8 Horror Movies With Deeper Meanings Than You Realise

Godzilla isn't an out and out horror character, but his monster movie leanings are absolutely a part of the backbone of the horror genre - as are the early movies.

And really, he's always represented something deeper than a big old lizard man from under the sea. Whilst Godzilla movies are giant celebratory monster mashes that see him face off against the strangest and most gigantic of foes, he's always had his own wide spread interpretation as well - that of the atomic bomb.

Rising up from the ocean and laying waste to Japan, Godzilla directly reflected the anxieties of the country about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War 2, rising from the deep after being disturbed by bombings himself. Over the years, he's developed into a heroic protector of the country as much as its destroyer - changing the context of what the monster really is.

Godzilla in his most recent outing is the one thing that stands between humanity and extinction, empowered by nuclear devices to serve as the front line defence from giant monsters. He's gone from a powerful creature of destruction born from man-made interference to being nature's own answer to killing off that which threatens Earth's balance, a representation that life finds a way that Jurassic Park would be envious of.

Godzilla is the apocalypse - the end and the beginning all in one.