Quick Hits: I Remember: Married to the Blob

I had no interest in science fiction in those days — as a filmmaker I just didn’t want to go into all that. It was a lot of special effects and a different kind of milieu than I was experienced in. But when Jack Harris gave us his idea we saw the kind of thing it was. It just had one fantasy, which was introduced in the beginning of the script, and from then on it was human beings and how normal, rational people react to this one fantasy: The Blob has landed and here’s what its characteristics are — how do you stop it?

The people on our team did not want to make a gory or a repulsive movie. We ended up making several fantasy-type films of which The Blob was the first — somehow the studios began to think we had a touch for that stuff. We made a picture called 4D Man for Universal Studios, which was about a scientist who found himself in the fourth dimension. And then we did a film called Dinosaurus!, which was shot in both Hollywood and the Virgin Islands.

The Blob was mostly shot out in Chester Springs, although we did some location shooting in Phoenixville, where the Blob came out of the theater, and some at the Downingtown Diner, which the Blob covers at the end of the film. The diner, by the way, is still there. It’s just been refurbished and doesn’t look the same anymore, and the fellow who owns it now has worked the Blob into the menu and so forth.

As we were working on the picture, films like The Fly came out. And The Thing had preceded us, which we thought was a literate and grown-up kind of science fiction. We were trying to work in that general direction. There were so many cheap films being made for a few thousand dollars — tying rags onto dogs and calling them strange animals from outer space.

We’d never done one of these before, and man alive, we didn’t have the money to waste. I story-boarded the show, because I really wanted to make sure that we were not shooting one scene we didn’t have to. And we edited in the camera, like Hitchcock used to be famous for. We had to, because we could hardly afford to buy the 35mrn stock.

I HAVEN’T SEEN THE BLOB IN 25 YEARS. As I remember, it didn’t look real — effects are so good today — but back then it was acceptable. We tried to make it look real by hints and misdirection — by working from darkness and just a little bit of moving here and there. We just couldn’t show the thing flat out, but we created several new devices and techniques to make it happen.

The Blob was made of silicon, which is glass that is molten at room temperature. Before people started using it for implants in various parts of people’s anatomies, it ate a movie theater. Anyway, we built some miniature models and miniature light sources, put the Blob down on the models, attached a camera to the end and tipped it. The Blob "moved" toward the camera. Tip it back, the Blob moved back.