"SKREEEEEEEOOOOOOOOONK!!!"
To reiterate again: This is one of the darkest Godzilla films ever made in the franchise's overall chronology, and the first film of the franchise. This not like the campier, more heroic movies later on in the series—this is a horror film, and a very dark reminder of the day that Hiroshima was hit by the bomb.
- Who knew a rubber glove being rubbed on a bass can produce THE roar
!?! - Special Effects Failure aside, the film has it on level of nightmare fuel:
- The opening sequence alone makes you shiver with Hell Is That Noise with Godzilla's iconic roar. The fact that John Williams used it as inspiration to make the creepy opening titles to the very first Jurassic Park movie says a lot about its foreboding factor.
- The destruction of the fishing boats in the opening scenes.
- The Typhoon scene. It takes place at night while a typhoon occurs. Footsteps are heard, and a sudden earthquake rocks Odo Island's town. Several rows of houses are crushed from above. Shinkichi's brother, Yamaji, runs out of his house, and an expression of absolute terror crosses his face as he sees something that kills him in an instant. The wide-angle shot of Odo Island being hammered by the storm, throwing gigantic waves up against the houses looks magnificently horrifying, and the low-lighting conditions only emphasize just how terrible the events of that night were.
- Godzilla's first appearance.
- Serizawa's experiment he shows Emiko.
- Godzilla's first and second raids on Tokyo. Millions of people die from getting crushed, burned to death or radiation poisoning, which was very painful for many Japanese audiences to watch at the time.
- The mother comforting her children during Godzilla's rampage, saying that they'll be with their father again soon. This small scene is one of the reasons why this movie is treated and considered a horror film, there is no filter and sugarcoating to just how horrifying and dire things are with a giant monster around destroying and killing everything in sight.
- The aftermath of Tokyo's destruction with nothing but dead silence, burnt houses, destroyed buildings, houses and lamp posts.
- The haunting climax.
- It's not the giant monster that's the scary part. No, what's terrifying about the film is the aftermath of Godzilla's attack on Tokyo which looks like the city was hit by an atomic bomb.
- If that's not enough, you see people in the hospital either dead or dying. You also see a little girl crying over her mother's death.
- A quiet, understated moment of heart-crushing power in the aftermath of Godzilla's attack: A doctor passes a Geiger counter over a little girl. The counter goes berserk.
- The Oxygen Destroyer is one of the most terrifying weapons in fiction. Sure, it's just a bomb - but it's a bomb that subjects victims to a horrible death via disintegration.
- And is how the original Godzilla is ultimately killed, after being exposed to the bomb, he leaps out of the water to give a terrifying roar, even more-so than his usual roar, in his death throes before sinking back into the water and dissolving into a skeleton - and then, nothing.
- Serizawa, the creator of the device, makes it clear that his device could transform Tokyo into a cemetery if it were used on land. He is absolutely terrified of the idea that it might be used as a weapon or that using it will lead to an arms race. When he finally agrees to use it to stop Godzilla, he burns all his research notes and kills himself, all just to make sure it can never be replicated.
- It gets worse, as the Oxygen Destroyer ends up creating Destoroyah.
- The analogies to weapon of mass destruction, the eerie music associated with it and its horrific effects makes it even more nightmarish than Godzilla himself in the movie.
- Godzilla himself is rather terrifying. This isn't some random confused animal in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, he knows exactly where he is. Oh, and he's pissed at humanity and wants to kill everyone. Yes, even you. Worse yet, there's almost nothing you can do to stop him. Something that's big, radioactive, and angry is not something to be taken lightly.
- How he appears in the movie. Unlike most of his later iterations that are either awesome or goofy, he's subtly off looking, with dead, human-like eyes, a warped mix of mammalian/reptilian facial features and more animalistic stance. It's more of an unnaturally warped creature mutated by radiation than a cool Kaiju that we later come to know him as.
- The choir scene. It's haunting and surreal and grief-stricken, like you really are looking at the end of the world.
- The assertion in the ending that it's entirely possible that Godzilla is not the only one of his kind and there could easily be multiple. An assertion that was right. While in the Showa Era, Godzilla eventually became heroic, that doesn't change just how horrifying a concept that this horrifying creature that leveled a city and caused all this havoc was not a unique creature...and now the only means of killing it is dead with its creator.
- Akira Ifukube's score is very eerie, even on its own.
- The main theme is pretty darn terrifying. It just builds and builds the same mofit over and over, sounding like a natural disaster coming closer and closer.
- "Horror in The Water Tank" and Oxygen Destroyer are really unnerving tracks, with the latter having a dismal feeling of dread. Both feel like they belong to a more traditional horror movie than a Kaiju movie. The second is a dark reprisal of the harmonica theme heard in the in the first scene, easily symbolizing the storm to the harmonica's calm.
- Re-scored versions, without the pops and degradation that accompany old audio tracks, show how well the composition communicates the despair that accompanies Godzilla's rampage.
