Enemy Soldiers Battle a Terrifying Monster in Intense New WWII Thriller

As if monster survival movies weren’t cool enough, director Mike Wiluan is throwing enemy WWII soldiers into the mix for his new horror movie Orang Ikan, which recently unveiled its first trailer. Written and directed by Wiluan, the film takes influences from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Predator, and even the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One. Orang Ikan is set to make its world premiere this week at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

Starring Dean Fujioka (Fullmetal Alchemist) and Callum Woodhouse (All Creatures Great and Small), Orang Ikan follows two shipwrecked soldiers during WWII who find themselves on a mysterious jungle island. With one a Japanese soldier and the other a British prisoner-of-war, the pair are immediately at each other’s throats once they gain consciousness. But when they discover a killer creature prowling the island, they must temporarily set aside their own conflict and work together to survive. The official synopsis reads:

“Set in the Pacific, 1942. A Japanese soldier and a British prisoner of war are stranded on a deserted island, hunted by a deadly creature. Two mortal enemies must come together to survive the unknown.”

The first trailer for Orang Ikan teases the humanoid creature. Looking like a blend of the Creature From the Black Lagoon and the Predator (or a much scarier version of the Missing Link from Monsters Vs. Aliens), the monster has razor-sharp teeth and long protruding claws that it uses to quickly disembowel and eat its victims. We get to see a bit of the creature in action during the trailer, as it hunts another shipwrecked Japanese soldier. Speaking to Deadline, Mike Wiluan said the creature is an amalgamation of the Gill-man found in Jack Arnold’s classic monster movie, as well as creatures from Malay folklore:

“Orang Ikan is an Asian interpretation of the creature theme set during the tragic real life occurrences of WW2. Aside from the horror, the film accentuates the theme of brotherhood and humanity against devastating reality of survival. This particular theme was inspired by John Boorman’s 1968 classic Hell in the Pacific.”

Why War & Monster Movies Are a Perfect Combination

There’s something special about a historical monster movie. While those set in the present day can certainly be scary, there’s something about knowing the survivors in the movie have limited technology and knowledge that drastically raises the stakes. But our love of war-based monster movies stems from a far deeper place, and has to do with our subconscious reactions to war itself. Monster movies force us as a species to face our own mortality. Be it a world-ending creature like the one in Cloverfield, or a single hunter like in Predator, the idea of a superior animal that’s more evolved than humans has always fascinated storytellers (it’s the main reason why the fantasy genre is obsessed with dragons).

The threat of imminent death in monster flicks is also an allegory for the devastating nature of war. Monster movies saw a sharp surge in popularity during the Cold War in the 1950s, and Japan started producing dozens of popular creature-based action and horror films after World War II — the most famous of which is Godzilla, who gets the WWII-set monster movie treatment in the recently released (and absolutely phenomenal) Godzilla Minus One.