Last week, we discussed The (reluctant) Bride of Frankenstein and the dangers of playing God. This week, we’ll talk about how the world reacts when real-life scientists took a page from Frankenstein’s book and started experimenting with things no human should ever have touched.
Since this article is the third in a series about the brief history of horror cinema, you may want to read (or reread) the first and second articles before we break down the cinematic reactions to atomic weapons.
Monsters, in general, weren’t new when Godzilla made his colossal Japanese debut in 1954, but larger-than-life monsters now were.1 The 7-foot-tall towering Bride of Frankenstein and 6-and-a-half-foot Frankenstein were already large, frightening creatures, but no one quite imagined the 160-foot (50-meter) tall lizard terrorizing Tokyo—until the atomic bomb, that is.
Thanks to the box office-busting Oppenheimer (2023), most people are familiar with the story of the creation of the atomic bombs that decimated Japan in 1945, as well as the ethical and moral questions and issues surrounding it.2 If, however, you’re unfamiliar, I’ll give you a quick rundown.
From 1942 to 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist, served as the director of the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos, New Mexico Laboratory.3 Under him, the first atomic bomb was created to end the Second World War that was ripping through the globe.4 After the successful completion and detonation of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, between 150,000 and 246,000 people were killed, however, the actual number is believed to be much higher.
At the testing of the first atomic bomb, Trinity, Oppenheimer is quoted as saying “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” The quote, if you aren’t sure of the background, at first glance doesn’t make much sense. If you know the background, though, it’s more telling. The Bhagavad Gita (meaning “song of God”)—a sacred Hindu book of scripture—tells the story of a conversation between the Pandava Prince Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna, who is a form of Vishnu (you might recognize that name).5 It’s set during the Kurukshetra War and covers the moral, ethical, and philosophical dilemmas of war and the struggles of human life.
One of the ideas of the Bhagavad Gita is the notion of “dharma” or “duty” as one has an obligation to understand and perform their duty since everything is connected by universal laws of cause and effect. The quote “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds” has been translated a few different ways, but the idea behind it is that Krishna (God) is able to destroy evil with fire. Did you get that? God is the one with the power.
Okay, that’s great, you’re thinking, but what does any of that have to do with Godzilla?6 I’m glad you asked! After the detonation of the atomic bombs and the Holocaust itself, the world was at a loss for how to emotionally and mentally comprehend what had happened. Nothing like that had ever happened in the history of the world, and the people had a hard time believing it was even possible. The one thing that people did know, however, was that “mad” scientists were behind some of the most heinous things to happen, whether they did it willfully or not.
Scientists, just like Frankenstein, were experimenting with things that weren’t to be touched by mortals. Lives were treated as simply disposable, with millions of people dying in the span of a few years. The only way that the horror film industry could make sense of what they were seeing was to have it fight back on screen. Just like the Universal Monsters films of the 1930s-40s, the 1950s was now the time for Monsters to replicate and process the horrors of everyday life that the world was left to face.
Before a re-cut and edited Godzilla stomped through the streets of Tokyo on American theater screens in 1956 (Godzilla, King of Monsters!), he invaded Japanese cinemas in 1954 and gained a cult following.7 The original (Gojira) tells the real story from the perspective of the Japanese public who had to live with the aftermath of nuclear weapons. The story tells of the revenge of nature against scientists for testing an underwater hydrogen bomb, and it struck a chord with the public, who were still physically, emotionally, and mentally recovering from their real-life bombings from the US only a decade earlier. It was inspired not just by the atomic bombings of two Japanese cities, but also by the 1954 American hydrogen bomb tests that went off near a Japanese fishing vessel. Atomic weapons now weren’t just sequestered to World Wars—they could strike at any time and any place.
The plot and moral of the film were not only simple, they were real-life horror. Scientists have gone too far by playing god and testing a bomb capable of mass destruction (right by a fishing vessel, might I add); a radioactive creature (or “kaiju,” meaning “strange creature”) is made as a consequence of nuclear testing and rises from the depths to make them pay; the only way to stop the horror is by using a weapon its creator knows governments (like America) will exploit and use for evil; the scientist, who has consistently warned of the dangers of what they’ve done, and the only weapon they can use to end it, dies along with the monster; and the warning that if nuclear weapons testing continues, the demon will return. Are you seeing some parallels?
Godzilla wasn’t the only giant monster of the 1950s, though. Giant crabs (Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)), leeches (Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)), spiders (Tarantula (1955) and The Spider (1958)), ants (Them! (1954)), people (The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)), dinosaurs (The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)), and lizards (The Giant Gila Monster (1959)) were all common subjects of colossal horror. The thread that ties them all together is the attacks of nature against human folly—it just happens to come in the form of some huge monsters.
After the 1945 bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the American government’s immediate push for the building of the even more powerful hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer spent the rest of his life trying to warn of the potential dangers of technological advancements if they weren’t closely monitored and rooted in ethics, history, and humanity.8 Horror film creators and their works, like Oppenheimer, tried to warn of the dangers of playing god with science. If the world wasn’t careful with nature, nature would fight back against the world.
When scientists start playing god, and governments take their experiments too far, fear and anger fester in even the unlikeliest of creatures. Now the monsters have become death, the destroyers of worlds.
Next time, we’ll discuss aliens, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the fears of communism hiding away in your very own neighbors.
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Are you scared yet?