Freeze-Frame
“Formless red slime lands in Pennsylvania, and teens try to warn scoffing adults.”
That could describe efforts by Gen Z — newly energized by Kamala Harris’s presidential bid — to prevent their elders from ceding the Keystone State’s 19 electoral votes to the oozing pestilence that is the Donald Trump-JD Vance ticket.
But it’s actually Turner Classic Movies’ description of a fictitious plague threatening to depopulate the state one town at a time.
The Blob nominally starred Steve McQueen in his first major role but was truly headlined by an ever-growing mass of extraterrestrial goo. It was shot largely in four Pennsylvania towns during the summer of 1957 and released the following year. The critics hated it, but their antipathy was powerless to stop its spread through the nation’s bijous and drive-ins. Filmed for $110,000, it grossed a whopping $4 million. No one was more surprised — and presumably dismayed — by the movie’s success than its novice star, who opted for a $3,000 paycheck rather than 10% of a box office take that he had to assume would be paltry.
I’d seen The Blob on television sometime in the late 1960s, but I remembered little about it other than that the special effects looked pretty unconvincing even to my adolescent eyes. I’ve since read that the titular mass was fashioned from silicone colored with red vegetable dye and was filmed on tilted miniature sets to make the wobbly stuff move around. The movie was originally to be called The Glob, but the production team learned that had been the title of a kids book by Pogo artist Walt Kelly and worried that the cartoonist might sue. Given the blob’s composition, I’m thinking that an opportunity was squandered to rebrand the flick during the 1960s — heyday of Playboy magazine and iconic artificially enhanced San Francisco stripper Carol Doda — as The Breast Implant That Ate Small-Town America.
At any rate, the reason I’m writing about The Blob is that a few weeks ago, in the wake of President Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump that made him both victim and triumphantly fist-pumping survivor, I spotted an article in the New York Times that lifted my dolorous spirits, at least briefly. The piece had been occasioned by the 25th anniversary of Blobfest — a three-day event in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, that was started by a group of local volunteers as a way to have goofy fun while celebrating a bit of local history. The event pays tribute to the camp classic and its low-budget peers with a parade, costume contest, dance and street fair — culminating with Saturday and Sunday re-creations of the scene in the film when terrified moviegoers spill out of Phoenixville’s Colonial Theater, desperate to escape a towering mound of goo that’s been gobbling up audience members like so many human-sized bags of popcorn and boxes of Junior Mints.
The visuals illustrating the article included a photo of the fire extinguisher parade (I’ll explain later), a snap of the costume contest winner (22-year-old Kate Graves, dressed as Stephen King’s Carrie), a pic of scores of fans in 1950s clothing running screaming from the still-in-business movie theater, photos of all manner of blob-shaped novelties, and a great shot of someone channeling Gill-Man from The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
It was so much fun to read about Blobfest — where, the article noted, “thousands of fans” celebrated the film and its schlocky ilk with “ooze and ahhs” — that I decided I needed to rewatch the reason for the summer-season festival.
What I quickly determined was that the New York Times had not been wrong in its 1958 criticism that the movie “talks itself to death” even as the mostly unseen blob “nibbles away at everything in sight.” A preponderance of screen time is spent with McQueen — allegedly a teenager but looking every one of his real-life 27 years — and his girlfriend trying to convince the town cops that the meteorite that landed outside of town has let loose a rapidly metastasizing threat to all humankind. (The girlfriend, by the way, is played by 24-year-old Aneta Corsaut, who’d later portray Sheriff Andy Taylor’s girlfriend Helen Crump on The Andy Griffith Show — and who, per the internet, had an offscreen years-long affair with the married actor that had been an open secret around the set.)
The Times’ reviewer, Howard Thompson, was also spot-on in describing the acting as “wooden,” with the mostly no-name cast spouting “dialogue that flattens as fast as the blob rounds.” But it’s precisely those aspects of the movie, combined with special effects that Thompson called “pretty phony,” that justify The Blob’s so-bad-it’s-good reputation and makes it festival-worthy.
There’s something stupidly inventive about McQueen’s discovery that the blob doesn’t like cold, and thus can be frozen in place by a critical mass of carbon dioxide from fire extinguishers retrieved from the local high school and other municipal buildings. It’s kind of satisfying that the blob can’t be killed. Rather, it must literally be kept on ice. The movie ends with the big ball of glop — conveniently still compact enough to somehow fit on an airborne pallet — about to be parachuted down onto the frozen tundra by a military transport plane. In a warning lent frightening modern-day resonance by the reality of global warming, we are informed that the blob will stay dormant for only “as long as the Arctic stays cold.”
(Rudy Nelson, one of the film’s scriptwriters, debunked the idea that The Blob was an allegory about the creeping horrors of communism and the resulting Cold War, arguing essentially that sometimes a blob is just a blob.)
Nostalgia is of course a powerful thing, even for an era that may precede one’s own lifespan. Although at least some of those faux-frenzied moviegoers fleeing the Colonial Theater in the New York Times photo were, according to the article, geriatric residents of the Phoenixville area who’d been extras in the Eisenhower-era film, many more participants got a kick from dressing like their grandparents and saluting a hackneyed and crude antecedent to today’s CGI masterworks of the sci fi and horror genres. The cops use rotary phones! Watermelons sell for 4 cents at the local supermarket! The federal government takes swift and decisive action on something of global importance!
But for me, again, the draw of the Blobfest article and the movie itself was specific to this moment in history. Not to put too fine a point on it, but here we had a political slime that was spreading out of control. Candidate Trump, who’d already been on an extended roll, grew to monstrous size after the presidential debate. Democracy seemed doomed to absorption by totalitarian forces.
I very much needed sanctuary from all that, however ridiculous and fleeting it might be. And I got it.
In The Blob, I found a balm — an oasis duplicated when I recently binge-watched the half-dozen Big Bang Theory episodes in which the now-late Bob Newhart appeared as grumpy former kids show host Professor Proton. As Newhart hilariously stuttered his putdowns of uber-fan Sheldon Cooper and despaired of his late-life obscurity vis-à-vis Bill Nye the Science Guy, my mind was transported, in half-hour increments, to a different universe from dispiriting Campaign 2024.
But then what happened next? President Biden at last listened to Father Time and conceded to dire polls showing he was going to lose to Trump. He ceded the top of the Democratic ticket to Kamala Harris. Donors responded with a massive cash influx and newly energized Democrats signed up to volunteer for her campaign by the thousands. Prospective voters who’d contemplated sitting this one out told pollsters they are now emphatically in, and swing states that had been trending Red started flirting Blue. The election between Team Decency and the duo of the Kamala Harris’s Blackness Skeptic and the Childless Cat Lady-Hater became a real contest.
It no longer appears that the Democrats will win only if and when hell and the Arctic (permanently) freeze over.
The Blob ends with a big question mark superimposed over the alien mass as it hovers above the tundra. The presidential election’s outcome, too, remains very much a question mark, my current optimism aside. Still — scoffing MAGA forces be damned — there’s legitimate hope that the red slime may have has met its match.
If that happens, I’m thinking I’d like to really celebrate next summer at Blobfest.
