When we talk about teen horror we tend to focus on films made in the last thirty years; now-classic 90s movies like Halloween H20, Scream, and The Faculty all helped establish the modern teen horror film, while more recently it's been influenced by "creepypasta," urban legends for the internet age. But teen horror goes back quite a long way, becoming an important genre alongside the rise of youth culture in the 1950s. While the 1958 drive-in classic The Blob is by no means the first teen horror movie (that would be Gene Fowler's I Was a Teenage Werewolf from 1957) and is often overlooked as a teen horror at all, it nonetheless is one of the greats of the early genre, a thoroughly weird, fun little film with pretty neat special effects and an interesting, almost modern sensibility that sets it apart from similar films of the era.
The plot is pretty simple. A meteor crashlands into the wilderness outside a small town in Pennsylvania. An old man investigates, only for a gelatinous creature to emerge from the meteor and cover his arm. A pair of teenagers (your stereotypical clean-cut guy and his girlfriend) come across him and take him to the doctor, where it eats the old man, the doctor and his assistant. Meanwhile, our teenage heroes recruit the local delinquents into helping track down the meteor, and eventually trying to warn the townspeople of the danger.
On its surface, The Blob is hard to take seriously. None of the "teenage" characters have ever been under 18 in their lives; the lead character is played by Steve McQueen (in his first starring role) who at the time was almost thirty. The film opens with an outright upbeat, even comedic theme song, signalling to audiences that what they are about to see is not a terrifying monster movie but good clean campy fun. The film even seems to call attention to its own status as camp with a major plot point being half the town attending a midnight horror movie matinee, watching real-world horror movies (among them the 1955 cult hit Dementia.) I haven't been able to find any evidence suggesting that this is not, in fact, the very first instance of characters in a horror movie watching real-life horror movies, a device used to delicious effect twenty years later in Halloween.
While The Blob stands today as an example of a classic '50s monster movie, a staple of drive-ins and matinee nights, actually watching it might be disappointing. The special effects don't always gel together (pun intended) and the acting is as wooden as the soundstages it's filmed on, which is made worse considering how much of the movie is just talk, talk, talk — not what you want to see when you came to watch a blob monster eat people. Nonetheless, it's a surprisingly good-looking movie for the era, filmed in DeLuxe color (all the better to show off the blob's disgusting transformation as it devours biological material, including people) and directed with a sensibility that honestly makes it seem almost like an 80s film. It's a lot of fun, with some great gags (the school principal realizing he's forgotten his building keys so he smashes a window instead got a good laugh out of me) and some genuinely terrifying moments, such as the mass panic of the moviegoers stampeding out of the theater as the blob eats the projectionist and begins to ooze out of the projection windows. While the special effects for that scene don't quite hold up, at least in the moment you can get swept up in the vibe.
That's really what gives movies like this longevity: no matter how bad the acting is, no matter how stupid the script is, no matter how unconvincing the special effects are, a movie that succeeds in what it wants to do, in this case create a deliberately campy teen monster movie that not only reflects modern youth culture but also the sci-fi obsession of the era, will never truly be forgotten. The Blob is B-movie royalty, a joyously goofy film that deserves its permanent place in the pantheon of drive-in classics.
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