Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

The Japanese title for this movie promises "three daikaiju [in] the greatest battle on Earth". To prove this is no idle threat, the title sequence is a spoilerific montage of shots from the fight scenes involving Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra and King Ghidorah (although it avoids giving away too much about King Ghidorah's appearance). Enjoy this while you can, because – barring a brief hallucinatory shot of the larval Mothra – it'll be most of an hour before any of them appears on screen. Astute readers will have noticed that there are four monsters present, not three – perhaps the Japanese title was meant to imply that we would see three monsters fighting among themselves, while hiding the twist that these three would team up in battle against the fourth.

The story opens with two oddities: a winter heatwave and a worldwide meteor shower. Although one solitary meteorite will play a significant part in the plot, the rest of the meteors and the heatwave aren’t really followed up on. They're just remarked on as examples of the kind of weird things that have been happening lately.

(Sidenote: the recent clash between Godzilla and Mothra is not listed among these weird things. In fact, it’s apparently so unremarkable that Mothra's tiny singing pixies, the Shobijin, can turn up on a family entertainment show on national TV without anyone turning a hair. But more on that shortly.)

Shindo Naoko is the lead reporter for Mystery in the 20th Century, a sensationalist TV show that's being developed to capitalise on all the weird stuff. We see her interviewing a group of UFO watchers who complain, in time-honoured tradition, that she's driving all the UFOs away with her sceptical thoughts. She's well placed to cover the events that unfold over the rest of the film.

She's also, by a lucky coincidence, the sister of the policeman assigned to guard Princess Salno, a visiting dignitary from the kingdom of Selgina. Selgina is supposedly a small Himalayan nation, but everyone who lives there looks Japanese. It boasts a jarring blend of buildings with windows in the Arabian style and costumes that include huge Elizabethan ruffs. The main human villain, an assassin sent to Japan to kill Salno, is obviously the villain because he always wears dark glasses. (If you've ever wondered what the fashion combo of dark glasses and a ruff would look like, now's your chance to find out.)

On its way to Japan, Salno's plane is blown up by agents of the Selginan political opposition. But before that happens, a UFO approaches the plane and shines a green light into Salno's face. (Vindication for the UFO watchers, if they only knew!) Salno appears to slip into a trance and hears a voice telling her to get out of the plane immediately. We find out later that she was rescued from the ocean by a fisherman, traded her royal golden bracelet for some of his old clothes and vanished when they landed ashore. She appears in Japan the very next day, preaching doom in a public square and claiming to be a prophet from Venus.

Meanwhile, the Shobijin guest on the TV show Where Are They Now? to answer the questions of two young boys who wanted to meet Mothra. (See, this is how mundane daikaiju are to the characters in these films now.) They no longer have the fancy hats they wore in Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) and are dressed much as they were in the original Mothra (1961). They bring the audience up to date on the two larvae last seen in the previous film – one sadly died but the other's doing very well, thank you. They also conjure up a vision of the larval Mothra by singing to the audience. This is a new song, heard only in this film, and the lyrics are actually in Japanese, making it less uncomfortable than the other Mothra songs with their "foreign" lyrics. The Infant Islanders are still wearing brownface make-up, though. Infant Island is only seen in this vision, which will be repeated with the song later on when the Shobijin summon Mothra for real. All we see of the island is the interior of a cave.

The Venusian prophet correctly predicts the reappearance of Rodan at Mt Aso (where the climax of the film Rodan (1956) took place) and trouble at the Kurobe Dam where a strange meteorite has landed. She also persuades the Shobijin not to stay aboard the passenger ship they were planning to take back to Infant Island. And a good thing too, because only a few scenes later that ship is attacked by none other than Godzilla.

Godzilla looks much as he did in Mothra vs Godzilla, but his face is a bit more under control now - the "eyebrows" have gone. After destroying the ship, he heads inland, presumably for a good old-fashioned rampage, but is repeatedly buzzed by Rodan. He appears to be disoriented by the sound Rodan makes in flight as much as by the dive-bombing. As in his debut movie, Rodan looks like a large pterosaur with two horns sprouting from the back of his head. He doesn't appear to have teeth this time, though. The two monsters chase each other to the vicinity of Mt Fuji, where they fight in earnest.

The meteorite, which has strong but intermittent magnetic properties, glows and hatches to release a golden cloud of energy. This energy coalesces into the form of a creature identified by the prophet as King Ghidorah. (The "King" in King Ghidorah's name is clearly meant to evoke King Kong, lending a bit of instant authority and personality to this new daikaiju. "Ghidorah", pronounced "Ghid'rah", suggests "Hydra", the multi-headed serpent of Greek mythology.)

Ghidorah has the scaly skin of a reptile, two legs, two tails, a chunky torso, a pair of leathery wings that allow him to fly, and three long necks. The heads on the ends of these necks strongly resemble those of the classic Japanese dragon - a sort of long-snouted, horned lion's face. He makes a chittering sound and can fire lightning-like destructive beams from his mouths. According to the prophet, he destroyed an advanced civilisation on Venus some 5,000 years ago, and now he's come to do the same on Earth. No details of his origin or motivation are ever given.

It's around this time that the policeman who was assigned to guard Princess Salno takes her (or the Venusian prophet, if you'd rather) to see Dr Tsukamoto, a psychiatrist, in the hope of restoring her memory. Tsukamoto puts her under hypnosis, but she still insists she's a Venusian. There's a bit of water-muddying at this point, as she talks about Venusian refugees coming to Earth 5,000 years ago, interbreeding with the locals and leaving little psychic traces of themselves. (So was the Venusian already waiting inside Salno's mind, or was it implanted by that UFO earlier in the film?) Perturbed, Tsukamoto insists he'll have to try shock therapy. (He's very quick to suggest shock therapy. I'm going to come right out and say it: Tsukamoto is a bad psychiatrist.) He doesn't get the chance, though, as a combination of Selginan assassins and giant monsters drives everyone out of his clinic. The prophet is later seen praying to the universe to spare Earth from King Ghidorah, which apparently achieves nothing except presenting a lovely clear target for the assassin. The bullet grazes her head and finally clears up her amnesia. The assassin then dies in a convenient rockfall.

Aware that Mothra can't defeat King Ghidorah on her own but keen to prevent the destruction of Earth, the Shobijin summon Mothra to negotiate with Godzilla and Rodan and get them to team up against the alien invader. This scene, famous among fans as "the monster summit", sees Mothra firing cocoon material at the other two monsters while they childishly bicker, with the Shobijin giving a running commentary of what the monsters are "saying". (The American dub adds a lovely line for the Shobijin, telling Godzilla off for his foul language.) Godzilla initially refuses to help humanity, for the astonishing reason that he feels victimised by them; Rodan sympathises. But when Mothra faces Ghidorah alone and takes a pasting, the other two relent. They bring Ghidorah to a standstill by having Godzilla hold his tail while Mothra, circling above on Rodan's shoulders, cocoons Ghidorah's three heads. Ghidorah flies off, apparently leaving Earth in peace. We may assume the terrestrial monsters disperse peaceably, but we only see Mothra and the Shobijin leaving Japan.

All the familiar faces turn up again, some of them in roles confusingly similar to those they played in the same year's Mothra vs Godzilla. Hoshi Yuriko, who was a press photographer in the earlier film, plays Shindo Naoko. Her editor is played by Sahara Kenji, the villain in the previous film. Koizumi Hiroshi plays the scientist Professor Murai, who is in no way to be confused with his last role as the scientist Professor Miura. Tajima Yoshifumi, a secondary villain in Mothra vs Godzilla, reverts to type here as the captain of a doomed ship. Omura Senkichi, instantly recognisable, cameos as the man who climbs down into the crater of Mt Aso to retrieve a tourist's hat moments before Rodan bursts onto the scene. Ito Emi and Yumi, of course, reprise their roles as the Shobijin. Rejoining the franchise are Hirata "Dr Serizawa" Akihiko as the chief of police and Shimura "Dr Yamane" Takashi as the psychiatrist Tsukamoto. Wakabayashi Akiko, starring as the Venusian-possessed Princess Salno, had played a supporting role in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and would go on to feature as one of the Japanese secret agents James Bond beds in You Only Live Twice (1967) (she's the one who doesn't make it to the end of the movie).

Although aliens had featured in some of Toho’s earlier films – notably the space adventures The Mysterians (1957) and Battle in Outer Space (1959) and the semi-comedic heist movie Dogora (1964) – this is their first introduction into the Godzilla series. The detail of Princess Salno claiming to speak on behalf of a vanished Venusian civilisation is an interesting one. 1964 is a bit early for Uri Geller, who didn’t start bending spoons in public until the late 60s and first claimed to be a vessel for extraterrestrial powers in the 70s, but there's always Atlantis. People like Madame Blavatsky in the 1870s and 1880s and Edgar Cayce from the mid-1920s to the mid-40s made a career out of revealing the secrets of ancient Atlantis and predicting doom to American audiences. It’s possible these were the model for the character of Princess Salno, Venusian prophet. I haven’t been able to find any record of a similar celebrity in Japan in the early 1960s, although that doesn’t mean there weren’t any. But between this and (spoiler alert!) the mention of a lost civilisation in Daiei’s first Gamera movie, I think it's fair to suppose there was a fashion for these and similar pseudoscientific topics in Japan around this time. Naoko's TV show, Mystery in the 20th Century, might well have been inspired by a real-world precedent.

And just to up the stakes, now that grudge matches and team-ups between terrestrial kaiju are old hat, we get an alien daikaiju as well. After a string of prehistoric monsters and giant but recognisable terrestrial creatures, Ghidorah’s design is a lot more out there. The costume works really well and the fight scenes look spectacular, thanks to several puppeteers working the heads and tails as well as stuntmen inside the body. Toho’s special effects team have come a long way since they pulled off a bodiless eight-headed wyrm in The Three Treasures (1959). The trade-off for this is that we don’t get an adult Mothra as well – we only see Mothra in her larval form. A giant moth flying around those Ghidorah heads would have been one set of strings too many.

The phrase "monster summit", to describe the scene in which Mothra mediates between Godzilla and Rodan, gives a clue to how some fans have interpreted this film. Ghidorah, with his multiple dragon heads, might perhaps represent an expansionist China (and 1964 was, after all, a Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar). He can only be contained if Mothra can persuade the monster superpowers (Godzilla = America, so Rodan must be... the Soviet Union?) to put aside their differences and defend Japan. Some commentators have tried to stretch this geopolitical reading of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster across the rest of the early Shōwa Godzilla series, which I think is too reductive.

In any case, dragons in Japanese art look very much like those in Chinese art, and the animal zodiac that includes the Year of the Dragon is also observed in Japan, so it’s by no means a given that Ghidorah is meant to embody China (although the much less subtle Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) might make us think again). Relations between Japan and China at this time were frosty but not particularly hostile – there was some trade between them, although China derided Japan as a lackey of the USA because of the American troops still stationed there, and Japan might have felt similar reservations over China’s close relationship with the Soviet Union. (That, incidentally, would complicate any reading of this film that sees Rodan as a stand-in for the USSR.) China’s first nuclear weapons test, conducted some distance away in north-western China, might have caused Japan some anxiety, but that had only happened two months before this film’s release and I don’t think it’s likely to have determined its plot or kaiju design.

This kind of interpretation – with daikaiju representing nations of interest to Japan, one for one – is only made easier by the way the kaiju are increasingly presented as named individuals with distinct personalities, their identity consistent across films. They’re becoming less like mindless, destructive creatures and more like kami or yōkai, and an inherent side effect of that is that they gain more potential as symbols. Rodan is now recast in this mould and resurrected at the site of his destruction in 1956 – Mothra’s mystical qualities are rubbing off on him as well as on Godzilla. Ghidorah, of course, has quite literally come from the heavens, and we’ll never get any other explanation of his origin, rational or supernatural.

What I find most interesting about this film is that, for the first time, we're invited to have pity for Godzilla. He's been an existential threat, a destructive nuisance and a buffoon, but we've never previously been asked to consider that he might have feelings. We’ve never really been asked to think about his psychology at all – it’s a bit startling to find he, Rodan and Mothra are capable of enough rational thought to have a “verbal” debate. If there’s much more of this sort of thing, why, we might even be asked to think of him as some kind of hero.