I’ve got kaiju on the brain. At the time of this writing, the Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) SDCC trailer is a hot topic online, there’s a new Godzilla anime on Netflix, I got back a couple weeks ago from a kaiju fan convention, and I’m in the final stages of prepping my kaiju novel, In the Shadow of Extinction, for publication on August 14th (#buymybook). GIANT MONSTERS EVERYWHERE. I grew up as a fan of kaiju movies and I think now is definitely the most rewarding time to be a fan, in my lifetime at least. Today I want to talk about my favorite writer of kaiju cinema and how we can take some lessons from him and use them in just about any genre.
Screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa (1921 – 1992) is one of the least celebrated names responsible for making Godzilla into the icon that it is today. More than that, he played an instrumental role in seeing that the kaiju genre persevered. Sekizawa was a fun loving, imaginative writer. He worked in a multitude of genres (including scripting crime pics for Seijun Suzuki and Kihachi Okamoto!!) but I think it’s safe to say that he found his calling when Toho brought him in to write science fiction spectacles starting in the 1950s. Along with the grumpy, more politically minded screenwriter Takeshi Kimura, Sekizawa became the writing voice behind many of the classic Japanese science fiction films of the 60s and 70s.
Audiences clamoured for more giant monster mayhem after Godzilla (1954) but, as with any hot new trend, they’d stop turning up if the filmmakers just kept churning out different variations of the same story. The first kaiju films, classics though they certainly are, follow the Hollywood formula as seen in films like King Kong (1933), Them! (1954), and a multitude of Ray Harryhausen special effects masterworks. In these movies, a monster is unleashed upon a world, creating a conflict that is eventually resolved by human ingenuity and/or weaponry. Shinichi Sekizawa wrote some of these classic formula kaiju films, like Varan (1958). That film’s biggest surprise is that the title kaiju can glide through the skies like a flying squirrel. But surprises are difficult to find in the story, characters, and plot twists. There is always this feeling that we’ve seen this movie before – sure, the monster is different, but a new monster with the same old moves just isn’t enough.
Sekizawa, who loved kaiju and sci-fi with all his heart, came up with a clever idea to keep things fresh. He took that old formula which had the monsters creating conflict and humans resolving it and flipped it on its head. The Sekizawa formula had humans creating conflict and let the monsters resolve it.
Let’s take a look at Sekizawa’s two key Mothra movies, Mothra (1961) and Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964). In both films, the twin fairies, who are protected by the godlike Mothra, are taken by greedy capitalist businessmen sensing an opportunity. This enrages Mothra, who wreaks havoc until the fairies are returned safely. At one point when the two evil schemers of Mothra vs. Godzilla are fighting each other over who gets to keep the riches from their plot, it’s Godzilla who sorts things out by walking through their building. For what it’s worth, capitalist greed is also a key characteristic for the (bumbling and lovable) ‘villain’ in Sekizawa’s King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), who discovers Kong and wants him brought to Japan because he wants to have his own monster for financial gain. Unlike the original King Kong, man’s weapons cannot defeat either Kong or Godzilla, and the problem that was unleashed by man is left to the monsters to sort out between each other.
You see this flip in formula again and again across Sekizawa’s sci-fi scripts: people do something bad and it’s up to our monsters to save us. This is only one of the links we can make between kaiju and superheroes. Of course, Sekizawa is also responsible for giving more comedic takes of the monsters. This development was both for the better and for the worse within the Godzilla series but there is no doubt that a sense of fun had a big part to play in keeping the series fresh for old fans and approachable to new audiences.
I think it’s worth considering whether we can use Sekizawa’s formula flip in other genres, too. We’re always asking ‘what if?’ questions in regards to reimagining our favorite genres. Sekizawa’s approach is like a more defined ‘what if?’ question. It asks us to reevaluate how we depict our monsters in the constraints of plot’s conflict and resolution. Can this formula flip be applied to your horror story about the slasher killer? Your adventure novel? Your original superhero comic? Think about what creates and resolves conflict and see if flipping those roles might make for a more original story in a familiar genre.
