Happy Halloween, readers! As a certain Transylvanian Count once intoned, I bid you welcome!
I don’t know about you guys, but Halloween is my favorite time of the year. After all, October is the one month when being a monster fanatic is socially acceptable! While watching monster movies and enjoying a good spooky story is a year-round obsession for me, its hard to deny that such ghastly goings on just feel more right on Halloween night. The weather is gloomy and dark, the leaves on the trees are in that perfect state of half living, half dying, and there/s nothing better than curling up under a warm blanket to partake in a creepy movie or book.
Last year, the GNP celebrated Halloween in style, going all-out with a social media celebration of terrifying tokusatsu flicks, all leading up to the publication of a brand new short story: Casefile”MATANGO”, based on one of Ishiro Honda’s most chilling creature features. Well, I had so much fun doing it that this year, I decided to do it again! If you’ve been following along on Facebook and Twitter, the GNP has been counting down 13 DAYS OF TOKU TERROR, all leading to October 31st for a special spooky surprise… and whaddya know, that’s today! So, without further ado, its time to reveal the GNP’s newest scary story…
In 1956, Toho released its first color kaiju eiga, a brilliant and masterfully constructed spectacle of destruction and horror about a series of ghastly murders in a mine, a race of ravenous giant insects, and a duo of flying reptiles hell bent on the destruction of mankind. The film was Sora no Daikaiju Radon, or, as its known outside of Japan, Rodan. I could go on and on about how much I love this film, or about how great it is. But I’ll spare you all that and just say this… in addition to being entertaining and ultimately tragic, its also a film guaranteed to creep the heck out of you! Seriously… mutilated bodies fished out of flooded mines? Giant insects that rip people apart like madmen? Giant Pterosaurs reducing jet pilots to piles of bloody clothes and simply flying over a building to tear it down? This is scary stuff! If ever there was a giant monster film that could be called a true horror flick, this, my friends, is it.
In other words, it was the perfect film to adapt for this year’s Halloween story!
Using the plot and flow of the original Japanese cut and combining it with the memorable narration dialogue written for the American version (in a similar fashion to The Steve Martin Report), this new story – which will be presented in two parts to reflect the structure of the film itself – is told in the form of an extended letter written by the film’s main character, Shigeru, played memorably by the great actor Kenji Sahara. With all the character went through in the film, including watching his friends die and being so traumatized by witnessing Rodan hatch that he looses his memory, I thought his perspective would be an interesting one to view the film through. I’m pretty proud of the end result, and I hope it will be entertaining for you all to read!
With that said, I think its time for me to stop talking and let you all read! Happy Halloween to all of you, and I hope you enjoy the first part of the GODZILLA NOVELIZATION PROJECT’s newest short story: Sora no Daikiju: An Excerpt from the Writings of Shigeru Kawamura.
See you all in November!
The Godzilla Novelization Project 