![]() ![]() While the original Blob creeps (“and leaps, and slides, and glides”-as the movie’s wildly catchy theme song goes) through miniature sets, demurely devouring its victims off-screen, the 1988 Blob is unabashed when it comes to eating on camera. In what is widely considered the golden age for practical effects, The Blob stands out as a standard-bearer for the Fangoria set. The box office issued a de facto mandate: each blockbuster must be gorier, gooier, and grosser than the one that came before it. Because of the runaway success of horror movies in the 1980s, movie studios found themselves in a cold war of their own. Of course, more than geopolitics would need to be updated for The Blob to hold its own in the modern era. The titular Blob is no longer sent from the stars as it was in Eisenhower’s time, but is instead the product of a failed experiment by the US government in its ceaseless arms race with the Soviet Union. While the original Blob stood in for Cold War anxieties about a changing world-particularly the growing divide between youth culture and the expectations of adulthood-the 1988 Blob, instead, is interested in Reagan-era distrust of governmental power. John Carpenter turned 1951’s The Thing from Another World into The Thing in 1982, and thirty years after The Blob first chased Steve McQueen through a small rural town in Pennsylvania in 1958, director Chuck Russell unleashed a new generation of the gelatinous horror on the fictional city of Arborville, California. Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film The Fly was reimagined by David Cronenberg in 1986. In an attempt to bridge the gap from the drive-ins to the multiplexes, many movie studios reached back in their catalogs to find old terrors that could be translated to modern anxieties and scare audiences all over again. It was the decade of the slasher flick, and moviegoers forked over fistfuls of cash to watch Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees find teenagers to perform impromptu anatomical experiments on. Although creature features like Attack of the Giant Leeches and The Killer Shrews were popular in the ’50s and ’60s, horror never had a bigger moment with American audiences than it did in the 1980s. ![]() The Blob menaces scream queen Candy Clark. ![]() Summer 2021 The Thing That Ate Abbeville (Kind Of) Things that go bump in the Louisiana night ![]()
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