There are few movies I love more than 1958’s “The Blob,” a film about extraterrestrial Jell-O terrorizing 30-year-olds pretending to be teenagers. I don’t love it in a cheeky “so-bad-it’s-good” manner; I love it the same way I love the original “King Kong” or Universal’s “Frankenstein.” Resemblance to a tasty after-dinner treat aside, The Blob itself is a horrifying concept: an amorphous mass existing purely to feed on life. There is no emotion, no reason, and no empathy. Only hunger and an innate desire to consume. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has stated that The Blob is his favorite Hollywood alien from a scientific perspective. From a horror geek perspective, I always just thought The Blob was really neat. All-devouring slime is an idea that’s both fun and genuinely creepy.
Alas, there are those who are against The Blob. In 1962, future “Gremlins” director Joe Dante listed “The Blob” as one of the worst horror movies ever made in an article for Famous Monsters of Filmland. When director/rocker Rob Zombie was set to direct a new version of “The Blob around 2009, he had this to say: “That gigantic, Jell-O-looking thing might have been scary to audiences in the 1950s, but people would laugh now. I have a totally different take, one that’s pretty dark.” Concept art for that version recently resurfaced, revealing that Rob Zombie had intended to turn “The Blob” into a sort of zombie movie. While I very much admire Zombie and Dante as artists, it’s clear that they don’t see “The Blob” as I do. But they’re hardly alone in their denigration of “The Blob.” Here is an excerpt from Howard Thompson’s review of “The Blob” published in The New York Times back in 1958:
“Unfortunately, his picture talks itself to death, even with the blob nibbling away at everybody in sight. And most of his trick effects, under the direction of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., look pretty phony. On the credit side, the camera very snugly frames the small-town background—a store, a church spire, several homes, and a theatre. The color is quite good (the blob rolls around in at least a dozen horrible-looking flavors, including raspberry). The acting is pretty terrible itself, there is not a single recognizable face in the cast, headed by young Steven McQueen and Aneta Corsaut.”
Stop thinking about Jell-O for one second. In fact, excise the image of dessert gelatin from your mind entirely. Now think about what The Blob is and what it will do to you if you’re unfortunate enough to cross paths with it. As mentioned previously, this is a thing that exists only to consume life. That isn’t particularly funny. Even the fact that it’s jelly comes from an actual phenomenon. Star jelly is a gelatinous substance found on grass and sometimes on tree branches. No one is quite sure what it is, but theories range from frog/toad remains to masses of amoeba. Folklore says that star jelly that comes from meteor showers. Reportedly, “The Blob” was inspired by a discovery of star jelly in Pennsylvania in 1950. Police officers allegedly discovered an object that glowed purple and was sticky to the touch.
As a monster, The Blob exists on the border of fantastic and plausible. A substance from outer space that envelopes everything around it is something we haven’t seen in real life… but it can’t be dismissed entirely. There are things beyond our understanding out there in the cosmos. Why couldn’t such a thing as The Blob exist? And if you’ve seen the 1988 remake of “The Blob,” you’ve seen how gruesome the concept can be.
Even without considering its monster, “The Blob” (1958) is just a wonderful movie with comic book colors and an affable group of survivors. If it’s “cheesy,” it’s in an appealing manner that shows us the 1950s as we would like to remember them. Steve McQueen is as cool as always, and the effects work really well if you embrace the out-of-this-world aesthetic. “The Blob” (1988) isn’t as charming, but it has gore and goo to spare. “Beware, The Blob”… is a movie.
No one can ever turn me against The Blob, the movie, or the monster. I love bad sci-fi, but “The Blob” ain’t that. Everyone laughs at Jell-O until that Jell-O swallows you whole. If they ever remake “The Blob” again (and they will), they need to embrace The Blob for what it is. Play the threat of it straight, and people will be scared. As the song says, we should all “Beware of The Blob.”
- The Phibes Philes: Wishmaster – Movie Review - June 12, 2026
- The Phibes Philes: The Eraser – Batman’s Forgotten Foe - May 27, 2026
- The Phibes Philes: The Ghost Galleon (1974) Film Review - May 17, 2026
