Five vacationers and two crewmen become stranded on a tropical island near the equator. The island has little edible food for them to use as they try to live in a fungus covered hulk while repairing Kessei's yacht. Eventually they struggle over the food rations which were left behind by the former crew. Soon they discover something unfriendly there...
Production
Gloriously grotesque mushroom sets that ooze 60s Toho craft.
Direction
Honda builds dread through claustrophobia, not kaiju spectacle.
Costume
Those fungal prosthetics—campy yet genuinely unsettling.
Director
Ishirō Honda
Akira Kubo
Kenji Murai - Professor
Kumi Mizuno
Mami Sekiguchi - Singer
Hiroshi Koizumi
Naoyuki Sakuta - Skipper
Kenji Sahara
Senzô Koyama - Sailor
Hiroshi Tachikawa
Etsurô Yoshida - Writer
Yoshio Tsuchiya
Masafumi Kasai - Owner
Miki Yashiro
Akiko Sôma - Student
Hideyo Amamoto
Transitional Matango
Takuzō Kumagai
Doctor (as Jiro Kumagai)
Akio Kusama
Police Personnel
Katsumi Tezuka
Police Personnel
Haruo Nakajima
Matango
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Released during Japan's post-war economic boom, Matango channels anxiety about American consumerism and losing traditional identity to foreign 'infection'—the mushrooms as capitalist excess.
Honda considered this his personal favorite; Toho shelved it for years, finding the human horror too bleak after his crowd-pleasing Godzilla films. The studio was wrong and boring.
JP
