I went down a winding road this month of related works. In my last reading post, I read through Delicious in Dungeon by Ryōko Kui. Miscellaneous Monster Tales -1- has a gag about the walking mushrooms in the dungeons, and a man turning into a mushroom creature called a Matango after eating walking mushrooms every day. I didn’t get the joke, so looking into it this month, I found Ishirō Honda’s 1963 horror film Matango, and managed to track down a copy to watch. Watching the film, I was reminded of a comic I’d encountered a few years ago about a shipwrecked man and woman trapped and starving on as island populated by horrific mushrooms. After searching around, I again found the comic by artist Turqiousemagpie on tumblr. Re-reading it, the artist links to the story the comic is illustrating, which I’d missed when I read the comic in 2022. The story is William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” from 1907, which has wound its way into comic form, and lent inspiration to Matango.
What a fun chain of horror stories! It was simultaneously wondrous and humbling to see what a long reach a single story had, as well as the shifting, transformative thread of inspiration winding its way across a century.
In “The Voice in the Night” sailors George and Will encounter a voice calling from the waters of the North Pacific, at night, of course. The voice asks not to be looked at, and begs for supplies, both of which are granted. The voice tells the story of how he and his sweetheart came to be stranded on a raft in the North Pacific, eventually coming to an an island where food is extremely scarce and everything is overgrown with a vile and fast-growing fungus. After telling his tale to George and Will, the voice pushes off into the night, but not before George dares to look at the speaker.
Turquoisemagpie’s comic is essentially a one-to-one visual translation of Hodgson’s story. It’s fantastic. The imagery had enough staying power to rattle around in my head for two years. The fungus is rendered in wonderful colors – a riot of blues and pinks that paints the fungus as a vibrant living thing, but with a washed-out quality that points to the consumptive, leeching quality of the fungus, and foreshadows the later white growth that spreads across living things, and makes up the bulk of the “extraordinarily shaped mass.”
Matango is a great film, and I’m sad at how difficult it was to find a watchable copy (though thankfully not quite as bad as finding the Suspicion episode that also adapted Hodgson’s story, which appears to have only one upload of pretty dire video quality). I thought it was interesting that while Matango is more inspired by The Voice in the Night, and less of a direct translation of Voice in the Night as Turquoisemagpie’s story is, the bones of the story are still very present, looming out at the viewer who can recognize them, albeit transformed. The survivors of a shipwreck balloon from two to seven, and survive a yachting accident rather than some sort of Pacific crossing. While they find a wrecked vessel to take refuge on just as the voice and his sweetheart do, the abandoned ship the survivors take refuge on is no longer a regular sailing vessel, but a mysterious military vessel from an unknown country, running nuclear tests. Rather than caring tenderly for one another as the voice and his sweetheart do, the group turns to petty jealousies, infighting, and extortion. The mushrooms take on a much more sentient position in Matango – they lure and trap and howl with malevolent laughter, rather than simply grow, as all living things must.
The islands in Matango and The Voice in the Night are and are not the same island. While there are few food sources on the island in Matango, the survivors do manage to find some things to eat, like turtle eggs and seaweed, unlike the abject desolation of the island in The Voice in the Night, where even fish are a rarity. Matango sports a dense and overbearing jungle that hides the mushrooms, whereas the island in Voice in the Night has nothing but fungal growth. The yacht survivors range across long, sandy beaches; gone is The Voice in the Night’s sole small clear patch of a beach of something that looks like sand but is not (and what is it, if not sand? What is it?! “It was not sand. What it was, I do not know.” This single line haunts me perhaps even more than the idea of two fungal figures on the not-sand beach, slowly starving, slowly transforming.)
Yet, one could imagine that it is the same island in Matango and Voice in the Night, having continued to draw ships in to it with its doomed current. The nuclear testing mentioned in the film has turned the mushrooms from merely predatory to malicious, as the mushrooms of Matango are now not only ambulatory (the sole fungal movement in The Voice in the Night involves a tearing), but a fungus that cackles and schemes and kidnaps.
As noted, in “The Voice in the Night,” the extraordinarily shaped mass does reach out and swipe at the voice. My reading of this scene is that it is not the fungus that does so, but whatever remains of the consciousness of the sailor that has been overgrown by the fungus, futilely reaching out for help. Of course one could always read it as the fungus compelling whatever remains of the sailor to spread itself, like the rabies virus does, but if so, it seems less a malicious act and one more simply of propagation. However, the abductions and transformations in Matango are targeted, the act of a thinking, and frequently cruel consciousness, not simply natural propagation.
Matango’s re-imagination and transformed motivations makes sense. In The Voice in the Night, starvation and consumption are the horror, embodied by the fungus. In Matango, the fungus embodies a different sort of horror – the natural world twisted into a more dangerous form by targeted human cruelty. The abandoned vessel in Matango was conducting nuclear experiments. 9 years before making Matango, Ishirō Honda directed Godzilla – a dinosaur made dangerous by nuclear testing. In Matango, the fungus is made malevolent by the same power, no longer consuming simply to live, but doing so with hideous, giddy cruelty.
Gabrielle Bleu 