Rob Zombie vs The Blob

The big news at the moment is that hard-rocker and exploitation filmmaker Rob Zombie has decided to make a move from his iconic serial-killer trailer trash flicks into the realms of scifi horror, having signed on to do a modern remake of The Blob. Variety reports that the film will go into production next spring, quoting Zombie as saying:

I usually follow a movie [in this case his Halloween 2] by putting out a record and going on tour, and I write the script during that tour. The tour will take me through Christmas.

He sees the film as offering a chance for him to “broaden his range”:

I’d been looking to break out of the horror genre, and this really is a science fiction movie about a thing from outer space… I intend to make it scary, and the great thing is, I have the freedom once again to take it in any crazy direction I want to. Even more than Halloween, where I had to deal with accepted iconic characters like Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. The Blob is more concept than specific storyline with characters, so I can go nuts with it.

He says that he’s abandoning the image of the Blob as “a big red blobby thing”:

That gigantic Jello-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.

Apparently Zombie will produce with Genre Company’s Richard Saperstein and Brian Witten, original Blob producer Jack H. Harris, and Judith Parker Harris of Worldwide Entertainment Corporation. Saperstein commented that funding is in place to make an R-rated film that will cost around $30 million.

It will be interesting to see what he comes up with as Zombie follows his strategy of not being overly reverential in his approach to genre icons.

I’ve often felt that the Blob is one of those monster icons that is more interesting in theory than he has been on film — though Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake certainly made a decent stab at doing him justice.

Originally developed for the screen by Irvine H. Millgate, a professor of humanities at Northwestern University, the first version of The Blob (US-1958; dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. [and Russell S. Doughten Jr. uncredited]) is very much a product of its time, with themes relating to teenage rebellion and the inability of authority figures to deal with it. It was Steve McQueen’s first film and though his character, as a rebel, seems extremely tame by modern standards (or even those set by James Dean in 1955 in Rebel Without a Cause), he did represent the “nice”, rather cuddly side of youthful alienation — sporting a decency blindly ignored by the adults in the small American town that becomes the alien invader’s hunting ground. It is of course McQueen and his teenage mates who save the day.

For those who don’t know the plot, it involves a strange “meteorite” that plunges to Earth spectacularly:

The meteorite comes apart when poked with a stick (an incident which has forever given me a deep suspicion of stick-poking generally),

disgorging a reddish jelly-like entity that surrounds and consumes living flesh:

This results in scenes of gooeyness that are fairly tame and implied in the original but which get much more graphic in Chuck Russell’s very decent 1988 remake:

These events are witnessed by McQueen and his girlfriend, but when they attempt to warn the townsfolk they are scorned and reviled and even accused of murder. After a while the Blob gets rather big, and after appearing (in a famous moment) through the screen of a movie theatre and feasting on the patrons, it traps our protagonists in a diner and is eventually dealt with through teenage (and military) heroics.

The best thing about it was the credit sequence, which features an oddly appropriate inappropriate theme song:

The Blob reappeared in a sequel called Beware the Blob! (US-1972; dir. Larry Hagman), which took a somewhat tongue-in-cheek and ironic approach and wasn’t very successful.

The 1980s remake — The Blob (US-1988; dir. Chuck Russell) — modernised the concept by giving the Blob a different origin that reflected that era’s paranoid attitude toward the Government as well as offering a better script and characters, decent dramaturgical control from the director, more gore and good 1980s SFX.

It will be fascinating to see what someone like Zombie makes of all this. What’s the bet that the teenage rebellion theme (which was still prominent in the 1988 version) becomes trailer trash antics instead?

• Source: Variety via DreadCentral and Avery
• Hoodreview of The Blob (1958)