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Every so often you get a work of fiction that just sticks with you. In our little marathon's case, that's usually due to it scaring the almighty piss out of you and leaving a mark on your psyche that lingers. Today's work didn't quite do that to me, but what it ended up being was unsettling as all fuck. We're looking at a small part of a larger whole here this time around. When They Cry, or Higurashi When They Cry, or Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, or... look, let's just call it When They Cry for simplicity, okay? Anyways, When They Cry started life as a visual novel series by one Ryukishi07. It ballooned out into an anime (which is what we're doing today, specifically) and a bunch of other bullshit. There's a really neat conceit to When They Cry and the way it tells its story, but we're going to ignore most of that and save it for offhand waffling at the end. As far as I was concerned for this, When They Cry is a four-episode serial not unlike classic Doctor Who. I'm doing it this way for two reasons. The first is that I don't have the time to do a deep dive into two 26-episode series of anime to do a great big waffle about the series as a whole. The second is more personal; this is how I originally experienced When They Cry, in August 2006. I did a marathon watch of the first four episodes which make up the first "arc" of the show, so to speak. Eleven years later and having not seen certain parts of it since that summer night, it's remarkable how much of it stayed with me. Marks on the psyche that linger, scratched by the fingernails of looming dread and terror. Delve deep with me.
The show wastes no time in setting the mood. June 1983. A man beating two bloody bodies with a baseball bat in a dark room. It's horrific and disturbing, a quick surprise attack of fear. What follows, after the equally spooky opening credits? Idyllic country town life in the Japanese village of Hinamizawa. Drop someone into this blind and skip the first two minutes, and they'd mistake this for some sort of generic slice of life lighthearted anime fun. Yes, children, we're playing in the happy fun land of Tonal Dissonance, and my god does the show do everything in its power to keep that facade up. Hero boy Keiichi (who looks an awful lot like that nasty man who was beating people to death in that other show) and his schoolgirl friends play around, make silly faces, and generally have a good time! Surely this will be a happy 100-odd minutes... but then the other show begins to intrude. There are mentions of murders happening in the past, and Keiichi finds old newspapers in the dump, right as his new friend Rena is walking behind him with a big hatchet... but no no no, that's just a cliffhanger or something! Episode 2 begins with even more fun at the Cotton Drifting Festival, but that other show doesn't take long to intrude. A visiting photographer and his lady friend talk to Keiichi about the curse of the god Oyashiro-sama, and all the deaths that have occured on every festival night for the past five years. Soon the police are talking to Keiichi, and the photographer is found dead and his lady friend is missing. Bless its heart, the show keeps trying to maintain its fun and games... but it's not going to last. Even Keiichi's friends are starting to act strange, talking to him with cryptic menace, their eyes looking like some feline predator waiting to pounce. The cute and cuddly Rena even screams at him about lying! Something is going on, and they don't like it.
By episode 3, the other show has dropped. Keiichi doesn't want to have any more fun and games. He's innately suspicious of his friends, who seem to know everything he gets up to and his secret meetings with the police chief. All of the past murders are connected to his pals in some way. It's here that When They Cry really begins to layer on the horror elements, even managing to add in a little ambiguity. Are Rena and Mion aware of what they're doing when they go all cat-eyed and threaten Keiichi, or is it some sort of split personality thing? Is Keiichi just slowly losing his grip on reality? There are answers to all of this to be found somewhere. I don't want to know any of them. I did watch the entirety of the first series, and one episode of the second which (might have?) explained everything. I don't want to know. I have not known for eleven years, and this has given the mark When They Cry has left on me its own sort of power. Rewatching these four episodes again has only strengthened it. I've began to turn this into a sort of plot summary thing, but I'll speed this along and give you the three most horrific scenes from these final two episodes. The first is the needle in the rice balls Keiichi is given by his friends. Just absolutely brutal, and something I totally forgot about until I threw this back on. Then I went "oh god THAT'S RIGHT". Something else I was dreading was the opening to episode 4, where a paranoid Keiichi is accosted by Rena trying to open the bolt and chain on his front door and he responds by slamming the door into her fingers while the regular Rena simply yells that she's sorry. Absolutely brutal in 2006, and the same in 2017. Then you have the entire climax, where Rena and Mion drug Keiichi with an untraceable thing that makes(?) him kill them with a baseball bat and ends with him on the phone with the police, clawing his own throat out.
It's here you may wonder how there ever could be an episode 5 of this show. Well... time loops? Different realities? Something like that, it's been eleven years after all. Point is, every 4 episodes or so this whole thing resets and we see it all repeat. Happy show opposed by murder show, murder show creeps in, everything is dread and people die horribly, rinse and repeat. There are answers. Again, I don't want to know them. What I do know is that When They Cry's first four episodes are the most memorable to me. I couldn't even tell you what happens in the show past... episode 12 or so? Hell, even the second arc's details are a bit hazy to me. Even without having seen it, I could have told you all the major beats of these first four episodes at any time between 2006 and tonight. It's stayed with me for all these years, and that's why I wanted to share them here with a slot on the marathon. If there ever was a solution, I don't know it. Sometimes it's better not to know why a high school boy murdered his two classmates and tore his own throat out. The answer's not going to be satisfying... and that's the scary part.
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