Whatever Happened to The Blob?

by Chris Vegvary

Do you guys remember the classic 1958 film The Blob, which starred Steve McQueen? Can’t say I do, because that was long before my time, but I do remember the 1988 remake which starred Kevin Dillon (Entourage, Twisted Metal) and Shawnee Smith (Saw,Repo! The Genetic Opera) against a slimy alien bacteria that crashes in the form of a meteorite in a small California town. While it seems like a blob of space jelly might not be a major issue, this particular mass of nastiness is not only sentient and moves by itself, but it absorbs whoever it attaches to by melting it with whatever acid it is composed of, and grows larger with each kill.

While the original 1958 film got its own sequel, Son of Blob, the 1988 version had no such luck, even though the ending was set up for the continuation of the story. I enjoyed the graphic nature of the 1988 film, seeing that the Blob is not just some formless jelly that covers people and then they’re gone, but going as far as showing a teenager (and later, a kid) being melted and absorbed by it while Shawnee Smith’s character tries to save him. It’s the only film that, to this day, scared me as a kid so much that I at one point believed I saw it moving around in my closet while I was trying to sleep.

Remember Rob Zombie’s Halloween, where he delved into the backstory of Michael Myers, trying to explain why he did the things he did? I felt like that was a fairly excellent movie (although there’s more than one version; I prefer the one I saw originally), and The Devil’s Rejects was almost a perfect movie (even though I felt its predecessor, House of 1000 Corpses, was lacking). A few years ago or so, Rob Zombie announced that he was going to be remaking The Blob, but that it wasn’t going to be a mass of jelly like it had been in previous films, and that it would be presented in a way we wouldn’t expect. In other words, we’d get to see a fresh take on The Blob made by the guy who made two of my favorite movies that came out recently.

Unfortunately, not much has been heard about this remake since then. While a sequel to the 1988 film would have been nice, that’s probably out of the cards now, and The Blob seems like the kind of movie you can remake over and over with different takes on the premise, like Dracula or Frankenstein. While it’s still not impossible that we’ll see a remake of The Blob sometime in the near future, I can’t help but feel curious about what Rob Zombie had in mind for one of the freakiest monsters ever to exist on film that would make it more terrifying than it was before. The world may never know.