Missing Child Videotape Ending Explained & Full Story: What Could've Happened To Tsukasa?

What’s the best kind of horror? Well, if you ask me, the best kind of horror isn’t the one that tries to deafen you with bargain-bin ghost wails and jumpscares we’ve all been jumpy about since the Stone Age. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against horrors that stick to the formula and pull it off well. But what I really love about Japanese horror is the ambiguity and how it draws out this unsettling, atmospheric dread that lingers long after the credits roll. Ryota Kondo’s Missing Child Videotape is disturbing and creepy from start to finish, and what’s cool is it pulls that off without ever really showing the scary entities on screen. Taking inspiration from found-footage classics like The Blair Witch Project and the 2009 Japanese horror Occult, the film leans on old-school VHS footage, letting the audience piece together the disturbing nature of the horror instead of flooding the screen with obvious supernatural tropes. The grainy, grunge texture of the nearly ten-minute-long videotape works brilliantly here—it sets the tone of the story and evokes an unsettling sense of what unknown horrors might lurk within the darkness.

Spoilers Ahead

What happens in the film?

Keita and Tsukasa are two young guys sharing a flat. They’re quite different in their own ways, but they’re comfortable enough in each other’s presence. The film kicks off with Keita volunteering to look for a missing child in the woods. When he finally finds the kid, he gives him a small bell he was carrying with him, and remembers this because it comes back later. One day, Keita comes home to find a package from his mother waiting in the apartment. Inside, along with some of his father’s old belongings, there’s a videotape. Keita asks Tsukasa to stay while he plays the VCR, and the video turns out to be quite haunting. When Keita was a kid, he was once told to take his little brother, Hinata, along with him to play. Even though it annoyed him, he agreed. The two of them ended up hiking on the nearby Mount Mashiro. Along the way, they stumbled upon an abandoned building that looked like some kind of old facility—part school, part hospital, or maybe a bit of both. Hinata wanted to play hide-and-seek with his brother, and while Keita was counting to ten, he went to hide. When Keita went looking for Hinata, he only caught a glimpse of him before he disappeared without a trace. Even after the entire town looked for him, Hinata was never found. Keita’s carried the weight of that trauma ever since, and now he can’t help but wonder why his mother would send him such a horrible videotape, forcing him to reopen wounds he’s never truly healed from. Tsukasa also feels pretty disturbed after watching the video, and they decide to send the videotape back. As for Tsukasa, he’s someone who has the ability to see the dead. Even though this is not a superpower many people would want, Tsukasa is pretty content with it since he doesn’t have to intervene in most cases. 

Why does Mikoto want to know about the disappearance of Hinata?

A journalist, Mikoto, approaches Tsukasa to ask his roommate, Keita, about the kid he recently found. But her curiosity is more than just that, as she asks Tsukasa about the disappearance of Hinata thirteen years ago. Even though Tsukasa is hesitant to answer her questions at first, he realizes that it might not be that bad a thing to help her with the article she’s pursuing, which basically focuses on the mysterious Mount Mashiro. The next day, Mikoto comes to see Tsukasa again, and she tells him that apparently, Keita’s mother called her and asked her to take care of her son. Tsukasa remembers that Keita’s parents were separated before his father died, and she has been all by herself for quite some time. Now the creepy thing is, even after Hinata was lost, his parents made sure to celebrate his birthday every year, as if their kid were present. Mikoto also knows about the videotape that recorded the moments before Hinata disappeared, and Tsukasa tells her to wait before he can reveal anything more about the subject. 

What do Keita and Tsukasa find in Mount Mashiro?

Seeing Keita not doing well, Tsukasa decides to drive him to his hometown so that they can return the videotape. When they reach Keita’s house, it appears empty. Footsteps echo from the second floor, but Tsukasa stays back as Keita goes upstairs to check if his mother is there. Failing to find her, they head towards the infamous mountain, and Keita insists that they should hike upwards, and Tsukasa follows. After a long, long hike, Tsukasa asks Keita to take a break, and that’s when Keita sees Hinata lurking behind a tree. Even though common sense tells you that it can’t possibly be a kid who was lost thirteen years ago, Keita still thinks and hopes that he’d find his missing brother there. After chasing Hinata’s shadow, they discover dozens of urns filled with ashes dumped in the mountains. The only explanation the police offer is that some company illegally disposed of its own urns there.

Does the abandoned facility really exist in Mount Mashiro?

The two friends find a lodge nearby to stay the night, and that’s when Tsukasa gets to know about a truth hidden all along. Mikoto FaceTimes him to inform him that over the years, there have been many inexplicable incidents in Mount Mashiro. After this many horrifying cases in a place, one would imagine it to be much more infamous for the mountain to be a haunted spot. Mikoto got her hands on an audiotape from her boss, which is nearly two decades old, where a bunch of students are heard recording their journey to the summit of this very mountain. They found the same building Keita recorded, and one of the female students felt something eerie while the others dismissed her, and when they went up to the second floor, something happened, and all the authorities found was this tape. Now, according to facts, there hasn’t been any construction on the mountains, confirming the fact that the ruins are in fact something supernatural. 

Another aspect of the mountains is revealed by the son of the inn owner, who tells Keito that Mount Mashiro is a place where people dump all sorts of things. Now the guy remembers that his late grandmother once told him the story of when she was young, she was asked not to venture out into the mountains. But she noticed that all the adults would head into the mountains late at night. Like any curious child, she couldn’t help but wonder if they were hiding something exciting from the kids, some secret fun only the grown-ups were allowed to have. So she and her friends secretly went to the mountains to play once, and they were scolded by everyone for going there. But what she found out was that the adults supposedly dump things belonging to the dead in the mountains; anyone who wishes to get rid of anything can discard it there. So when she got her first period, instead of telling anyone, she quietly threw her stained underwear away with the rest of the trash. Strangely enough, she never got her period again after that. Now the guy was always creeped out by his grandmother, and he wondered if his mother, the inn owner, was really the child of his grandmother. 

What compels Keita to go into Mount Mashiro alone?

After getting to know about the horrid lore about the mountains, Keita sees the ghost of his mother reminding him that Hinata’s birthday is approaching. She asks him if he remembers, and when he says yes, she accuses him of lying again. So it’s clear that even though it wasn’t anybody’s fault that Hinata got lost, his parents always held Keita responsible for it, and it’s so bad that he’s getting haunted at this point. Meanwhile, Tsukasa went to Keita’s house alone, and when he mustered the courage to go upstairs, he found Keita’s mother had hung herself, holding a picture of her two children. Knowing that Keita must’ve seen this too, Tsukasa calls Mikoto, asking her to stop Keita, and she has already found him at the inn. Mikoto, realizing that Keita is the one who entered the mythical building, decides to take him back to the mountain. As Tsukasa pleads with her over the phone, the call is suddenly interrupted by static, and his words distort, shifting from “stop him” to “take him into the mountain.” Keita starts to hike alone and asks Mikoto to stay back. 

Does Keita find his missing brother?

Keita plays the audiotape of the students and follows their instructions to reach the point where they found the building. By the time Tsukasa gets to the bottom of the mountain to find Mikoto, Keita has already travelled quite far. But surprisingly enough, the duo manages to catch up to him and makes their way to the building with ease. Just when Tsukasa and Keita come face to face, Keita sees Hinata once again, down the hall. Tsukasa finally reveals a truth that he has been hiding all along—that the kid Keita can see in the moment isn’t real, and he’s been long dead. From the very first moment Tsukasa met Keita, he could see young Hinata’s spirit lurking around him, as the kid never really left his big brother’s side by choice. Keita looks back again, and he finds his parents’ spirit standing with his brother, and he finally realizes that it’s been an illusion all along. He could only see Hinata in this surreal structure, which doesn’t exist on maps, because that’s the very place where he died. Keita apologizes to his family for losing his brother, where it all started, and walks away. 

But the spookiness of it all was far from over, and Mikoto, who didn’t follow Tsukasa, finds a ghastly hand holding her arm. Meanwhile, Tsukasa sees a blinding flash of light, which takes him back to the very day Keita lost his brother, in broad daylight. He could see how it unfolded, just like in the VCR, and he follows Hinata to see he died from tripping over the stairs. Keita finds the same spot in the present time by himself, where he can see a patch of blood and Hinata’s clothes, and he wails in misery, knowing his brother died this way. Mikoto firmly tells the spirit to let go of her, and it does. Even though Keita and Mikoto make it out alive from the haunted ruins, Tsukasa never snaps out of the past he was transported to. Three months later, Mikoto is writing an article on the missing case of Tsukasa and how many others like him have vanished into thin air in this supposed facility of Mount Mashiro, which itself is a building that doesn’t exist on paper. She knows her editor would never let her publish this, but she hopes that one day she can let the world know about the horror that takes place in a seemingly ordinary mountain. 

What could’ve happened to Tsukasa?

Since he could see dead people, it’s possible that this haunted building trapped him inside because he might be more vulnerable than normal people because of the very gift he possessed. Also, the fact that when he told Mikoto to stop Keita from going to the mountain, a static manipulated his words, meaning that the dark entities lured Tsukasa knowing that he’d come after his friend. Judging by how he got transported to the past, specifically thirteen years ago, he now maybe might be stuck in the past and has no way to break out of it. 

In Missing Child Videotape’s ending, we see a VCR camera recording the son of the inn owner and Keita while both of them realize that somebody or something is stalking them, and I would go as far as to say that now Tsukasa is the medium that the powers of the mountain are using to lure and trap other people. Sadly, Tsukasa’s fate became tragic only because he wanted to help others, not because he was there to be adventurous or have fun, like the other victims who disappeared from the mountain.

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