Mushroom people – Körperhorror, Science Fiction und Ökologie bei Ishiro Honda und Hayao Miyazaki
Credit: Attack of the Mushroom People (Director: Ishirō Honda, Japan 1963), screen shot
Lecture by Ilka Becker
Schmela Haus, Düsseldorf
13/03/2014
On the occasion of the programme Futur 3
Conception: Marion Ackermann, Doris Krystof
In Japanese cinema, ideas about the future are often associated with post-apocalyptic scenarios and physical transformations. Monster film and anime are the preferred genres in which war catastrophes, nuclear contamination and environmental pollution result in dystopian and equally fantastic landscapes. Their inhabitants: mushrooms and humans. And sometimes mushroom people. Mushrooms here not only have the property of being poisonous and hallucinogenic, plunging their consumers into a confusion of the senses and transformed bodies, as in Ishiro Honda's film "Matango", which was also released under the title "Attack of the Mushroom People". In Hayao Miyazaki's "Nausicaä from the Valley of the Winds", they are also addressed in their ability to remediate soil. In this way, they are literally "toxic media" of cinema that make man-made catastrophes visible and restore the ecological balance.