Jase Short

Many horror films of the 1960s played upon themes of societal collapse and anomie. These narratives resonated with audiences who had experienced a social collapse of extraordinary proportions, as Japan had rapidly transitioned from an imperial giant into a devastated wasteland in the space of a few short years. Exemplary of this trend is Matango (1963), which was released in the United States under the title Attack of the Mushroom People. The American title gives one the sense that the film is yet another campy B movie in the atomic horror sub-genre, rather than a biting commentary on contemporary Japan and the crushing rhythms of Japanese capitalism.

Giant monster movies, far from representing  mere escapist fantasy, constitute a major mode of modern mythology. Born with the development of colonialism, capitalist industry, and cinema, the mythology of giant monsters provides a lens through which to understand the modern world.

The period of late antiquity is often characterized as a time of exceptional spiritual crisis emerging from the broader social crisis of the Mediterranean social system. This was the soil on which Rabbinical Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and mystery cults such as that of Mithras gained prominence. Speculation as to why this period saw such a flourishing of spiritual expression quite separate from the traditional religious system (anachronistically referred to as paganism) has emerged as a sort of cottage industry in contemporary popular history, but for our purposes it suffices to say that, whatever the causes, numerous spiritual practices emerged in the third and fourth centuries of the Common Era. It was in this context that Plotinus' Platonic philosophy must be situated as a spiritual practice which, while not entirely dismissing magical rites and other practices common to its competitors, centered the ψυχή—soul —according to its capacity for rationality as a central concern. Plotinius' vision of spiritual practice was not that of the salvation of the soul from a damned world, but rather its awakening to its destiny in the higher realms by the employment of discursive reason.

One of the more salient features of both Greek and Roman theater is contained in its portrayals of characters who are confronted with situations of monstrous horror. The term φρίκη (and its Latin equivalent, horror) are used in vital moments in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca to convey a sense of dread and trembling in the face of terrifying conditions. The Greek stem φρίττω refers to trembling in the literal sense of bodily shaking. The concept of monstrous horror, I argue, emerges through a meta reading of these texts. The manifestations of this sensibility include the tropes of " nature out of balance " (what I term, elsewhere, unbalance) such as plagues and animal omens. Indeed, one reading of the Oresteia is that it displays a reflexive tendency in the art of playwriting, in which the unleashing of the Furies and their eventual reconciliation mirrors the impact of audiences being exposed to horrific acts and then finding their way to a place of emotional acceptance. The primary means by which this is deployed involves a complex of emotional elicitation by emotional displays on stage, emotional displays which Plato famously argued led to moral degeneration. I argue that Seneca's plays display a strong philosophical self-awarenness of this notion, and that his work displays one attempt to repeat it in other circumstances under other conditions. Seneca's work is a model that we can follow in trying to understand how we might deploy this notion today, as we face social and political conditions analogous to the period of the three Classical Greek tragedians. The potency of this conceptual couplet—not just horror, but monstrous horror—is due in large part to this social context of instability and the upsetting of the established order of things. Our own world is ridden with crises of just this sort, and so there is great value in investigating how the ancient Greeks (and Seneca) portrayed the sensibility emergent from analogous conditions.