We're not here for the people...

 ... we're here for the giant monsters fighting

Was watching the new Godzilla anime on Netflix (Singular Point), and briefly had a talk about the fact that the first few episodes were about the people, without a single kaiju battle taking part (well, okay, there's something adjacent to it, but you get the point). Much like how Godzilla vs King Kong had a strong human element before the kaiju battle, or the human element in Godzilla: King of Monsters, or Pacific Rim having human drama.

There's a reason for all this.  It's the same reason J-Horror is the way it is. And a big part of this is how Japan does storytelling on these subjects.

Godzilla, the first Godzilla, was a statement on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was on the horror of nuclear destruction, and how it devastated Japan's population without a care about the people's lives it upended. That, right there, made it a human story. It was about how you had your hopes and dreams and ambitions, and then this force can come in and destroy your life without a single thought to what you wanted.

Godzilla was, at its bare bones, a human story.

And this carried into other horror stories.  The Ring.  The Grudge.  The style of story telling in J-Horror carries the same DNA.  It's a human story -- people go about their lives, oblivious to what's to come. Then the horror comes and the people it affects have to come to terms with it. It doesn't care about you. It isn't, specifically, targeting you.  You're just in the wrong place, at the wrong time. And the story is about these people, how they cope with the force, and whether or not they can survive it.

Oh, most certainly, we come to watch the giant robot fight the giant monster, or to see people scrambling against the monsters in the dark. That's what we're used to -- the action of these movies.

That's great.  But that's not the story being told - that's only a small part of it. The kaiju, the ghosts, the giant robots -- those are just the vehicle that helps drive the human story. The helplessness of humanity against the threat is the story being told.

Which isn't to say that coming for the kaiju battles or the horror is wrong. Not in the least, you like what you like. But complaining about the human element in your daikaiju movie is like complaining about going to the ocean and finding out that the water's wet. It's kind of why it's there.

I think this is why Call of Cthulhu (and the Cthulhu mythos as a whole) is the most popular RPG in Japan.  It falls directly into their line of storytelling.  CoC is very much a Cosmic Horror genre -- you're people who are helpless against the threat that lies in the stars and in the shadows. In the long run, you're a drop in the bucket as you struggle in vain against the Elder Gods. Humanity is never going to win, and while fighting these things can be very personal for you, you mean nothing to the things out there - you're not even a blip on their radar. Their plans and schemes have nothing to do with you in particular... you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and all your struggles are just to slow down the inevitable.

Yeah, it's bleak. But trust me, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki dug some very deep grooves into Japan's collective psyche, so you can forgive them if those events may have impacted their style of storytelling.

But, I think, it kind of goes beyond that as well. In Shinto (Japan's religion), there is this idea that the cosmos itself is neither aligned to good, or evil. That there is no struggle between the two - it just exists, and it acts without thought to humanity. The impact of its existence can have a harmful or helpful effect on people, but that is more ... incidental. The gods don't specifically look at you and go 'let's help you' or 'let's harm you'. Anything that happens is incidental on that scale.

So, you can see that here, too. It isn't quite on the scale of Cosmic Horror, where the forces in play can very well be evil, but that evil really just doesn't care about you or your goals, ambitions, or dreams. It acts.  You're there.  Sucks to be you.

Hmm.

The closest thing I can think of in the West is Friday the 13th. It doesn't quite fall into that style of storytelling, but it easily could. Rather than making it a slasher flick, with a 'well, the people are doing things wrong, so they should be punished', actually just have the people be ... people. Have the camera focus on their lives, what they plan on doing or being, their goals.  Make the audience feel for them.

Then have Jason show up. The people aren't doing anything 'wrong'. Jason just kills people who are in this region. It isn't personal, it's what he does.  Don't glorify the violence, make it visceral and horrifying instead. Have these people struggle to survive, and have him cut them down anyway. He doesn't care about them - the audience does.

And they lose. They don't stop him.  They can't.  All they can hope to do is escape with their lives, and ... that won't be a given. In fact, if done 'properly', there may well be no survivors at the end.

Bleak? Yes. But it's a horror story. Having a 'happy' ending (where there's at least one survivor) shouldn't be a default expectation.  (Again, look at The Grudge).

I think that's what gets overlooked when people think 'kaiju film'. They're there for the big battle between Godzilla and the Threat of the Film. And sure, enjoy the hell out of that. Just... that isn't entirely the point of an actual kaiju film. That's just a part of it.

And in a lot of ways, Hollywood is doing the kaiju films right, by making it about the people, not the monsters. It's about the people, and always has been.