Godzilla and "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms"

Above, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms rampages in New York City. Warner Bros. photo.

Godzilla fans, a more sophisticated bunch than average movie fans, are aware that the inspiration for Tomoyuki Tanaka's and Ishirō Honda's Godzilla (1954) had its inspiration by The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms in 1953.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was the first giant monster movie that mixed a monster with the then-new nuclear bomb.

Collider posted an article on the "forgotten" (definitely not by giant monster fans) sci-fi monster movie that came before Godzilla and inspired it.

The article begins with:

When audiences think of kaiju cinema, the image that towers above all else is Godzilla rising from the sea in 1954, a monstrous embodiment of the terrors of nuclear power. Yet one year earlier, American audiences had already seen a giant reptilian beast awaken and wreak havoc on a coastal city. Eugène Lourié’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) was more than a creature feature — it was a prototype, laying down the DNA that Godzilla would refine into legend.

Adapted loosely from Ray Bradbury’s short story The Fog Horn, 20,000 Fathoms gave cinema its first modern giant monster born from atomic power. The titular Rhedosaurus, a stop-motion marvel animated by Ray Harryhausen, stomped through New York City with a destructive force unlike anything audiences had seen on the big screen. By merging Cold War anxieties with prehistoric terror, the film provided the kaiju formula: mankind’s hubris awakens a monster, cities tremble and fall, and survival depends on desperate human ingenuity.

To read the full article, go here.