The Blob (

1958

) ½

Pretty much everyone alive today has grown up in a landscape where teen-focused horror movies have been the rule rather than the exception. How many times have you seen college or high school kids menaced by some masked killer or eldritch abomination? Hell, a film critic no less august than Roger Ebert was quick to denounce most horror films as “Dead Teenager Movies” (though usually these teens were played by actors in their mid-twenties). It's difficult for us mighty space-men of the future than to understand then that in the early 1950s the concept of a teen-centered horror movie was totally unknown. Horror films in the 1930s, 40s, and early 50s all focused, almost exclusively on adults. Even after teen-horror was pioneered by smaller indie productions like Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) and I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) it took at least a full calendar year for the major studios to catch onto the trend. But catch on they did, as evidenced by today's film, a teen-centered horror movie produced by Paramount Studios. This means that for once, a shlocky 1950s horror movie had a big enough budget to afford color photography and a smattering of convincing special effects. The result is one of the most memorable, horror films of the decade, one that even viewers unfamiliar or uninterested in the genre and epoch will likely recognize at least a couple of scenes from (for instance the famous shot of an audience fleeing a theater which youtube critics have gotten no small usage out of).

In a way, it's odd that The Blob is held up as the standard-bearer of the 1950s American monster movie because it looks so completely distinct from the vast majority of its contemporaries. For one thing, it's in color, while most of its competitors couldn't afford such luxuries and instead were shot in black and white. The Blob also has the daring (and the budget) to set the movie entirely at night, and mostly outside, two factors that can make even the simplest scene a considerable challenge to film. The result is a movie that is visually darker than any of the period's noirs! In most shots, the background is utter blackness, with the characters leaping to the foreground thanks to their brightly colored costumes. The cars, in particular, stand out against the backdrops thanks to the vibrant colors that were then in vogue (the main character, Steve, for instance, drives an atomic blue two-door that I'm more than a little bit envious of). There are only a couple of brief shots where the filmmakers try to pass off day-time photography as night, and while they are mercifully fleeting, they work about as well as you would expect in a full-color film. Even darkened in post it's obvious that these shots could only possibly have been films hours before or after the preceding images. Still, if you watch as many 50s horror films as I do, you're probably used to forgiving a whole lot more in the way of technical errors.

The plot borrows heavily from the earlier Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), mostly concerning a few (unusually weathered) teens who in the midst of a romantic evening at make-out point, get entangled in a conflict with alien invaders. Here, the principal teens are Steve (a young but still way older than High-School aged Steve McQueen, doing his best James Dean impression) and his new girlfriend Jane, who sees a falling star while stargazing in the hills outside of town. Well, at least Steve says they're just stargazing, Jane has suspicions that he's got other things on his mind, not that she seems particularly upset about that (I suppose there are some advantages to literally looking like a young Bullitte (1968)). They take off after the falling star to see if they can find it but are beaten to the punch by an old man who lives in the hills. He finds a meteorite crashed on his property and does exactly what I would do in such a situation, starts poking it with a stick. The meteorite cracks open, exposing a pile of transparent alien snot that proceeds to leap onto the man's arm and attach itself with such force that it cannot be pried off. What's more, apparently the alien was a bit peckish after its journey, so it starts to digest the man right there and then!

Steve and Jane find the man and take him into town to see the local doctor, but along the way Steve makes the mistake of passing Tony, the local drag racing king, as he speeds to the doctor's office. So naturally, after he's dropped off the old man Tony and his two goons challenge Steve to the obligatorily drag race (Thanks to Rebel Without a Cause (1955), no 1950s teen movie is complete without a bit of street racing). Steve accepts but insists that they race backwards, a contest he handily wins. This is all so much mucking about though, while Tony and Steve are first feuding and then bonding in that particularly masculine fashion with which male friendships are formed, the blob is growing out of control. First, it completely engulfs and digests the old man before turning its attention to Doc Hallen and his nurse. They try to kill the creature, first with acid then with a gun (The acid is a good idea, the gun is a hopeless ploy, the thing is an amorphous mass, what the hell are bullets going to do to it?). When that fails though, the blob eats both of them. Observant viewers will notice that the blob has changed colors from a transparent whitish color to bright red color. Must be all the blood it's eaten!

Steve sees the blob devour doc Hallen through the window and does what I think a lot more people in horror movies should do, he calls the proper authorities. The cops are unusually well-characterized for a teen horror movie too, being represented both by the hard-ass no-nonsense type in the form of Sergeant Bert, and the more reasonable Lieutenant Dave. The cops investigate Hallen's house and see that the place is pretty much trashed, the doc's rifle has been fired and there's no trace of the doc anywhere. Unfortunately, the landlady says that the doc has left town for a big medical conference, so the cops have literally no idea what they're dealing with. Dave is prepared to treat it as a genuine mystery that they can solve in the morning while Bert is convinced that the whole thing is a setup, some elaborate practical joke that the kids have put together in order to humiliate the cops in general and him personally. However, even Bert can't figure out how the teenage miscreants managed to lock all the doors and windows from the inside after they wrecked the place. The police release Steve and Jane into their parents' custody, not that it does any good, the two sneak out and meet up again almost immediately. Clearly, there is a monster loose in the town, and if the cops aren't doing to do anything about it, then it's up to the local kids. The only problem is the blob is a slippery monster, so actually getting a hold of it is damn near impossible, to this end, Steve enlists the help of Tony and his crew of delinquents to scour the town for clues.

The blob is not a film that anyone would consider a comedy, but it does have a couple of very well-timed and well-placed jokes. At one point both the town's air-raid siren and fire alarm are going off, and an old man, a member of both the civil defense and volunteer firefighters, debates earnestly which of his helmets to wear as this “has never happened before.” In another scene a couple of teens see some motion in the bushes, and thinking that it might be the blob creep carefully over and peek inside, only to find a pair of young lovers making out. When these two express their annoyance at being interrupted, the teens apologize and insist that they were only looking for monsters. Generally, I find most mid-century comedies to be tedious, and the comic relief they stuff into horror movies from the 1950s to be downright obnoxious. The jokes in The Blob, however land and even manage to tickle my funny-bone. Unlike in say, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the comedy does not make the situation or the monster any less frightening. Instead, the humorous moments are amusing asides that arise naturally as a result of the central, horrific scenario.

Monster movies are only as good as their monster, which goes some way towards explaining why The Blob is such an unmitigated delight. For one thing, the concept of a slime-based monster is one that I, and I'm sure everyone who ever suffered a TPK at the hands of a gelatinous cube, will find innately terrifying. The Blob, despite being an amorphous mass of red jelly, has tremendous personality. It's so alien to everything human, or even mammalian, that it's difficult for even the most imaginative viewer to totally grasp the threat posed by such a monster. All forms of conventional weapons are, of course, useless against a being with no internal anatomy to damage. Doors can't stop it, because the blob can just slip under the crack as easily as it can crawl through a vent. The blob doesn't have any plan or even any desires. It's just going to keep eating and expanding until it swallows up the whole world. One wonders in when the people of this film take to the stars, will they find a universe full of planets that have been completely consumed by these mucus-based conquerors? The color and all-consuming nature of the monster also make it a great representation of the era's fears of communism, though I suspect that this is just a happy coincidence rather than any deliberate symbolism on the part of the filmmakers.

A word must be said about the film's weirdly catchy title song. Personally, I suspect that it was motivated by the same studio cynicism that gave us Rock Around the Clock as the opening tune for Blackboard Jungle (1955). If teens were willing to sit through a 100-minute lecture thanks to a rocking theme song, then imagine how many will buy tickets for an actually fun movie! Sure I can scoff at the brazen marketing, but for once I'm thankful for this trend, if only because I have no idea how else we would ever get such a fun and goofy song.