GODZILLA VS. HEDORAH Deserves More Love

Yoshimitsu Banno’s sole directorial entry in the series, with its divisive yet unique mix of psychedelia and apocalyptic horror, marks a memorable high point in the franchise.

Jack Anderson Keane
3 min readMar 1, 2024

“The atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb cast their fallout into the sea. Poison gas and sludge gets dumped in the ocean. Even sewage. I bet Godzilla would be mad if he saw this.”

Before it reaches its nuclear-powered flying form, Hedorah’s evolution into a gloopily grotesque tendril-covered red-eyed eldritch nightmare makes it the closest that Godzilla has come to fighting actual Cthulu. And although laying one’s eyes upon Hedorah doesn’t immediately drive the human psyche into irretrievable madness like the sight of Cthulu would, Hedorah is still enough of a Lovecraftian cosmic abomination to make it one of the most fearsome foes in all of Godzilla’s rogues gallery.

That Lovecraftian factor feeds into Godzilla vs. Hedorah’s admirable return to the franchise’s darker roots, of man-made monsters striking a palpable mortal fear into the hearts of the humanity that spawned it through our own hubris and planetary destruction. Where once Godzilla was awakened by our nuclear bombs, Hedorah is birthed from an extraterrestrial minuscule life-form that evolved and exponentially grew by feeding off of our toxic sludge and industrial pollution poured into the sea and the air. And from this living, breathing, walking morass of cancerous smog and factory filth, Hedorah delivers unto us multiple moments of truly upsetting, nigh-on full horror imagery, where death and destruction has a visibly human toll again.

It starts right from the opening credits montage, featuring that jaunty song and its bleakly apocalyptic lyrics, with that one primordially unnerving image of a mannequin broken apart, lying among the detritus floating in the toxic waste coating the sea’s surface, looking disturbingly close to a real human having been cut into pieces and dumped in a polluted river. This gets mirrored later in the film when a house full of people gets flooded with Hedorah’s excess sludge oozing off it at all times, and director Yoshimitsu Banno chooses to hold on the stark, quietly horrifying image of the house half-filled with the deadly sludge, its surface punctured by the frozen limbs of the people consumed beneath it. Yet even with later instances of seeing Hedorah having the power to kill people by spraying acidic mist that burns and melts people en masse down to nothing but skeletal remains (seriously, this movie goes hard), the one image that haunts me most is the moment when Hedorah’s sentient sludge withdraws its invasion of a psychedelic nightclub, leaving behind only its residue on the floors and walls, and a small, scared cat that it had swallowed and spat back out, leaving it dirty and shivering and mewling on the stairs in fright.

From what I’ve gathered via the Criterion Channel referring to this as a “divisive” entry in the Godzilla franchise, and from Wikipedia’s abridged history of what the reaction to the film was contemporaneously and retroactively, it seems Godzilla vs. Hedorah is an extremely your-mileage-may-vary kind of film, to put it mildly. Some are receptive to its blend of psychedelia in its imagery and music, its abstract animated segments, its examination of the psychological impact Hedorah’s destruction wreaks on a micro and macro level, and massive tonal shift towards apocalyptic monster horror, leaning quite a ways away from the goofily fun histrionics most of the series had steered into as Godzilla reached the insanely popular heroic icon status he’d achieved since Ishirō Honda’s original film 17 years prior. And others are decidedly not receptive to its charms, unable to vibe with its particular wavelength.

For me, however, this was exactly my cup of tea, and I think Godzilla vs. Hedorah ranks pretty close to the first Godzilla, and certainly high among the best sequels that came earlier in the series, right up there with Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, and Ebirah, Horror of the Deep.

Originally published February 5th 2024 at https://jackandersonkeane.substack.com.

--

--

Jack Anderson Keane

Bespectacled beardy bald bloke, writing film reviews, poetry, listicles, personal essays, and whatever else comes to mind.