According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, two police officers reported a parachute-like object drifting down into a field near South Philadelphia West on the night of September 26, 1950. Joined by two of their colleagues, they approached the mysterious six-foot-wide mass, which appeared to be filled with crystals and emit a purplish mist. When one officer attempted to grab hold of the object, what he’d touched disintegrated, leaving behind a sticky, odorless residue. Within a half-hour, the entire mass disappeared. Inspired by a sense of duty and the still-new phenomenon of publicly reporting UFO sightings—and, perhaps, the recent onset of the Korean War—the befuddled officers contacted the FBI and the press, though the case appears to have, much like the mass itself, evaporated due to a lack of any lasting evidence.
This rather flimsy close-encounter account provided the initial inspiration for producer Jack H. Harris and director Irvin Yeaworth’s wildly influential film The Blob (1958). The movie was a low-budget hit featuring a star turn by the young “Steven” McQueen (though, at 28, not nearly as young as the teenager he plays), a melodramatic and talky script co-written by actor Kay Linaker (under the pen name Kate Phillips), an ear worm of a novelty song co-written by Burt Bacharach, and the “Blob” itself, constructed mostly of liquid silicone dyed cherry red and often shot upside-down to give it the appearance of locomotion. Unlike the mysterious mass of its real-world origin story, this Blob devours its victims’ bodies and grows exponentially. It was a perfectly horrific, elemental creature that left an indelible mark on the young filmgoers’ minds of the day, including Chuck Russell, a rising filmmaker on the hunt for an established (and affordable, after the failure of 1972’s Beware! The Blob) property to launch his career as a director. Russell and fellow up-and-comer Frank Darabont pitched the remake to New Line Cinema, who turned it down, but offered them their debut: a little genre gem called A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987).
Premiering a year later, The Blob shares more similarities with Dream Warriors than its ‘58 predecessor—beyond the basic plot beats. The practical effects are appallingly effective, ghoulish, and, on some occasions, hilarious; moreover, its main characters are teenagers whose compassion for their neighbors and lack of cynicism enable their initial encounters with, and eventual triumph over, the supernatural. The original version of The Blob also starred teenagers who must convince their elders of the oozing threat within a single feverish night and discover the creature’s ultimate weakness just in time to preserve the town; however, in that telling, the teens are forgiven for “drag racing” and the adults are, in the end, forgiven for taking so long to come around to the truth. In the ‘88 version, as in many genre movies of the era, parents are (sometimes lethally) neglectful, caught up in their capitalist dramas while their pubescent children stock up on condoms, drive their puny scooters off broken-down bridges, sneak into R-rated movies, and witness the local diner’s fry-cook get folded in half and dragged down a filthy sink drain. And, the earthbound threat extends beyond the parents’ incredulity to government malfeasance; rather than an extraterrestrial monster, this Blob is the byproduct of germ warfare testing gone awry—an engineered bacterial weapon that mutates in space before crash landing and running amok in small town America.
Though the parallels to Dream Warriors are many, the ‘88 Blob also reverberates with far more recent controversies. For example: to hide their incompetence, the bureaucrats in hazmat suits lie to the good townspeople, telling them they are the subjects of a “medical quarantine” and that our be-mulleted hero is carrying a dangerous plague—conspiracy fodder from 1988, or 2020? Last week, a massive piece of “space junk” landed in Kenya, crushing vegetation, frightening residents, and begging for a less banal explanation. Though its specific origins remain unconfirmed, they are believed to be from a commercial spacecraft bound by regulations that have failed to keep pace with the volume of launches into the debris-riddled beyond. And, most potently, the film’s teenage leads drag a groaning man into the hospital, shouting that something strange and menacing seems to be devouring his flesh. When one of them finally gets the receptionist’s attention, her first question is: “Does he have Blue Cross?”
The Blob screens tomorrow night, January 10, at Nitehawk Williamsburg as part of “Midnite Movies.”
