The premiere of the celebrated episode 3 of ‘The Last of Us’ has increased the movement created by the HBO series, despite the fact that barely a single zombie appears in its hour and a quarter, which leaves us room to remember ‘Matango’ a strange horror movie with mushroom men, with designs similar to those infected with Cordycepswhich was more fully delivered to pure terror, but which could perfectly be chapter zero of the fiction that emerged from the video game.
Let’s change Jakarta for Tokyo and the ending could connect with what the fiction of Neil Druckman. Those responsible for the film are the director and the producer of the first ‘Godzilla’ film (1954). Here Ishiro Honda took a break from his kaiju eiga series with a couple of sci-fi movies like ‘Kaitei Gunkan’ and ‘Atragon’, to delve into the most classic terror away from giant monsters. Known in several English-speaking territories as ‘Matango: Fungus of Terror’ or ‘Attack of the Mushroom People’, they made one think of another camping trip with rubber suits.
But both titles don’t quite fit together with a surprisingly serious film, much darker and more mature than one might expect, one that foreshadows later new-flesh horrors, and fungal mutations not just akin to ‘The Last of Us’ but creations of The Last of Us. Charles Burnseither episodes like ‘Spores’ from RL Stine’s ‘The Haunting Hour’. About to turn 60 in 2023, his popularity has grown over time, with fantastic names like Guillermo del Toro declaring themselves a fan.
The story, written by Takeshi Kimura, adapts a 1907 text by William Hope Hodgson, ‘The Voice in the Night’, which had already been faithfully adapted in 1958 for an episode of the television series ‘Suspicion’, and partially also ‘Fungus Isle’ (1928) by Philip M. Fisher Jr. Here the plot varies and we follow university professor Kenji Murai ( Akira Kubo) who is imprisoned in a Tokyo hospital, from where he recounts the events that led him there, in the purest Lovecraft weird fiction style. He was just one of a group of people now lost.
Claustrophobia and contagion
The rest of his team included his assistant Senzō Koyama (Kenji Sahara), writer Etsurō Yoshida (Hiroshi Tachikawa), celebrity Masafumi Kasai (Yoshio Tsuchiya), singer Mami Sekiguchi (Kumi Mizuno), and student Akiko Sōma (Miki Yashiro). , who are enjoying a trip on Kasai’s yacht when a sudden storm severely damages the ship, leaving them stranded on a seemingly deserted island. They soon meet a large forest of brightly colored mushrooms and the wreckage of another yacht, with rotten sails and the interior covered with a mysterious fungus. Not very different from what happens in ‘Alien’ or ‘Final Horizon’.
They begin to suspect that nuclear tests conducted on a nearby island might have mutated the local fungi into huge mushrooms, and as their food supply dwindles, they realize they may need to be eaten, Yoshida being the first to try. Kasai is attacked by a hideous looking man and others start behaving strangely as they start to transform into fungal creatures. A premise of infection and survival horror that could be a precedent for any zombie movie.
In fact, there are details not very different from ‘Night of the Living Dead’, and that air of an anachronistic 50’s science fiction movie that becomes more distressing and claustrophobic than necessary. The idea of the infection or contagion of a group within a more or less closed space is also reminiscent of ‘Cabin Fever’ (2002), although here the appearance of the mushroom-men is simmering and there is a great job to increase the tension and convey uneasiness to the viewer. Strange things are glimpsed first behind the undergrowth in the woods, then they show themselves through doorways or windows.
A ’60s horror anomaly
The zombies of ‘Matango’ they convert slowly and also have different states of infection, like those affected by cordycepsbut what is ahead of us is a genre of characters of both sexes isolated against nature, which could take some early elements of shipwreck narrative “perversions” like William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’, to movies of similar “botanical” infection as ‘Las Ruinas’ (2008).
‘Matango’ was far from what Toho used to offer. It was so different that it was not particularly popular in Japan and was even considered banned, as the facial disfigurements caused by the fungus were reminiscent of some of the horrific effects on some survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks. This atomic association was not free, and it can be perceived even in the original posterin which it is not difficult to see the creatures as walking mushroom clouds.
It is also one of the first samples of psychedelic cinema, similar to what we could find in chapters of ‘Mothra’ or ‘Godzilla’, like ‘Hedora, the toxic bubble’ already in the 70s. ‘Matango’ is an anomaly of the time, without completely leaving the monster science fiction of the 50s or completely entering the gothic drift of the 60s; an eccentric and at times strangely beautiful piece of work, with mind-blowing sequencesvery careful set design and macabre special effects by the famous Eiji Tsuburaya, which converge on Hogdson’s inspiration with ‘The Fog’ (1980) by John Carpenter, in his foggiest and most unreal moments on the ship.
Different interpretations and critique of liberalization
In fact, the Spanish film ‘El buque maldito’ (1974) also shares that rarefied atmosphere of bow and stern, although here the legend and ghostly ideas weigh less and more the process of disintegration of the cohesion of the group as they spend more time on the island, condensing a depressing, pessimistic and disturbing mood at the same time. The artificiality of the jungle, with its aggressive mushroom blooms, is a particularly bizarre sight, and their mutations are unlike anything seen up to that point, especially their strange, eerie noises, particularly the low, slow laugh they make as they try to overwhelm Murai.
Another of the differential elements of ‘Matango’ with Toho’s work is its substantial social commentary, not because the Godzilla films did not reflect the terrors of an era, or ended up being an avatar of the country’s patriotic spirit, but because in this era more elusive and varied, so that has had different interpretations. On the one hand, it was seen as a warning statement about the coming drug invasion, but consumption was perhaps only part of the postwar critique of Japanese culture.
The moral weakness and corruption exhibited by the human characters is a sign that the film operates at the level of metaphor, about Japan’s economic miracle and the changes its society underwent due. The castaways represent different figures that appeared under opulence and change: business people, industry, art, culture, academics or merchants, all experience the temptations of the island, they approach materialism and the drive for consumption, which It leads to the destruction of individuality.
From obscurity to pop culture
They become a monstrous mass, beings indistinguishable from one another. It was also interpreted as the effect of the invasion of Western culture, but the truth is that no hypothesis is too twisted to exclude it, not even the echoes of the later Gaia hypothesis. The only certainty is that from lysergic lighting to colorful visions of intoxicating textures, Honda unleashes mind-blowing visuals in the third act, explicitly linking the island’s mind-bending environments with the neon-drenched surrealism of Tokyo.
Although still a rarity, ‘Matango’ has been gaining popularity over time, DVD and Blu-Ray editions have made it easy to access and it has seen directors like Steven Soderbergh have declared their devotion to her. Something he recalled in an interview with Little White Lies magazine:
“It was a movie I saw as a kid and it scared the hell out of me. I wanted to do a remake, but despite trying twice I couldn’t reach an agreement with Toho, so it came to nothing.”
Many have compared the film to a nightmarish version of ‘Gilligan’s Island’, in fact, some say the CBS sitcom could have been inspired by it. Be that as it may, it is not a common work in the fantastic Japanese of the time and can only be related to other fascinating oddities of the decade like ‘Goke, Bodysnatcher from Hell’ (1968) by Hajime Satô, also about a group of people at the mercy of a threat worthy of cosmic horror.
The mycological legacy
We could also see similar plots with hostile mushrooms in ‘One Step Beyond’ episodes like ‘The Sacred Mushroom’ (1961); ‘Blake’s 7’ as ‘The Web’ (1978); ‘Welcome Stranger’ (1965) from ‘Lost in Space’, in which small eukaryotic life forms become giant tentacled monsters; ‘The Last Sunset’ (1974) from ‘Space 99’… the mushroom has never been a foreign concept in science fictionalthough the Lovecraftian variations of ‘The color that fell from the sky’ such as the episode ‘The lonely death of Jordi Verrill’ from ‘Creepshow’ (1982) or ‘Annihilation’ (2018) have used not very different developments.
His legacy, little by little, has been finding its place in details such as the 80’s period of the comic ‘The Swamp Thing’, in which an entity called Matango appeared, a spore-hive mind that infected people and turned them into giant mushrooms who walked until they finally suffered a horrible death, which left no doubt of their inspiration. In the ‘X-Files’ episode ‘Field Trip’ (1999), Mulder and Scully encountered hallucination-inducing spores not unlike those in the film, while being ‘consumed’ by the fungus and in ‘Melanie: the Girl with all the Gifts’ there is a convergence in inspiration with ‘TLOU’.
Current films such as ‘Gaia’ (2021) or ‘Spores’ (2021) follow the trend, and, taking into account that ‘Matango’ appeared before George A. Romero’s walking dead, ‘The Walking Dead’ or even ‘Troll 2’, in which eating a plant made you a vegetable, his contribution of mushroom-men continues to be unique, despite the fact that he has found its translation into the 21st century in a series like ‘The Last of Us’, which turns infection by spores, or hyphae, into a new mythology in which the direct precedent is both in zombie cinema and in this little hidden gem from the sixties.