What do I do for the Halloween season as a horror movie lover running a fansite about somebody who wasn't really in any horror movies? I talk about some horror-adjacent movies, I guess.
I'm going to structure this the same way I structured my Sanjuro post: since most of you have probably already seen The H-Man, I'll focus less on the film itself and more on things like merch, international releases, and other stuff that will hopefully be new to at least some readers. I would argue that The H-Man is the strongest contender for a horror label in the Transforming Human series, as the transformed humans in this film bear very little resemblance to humans anymore, whereas the antagonists of Secret of the Telegian and The Human Vapor do retain their human form.
This will be the first in a series. Throughout the month - in addition to regular, non-themed posts - I'm also going to cover Legend of the Beautiful Cat and maybe some Saturday Wide Theater stuff if I can find enough information about it. (I personally consider Godzilla a horror movie, but that's fairly controversial.) There's also episode 20 of Operation: Mystery, which is arguably a horror show more often than not, but I am currently unable to talk about that for secret reasons.
The H-Man was released to Japanese theaters on June 24th, 1958. It shares a lot of its DNA with Godzilla, having also been directed by Ishirō Honda and including explicit references to the Lucky Dragon no. 5 incident, but whereas Godzilla presents nuclear testing and weaponry giving rise to an external threat, The H-Man looks at the possibility of humanity itself becoming infected by the aftereffects of nuclear power. Honda visited Japan's first nuclear reactor (the now-defunct JRR-1) and interviewed a scientist from the University of Tokyo's nuclear science department as research for the film.
It's one of my personal favorite tokusatsu movies. It's entertaining, fast-paced, and genuinely scary at times, but it also has that Honda introspection that makes it stick in your brain long after watching it. I talk about it on my film review blog here.
The film was actually based on a story by a contracted Toho actor, Hideo Unagami, but Unagami passed away the year prior to filming. Unagami would write scripts on the side and bring them to Toho's planning department, and got the idea for a story about a new human born from the radiation of a hydrogen bomb during filming of The Mysterians. Takeshi Kimura took Unagami's manuscript and finalized it into a script for The H-Man.
As per Kenji Sahara, the climax of the movie was filmed in an actual sewer and apparently smelled as bad as one would expect. (I always get a kick out of seeing Akihiko Hirata hanging around down there in a plastic jumpsuit with a full suit and tie under it.)
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| American lobby cards for this film fetch semi-ridiculous prices, for some reason. |
The film was first screened in American theaters a little less than a year after its original release, on May 28th, 1959. Columbia Pictures handled the release and surprisingly they still retain distribution rights to the film to this day, after having renewed the license in 1987. I haven't seen the Columbia dub, but as I mentioned in my review, it apparently removes all mention of the "H-Men" retaining their human memories after they've been transformed, which, to me, ruins a lot of the film's impact. From what I understand the American cut also guts the special effects to a large extent. You can read more on the differences between the two cuts of the film here.
Other theatrical releases of the film extended to twelve more countries over the next four years.
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| West German poster - Google Translate says the title is "The Terror Creeps Through Tokyo" |
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| French poster included with the leaflet inside a Japanese laserdisc release of the film |
Speaking of fetching insane prices, there is a sequel manga that was released shortly after the film itself. This has been translated in full over on Toho Kingdom. It isn't fully scanned, but the translation does include a selection of images from the manga, and you can check out some more on this Mandarake listing. The protagonist is a youngish boy as per shounen manga tradition, but Chief Inspector Tominaga actually does have a decent role in it. There's also baseball, and a white guy with a fearsome mustache.
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| Nicholas Driscoll from Toho Kingdom apparently bought this for $800. I feel solidarity with him as I myself have done some questionable spending lately. |
There is technically another manga, but I don't think you're ready for it. It appeared in the January 1971 issue of Saturday Manga. The best I can figure, a man drinks some kind of whiskey that H-Man-itizes him, a woman kisses him and somehow... swallows him... and then coughs him out... but it all turns out to be a dream sequence in the imagination of a woman who is being given CPR after nearly drowning?
Let's move on to merchandise... if you really, really need your own liquid human, you have some options. CAST has, of course, produced an ornament of one of them, which comes packaged with the poor frog who gets liquified in the film:
That's the deluxe version, though. If the frog weirds you out, there is a version with just the human.
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| Hang him on your Christmas tree. You must. |
There are also more H-Man sofubi than I expected. There exists a possibly unlicensed garage kit that comes not only with a humanoid H-Man but also one of the dancers in mid-H-Man-ification:
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| This picture really gives off a vibe, doesn't it |
Or you can get a more normal-looking, run-of-the-mill (and licensed) sofubi that you don't have to assemble and paint yourself.
We're going to end our H-Man journey here, since there's not a lot out there in the way of merch and fun stuff. I think it would be cool if somebody like Super7 did Transforming Human figures, but that feels like it's probably never going to happen.
You can watch The H-Man right this instant on various streaming services (Tubi, Amazon Prime, etc), but unfortunately all legal online streaming platforms have the shortened English dub. However, Columbia Pictures' "Icons of Sci-Fi Toho Collection" DVD, which packages this film with Mothra and Battle in Outer Space, appears to include both the original and the dub, and is pretty cheap and easy to find secondhand. (Interestingly, the back of the box covers all its bases by referring to Ishirō Honda using both his real name AND "Inoshiro".) Mill Creek and Eureka have released it on DVD with subtitles as well and both times it is packaged with Battle in Outer Space.
Tune in next time for more vaguely spooky films...
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