Monster Mash V: The Monsters You Never Suspect

A Personal Reflection on The Blob (1958)

The Blob (1958) – A Personal Reflection

Y’all. Happy Halloween and all that jazz, but we have some serious shit to talk about today on our final installment of Spooky Season Monster Mash. I thought, “oh wouldn’t it be fun to finish with a real classic monster film, one I’ve not seen like perhaps The Blob?” and then I was subjected to HORROR. I thought, “oh I can handle an old school scary movie because they’re so removed from modern horror that it’s accessible and almost parodic when compared to horror movies like Gremlins (1984) or Signs (2002), two of the scariest films I have FOR SURE ever seen. Signs scarred me and to this day I am afraid of basements, aliens, and corn. Surely The Blob can’t be that scary.” And then there was Jane.

For those of you who haven’t had the displeasure, Jane is the real monster in this film – and this will be distressing, I am warning you now – because she THROWS A DOG AT THE BLOB. GIRL. AND THEN PRETENDS TO CARE ABOUT THE DOG AFTERWARDS. BE SO FUCKING FOR REAL RIGHT NOW. She’s like crying in her man’s arms like “Steve, the dog, the little dog, it got the little dog.” You mean the dog you THREW AT IT?

The Blob is about a space specimen that comes to earth in an asteroid that Steve (Steve McQueen) and Jane (Aneta Corseaut) see while making out and arguing in Steve’s car. An old man goes out to see what the raucous is when The Blob attacks him, climbing up his arm. Steve and Jane take the old man to the doctor’s house and then there’s an interminably long scene of hoodlums being hoodlums before we get back to the plot and finally to where the film actually begins: the gang finding their Scooby (the old man’s now-abandoned puppy). And we think Jane is the hero. The film lets us think Jane gives a single ounce of a fuck about the cutest little friend but then SHE LOSES IT MULTIPLE TIMES. She’s like “oh man, what happened to that little dog?” BRO, YOU WERE JUST HOLDING HIM, WHAT DO YOU MEAN? YOU HAD ONE SINGLE JOB, JANE.

And then more things happen and The Blob is consuming people and multiple people are like “Do we shoot it?” because this here is America. Specifically, it’s small town Pennsylvania not far from where I grew up, and obviously the natural impulse is to shoot things we don’t understand like the aliens in Signs which is also set in Pennsylvania not far from where I grew up. It’s called culture.

Meanwhile, Jane and Steve are taken to the police station after the cops don’t believe their story about the doctor’s disappearance. They’re sent home with their parents and make plans to sneak out, meet up, and hunt The Blob to make their case and save the town. On her way out, Jane has a full costume change to look like poodle skirt Daphne now that she found and lost Scooby, and she runs into her much younger brother Danny. Danny is absolutely precious and pledges to keep their parents safe, and Jane, for absolutely no fucking reason because remember, REMEMBER she lost the dog, PROMISES DANNY A NEW PUPPY. SHE’S LIKE “OH I HAVE THIS DOG, HE’S PERFECT, ALL YOURS, MY GUY. BUT ALSO I DON’T HAVE THE DOG BECAUSE I AM AN IRRESPONSIBLE, UNSERIOUS PERSON.”

Anyway, The Blob is makin’ its way downtown, slinkin’ fast, munching up bar flies and grocery clerks when the real climactic scene happens and Jane reveals she’s the worst person, nay, being in the film when she just fuckin launches the little puppy. She’s scared by the slow moving molasses ass Blob that, yes, can consume you alive, but that’s no reason to DROP THE TINY DOG IN YOUR HANDS. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

No one believes Steve and Jane except other teenagers and kids. One cop is like “the kids in town are making it up because I served in probably Korea and they don’t think I’m man enough and they want to see if they can fool my clever veteran brain” and another cop is like “Bert, you good? Maybe you should talk to someone, you know?” But the head cop is a softy who comes around to believing the kids after they set off an air raid siren to wake up the town in the middle of the night, which, let’s be real, that’s terrifying. This film is set in 1957. This is peak nuclear age and if you heard the air raid siren, even with all the car horn honking and emergency services alarms they also triggered, you would not be going outside to see what the commotion is right? You’d be like “oh this is Armageddon, I’m gonna check on MY DOG, JANE.”

The kids lead the way in warning the town about the dangers of The Blob and Jane even though they aren’t 100% sure, they just trust that Steve is right. It’s quite a sweet story about how you can have faith in and prepare for the improbable without tangible evidence right now all because a trusted voice is setting off the warning. And ultimately, the real danger is on par with nuclear annihilation and Jane throwing a helpless dog at The Blob because the film’s last line and vague “The End?” are about how climate change will kill us all – a left turn I definitely did not see coming.

And I guess that’s really the lesson we have to take from this film: to trust one another to watch out for our community, or at least to work on building that trust. For instance, we’re told shortly after Jane drop kicks the puppy into the alien mass consuming everything in sight, and just after we hear the puppy’s HOWLS from inside the store when Steve and Jane save themselves, that the puppy makes his way out of the store WITHOUT ANY HELP and is seen running away from the scene of his second, and worst, abandonment in the film. And I guess we just have to trust that, even in the face of a monster so horrid who PROMISES A YOUNG CHILD A PUPPY SHE THEN CHUCKS TO ITS OFF SCREEN FAKE DEATH, good things can happen. So long as we oust Jane from society to the Arctic.

I hope even with this horror you can find a way to enjoy your holiday. Stay safe, be kind, and give out far more treats than tricks this evening. Happy Halloween from me, Ben, and The Blob (Biscuits)!