Alex Adams

@gdemonology

Independent Scholar. Author of Kill Box (2024), Death TV (2021), How to Justify Torture (2019), and Political Torture in Popular Culture (2016). Currently writing GODZILLA: A CRITICAL DEMONOLOGY.

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Alex Adams@gdemonology· 20d

Birthday prezzie haul!

Alex Adams@gdemonology· 28d

Boosting my cfp for Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, a collection of new kaiju scholarship: call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/... Especially keen to hear about non-Godzilla texts!

Giant Monsters All-Out Attack: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century
deadline for submissions:
October 31, 2026
full name / name of organization:
Alex Adams, Independent Scholar
contact email:
c21kaijucollection@gmail.com
GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century

Edited by Alex Adams, independent scholar

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jul 10

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jul 9

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS! I'm working on a new collection of kaiju scholarship, provisionally titled GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: KAIJU CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, and I need your essays! Full details: www.atadamswriting.com/gmaoa-cfp

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century

Edited by Alex Adams

The kaiju genre has never been so healthy. Godzilla, now an Oscar-winner thanks to the world-leading VFX of Godzilla Minus One (2023), stars in two global movie franchises at once, with the Legendary MonsterVerse expanding into TV, print media, and video games whilst a freshly announced ‘Godzilla Universe’ promises to deliver a comparable slate of output from Japanese originators Toho. Gamera, Ultraman, and Evangelion too, have been rejuvenated in recent years; giant monsters have made prominent appearances in both the MCU (Galactus in Fantastic Four: First Steps [2025]) and DCU (Kaiju in Superman [2025]); Chinese cinema has given us Abyssal Spider (2020) and The Monster is Coming (2024), South Korean The Host (2006). Broadening its territory from the conventional US-Japan B-movie axis, the giant monster movie has entered a new golden age, but we scholars are yet to catch up.

While Godzilla’s symbolic associations with nuclear weapons, Japanese historical trauma, and Cold War tensions are well-known, scholarship has yet to fully reckon with the multifaceted implications of the contemporary re-emergence of giant monsters as major cultural figures. How, for example, can we reconcile Godzilla’s progressive antinuclear political credentials with Adorno’s claim, in Minima Moralia (1951), that the fascination with giant monsters is a sublimated form of fascination with sovereign power – or indeed, how do we reckon with Shinzo Abe’s attempts to appropriate Shin Godzilla as an icon of his right-wing neoliberal government? How do we read the MonsterVerse’s conception of violently enforced natural hierarchy in a time of global fascist solidarities? There was much twentieth century talk of Cold War monstrosity, but are we yet able to talk of a post-9/11 kaiju? ... read more at https://www.atadamswriting.com/gmaoa-cfp

Customary very long yet necessarily incomplete list of suggested topics:

Power, violence, justice

Neoliberalism and political spectacle

Antifascism & anticapitalism

Contemporary warfare

Climate disaster, the Anthropocene, eco-politics, eco-fascism

Monster Theory, animality, the more-than-human

Nostalgia: genre prehistory, historical revision, rebooting

The future: time travel, the end of the world, hope

Race, racialisation, racism: simianisation, noble savages, slavery, biological determinism, white supremacy, whiteness, techno-orientalism, afrofuturism

Kaiju & imperialism: alien civilisations, invasion, self-defence, emergency ethics

Utopia: internationalism, geopolitics, perfected societies, class, the city

Sex, gender: reproduction, transformation, parenthood, family

The body and difference: neurodiversity, disability, embodiment

Disreputable epistemologies and ontologies: occultism, conspiracism, para-archaeology, ufology, post-truth, etc.

Mythology, classics, folklore

Oceans, marine life, the planetary

Religion, eschatology, apocalypse

Robots, Mechas, AI, transhumanism, technology

Genre fluidity: the relation of kaiju movies to science fiction, comedy, horror (particularly J-horror), children’s media, fantasy, wrestling, dance, sports, comedy

Parody, mockbusters, badfilm

Form crossover: kaiju in video games, comics, literature

Franchise-building, intertextuality, sequelization

Material culture: collecting, toys, physical media, advertising

Audience reception & fan cultures: podcasts, social media, fan scholarship, conventions

300-word abstracts and short bios should be sent to c21kaijucollection@gmail.com by 31st October 2026. Queries and questions are welcome. Completed chapters will be in the 7500/8000-word range, although depending on the nature of the submission other lengths will be considered. Anything composed using any form of AI will not be considered.

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jun 20

Some majorly weird recent purchases!

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Apr 23

Current reading...

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Apr 18

Recent reading: Queer as Folklore, Postwar Japan, Other Minds, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra!

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Feb 3

Reading up on the salaryman genre to get my head around these three dorks!

White-collar comedy and Toho’s ‘Wholesome
Color’ in Japan’s era of high economic growth
Hannah Airriess
To cite this article: Hannah Airriess (2023) White-collar comedy and Toho’s ‘Wholesome Color’
in Japan’s era of high economic growth, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 15:1, 1-18,
DOI: 10.1080/17564905.2023.2209946
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2023.2209946

Three characters from King Kong Vs Godzilla (1962/3). Two men in bright Hawaiian shirts standing on either side of their boss, a man in a safari suit holding a yellow umbrella.

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jan 30

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jan 25

Researching the time-honoured tradition of Kongsploitation. King Dong (2005), King Klunk (1933), Kinky Kong (2006), Queen Kong (1976)...

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jan 23

NEW PUBLICATION! My second essay this month on Eye in the Sky: "TARGET CONFIRMED: DRONE VISUALITY, DEHUMANISATION AND THE WEEPING SOLDIER IN EYE IN THE SKY" In War Faces on Screen, ed. Mani Sharpe and Katy Parry. Full info here: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/war-faces...

The cover of WAR FACES ON SCREEN - the title over a blurry pink-hued image of a man's face.

Text:

"A critique of 'shoot and cry' sentimentality and anthropometric dehumanisation in drone movie Eye in the Sky (2015).

From the introduction:

This chapter focuses on two aspects of Eye in the Sky in depth, examining what it reveals both about drone discourse and about the role of the close-up of the face in the representation of war. First, Eye in the Sky is a bold example of what Israeli critic Ilan Pappe has called ‘shoot and cry’, a rhetorical strategy in which military murderers emphasize their own pain and regret to downplay the savagery of their own actions and, importantly, to exonerate themselves morally of these actions. The weeping drone operator is emphasized across a range of drone fictions: it is a figure which functions to supplant political and moral questions of the ethics of military violence with private reflections on drone operator trauma. Second, in stark contrast, the movie is a clear example of the ways in which dehumanization is built into drone visuality. This form of militarized machinic opticality synthesizes targeting, cartography, surveillance, and imperial racism, and its representation and reproduction in Eye in the Sky both reproduces its dehumanizing gaze and contributes to a technophilic fantasy in which drone visuality achieves total visual and informational transparency. The scene, that is, interleaves two visual registers, one that brings the characters’ humanity to the foreground, and another that works to eliminate it altogether."

Text:

"Description

How have images of the face been used to document and distort the phenomenon of war? Such is the question that drives this book, with the face forming a recurring - almost ubiquitous - motif throughout visual depictions of military conflict.

At once interdisciplinary, transnational, and transhistorical, War Faces on Screen is organised into three sections. Section One examines representations of the face in war photography, illustrating how photographers have visualised the invisible violence of psychic trauma. Ethical and political concerns are at the forefront of each essay, from the advocacy work of portraiture, to AI tools capable of generating a range of aesthetically convincing yet potentially discriminatory images. Section Two focuses on the aesthetics of the cinematic close-up, drone vision, and how the selective digital colourisation of bodies and faces from archival footage works to impose a moral hierarchy. Section Three concludes the book with a focus on colonisation, decolonisation and defacement, extending earlier discussions of the imperial violence found in recent Hollywood films, where empathy is displaced from the ethnic other to the suffering Western soldier. Our final chapters chart how the face is central to articulating the meaning and sentiment of colonial and civil wars, with even seemingly progressive documentaries perpetuating unequal power dynamics and problematic notions of victimhood. Foregrounding the work of artists and practitioners, alongside theoretical frameworks, War Faces on Screen ultimately forms a radically innovative contribution to the study of image-making and war-making."

Two screenshots from Eye in the Sky: In the upper, a close-up on the targeting apparatus of a military drone in flight; in the lower, an image technician confirms the identity of a drone strike victim.

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jan 20

NEW PUBLICATION: "The Ticking Bomb Drone Strike: Drone Warfare and Emergency Ethics in Eye in the Sky", in a new book called Human Rights in the Age of Drones. I've written a lot on this film, and I'm proud to publish this concise version of my thoughts on it here: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Cover art for Human Rights in the Age of Drones, edited by Muhammad Waqar Azeem: a schematic of a predator drone on a grey background.

Home Human Rights in the Age of Drones Chapter
The Ticking Bomb Drone Strike: Drone Warfare and Emergency Ethics in Eye in the Sky
Chapter
First Online: 02 January 2026
pp 239–257
Cite this chapter

Abstract
The ticking bomb scenario is a thought experiment that dramatizes a falsely unambiguous decision point—a bomb is ticking, and a prisoner is tortured until they reveal the information that can prevent the bomb detonating—to frame a misleadingly persuasive narrative that attempts to justify torture. This chapter examines Gavin Hood’s 2015 film Eye in the Sky, which frames a classic ticking bomb scenario with the key difference that the violent political technology that provides the solution is a drone strike. This film is explicitly staged as a debate about the morality, ethics, and legality of drone warfare, including a foregrounded consideration of collateral damage and human rights. I argue here that it also reveals the limitations of any critique or understanding of drone warfare that relies on the granular basis of emergency ethics. The framing of the story telescopes towards an inevitable use of force, which, although it has regrettable consequences, is represented as justifiable and ethically defensible. Like arguments justifying liberal interventionism that position imperial violence such as military invasions as virtuous defences of human rights, Eye in the Sky’s ticking bomb narrative positions drones as a military technology with the potential to save lives.

Eye in the Sky (2015) - a closeup shot of the surveillance camera mounted on the front of a military drone.

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jan 19

Researching for King Kong 1933...

A book on a table: Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jan 12

If you enjoyed Skreeonk's remarks about bisexual lighting in Godzilla Vs Kong, you may enjoy my essay that I wrote on exactly that! Here's a long read about colour, 'seriousness', and queer-coded lighting in the MonsterVerse: popmec.hypotheses.org/5186

JUST FUCK ALREADY: BISEXUAL LIGHTING IN GODZILLA VS KONG

This visual austerity did not characterise the MonsterVerse for long. Three movies later, in 2021, Adam Wingard’s Godzilla Vs Kong fully embraced the more flamboyant and freewheeling aspects of Godzilla’s past. Where Godzilla 2014 shows us a grounded, sober story of an everyman caught up in the catastrophic re-emergence of a long-secluded mythic titan, Godzilla Vs Kong focuses on a high-octane showdown between Godzilla and Kong which propels the audience from Skull Island, to an ancient civilization inside the Hollow Earth, and, ultimately, to a Hong Kong showdown with Mechagodzilla, a giant telepathically-controlled robot. Where Godzilla 2014 embraces the aesthetics and tone of the 1954 original, Godzilla Vs Kong looks back fondly on the more kinetic, anything-goes approach of the sequels; where Godzilla 2014 needs you to know that it went to film school, Godzilla Vs Kong needs you to know that it likes to party.

Cutting through this obnoxious masculinist iconography is precisely why a queer read of Godzilla Vs Kong is so appealing. Though on the surface it is a story about a battle to the death, most of all Godzilla Vs Kong is about attraction. Both monsters are pursuing different, specific aims—Godzilla is pursuing Mechagodzilla, which it can sense but not find, and Kong is helping the human characters access a secret power source in the Hollow Earth—but as soon as they become aware of one another, they drop everything and grapple. They can’t wait to get their hands on one another. In terms of the canonical mythology of the MonsterVerse, this is because they have a longstanding ancestral hate of one another due to an ancient titan war between their respective species. And yet we all know that love can be a dangerous obsession, that rivalry has an erotic component, and that power has a sexual charge. Why, after all, when Godzilla decapitates the MUTO and literally blasts Monster Zero into atoms, does it let Kong survive? Godzilla usually asserts dominance through murder, and yet here Godzilla exhausts Kong, roars in his face, and then leaves the ape gasping on his back. Soon, too, Godzilla and Kong team up against Mechagodzilla, with Kong tearing the robot to scrap in order to rescue his so-called enemy Godzilla. Tell me again how much you hate him, sis…

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jan 5

The Mighty Kong (1998)

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Jan 3

Doing some background on Eiji Tsuburaya by watching The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya. Really interesting historical piece!

An image of the DVD package for The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya. A screaming pilot and a fighter plane next to the text: "American Occupation Authorities confiscated all prints convinced the realistic special effects were real Pearl Harbor footage!"

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Dec 22

Bargain alert! In the Routledge end of year sale, my book POLITICAL TORTURE IN POPULAR CULTURE is reduced to a mere £120 hardback and £33.59 paperback! www.routledge.com/Political-To...

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Dec 12

Looking for Christmas presents? Allow me to recommend Kill Box, my book on cultural representations of drone warfare, now only £85! www.bloomsbury.com/us/kill-box-...

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Nov 20

Love songs from the swamp: Support indie publishing by grabbing your copy of DEVASTATION SONGS from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social: www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Nov 19

Luminous Fairies and Mothra shipped!!

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Nov 15

If you want a model of how to do Kaiju scholarship, look no further than @chrisstewardson.bsky.social's great book on Ghidorah, the Three-headed Monster! Snappy & accessible, but wide-ranging and informed by deep knowledge of relevant historical, political and genre contexts. Highly recommended!!

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Nov 12

About to watch Predator: Badlands & trying not to get too caught up in the hype. Here's my We Are The Mutants essay on the original, in case you missed it: wearethemutants.com/2020/12/03/i... #predator #predatorbadlands #demonology #monstermovie

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Nov 10

Quick reminder that my episode of KAIJU COMICCAST discussing GODZILLA IN HELL is live now: open.spotify.com/episode/5nCQ...

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Nov 5

One of the things we talked about was katabasis, a template for stories about Hell which emphasizes the trials endured during the journey through Hell. Godzilla in Hell is a katabasis story! 3/

Quote from Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945 (2005), p.3: In classical katabasis, the descent to Dis or Hades is about coming to know the self, regaining something or someone lost, or acquiring superhuman powers or knowledge. The descent requires the hero to undergo a series of tests and degradations, culminating in the collapse or dissolution of the hero's sense of selfhood. In the midst of this dissolution comes the infernal revelation, or the sought after power, or the spectre of the beloved. The hero then returns to the overworld, in some cases succeeding, in other cases failing to bring back this buried wisdom, love or power from the underworld...

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Nov 5

We had a really wide-ranging conversation about comics, kaiju, late night discovery of oddball movies, and the iconography of hell! 2/

Screenshot from Altered States (1980). A grainy red and black image of multiple damned souls hanging from crucifixes.

Screenshot from Godzilla Vs Destoroyah (1995). A huge horned and winged monster rises from flames.

Screenshot from Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966). Teenagers party at a dance competition.

Screenshot from Tokyo SOS (2003). As Mothra flies into the sunset, her fairies make a cruciform sillhouette.

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Oct 9

After years of being unable to remember the name of a weird & unsettling movie that I saw way too young, I finally cracked the mystery. It was ALTERED STATES. Though it is dated and pretentious in places, its visions of hell struck me as strongly this week as they did when I was a baffled teenager!

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Oct 6

Read all my Godzilla work here: www.atadamswriting.com/godzilla-a-c...

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Oct 6

I wrote four blogs for We Are The Mutants, and this essay on Ghidorah is my favourite of them: "the Showa Ghidorah movies are a rich engagement with world-historical themes of Cold War antagonism, first contact, and imperial manipulation." wearethemutants.com/2021/10/06/t...

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Oct 6

Another essay about colour, aesthetics, politics: The Blackness of the Beast: Godzilla in the Heart of Darkness. "The contemporary incarnation of Godzilla is an embodiment of the natural rightness of violently enforced hierarchy." sftpinstitu.us.es/revistas/est...

Alex Adams@gdemonology· Oct 6

For anybody who enjoyed my recent @kaijuunited.bsky.social piece, a quick thread of some of my other Godzilla writing! First up: The Colour of Monstrosity, an essay about the MV's use of colour! "Godzilla Vs Kong needs you to know that it likes to party." popmec.hypotheses.org/5186 1/