Halloween Special: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The H-Man

Part I: The Men Behind The H-Man

The staff of The H-Man.

The screenplay for The H-Man was written by Takeshi Kimura (also known under his birth name Kaoru Mabuchi), who had already written several screenplays for Toho by the time the film was released in 1958. Within the field of tokusatsu, he'd contributed Rodan and The Mysterians, but he had also penned noted wet blanket Farewell Rabaul in 1954, and Red Line Base in 1953, a film which was postponed due to its perceived anti-American sentiment.

You can usually tell when a Toho movie has a Kimura screenplay (as opposed, for example, to Shinichi Sekizawa, frequent contributor to the Godzilla series and purveyor of more light-hearted fare). Kimura's work tends to be fairly pessimistic, with a focus on the monster as outcast, although in volume 4 of Toho's SF Special Effects Film Series books, he himself stated that he "does not know where [his] own style lies". I'm not going to try to psychoanalyze the guy or anything, but one does have to wonder if Kimura's nihilistic tendency was at all influenced by having been in prison for ten years.

The H-Man's director, Ishirō Honda, needs no introduction if you know anything whatsoever about tokusatsu or really about Japanese cinema at all. I believe survivorship bias affects Western perception of Honda's work quite a bit - he also directed romances and dramas, but most of his other pictures are not available outside of Japan, so to most Western fans, he is associated solely with tokusatsu. Nevertheless, his style as a director also tends to be more introspective than his fellow Godzilla helmsmen, which makes him a perfect compliment to Takeshi Kimura.

Instrumental (sorry) to the overall atmosphere of The H-Man is Masaru Sato's deeply spooky score. Sato is a rare breed in that he was unbelievably prolific (just scroll down his JP Wiki page to see how many soundtracks he composed), but the quality of his work is consistently very good. Those delightfully offbeat doyoyoyoiiii! noises you hear throughout The H-Man were achieved by Sato recording plucked piano strings and doubling it with woodwinds.

And, of course, you've got Eiji Tsuburaya in charge of the special effects - another figure who needs to introduction. We're going to give The H-Man's effects further examination in the next section, so we'll skim over him for now.

Before we move on, though, if I may, I'd like to set the scene a little. This is the spooky season, after all, and a post about such a dark, stylish movie as The H-Man deserves some ambiance.

You used to date a nightclub singer. Now you don't know what you are. Dimly, you recall something terrible and wet crawling up your leg - did you once have legs? - and you remember pulling out your gun and shooting at it, though you knew it was too late. But you still have a will, even if you've become something else. Even in your altered state, you're not helpless as you watch the gang you once ran with close in on your girl. And if you can see them, you can touch them - like that thing touched you...

Part II: The Primordial Ooze: Creating The H-Man and Its H-Men

You KNOW whoever drew this was having a great time.

Although I've made it seem like the driving force behind The H-Man was Takeshi Kimura, there is a ghost behind the film, and that ghost is named Hideo Unagami.

Hideo Unagami - sometimes also called Hideo Kaijo - is kind of an interesting figure: he was contracted by Toho as an actor for bit part roles, but he would frequently bring scripts to Toho's planning department while still acting as well. Among a few other things, Unagami was responsible for the infamous Bride of Godzilla? script, which, if filmed, would have been a sequel to Godzilla Raids Again. None of Unagami's scripts were ever adapted directly, but he had an influence on several of Toho's late-'50s tokusatsu pictures.

Unagami, while acting in The Mysterians, was inspired to write a script titled Liquid Man Appears, which he brought to Tomoyuki Tanaka. Tanaka read the script and favored it very highly, choosing to adapt it to film - only Unagami passed away in November of 1957, before his idea could be realized. (His costar Yoshio Tsuchiya attributes his death - by heart attack - to the stress of wearing his Mysterian suit, which I can confirm does suck.) Unagami received posthumous credit for his work on The H-Man.

The content of Unagami's story treatment is pretty much entirely unknown to us. What elements were added by Kimura and which were original to Unagami's script cannot be determined. I think this is somewhat unfortunate, but with such a splendid final product, it's hard to really wish things had gone any differently.

The original title of the film, of course, is Bijo to ekitai ningen, or "Beauty and the Liquid People". 

Manufacturing setpieces. (Unfortunately I can't tell what exactly is being manufactured here.)

So now we have the story about the goo people, but we need to actually make some goo people. As per a press release written by Eiji Tsuburaya:

For the creation of the Liquid Men we decided to use gelatin and cellophane which we crumpled before flattening into a solid mass. We also used organic glass[...]which is more transparent and colorless than gelatin. We could have used whatever we had thought would do the job, but finally we decided to avoid using things that audiences might recognize, although we did want the forms of the things to look somewhat human.

Gelatin and cellophane is straightforward enough, but I had no idea what "organic glass" was and, not being a chemist (though I do know a fine one; shame he died so young), I had to look it up. Organic glass is "a fully synthetic plastic material available in a vitreous state [that] consists of macromolecular organic compounds which do not follow any principle of periodic arrangement and are hence amorphous."

From what I can gather, the organic glass Toho was using to depict their liquid humans had to be cut up and then melted to achieve its vitreous state, which, according to Keizo Murase, was one of his first jobs after joining Toho's special effects department. After it had been liquified, sets were built on a slant so that the goop would ooze and roll the way Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects crew wanted it to. For scenes where the liquid people take on humanoid form, wet organic glass was sandwiched between two (solid) glass panes, which were then manipulated so that the organic glass inside would slip around and give a shifting, seething appearance.

Another thing you may have noticed while watching The H-Man is lighting: it's a noir film, after all, so maintaining the perfect level of darkness at all the right times is crucial to the movie's overall atmosphere. We hardly ever mention lighting technicians when talking about a film, so I'd like to give credit to Toho's Tsuruzo Nishikawa, the man responsible for The H-Man's distinctive look. His direction did make things difficult for the special effects department, who had to figure out how to make their work still come out well in low lighting, but the movie is all the better for Nishikawa's creative use of shadow.

We'll move on shortly to looking at what happened to the movie once it was completed and distributed across the world, but before we do, we're going to get introspective.

You are a nightclub singer. Your boyfriend is a gangster, or at least he was until recently - he's vanished, and hasn't even contacted you to tell you he needs to lay low for a while. You're peripherally aware that there have been strange deaths in the city: people disappearing right out of their clothes, no bodies ever found. A few weeks ago, you were just another girl trying to make a living, but now you find yourself caught between the police and your boyfriend's less-than-reputable associates - both asking questions you don't know how to answer...

 

Part III: What Is An "H-Man"?

The reason why I love Toho's "Transforming Human" series so much is specifically because of the sense of empathy entangled with horror that they convey - as opposed so strongly to contemporary American monster movies. None of the transformed humans in these Toho films are entirely at fault. The mushroom people in Matango are a cautionary tale more than anything; Sudo in Secret of the Telegian is, honestly, objectively right, if overzealous and warped by his own vengeance; Mizuno in The Human Vapor really didn't ask for any of that. The liquid people of The H-Man are no different. These are victims: completely innocent humans altered beyond recognition thanks to the actions of men who never met them or even spared them a thought.

The H-Man, like Godzilla, was heavily inspired by the Lucky Dragon no. 5 incident, in which the crew and cargo of a tuna fishing boat were irradiated, and the crew subsequently sickened by fallout from the American Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test. It should be noted that Lucky Dragon was operating well outside the declared danger zone of the test. Very often, when people talk about this, I hear the claim that the boat wandered into a known restricted area by accident. In reality, this incident was so heinous specifically because the Castle Bravo test was much bigger than anticipated, and hence the declared boundaries of the danger zone were too small.

The most horrifying thing about the liquid humans is that there are suggestions throughout the film that they retain their human will and memory. It's likely, if you've only seen the English dub of The H-Man, that you have a very different idea of the liquid humans. The English dub excises any reference to the H-Men retaining their memories and renders them little more than monsters to be feared because they might eat you. This is an entirely different angle from how they come across in the Japanese. There, the liquid humans terrify not only because they can kill you, but because there is virtually nothing standing between you and becoming one of them. Some sources even indicate that the liquid human who attacks Uchida in the sewers at the end of the film is Misaki, the liquified gangster played by Hisaya Ito.

We should remember that, although The H-Man might resemble contemporary "atomic terror" films, it does have very specific origins. Whatever else you may think of it, it's a movie that lays out its cycle of cause-and-effect quite clearly.

In what follows, we're going to take a look at how such an esoteric movie was marketed and received after it left its native country.

You once were a human. You could have been anyone. Fisherman, gangster, cop, dancer. Now you are slime. You know you are slime, and yet you remain you, with all of your memories and impulses. Only, now, when you act on those impulses - the instinct to seek help, to find the nearest living human and reach towards them, desperately - terrible things happen. As it sinks in what has become of you, you cannot fully blame your fellow humans for their fear and revulsion. And yet you still feel, somehow, as if you're one of them...

 

Part IV: Goop Across the Water: The H-Man Worldwide

Writing this section was difficult. The H-Man had theatrical runs in so many countries, and each of them was unique, with funky posters, interesting marketing, and a selection of critical reviews to either point and laugh at or vaguely agree with. I can't include everything, or we'd be here for the next century. So how do I choose what to put in?

I guess we can start with the American release, because there's more information about it than probably anything else. I should mention up front that there is one chapter in The H-Man's initial US theatrical run that I'm holding back - this is because it's so delightful that it deserves its own post, which will go up next week.

Obligatory "It's in Tohoscope, not Eastmancolor, yes, they have basically the same specs, but they're different, blah, blah."

Columbia Pictures has been in control of American distribution of The H-Man since its stateside premiere on May 28th, 1959; they retain rights to the film even today. You can check out an original American trailer here, but it's in such bad quality, you might get motion sickness. As you'll see in the post to follow, The H-Man lingered in American theaters quite a bit. It was shown in several states starting in late May and going on through June, with some drive-through showings even later in the summer, usually alongside a cheesier Western horror flick like The Woman Eater.

My ability to go through contemporary reviews is hampered significantly by the ridiculous monetization and gatekeeping of newspaper archives, but that doesn't mean we have nothing. Here is a contemporary review from Motion Picture Exhibitor, written in June of 1959. MPE was a periodical geared towards theater owners, rather than theatergoers, so their reviews tend to take a slightly different tack.

The H-Man –––– MELODRAMA, 79m

Columbia

(Japanese-made) (Dubbed in English) (Eastman Color) (CinemaScope)

Estimate: Good horror entry.

Cast: Yumi Shirakawa, Kenji Sahara, Akihiko Hirata, Eitaro Ozawa, Koreya Senda, Mitsuru[sic] Sato. Associate producers, Tomoyuki Tanaka; directed by Inoshiro[sic] Honda.

Story: Japanese citizens begin to disappear and scientists believe that effects of A-Bomb tests have created a liquid monster capable of disintegrating humans. Police scoff at the idea until it is proven experimentally. The monster reaches the city and creates considerable panic until it is trapped in the sewers and burned out of existence.

X-Ray: The Japanese have certainly learned the knack of the science-fiction and horror combination, and fans of such films who don't demand much sophistication with their horror should be happy with this one. The Japanese cast is adequate, and the color and wide-screen photography quite acceptable. It is in the field of special effects that these Japanese features excel, however, and this one is no exception. The liquid monster disintegrates victim after victim before the audiences[sic] eyes; so hats off to special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, whoever he is[...sic]. The story is not much and some of the characters and situations are pretty unbelievable by American standards. The emphasis, however, is on the horror and special effects, and in these fields the film does fine. Screenplay is by Takeshi Kimura.

Ad lines: "A Puddle In The Street... A Spot On The Wall... Watch It Closely And If It Moves, Scream For Your Life! You're Face To Facelessness With The H-Man"; "Big As An Entire City! Deadlier Than Anything You Have Never Seen!"

We've got Variety's review of it as well, which is also geared more towards industry insiders, hence why you'll often see reviewers discuss how a film should be "exploited" (= sold/advertised).

The H-Man

(WIDESCREEN–COLOR)

Good story well made. Pic is exploitable.

Hollywood, June 2.

Columbia release of a Toho production. Produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka. Directed by Inoshiro Honda. Screenplay, Takeshi Kimura, from original story by Hideo Kaijo; special effects, Eiji Tsuburaya; camera (Eastmancolor) Hajime Koizumi; sound, Choshichiro Mikami and Masanobu Migami. Previewed at Columbia, May 28, '59. Running time, 79 mins.

Actors: Yumi Shirakawa, Kenji Sahara, Akihiko Hirata, Eitaro Ozawa, Koreya Senda. Bitzuru[sic???] Sato.

"The H-Man" is a filmy green monster created from a slimy liquid that dissolves human beings as it oozes through Tokyo like jellied consomme. The Japanese Toho Production is well made and seemingly more thoughtful than the company's two other U.S. summer releases (Metro's "The Mysterians" and Warner Bros.' "Gigantis") and Columbia will be able to exploit good bookings with the widescreen, color production.

The story is reminiscent of last year's Paramount release, "The Blob," and while recollective science-fiction addicts may pooh-pooh the idea of an Oriental copy, they should be pleased indeed with the quality of the replica. It abounds in fewer special effects than either "Mysterians" or "Gigantis", but its one effect - namely, the disintegration of the human body - is skillfully and terrifyingly adept.

"H-Man" is as timely a[sic] Strontium 90 in describing how hydrogen bomb tests have reduced living things to a gelitanous[sic] mass which, in turn, can dissolve any other living tissue it touches. The liquid lives, and, to stay alive, seeks a repast mostly composed of the heroes, heroines and heavies of this picture. Once the authorities believe those who have seen the nuclear monster, it is a comparatively simple matter to do away with it via a manmade holocaust

Yumi Shirakawa, as a delightful looking nightclub entertainer, is excellent, as are Kenji Sahara, as the chief detective, and Akihiko Hirata, as a scientist. The Takeshi Kimura screenplay (from an original story by Hideo Kaijo) is effective, and Inoshiro Honda's direction takes full advantage of the story, the special effect (directed by Eiji Tsuburaya) and the terror generated by both. Tomoyuki Tanaka produced, with the technically excellent production aided by Hajime Koizumi's cinematography, Takeo Kita's art direction, Masuru[sic] Sato's music and the sound by Choshichiro Mikami and Masanobu Migami. Culturally, it is unfortunately the West has made such inroads in the Orient that a Japanese picture, such as this one, looks more like an American film with Japanese actors.

Potentially the only time we've ever had to clarify that no, Hirata does NOT play the scientist in this one.

These are both surprisingly favorable reviews, but I would posit that critics writing for industry-focused publications might have slightly more open minds as regards international pictures than writers whose job is not tied to the industry itself. National Parent-Teacher calls the film an "often ludicrous, occasionally pathetic, but nonetheless thought-provoking parody of grade-C American science-fiction thrillers", and the New York Tribune's reviewer called it "A good-natured poke at atom-bomb tests." I don't think the point of the movie could have flown any higher over that reviewer's head if it was shot out of a cannon.

The Indianapolis Star refers to the H-Men themselves as "palatable little creature[s] who look like mint jelly and [are] twice as good as 'the bubble machine'." I have no idea what any of that means.

I think that'll serve us for the American release, so let's move on now to the next country to receive the film, which was West Germany. There's nothing too remarkable about it, and the German dub is fully extant and available on Blu-Ray and DVD for German consumers (check out the trailer here as well), but the notable thing about this movie's half-life within Germany is that it has a strange tie to what is considered the country's first pulp horror novel.

Yes, that is just a completely unedited H-Man lobby card.

Published in 1968, The Horror Creeps Through Bonnard's House was the first entry in the Larry Brent series of pulp horror books published by "Dan Shocker" (a pseudonym of Jürgen Grasmück). Not only is its title a direct callback to the German title of The H-Man, which translated to The Horror Creeps Through Tokyo, its cover - when first published as part of Silver Crime, a long-running series of monthly novels - was lifted directed from a German lobby card for the film. Oddly enough, from what I can tell, the novel itself has nothing whatsoever to do with The H-Man: Larry Brent is a kind of James Bond ripoff with supernatural powers, and Bonnard's House appears to be about vampires.

Many countries deemed The H-Man unsuitable for children. In the UK it received an "X" rating, which at the time indicated that no children under 16 were allowed in theaters. (Evidently the UK reconsidered; the film was reclassified with a "12" rating when released to home media in 2020.) France and Finland did the same in not allowing children under 16 to see the film. This makes it funnier that the United States did pretty much the exact opposite, with some theaters even showing the film as a double-feature "kiddie matinee" alongside a more lighthearted picture. (To be fair, though, the US cut does remove a lot of content parents may have found objectionable, like gang violence.)

Sweden produced hands-down the best poster from any country in the world for their release of The H-Man (under the title "Fasans monster" or "Monster of Horror"):

Brazil's newspaper advertising for the film solved my eternal gripe about people using Tohoscope and Eastmancolor interchangeably by saying "hey, what if we call it both?":

Check out the peepers on that H-Man!

And - though we are not touching home media releases in this article due to space constraints - this French VHS tape of the film has potentially my least favorite cover art of anything I've ever seen in my life.

Yes, that is a white man. No, there are no white people in The H-Man.

Post-initial-release screenings do continue around the world, although I'm not sure how frequently; I've heard anecdotal reports of TV syndication in Mexico and in Finland it apparently played at a film festival as recently as 2024.

Posters are cool and all, but one of the most intriguing episodes in The H-Man's adventures outside of its home country comes with no visual evidence to back it up at all: getting boycotted in Indonesia. From a November 1964 issues of the Surabaya Press Summary, a digest of the most pertinent headlines culled from thirteen Surabaya newspapers and summarized in English:

SHOWING OF AMERICAN FILM FURSTRATED[sic]

A showing of American film scheduled to be held in Banjuwangi and Irama theaters at Banjuwangi has been frustrated by the local "committee for boycotting American films. It was "The H Man", a Columbia production with Japanese actors. The boycott of the film was initiated by the committee and conducted by the masses with the support of the Pantja Tunggal. To fool the people, the words Columbia Pictures had been erased, and the name of a Japanese producer was printed on them. 

I mean... okay.

I think that's basically it for international releases - if I went into any more detail I might have to make a separate post, and it wouldn't be that interesting anyway, so we might as well end it here. 

You are a scientist. You are a scientist, and you don't want to believe your own hypothesis. But in the past decades, man has created horrors that nature could never have imagined: nothing, it seems, is beyond the realm of possibility anymore. You have an explanation for the Tokyo liquefaction deaths, if only the police would listen. Since the Chief Inspector is an old friend, you were sure you could get him to see reason, but either he's more stubborn than you'd estimated or - you fear - your theory is too far-fetched. If he won't come around soon and lend the Tokyo Metropolitan Police's formidable strength to your cause, you don't know what might happen next...

Conclusion

What can we learn from The H-Man? I'll tell you one thing I've learned: not everyone likes this movie as much as I do, which is a bias that I find difficult to put away when I'm trying to do critical analysis of the film.

But aside from its quality as a work of fiction, I think the thing we can all learn from The H-Man is largely the same as what we can learn from Godzilla. Godzilla is a nuclear nightmare, the trauma of a generation writ large and exorcised on-screen. Godzilla is also, sometimes, a big friendly dinosaur with a goofy son. The H-Man took direct inspiration from the exact same circumstances that birthed Godzilla, and while it never transitioned into defanged commodification the way Godzilla did, it's also still a horror movie. It has green goo and a bunch of scantily clad ladies and some suave gangsters with cool guns and stuff. It's a movie that's been called silly and boring, it's a movie that's been ridiculed, it's a movie that's been badly dubbed and chucked onto drive-in theater screens alongside whatever trash theater owners assumed was in the same caliber as it.

So here's what we learn from The H-Man: A movie can be an exploration of trauma at the same time as it is a movie that's fun to watch and will hopefully put a little thrill into you.

Anyway, I hope that's everything you've ever wanted to know about The H-Man. 

You are a police inspector. An old friend has recently shown up on the doorstep of your precinct at exactly the wrong moment during what seemed like a routine narcotics case. Now he's making some truly outlandish claims and getting a bit too friendly with one of your persons of interest. You like the guy, but god, you're starting to wish he would leave you alone. After a while, though, he wears you down. You don't want to see logic in these things he keeps trying to thrust at you - irradiated life-preservers, insane stories from half-coherent sailors, melting frogs - but something about his own conviction begins to convince you. If he is right, though, you don't want to think about what it means for Tokyo - and for the rest of the world...

____

Sources: 

Brothers, Peter H. Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2009.

Toho SF Special Effects Movie Series vol. 4. Toho Publishing Department, 1985.

Godzilla and Toho Special Effects Official Mook vol. 36. Kodansha, 2024.

www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/organic-glass

Silverman, Ron. Review of The H-Man, directed by Ishiro Honda. Variety, 3 June 1959, p. 6. 

Review of The H-Man, directed by Ishiro Honda. Motion Picture Exhibitor, 3 June 1959, p. 19.