Kevin Cooney
Rich in motifs associated with folk horror- from collective derangement to debilitating superstitions- Daiei Motion Picture Company’s The Whale God (1962) depicts a village’s descent into madness in its quest to slay a deified cetacean known as Kujiragami, or the Whale God. Rather than fitting neatly into the folk horror genre, however, the film tells a different part of a folk horror story. The film shows the antecedent estranging events, supernatural or not, often left as background in other films. Unlike conventional folk horror portrayals of late-stage cults and rituals, The Whale God presents a community’s initial struggle and manifestation of social breakdown and collective estrangement, punctuated, as I contend, by a climax or “happening” that redefines the film as folk horror.
Check out the trailer for The Whale God:
Set in Meiji-era Japan and based on Uno Kōichirō’s 1961 novel, the film depicts the annual destructive pilgrimage of an invulnerable Pacific right whale and the collective delirium that follows in its wake. Within the first minutes of The Whale God, dozens of harpooners and boat crews die hunting Kujiragami. The casualties are not a singular event, as with each passing year, Kujiragami takes the lives of those seeking to kill it. One whaling family repeatedly sends men to die hunting Kujiragami, believing it is a righteous duty. As her husband and son die, the family matriarch, surrounded by her grandchildren, staring out over the sea, shouts, “We’ll put a harpoon into his belly with our hands, cut off his head, and have our revenge.”
Overhearing the pleas for violence, a missionary cautions the Christian converts, “Those with deep faith should never pursue the Whale God. Competing against the devil is not for the children of God.” His warning fails to sway the children’s mother (Murata Chieko), who defiantly proclaims, “We will kill the devil of the sea with our own hands. These children will deliver the death blow to the Whale God.” The battle is no longer just between humans and nature or between man and myth. The whale, a physical manifestation of the divine, wreaks havoc on the village and must be destroyed to return balance to the community. The opening minutes importantly portray how blood lust and fear transcend class and gender, a facet underpinning folk horror. The Whale God quickly establishes that while the village is isolated and their trauma motivates and contorts their thinking, those classic elements of the genre are not enough to blossom into folk horror. Without communal buy-in of estranging events, folk horror machinations cannot fully take hold.
Figure 2- Faced with sure death, Shaki (Hongo Kojiro) finds solace in alcohol as his village descends into madness.
A decade has passed, and now the whaling family’s youngest son, Shaki (Hongo Kojiro), kneels beside the corpse of his elder brother, recently killed by Kujiragami. Now gray-haired and bent with age, Shaki’s mother flails about, ranting that it is up to him to slaughter Kujiragami, and, until that time, he may not settle. Separately, a village elder hurries to the group of mourners, hysterically screaming, “The Whale God is coming! He is coming!” further unnerving the community. With the last generation of whalers confronting a surely deadly battle with Kujiragami, a collective madness descends upon the village, and the film captures the moment when the collective is broken.
Possessed by fear and hatred, the village coheres into an entity driven by irrationality and superstition. Prayers are replaced by the vengeful cries of the widows, and violent melees among whalers substitute traditional rituals. Men thrash about on the black sand beach, jostling and screaming. While some whalers throw themselves to the ground and roll madly, others splash ecstatically in the surf. As madness engulfs the village, the town’s whaling boss (Shimura Takashi) promises his daughter, the unwilling Toyo (Enami Kyoko), to the whaler who kills the demon whale, along with the transfer of his title and riches to the victor, even though he admits later that no whaler will survive the battle.
Instead of honoring the ocean-dwelling mammal, as was customary in period Japan, the village profaned their foe by anthropomorphizing Kujiragami’s behavior. The whaling families see themselves as simple agents, earning a living in an already dangerous trade against a bedeviled creature. The community believes the whale’s power to kill and survive otherwise deadly assaults constitutes the ability of a supernatural beast. To all but a handful of inhabitants who recognize the whale as just a whale, it is the supernatural Kujiragami, not the whalers, who possess hatred and murderous desire. By placing a divine moniker on the whale and then heaping on greedy motivators to see it killed, the villagers in The Whale God unknowingly participate in conditioning their world into one recognizable as folk horror. Trapped in a destructive spiral, the village’s obsession with the whale leads to continued resistance and death, never giving space to moral or spiritual introspection to extricate themselves from the cycle. The Whale God maintains a constant tension and leaves the viewer anticipating some form of resolution, either sacred or profane. It is the climax where The Whale God takes its narrative elements and ties them into a resolutely folk horror conclusion.
Parts of Adam Scovell’s “Folk Horror Chain,” such as “landscape,” “isolation,” combined with a “skewed belief system and morality,” and a climactic “happening/summoning” (Scovell 17-18) are recognizable throughout The Whale God. Nonetheless, the film concentrates mainly on the community’s antagonism and resistance to the external force, with its folk horror transcendence at the climax. Even after the villagers anoint the whale as divine while profanely attempting to kill it, the film holds back its horror potential. With the deaths of a third generation of whalers, however, the village plummets into mass hysteria, setting the conditions for a moral corrosion that leads to a folk horror outcome.
The film privileges folk horror in the opening tumult and initial distortions, but then restrains the genre until the film’s climax, or “happening,” when a proxy for the community, the last member of a harpooning family, Shaki, in death, becomes one with the creature. Every passing season of failures and deaths, isolation and twisting morality, produces more strain that, rather than breaking the ‘Folk Horror Chain,’ forges its final link – Shaki’s confrontation of Kujiragami. As Simon Bacon writes, tensions in the ‘Folk Horror Chain’ “need to be released or counterbalanced by a death so that some kind of order can be restored. The death doesn’t need to be the protagonist; it can even be the god or the ancient one who has been conjured into being, but not everyone can leave the narrative alive” (6). The savage final hunt, with the choreographed swarming of boats, synchronized harpooning, and netting, before releasing Shaki to kill the beast, is the film’s commencement of the ritualized “happening.” Battling his rival, the violent drifter Kishu (Katsu Shintaro), for recognition as a Kujiragami killer, Shaki leaps onto the writhing, harpoon-pierced, and net-tangled whale. While Kishu drowns attempting to beat the whale, Shaki, drenched in geysers of blood, delivers the killing blow.
Figure 3- As death nears Shaki, he is taken to commune with the beheaded Kujiragami. This scene realizes the film’s folk horror potential with a Scovell “happening.”
Body shattered from his final battle, Shaki lingers near death, surviving long enough to confront the Kujiragami‘s spirit. Lying on the beach for three days, evoking the story of Christ’s resurrection, Shaki, in his driftwood coffin beside the whale’s severed head, transcends his rage-filled body, “I am not dying. I am becoming the Whale God. The Whale God is me! And I am the Whale God!” As Shaki fades, desiring to become one with the spirit of Kujiragami, a new whale is seen swimming offshore. Shaki’s violent apotheosis, or the narrative’s “happening,” enacts the mythic qualities buried deep in folk horror narratives. The viewer is left with the impression that the community’s thirst for revenge may not be quenched but rather is about to transform into decades of refined, ritualized violence against the coming generation’s Kujiragami, whether it is real or imagined.
The film demonstrates a communal mania penetrating every layer of the whaling village. Leaving the town is considered abandonment, a disgrace. The only existence worth living is to stay and fight and most likely die. The film finds horror originating not from Kujiragami’s supernatural power but from the whaling leadership, senior harpooners, and villagers. Their collective rapture is the outcome of the villagers’ abuses of nature and each other. The harpooners believe their misery cannot be of their own doing; as such, its cause must be supernatural, leaving them unstained. Superstition and fear give birth to Kujiragami. Greed and revenge sustain the monster. The desire to destroy it redefines the village’s purpose. And annihilating Kujiragami elevates Shaki’s goals beyond prosperity, becoming one with the whale, and at that moment, The Whale God becomes folk horror.
You can find The Whale God on Internet Archive:
Works Cited
Bacon, Simon. Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures. Lexington Books, 2023.
Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017.
The Whale God. Directed by Tanaka Tokuzō, Daiei, 1962. Plex, https://watch.plex.tv/movie/killer-whale. Accessed 14 March 20025.
Kevin Cooney is an independent scholar specializing in the environmental, class, and religious themes present in science fiction and horror. He was a co-winner of the 2022 British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Nonfiction Publication for the anthology Worlds Apart: World Building in Fantasy and Science Fiction and shortlisted for the 2023 British Fantasy Award for the anthology Follow Me: Religion in Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 2019, Kevin also presented “Gothic Kaiju: The Vengeful Landscape of Daimajin” at the EcoGothic Conference II at the University of Roehampton, London. He has previously published for Horror Homeroom on “Terror in the Eyes: Jaws, Godzilla Minus One and Horror,” “The Lithic Nightmare of The Keep,” and on Tangina Barrons in Poltergeist – as well as in our special issue on found-footage horror. His work can be found at https://linktr.ee/kcooney.
