Day 7: The Blob (1958), dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.
Streaming Availability: Tubi
The most amazing part of The Blob is the opening credits. I rarely have much to say about the scores of these movies, so when I need to make special notice of the opening track, you know it is important. Urgently important that you hear this tune. We start with this sultry surf rock riff, before suddenly cutting into this jazzy saxophone and moaning chorus. Then there's our lyrics, demanding the audience "beware of the blob!", right after a hysterical popping noise. Legendary songwriter Burt Bacharach co-wrote this track with Mack David, and they are at their very campiest. This song actually charted as high as #33 on Billboard in 1958.
You'd think the movie you're about to see after this would be just as campy, a tongue-in-cheek pile of nonsense about teenagers getting eaten by alien goo. Musically, the rest of the score is playing it straight. If the rest of The Blob is running on irony, it is doing a much better job of hiding it.
Clearly though, more horror movies need wacky theme songs. Why couldn't Burt Bacharach write a burping sax solo and ad jingle lyrics for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre?
The goofy pop song demonstrates a big shift in how B-movies are made and for whom. Today a dumb horror movie with an intended audience of wise-cracking adolescents is a rite of passage. However, the concept of "teenagers" as distinct social group, one that could be marketed to, is a recent invention. We only created this class of people in the Post-War era. The idea that young adults even should have their own social sphere distinct from their parents was new and radical - built largely because suddenly kids had money and could afford cars. That gave them a place outside the home to be with other kids, listen to the own music, and fuck. There's was always something like a youth culture, kids always would find ways to mess around, but that it could have its own identity, that's all new. We're several generations into this whole "teenager" experiment, so the idea seems like it is going to last.
The late Fifties had a big rush of horror movies marketed at this new youth market. The titles could not be blunter: I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Teenagers from Outer Space. The Blob should have called itself "I Was a Teenage Slime Monster" considering its demographic targets. The heroes of The Blob are all kids. If not for all the space stuff, they would be chilling at lover's lane, getting into Rebel Without a Cause car chase shenanigans, or going to the movies. This is the marketing at work here, a movie sold to kids in movies telling them how cool it is to go to movies with your buddies.
Well, until pink slime pours out of the projection booth and eats the audience. But maybe the movie you're watching is Joker 2, and the Blob is doing you a favor.
We open on what will become a stock cliche of horror scenarios. Two kids on lover's lane, Steve ("Steven" McQueen in his first role) and Jane (Aneta Corseaut) see something in the dark, interrupting the game of pushing sexual boundaries. This is all so stock that Killer Klowns from Outer Space is 70% a remake of The Blob, with space clowns replacing the slime, up to and including a character named 'Officer Dave' and casting a 28-year-old actor as a teenager.
The alien meteor keeps everything chaste by dropping a small bit of snot which will grow to eat much of the town. First it grabs hold onto an old man's hand. Then we see the entire arm has been replaced by an arm-shaped jello-mold, then the alien eats the rest of him. The police are convinced this is just another prank by these pesky kids and their hormones and their genders and their screens. (Little has changed in seventy years.) The kids end up the heroes in the end, rebelling positively to make people realize there's a monster in town. They even push Jane's stuffy high school principal father vandalize his own school to save the day. The cops end up heroic as well, forced to finally do their jobs when a monster the size of a diner is right in front of them.
If there's a message here it is "the kids are more right than you know". Which considering we're about to go through Vietnam, and all this youth rebellion will get a lot more radical, hm. Even the delinquents of 1958 have hair parts so neat they might as well have been carved with a hammer and chisel.
The most fun bit of The Blob (other than that theme song) is the effects. The monster is a charming lump of round goop. They use every trick in the book to build scale and it is adorable, how can you not love this thing? They used some silicon and vegetable dye over a weather balloon to make the monster. We're in color so there's a great deep red to the villain. Sometimes the Blob is pushing through miniature sets. Sometimes it is obviously in front of a still photo of the movie theater it attacked as a perspective gag. When the movie needs to shoot lightning at the Blob, they cut over to a still painting.
The Blob is a classic Fifties indie film, back when such a term had no prestige at all. This was shot in the suburbs of eastern Pennsylvania during a brief window of the late-Fifties and Sixties when this area was a hub of indie production. After a small string of genre pictures, Irvin Yeasworth Jr. shut down productions only a few years after The Blob, this being his only real hit. But indie horror films in Pennsylvania would have a long history, with George A. Romero as a highlight on the other side of the state.
The Blob is an icon, how can you not love a ball of red jello? Sure this movie is not all that scary. It's efficient. Steve McQueen shows off some acting chops, a few people get eaten off camera, you get big 1950s screams from horrified ladies. The Blob is not a movie that is easy to take seriously now, and probably was not taking itself all too seriously back then. You can see the irony on display when the Blob attacks a theater, literally devouring its own audience.
All these kids are crowding into a midnight showing of some non-existent Z-grade Bela Lugosi movie. What are they doing? They're laughing at the screen. So enjoy these B-movies however you want, The Blob is fine with you laughing along with it.
Luckily for all involved, the Blob has a critical weakness to cold, so some fire hydrants do the trick. We end on the military dropping the creature off at the North Pole. We'll be safe "as long as the Arctic stays cold." Well, it is still 1958, there's plenty of time to stop global warming.
We even get the wonderfully cheesy "THE END?" credit. Bravo, The Blob. I would raise this monster as my own son if I could.
Next Time! Well, it isn't the end. There's a sequel, the Movie JR Shot, Beware! The Blob
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