One of the glorious things about the internet is that it can answer questions quickly, and generally to a degree of satisfaction that stops my brain itching. Like, recently I saw an ad for a documentary about Shere Hite, a woman who’s writings on female sexuality were massive best sellers in the late 70s and early 80s, who was on a lot of talk shows, and was one of those omnipresent figures in pop culture that everyone seems to have forgotten. The movie’s ad portrays her vanishing from pop culture as a great mystery, which the movie will solve. I’ll admit the marketing worked. “Yeah, what did happen to Shere Hite, someone I haven’t thought about since she appeared on the tv show Donahue, which I probably saw when there were only three networks and I was too young to know what an orgasm was, let alone why this woman was talking about them?” I wondered, preparing to subscribe to whatever service was showing the movie and then preparing to unsubscribe once I’d had this suddenly burning question answered.
It’s perhaps a function of my age that it took a while to remember that the filmmakers did not have a lock on the answer to “What happened to Shere Hite?” and I looked at her wikipedia entry– she married a younger man, got divorced, married again, moved to England, renounced her citizenship and became a German citizen, and died at the age of 77. I found that satisfying enough so that spending the ten dollars or so to find out seemed less pressing. Of course, that’s not the question the movie is really seeking to answer, which is more along the lines of “why did we stop talking about someone who made such a giant impact?” and I will probably catch the movie at some point, as the question is interesting, and the potted biography isn’t the answer to the question, but it’s answer enough, and that will do for now.
The things that get stuck in my brain are quite odd. I recently had a memory involving the film “Attack of the Mushroom People”, as I first knew it, in which I imagined myself in the watching “The Creature Double Feature” in the basement of one of my childhood homes during a snowstorm. There are a number of things wrong with this memory. First of all, the movie is actually named “Matango”. However it goes by “Matango: The Fungus of Terror” and “Attack of the Mushroom People”, depending on where it was released. Second, we apparently didn’t have a TV in the basement where this memory takes place. Thirdly, I perpetually remember the place being snowy. That wasn’t so, and I have no way of verifying if this movie was on during a snowstorm. I am, however, certain that the movie creeped me out in a way that the other movies on “The Creature Double Feature” did not; most of the movies shown on “The Creature Double Feature” were kaiju films, so a lot of men in rubber suits fighting over miniature cities and bad dubbing. “Attack of the Mushroom People” was something else entirely.
The memory was sticky enough for me to track down the film, which was available on a free streaming service (under the “Attack of the Mushroom People” moniker, which I will shorten to “Attack…” and will be using from now on), and I sat down and watched it. It was… odd.“
“Attack…” tells the story of a group of Tokyo residents out on a wealthy businessman’s yacht. They are dilettantes, a grab bag of entertainers, a writer, a university professor, and so on, along two experienced sailors who are assisting. The yacht looks hilariously tiny to me; at some point the owner mentions the cost of the boat, and it’s roughly 2.7 million in today’s dollars. I’d like to think 2.7 million would by a bigger and better boat.
Whatever the cost of the boat, it’s not a match for a storm they get caught in, and the mast is ruined. They drift until coming across a deserted island, which they speculate is near the Bonin islands, which are about 600 miles away from Tokyo, but that’s someone speculating; their radio is down, they are lost with a capital L. On the island, they discover a shipwreck, which is coated in a fungus; cleaning products keep the fungus at bay, and the shipwreck is set up as a base of operations while they begin the task of surviving.
The film has a really unclear timeline, but these people begin squabbling and power struggling almost immediately. In spite of this, they search for food and water, and discover the island is rich in mushrooms, which the shipwreck’s logs caution them away from. There are other hints of problems : the ship’s mirrors are all missing, and later discovered to have been deliberately moved offboard and broken. The ship’s logs tell of people heading out and not returning, and so on. There’s fresh water on the island, and foraging brings up roots, seaweed and turtle eggs, but eventually food becomes a concern, and eventually, one of them tries the mushrooms, in spite of all the signs that they are really a bad for you.
Apparently, eating the mushrooms on the island 1) make you high, 2) make you not hungry, 3) make you want to eat more mushrooms, and 4) eventually turn you into the titular mushroom people. It’s not clear to me why the mushroom people attack, but they do, at various times, first as zombielike people, then by the end as sort of giant bipedal mushrooms who laugh. I’m skipping a minor fuckton of plot points, but eventually the yacht is kind of repaired, and there are only two survivors who have not either been shot or become mushroom people. One of them succumbs to temptation and eats the mushrooms, the other escapes, is rescued and ends up back in Tokyo, where he reveals he too has eaten the mushrooms.
It’s both silly and effective at the same time. Like most Japanese sci-fi/horror of that era, it looks very low budget, and the scenes where the yacht is in a storm in particular are of the “miniatures in a bathtub” school of special effects. But since most of the film is a drama about people trapped in desperate circumstances, the budgetary restrictions aren’t always so in your face. It has that 60s-70s thing going where all the men are perpetually sweaty (appropriate for the setting) and the women’s makeup is perpetually fresh (weirdly distracting for the setting). I can’t judge the acting all that well because I’ve only ever seen the dubbed version; the people doing the dubbing are… fine, but you can’t judge the actors when someone is literally putting the words in your mouth. It’s also unclear to me how much the movie was recut for the West. Articles about it are not very clear if the only difference is the dubbing or if there’s some kind of recutting or restructuring. The dubbing is done to match the lip-flaps of the actors, and I suspect that some of the resulting incoherency comes from that.
If you’re the right kind of viewer, you can see the film that’s inside the film, and it’s an excellent, scary one– Steven Soderbergh was (at least according to Wikipedia) planning a remake, but couldn’t get the rights. There are a few other famous fans of the film, and it makes sense to me. After all, it’s stuck with me for over 40 years. The story is ultimately one of human struggle against the elements, against temptation, and against the worst part of our natures. There’s a question for the final survivor if he was truly better off, if he should have joined the woman he loved and become a mushroom person and stayed on the island. I’m not entirely certain the film earns this kind of existential questioning, but I can see how it might with some tweaking.
I became curious about the origins of the story. I could see a horror film where people are shipwrecked and stalked by monsters, I could see a drama film where people are shipwrecked and the real monster is mankind™, but the combination of those two with a magic fungus that does all the things described above seemed odd. Both the internet and Steve Ryfle’s biography of Ishiro Honda (the director of “Attack…”, probably more famous for “Godzilla” and “Mothra” among others) point to a story by William Hope Hodgson, a writer who I had never heard of before but is believed to, among other things, have influenced HP Lovecraft. He lead an interesting life, and was a prolific writer who died in World War I at the age of 40. I’ll leave it to you to scan the Wikipedia article about him for greater detail, if desired. The story that inspired the film is “The Voice in the Night”, and I gave it a read.
Island and fungus aside, it tells a different story to the one in “Attack…” though there are common elements. In the story, a ship is approached by someone in a small craft begging for food. He will not show himself, and alludes to a woman who is stranded with him on an island after a shipwreck. After some persuading, he tells his story in full : he and a woman were on a boat in a storm, which lost its mast, and washed ashore on a mysterious island. In Hodgsosn’s story, the fungus is an invasive thing, and while it can be temporarily repelled by carbolic, it spreads quickly and cannot be permanently repelled. They find a place where the fungus will not grow, but soon realize that they have become infested, and out of concern for the rest of humanity, decided that they have to stay and succumb. Having told his story, the infected man rows away from the ship, back to the island, and presumably to his death.
It’s an effective little story, and I plan to read a little more of Hodgson’s work.
Reading about “A Voice in the Night” lead me to read about “Fungus Isle”, a story by even more obscure author Phillip M. Fisher. One blog asks if it is the source of inspiration for “Attack…”, but on and offline research says “no, it is not”. As another blog points out :
“The fact that the story was first published in 1923 (only 5 years after Hodgson’s death and only a few short years after the reprinting of WHH’s entire line of books in 1920-21), shows almost definitely that Fisher had read Hodgson. The similarities are too close. Given that Hodgson was fiercely territorial about his works and ideas, it is likely that he would have taken legal action against Fisher. That is purely speculation on my part, of course, nor do I have any idea if he would have had a case for copyright violation in the courts of 1923.”
In other words, it’s clearly “inspired by” not “the inspiration for”. Fisher himself is a minor figure in the world of scifi/horror. Online sources don’t offer a whole lot of information, and this is the best biography I found : https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/fisher_philip_m_jr . But The Lithole is nothing if not wildly completionist, so I bought (from what I can tell) the sole existent collection of his work and I read that, too.
Fisher’s story is a lot pulpier than Hodgson’s. It’s filled with phrases like “choking, water-quenched anathema” (a phrase which, for the life of me, I cannot parse), and other “I am being paid by the word” phrasing. The elements are here, a shipwreck, a fungus, a thing which fights the fungus (in this case, salt water). Fisher replaces the notion of hunger with thirst, which works well enough because you get thirsty well before hunger sets in, and a chunk of his story involves the crew of the wrecked boat needing water.
The most effective element in the story is that if the fungus takes root in you, and you kill it with seawater, it will leave a wound; the fungus replaces your flesh, and as it takes over, killing it becomes torturous to do. That’s a legitimately spine-tingling thought, and stayed with me after I was done reading. It ends less bleakly than Hodgson’s story, with the shipwrecked crew discovering a boat that had landed on the island, providing some hope for escape.
There are, of course a lot of other works about evil fungus, A few years ago I read a horror novel called “The Fungus” which is about an experiment gone wrong that creates a monstrous fungus that… takes over everything. There’s the videogame and TV Series “The Last of Us” which is about a monstrous fungus that… takes over everything. Someone with more ambition than I have could probably get a doctoral thesis about the role of fungus and it’s dehumanizing capabilities in horror. I’m just going to take a moment or two and marvel at the ability of a short story to inspire. The kid in the (not) basement and the adult he became is fascinated by the places following a single thread can take you. Not every journey is a profound one, but most of them are fun. Take a little bit of time and follow the streams.
The Lithole 