WHAT IS GMK!GODZILLA?
GMK Godzilla (the one from Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, 2001) is officially a second, distinct Godzilla (sometimes called “second-generation Godzilla” in Toho materials); he is not the re-animated corpse of the 1954 original. The 1954 Godzilla was completely liquefied by the Oxygen Destroyer; nothing was left to come back.
So what exactly is this new creature that looks like Godzilla and is possessed by the restless souls of World War II dead (both Japanese soldiers and their victims)? The film itself never gives it a precise scientific or mythological name, but when you cross-reference Japanese demonology (yōkai studies) with the movie’s own symbolism, the closest traditional analogue is indeed a type of oni, specifically a vengeful, collective oni (a kishin 鬼神 or “demon-god”) formed from an amalgamation of countless angry ghosts.
GMK Godzilla fits the oni archetype almost perfectly: he began as an animal body that has been “borrowed” and possessed by millions of restless WWII dead; he is the embodiment of wrath, vengeance, and forgotten atrocities, powered by the anger of Pacific War victims toward a Japan that has conveniently forgotten or downplayed its wartime sins; he has pure white, pupil-less eyes (common in undead/possessed oni); he carries a supernatural aura, causes unnatural storms and earthquakes in prophecy, and is explicitly supernatural; he is sadistic, toying with and torturing the Guardian Monsters instead of just killing them; he literally sucks in the souls of Baragon, Mothra, and Ghidorah; he is ultimately defeated by the D-03 missile exploding inside him (a modern “sword” cutting him open, playing into the traditional oni weakness to blades); he follows textbook Buddhist hell lore in which extreme resentment after death can create an oni or kishin; and he is larger and more terrifying than the previous member of his species (Toho books state this second Godzilla is physically larger than the 1954 one).
The key scholarly connection is Noriko T. Reider’s book Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present (2010), which is repeatedly cited by fans for this exact reason. Reider explains that oni evolved from vague, formless vengeful ghosts (onryō) into the horned, physical demons we know, and that especially powerful or collective aggregations of resentful dead can manifest as a single gigantic oni or kijin (“oni god”). GMK Godzilla is almost a direct cinematic example of that process: millions of Pacific War dead (soldiers, civilians, victims of Japanese aggression) have no single body, so they hijack the body of a new, living Godzilla-like creature and turn it into their instrument of vengeance.
So what is GMK Godzilla, in plain terms? A second Godzilla (a natural or mutated giant reptile like the first one) that has been completely taken over and transformed by a collective oni/kishin formed from the fused resentment of everyone who died because of Imperial Japan’s actions in WWII. It is not the 1954 Godzilla brought back to life. It is not a dinosaur zombie in the Western sense. It is, in Japanese folkloric terms, a living kaijū that has become the physical vessel for an oni made of 36+ million angry souls, essentially a walking, city-destroying embodiment of Japan’s suppressed war guilt.
That is why the film gives him blank white eyes, an aura of pure hatred, and supernatural traits no other Godzilla has. He is the closest the franchise has ever come to making Godzilla an actual yōkai rather than just a mutated animal.