Godzilla Essay

In today’s modern media there are many genres to suit many audiences individual tastes and one of these genres is horror. Horror is a genre that seeks to coerce a negative reaction, such as fear or disgust, in audiences by manipulating their emotions. Depending on where the audience is from massively varies what they see as horror due to different cultural backgrounds and for this reason horror films are often given the prefix of its country of origin. One of the more unique countries of origin for horror is Japan where there is a heavy focus on the building of suspense and psychological horror. While these movies generally focus on ghosts and themes heavily influenced by Japanese folklore there are movies that are more influenced by modern culture such as Godzilla or Gojira in Japanese. Godzilla was the beginning of the Kaiju Eiga (monster movie) subgenre in Japan, which generally featured monster attacks on major Japanese cities or the monsters fighting with each other. The movie is centred on Godzilla, a prehistoric monster revived by the experimentation of nuclear weapons,
In the film Godzilla is a symbol for the nuclear attack on Japan that happened at the end of WW2 a little under ten years prior to the films release. "The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the bomb. Mankind had created the bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind." (Steve Ryfle, 2005) The director of the movie Ishirō Honda filmed the rampage of Godzilla with the mentality that its onslaught was the physical embodiment of an anatomic bomb and is quoted saying "If Godzilla had been a dinosaur or some other animal, he would have been killed by just one cannonball. But if he were equal to an atomic bomb, we wouldn't know what to do. So, I took the characteristics of an atomic bomb and applied them to Godzilla." (Steve Ryfle,