As the film Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire opens, we consider the history and legacy of the two most famous giant monsters in film history. Both monsters are represented in posters and stills from the collection of Forrest J. Ackerman, the founding editor of the magazine “Famous Monsters of Filmland.” 

Godzilla first appeared in the Japanese film Godzilla, directed and co-written by Ishirō Honda, which was released in Japan in 1956 and in America two years later in a re-edited version featuring Raymond Burr and titled Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

Released in Japan less than a decade after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla has been called “an unflinchingly bleak, deceptively powerful film about coping with and taking responsibility for incomprehensible, manmade tragedy. Specifically, nuclear tragedies.”

As film critic J. Hoberman has noted, the incident that opens the original film and leads to the discovery of the ancient sea creature – the destruction of a Japanese freighter – parallels the contamination from nuclear fallout of the crew of a Japanese fishing boat by an American thermonuclear test at Bikini Atoll. Godzilla has gone on to appear in more than thirty films over the last seventy years, including Godzilla vs. the Thing (1964) (aka “Mothra vs. Godzilla”) and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971) (aka “Godzilla vs. Hedorah”).  

King Kong, the creation of American filmmaker Merian C. Cooper and British writer Edgar Wallace, first appeared in the 1933 film King Kong, in which the monster famously co-starred with Fay Wray and the Empire State Building. In that film, an American film crew arrives at Skull Island, where Kong lives, and takes him, in chains, to New York City to exhibit him as the “eighth wonder of the world.” The original film is now recognized as an unsettling racial allegory. 

As one scholar has argued, “King Kong serves as the sublime object not only of fear and terror but also of the disenfranchised black, exotic other who must be put back into his place so as not to be a threat to the status quo.”¹

According to another scholar, when Kong is captured, enslaved, and exhibited, he “bears a striking similarity to the undressed slave on the auction-block showcased for fetishistic, visual dissection.”²

In the film clip below from Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, a Nazi (!) describes the parallels between “the Negro in America” and Kong. 

King Kong has gone on to appear in multiple sequels, remakes, and reboots, including Son of Kong (1933), a sequel to the original film, King Kong Escapes (1967), and King Kong, a 1976 remake starring Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, and Charles Grodin. And Godzilla and Kong first appeared together in the 1963 Japanese film King Kong vs. Godzilla which was directed by Ishirō Honda, the director of the first Godzilla film.

One final note: Perhaps the most unusual item involving one of these giant monsters is not in the Forrest J. Ackerman collection, but in the papers of writer Jerry Sohl. Sohl, who wrote for such television series as The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, and the original Star Trek series, wrote a seventeen-page treatment (never produced) set near the end of World War II and titled “Godzilla vs. Frankenstein”!

Post contributed by AHC Archivist Roger Simon (our resident film expert).

¹ Valerie Frazier, “King Kong’s Reign Continues: ‘King Kong’ as a Sign of Shifting Racial Politics,” CLA Journal, vol. 51, no. 2, 2007, pp. 186–205.

² Robin Means Coleman, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, (Routledge, 2011), p. 43.