Luke Owen counts down to Pacific Rim by looking back at some of his favourite giant monsters…
Kaiju: The Japanese word for “strange beast”. However, the word Kaiju has been universally translated and defined into English as “monster” or “giant monster”.
Giant monsters can come in all shapes and sizes and never is that more true than today’s entry, The Blob.
The Blob is a gelatinous alien creature that crash landed on Earth via a meteorite in the 1958 movie of the same name, starring Steve McQueen in his debut leading role. When an old man accidentally gets the creature onto his hand, it causes a chain reaction whereby The Blob gets bigger and bigger the more it consumes. Before they know it, a quiet rural Pennsylvania town has become overrun with a giant jelly mould that seemingly cannot be stopped.
What I love about The Blob as a monster is that it works by a simple nature – the more it consumes the bigger it gets. And the bigger it gets, the easier it is to consume things. This very basic premise leads to some good thrills and while the 1958 original has dated pretty badly, the 1988 remake from Nightmare on Elm Street 3 partners Frank Darabont and Chuck Russell is actually very decent.
In the remake, they were able to make the monster actually a lot scarier (due to the larger budget) and while many people didn’t like it at the time, I do think there is a lot to take away from it. Time has not been cruel to the remake as it has to the 1958 classic.
That’s not to say that the original is bad. As I said in my review in last year’s Countdown to Halloween, it’s hard to criticise the movie just because of the time it was made and the very low budget constraints the movie had. But McQueen is incredibly likeable and when The Blob is on screen, it looks really effective.
Aside from the 1988 remake, The Blob also featured in a sequel directed by Larry Hagman (with the tagline, “the movie that J.R. shot”) and there was a period in time where House of 1000 Corpses director Rob Zombie was going to direct another remake.
Personally, I’d love to see this big bad jelly mould back on the big screen. The Blob may not be the most loved of giant monsters, but I think the idea behind him still works. Jeff Sharlet once wrote that The Blob was a metaphor for consumerism (which was shot down by script writer Rudy Nelson) but it’s actually something that could be looked at with a serious angle. All great monsters are a metaphor for something, and The Blob could be one of those too.
Plus, it eats people. And what’s not scary about an unstoppable mass that can’t be reasoned with that consumes people? Hell, it was even scary in the Goosebumps homage, Monster Blood*!
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Month in Review show for Flickering Myth’s Podcast Network. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
*well, it was scary when I was 8.
Originally published July 1, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
