Honda Ishiro’s
Matango (1963), also known as
Attack of the Mushroom People, has an acquired a cult following over the years, though it offers few of the standard Toho tokusatsu (special effects) thrills.
Based on William Hope Hodgson’s 1907 short story The Voice in the Night, the film is closer in tone to horror, spinning its scares from the real-life properties of mushrooms, including their power to induce both euphoria and terror.
Hodgson’s story about mushrooms that turn the humans who eat them into fungi struck Toho producer Tanaka Tomoyuki as filmable and he commissioned Fukushima Masami, the editor of an SF magazine, to write a story based on Hodgson’s original.
Kimura Takeshi, who also worked on Honda’s Gorath and The Human Vapor, then wrote a script based on Fukushima’s story, with novelist Hoshi Shinichi contributing an uncredited polish.
The film begins like an episode of the American reality show Survivor, in which the passengers and crew on a day trip aboard a rich man’s yacht find themselves caught in a violent storm and deposited alive, if short of supplies, on an uninhabited island.
Foraging for food and water, the seven castaways – five men and two women – come across an abandoned ship used by a research expedition, with no survivors about.
Though the ship’s interior is covered with a strange fungus, they take up residence and discover that radiation from nuclear testing has mutated the surrounding plant life, including the large, odd-looking mushrooms the captain (Koizumi Hiroshi) warns might be poisonous.
After the castaways encounter a grotesque creature with a horribly deformed face prowling around the boat, their uneasiness about their new home grows.
Meanwhile, starvation drives a libertine writer (Tachikawa Hiroshi) to sample the mushrooms. He finds them delicious – and addictive.
The castaways soon learn the horrible truth about the expedition’s vanished researchers and crew: After eating the mushrooms, they became mushrooms themselves. The same fate awaits them.
As their fragile unity shatters, they reveal their true colors, with the ship’s wealthy owner (Tsuchiya Yoshio) turning craven and sneaky, the rough-edged crewman (Sahara Kenji) greedy and violent and the sultry singer (Mizuno Kumi) coy and calculating.
Meanwhile a straight-arrow professor (Kubo Akira) tries to protect a fearful girl student (Yashiro Miki) while trying, unsuccessfully, to bring the others to their senses.
The shock ending is obviously inspired by the then-recent hit Psycho, though the final shots of Tokyo’s neon lights – symbols of other sorts of appetites – express a broader social critique than found in Hitchcock’s masterpiece.
After opening in Japan in August 1963, Matango had a limited release in the UK and the United States. Most of film’s foreign fans, however, first saw a dubbed version that American International Pictures syndicated to US television, starting in 1965.
Despite the absurdity of some effects, such as the tropical plants that look like ungainly crafts projects, Matango generates a nightmarish power as a metaphor for the fragility of both civilization and humanity as a species. It’s as if the children of Lord of the Flies were to not only behave like beasts, but become them.