21 Days of Spooky: Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, 2016)

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21 Days of Spooky is not about pop culture that sets out to fright you with brain-eating, viscerae-hanging, slash-killing scenes, but with thoughts that linger and persist on your life long after you've watched them. Or are just downright creepy. Tonight's spooky: Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi's Shin Godzilla. Some spoilers ahead.

What's it about?: It's a peaceful day in Japan... until a creepy ass creature pops up from the water and starts rampaging everywhere, evolving into scarier forms right in front of politicians' eyes while they try to choose what's the most bureaucratic thing to do in this catastrophic case.

Our friendly neighborhood Godzilla has received multiple film adaptations throughout his lifetime, to the point in where he's getting multiple Criterion Collection releases to celebrate his movie existence. But few of those pictures are remotedly as scary as 2016's Shin Godzilla, Toho's third reboot of the franchise, where his origins are pretty much shown to us from the get go, and we even get to see him grow up! Well, maybe sometimes it's not cutesy to see a living thing grow, especially when said thing is a gigantic radioactive lizard with zero concerns about whatever ceased to exist under his huge paw.

In this film, the biggest threat is Godzilla himself, who doesn't get to save us from some other big reject of nature like in most of his features, but instead rampages throughout Japan believing to have all the privilege of a famous white lady pleading guilty to buying her daughter's college spot. The second biggest threat here is, not surprisingly, bureaucracy, comprised by our main characters, politicians who have no clue on how to act when faced with a huge lizard, and all they seem to do is scribble random horseshit locked in buildings until they fail, die, or anything in between. It's doom everywhere you look.

Shin Godzilla's plot is based on the government bureaucrat reactions to both the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, only that in this case we're replacing real disaster with a nuclear dino. There's absolutely no way to feel hopeless and helpless as you watch a whole room of people asking one single person for permission to do a preliminary action that could save some bystanders from getting squashzilla'd. "Experts" are brought in, and their solutions are pointless or speak in pretentious gibberish that helps nobody. Big shots die and then everyone has to find a successor.

Meanwhile, nuclear Barney evolves right in front of our eyes, initially being a tadpole-like looking creature, then a wobbly mess with shaky legs, then a more sturdy and upright thing, and from there on it grows on size until we get to the Godzilla we all know. He gets a lot of screentime, as do the poor humans who happen to be around him as he goes by and subsequently are stomped, thrown around in their cars or, my personal favorite, roasted by Godzilla's adorable nuclear breath and shiny killer rays of death. It isn't your friendly dino, this reboot has him as an angry monster who doesn't care about humanity at all.

Bureaucracy runs so slow when faced with this threat, that the American government decides to take action. And we know how historically great has the U.S. been with Japan. So, when the young team of hit-shot wannabes discover a scientific research that shows Godzilla can reproduce asexually, 'Murica does what they do best and intervene on a foreign government, giving the Japanese politicians a deadline to destroy the dino, or they'll launch a nuclear attack on the country (again). Add that new threat to the list of "things happening in this film that make me very uneasy". And we're not even near the climax.

Imagine if something like this happened in real life. The film shows us the army firing at the creature to no avail, launching a cool-ass missile attack from the high heavens (to no avail, duh), and all sorts of theories that make zero sense as the body count rises and the bureaucrats only get to navigate a red-tape labyrinth of nothingness. No country is truly prepared for a catastrophe or a massive-scale invasion, and the ones who pay the price are we, the tax paying folk that doesn't get to escape in helicopters, hide in bunkers, or beg for diplomatic immunity to dodge the consequences of our non-actions.

Now, I won't tell you how the film ends, or the even more maddening actions taken by the few politicians that are left standing, but you should remember Godzilla is Toho's cash cow. Though that makes the film's last shot, which I consider one of the creepiest pop culture things my eyes have ever seen, even more frightening.

Tomorrow: Ian Clark's The Facility is a tough pill to swallow.