1958

DIRECTOR: IRVIN S. YEAWORTH JR. PRODUCER: JACK H. HARRIS SCREENPLAY: THEODORE SIMONSON AND KATE PHILLIPS, FROM AN ORIGINAL IDEA BY IRVINE S. MILLGATE STARRING: STEVE MCQUEEN (STEVE ANDREWS), ANETA CORSAUT (JANE MARTIN), EARL ROWE (LIEUTENANT DAVE), OLIN HOWLIN (OLD MAN), STEVEN CHASE (DR. T. HALLEN), JOHN BENSON (SERGEANT JIM BERT), GEORGE KARAS (OFFICER RITCHIE)

The Blob

PARAMOUNT • COLOR, 86 MINUTES

A group of teenagers tries to convince the police that a deadly glob of intergalactic goo has landed in their small town.

Olin Howlin discovers the Blob inside a meteorite.

What do you get when you cross the misunderstood teenagers from Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with the creeping space fungus from The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)? Science fiction’s most celebrated slime of all time: The Blob. A tour de force of 1950s low-budget filmmaking—complete with a campy concept, a surprisingly sensitive and optimistic script, and a young(ish) Steve McQueen in his first starring role—The Blob has slithered its way into the hearts of fans for generations.

The birth of The Blob is the stuff of B-movie legend. Its producer, Pennsylvania film distributer Jack H. Harris, had one dream: to combine two hot box-office trends—juvenile delinquency and sci-fi—in a single movie. Its director, Irvin “Shorty” Yeaworth, was a Methodist minister who couldn’t make it to the set on Sundays (he was needed to play the organ in church). Its screenwriter, Ted Simonson (also a minister), had only written educational Christian films until he tackled The Blob. Together, they concocted one of the most endearing monster movies in horror history. “We thought it would give an extra layer to the picture to have the bad kids be good kids,” Harris said. Instead of being delinquents, the teens of The Blob are more heroic than the adults. Rambunctious but well intentioned, they save their suburb from a gelatinous substance that oozes forth from a meteorite, devouring everything in its path. Growing redder and more bloated with the blood of its victims, the jellylike mass threatens to consume the Earth until Steve, Jane, and the gang discover its preference for tropical temperatures.

Twenty-seven-year-old McQueen (credited as “Steven”) was working regularly in television but struggling to land film roles at the time. Harris gave him his big-screen break—in DeLuxe color, no less—with The Blob, though there was a catch: McQueen had to play a high-school kid. “I’m a Method actor,” he assured the producer, “and I can do it.” Sure enough, the star-to-be pulls it off with characteristic charm. McQueen’s burgeoning “icon of cool” persona can even be glimpsed here and there. When the blob threatens Jane in the canned goods section of the grocery store, Steve leaps over the aisle to the rescue as “Cooler King” Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape (1963) might do; the backward car-race scene evokes images of a mature McQueen behind the wheel in Le mans (1971). His electric energy helps to bring The Blob’s squeaky-clean dialogue and naive visual effects to life.

The blob

A lobby card featuring Aneta Corsaut, Steve McQueen, Olin Howlin, and Steven Chase

Teenagers save the world in The Blob.

Steve McQueen as Steve Andrews

Shot entirely in the Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, area with hundreds of locals in supporting roles, the film was truly a hometown project—and it shows. Only a picture made outside of the Hollywood system could capture midcentury American life with the simplicity and sincerity of The Blob. The snappy theme song (by a young Burt Bacharach) and animated credits sequence set the tone for the movie’s playful innocence, and its hopeful finale: The teens that nobody would believe (“they’re just kids”) end up uniting the whole town to fight the viscous alien invader. The Blob even gave its filmmakers their own happy ending. Harris—who had mortgaged his home and borrowed against his children’s life insurance policies to raise the $130,000 budget—recouped his expenses three times over when, miraculously, Paramount Pictures snatched up the homegrown sci-fi effort and distributed it across the country.

Reviewers didn’t think much of the film. Cue magazine’s critic even accused The Blob of promoting emotional disturbance in children and recommended boycotting it. But the public couldn’t get enough. It did tremendous drive-in business, and was reissued to theaters in 1964 before squishing its way onto TV and home video. A 1972 sequel was made (Beware! The Blob) followed by a $19 million remake in 1988. The lavish revamp was quickly forgotten, proving that bigger is not always better. Today, the original still prevails. In 2000, director Yeaworth—seemingly unaware of the parallel between his film’s longevity and its gooey monster—said earnestly of The Blob, “It just won’t die, somehow.”

FAR-OUT FACTS

The blob—which is never referred to as “the blob” in the film—was made of colored silicone manufactured by a Union Carbide plant in Sistersville, West Virginia.

For two weeks, the filmmakers brainstormed titles. The Meteor Monster, The Molten Meteor, The Night of the Creeping Dead, The Glob That Girdled the Globe, and The Glob were working titles before they finally settled on The Blob.

Once he became a big star, Steve McQueen often made disparaging remarks about the film, but came to grudgingly appreciate it later in life. When McQueen died of cancer in 1980, the only piece of decor hanging on his bedroom wall was a framed poster for The Blob.

MIND-BLOWING MOMENT

Toward the end of its reign of terror, the giant blob oozes through the projection booth of a movie theater, sending the crowd below into a panic. The famous scene of the audience running out of the Colonial Theatre is ritually reenacted every year at Blobfest, a Phoenixville event that draws thousands of fans.

KEEP WATCHING

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FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958)