Mothra vs. Godzilla & Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)

1964 was the turning point for the Godzilla films—after ten years and four movies, the series not only solidified into what it would be for the rest of the Showa era, but what it would be in all the years beyond that. After hitting on the kaiju battle premise in Godzilla Raids Again, King Kong vs. Godzilla, demonstrated that having multiple monster headliners duking it out brought in audiences like nothing else. As we have seen in the sixty years since then, it’s a pitch that finds its way back into public favour even after a period of downtime—watching two or more big monsters fighting hits a primal nerve.

These shifts in focus inevitably changed how the stories were written—for one, humanity was no longer living in a world where monsters were a freakish and tragic aberration, but one where they are woven into the fabric of existence. More importantly, though, was how all of this altered the depiction of Godzilla, which spoke of changing attitudes in Toho and possibly in the populace. Although the tone of the movies had significantly softened after the stark nuclear terror of Ishiro Honda’s original, one thing that stuck around even with the relative optimism of Raids Again or the lighthearted spectacle of KKvG was the idea of Godzilla as the ultimate threat, a walking disaster that humanity must contend with again and again as a constant reminder of what they had brought upon themselves. In 1954, Godzilla’s atomic origins made it feel like a new existential problem for life itself—but what happens when that becomes normalized? If Godzilla is eventually part of everyday life, how are we supposed to see him? Could he even become something more than a menace?

Circumstances at Toho led to the regular monster movie crew producing two movies in the Godzilla series in 1964 (with Dogora released between them), and you can see the drastic shift in the tone of this series happen in real time as you watch them. Godzilla gets one more round as the antagonist that brings humans (and more benevolent monsters) together—but within a few months, the tables turn completely, and it is Godzilla himself that humanity turns to for help from an even greater threat. There is something of a logical through line in this—Godzilla’s subsequent change into monster hero did not come from nothing—but it still rather dramatically realigned how these movies would be made from then on.

Rodan (1956)

While the original 1954 Godzilla remains a startling effective film, it’s clearly also something improvising a genre as it went along, experimenting with special effects, with tone, and with ideas throughout its run time—it becomes its most cohesive mainly during its latter half. It’s the starting point for all kaiju films to follow, but the point where Ishiro Honda, Eiji Tsuburaya, and the rest of their crew really found the path forward was two years later in Rodan (Japanese title Giant Monster of the Sky Radon, and the name will always have two vowel-switched regional variations for the rest of time), the first kaiju film in colour, and the one where Honda found a steady way to handle this type of story. It is kind of amazing to see what a difference two years can make, and how quickly these filmmakers went from figuring out how similar and different these movies could be from their American counterparts to finding their footing in this entirely idiosyncratic take on monster movie, allowing them to experiment with the details of the genre instead.

The H-Man (1958)

Released in the same year as Varan, The H-Man sees director Ishiro Honda return again to ideas and imagery from Godzilla, just four years old at the time, beginning with more footage of a nuclear bomb test and another invocation of the Lucky Dragon 5 incident. What’s different here is that while the kaiju films visualized the fear of nuclear fallout and ongoing weapons testing through the creation of a walking natural disaster, this one is entirely human-based: men transformed into nightmarish new forms, completely unlike anything seen in nature (this is, in fact, yet another blob movie that predated The Blob—there must have been something gooey in the air in the late 1950s.) While treading some similar ground to other Honda/Toho genre films on the surface, the smaller scale and bizarre nature of the threat lead to something far different from the other monster movies of the Showa era.

Space Amoeba (1970)

We now travel from the early days of Toho monster movies to their waning days, with increasingly diminished budgets and increasingly diminished audience numbers. Space Amoeba (called Gezora, Ganime, and Kameba: Decisive Battle! Giant Monsters of the South Seas in Japan, and alternatively titled Yog – Monster From Space in North America) turned out to be the penultimate monster movie directed by Ishiro Honda, and while at this point these movies were expected to mostly cater to monster-loving kids, it carries on a number of his recurring themes, and even has a surprising number of parallels to Varan, despite the twelve years between them. This could have potentially been his last go-around in the genre, so it was entirely possible that Honda wanted a chance to get as much of the old gang back together, including several actors and composer Akira Ifukube, to make one of these—and while at times it, like Varan, feels like a composite of other movies, its place in the history and the ideas it utilizes make it interesting all the same.