Movies
RANKING THE GODZILLA ERAS: Giant Monster Greatness, Time After Time
Leaving a screening of Godzilla: Minus One late last year, the same usual conversations of our favorite Godzilla films ripped through my friend group as we processed the spectacle we had just seen (and lamented that Minus One would never win an Oscar, since I had very little faith in the Academy, but I stand corrected).
We praised the film’s incredible cinematography, performances, and all it had managed to do on a reported budget of $15 million. But in my mind, I was starting to think back through the many years and years of Godzilla films that had been made, and wondered: if this was how the current era of Godzilla was shaping up, how did the others? Was the best yet to come, or has it already happened?
Every Godzilla Era RANKED
Today is an attempt to try and organize my thoughts on them, by ranking each of the four major eras: Showa, Heisei, Millenium, and Reiwa.
If you’re curious why they’re designated this way, it’s because each era is named after a corresponding political period in Japan, with each period itself named after the posthumous name of Japan’s emperor.
Except for Millenium, they just call it that because the first film was Godzilla 2000: Millenium.
Weird.
I’ll also include a “Highlight of the Era” for each that details the films I believe best capture the spirit of the time and are just fun films to watch in isolation. So, let’s start with an…
Honorable Mention: THE LEGENDARY ERA
The Legendary Studios films, dubbed the Monsterverse for marketing purposes, are not great. With the exception of Godzilla (2014), they have some truly atrocious writing and world-building. But they are undeniably very fun to watch if you can disregard quality and just love ridiculous monster fights, so I felt obliged to mention it.
They may deserve a whole article of their own just trying to decipher how they ended up that way, but that is not this article.
4. THE MILLENIUM ERA
Home of arguably the best Godzilla suit design, the Millenium era was marked as a bold venture into the 2000s with a series of six standalone movies, each one branching off as an independent continuation of the original 1954 Godzilla. The Millenium Era is home to many good Godzilla films and has no poorly made ones. But it does come in last because it doesn’t have any truly great films in its ranks. There are no showstopping Millenium era entries, despite all the fun that is to be had here.
On top of that, the Millenium films were intended as more of a Godzilla anthology than a line of sequels. Still, that concept is abandoned halfway through since there is a duology in the middle of the era with Against Mechagodzilla and Tokyo S.O.S.. The last film, Final Wars, feels much more like a Heisei or Showa era tribute film that is even more disconnected. Though the Millenium Era has plenty to offer in its many parts, a lack of cohesion makes it less enjoyable as a whole.
Highlight of the Era: A much younger version of myself would say Godzilla: Final Wars was the end-all-be-all of Godzilla films. It’s the “cereal and Saturday morning cartoon” of Godzilla films that will make you feel like a child again. And though that is very appealing, cereal doesn’t have the most complex flavor profile. So, in retrospect, the most balanced and well-made of the Millenium films to introduce someone to is Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. This is kind of a crazy sentence when you read that title, but it is the best of the era.
3. THE REIWA ERA
The fledgling of the list, the Reiwa Era has only really just begun. It might seem strange to rank this above the Millenium films, which are fully developed as an era, but Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One are both solidly top ten Godzilla movies of all time right out the gate, and I can confidently say it has nothing to do with recency bias. That is a real marker of quality, and a great sign of things to come.
They are truly compelling stories that utilize Godzilla perfectly, both as a player on the stage and as a strong thematic core to the narrative. Like the Millenium Era, however, it’s lacking a strong backbone that will have to be built up over time. The animated Netflix features that accompany this era is a trilogy of films that feel fairly far off from any conventional Godzilla film, with some sci-fi plots and creature designs that felt flat at release and upon rewatch.
Takashi Yamazaki, director of Godzilla: Minus One, has expressed in interviews that he has an interest in following up on his phenomenal work in that film. If the sequel is to happen, there’s supposedly going to be a stronger focus on “[pulling] off a more serious tone of kaiju-versus-kaiju with human drama”. If the Reiwa era belongs to him, and more passionate filmmakers with clear direction like him and Hideaki Anno, then it’s safe to say this era is in good hands.
Highlight of the Era: All of it I guess? Again, only two live-action films. I will give a cheat answer and say that the animation and character designs in the Godzilla: Singular Point series are pretty great, so you should also check that out if you haven’t yet.
2. THE SHOWA ERA
The longest-running of all the eras with an astounding fifteen films, it’s incredibly hard to encapsulate a period of Godzilla history as sprawling as this one. Steered by the on-and-off direction of Ishirō Honda, 21 years of Godzilla history seem to blur together in the mind’s eye if you haven’t seen any of these recently. Details mix, and sometimes plots repeat. But this is the quintessential era for viewing Godzilla and understanding how the icon evolved from an avatar of cultural memory and the atrocities of war into children’s favorite monster.
Though the period saw diminishing financial returns at the box office, almost every movie of the Showa Era became a staple through their television releases and engrained themselves into the minds and hearts of everybody who came across them. The period gets a lot of flak for the handful of films that reuse footage and only show sparing creativity, but the hit rate for the Showa Era when it comes to films that are both successful and enjoyable films is uncanny. Few franchises are as reliable as Godzilla, and only one era is consistently better in quality.
Highlight of the Era: The very obvious answer is to say the original Godzilla (1954), but saying it’s a highlight would be like saying the Taj Mahal is a “highlight” of international architecture, it’s an understatement. I will instead go with Godzilla vs Hedorah. I didn’t vibe with it in the past, but can now appreciate it for its very out-there visuals, laying the groundwork of unique environmental conservation themes that resurface in later films, and for having some of the best special effects of the era.
1. THE HEISEI ERA
But the Heisei Era? The Heisei Era is a different animal altogether. Running for a paltry 9 years compared to its predecessor, the cycle that began with The Return of Godzilla followed through to its bloody, wonderful end in Godzilla vs Destoroyah with some of, if not the best, kaiju movies to ever grace our screens.
Getting a high-quality sequel to a monster movie, let alone a trilogy that works well is hard. But there has never been a back-to-back seven-movie hot streak in horror like the Heisei era’s. The cinematography got better with each film, and the effects flounce every other era with ease. The writing is solid and captures all the fun of the Showa era while giving it some emotional weight; it even manages to pull off the especially difficult task of giving Godzilla and his cohorts some real personality and life to them.
Of course, I’d be remiss not to talk about the effects here more. The kaiju designs of Koichi Kawakita are the best to grace the series and played no small part in making the Heisei era a visual powerhouse. His work brought us a score of new creatures, automatic fan favorites like Battra, Moguera, Biollante, and, of course, the menace that is Destoroyah. It’s hard to overstate how influential these designs and the art direction of the films were, since they affect every other movie that comes after them. Heisei is at the head of the pack, and like Godzilla himself, it’s going to be hard to unseat the king of the monsters.
Highlight of the Era: Now, Godzilla fans will know the objectively right answer here is Godzilla vs Destoroyah. It’s a masterpiece, it’s the only film that feels like it’s really closing out an era, and it serves as a satisfying finisher to the insanely good series that precedes it. It’s incredible, no arguments here.
…But I have to choose Godzilla vs Space Godzilla, because it has the best enemy kaiju in all regards. A good friend of mine once said, “Space Godzilla is the most frightening villain of any Godzilla film because he’s the only one to attack Godzilla psychologically”.
I know that sounds ridiculous but trust us. Godzilla vs Space Godzilla is the way.
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I’ve spent years honing my craft making strange, retro-inspired horror films on a budget — films driven by style but rooted in emotion. Love, grief, heartbreak, longing — all filtered through darkness. I’ve always been drawn to horror because, like many people, I found healing there. In stories where fear becomes confrontation, where pain can finally take shape.
How Joshua Tree Inspired In the Valley
During COVID, my partner and I bought land in Joshua Tree and built an off-grid glampsite. It became an oasis away from the city — a place defined by silence, stars, old VHS tapes, and isolation that initially felt restorative. At night, we’d drift between local dive bars, searching for connection in the middle of nowhere.
One spot we frequented was Out There Bar — a strange desert refuge with drag nights, disco, and often only a handful of people scattered inside. Most nights felt harmless, almost dreamlike. But every so often, something shifted in me. A wall would suddenly go up — an instinctive voice whispering: Be careful. Don’t let anyone know you’re queer. The feeling was immediate and overwhelming. A defense mechanism I thought I had long outgrown. One of the largest military bases in the country sat only a few miles away, and soldiers would often cycle through the bar. Some encounters were warm, others less so, but there was always an underlying sensation I couldn’t shake — that isolating feeling of being watched too closely.
What unsettled me most was the contradiction. I had been openly queer since I was seventeen. Proudly. Yet suddenly, in the place I considered my sanctuary, old survival instincts came rushing back. Joshua Tree is romanticized as liberating and expansive — a place people go to find themselves. And yet, underneath that openness, I found myself shrinking again. That feeling became the seed of In the Valley.
The stars are why you go to the desert. No matter how many vintage motels or pools people chase, the conversation always circles back to the sky. The desert remains one of the few places where light pollution disappears, and the stars reveal themselves fully. But I became fascinated by another feeling entirely: the sensation that something might be watching back. As the desert became my second home and that defensive wall kept resurfacing, I started interrogating the feeling more deeply. Why was I suddenly so concerned with safety? What exactly was I afraid of?
Queer Fear and Survival in Isolated Spaces
The answer was complicated because I hadn’t experienced overt homophobia in any defining way before. Sure, there had been passing slurs shouted from cars or strangers trying to provoke something ugly, but those moments felt easy to dismiss. What unsettled me more was the quieter feeling underneath it all — inherited vigilance. My partner is non-binary, and their safety often occupies my mind more than my own. Even in harmless moments, I found myself scanning rooms, reading body language, calculating exits. It wasn’t irrational. It was conditioning — a survival instinct sharpened over generations of queer people learning when to stay visible and when to disappear.
Building Horror From Internalized Fear
That was the horror I wanted to explore.
Not simply homophobia itself, but the psychological architecture it leaves behind. The way fear embeds itself into the body long after you convince yourself you’re safe. Eventually, I realized I had to confront it. I had to give it a face.
In the Valley is a descent — a body-switch film wrapped in alien imagery and retro western horror aesthetics. The film begins with Josh entering a queer speakeasy hidden in the middle of the desert. The room immediately studies him. Josh carries himself with hesitation, almost like someone entering a gay bar for the first time and trying desperately not to appear uncomfortable.
Romance, Desire, and Alien Horror
After several strange encounters with the bar’s enigmatic owner, Dahlia, the atmosphere shifts when Richard enters the room. Their connection is immediate, communicated through something as simple as a smile. Quiet conversation turns into flirtation, flirtation into dancing, and suddenly the film reveals itself as a romance. Richard takes Josh home after Josh admits he can barely remember where he lives — an important detail. Josh exists untethered, emotionally disoriented, searching for grounding in another person. Outside, the two lie beneath impossibly purple desert skies, staring upward as the stars loom over them.
For a moment, the desert becomes sacred. Then the film turns.
After the two move inside together, storm clouds begin swallowing the sky while purple lightning fractures across the landscape. The storm doesn’t interrupt their intimacy — it amplifies it. Desire and danger begin occupying the same emotional space. I wanted the sequence to feel like the best night of your life teetering on the edge of violence. With every flash of lightning, horrific images invade Josh’s psyche: a man bound to a barbed wire fence, an ominous cowboy gripping a bat, fragments of brutality interrupting intimacy like inherited nightmares.
By the climax of the sequence, the lovers are no longer alone. Their bed now sits exposed beneath the storm as two towering extraterrestrial beings silently observe them above. Because for me, the horror was never simply the aliens. It was the feeling of being watched while trying to love someone openly. At the final moan, Josh awakens alone — naked and abandoned beneath the brightness of the desert morning. Richard is gone.
The Desert, Memory, and Queer Trauma
Searching desperately for help, Josh instead discovers something impossible: a single black orchid growing from the dry sand. The flower mirrors the tattoo seen earlier on Richard’s arm. In panic, Josh rips the flower from the earth. Inside, a violent purple light pulses outward. Fractured memories stab through him in flashes: the dancing, the bedroom, the storm, the extraterrestrial figures looming above them. Then the desert itself revolts, erupting into blood and consuming him completely before releasing him back into the endless landscape.
By nightfall, dehydrated and unraveling, Josh discovers a lone fire burning beside an unfinished barbed wire fence. A baseball bat rests in the flames. Torn clothing hangs from the wire. Nearby, he finds a mound of disturbed earth crowned with a cowboy hat. Beneath the hat sits another black orchid.
Uncovering the Film’s Central Mystery
This time, when Josh removes it, there are no violent visions. Only silence. He begins digging. Slowly, a grave reveals itself. Inside lies a body reduced almost entirely to bone and weathered skin. Then Josh realizes who he’s looking at. Richard. Not recently dead — but buried there for years.
The Horror of “Bury Your Gays”
Josh stumbles backward in horror only to suddenly find himself seated beside Richard once more at the barbed wire fence, the same way they sat together in the bar earlier that night. Only now the atmosphere has changed completely. Romance has curdled into mourning. Richard speaks like a ghost struggling to remember his own humanity. He tells Josh the story of a man who only wanted love — and another man too terrified to survive what that love awakened inside him — and suddenly everything clicks into place.
The uneasy looks from the bar patrons were never truly about Josh. They were about what he represented: a repetition. An echo. The cowboy was never a monster in the traditional sense.
He was fear weaponized.
A closeted man who carried his self-hatred into the desert and attempted to bury it there alongside the person who exposed it. A literal manifestation of the old horror trope: “bury your gays.” Richard tells Josh it’s time to leave. The grave suddenly splits open into a violent purple void as storm clouds consume the desert once more. Before falling in, Josh looks back one final time. The extraterrestrial beings stand silently above the true history of the murder unfolding beneath them: Richard bound to the barbed wire fence while the cowboy approaches slowly with the bat in hand. Josh is no longer witnessing metaphor. He is witnessing buried history itself.
How In the Valley Reclaims Queer Horror Tropes
Josh crawls out of the grave and back into the present day. Disoriented and exhausted, he stumbles toward the bar from the beginning of the film — only now it has changed. Modern cars sit outside. The once-forgotten dive has been transformed into a stylish Airbnb. Inside, a man frantically calls the police, searching for his missing partner.
Then Josh collapses through the doorway. His own partner rushes toward him, holding him tightly in relief. And in that final moment, music begins playing softly in the background.
The spirits of Richard and the Cowboy appear together one last time, replaying their dance across the room. But now the cowboy is no longer monstrous — just young, frightened, human. Josh watches as they move together exactly as he and Richard once did. Finally, everything aligns.
The Hidden Meaning Behind In the Valley
Josh was chosen to relive this forgotten history — not simply to witness violence, but to understand survival. To recognize the privilege and responsibility of existing openly in spaces where others once had to hide. The desert did not just hold trauma. It held memories. In The Valley is intentionally layered. Viewers may miss the clues on a first watch: the body switch, the orchid tattoo, the realization that the sex scene is not simply passion but “gay panic” refracted through alien abduction imagery. The storm itself becomes psychological — terror building inside someone unable to reconcile desire with shame.
Why Horror Is the Perfect Language for Queer Stories
I never wanted to make a “clear” queer film because my experience as a queer person has never felt clear or linear. Fear rarely announces itself directly. Trauma lingers, mutates, hides in the body, resurfaces unexpectedly. Horror became the only language that felt honest enough to express it. The core of In the Valley is about the collision between passion and fear. A film wrapped in neon skies, extraterrestrials, and retro horror, but underneath, grappling with violence, shame, inherited trauma, and survival. Even the barbed wire fence carries historical weight. It directly references a young queer man whose death mirrored the imagery in the film. If you know, you know. If you don’t, I encourage you to research the history of violence against queer people, particularly in isolated spaces where secrecy and fear have too often turned deadly.
When Art and Reality Collide
Since the film’s release, it has played festivals around the world and received recognition I’m incredibly grateful for. But life has a strange way of collapsing the distance between art and reality. In February of this year, I was physically attacked for being queer for the first time in my life. The assault left me with a severe concussion and heavy bruising, and I’m still processing what it changed inside me.
The Real-World Importance of Queer Horror
More than anything, it forced me to confront a difficult realization:
The fear that inspired this film was never imaginary. It was always real.
Which is precisely why we have to keep protecting one another. Keep creating spaces for queer people to exist openly. Keep telling stories that confront what others would rather bury. And keep making horror films that remind us we survived.
Yes, Paul W. S Anderson’s film Event Horizon is far from perfect. In fact, it is very deeply flawed, especially because of its semi-lost, boundary-pushing torture scenes, dated character motifs, and a sense of humor that, tonally, does not feel a thousand percent well-balanced with the existential, hopeless tone. That being said, many of the negative reactions do not account for the pure nightmare fuel of this film at its core. Event Horizon might not be the greatest sci-fi horror film of all time (though I would personally say otherwise), but there is more than enough of a case for it being the most frightening.
The Hellish Premise That Makes Event Horizon So Terrifying
The film itself follows a group of scientists in the distant future looking for a lost ship – the “Event Horizon”. The ship, which was revolutionary in its ability to literally fold space time, poke a hole through it, and go through, went missing years ago, and had only just been discovered. As the crew boards the abandoned ship, the film plays out like a combination of cosmic terror, a haunted house/gothic aesthetic, and hopeless dread, as they discover the ship may have passed through Hell itself.
The Chaos Realm and the Fear of a Fate Worse Than Death
Probably the scariest existential concept introduced in Event Horizon is the concept of a fate worse than death. In addition to the haunted house horrors of visualized grief and deadly kills, the film vies for a more Hellraiser approach of inflicting brutal, unflinching nightmare fuel on its characters and audience. I am of course referring to the chaos realm, and how it completely derails any expectations of what the movie might have been.
So let’s say you go to a movie theater to see Event Horizon in the 1990s. It’s labeled as sci-fi horror. With Alien 4 scheduled to come out in a few months, and films such as The Arrival, 12 Monkeys, and other grunge science fiction outings filling the decades, one could assume the movie would be an alien, time travel, or other high sci-fi concept film. Soon, it shows itself as a haunted house story in space. Then, with one more twist, it becomes half Lovecraftian cosmic terror of the unknown, and half otherworldly torture. The ship passes through a Hellish torture realm; anyone who sees it becomes corrupted, and they might even participate in the infamous “blood orgy” scene. Seeing is not just believing-it is possession and corruption. This is Hellraiser in space.
Cosmic Horror and Lovecraftian Terror in Space
The concept of the chaos realm, as a demonic version of the zone from Annihilation, is partially scary because of the movie’s pacing, and how it takes a while to set up this twist of a concept. It is a festering, evil place we are dealing with. Even inanimate objects such as the ship itself, can become sentient demons in their own right. The movie, intelligently so, also does not overexplain this place. It is not quite Hell itself, but rather, a place of pure evil caught in between time and space, that people may have interpreted as Hell.
Sam Neill’s Dr. Weir Is an Underrated Horror Villain
Throughout the film, Sam Neill’s character, Dr. William Weir, makes a horrific transformation. Revealed to be the designer of the Event Horizon, visions of his dead wife led him to reach this chaos realm himself. On the Event Horizon, which had become a demon, William becomes a corrupted servant of the Hellish servants on the other side.
A potential factor in the lack of awareness of Event Horizon is that it came out in the 90s, not the 80s. If this film had premiered about ten years earlier, it almost definitely would have held Sam Neill’s character on the same pedestal as Pinhead, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Michael Myers. However, in the late 90s, there was such a fatigue over slashers and high-concept antagonists that his character didn’t receive the cult status he should have.
Seriously…the bloody, scraped-in satanic symbols into the body? The blood-drenched skin? The cold, unloving attitude? He gives Pinhead a run for his money, and is a whole lot more sadistic than him. All the elements are there for an iconic horror villain, making his way into Funko Pop figures and T-shirts. However, he is not held on that pedestal as he should be. Maybe if there were a couple more sequels with him doing wacky kills and making puns? Sign me up for Event Horizon: The Dream Master.
The Gothic Design of the Event Horizon Ship
In addition to Sam Neill’s character, the ship itself should be as iconic as the Overlook Hotel or Amity Island. It is not a regular science-fiction designed thing, but rather more akin to a gothic Church. It gives the impression that it was destined for evil from its conception, and no one would have any control over where it went. Truly chilling-huge props (pun not intended) to production designer Joseph Bennett.
Why Event Horizon Is a Sci-Fi Horror Masterpiece
Event Horizon is a masterwork of terror. Yes, it’s cheesy at times with dated effects, and yes, some of its corny jokes feel out of place when the rest of the movie is painstakingly serious, but at its core are some truly terrifying concepts.
Ending on a final factoid, the movie was famously cut down from its original length. Some of the cut scenes from the horrific torture sequences, which were shot on film, were actually found years later in a Transylvanian salt mine of all places. Imagine being the poor sucker who uncovers practically done torture scenes in a mine. Hopefully, one day we might have a Director’s cut that would somehow be even scarier. But for now, Event Horizon as is, could take the cake as the most frightening sci-fi-horror film of the 1990s.
