Matango (1963)

Wissenswertes

Matango (マタンゴ) is a 1963 Japanese horror film directed by Ishirō Honda. The film stars Akira Kubo, Kumi Mizuno and Kenji Sahara. Partially based on William Hope Hodgson's short story "The Voice in the Night", it centers on a group of castaways on an island who are unwittingly altered by a local species of mutagenic mushrooms.

Production

The film was based on a story in S-F Magazine which Masami Fukushima was an editor of. A treatment was written on the film by Shinichi Hoshi and Fukushima which was then made into a screenplay by Takeshi Kimura. The story itself was based on William Hope Hodgson's short story "The Voice in the Night", which originally appeared in the November 1907 issue of Blue Book.

The script was relatively faithful to Hodgson's story, but added a number of extra characters. Honda was also inspired by a news story about a group of rich kids who took their father's yacht far into the sea and had to be rescued. Early drafts featured characters paralleling their real-life counterparts, as well as reports of ships and aircraft vanishing in the Bermuda Triangle.

Director Ishirō Honda was better known for his kaiju (giant monster) films, but occasionally developed horror films such as The H-Man (1958) and The Human Vapor (1960), where characters become bizarre transformed beings. Honda's last film in this style was Matango. Critic Bill Cooke noted in Video Watchdog that Matango defies easy categorization as a film belonging to either the kaiju (monster) or kaidan (ghost) genres of the era.

In their book Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa, Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski stated that both thematically and visually, Matango was "uniquely dark" among Honda's films and was a radical departure from his brightly lit and lighthearted films Mothra and King Kong vs. Godzilla. Art director Shiegkazu Ikuno designed the stark look of the film. Ikuno was the apprentice of the production designer of Godzilla, Satoru Cuko.

According to Yoshio Tsuchiya, Honda took the project seriously, telling actors before production that the film was "a serious drama picture, so please keep this in mind and work accordingly". Tsuchiya also explained that in addition to the official ending of the film, a different ending was shot where Kubo's face was normal.

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