Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla didn’t exactly live up to that amazing Comic-Con teaser trailer a few years back. I mean, Aaron Taylor-Johnson couldn’t have been more dull as the hero and, let’s face it, when the entirety of the titular monster’s onscreen time can be contained to an eight-minute YouTube video, that might be a bit of a problem.
However, upon a second viewing, it’s hard not to at least respect the movie for treating the beloved behemoth with the Old Testament shock and awe he deserves. And that’s why the Comic-Con trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters pushed all our kaiju-lovin’ buttons.
Seriously, it was one of the best previews to come out of the convention, giving us a great look at who everyone’s favorite radioactive mutant lizard will be throwing down with next summer. There was King Ghidorah, the three-headed monster renowned as one of the most destructive in Toho’s mythology; Mothra, one of the more environmentally inclined monsters and potentially the most visually haunting, and Rodan, who looks to present a danger simply by existing – destroying houses in the same way a nuclear blast would simply by flying over them.
But beyond that, there were also some sneaky Easter Eggs thrown in for fans to find. And now that we’ve all had the chance to comb through each and every frame, nods towards horror classics The Exorcist and The Thing have been discovered.
For one, the frozen body of King Ghidorah that we see in the trailer, encased in ice, is surely a callback to the alien discovered in John Carpenter’s aforementioned 1982 flick. Not to mention the “research facility set up to study this monstrosity looks more than a bit like Outpost 31, the Arctic location where The Thing is set.”
Meanwhile, around the 1:50 mark, we see a statue on the far right of the frame, which is pretty much identical to the Pazuzu statue Father Merrin discovers in the opening scene of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Beyond that, there hasn’t been anything else uncovered just yet, but we’ll certainly be keeping our eyes peeled as Warner Bros. continues to dish out the promo material.
The third installment in what’s been dubbed the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse – preceded by Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island – will see Gojira meet Ghidorah, Mothra and Rodan in a title fight of unimaginable magnitude next year when Godzilla: King of the Monsters crashes into theaters on May 31st.
