10 Real Life Happy Endings That Became Disturbing Movies

3. The Blob (1958)

Astonishingly, Irvin Yeaworth’s fifties b-movie classic The Blob was based on a true story… or at least, on an event that actually took place.

The movie sees Steve McQueen investigate a meteorite crash site only to find that a strange gelatinous creature has fallen to earth that consumes anything in its path, getting bigger and stronger the more it eats. In typical fifties b-movie fashion, they discover that the extraterrestrial eating machine can’t stand the cold, so they freeze it with fire extinguishers and drop it in the Arctic. THE END, dot dot dot question mark.

The story stems from a 1950 police report from two veteran Philadelphia cops, Joe Keenan and John Collins, who claimed to have seen a massive, glittering mass fall to earth. Tracking down the crash site, they described it as a pulsating, glowing purple jelly about six feet in diameter and around a foot high.

Calling for back-up only gave them two more witnesses to the unearthly phenomenon. One of them tried grabbing a handful, but it instantly fell apart and dissolved in his hand - and after half an hour, the entire mass followed suit. From the report, all four policemen believed that ‘the blob’ had been alive.

Their encounter was immortalised in print by the Philadelphia Inquirer in the September 27th 1950 issue: an article that, seven years later and racking his brain for ideas for a new monster movie, screenwriter Irving Millgate remembered and used as inspiration. If only the fictional Blob had evaporated as easily...