Directed by Takuya Uenishi, who also made the short G vs. G, which led to 2022’s official short Godzilla vs. Gigan Rex, this celebrates the 50th anniversary of Godzilla vs. Megalon, making me feel very old.

“All bound for Mu My Land,” or at least Mu or Seatopia, as one of their priestesses has used the dead body of Gigan Rex to bring Megalon back to life. Godzilla still stalks Tokyo, destroying all of the still alive Gigan that escaped, as well as ones that humans foolishly kept to experiment on. As a streaming tries to break into a government lab, the priestess appears and attacks JSDF soldiers, bringing Megalon up through the ground.

I love that Heisei Godzilla continues in these movies and wow, I’ve never seen a kaiju battle that had this much destruction before. Megalon is so much more frightening than he ever was before, more of an armored and caped cockroach than his skinny first form. Godzilla also shows off some new powers here, like being able to direct atomic energy to his fists and also use it to power him into a dropkick, a move that he famously used back in the first version of this movie.

The only thing that this movie is missing is Jet Jaguar. Once that happens, this will be perfect. They can keep making these as long as they can, because they’re amazing.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This short film was directed by Takuya Uenishi and is an official Toho-produced sequel to Uenishi’s fan-made short film G vs. G. That movie was entered into the 2019 Godzilla contest and he was given the opportunity to develop a sequel project with Toho as his winning prize.

In the future, a place nearly twenty-five years since the last appearance of kaiju. he human race is fresh meat for several Gigan until one of the monster’s dead bodies is thrown at them. In the foggy distance, Godzilla appears and fights off three of the Gigan and their buzzsaws before they give their energy to the Gigan Rex and the battle rages.

According to TV Tropes, the Godzilla in this movie is a grown-up Godzilla Jr., with the first shot being similar to his resurrection Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II. His lullabye theme plays as well. He uses the Heisei era Nuclear Pulse and also has a Super Mode like Burning Godzilla. This also has narration from Megumi Odaka and has similar words to a speech in Godzilla vs. Destroyah.

Takuya Uenishi also worked on visual effects for Godzilla Minus One and created another short last year, Godzilla vs. Megalon.

I loved this! Toho has been awesome about how their trying to expand the Godzilla brand more creatively with their contests. This is just another example of the great things that come out of that!

You can watch this on YouTube.

As I have grown older, I have become less concerned about things like continuity and making sense. I’m happy that this show can exist, a Godzilla world where three brothers — Godzilla-kun, Minilla and Little — are training to be great monsters. For example, in the first episode, they try to learn how to control their atomic breath and just end up making fireworks.

This series is adapted from a puppet fan film of the same name that was created by puppeteer Hideyuki Kobayashi for the 2019 Godzilla Contest. There are so many kaiju on Godzi Godzi Island, including Grandpa Hedo and Hedochi the smog monsters, who often close out each episode with a koan or introspective riddle. There’s also Rodan, Baragon, Battra, Jet Jaguar, Gigan, Young Caesar, Destroyah, twin Mothra Moshu-Moshu and Moshuu-Moshuu, Mecha Godzilla and so many more.

There are also live action scenes called “Attention! Godzilla” where women are struggling in their lives before meeting and adopting a Kamatte Gojira, the second stage of Godzilla from Shin Godzilla, who ends up acting a lot like my chihuahua Cubby, snarling and biting everything. Plus, “Go! Jet Jaguar” has the robot getting ready to fight Megalon.

How charming is this show? There’s Grandpa Zilla is the 1954 Godzilla but old. He has a a wizard staff and works for Santa Claus, delivering gifts to all of the good monster children. Godzilla 2000 is Godzilla-kun’s mother Mirei-san, the classic 70s Godzilla appears to be their father Taigo, Uncle Zilla is Shin Godzilla, Anguirus uses speech balloons just like he did in the original movie, Miyarabi is a human version of King Caesar, Rodan’s little brother Radon appears and the Godzilla brothers wearing turtle shells before worrying that they’ll be sued.

You can watch the series on YouTube.

Director Sietske Tjallingii explains to us something that I have always wondered. What happens when Godzilla goes to other countries? And what if it was the Netherlands, where he could pick up trains and whip them around like nunchakus? Could he arrive in the quiet of the night so that he could throw the Ajax Stadium roof like a frisbee and roast cows before swimming back off into the ocean, happy that there’s no oxygen destroyer in Amsterdam?

Tjallingii made a bunch of movies like this, including The Many Faces of Dracula, The Last Adventure of Superman and Visit from Outer Space.

If you’re wondering, “Does Godzilla use his atomic breath on a windmill?” the answer is yes. Really, this is everything I want from a Godzilla movie. Strange ambient music, no human beings to get in the way and just destruction. Our favorite kaiju should have rolled one up and eat a bunch more of those roasted cows.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This is a kamishibai film, which is similar to the paper theater in Japanese street theater. The kamishibaiya or narrator uses a set of illustrated cards to tell the story. This form of theater is where Ōgon Bat started.

In this short film, instead of a stage that was used to shift the cards, camera moves do pans across the artwork and there is sound design.

Written, produced, painted and narrated by Naoyuki Niiya, this is an examination of the murders of women near Hitokui-Yama, which is the Man-Eater Mountain. A police officer investigating these crimes, Haido, meets and falls in love with a young girl outside the village named Haruko. Yet with a mountain named in this way, you know that things will not be good. “Made to swallow slugs and worms, a yam shoved in my ass,” go just some of the lyrics to the song that is sung in this — an old traditional song from the village! — and once you hear a woman sing that, I mean, you have to realize that you’re probably going to be murdered. I don’t know, I’m not a character in a Japanese folk horror and perhaps I can see things with a bit more perspective.

Spoilers from here on in, but if you walk into a cave that’s shaped like a woman’s anatomy and hear demons laughing the entire way up a mountain, do not be startled when you walk right into a demonic orgy and you get turned out on top of a mountain of skulls by a giant bear while zombies eat feces all around you and get drunk on fermented blood.

Man-Eater Mountain is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2.

You can order this set from Severin.

Directed by Damien Ounouri, who wrote the story with Adila Bendimerad (who stars as Nfissa), this is a dark tale of what can happen at the beach. This movie is from Algeria and one of the first I’ve seen from there.

Nfissa is a young mother who is violently sexually harassed before she is drowned by several young men. After all, all she did was swim among them. At the same time, her family is wondering where she is, as no one else seems to care that she is gone.

Many people have died on this beach, enough that the dead who come back are well-known by the locals, and now Nfissa can breath under the water, which means that she will certainly get her revenge on the men who so easily threw her away.

The cops are about as solid as the ones in a giallo, so when one tells Nfissa’s husband, “I’ve never seen a woman become a jellyfish without reason,” you may wonder what he means. A jellyfish is what they call these zombies. Yet to me, the true horror of this is that she must be lured by her husband back to these uncaring police and destroyed all over again, because that’s what happens in this world.

You can watch this and pretend that it’s just a movie or that it’s set in another country but the sad truth is that things like this — look, I know women don’t transform into zombies every day, allow me my soapbox — happen every single day and we’ve become so desensitized to violence against everyone because we have the news looking for fresh meat for their 24/7 endless charnel house and we turn to murder TV for pleasure now, staring as people ask for a break and cry and the cameras just keep rolling.

I don’t know the answer. Maybe we deserve the zombies.

Kindil is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2.

You can order this set from Severin.

Directed by Wen-Ming “Joe” Hsieh, the look of this film feels like a strange sketchbook come to life. A businessman is stuck in a small town after the last ferry has left, so he walks to a hotel. There are no vacancies, but the manager feels badly and allows him to sleep in a storage closet that has a bed. He’s warned not to disturb the person in the next room.

That person is the manager’s daughter, who overnight falls in love with the man, who simply wants to make love and go back to his wife. When I was younger, I used to read Penthouse Forum and wonder how these things happened to the writers of the letters, which I know today are untrue. That’s because they’re all written without the actual reality of emotions. People can fall in love instantly and often, those people will seek supernatural revenge on you, so the moments are carnal bliss that you quickly pumped away will end up with you dead on the bottom of a river. Or at least coming close, but then as you may know — I hope only from folk horror films — that someone isn’t going to give up on getting their revenge just because you got away once.

This was amazing.

The Present is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2.

You can order this set from Severin.

Directed, written by and starring Dayan D. Oualid, this short explores Dan (Oualid), who studies scripture all day, but has been asked by Sarah (Sophie Arama) to help her husband Eli (Michael Charny), who seems not himself. He’s possessed, but what follows isn’t what we’ve come to expect from Western films. He gathers a minyan, a quorum of ten Jewish adults required for certain religious obligations which in this case is casting out a demon.

They get ready like Rambo, but their weapons are verses on their arms, prayer wraps and a small horn. The ritual they go through seems exhausting, much more than any modern exorcism movie with all the crazy ghost traps and night vision. This doesn’t need herky jerky demons and strobing effects to be powerful and terrifying.

The end of the film, as Dan stands surrounded by the boxes that hold these demons and just lets out a scream as he’s made it through again, is so powerful and emotional, as is the ideal music that forms the score. I wish that there was more of this.

Dibbuk is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2.

You can order this set from Severin.

Directed by Dennison Ramalho, who wrote Embodiment of Evil, this is the tale of Filho (Everaldo Pontes), a man caught between his love for his pious mother and his overwhelming lust for Formosa (Débora Muniz), who has given her soul to Satan and wants him to join her as she leaves behind their small town. If only his mother would let him date. Or die. Probably just die, if Formosa has her wish.

She ends up lying with another man while another watches, so Filho busts in with a machete. Instead of killing her, she goes full possessed and demands the heart of his mother. As you can see from Ramalho having worked with Coffin Joe, he knows how to get to the filthy bloody beating balls and heart of Brazilian horror. Nudity, demons, gore, all shot on film, all making me wish that this was longer than it is. Now I have to hunt down more of his films. This was totally up my alley and I want Severin to just release whatever else this man has made.

Love from Mother Only is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2.

You can order this set from Severin.

These three films appear along with November on the All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2 set.

Boundary (2009): Set among an isolated community in a remote landscape near the Russian border, Boundary offers the sound of wind, images of spaces and a general feeling of a chill. According to its mission statement, it “evokes a space of ambiguity, a psychogeography, an absence of personal histories. It is the first installment in a tetralogy of films based on a statement by Sadeq Hedavat: “In life it is possible to become angelic, human, or animal. I have become none of these things.””

Perhaps this would be good to watch before November when viewing this set instead of an extra. Consider programming these films yourself to get in the mood for the coldness and wide open regions that you will soon be watching.

Journey Through Setomaa (1913): Estonia’s first ethnographic film, this was made by Johannes Pääsuke n his expedition to Setomaa, a South-Eastern region in Estonia. You get to see how the town celebrates its customs, as well as farming, but perhaps the most interesting thing is that the subjects are fixated on the new technology that is capturing them.

I’m always wondering what it was like when these cultures were exposed to what today is the smallest bit of technology in the phones that we all carry. Here I am, over a hundred years later, watching these people who are all gone and they look vibrant and alive, like the twinkling of stars that we see after their light has reached us long after they have been extinguished.

Midvinterblot (1946): Directed and written by Gösta Werner, this presents a Norse blood sacrifice meant to end the darkness and cold of winter and usher in the return of the sun and warmth. Also, the man under the hood is Gunnar Björnstrand, who would go to be one of Ingmar Bergman’s collaborators from 1941 to 1968, then made Fanny and Alexander with him before he died.

This is mainly a series of images — the man abut to die, the ones killing him, those that watch — all illuminated by the flames as they carry out this ritual. It looks absolutely gorgeous in its two tone simplicity and I’m shocked more metal bands haven’t just started using this behind their songs. Sweden is the home of so much wonderful metal, after all — At the Gates, Ghost, Bathory, Candlemass, Craft, Watain…

The sun is going to come out tomorrow. Of course, someone is going to have to get stabbed for that to happen. But there will be sun.

These short films are part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2.

You can order this set from Severin.