The Atomic-Monster Canon

For about a decade, roughly 1953 to 1963, two film industries on opposite sides of the Pacific independently decided that the correct response to nuclear weapons was a large animal. The coincidence is less absurd than it sounds. Radiation is invisible, odourless, slow, and statistical — the least filmable threat ever devised — and a monster solves every one of those problems at once. It can be photographed. It arrives on a schedule. It can be shot at.

This is the cycle’s eleven essentials, and the argument I want to make with them is that the two industries used the same premise to say opposite things. The wider aesthetic case sits in the atomic age and the birth of the creature feature, and the Japanese line runs on past this list into the kaiju canon.

What makes a monster atomic

The cycle has a genuine entry requirement, and applying it strictly is what makes the list useful. An atomic monster is one whose existence is caused by the test. The bomb wakes it, grows it, mutates it, or irradiates it into hunger. That excludes the flying saucer films, which are about a threat arriving from outside; The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) lectures us about the bomb and has no monster the bomb created, and The War of the Worlds (1953) merely gets nuked in the second act. It also excludes the body-snatcher strand, where the anxiety is political rather than nuclear.

The requirement matters because it forces every film here to open the same way: a test, a reading on an instrument, a scientist saying a number out loud. The cycle’s real subject is consequence — somebody did something in a desert or an atoll, and the bill has arrived.

The two originals, seventeen months apart

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). The film that started everything, and it is still brisk and strange. Eugène Lourié directed; Ray Harryhausen did his first solo feature effects; the source was a Ray Bradbury short story, “The Fog Horn”, about a sea creature that mistakes a lighthouse horn for a mating call — an image so good Warner Bros bought the story to bolt onto a script that already existed. An Arctic test thaws a fictional Rhedosaurus, which swims to New York and dies at Coney Island with a radioisotope in its wound. It made a great deal of money, and Toho’s producers noticed.

Gojira (1954). Ishirō Honda’s film exists because of an actual event. On 1 March 1954 the American Castle Bravo test at Bikini Atoll dusted the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru — the Lucky Dragon 5 — with fallout; its crew fell ill, and the radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died that September. Toho’s Gojira went into production immediately and opened on 3 November, eight months after the test. It opens with a fishing boat destroyed by a light on the horizon.

Everything about Honda’s film is a funeral. Akira Ifukube scored it as a march for the dead. The monster is treated as an atomic wound with a body, and the scenes that hurt are the hospital wards, the Geiger counter over a child, and the schoolgirls singing a prayer for peace on television. The scientist who can kill it, Serizawa, spends the film’s moral weight on whether a weapon should exist at all, and settles it in a way no American entry would have permitted. Seek out the Japanese original; the 1956 Americanised recut cuts a great deal of this and inserts Raymond Burr.

America: the bomb makes the vermin big

Them! (1954). The best American film in the cycle and a genuinely well-made picture. Gordon Douglas opens on a mute child wandering the New Mexico desert in shock, and holds the ants off screen for nearly a third of the running time, using a sound design of pulsing chirps to do the work. The ants are Trinity’s children, mutated by the 1945 test, and the film treats the investigation as police procedure — Warner Bros pulled its colour and 3D budget late, which forced the noir photography that makes it. It ends in the Los Angeles storm drains. Full read.

Tarantula (1955). Jack Arnold’s desert horror, with a growth nutrient rather than a test doing the mutating, admitted here because Arnold shoots the Mojave as a nuclear landscape and the film’s logic is pure fallout anxiety. The spider is a real tarantula optically composited into real desert, which is why it moves correctly. A young, uncredited Clint Eastwood drops the napalm.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955). H-bomb testing has irradiated a giant octopus, whose natural prey now avoids it, so it comes to San Francisco to eat people — a food-chain premise with real thought in it. Harryhausen gave the creature six tentacles because the budget would not stretch to eight, and cheerfully called it a sixtopus for the rest of his life. The Golden Gate sequence remains superb.

Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Roger Corman made it for around $70,000 and it was among his most profitable early pictures. Bikini fallout has produced crabs that absorb the minds and voices of the people they eat, so the monster calls to the survivors in their dead colleagues’ voices. That idea is worth ten better-funded films. Corman’s method is laid out in the mogul of the margins.

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). Arnold and Richard Matheson, adapting his own novel, take the cycle’s premise and turn it inward: a radioactive mist and an insecticide react, and a man begins to disappear. It is the only film here where the atomic consequence lands on one ordinary person, and its closing monologue is the best writing the decade produced in this genre. The full case.

Japan and Britain: the mourner and the mud

Rodan (1956). Toho’s first kaiju in colour, and the cycle’s clearest statement of the Japanese difference. Mining awakens a pair of enormous pteranodons; the film’s climax strands them on a volcano, and it asks you to grieve for them. American atomic monsters are exterminated by the army and the survivors go home. Honda’s are mourned.

X the Unknown (1956). Hammer’s contribution, written by Jimmy Sangster after Nigel Kneale refused the studio permission to reuse Quatermass — so the scientist is renamed and the monster is radioactive mud that rises through a Scottish moor to feed on fissile material. It is grubby, provincial and much nastier than its budget, and it sits beside The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) as proof that Britain’s version of the anxiety was about contamination seeping up through the ground.

Gorgo (1961). Lourié’s third giant-monster film, and the one that breaks the formula. Salvagers capture a young sea creature off Ireland and exhibit it in Battersea; its mother, sixty metres of it, comes to London to fetch it. Lourié liked to tell interviewers that he had destroyed his monster in The Beast and again in The Giant Behemoth, and that a child’s question about why he always killed them prompted the ending here, in which mother and baby walk back into the sea and London can live with the damage.

Shin Godzilla (2016). The coda, and the proof that the form still works. Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi made it after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, and its true monster is procedure: committee meetings, nested chains of authority, ministers requesting clarification while a thing eats Kamata. It is the most sustained satire any kaiju film has attempted.

Harryhausen versus Tsuburaya

The two industries arrived at incompatible techniques, and each technique produced its country’s meaning.

Ray Harryhausen animated puppets a frame at a time and composited them into live plates with rear projection — the process he later branded Dynamation. It is agonisingly slow, a few seconds of screen time per working day, and it yields something no other method can: a creature that moves like an animal. Harryhausen’s Rhedosaurus shifts its weight, hesitates, and turns its head to look at things it has decided to look at. Every frame is an individual authorial decision about intention.

Eiji Tsuburaya wanted stop-motion for Gojira and had neither the schedule nor the money, so he put Haruo Nakajima inside a suit weighing close to a hundred kilograms and built Tokyo around him at roughly 1/25 scale. The technique that saves it is overcranking: shoot at three times normal speed, play back at twenty-four frames, and the suit’s motion slows and acquires mass, because falling debris in a miniature drops too fast at normal speed and the eye reads it as small. Nakajima studied animals at Ueno Zoo to build the walk.

Here is the consequence. A stop-motion creature can never quite share a frame with a person, so Harryhausen’s monsters are photographed as phenomena — surveyed from a distance, met with artillery. A suit contains an actor, so Tsuburaya’s monsters have posture and mood, and the camera can stand in the street with them. The American cycle therefore produced a problem to be solved by the National Guard, and the Japanese one produced a character with a grievance who could return next year, which is exactly what happened. The aesthetic argument for suitmation is in the rubber-suit sublime.

What ended it, and how to watch

The cycle wound down for reasons that were half political and half commercial. The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty drove testing underground and out of the newsreels, taking the mushroom cloud off the front page; the drive-in audience that had sustained the B-half of the bill moved on to beach pictures and the Poe cycle; and the anxiety itself matured into something a monster could no longer carry, ending up in Dr Strangelove the following year. The genre’s dread migrated indoors, and by the 1980s it was biological — Carpenter’s The Thing and Cronenberg’s The Fly are the atomic monster’s grandchildren, with the fear relocated from the test site to the cell.

Start with Gojira in the Japanese cut, which Criterion restored along with the American version for comparison — watching them back to back is the most efficient film-history lesson available on the subject. Then Them!, which is on Warner Archive and holds up as a thriller with no allowance made. Then The Incredible Shrinking Man for what the cycle could do when it stopped looking at the skyline and looked at a man in a cellar.