Half Human (original Japanese title The Beastman Snowman) exists as a curious footnote in the history of Toho’s monster movies—it is Ishiro Honda’s direct follow-up to Godzilla (which prevented him from directing the actual Godzilla sequel also released in 1955), with much of that film’s cast and crew carrying over, including effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, story originator Shigeru Kayama, and screenwriter Takeo Murata (also the writer of Godzilla Raids Again and Rodan), which subsequently became an obscurity whose original Japanese release has never officially appeared on home video (although that doesn’t prevent people from finding it if they look a little.) Like Godzilla, this movie’s American incarnation was a heavy edit job, lopping off over over thirty minutes of run time, radically altering the story and tone, and inserting scenes of American actors like John Carradine (who probably wouldn’t turn down a movie role even if you paid him to) to make it seem less foreign, and that version has been the only one easily available all this time. There’s a reason for that pattern of unavailability that we’ll get to, but it has in some ways rendered this movie as much of a phantom as the Abominable Snowman at its centre, a missing link between Godzilla and the Honda-directed monster movies to follow.
As you could probably guess, this is very much based in the early fifties Yeti zeitgeist that also led Nigel Kneale to write The Creature/The Abominable Snowman in 1955. Half Human relocates the Snowman to the Japanese Alps—why not? Who is to say that only one mountain can have mystery hominids roaming around?—giving it a slightly different context, although one could still find tonal parallels between this and Kneale’s story. The setting gives Ishiro Honda the opportunity to do plenty of location shooting, showcasing the breathtaking vistas of the mountain in a way that likely calls back to the documentary films he made before moving to fiction, and puts the actors in the roles of minuscule specks traversing the rocky wilderness. The way the human characters seem so unimportant next to the setting reflects their underwritten nature, a collection of simplistic personalities that lack the stand-outs that Murata and Honda created for Godzilla. Told as a series of flashbacks delivered to a reporter at a train station, the film opens with a group on a skiing vacation that goes awry when some of them ventures to a friend’s cabin and are caught in a blizzard, leading to an eerie phone call where we only hear screams, gunshots, and a mysterious roars, a standard horror moment that is nonetheless executed well here. While investigating the other cabin, they find several (but not all) of their friends dead in the demolished building, and tufts of hair that brings the situation to the attention of zoologist Dr. Koizumi (Nobuo Nakamura, eventually to play more scientists in Dogora and War of the Gargantuas), who like so many featured experts in Yeti/Bigfoot “documentaries”, can’t definitively identify their source.
Among the group who come back to the mountain to help Dr. Koizumi after the spring thaw is Iljima (Akira Takarada, lead in Godzilla and many, many other Toho monster movies, which of course earned him an appearance in The Great Buddha Arrival as well), who was present for the initial disaster, and Michiko (Momoko Kochi, female lead in Godzilla who reprises her role in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah), whose brother Takeno (Tadashi Okabe) is still missing—many of the other roles went to actors who recur throughout Ishiro Honda’s filmography, but listing them all off would be exhausting for both me and you. There’s a lot of people in the search party, and plenty of conversation about the likelihood of Takeno’s survival and just what kind of animal they’re searching for—but while they start looking for it, it ends up finding them, with a very neat and shadowy introduction that leads to it reaching into a tent (a scene that also bears a resemblance to one in The Abominable Snowman), alerting the whole group that yes, there is an Abominable Snowman on the loose in the Japanese Alps.
This discovery puts that group at odds with a band of criminal animal poachers led by Oba (Yoshio Kosugi), who know that the creature exists and seek to capture it for their own profit. Every one of them is a cartoonish moustache-twirler (a lot of them do seem to have moustaches), and their immoral antics seem to be for comic relief, which feels especially at odds with this rather sombre story—Honda was able to better integrate lighter moments in subsequent movies, but there is still a degree of moodiness carrying over from Godzilla that seems to resist tonally accepting the ridiculousness of this pack of goons. They ultimately serve the moral purpose of the movie, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t feel out of place.
While none of the human characters in this aren’t particularly charismatic, the monster itself is, existing in the tradition of portraying Yeti figures as sympathetic. Although its introduction, would lead you to believe that this creature is menacing, we quickly learn that it is not—it is, in fact, a curious but otherwise benign inhabitant of the mountains, seeking only to take care of its child, the last two of their kind (the others died after eating bad mushrooms—seriously!) The role is played by suit actor/modeller Fuminori Ohashi under the alias of Sanshiro Sagara, who would not only go on to work on other effects movies like The Whale God, but has an important ape-based part in Japanese monster history, portraying the lead monster in the lost 1938 film The King Kong That Appeared in Edo, a kaiju movie precursor that is forever shrouded in mystery. With a fairly good suit, Ohashi sells the creature as having both recognizably animalistic side and recognizably intelligent sides in its movements and reactions, giving it a sense of motivation and humanity often lacking in the giant-sized monsters of other Toho films. In one scene, we see it casually carry off the carcass of a dead boar, only to stop and immediately help Iljima, who has been tied up and left to hang off the side of a cliff—with its good deed done, it picks up the boar and walks off again, its benevolence as casual as all of its survival instincts.
Living its life in its very roomy cave abode, the creature is worshipped by a group of mountain villagers—and this is very likely what caused the problems for this movie’s preservation. Although Toho has never given a reason why they keep this film buried, Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski in their book Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film speculate that these villagers, referred to as “buraku”, come off as caricatures of burakumin, people who are descended from members of the “untouchable” classes from older Japanese class systems, historically subject to discrimination and who continue to have advocacy groups in Japan. Wanting to avoid serious accusations from those groups, the studio has chosen to keep Half Human out of circulation. You can sort of understand what the issue is: most of the villagers are dirt-encrusted, disfigured grotesques, the only exception being the girl Chika (Akemi Negishi), the only one who regularly ventures out to interact with the world that her people shun. As the story goes along, we see that their dedication to isolating themselves may have been correct—Chika ends up leading Oba’s gang to the creature and its child after mistaking them for friends of Iljima, who she has some affection for, and that has dire consequences for the village—but the violent way they enforce these rules (Chika gets mercilessly beaten disturbingly frequently) does their viewpoint few favours, and makes them seem even less human than the creature itself. As Ryfle and Godziszewski point out, Ishiro Honda has a particular fascination with exploring “archaic” societies’ interactions with the modern—something that can be seen as early as the fishing village in Godzilla—and despite often sympathizing with the “primitive” people as seen in films like Mothra, these portrayals are almost never without some stereotyped and condescending elements, with the villagers in this movie as probably one of the more extreme examples.
That disruption of the ancient by the modern is one of the stronger themes in Half Human, a particularly harsh tragedy for both Chika and the monster—in particular, her desire to connect with modern society into her life causes the downfall of everything she knows. After a scene of the two creatures being captured by Oba’s group and then escaping (including a not-terribly-convincing effect where they have to use compositing to make it look like the creature is picking someone up and throwing them, which I imagine was necessitated by the location shooting preventing the use of wires), the child monster is shot and killed, and the way the parent whimpers and cradles its limp body gives Ohashi another opportunity to demonstrate the very human inhumanity of the ape-man. There is an equal amount of power in the portrayal of its subsequent rage, as it angrily tears down every human-related thing it finds, including burning down the mountain village—it is a frightening turn for this creature, but we understand its grief and its desire for revenge. The melancholy and the action of the final third or so of the movie benefits not just from Honda’s direction, but from the music by Masaru Sato (also heard in The H-Man and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla), such as in a particularly emotional scene where the crew discover Takeno’s body and read a note where he describes the creature’s attempts to save him (it is odd that he apparently doesn’t have enough energy to eat but does have enough energy to write multiple paragraphs), which is underscored with sad harmonica. While the film often delves into more cliche monster material—such as having the creature kidnap Michiko leading up to the finale—there are many moments leading up to the conclusion that offer more genuine pathos than many of its contemporaries.
These all fit into the recurring trends in the Abominable Snowman material I’ve written about for this site—it’s a monster whose innate similarities to us seems apparent to most artists, a mirror image that we can project our own feelings on human nature onto. Honda and his crew had already mastered the art of making a monster story an affecting tragedy in their first go, and so this seemed like a logical next step, giving them the opportunity to make the monster something we can truly see ourselves in. That, in turn, makes its final fate (and Chika’s) all the more of a gut punch—it was an innocent whose life was destroyed by exposure to the modern world, where greed and evil inexorably arise. When the film ends, the crew finish telling their story, and hearing their train arrive, walk off silently; after learning of what they saw, you can understand why.
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