The Blob (1958)

directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.

USA

86 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I don't know how I've made it this long without having seen The Blob. I have remained fairly unaware of the particulars of it - excepting the blob itself, of course - and therefore I was absolutely unprepared for it to have a jazzy, peppy theme song about the blob playing over the opening credits. I'm very surprised that more is not made of this, because in the world of theme songs for horror movie monsters that have lyrics about the monsters themselves, this might just be the best one. Who wouldn't want to listen to a lounge-y '50s pop song about a blob?

I have to assume that this took at least some small inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft's "Color out of Space". The blob itself may not be as incorporeal as the extraterrestrial force in the story, but it is an extraterrestrial force, and it's amorphous and weird enough that nobody can quite describe it except to call it a "monster". In fact, now I'm thinking of it, I don't think anybody even attempts to describe it; they just stammer and say things like "it's huge, it's getting bigger, it's eating people". The foreignness of the blob renders all classical descriptions of life inapplicable. But anyway, the opening scenes of the film remind me of nothing so much as Lovecraft's "blasted heath" - the meteor coming to rest on the property of some poor dweller in the countryside and him becoming its first victim, the visual of it sitting in its own crater and then transforming when disturbed, it reminds me a lot of Lovecraft but with a stronger visual component.

After the first victim gets blobbed and is transported to a doctor we then are inundated with late-'50s youth culture. Steve McQueen's character, Steve, and his maybe-girlfriend Jane (Aneta Corsault) end up in a poor excuse for a drag race with a couple of the town ne'er-do-wells - these guys will eventually get their redemption and be an important part of the effort to make the townspeople aware of the blob, but for now, all they're doing is trying to see who can drive backwards to a red light faster. There's a bit of whiplash between what we just saw of the blob and the normalcy of a bunch of teenagers doing teenager stuff, but I think it works somehow, because the audience knows that while these characters are preoccupied with their own silly stunts, there's somebody lying on a cot somewhere getting eaten alive by an alien lifeform. The knowledge that that is happening in the background makes us want to grab every character by the shoulders and tell them to get the hell out and stop racing their huge clunky cars around.

But as far removed as this specific strain of youth culture may be to us today, this movie takes pains to situate itself in something that feels like reality. There's a horror movie playing at the town's theater and it seems to be the main source of entertainment for a lot of the teens ("teens"). We should make note of the fact that this movie exists in a world where everyone is familiar with horror movies: It lends a sense of realness to it, like when characters in a zombie movie immediately recognize that they're in a zombie outbreak, just like the ones in the movies, except for real. But The Blob's vision of an alien invasion in a world that is already used to watching horror movies is scarier than that, because this isn't a zombie, it's something nobody has ever seen before and, as I said, they don't even have the words to describe it. A group of people sitting down to watch a horror movie in a theater when a werewolf or a zombie walks in would just be kind of corny, but the people sitting and having a good time watching horrors from what they think is a safe remove, only to be confronted with something huge and inexplicable, is much more potent.

The blob itself is just awful. It remains awful 65 years later. On a personal note, I have a strong texture aversion to things like Jello, yogurt, custard, semi-solid foods like that. I think this may have given me more of a full-body revulsion whenever the blob was onscreen than was intended. It made me want to throw up. I could not stop imagining it in my mouth, touching my skin, all over my body - there's a disturbingly tactile feeling to the blob, granted to it by its nature as a physical, non-CGI object, and it's so enduringly creepy that I totally understand why this traumatized a generation of kids. There's just something so unwholesome about it. It looks like it smells bad. It has no face, no appendages, nothing we can relate to, it's a being of pure want that can't be stopped. We don't know its motives, we don't know where it came from, and we can't kill it. This is a picture of an overconfident humanity being confronted with something that makes us realize our place in the food chain of the universe.

But the thing that makes The Blob a great movie is only in part the actual blob. The thing that makes this a great movie is that it's handled so well and so evenly when compared to other teen screams of the time. Steve McQueen delivers a remarkably naturalistic performance; I totally believed that his character believed there was something roaming around town that was deeply frightening, and his frustration when no one will listen to him is palpable. He doesn't outwardly panic, but you can tell in the way his voice catches when he asks one of the stubborn policeman if he looks like somebody who's lying or somebody who's scared stiff that he really is scared stiff. The horror of this movie is half in the blob and half in trying to get people to believe you about something that sounds completely ridiculous but that you know is real.

(I also really love how insistent the movie is on making sure we know the first victim's little dog is okay. There are so many moments when it leaves the screen and we think for sure it's done for, but every single time, somebody will bring up the dog afterwards and say they saw it running off down the street looking terrified or something. I'm glad that the dog makes it through okay. I think he might now be one of my favorite dogs of film. He's just a little guy. And he's a slippery one to have evaded the blob that whole time.)

When I think about horror movies from the '50s, most of them have a monster that's at least somewhat conventional - it's not that there were no weird monsters, but the movies that were really out there with their creatures are not typically the ones that have gone down as cultural phenomena - except The Blob. Usually it's vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's Monsters, things that we're familiar with; it must have been that sense of the unknown that has kept this movie so compelling for the last 60+ years. But again, the incredibly unique monster design is only a facet of what makes this movie so good; the rest, it owes to tight scriptwriting and empathetic, believable performances. And my god, what a terrifying ending. My one nitpick is that, as other reviewers have said, it could use a little more blob.