The Best of Scenes and The Worst of Scenes: Gamera vs Viras

 

A Plan9Crunch essay by Joe Gibson

Gamera vs Viras is a conflicted, almost frustrating film to watch.  The tropes that will define the rest of Gamera’s Showa era are established here, such as AIP’s mandate of American boys starring alongside the Japanese boys and extraterrestrials menacing Earth, but there are still the last vestiges of early Showa Gamera here as well, as it is Kojiro Hongo’s third appearance as a prominent adult hero (though by far his least prominent role) and the protagonists here are mischievous, not entirely virtuous as their introduction is sabotaging a minisub and inadvertently endangering their scout master.  The practice of extensive stock footage use begins in this film, but it was not as refined as in later entries to the point of being distracting.  All this to say, the film fluctuates wildly scene to scene in the tone, writing quality and creativity to the point where the simplest way to describe the quality of Gamera vs Viras is in its juxtaposition.

Tone and Realism

The cold open of this movie is a remarkably effective scene of intimidating aliens stating their intention to colonize the Earth but being attacked by Gamera.  Gamera’s assault contains none of his characteristic warmth and keeps him out of focus, his face most visible only after he’s breached part of the spaceship with it.  When Gamera destroys a section of the ship, they jettison it, and when he flies around them, they attempt to extinguish his jets.  In this part, the film has put the viewer more in the perspective of the aliens, Virians/Virasians/Virases as they are called, as the commanding voice on the speaker becomes frantic then regains its composure to make some evasive attempts but ultimately seems to realize the ship is about to be destroyed.  This is easily the most destructive Gamera has been since the beginning of Gamera vs Barugon, and it is an effective contrast to have Gamera’s next scene be him warmly racing two boys in a minisub and protecting them from the second spaceship’s Super Catch Ray, as every action taken by these agents thus far is in line with their characterization.

However, a film that begins so darkly and semi realistically should not also contain a scene where the UN decides to surrender to alien invasion in order to save two children.  For those unaware, a major contributing factor for why Noriaki Yuasa, the director of most of the Showa Gamera films, made films wherein the children were smart, heroic and always had Gamera to look out for them was because he had briefly filmed at a home for abandoned children and wanted to give them a hero to look up to.  Yuasa had his own issues with adults, hence why as the series went on, there was less emphasis on heroic Kojiro Hongo type characters and more on how Gamera is willing to do anything for the children.  A world where the UN would surrender Earth to save two children is a world that arguably does not need Gamera to look out for the kids.

This film already has the Virians use Gamera’s “unusual and overwhelming kindness to human children” to their advantage, threatening to kill the kids if Gamera attacks their second ship, and the boys already take an active role in trying to escape their imprisonment, so nothing changes in the stakes if the UN were to refuse that offer.  It must be emphasized that a world that will sacrifice itself for two people strains credibility more and in different ways than giant monsters existing.  The cold open to this film already showed that it is possible to approach realism in the spaceship’s intelligent defensive moves and ultimate ill fate.

Cohesion of The Main Characters’ Arc

As alluded to, the boys in this film, Masao and Jim, are rather mischievous, especially compared to the earnest Eiichi in Gamera vs Gyaos before this, the introspective and reactive Akio and Tom in Gamera vs Guiron directly after this, and the dutiful teens that go inside of Gamera a couple films later in Gamera vs Jiger.  Indeed, their introduction to the film is wandering away from their scout troop to perform a shortsighted prank by switching the controls of a submarine, cringe at the consequences of endangering Kojiro Hongo and the friendly scientist letting them use the sub but then also laugh and spin the situation their way to be able to be the only scouts that can use the minisub (when if they had not sabotaged it, everybody would have been able to).  Once the aliens kidnap them, they learn what they can about the spaceship and try to use it to their advantage, easily some of the most dynamic protagonists of the franchise thus far.  After some failed attempts of escaping and a startling willingness to sacrifice themselves to save the world, their scoutmaster actually inspires them to repeat the prank on the Virian machinery to escape and free Gamera from the alien’s control.

 

Their selfish setup would have lent itself well to a coming of age arc where they would mature in order to achieve their victory.  During their time on the Virian spaceship, they show more compassion than before, promising to free what they think is a captive monster in a cage but is actually the Virian boss’ in his equivalent of a throne room, and, when they can finally reach Masao’s sister on their wrist communication devices, the boys are actually willing to selflessly lay down their lives for the good of humanity.  For whatever reason, it is the moral authority of Kojiro Hongo’s Scoutmaster character that encourages them to do the same prank to escape, seemingly vindicating their mischievousness.  Their arc seems to run backwards of how it should, learning a lesson offscreen with the screen time given to them embracing who they were before everything changed.  Their actual contributions to Gamera fighting Viras are minimal, just commands for actions he would have taken anyways, an awkward middle ground between Eiichi needing Gamera to save him and Akio and Tom assisting Gamera in battle by launching a rocket for him to use.

Creativity In Fight Scenes

The action in this movie is also rather varied.  Space Monster Viras, technically a combination of several Virians with their boss, was a rather inventive physical suit with a mess of spindly tentacles disguising the actor’s legs.  Coming off villains that were essentially a quadruped and a bird, this is something creative and new, and it is equally unique how Viras fights Gamera, where it is on the backfoot until it can set up an efficient and underhanded attack, goring Gamera’s stomach.  That is just the final battle though; outside of the cold open, all of the other action scenes in this film come from the previous films, administered in a few lengthy stock footage segments recapping Gamera’s rampages in the original film and Gamera vs Barugon as well as his fights against Barugon and Gyaos.  

 

Quite distractingly, some of these clips were in black and white originally, and the film putting a blue hue on those scenes does not fix the issue.  As far as repeating the previous movie’s fight scenes, there is a slight issue with that.  While it is the contrast from those villains that makes Viras’ one short fight against Gamera stand out, the film did not need to show them again to achieve that effect.  Gamera vs Guiron features multiple of the Gyaos species, and the different way Guiron kills it sets Guiron apart.  Similarly, Jiger later on is unique simply for having so many absurd abilities that her film explores throughout three fights and an impregnation scene.

Conclusion

The highs of this movie are exceptionally high, and there was a lot of potential for the best Gamera movie yet, but the vision was inconsistent, almost to a greater extent than the original Gamera (which itself relentlessly switches between Daiei’s desire for a Godzilla ripoff competing with Yuasa’s vision of a child friendly icon).  Consequently, it is difficult to justify a favorable review of this film, when other Gamera movies used the same building blocks as this film much more consistently.  Still, this film’s place in the franchise is a major turning point and important to remember.  Without this film, the later Showa Gamera films would not have happened the same way, and Viras could not have been one of the main villains of the recent Netflix show Gamera Rebirth.

A Jungian Exploration of Gamera vs Guiron

 

By JOSEPH GIBSON

The following essay was presented at the 2024 National Undergraduate Literature Conference at Weber State.

 

Abstract - 439 words

 

In the 1969 giant monster movie Gamera vs Guiron from Daiei Film, two curious boys embark on an interplanetary adventure.  Seeking a more advanced world, they come into conflict with its sole survivors, forcing a three round monster brawl between the boys’ friend, a giant turtle named Gamera, and the aliens’ watchdog, a quadrupedal fish with a knife for a head called Guiron (Yuasa, 1969).  Fans of the series praise this film in a backhanded sense, acknowledging lessened quality while upholding what it “tried” to do (Madole, 2022). This essay argues that Gamera vs Guiron uniquely explores psychological concepts proposed by Carl Jung, as opposed to more traditional themes for its technical subgenre of portal fantasy.  The ways in which the film develops its primary monsters, characters and worlds most strongly portray several Jungian ideas such as the self, shadow, anima, unconscious world and “answer to Job.”

Out of the twelve Gamera movies, Gamera vs Guiron is the fifth installment and the fourth of director Noriaki Yuasa.  AIP, an American production company Daiei partnered with for distribution, ordered Gamera vs Guiron to be a straightforward space adventure (Draper, 2023).  However, the crew’s input resulted in a script that follows plot beats of portal fantasy while containing events that benefit from a Jungian analysis.  Nisan Takahashi wrote all of the early Gamera films, Hidemasa Nagata, producer, enforced the films as fairy tale lessons for children, and Yuasa defined Gamera’s identity as a character and series through a reciprocal connection to active and curious child protagonists (Cynical Justin, 2022).  Meanwhile, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychoanalyst and contemporary to Freud, wrote prolifically on the collective unconsciousness, naming archetypes as patterns of behavior (Jung & Stoor, 2013, pp. 13-16).  The persona, anima/animus and shadow count as archetypes of the self and personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious archetypes are the creator, ruler, caregiver, everyman, jester, lover, hero, magician, rebel, explorer, sage, and innocent (Main, 2023). Being a Japanese children’s film, it is certainly an unlikely place to find demonstrations of the archetypes of Carl Jung; Jung’s ideas have uniquely informed the landscape of cinema.  Jung’s insights into the self and shadow or anima and animus dichotomies have shaped the cinematic trope of doubles (Barnett, 2007). At the conclusion of this essay, the implementation of information from sources ranging from compilations of Jung’s work to scholarly articles analyzing Jung as well as portal fantasy conventions will indicate similarities to a Jungian perspective.  Because of the juxtaposition of these heretofore unconnected concepts, the findings in this essay will contribute to academic discourse on Japanese B movies and the men and philosophies that made them.

 

Jungian Shadow And Christ Concepts - 645 words

 

The rivalry between Gamera and Guiron is uniquely Jungian in that Guiron serves as Gamera’s Shadow. Generally, Jung writes on the idea of the shadow as being undesirable unconscious facets of the hero that keep them from a true understanding of themselves and their world (Jung & Stoor, pp. 91-93).  While analyzing Nietzche’s Zarathustra, Jung clarified that the shadow is a negative relationship between archetypes, informed by insecurities or possible failings (Jung, 2012).  Gamera does not fit any of the 12 common literary archetypes, so for this stage of the analysis, Gamera is Gamera, Guiron as an inverse Gamera.  On the surface, the knife head of Guiron contrasts Gamera’s protective shell, casting Guiron merely as the aggressor to Gamera’s defender, the sword against his shield in the theaters of land, sky and underwater. However, Guiron’s introduction into the film is defending the other world Tera from Gyaos, a monster that Gamera defended Earth from.  Furthermore, Guiron has a connection to the two remaining Terans, Flobella and Barbella, just as Gamera protects Akio and Tom specifically.  Additionally, the film chooses a gray and red/orange color palette for Tera that it keeps consistent with the infrastructure as well as the new Teran breed of Gyaos, indicating that the gray, red and green Guiron, since Gamera is also green, is to be Tera’s Gamera.  (Yuasa, 1969).  

Gamera is a being that inexplicably knows the state of the universe and the needs of his human friends, what they should do, and how he can help them, with no internal change necessary, which can only make him, according to Jungian psychological archetypes, the ideal Self: the Christ.  If the premise of attributing a turtle with human psychological qualities seems unwise, according to a 2002 interview with Jörg Buttgereit, Noriaki Yuasa’s understanding of the giant monster subgenre was thus that animals and humans were very similar in the capacity and expression of certain feelings (2002). Gamera undeniably serves a mentor role to the children, warning them against going to Tera and fighting to his utmost to keep them safe, even seeming to die and resurrect in the process (Yuasa, 1969).  This includes aspects of the Caregiver and Sage, but the Sage generally defers physical fighting to the hero (Gaynor-Guthrie, 2023). The Caregiver seems to be contextualized through the “Great Mother” archetype (Main, 2023). The Christ, as Jung defines it, can contain both and yet still more that applies to Gamera.  

Jung notes that the Christ of religion and tradition does not have a fitting Shadow and yet fights against evil, leading Jung to quote St. Augustine, “Those things we call evil, then, are defects in good things….” (Jung & Stoor, 2013 pp. 299-305).  Whereas Gamera defends Earth and children from Gyaos merely dutifully, Guiron does so sadistically. Importantly, whereas Akio and Tom build a relationship with the Christ figure Gamera, as Jung recommends, Flobella and Barbella’s use of technology as a shortcut for Guiron’s control undermines their society’s strength in the aftermath of a Gyaos attack (Yuasa, 1969). Gamera follows the boys to Tera because of his overwhelming drive to save children, but the distance the Terans put between themselves and Guiron downgrades his willingness to save them, turning him into a soulless weapon.  According to Wikizilla, the creature designer of Guiron, Akira Inoue, said, “....when I put the head of a knife on a body I created Guiron. It's not a living thing anymore, the idea comes from a weapon….” (Wikizilla, 2022).  This was a deliberate choice to reduce Guiron physically to a weapon even when the being showed complex thought in battle. It is significant that Gamera wins only when the children align with his will and Guiron’s allies retreat.  This essay will elaborate on Gamera as a distinctly Jungian Christ; first, it is important to see how that interpretation transforms the journeys of Akio and Tom with the villains.

 

Jungian Anima or Portal Fantasy in Gamera vs Guiron - 820 words

 

Akio and Tom’s journey displays Jungian themes, as they start the film as the characters most concerned with seeking unconscious truths about the cosmos and gradually gain understanding about their role in their world by mastering a shadow version of it.  While the basic setup classifies Gamera vs Guiron into portal fantasy, the film is a poor example of the associated character arcs.  Portal fantasy is essentially any story that emphasizes bizarre creativity from the perspectives of young children discovering fantasy worlds.  Another word for a child’s fantasy world is paracosm (K. & Swamy, 2021, pp. 28-29). Crucially, these stories function as a marriage between reality and fantasy, brought on by a child protagonist’s boredom (Tatar, 2020, pp 24-25, 27).  Gamera vs Guiron is commonly vaguely referred to as a fairy tale for reasons that fit portal fantasy. Coraline by Neil Gaiman, the typical modern and contemporary portal fantasy novel, also extends the genre to its ultimate implicit psychological stances on paracosm (K. & Swamy, 2021, pp. 35).

Coraline’s paracosm is, in story, real but can also be considered symbolic for the growth and maturity of a child during self play: wanting to escape the world around her into a new one filled with magic, realizing the imperfections of her paracosm, losing interest in it, and, finally, returning to it in order to finish the story.  Like all paracosm and most examples of portal fantasy, Coraline’s Other World is a mixture of reality and fantasy; in particular, the fantastical figures populating it are versions of the people she knows in the real world (K. & Swamy, 2021, pp. 30-34, 32). The expectation would then be for Gamera vs Guiron to follow these beats for the journeys of Akio, Tom, and the people they find on Tera, and, lest it seem an unfair comparison, Yuasa had already directed a horror film called The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch with similar tropes to those that would eventually inform Coraline: ambiguously real fantasy and the warping of surrounding people into monsters through the eyes of an intelligent young girl (Miles). 

The boys begin Gamera vs Guiron studying the stars through Akio’s telescope, when they see a spaceship.  Akio’s mother soon chastises them for imagining a spaceship rather than studying, and Tom’s mother agrees, casting them as stern characters, unlike Flobella and Barbella’s warm reaction to the boy’s curiosity (Yuasa, 1969).  However, Akio’s quirky neighbor, policeman Kondo, does not have a Teran equivalent, nor does Akio’s sister Tomoko, and Flobella and Barbella have an arc and dynamic more similar to Akio and Tom than their mothers.  Akio constantly orders around Tom, who obeys, and Flobella does the same to Barbella, while the mothers are equals. Also, the Terans plan to leave Tera, just as the boys left Earth. The film subverts portal fantasy conventions in order to include another doubles pair.  In this case, the doubles are swapped in sex, which points back to Jung’s idea of the anima/animus.  

The anima (man’s inner woman) and animus (woman’s inner man) generally comprise underlying personalities for the self based on the person’s previous experiences with an opposite sex parent, and Jung writes that when people remain unconscious to their world, the anima will be warped (Jung & Stoor, 2013, pp. 104-109).  Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is an archetypal doubles film, and its doubles pair is the confused Norman becoming his anima (Norma) in a deviant fashion (Barnett, 2007). Akio and Tom are curious about the cosmos and Tera because they want to escape Earth; the Terans are curious about Earth to escape there.  Akio’s telescope is not precise enough, so their animas act in imprecise and cruel ways: eating Akio’s brain for his knowledge (Yuasa, 1969).  According to Jung, “...when anima and animus meet, the animus draws his sword of power, and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction” (2013, pp. 112).  While Coraline crafted a narrative through experiencing the paracosm and ultimately outsmarting the Beldam, the only asset of Akio and Tom in their journey, other than Gamera, is a cap gun that Tom has as a masculine symbol.  The Terans deceive the boys and are attractive (Madole, 2022).

Interestingly, neither the cap gun nor the trickery excel for the pairs long term in their confrontation, even when they switch, with the boys using trickery and the Terans using laser guns.  This is because the anima and animus are complementary, and the self must accept both the logical male traits and the emotional female traits in order to achieve awareness (Jung & Stoor, 2013, pp. 113). To win, Akio and Tom have to exemplify both halves, containing the emotional Tom and logical Akio and align the technology of Tera to Gamera’s will, controlling a rocket missile for Gamera to use against Guiron. The Terans do not assimilate Earth and divide, leaving Flobella at the mercy of an incidental missile collision, no longer in control of Tera.  

 

 Jung and Portal Fantasy In The WorldBuilding of the Film - 383 words

 

Gamera vs Guiron portrays its worlds and the struggle of using technology to try to understand or master them, and this is important both to Jung and portal fantasy.  Some of the historical hallmarks of portal fantasy are odd vehicles (the portal itself), references to sweets, magic, and an implicit disdain for Enlightenment scientific ideals and technology.  One of the earliest influences on the genre E.T.A. Hoffmann used the concept of whimsical fancies of bored children to create magical aesthetics and explore debunked magical thinking (Tatar, 2020, pp. 31-32, 26-27, 36). 

The Terans tempt Akio and Tom with donuts, and the overreliance of the Terans and human scientists on modern technology prevent them from understanding their worlds. However, the boys’ eventual mastery over Tera and return home hinges on the use of technology; crucially, the portal vehicle is not magical at all but a mere spaceship.  The aesthetic of Tera is not magical but technological (Yuasa, 1969).  According to Jung, “technology is neutral…neither good nor bad,” with the danger being a misplaced sense of control over the world, with the lack of consciousness in operating the technology inevitably leading to destruction (Brien, 2013). The film is closer to this because the use of technology is from honest efforts to understand the cosmos or improve life, from Akio’s telescope to the Earthbound scientists studying space and even the Teran innovations, and the positive characters accept Akio and Tom’s conscious explanation.

Under the purview of portal fantasy, the Teran Space Gyaos are technically an “Other Gyaos” but not ones that say anything about the nature of the boys’ paracosm.  Interestingly, the origin of Space Gyaos in this film is that they were a created species on Tera that wreaked havoc on their creators (Yuasa, 1969).  The Terans’ technological advancement led to their destruction.  There is a component of childlike randomness in the film’s explanation, that it was a computer malfunction that generated uncontrollable monsters, but the film constantly reiterates that Akio’s idea of a superior world would lack wars and traffic accidents, and Tera shows him that world with its teleportation machines and superior technology.  It is warped because technology does not bring Jungian awareness.  That superior technology can malfunction to create monsters, necessitating the creation of missiles and other monsters (Yuasa, 1969).

 

Answer to Job in Gamera vs Guiron - 427 words

 

Outside of the mere allusion, appointing Gamera as Christ requires more specific character beats to fit as a Jungian archetype.  Jung wrote exhaustively, and to some degree uncomfortably and unwillingly, about how the god-image could be both good and evil particularly in the Book of Job (Woolfson, 2009, pp. 127-128). This is, evidently, because of Jung’s complicated emotions toward Christianity and God as a whole following the loss of faith of his father Paul Jung (Woolfson, 2009, pp. 124, 134).  In the Book of Job, God tested Job’s faithfulness with a series of horrible trials, and Job endured it (Jung & Stoor, 2013, pp. 309-320).  While Jung emphasized the importance of both positive masculine and feminine influences (syzygy of anima and animus) and the risks of lacking either, it greatly disturbed Jung to realize that God lacked the caring feminine traits until after Job’s story.  Suffice it to say, this goes against everything else in Jung’s psychology about man’s need to align with God’s will to find enlightenment if God was “unconscious” and “monstrous” (Woolfson, 2009, pp. 135, 138, 134).  Eventually, Jung concluded that Job showing greater goodness than God is what inspired God to become Christ (Jung & Stoor, 2013, pp. 309). 

Inexplicably, this idea has a parallel in Gamera vs Guiron; in order to learn more about the Gyaos-slaying Gamera, the Terans technologically extract Akio’s memories to recapitulate the previous films, including showing Gamera’s first act of heroism (Yuasa, 1969). The montage briefly shows Gamera’s journey from destroying a lighthouse and catching a child to defending the same child from Gyaos to finally defending all children from the extraterrestrial squid Viras. This covers Gamera’s arc well; he was an attacking monster that saved a child, and that event inspired Gamera to be “The Friend to All Children” (Yuasa, 1969).  In a revisionist sense, this montage is the truest version up to that point in the series of those past events, and its deviations correspond to Jung.  It is not as precise as Jung’s Answer to Job, because Yuasa had a different agenda.  

Yuasa campaigned seriously to include the lighthouse scene and follow it through to its natural conclusions in subsequent entries (Cynical Justin, 2022).  An interview clarified why this was so important to Yuasa; he briefly filmed at a home for abandoned children, saw their sadness and appointed Gamera as a friend to all children for them (Buttgereit, 2002).  

Later creatives on the franchise would make the comparison even less subtle, but this is also the first film where Gamera undergoes a cycle of death and rebirth. 

 

Limitations - 162 words

 

Jung’s writings and Yuasa’s film have different goals and will, consequently, not line up in every detail.  First, all this aforementioned Jungian subtext is exclusive to this movie and the presentation of those stock footage scenes. Secondly, as a consequence to Jungian unconsciousness plaguing the boys’ mothers, they do not encompass many of Jung’s Mother Archetype tropes; they are neither great sources of wisdom, nor terrible, seductive objects (Jung, 1968 pp. 81-84). Finally, this essay cannot present any evidence that Yuasa was familiar with Jung or held any Christian beliefs.  Yuasa’s description of his own beliefs in his works extends more to finding humanity in giant creatures than finding divinity in man (Buttgereit, 2002).  Also, as aforementioned, Yuasa directed The Snake Girl and the Silver Haired Witch, which features both Christianity and Nietzsche subtext in its monsters (Wilkins, 2022).  However, that film was based on a large body of work from Kazuo Umezu, who has his own associated tropes and views (Miles).

 

 

Conclusion - 125 words

 

In conclusion, this essay contrasted interpretations of the film Gamera vs Guiron in order to argue that it predominantly upheld Jungian conventions, even deviating from the parameters of portal fantasy in order to do so.  The portrayal of Gamera and Guiron as a Christ/Shadow pair, the boys and villains along the parameters of animus/anima development, the uniquely Jungian stance on technology and rough depiction of the Answer to Job outweighed the alternative explanations that portal fantasy would provide.  Based on this research, there are similarities between the outlooks of Yuasa and Jung, and further analysis through this lens could help to better understand Yuasa’s intent on his filmography.  Further cursory research suggests potential commonalities in both of their views on animals and children.

 

References

Barnett, V. L. (2007). Dualling for judy: the concept of the double in the films of kim novak. Film History, 19(1), 86+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A160592787/PPFA?u=ogde72764&sid=bookmark-PPFA&xid=544229b0

Brien, D. E. (2013, October 27). The star in man: jung and technology. Jungpage. https://jungpage.org/learn/articles/technology-and-environment/681-the-star-in-man-jung-and-technology

Cynical Justin. (2022, August 26). The history and evolution of gamera [Video]. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfArMhrfvAA

Draper, M. (2023, August, 2). GAMERA: The heisei series retrospective - The greatest kaiju movies ever made [Video].  YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnAh4uzxxOY

Draper, M. (2023, May 17). GAMERA: The showa era retrospective - The rise & fall of a cult kaiju icon [Video].  YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jeTGqdW1-k

Gaynor-Guthrie, G. (2023, March 9). The sage archetype: a guide. Literature and Latte. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/the-sage-archetype-a-guide-literature-latte-1#:~:text=What%20is%20a%20sage%20archetype,the%20world%20and%20its%20mysteries.

Jung, C. G. (1968). Collected works of c. g. Jung Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press (pp. 81-84).

JUNG, C. G. (2012). 27 june 1934. In JAMES L. JARRETT (Ed.), Nietzsche's "zarathustra" (pp. 129). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G., & Storr, A. (2013). The essential jung (Paperback reissue, with a new foreword by John Beebe. ed.). Princeton University Press

K., K., & Swamy, S. K. (2021). Through the portals of the mind: A paracosmic study of neil gaiman’s coraline. Fafnir, 8(2), 28-37

Madole, D. (host). DaikaijuTony. & Barry, S. & Derek. & Blount, C. (panelists). (2022, January 15). TokuTitanCast #17 Ranking every gamera movie! In TokuTitanCast. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fttH5MNgCR8

Main, P. (2023). Carl jung’s archetypes. In P. Main (Ed.) Cognitive Development  https://www.structural-learning.com/post/carl-jungs-archetypes

Miles, S. (N.A. September, 26). [Film Review] Snake girl and the silver haired witch (1968). Ghouls Magazine. https://www.ghoulsmagazine.com/articles/snake-girl-and-the-silver-haired-witch-1968-horror-film-review

Tatar, M. (2020). Inventing portal fantasies: E. T. A. hoffmann's the nutcracker and the mouse king. Marvels & Tales, 34(1), 24-37. https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.34.1.0024

Wilkins, B. (2022, January 7). Review: yuasa noriaki’s the snake girl and the silver haired witch on arrow blu-ray. Slant. https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/the-snake-girl-and-the-silver-haired-witch-blu-ray-review-yuasa-noriaki-arrow/

Woodside, A.G., & Sood, S. C. (2016). Storytelling-case archetype decoding and assignment manual (SCADAM) (2st ed.). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1871-3173201611

Woolfson, T. (2009). The book of job revisited. The International Journal of Jungian Studies, 1(2), 123-143. https://doi.org/10.1080/19409050903109330

Wurdeman, A. (2022, February 15). The innocent archetype - everything you need to know. Dabblewriter. https://www.dabblewriter.com/articles/the-innocent-archetype

Yuasa, N. (1969). ガメラ対大悪獣ギロン, Gamera tai daiakujū giron [gamera vs. giant evil beast guiron]. Shout Factory!; Mill Creek Entertainment; Arrow Video; American International Pictures (AIP); Daiei Film

Yuasa, N. (Director). (2021). Gamera: the showa era collection gamera vs viras/gamera vs guiron [Film; BluRay with special features, specifically the interview taken from Die Monsterinsel of Yuasa with Jorg Buttgereit on August 10, 2002]. Arrow Video

Yuasa, N. (Director). (2021). Gamera: the showa era collection gamera vs viras/gamera vs guiron [Film; BluRay with special features, specifically David Kalat’s commentary track of Gamera vs Guiron].  Arrow Video

(2022, September). Guiron. Wikizilla. https://wikizilla.org/w/index.php?title=Guiron&oldid=170910

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To read a review of Gamera versus Guiron, go here.

Messiah of Evil – An underrated 1970s horror film

Directed in 1973 by Willard Huyuk, Messiah of Evil is an underrated 1970s horror film that deserves some newfound attention. If you're a fan of zombie movies, you may find some interest in Messiah of Evil. Huyuk's treatment of zombies is much different than how zombies are portrayed in George Romero's zombie films. Romero gives viewers a clear explanation for why zombies become the way that they are. Messiah of Evil leaves the explanation for zombies ambiguous.

Arletty Lang (Marianna Hill) travels to a small coastal town called Point Dune in California to find her artist father, who she has not heard from in weeks. Her father, Joseph Lang (Royal Dano), is part of an artist's colony at Point Dune. The local art gallery does not have any of his paintings on display, as Arletty discovers when she approaches the gallery curator to inquire if anyone has seen her father or spoken to him.

After failing to find anyone who has spoken to her father, Arletty arrives at her father's beachfront house, only to find it abandoned. She decides to stay in the house until she can discover where her father has disappeared to. She spends time going through his art studio and personal belongings and discovers a diary. In the diary, Lang talks about darkness and evil consuming Point Dune, and strange nightmares he experiences in his sleep. Most of his writings in the diary appear to be directed at Arletty. He speaks of her frequently in his writings.

While continuing to search for her father, Arletty is told by the art gallery curator in town to go to a local motel to seek out some individuals who inquired about Lang's paintings earlier that day. Arletty arrives at the motel and speaks with Thom (Michael Greer) and his two attractive traveling companions – Toni (Joy Bang) and Laura (Anita Ford). The trio are currently interviewing a crazy homeless man who tells them strange stories about the history of Point Dune.

Thom, Toni and Laura are asked to leave the motel, then make their way to Arletty's father's house. Arletty allows the group to stay in the home overnight. Since Thom is a stereotypical womanizer, he attempts to make sexual advances towards Arletty. This angers Laura, so she leaves the group and hitchhikes with an albino truck driver (Bennie Robinson), who eats a live mouse while driving the truck. Frightened by this, Laura gets out of the truck and makes her way to a grocery store with an empty parking lot. In the store she witnesses zombies eating raw meat in the meat department.

Unlike the slow moving zombies in George Romero films, the zombies in Messiah of Evil move quickly and run after Laura in the store. They are hungry for human flesh, as most zombies are in any zombie film. Laura's friend Toni suffers the same fate when she attends a movie and is barricaded in the movie theater with zombies who attack her.

After viewing Messiah of Evil a number of times, I have yet to understand how the opening scene connects to the rest of the film. In the opening, a profusely sweating man is seen running to a swimming pool. He lays down next to the pool, gasping for breath. A teenage girl approaches him, smiles at him, then slashes his throat with a razor. The scene then transitions into the title and credits of the film. I spend the rest of the film trying to connect this opening scene to the remainder of the film, as bizarre as the scene may be. The scene gives the appearance of a flashback sequence, yet it never connects to the rest of the film.

Look carefully for a scene in Woody Allen's 1977 film – Annie Hall, which shows a theater marquee advertising Messiah of Evil on the marquee (see still above). It's not likely that Messiah of Evil was ever shown on a double feature with Annie Hall. Messiah of Evil was put on a double feature DVD with The Devil's Nightmare (1972) by Diamond Entertainment in 2001. Happy viewing.

Steve D. Stones

Horror Hotel – One of the best horror films of the 1960s.

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Horror Hotel (1960) ranks as one of the best horror films of the 1960s. The film certainly should be on any serious horror movie fan's list of the 100 best horror films of all time. Some similarities can be found in this film to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, also released in 1960, since both films center around a young woman who travels alone to a hotel run by a disturbed individual. The film is also known as City of The Dead, which includes longer dialog from actors in many of the scenes seen in Horror Hotel. Although not considered film noir, Horror Hotel has very dark exterior shots with lots of fog and deep depth of space, which gives viewers a constant sense of menace and atmosphere.

A beautiful young college student named Nan Barlow (Venitia Stevenson) travels to a small Massachusetts town called Whitewood to conduct research on witchcraft for a college course taught by Alan Driscol (Christopher Lee). Barlow finds her way to a creepy, old motel known as the Raven's Inn. The motel is run by Mrs. Newless (Patricia Jessel). Barlow picks up a hitchhiker named Jethrow Keane (Valentine Dyall) who disappears from her car after they arrive at the Raven's Inn.

After borrowing a book on witchcraft from a local bookstore owner Patricia Russell (Betta St. John), Barlow hears loud chants under the floorboards of her motel room. She opens a trap door in the middle of the floor of her room and finds an underground passage. She stumbles upon a secret chamber with a coven involved in a witchcraft ceremony. One member of the coven is her professor – Alan Discoll. Another member is Mrs. Newless, who is actually the ghost of Elizabeth Selwyn – a woman burned alive as a witch over 200 years earlier.

From the moment Christopher Lee's character of Professor Alan Discoll appears on the screen, the viewer gets a strong sinister sense of evil and doom in his demeanor. On the surface, Discoll appears to be friendly to student Nan Barlow, and wants her to succeed in writing her term paper for the class, but as the plot of the film advances, we see that his intentions of sending Barlow to the Raven's Inn are for his own purposes of sacrificing her to the coven of witches.

Horror Hotel exhibits an interesting contrast of science versus folklore and supernaturalism. Nan Barlow's brother, Richard Barlow (Dennis Lotis), who is a professor of science, is a skeptic of Driscoll's lectures about witchcraft. He directly tells Driscoll that witchcraft is superstitious nonsense, which angers Driscoll and adds to his sinister appearance in the film. The two men argue about the validity of witchcraft as Barlow makes snarky remarks to Discoll about the topic. Even Nan Barlow's boyfriend, Bill Maitland (Tom Naylor) is a skeptic of Nan's desire to learn more about witchcraft and discourages her from traveling to Massachusetts to conduct research on the topic.

Like many Gothic horror films, Horror Hotel relies on the symbolism of the Christian cross to defeat or repel evil in the end. After Bill Maitland crashes his car into a tree on his way to Whitewood to search for Nan, he picks up a cemetery marker of a Christian cross and walks towards a witches coven in the cemetery. The coven is about to sacrifice Patricia Russell on an altar. The shadow of the cross burns members of the coven as he moves closer to them.

Horror Hotel would make an excellent double feature with another 1960s film that deals with witchcraft – The Witchfinder General (also known as The Conqueror Worm), starring Vincent Price.  You can watch it on YouTube here. Happy viewing.

Steve D. Stones