Tag: horror

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The Godzilla Film That Confronted Japan’s Darkest History

There’s a blind spot in the triumph of Godzilla Minus One. While it tells a brilliant story about trauma and survivor’s guilt, it also quietly sweeps the brutal reality of Japan’s own wartime atrocities under the rug. I love Minus One, but I have to agree with its critics—it dodges inescapable questions raised by its premise.

The same cannot be said for Shusuke Kaneko’s 2001 film, Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack—often just called GMK—which makes it brutally clear that Japan was a perpetrator. Here, Godzilla doesn’t just represent nuclear anxiety; he embodies the collective rage of the Pacific War’s victims. Chinese civilians, Asian conscripts, and abandoned Japanese soldiers return to punish a modern country that has willfully erased its own aggression. The horror in GMK is moral: we deserve the haunting.

The plot kicks off with tabloid TV reporter Yuri Tachibana, who is shooting a fluff piece when unnatural earthquakes swallow a biker gang whole. The sole survivor swears he saw a monster in the rubble. This leads her colleague to dig up an ancient text on Japan’s three Guardian Monsters: Baragon, Mothra, and King Ghidorah.

Yuri’s investigation leads her to a mysterious old prophet who delivers a chilling warning: Godzilla has returned. He is no longer just a mutated dinosaur, but a vessel for the restless, furious dead, driven to destroy a modern Japan that has chosen to forget its sins. The film then tracks Yuri, her reluctant crew, and her estranged father—Admiral Tachibana—as the ancient guardians are awakened one by one to meet Godzilla in a city-leveling collision.

It’s this grounded, human anchor that elevates GMK into the upper echelon of the franchise. Unlike typical kaiju protagonists who passively stumble into the plot, work for a faceless government agency, or rely on magical psychic abilities, Yuri actively and dangerously forces herself into the narrative. When her colleague Takeda—who provides the crucial historical context—refuses to drive her into an active war zone out of entirely realistic terror, Yuri simply grabs a bicycle and pedals off to chase a fifty-meter radioactive lizard on her own.

She perfectly channels the film’s tension between modernity and tradition, using cheap, digital broadcasting technology to expose ancient, suppressed spiritual truths. Yuri operates as a modern-day Cassandra, desperately trying to broadcast a warning to a populace that has been conditioned by its own government to look away from the ugly truth.

The dynamic with her father brings genuine emotional weight. He is a survivor of the original 1954 attack and the military commander burdened with stopping this new incarnation. To him, she is just a junk-media journalist chasing the very nightmare he is living. Watching her relentlessly pursue the truth and gradually earn his respect delivers a character payoff we rarely see in a kaiju flick.

Visually, the film is just as striking. Cinematographer Masahiro Kishimoto utilizes extreme low angles on massive open sets to emphasize the overwhelming, crushing scale of the monsters. Godzilla is framed as an unstoppable force of nature—frequently obscured by thick smoke, swallowed in deep shadows, and set against the chaotic backdrop of terrified civilians fleeing for their lives.

Beyond the heavy themes, the film still leaves room for some fantastic easter eggs for franchise fans—including a clever cameo by the Mothra twins, and a snarky dismissal of a monster attack in New York, serving as a cunning dunk on the 1998 American adaptation. There is also a great piece of behind-the-scenes trivia: during the production of Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino actually rented the Tokyo miniatures from this exact set to film the stylized sequence where the Bride’s airplane flies over the illuminated city skyline.

GMK stands as one of the sharpest, most relentless Godzilla films ever made. If you want to see it for yourself, there is a stunning 4K remaster and it is currently streaming on Netflix.

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The Dark History Buried in Exhuma

While Exhuma is marketed as a straightforward horror film, its true genius lies in its structure as a piece of supernatural “competency porn.” This is a film about experts doing their job with breathtaking skill, only the job happens to be calming the dead and confronting ancient curses.

The narrative begins with a wealthy Korean-American family in Los Angeles, plagued by a series of inexplicable and terrifying paranormal events. They enlist the help of a pairf young, stylish, and prodigiously talented shamans. The pair quickly diagnose the problem as a “grave call”—a cry of anguish from a tormented ancestor whose burial site has been desecrated.

To resolve it, they must return to South Korea and assemble a team: a veteran geomancer, who reads the very energy of the earth, and a duty-bound mortician. Their task is to locate the grave, exhume the coffin, and pacify the spirit through ritual cremation. But when they arrive at the remote, eerily isolated burial mound, the geomancer immediately senses a malevolent energy far darker than any ordinary restless spirit. They are standing on unhallowed ground, and what they are about to unearth is a secret tied to a painful chapter of the past

The film is anchored by a magnetic  performance from Kim Go-eun as the shaman Hwa-rim. She portrays a character who is both deeply reverent to tradition and thoroughly modern. In her ritual scenes, particularly the astonishing daesal gut exorcism, her physicality is hypnotic. The rhythmic chanting, the precise gestures, the sheer force of her conviction—it’s a performance of terrifying authenticity that makes the supernatural feel chillingly real.

Yet, outside of these ancient rites, she is a pragmatic professional. Kim Go-eun shows us a confident expert who approaches a paranormal crisis not with fear, but with a clear, systematic methodology. She and her team are consultants for the supernatural, and their meticulous process is utterly compelling to watch.

This sense of historical weight is not accidental. The director deliberately named his main characters after famous Korean independence activists who fought against Japanese colonial rule. This choice reframes their ghost-hunting as a continuation of that historical struggle. They are not merely exorcising a ghost; they are finishing the work of their ancestors, liberating the land itself from a curse born of occupation and oppression.

Exhuma is a great film blending folk horror with historical allegory. You can find it on several streaming services, and it is a must-see for anyone who appreciates a horror film that is as intelligent as it is terrifying.

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Where Horror, Comedy, and Kung Fu Collide: Mr. Vampire

Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s was a creative cauldron, bubbling with relentless commercially driven energy and an “anything goes” mentality.. Unlike Hollywood’s often more rigid genre structures, the most electrifying Hong Kong films of this era thrived on audacious collisions—action crashing into comedy, romance bleeding into horror, creating crowd-pleasing mashups that shouldn’t work but absolutely did.​

But sometimes, when you improvise wildly enough, you don’t just bend genres—you invent entirely new ones. Case in point: Ricky Lau’s 1985 masterpiece, Mr. Vampire.


The film tells the story of Master Kau, a stern Taoist priest whose unibrowed gravitas anchors a world gone deliriously mad. With two bumbling, girl-crazy apprentices in tow, he’s hired by the wealthy Mr. Yam to exhume and relocate his father’s remains—a practice hoped to improve the family fortunes. Upon opening the coffin, however, Master Kau discovers that twenty years have failed to claim the body. It remains pristine, unmarked by decay—a sure sign that it’s transforming into a jiangshi, a malevolent hopping vampire.​

He relocates the corpse to his mortuary for observation, but his apprentices’ spectacular incompetence allows the creature to escape, unleashing terror that only spiritual kung fu can stop.​

Mr. Vampire didn’t just create a film—it codified an entire jiangshi subgenre for the next decade. The film established the tropes of hopping vampire movies: the Stern Master, , the Bumbling Apprentices (whose incompetence drives half the plot), and most crucially, a specific set of esoteric combat principles for battling the undead.​

Sticky rice draws out vampire venom, paper talismans inscribed with blood-ink spells can immobilize the creatures, and holding one’s breath renders you invisible to these sightless predators. This last was actually improvised by the actors during the filming, but became so central that the movie was released in Taiwan with the title “Hold Your Breath for a Moment”.​

While Mr. Vampire essentially invented the cinematic jiangshi, the film’s visual inspiration springs from a genuinely haunting historical practice: corpse herding. During the Qing dynasty, the practice of “autumn executions” concentrated the killing of convicts into one brief annual period, creating a logistical nightmare: corpses often had to be transported vast distances for burial in their ancestral homes. Traditional funeral processions with four pallbearers were prohibitively expensive. .​

The solution was as ingenious as it was eerie. Taoist priests would bind corpses to flexible bamboo poles, and when two men carried these poles on their shoulders, the natural flex and bounce of the bamboo made the bodies appear to “hop” in unison as the procession moved through the countryside. This practical transportation method spawned folktales of hopping vampires. 

Mr. Vampire was Ricky Lau’s directorial debut, and its success instantly made him the go-to specialist for the genre.. His key technique was the masterful balancing of the film’s wild tonal shifts, ensuring that the slapstick comedy, intricate fight scenes, and moments of horror felt like a cohesive, exhilarating whole.

Mr. Vampire was a massive box office sensation in Hong Kong and across Asia, striking a chord with audiences who delighted in its unique fusion of screams and laughs..   

Today, the film’s reputation has only grown. It is beloved by cinephiles as a great example of the mashups that defined the golden age of Hong Kong’s cinema.

Right now, in October 2025, you can find Mr. Vampire and it’s sequels on the Criterion Channel.