Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda by Peter H. Brothers

Author:Peter H. Brothers [Brothers, Peter H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2013-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

MATANGO (1963)

ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE “It was a dark, starless night. We were becalmed in the Northern Pacific. Our exact position I do not know; for the sun had been hidden during the course of a weary, breathless week, by a thick haze which had seemed to float above us, about the height of our mastheads, at whiles descending and shrouding the surrounding sea . . .”

-- Opening paragraph from “The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson. It has always been to Tomoyuki Tanaka’s enormous credit that he was willing to let his favorite monster movie director have the occasional experiment.

monster films were

As long as Honda’s commercial successes, Tanaka could allow him the opportunity to direct something not necessarily guaranteed to reach a mainstream audience, and no one appreciated this more than the director himself who once said of Sekizawa and Kimura’s screenplays: “The actors’ delivery were different for each of those two writers’ screenplays, which was very interesting” (this was typical modesty as he surely had something to do with it as well). Great drama is always about things happening on different levels, and although people are always interested in conflicts between characters in a film, the most interesting conflicts are those within people, and while everyone has a personality they present to the world, in many cases it is not at all representative of whom they really are as individuals. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” and Matango exhibits the seemingly pleasant dispositions of the various characters only to strip them away revealing something not quite so pleasant underneath.

The imaginative release poster for Matango. Matango was inspired by Hodgson’s short story “The Voice in the

Night” which was first published in The Blue Magazine in 1907. The story

concerns a yacht called the Albatross (Ahodori in Japanese) which comes

upon an unseen man in the mist pleading for food for himself and for his

female companion who are both marooned on an island. The man begs

not to be seen, and after receiving some food, tells his incredible tale of

woeful horror.

A number of key elements of Hodgson’s story were put into the movie

in collaboration between science-fiction editor/writer Masami Fukushima

and Shinichi Hoshi. Takeshi Kimura drafted the final screenplay, and this

time his characters would be little more than animals both literally as well

as figuratively, reduced to lapping-up water, sucking eggs and licking roots.

Kimura relished every opportunity to bring down those in authority and was not above ridiculing his own profession. During the storm scene on the yacht when author Yoshida yells to psychology professor Murai:

“To get a girl you scare them first then treat them tenderly. Am I right?” “That’s not psychology,” Murai replies, “that’s a paperback novel!”

Kimura’s personal testaments about people ring throughout the film such as when Sakuta informs Koyama that “People act like children, regardless of how old they are. That’s just how the world is.”

For Kimura, whose beliefs in human values

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