#matango 1963

When I was in college, there was a little independent theater that mostly showed foreign & independent films, plus midnight cult classics, monster movie Mondays, and a monthly? amateur short film festival that was also a gong show*. I didn't make near enough use of this theater and I regret that to this day, but one of the movies I did see there on a Monster Movie Monday was Matango.

Spoilers for Matango below, if it wasn't obvious.

Matango (1963) is a Japanese monster movie by director Ishiro Honda, who you're most likely to know as the director of Godzilla (1954). Matango is generally considered his darkest film. Also, weirdly, I've heard a rumor it might be a major inspiration for Gilligan's Island? And I can kinda see it?

Anyway, it's about a group of people who are shipwrecked on an island full of radioactive fungus. Everybody's pretty leery about eating them, because the shipwreckees found an older shipwreck, including a ship's log from its (now-absent) survivors saying the mushrooms cause hallucinations - but they're running low on food so eventually some of them say y'know what, fuck it.

The mushrooms turn out to be not only hallucinogenic, but also addictive and infectious - you can tell how long someone's been eating mushrooms based on their level of mushroom disfigurement. The mushroom eaters hunt down the holdouts and force them to eat the mushrooms too. Only one dude escapes the island, and in the last shot of the film we see - dun dun DUN! - even though he got away without eating any mushrooms, he still got infected and is turning into a mushroom person.

So the implication is that the travelogue guy ate from a Matango-style walking mushroom, and got transformed into one himself for his trouble. And because it's a funny side page instead of main comic continuity, Marcille understands the implication and is freaked out by this.

What's funnier to me, though, is Laios's nonchalance. You just know that if he understood the cultural reference, he would be fucking drooling at the thought of a monster he could both eat and turn into.

Dumb asides about that independent theater's film festival below the cut.

Been real into the 1963 horror movie “matango” recently! Here are some doodles! akiko is 100% my favorite character, she’s such a sweetie I wish she wasn’t wrapped up with those dick heads