DAY TWENTY TWO:
DIFFERENT DIMENSION PEOPLE GILANBO
Written by Jonathan Wojcik
Happy early Halloween!!! Maybe Gilanbo would have been more appropriate for the 31st, given that she's the only
explicitly Halloween themed Ultra Kaiju, but the final stretch are monsters I've saved up based on sheer "horror" factor, not necessarily "Halloween" factor! That said, Gilanbo is still
mighty ghoulish! She's basically a giant, alien "witch," and she not only attacks the Earth on Halloween night, but disguises herself as only a human in a witchy costume and hands out tainted candy to human children! This candy leaves her victims susceptible to her creepy, hypnotic song (actually the sound of a children's music box) as they sleep, drawing them to her interdimensional lair - which, by the way, she disguises as a giant pumpkin - so she can devour their dreams, Baku style!
This process reduces children to near-mindlessness, as though still only "sleepwalking," and she doesn't even bother to return them either way - only discard them in an alternate reality that resembles our own, except, you know, there's brainwashed children meandering around in it, and it's also littered with discarded toys to give us a horrible idea of
how many times she's probably done this before.
Gilanbo's true form is a wildly unique design, too. Her "head," if that's indeed what that is, looks kind of like a long, bisected animal skull, or maybe a bony white octopus with only two tentacles? Then it has a strange, blue "screen" inside that flashes little lights, like some kind of digital readout, and then she has those sharp-edged giant ring things growing out of her like ears, and
then she has what looks like a second pair of long, swooping red eyes on her "chest!" What the hell IS Gilanbo's anatomy?! Nobody knows! She certainly does look like something from another dimension, however, and just the sort of thing that might wield creepy, alien abilities resembling "magic." It's a witchy, Halloweeny design without
really being a witchy, Halloweeny design; it's marvelously subtle.
Finally, I'd like you to watch just this specific minute and a half of Gilanbo in her "disguise." We never see what her "human" face fully looks like under the witch mask, but we do see that its skin looks diseased and scabrous anyway, implying perhaps that the Halloween costume is to make her look
less horrifying to her targets. Even the way she moves around is disturbingly wrong, as though she's still not used to navigating in a human body, and I've also gotta say, I positively adore the dramatic pacing of this entire sequence. She's genuinely so creepy and so menacing, while simultaneously so hammy you expect her to break into a villain song as the music kicks in, and it's a TRAVESTY that she
doesn't.
Again, perhaps I'm making a mistake by now saving Gilanbo for our final or near-final entry, but perhaps you can think of her as the "herald" of our very spookiest, scariest entries to come!
NAVIGATION:
