Netflix's Human Vapor adapts Toho's odd 1960 sci‑fi into a modern thriller

Human Vapor, an eight-episode series, debuts on Netflix on July 2. It brings together South Korean and Japanese production houses and marks the first collaboration between Netflix and Toho, the studio behind Godzilla. The show draws its name and premise from Toho’s The Human Vapor (1960), one of the studio’s strangest tokusatsu films.

Directed by Ishiro Honda, the original follows a librarian who survives a scientific experiment and gains the ability to turn into mist, using the power to slip through walls and fund a dancer’s career through robberies; it was part of Toho’s Transforming Human Series alongside The H-Man and The Secret of the Telegian.

Netflix’s version is not a straight remake: it keeps the mist-transforming idea but builds an original story set in modern Japan. After a series of shocking murders, police, journalists, livestreamers and politicians become entangled in a nationwide hunt for the criminal nicknamed "Human Vapor," shifting the focus from the original’s doomed romance to a larger conspiracy thriller.

Japan

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