When the King of the Monsters first shambled forth onto land, it didn’t simply rain down fire onto Japan — it brought with it a titanic shift in science-fiction storytelling. The release of Godzilla in 1954 began the age of kaiju, a genre defined by the evocative visual power of massive supernatural behemoths. Of course, stories of fearsome beasts predate movies, and perhaps more important than the folk monsters themselves was what they represented.
