Please enjoy this monstrously fun episode about the legacy and appeal of Godzilla! This week, we are joined by Grace McRae-Okine (she/her), a lifelong fan of horror, writer of Meat Cute (Substack) and a novelist currently querying her first book, a queer horror-romance. We begin, as always, with Why This? Why Now? and begin with a look at the 1950s and post-war Japan. Hannah leads us through an overview of Godzilla's impact as the longest-running film franchise in history (according to Guinness World Records).
We then take it to the theory section with a deep dive into Monster Studies! We pull on scholarship from one of the field’s defining texts: American cultural studies scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s 1996 essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" and Grace offers her own insights into how cultural anxieties and ambivalences influence the last 70 years of Godzilla narratives.
Happy listening! We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode!
More Grace
Meat Cute (on Substack!)
Music Credits
“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020
Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.
Works Cited
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 3-25.
“Godzilla (1954 film).” Wikipedia. Accessed 16 October 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_(1954_film).
Merchant, Brian. “A Brief History of Godzilla, Our Never-Ending Nuclear Nightmare.” Vice, 25 August 2013. https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-brief-history-of-godzilla-our-never-ending-nuclear-nightmare/.
Rawle, Steven. “Godzilla at 70: Time for Kaijū Studies.” Humanities 13.6 (2024): n.pag. https://doi.org/10.3390/h13060145.
Tsutsui, William M. “Is Your War over Now? Nationalism, Nostalgia, and Japan’s Long Postwar from Gojira (1954) to Godzilla Minus One (2023).” Humanities 13.6 (2024): n.pag. https://doi.org/10.3390/h13060158.
More About Material Girls
To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. The best way to support our show is to become a Patreon supporter! We've got oodles of perks, hours of listening and ad-free episodes at patreon.com/ohwitchplease!
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Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.
*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both.
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