Shudder’s Upcoming WWII Monster Movie Looks Like ‘Hell in the Pacific’ Meets ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ – Trailer Reaction and Possible Inspirations
This new creature feature looks like a lot of fun!
Earlier today (June 26th) a trailer was released for Monster Island, an upcoming Shudder Exclusive. The title might bring to mind giant monster action for kaiju fans, but that’s not what this is. Instead, Monster Island is a story of enemies fighting for survival on an island inhabited by a fish-man monster. Take a look at the trailer below.
Set in 1942 during World War II, the story strands a British POW and a Japanese soldier on a deserted island. While struggling to survive the elements and each other, they are forced to work together when a humanoid aquatic monster, the legendary orang ikan, begins hunting them both.
My Reaction
My initial reaction upon seeing the trailer is that Monster Island looks to be a direct descendant of movies like Hell in the Pacific (1968) in which individuals from different sides of a war are forced into situations where they come to understand the humanity of their enemy through a common need for survival. Movies like that are always relevant, because society is always ideologically split to some capacity. Also, obviously, any movie with a bipedal fish-monster is going to be compared to the blueprint for the genre, The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).
Monster Island also reminds me of the opening scene of Kong: Skull Island (2017), but that scene feels like a riff on Hell in the Pacific, so maybe that’s redundant.
A more thorough reference for the monster aspect of Monster Island might be something like Sweetheart (2019). In the film a castaway is visited nightly by a sea monster that gets more and more bold the longer she is stranded on the island. The point I’m making is, Monster Island looks somewhat similar to a bunch of other good movies, which means it’s probably going to be pretty fun.
Possible Inspiration
Monster Island also takes inspiration from Southeast Asian folklore, or at the very least from stories purporting to be based on folklore. A little searching pointed me towards a story repeated many times across the internet about Japanese soldiers stationed in the Indonesian Kai Islands during WWII. They supposedly saw humanoid creatures with fish-like mouths and sharp teeth. The locals knew about the creatures, calling them orang ikan, which translates from Indonesian and Malay to “fish people.” Orang Ikan is the original title of Monster Island.
In my limited research I couldn’t tell whether that “real” story is legitimately something that originated from the 1940s, or if it’s just something someone made up on the internet and it got passed around until people just accepted it as legit. I’m inclined to believe the latter. Regardless, it seems like Monster Island might have taken partial inspiration from that story. But beyond that, fish creatures are a part of the folklore of many cultures.
Monster Island will be available to stream beginning July 25, 2025 on Shudder and AMC+.
