Welcome back to Mockingbird’s Spooky Summer series! Blaine Grimes, Blake Collier, Caleb Stallings, and I are so glad you’re here to hang with us and watch Matango, otherwise known as Attack of the Mushroom People, Ishirō Honda’s 1963 dread-inducing gem of a cautionary tale. You might not have woken up today knowing you were afraid of turning into a mushroom, but Honda had his finger on the pulse of a fear growing in the damp, overlooked regions of the human heart.
But don’t be afraid to hang with us! We’ve got a spot for you right here. Toast a couple of s’mores and get comfy in that toadstool seat as we watch and discuss Matango!
Ian: Blaine, what force compelled you to pick this flick? Besides being a fun guy, of course.
Blaine: Several things. One, I very much enjoy getting to watch movies that are a little off the beaten path with friends who I think will appreciate it. It feels like sharing a piece of yourself with others, and it is one of life’s great joys for me.
Second, Ishirō Honda is obviously well known bringing Big G. into our lives, but his other films deserve to be more widely seen and known. The H-Man, The Human Vapor — all that stuff. It’s great.
But also — and we’ve circled around this a bit in conversations about the other films in this series — films like Attack of the Mushroom People are, increasingly, the kinds of movies I find myself gravitating toward in place of the trauma-porn-horror fare that sells right now. Matango does indeed contain SERIOUS THEMES™️, but it is just a good time as well. I mean, this is a movie that was almost banned in Japan upon its release because the skin mutation shots looked like burn victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there are also mushrooms walking around grunting and stuff.
And there’s seafaring stuff. So, count this guy in.
Ian: Blaine’s heart belonged to the sea before it did any fungus.
Blake: I’m offended that I have to work this hard to get at SERIOUS THEMES™.
Caleb: I understand this film is somewhat based on W. H. Hodgson’s short story “The Voice in the Night.” I’m not familiar with it. Have any of y’all read it?
Blake: No, but if it’s not too long, I might tonight.
Ian: I have not! But very much want to, now. He’s a big lacuna for me, but Lovecraft’s vote of confidence has made me want to wander through his fungal forests.
Caleb: Of course, it’s such a self-contained story, you don’t really need to know that trivia beforehand to thoroughly enjoy it (which I did!).
Blake: I have one or two of his longer works but have yet to read them.
Blake: Same. It was very enjoyable if for nothing else than the suffocatingly moist ambience of the film.
Ian: (shudders)
Caleb: And really terrific character exchanges! And speaking of ambiance, I couldn’t even fathom stepping aboard that moldy ship, much less taking refuge in it.
Blake: As someone who spent a good portion of his life cleaning up other people’s, ahem, “messes,” I found their utter lack of concern for their respiratory systems to be quite harrowing.
Caleb: To Blaine’s point, I also really appreciate reflecting on serious subject matter through the disarming silliness of genre. I think I actually sit with things longer through a medium or a metaphor — whether we’re dealing with class discrepancy or post-bombing survival, something about people turning into inhuman mushroom monsters is striking.
Blake: What do you fellas think the large ghost ship was/represented?
Caleb: I couldn’t help but notice it looked so ancient, and yet its purpose was for conducting nuclear experiments. I wonder if it has to do with the haunting past.
Ian: Hauntology up in here! Golly, it’s almost like the past is commandeered by the churlish “needs” of modernity.
Caleb: Of course, I think there may be some critique of the decadence of drug culture going on in this film too? Here are these rich, aimless Bohemians who pretty easily give themselves over to psychedelics that they know will not only destroy them but maybe each other.
Blake: Or decadence of the upper class too, probably.
Caleb: Yeah. One of them points out (while they are all borderline starving, by the way) how these mushrooms may be like those famous ones from Mexico that get you really high. It’s kind of a yacht-owning mentality in the face of annihilation.
Ian: Not a “yacht” to ground a life upon.
Blake: I also want to point out that we are watching this a couple of days after Taylor Swift’s wedding. Seems the comparison should be fairly easy to parse out.
What do you fellas think is the main thrust of commentary that Honda was wanting to make with this film? It seems that, by his own assessment, this was his darkest film. I find that quite fascinating. What makes it so dark?
Ian: That the evil common to men that is within them finds evil exterior to them to complete their destruction.
Blaine: “We become what we eat.”
Ian: We eat to complete what we’re becoming.
Blaine: I can’t remember which character said it, but it’s a line straight from the film. But I think the eating — the consumption — only reveals our desires. Well, no, that’s not quite right: the act of consumption is also formative.
Ian: Yes and yes. The formation reveals. None of us think we’re gross fungoids, but we find out as we consume. You don’t have to see it as law, but recognize it as veil-tearing revelation: take care what you consume. Instagram and TikTok and X inevitably turns you into this; Word and sacrament transforms you into this.
Caleb: Professor Murai, the character who recounts the events of the film from a psych hospital in Tokyo, seems to suggest that he was doomed regardless of whether he escaped or not; whether he ate the mushrooms that warp you or not.
So, shockingly, he wishes he stayed marooned on the island with his girlfriend. It’s kind of a hopeless conclusion, maybe just shy of nihilism.
Ian: Nihilism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A self-fungifying prophecy?
Blake: Is it non-fungible?
Ian: You son of a mushroom, I was about to say that! I suppose, actually, that nihilism is the common thread making all varieties of worldliness fungible … to put a cap on that pithy pun.
Blaine: I also think it’s notable that Dr. Murai’s apartment appears to be just that at the beginning, complete with a gorgeous view of the Tokyo skyline. In the end it’s revealed to be a prison, and in the context of a 1960s Japanese experience of unprecedented economic growth and concomitant consumerism, protests and liberation moments, it reads as a damning indictment of the dogged pursuit of excess. That which appears to bring freedom is a neon-lit cage.
Ian: So how does Matango draw the curtain to show what’s actually happening here and now where we are? Blake, you brought up Taylor Swift’s wedding, which is also an instance of spectacle, à la Nope…
Blake: Everything is an ice cream cone. Enjoyable as far as it goes to the senses but melts away quickly. Hence why spectacle after spectacle must be maintained so that we are not given the ability to look behind the curtain and see the strings. This, in my mind, is how corporations, elites, etc., maintain the ongoing illusion — by capturing the goodness of being a fan of something and turning it into a dogmatic and ongoing spectacle creator, which in effect creates more profit streams for those who retain the most power.
Ian: Vanilla in a cone with a side of mushrooms.
Blaine: I don’t want to distract or detract from Blake’s fantastic observation, but can we not let this conversation end without acknowledging how awkward the bit is where the mushroom man first appears, and then we immediately cut to a scene from the next morning where they’re all sitting around a table saying, “That was sure a strange little thing that happened.”
Caleb: Yeah, I thought I had accidentally sat on my remote and skipped something!
Ian: I agree with Blake’s point but want to do so without sacrificing the singular, personal dimension of consumption. I think this is something The Platform did well, where the accidents of class exacerbate the sinful human drive to consume and hoard but do not create it. Which means it doesn’t allow us the fantasy, then, of an innocent proletariat that is above the sins of the bourgeoisie, that would never sink to their sinful level.
Here it turns out that that choice of apartment overlooking Tokyo is a mutagen, the forbidden mushroom at the heart of the garden that solidifies your choice to become something less human. Upward mushroomability promises something it cannot deliver.
Boys, what’s the most summery thing about Matango? (Blake, shut up.)
Caleb: Everything about it felt humid, swampy, and oppressive, from the setting to the interplay between the characters.
Blake: It’s one big feeling of swamp ass, which I only get in the summer.
Ian: Whoa, TMI.
Caleb: Lord, I cannot wait for autumn…
Blake: It’s pretty much how I imagine Florida year round.
Ian: Look, we all thought that, but you can’t just say that … Caleb, do you ever lament the condition of your notorious neighbor?
Caleb: Like everything in life, it must be enjoyed in moderation. A vacation week on the beach? Sure. But living there as a resident? It’s just irresponsible.
Ian: Speaking of which — what was the most dreadful part for y’all?
Blake: Honestly it’s the parts where they first entered the ship and bothered the mold. That’s probably why the professor is so engendered with something like nihilism at the end. That mold got up in there.
Caleb: That’s what I was gonna say, Blake. I hated them taking refuge on the shipwreck. I know they thoroughly cleaned all the mold away, but I couldn’t help but feel some little spore of discontent or death would get in before too long.
Blaine: The mushrooms’ laughter was unsettling to me. Huh. That’s a sentence you never think you’ll say…
Ian: Mycelium sentiment, exactly.
Caleb: Ian, you have to be stopped!
And stop we will for now, fiends, but only for now! We sure are glad you joined us today for this mushroomy menace! Keep your dance card open, and be sure to join us next week for the final installment of Mockingbird’s Spooky Summer when we watch M. Night Shyamalan’s absolute classic Signs. Be there and be square!
