Background and Trivia |
- This concept was brought up in a 2022 interview on the Los Angeles Review of Books where Paul Thompson interviews John Carpenter. In the interview, Thompson brings up that Carpenter is a big Godzilla fan. He probes by asking if Carpenter ever wrote a Godzilla script. Carpenter replies that he hasn't, as "they know what they're doing". However, this does cause him to bring up this project noting that he did meet "the head of Toho: he came to visit me. He wanted me to do [a remake of] Matango, but I wasn't ready to do it."
- The image of Matango featured in the article was created by Toho Kingdom, using a modified creature design from the 2015 film The Hollow. It does not reflect how the creatures would have appeared in the actual project.
- The exact date of this project is unknown and remains speculative. It is often assumed that Toho approached Carpenter after seeing his work on the 1982 film The Thing, given the conceptual similarities between the two stories. The Thing itself is a remake of the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, which was based on John Campbell Jr.'s 1938 novella Who Goes There?. The Thing was released in Japan in 1982 under the title "Object X from Outer Space" (遊星からの物体X - Yusei Kara no Buttai X), suggesting that Toho's interest may have arisen in the 1980's. This hypothesis could be further supported by the trend during the later part of that decade in Japan of involving influential international artists in domestic productions. Examples include H.R. Giger's design work for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988) and Dick Smith's makeup work for Sweet Home (1989), which was heavily promoted including taking almost half the runtime of the film's theatrical trailer.
However, it remains unclear when exactly Carpenter was approached. The proposal could have come at any point between the Japanese release of The Thing in 1983 and the 2022 interview, especially since Carpenter, despite not having directed a film since 2010, has remained open to returning to directing.
- The project's title is also unknown. It may have been intended to simply be Matango or retitled entirely. The usage of "John Carpenter's Matango" is an interpretive label inspired by the way The Thing is often referred to as "John Carpenter's The Thing," reflecting the likelihood that Toho sought to replicate his success in remaking a property centered around the horrifying concept of humans being unwillingly transformed into monsters.
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