10 Horror Movie Monsters Who Make You EAT Your Words

Few pictures exemplify the monster movies of the fifties better than The Blob. The image of the giant slab of carnivorous alien ooze sliming its way across small-town Pennsylvania is one of the zeitgeist visuals of the era, and yet it is so rooted in this time, the nuclear age vision of suburban life, the sanitised film experience under the Hays Code, that it all seems a bit corny. What, then, could we expect from a remake just three decades later?

Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont’s Blob arrived at the tail-end of the eighties, and offered a story whose structure and driving narrative force is pretty much the same as the original. The Blob lands in the US (this time, small-town California) and a group of teens lead the effort to get the word out, get the military involved, and stop it before it consumes everything. Only, this version is updated with a punchier, more explicit Cold War narrative, with the Blob turning out to have been created by the military as a biological weapon.

And that’s not all they changed: this Blob is not just a giant ball of blubber people disappear into. No, this is the era of body horror and David Cronenberg, and the film places its villain squarely in the centre of that. The monster ends up being really, needlessly vicious and nasty, with a series of grim and disturbing kills that make us wish it was the cosy, disarming romp we expected.