Its like someone watched The Baby (1973, great exploitation movie btw) and thought it didn't have enough potential fetish material.
who the heck even approved the publishing of this garbage
In the afterword the author talks about his experiences with editors during his horror manga career. None of them found this inappropriate for shoujo mags. (The taglines for one of his other books was "Sanjou Tomomi, stop putting S&M in magazines even elementary schoolers read!!")