lucrative horse girl gacha game and last season’s moody, comedic, and weird Apocalypse Hotel, the studio has rapidly become one to look out for. Here, director Ryouhei Takeshita (Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night), who also handled storyboarding, series composition, and the script, captures a sweltering atmosphere as he cuts from sweating bodies to scenery that reminds us these characters are trapped in this isolated mountain village, shrines and creaky buildings indicating this place is very old, from a different time.

But what really elevates the series so far is how all this imagery drives at its central themes of what it’s like for Yoshiki to be queer in this small isolated community (and also what it’s like if you’re romantic interest was Invasion of the Body Snatchers-ed by an Eldritch blob monster). Yoshiki’s best friend, whom he very clearly had romantic feelings for, is dead. But, out of some combination of denial, curiosity, and fear, he goes along with this new Hikaru, best represented by a scene where he’s swallowed by the frame as he admits that even if this person is a fake, he wants him to stay, because he’s as close as he will get to having Hikaru back.

There’s a complicated, messy, very adolescent element to all this because Yoshiki is clearly in some degree of denial about his sexuality. A scene from episode two, where a nosy cashier insensitively yaps about his hikikomori sister and other elements of his family’s private life, shows us a big part of the reason why: there are no secrets in a tiny, traditional community like this. And considering that gay marriage isn’t legal in Japan in general, this pressure is even more overwhelming in a place with one foot in the past. Of course, the situation is even more tragic because we learn early on that pre-blob monster Hikaru seemed to also have feelings for Yoshiki, as confirmed by said blob monster, who retains all of his host’s memories, and seemingly some of his feelings.

The body horror scene in episode 2, which twists the classic anime setup of two romantic interests being alone in the gym storage room, brings both halves of the story together. After Hikaru fights off a yokai to protect Yoshiki, the latter asks to understand more about how the former’s powers work. Hikaru offers to show him, opening an impossible slit in Hikaru’s chest that somehow leads to somewhere else. Here, sensuality and the grotesque overlap, and as Yoshiki sticks his hand in, he describes the feeling as rubbing up against marinated meat, leading to a hilarious cutaway to actual footage of raw chicken on a cutting board. As Yoshiki moves his hand around, a tender moment of intimacy shifts into unsettling as he is almost pulled in. But even as he seems to be in danger, Yoshiki remains loyal to Hikaru, something increasingly relevant as we get backstory around this town and a group of villagers actively trying to track down the thing that escaped from the mountain through Hikaru.

While the specifics remain cryptic, a band of locals begrudgingly sends for help, and an apparent yokai hunter named Tanaka returns the call. It all seems to be setting up a greater conflict where this group will slowly hone in on Hikaru, as the thing possessing him claims more and more victims. Apparently, it used to be siloed on the mountain, and Hikaru’s family was tasked with regularly making trips to perform some sort of ritual, presumably to keep it there. It’s clear that the story intends to expand on the rules and mythos of this world, and so far, it’s been handled in a relatively grounded way that draws from traditional Japanese folklore and ghost stories, the kind that haven’t been forgotten in this small community.

One possible theme-y interpretation of this situation is that the group that intends to hunt the monster from the mountain will eventually try to separate Yoshiki and Hikaru, something with overlap to how LGBTQ+ people are stigmatized and driven apart by conservative forces. However, on the other end, it’s clear that Yoshiki isn’t truly processing his grief over the death of his friend. In this read, this possessed version of Hikaru is something he needs to distance himself from so he can heal, move on, and hopefully one day explore his queerness in a healthy way that doesn’t involve hanging out with an Eldritch entity that kills people.

While all of this could risk portraying queerness as some terrifying, evil thing, what makes it work is that it’s very clearly meant to reflect Yoshiki’s internalized homophobia about himself. Even as it’s incredibly obvious to the audience how he feels thanks to both the visual language and script, his own sexual confusion is further complicated by the fact that he spends every day with his dead crush being puppeted by an ancient evil.

All of this is to say, the first two episodes of The Summer Hikaru Died have a lot going on at basically every level. It explores a particular kind of claustrophobic queer adolescent experience through well-considered shot compositions and uncomfortable audio that makes us understand why our protagonist is spending all his time with an otherworldly being that may or may not kill him. While it won’t be easy for the series to keep up this level of aesthetic execution and stifling atmosphere, and its central metaphors very much run the risk of going sideways, it’s hard to imagine how these first two episodes could have navigated this situation better. It’s sweaty, gross, and weird: pretty much teen existence in a nutshell.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.