The Blob (1958)

This post is part of my ongoing project to watch my science fiction blindspots. You can find my list of upcoming movies for this project here.

I’m trying to nail down why The Day the Earth Stood Still worked for me, while The Blob didn’t. Both are brief, deliberate 1950s science fiction movies about an alien invasion of some kind, each from the point of view of someone witnessing first contact firsthand. They both even feature a precocious child of some sort.

I think my issues with The Blob come down to the characters’ relationships, with each other and with the titular monster. Klaatu may be a jerk, but he’s interesting: a jerk who’s curious about the planet he’s found himself on, kind to children despite his condescension to adults, willing to talk and to listen to others even when his life is in danger. The humans in The Day the Earth Stood Still are all distinct, too, and each one has a distinct relationship with the others and with Klaatu. The Blob has no such complexities: each character is an archetype (doctor, daughter, teenager, fireman) with no apparent life outside the edges of the screen and no internal life, either.

Perhaps it isn’t fair to compare these two; they are different movies with different goals, after all. The Day the Earth Stood Still is good with relationships because that’s the issue the movie is most concerned with, on a planetary level. The Blob’s main focus is less on the human beings populating it and more on the fear of an amorphous unknown devouring the quiet orderliness of their white-picket-fenced community. Still, the strokes aren’t nearly as masterful in the latter. The movie all but spells out its thesis with an extended confrontation between a policeman and the teens he’s just caught driving backwards down the street—the same fear represented by the alien, that of Usurping Our Way of Life, all while forgetting the alien’s presence for nearly ten full minutes. B-movies don’t need to be good, necessarily, but I have a difficult time accepting their premises when they fail to be interesting.