The Blob
The Blob is a 1958 American science fiction horror film directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. from a screenplay by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips, based on an idea by Irving H. Millgate. It stars Steve McQueen and Aneta Corsaut and co-stars Earl Rowe and Olin Howland.
The film concerns a carnivorous amoeboidal alien that crashes to Earth from outer space inside a meteorite, landing near the small communities of Phoenixville and Downingtown, Pennsylvania. It envelops living beings, growing larger, becoming redder in color and more aggressive, eventually becoming larger than a building.
The Blob was released on September 10, 1958 by Paramount Pictures as a double feature with I Married a Monster from Outer Space.
Plot
In a small Pennsylvania town in July 1957, teenager Steve Andrews and his girlfriend Jane Martin kiss at a lovers' lane when they see a meteorite crash beyond the next hill. Steve goes looking for it but Barney, an old man living nearby, finds it first. When he pokes the meteorite with a stick, it breaks open and a small jelly-like globule blob inside attaches itself to his hand. In pain and unable to scrape or shake it loose, Barney runs onto the road, where he is nearly struck by Steve's car. Steve and Jane take him to Doctor Hallen.Doctor Hallen anesthetizes the man and sends Steve and Jane back to locate the impact site and gather information. Hallen decides he must amputate the man's arm since it is being phagocytosed. Before he can, the Blob completely absorbs Barney, then Hallen's nurse Kate, and finally the doctor himself, growing redder and larger with each victim. Steve and Jane return in time for Steve to witness the doctor trying to escape through the window with the Blob covering him. They go to the police station and return with Lieutenant Dave Barton and Sergeant Jim Bert, but they find no sign of the Blob nor its victims. The skeptical Bert dismisses Steve's story as a prank. Steve and Jane are taken home by their parents, but they sneak out later.
The Blob absorbs a mechanic at a repair shop. During a midnight screening of Daughter of Horror at the Colonial Theater, Steve recruits Tony and his friends to warn people about the Blob. When Steve notices that his father's grocery store is unlocked, he and Jane go inside to investigate. The janitor is nowhere to be seen. The couple is quickly cornered by the Blob and they seek refuge in the walk-in freezer. The Blob oozes under the door but quickly retreats. Steve and Jane gather their friends and set off the town's fire and air-raid alarms. The responding townspeople and police still refuse to believe them. The Blob enters the Colonial Theater and envelops the projectionist, then oozes into the auditorium. Steve is finally vindicated when screaming people flee the theater in panic.
Steve, Jane and her kid brother Danny are trapped in a diner, along with the owner and a waitress, as the Blob—now enormous from the dozens of people it has consumed in the theater—engulfs the building. Lieutenant Dave taps into the diner's telephone with his police radio and warns those in the diner to shelter in the cellar before the police bring down a live power line onto the Blob.
Dave and Bert plan to electrocute the Blob by felling an overhead high-voltage power line. It discharges a massive electric current into the Blob, which is unaffected, but the diner underneath is set ablaze. When the diner's owner uses a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher on the approaching fire inside, Steve notices that the Blob recoils. Steve remembers it also retreated from the freezer and realizes it cannot tolerate cold temperatures. Shouting, in hopes of being picked up on the open phone line, Steve tells Dave about the Blob's vulnerability to cold. The firemen have a limited supply of fire extinguishers. Jane's father, high school principal Henry Martin, leads Steve's friends to break into the school to retrieve its extinguishers. When they return, a brigade of fire extinguisher-armed students, firemen and police drive the Blob away from the diner, freeing the five trapped there. They surround and freeze the Blob.
Dave requests authorities send an Air Force heavy-lift cargo aircraft to transport the frozen Blob to the Arctic. Dave realizes that the cold will stop the Blob "as long as the Arctic stays cold", but it won't kill it. Parachutes bearing the Blob on a pallet lower it onto an Arctic ice field with the superimposed words The End morphing into a question mark.
Cast
Production
The film was the first production of Jack Harris, a film distributor from Philadelphia, and was reportedly inspired by a discovery of star jelly in Pennsylvania in 1950. It was originally titled The Molten Meteor until producers overheard screenwriter Kay Linaker refer to the film's monster as "the blob". Other sources give a different account, saying the film went through a number of title changes before the makers settled on The Glob. After hearing that cartoonist Walt Kelly had used The Glob as a title for his Pogo children's book, they mistakenly believed they couldn't use that title, so they changed it to The Blob. Although the budget was set at $120,000, it ended up costing only $110,000.The film was the second feature directed by Irvin Yeaworth. Filmed in and around Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, principal photography took place in the summer of 1957 at Valley Forge Studios. Several scenes were filmed in the towns of Chester Springs, Downingtown, Phoenixville and Royersford, including the basement of a local restaurant that is currently named Downingtown Diner. For the diner scene, a photograph of the building was put on a gyroscopically operated table onto which cameras had been mounted. The table was shaken and the Blob rolled off. When the film negative was printed in reverse, it appeared to be oozing over the building. The Blob was filmed in color and projected at a 1.66 ratio.
Steve McQueen received $3,000 for his starring role. He turned down an offer for a smaller up-front fee in return for a 10 percent share of profits, thinking the film would never make money; he needed his signing fee immediately to pay for food and rent. However, The Blob ended up a hit, grossing $4 million at the box office.
The film's tongue-in-cheek title song, "The Blob" , was written by Burt Bacharach and Mack David. It became a nationwide hit in the United States, peaking at #33 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on November 9, 1958. It was recorded by a studio group who adopted the name The Five Blobs.
The Blob background score was by Ralph Carmichael, who, like Yeaworth, had worked on television specials for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association; it was supervised by the director's wife, Jean Yeaworth. It was one of only a few film scores Carmichael wrote. He composed different opening music for the film—a piece called "Violence", intended to start the film on a serious, frightening note. However, the director chose to replace it with the novelty song "The Blob" to encourage audiences to view it as campy fun. The song has contributed to the film's enduring popularity. The original score and title song were both included on the soundtrack album, which was re-released in 2008 on the Monstrous Movie Music soundtrack label.
Release
Paramount acquired The Blob for $300,000 from Jack Harris and spent another $300,000 promoting it. According to Tim Dirks, it was one of a wave of "cheap teen movies" for the drive-in market—"exploitative, cheap fare created especially for in a newly-established teen/drive-in genre".Harris eventually bought back the rights from Paramount, with Allied Artists Pictures Corporation reissuing it as a double feature with Harris and Yeaworth's Dinosaurus! in 1964.
Home media
The Blob has been released as part of the Criterion Collection on three formats: LaserDisc, DVD and Blu-ray. The DVD and Blu-ray feature new cover art by Michael Koelsch. The film, together with Son of Blob, was released on DVD in Australia by Umbrella Entertainment in September 2011. The DVD is compatible with all region codes and has special features, including audio commentaries with Jack H. Harris, Bruce Eder, Irvin Yeaworth and Robert Fields. In November 2016, Umbrella released a 2-disc Blu-ray, The Blob Collection, featuring the 1988 version of The Blob and the 1958 version of The Blob. Disc two also includes the Criterion Collection's opening identification, although the release was distributed by Umbrella Entertainment with no mention of Criterion on the disc sleeve.Reception
The Blob received negative reviews upon release. The New York Times highlighted some of its problems and identified some positives, although Steve McQueen's starring debut was not one of them. On director Irvin Yeaworth's work, they wrote:Unfortunately, his picture talks itself to death, even with the blob nibbling away at everybody in sight. And most of his trick effects, under the direction of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., look pretty phony. On the credit side, the camera very snugly frames the small-town background—a store, a church spire, several homes and a theatre. The color is quite good. The acting is pretty terrible itself, there is not a single becomingly familiar face in the cast, headed by young Steven McQueen and Aneta Corseaut.
Variety had a similar reaction, seeing McQueen as the star, gamely "giving the old college try", but that the "... star performers, however, are the DeLuxe color camerawork of Thomas Spalding and Barton Sloane's special effects".
Writing for Famous Monsters of Filmland in 1962, Joe Dante Jr. included The Blob in his list of the worst horror films ever. Dante found the film spent too much time on drag racing, and disliked how the monster was dealt with at the end.
In a discussion with biologist Richard Dawkins, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated that among all Hollywood aliens, which were usually disappointing, The Blob was his favorite from a scientific perspective.
The ethnobiologists Oscar Requejo and N. Floro Andres-Rodriguez suggest that the slime mould Fuligo septica may have inspired the film's eponymous blob.
The film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 68% "Fresh" approval rating based on 31 reviews, with an average rating of 6.3/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "In spite of its chortle-worthy premise and dated special effects, The Blob remains a prime example of how satisfying cheesy B-movie monster thrills can be."