As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!
Bubblegum pink has never looked scarier than this.
The Blob (1958) is iconic, yet rather campy. The Blob (1988), on the other hand, removes all the camp and makes the entire experience pure horror.
- When comparing the two, the 1988 iteration of the Blob is almost inarguably the scariest. The 1958 Blob was already formidable and dangerous to begin with (if, again, somewhat campy), but its remake version? It's fast, capable of almost catching a fairly fleet-footed pair of teenagers, it has Combat Tentacles that allow it to reach out and grab you rather than needing to directly contact you, but these are just the icing on the cake. It Can Think. This Blob is an intelligent predator, capable of plans and ambushes. It even displays a genuine streak of sadism in some of its actions, and the implication is that it's not merely a predator, it's actively enjoying killing people.
- Not to mention that, unlike the original movie, there are plenty of onscreen deaths. Whereas many Blob-related deaths happened offscreen in the original, due to a combination of The Hays Code, limited effects, and Nothing Is Scarier, the remake shows in full detail what the Blob does to its victims once they are caught.
- One of the scientists states something that really puts in perspective the apocalyptic threat that the creature represents: if they don't stop it right then and there, in a week the country may be wiped off the map.
- The worst part is that Too Dumb to Live is largely averted, with all the characters making relatively reasonable choices, with only the occasional slip-up that's still relatively understandable to make under the duress of the situation. This means that the Blob itself has enough intelligence to adapt to its surroundings and counter the cast's various choices in trying to combat it.
- As stated above, the original didn't have a lot of onscreen deaths, this one does. The deaths in general are terrifying since the different setting allows for much more visible kills.
- The Can Man? We first see him try and hack his hand off with a hatchet — but the Blob just expands to envelop the wound, as if drawn by the scent of blood. When we see him later in the hospital, the corpse's head twists around as if still alive, with grotesque bulges visible under the skin. When a doctor dares to remove the blanket, the hermit's body has been just... corroded from the ribcage down. Nothing is left but a hollowed-out torso and head, lying in a puddle of gory froth.
- The second victim, Paul? The still-small Blob falls on him from above, and when his girlfriend finds him, he's just got one hand jutting from its mass, his screams for help muffled by the layer of goo. He then visibly dissolves, with jaw detaching and eyes melting into blood as his last scream becomes a death rattle that doesn't even sound remotely human. As the rest of him melts, his right upper arm gets torn off, the only part of him untouched.
- The novelization makes his death even worse. It's much more visceral and his death was made even slower than in the film, and Meg unlike the film is still awake so we can see her reacting to his death more shockingly.
- Paul supposedly being the main protagonist proves this blob creature isn't pulling any punches.
- The infamous car scene, where the Blob sneaks up on a girl, and dissolves her from the inside out, and waits for her Jerk Jock boyfriend, Scott, to try and Date Rape what he thinks is a sleeping girl. The the Blob's tendrils tighten around his hand, and "Vicky" turns around, and her face implodes, and Scott can only scream in horror as he is eventually consumed.
- In a Mythology Gag to Beware! The Blob, the next victim after that gets sucked headfirst down a drainpipe. Only this time, we get to see and hear the bones crunching and the blood spurting as the body is compacted into too small a space.
- Shortly after, the diner owner flees for a phone booth, where the Blob almost leisurely starts to envelop the flimsy container. She finally gets through to the police station, by which time she's trapped, only to be told that the Sheriff was last seen heading towards her diner. As if to deliberately taunt her, the Blob chooses that moment to slap the Sheriff's half-dissolved corpse against the window, giving her a good, long look at her inevitable fate before it crashes through the door and snatches her up.
- The projectionist's death and how his body is found. The Blob catches him from inside a vent and consumes him, but it's when his coworker finds him that things get really ugly. The coworker sees his yo-yo bouncing up and down, and sees the projectionist glued stuck on the ceiling, half-digested and screaming for help through a gargle of pained sounds.
- In a nice Mythology Gag to the original, the theater scene is every bit as terrifying, and then some. The interrupting guy getting snatched up like a grape and digested is every bit as horrifying as it sounds, with the projector in the Blob's mass dissolving the film, alerting everyone present. Then all hell breaks loose as it snatches up more patrons.
- Special mention goes to a collateral victim, trampled in the rush and stuck to the floor, half of her face dissolved away.
- It leads directly to a chase with Meg, her little brother Kevin, and her little brother's friend Eddie in the sewers
. A fast-paced flight as they desperately try to avoid the onrushing Blob, which is making these horrific squeals and gurgles as it comes. In the end, Eddie ends up being dragged into the water of the sewers by the Blob — then pops out of the water, half-digested and screaming in pain before being dragged back in. Mind you, he was a kid, most horror movies at least try their best to stray away from child-killing (or if it does, it's usually censored in a way), this movie however not only shows poor Eddie being taken by the blob but then showing the poor kid dying in graphic detail.- After the Blob pulls that stunt with Eddie, almost as if to mock Meg (i.e., "Look what I can do to you too!"), it sure is taking its sweet time chasing after her and her brother as they scramble to get away. Rather than extending one of its pseudo-pods to just grab her, it slowly rises up from the water and forms a giant maw underneath her. It's just toying with her.
- The reveal that the Blob isn't an alien, but a man-made byproduct of a Cold War bio-weapon. It's very horrific if you think about it, that man is capable of creating a giant, digestive amoeba that is uncontrollable.
- Dr. Meddows, who initially comes off as a sincerely sweet, kindly old man... but that's a lie, hiding a raving lunatic who is fascinated by the mutant monstrosity his research has spawned, even as his own men are disgusted by it and warn it might end up being the destruction of all life on earth rather than the ultimate Cold War-winning biological weapon. His death ironically looks rather tame by comparison, with the Blob just snatching him from a sewer hole and filling up his suit before pulling him in. Probably so it's more satisfying to watch than horrifying.
- "It got them. Bigelow and Wilson... They were trying to scream. Inside it. Trying to scream..."note
- The climatic rampage of the Blob through the main street, snatching up victims in its pseudopods and tentacles or just rolling over those trampled in the stampede.
- Special mention goes to the random soldier who tried to fight the Blob with a flamethrower, only for a tentacle to block the nozzle, causing an explosion that makes the guy burst into flames. Considering the fate of the people who were consumed by the Blob, he was one of the lucky ones since he died before the Blob could get to him.
- The Blob pulls one police officer through a barricaded window by bending him in half, complete with the loud crunch of his spinal cord.
- Near the climax of the film, one of the Blob's collateral victims is left discarded, limbs melting off but still alive, weakly pleading for help. The protagonist just grabs a satchel charge off him and keeps right on going.
- When Brian's snow-making truck flips over in the climax, there was supposed to be a scene where he could see all the half-digested bodies of the Blob's many victims (including Meddows) inside it through the window as it was creeping over. Due to the special effects not working and a lack of time, the scene was never included in the film, but there is a photo of Meddows' half-digested corpse.
- How the film ends deserves special mention: Reverend Meeker, disfigured by the Blob and having been mentally scarred, preaches to a tent full of people about the eventual Judgement Day, with what he describes bearing a too coincidental resemblance to the Blob's rampage. After his sermon, he heads off into a back room to recompose... only for one of his parishioners to walk in to ask him a question.Woman: When, Reverend?
Meeker: (looks up into his mirror) Ma'am?
Woman: The day of reckoning. How far off?
Meeker: Soon, madam. ...soon. (looks down; holds up a jar containing a part of the Blob) ...the Lord will give me a sign... - Really, the whole movie and the concept of an invincible monster like the Blob is terrifying once you realize that the only reason the town survived at all was because they just so happened to have a snow-making truck with canisters of liquid nitrogen, and even that doesn't really kill it. Now, try to imagine this happening to a town where there isn't any of that...
- Even the trailer is nightmare-inducing. Throughout the whole thing you hear a sound that can only be described as the painful last breath of one of the Blob's victims, all while the trailer doesn't even show the monster save for a small glimpse of its tentacles, but the reactions of the characters say it all… and Don LaFontaine's incredibly ominous narration certainly doesn't help:"If it had a mind, you could reason with it… if it had a face, you could look it in the eye… if it had a body, you could shoot it… if it had a heart, you could kill it."
- And all capped off with the movie's eerie tagline:"Terror has no shape."
- The film's other tagline, as seen on the poster, is rather creepy as well:"Scream now, while there's still room to breathe."
- And all capped off with the movie's eerie tagline:
