The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

But if I’m going to be writing about the history of Godzilla, I should go back to where it really started.

In the development of the monster movie as we know it, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was the second impact, following previous Creature Classic subject The Thing From Another World, and the two of them set the tone for the rest of the 1950s. As was the case in writing about The Thing, I feel like it’s difficult to convey to readers how this type of movie, which most people probably assume has always been one of the primordial ideas of cinema, was simply not a thing before this—okay, it had had been a thing once before, almost twenty years prior, but there was nothing in between. For myriad reasons inside and outside of the film itself, King Kong (which had been re-released the year before this and saw a surprising amount of success) casts a long shadow over this film, possibly even more than all the subsequent movies about giant monsters stomping through a city, and while both share a dedication to realistic-as-possible depictions of prehistoric animals (even if they are fictionalized ones) and showcasing excessive property damage in New York City, Beast 20K (as I like to call it) offers a significant and timely innovation: attributing the appearance of the monster to atomic bomb testing. With this single narrative detail, one of the primary fascinations and terrors of the monster movie was unleashed upon thousands of theatre screens—it is not the only thing from this movie that subsequent ones would utilized, but it is among the most significant, providing a recurring theme for decades of movies about the perils of the post-war age of scientific advancement. With that in mind, it’s even more interesting to look at how this story’s use of that concept feels so removed from its imitators.

Howl From Beyond the Fog (2019)

As a crowd-funded kaiju project (reaching 150% of its goal in 2017 and guaranteeing credits full of bizarre nom-de-plumes), the thirty-minute short film Howl From Beyond the Fog is already marked as something fuelled by fan passion, but it has even deeper historical roots that further illustrate that. Director Daisuke Sato had worked on the suits and models of the Millennium-era Godzilla films and Gamera the Brave, and his main collaborator on both the effects and the cinematography was Keizo Murase, whose credits include…well, almost every single Toho and Daiei kaiju movie I’ve written about on this site (as well as Yongary and The Mighty Peking Man), usually as the one sculpting the suits—obviously, they are two veterans of this style of film, although they also chose to go a slightly different direction this time by using puppets to portray the human cast alongside the traditional man-in-suit and miniatures. The choice of story is also very much a nod to the history of giant monsters: a re-interpretation of Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story “The Fog Horn”, a melancholy tale of a gigantic marine reptile who mistakes the titular sound as the call of another of its kind, which was sort of co-opted into the 1953 Eugène Lourié/Ray Harryhausen monster film The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (the original title of Bradbury’s story), which in turn served as the inspiration for Toho to produce the original Godzilla. I don’t think there’s any greater signal of passionate fandom than going all the way back to one of the source texts of the genre (Sato even directed another short film based on the story in 2007), and this not only uses it as the basis for its imagery, but also for the tone and atmosphere, creating a giant monster that is much more sympathetic than most of the ones that directly followed “The Fog Horn.”