Gojira quickly established the kaijū film as an attractive film genre. The film's success, and that of its sequels and imitators, cemented trends for kaijū not just in Japan, but globally. Producers had already borrowed elements from King Kong to develop their own variants, but once defined, the kaijū film spread more generally. This chapter thus continues to look at how the kaijū film developed via cultural flow and transnational connections. While the previous chapters have sought to make a case for the kaijū film as a popular national cinema genre reliant upon transnational influences and networks, this chapter steps outside Japan to look at how the kaijū film became adopted in other countries. Initially, we’ll explore East Asian variants and the ways in which kaijū were imitated regionally in a few guises. Our case study will almost exclusively be of films produced in South and North Korea, to look at the ways in which genrification (to use Rick Altman's [1999] term) occurs in supranational spaces but is grounded in local production (as Elena Oliete-Aldea, Beatriz Oria and Juan A. Tarancón argue in the Introduction to Global Genres, Local Films [2016]). The South Korean film Yongary: Monster from the Deep (Taegoesu Yonggari, lit. Great Beast Yongary, Kim Kidŏk, 1967) closely mimics the Godzilla structure, with a child protagonist and a dancing monster. Yet it has a tenuous basis in local mythology. This is, however, unlike other regional kaijū films, such as the North Korean Pulgasari (Shin Sang-ok, 1985) or the Thai Garuda (Paksa wayu, Monthon Arayangkoon, 2004), both of which draw more explicitly on myths to different ends (especially in the case of Pulgasari). Others, such as Hong Kong's The Mighty Peking Man or South Korea's A*P*E, are more exploitative attempts to capitalise on the release of popular films, particularly the 1976 remake of King Kong (by John Guillermin), and as such we’ll consider them in a later chapter under the heading of Kongsploitation.

While elements of these films have been attributed to shared global anxieties and concerns (particularly by Jason Barr, who argues this is a defining facet of the kaijū film), the approach taken here is closer to Iain Robert Smith's identification of a meme-like quality in the ways that unofficial remakes in transnational cinema adopt tropes and aspects of Hollywood cinema.