It was a commercial disappointment in 1988, but The Blob is now a cult classic – and contains one of the most spectacular effects-driven death scenes ever. The 1980s was a golden era of practical effects in horror. From the unforgettably grotesque work of a young Rob Bottin in 1982’s The Thing to Screaming Mad ... The Blob | This cult horror contains one of the best death sequences of the 1980s
It was a commercial disappointment in 1988, but The Blob is now a cult classic – and contains one of the most spectacular effects-driven death scenes ever.
The 1980s was a golden era of practical effects in horror. From the unforgettably grotesque work of a young Rob Bottin in 1982’s The Thing to Screaming Mad George’s gloopy work in Brian Yuzna’s Society in 1989, it was a period of dark imagination and technical ingenuity.
Although it’s more widely regarded as a cult classic now, The Blob was criminally overlooked when it came out in 1988. Directed by Chuck Russell (who co-wrote the script with Frank Darabont), it’s a tour-de-force of in-camera effects, employing an array of miniatures, stop-motion, prosthetics, puppetry, and what looks like gallons of goo to bring its titular threat to life.
The Blob also contains what is, for this writer, the most spectacular death sequence in 1980s horror cinema.
A remake of the 1958 film (starring Steve McQueen), the 1988 version’s premise is broadly identical to the original. A deadly organism lands on the outskirts of a quiet American town. Gelatinous and seemingly alive, the creature dissolves and consumes whatever it touches – and steadily grows the more it consumes. Various small town archetypes are cornered and swallowed up on the blob’s deadly rampage, while the heroes – here, Kevin Dillon’s tearaway Brian and Shawnee Smith’s cheerleader, Meg – try to figure out how to stop it.
Chuck Russell keeps the film constantly moving over 95 brisk minutes, his camera careening from one gob-smacking set-piece to the next. Meg’s jock boyfriend (Donovan Leitch) is transformed into what amounts to a screaming puddle. A handyman in a diner is pulled face first down a drain. An entire cinema is engulfed in a pink morass, its audience left running down the aisles, shrieking.
The Blob delivers these unforgettable spectacles and more besides – most notably, the phone booth.
Seconds after seeing the handyman’s kicking feet sticking out of the diner’s sink, waitress Fran Hewitt (the great Candy Clark) flees the diner and seeks refuge in a phone booth. Hands shaking, Fran fumbles in her pockets for the phone number of the local sheriff, Herb (Jeffrey DeMunn). She’s too busy panicking and dialling to notice that the glob of sentient ooze is slowly covering her fragile hiding place.
By the time Fran’s spotted the danger, it’s too late: the booth is completely surrounded by the creature. And, in but one of an endless stream of dark gags, the sheriff that Fran was trying to call up appears outside the booth – his lifeless face pressed up against the glass like an overripe tomato.
Fran lets out a desperate wail as the blob works its way inside the booth, its form able to squish through even the narrowest gaps with ease. We as an audience know that this latest victim is done for, and ordinarily, we might expect the filmmakers to cut to an exterior shot of the booth collapsing under the creature’s weight, or maybe a final, tight reaction shot from Candy Clark, eyes bulging in horror.
Instead, Russell and cinematographer Mark Irwin do something much weirder. They cut to an overhead shot of Fran, just as the booth’s structure fails under the blob’s sheer weight. We see its pink form gush into view, the force of it blasting Fran up towards the lens, headfirst. Before we’ve had a chance to register what’s happened, our view is completely filled with a churning miasma of goo, limbs and what appear to be disembodied teeth.
The entire sequence lasts approximately one minute; Fran’s absorption by the blob is over in about a second or two. But the whole thing is a miniature masterpiece of build-up and pay-off, effects trickery and crisply-timed editing.
The production had a couple of secret weapons, both in this scene and elsewhere in the film. According to special effects artist Nick Benson, the blob’s translucent, slippery form was created using what he and his team called ‘quilts’ – huge sheets of silk with hundreds of tiny pockets sewn into them. These pockets then had a substance called Methocel – a gelatinous, plant-based compound – injected inside each of them. It was a laborious process, both because of the number of pockets that had to be filled and the substance’s tendency to seep back out again within a few minutes.
“We hired a shit-ton of what we called Blob Wranglers,” Benson explained in an interview with Terror At Synth High on YouTube. “They took all of those quilts and were… continually filling all those little postules with Methocel so we could continue to shoot. If I remember correctly we had hundreds of those quilts.”
It’s these quilts we can see slowly working their way down the outside of the booth; the Sheriff Geller face slipping and sliding around in among them is, of course, a mechanical puppet with a distorted face made out of latex.
The effect of the blob engulfing the booth’s interior was even more complicated. According to Benson, the booth set was surrounded by hydraulic rams capable of creating the crushing effect required. At the necessary moment, Candy Clark was ushered out and a life-sized mannequin was put in her place.
Here, some clever editing helps sell the switch between actor and dummy double. Before the big effect occurs, the viewpoint switches to an overhead shot of Clark (see the lead image at the top of this piece).
We only see it for a split-second, but it’s striking enough that, when the perspective cuts back to the same angle a few moments later, we don’t notice the switch take place – the wig on the mannequin only becomes obvious when viewing the footage back multiple times.
“It turned out really cool. It’s one of the coolest kills, I think,” Benson said of this startling moment in 80s horror cinema. “I have to say that’s my most favourite.”
The film as a whole has since become a favourite among connoisseurs of 80s horror, and even influenced a new generation of filmmakers here and there.
British director Corin Hardy recently listed The Blob as one of the films he had in the back of his mind when making his recent horror, Whistle – which is itself filled with imaginative, grisly deaths. “It’s brilliant,” Hardy told us, for the latest edition of Film Stories magazine. “Every shot in The Blob, there’s animation, stop motion, puppetry, prosthetics – it feels kind of like an R-rated Spielberg movie. It’s got that small town neighbourhood, with a monster that’s kind of ridiculous in that it’s a blob, but it does terrible things on touching you.”
Read more: The Thing | Its most subtle effects sequence is also its most effective
And while The Blob didn’t get the recognition it deserved in 1988, its makers nevertheless went on to enjoy long and successful careers. Co-writer Frank Darabont made The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Mist and developed The Walking Dead. Chuck Russell returned six years after The Blob with The Mask – a film that turned Jim Carrey into a morphing special effect not unlike that earlier, oozing monster. The madcap comedy was a global hit.
As for The Blob, there have been attempts to bring it back to the screen in the decades since. Con Air director talked about heading up his own remake in the early 2010s with Samuel L Jackson in a lead role. It never happened. Instead, director David Bruckner – who made the 2022 remake of Hellraiser – is behind another version announced in 2024.
Special effects have moved on a great deal since 1988, but we’d wager that a modern remake would struggle to match the unhinged brilliance of Russell’s incarnation – not least that captivating phone booth sequence.
