31 Days of Halloween 2024 — The Blob (1958)
For those of you who have been keeping up with this crazy 31 essays in 31 days experiment, I appreciate it. These can be rough, mere sketches of an idea, but the approach of sitting down to write about a horror movie after having just watched it has been very freeing despite the block of hours that need to be set aside to make it work.
I am wondering about taking these, collecting them, and throwing in some additional material as a zine. If you have some thoughts on that I would love to hear them. It’s a substantial collection of writing and I wouldn’t mind doing more with it.
Anyway, yesterday’s post, if you missed it, was about a favorite movie of mine and the element of voyeurism in the camera work. Please feel free to share your thoughts on that as well. Most of my feedback has been through Discord; I would probably whoop a cheer at any comment I receive on one of these posts.
Today though, we’re all about The Blob (1958) and the increasing need to remake it again.
You can watch The Blob on Max.
23. The Blob (1958)
The world has never been more primed for a remake of The Blob (1958) than it is now, since the 1988 version, which is pretty underrated in my opinion. The Blob is a simple conceit, a foreign goopy substance wreaks havoc in a small town, dissolving and consuming everything in its way, growing larger and larger.
Variations of the tale have existed in different forms, to different ends. The original film featuring the world’s oldest teenager, Steve McQueen in his film debut as a leading man, strikes a cautious and warningy tone. It ends with the Blob being dumped in the arctic. As long as that region remains cold, it should keep the Blob at bay.
Well, about that…
The 1988 remake goes out on a far more outwardly cynical take, with the blob preserved by a mad reverend, ready to unleash what he sees as God’s wrath on the world, and probably pretty soon as he is a mad reverend.
Rewatching the 1958 original, I kept being struck by how little the story needs to be changed to work today and to draw out certain themes and associations that would make a modern spin on the film.
In a world of disinformation, government distrust, health crisis skepticism, and sovereign citizens taking up arms, all the elements are there to take The Blob and let it ooze back into the public consciousness. We already know that a town being locked down by a carnivorous amoeboid would rattle certain folks, the truck-nuts sort, and immediately do everything opposite of a lockdown protocol. They’d get downright hostile. It’d be seen as a power grab by the government.
It’s not like we haven’t seen it before.
We’re well past due for another Blob film. There are so many approaches to take and so many themes to play on.
You could have a film that looks at the Blob as a climate change metaphor — a consequence of mistreating the Earth. Ambient global temperatures have allowed this thing to survive. You could even make this a direct sequel to 1958’s original; the ice caps are melting. The Blob is set free. It’s not like global warming risks having things re-awaken, right?
Or, maybe the Blob is a result of a lab accident or an industrial accident. By then you’d just have Larry Cohen’s The Stuff (1985), but the film owes a lot to The Blob anyway. It’s all circular.
You can easily work a lockdown element into the film — that is certainly a trauma that can be mined from the collective world. The government is on the spot when this substance begins to spread in the small town and is brutally efficient in locking it down and fighting it off until a bunch of sovereign citizens stage an armed standoff and the Blob becomes a secondary concern.
Disinformation in a small town makes sense, maybe different folks are trying to help or trying certain things to combat this thing during the lockdown. Maybe someone sings the praises of colloidal silver — maybe there is an Alex Jones-type grifter. Maybe the mayor suggests that covering your skin with bleach is a way to protect yourself from it. It’s not the weirdest bleach suggestion we've heard from a politician.
Maybe it’s all a conspiracy, maybe the film sews doubt in the origins. The Blob is a bio-weapon. I mean, that’s scary, right? I wonder if the US has ever used citizens as test subjects. Surely not, right? I mean the potential is there but…
Shit.
Hell, you can even play with tech anxiety and global capitalism. This is a new grey goo — the Blob is a computer. Or maybe it is a tech that is meant to break down organic matter to help curb pollution and waste.
Let’s be honest. it’s kind of a crime we didn’t get a remake of this back in 2018, 30 years removed from the 1988 remake. We missed the boat, there. We are not too late to revisit The Blob in 2028. We owe it to society to use The Blob to process our societal garbage and trauma using goo.
Besides, who knows what other horror the next four years will bring that we can add to the mix? I heard there is an election around the corner.
