The Blob

***The Blob*** is a 1958 American independent science fiction horror film directed by Irvin Yeaworth. It was theatrically released in the United States on September 12, 1958.

## Plot

In a small Pennsylvania town, teenager Steve Andrews and his girlfriend Jane Martin kiss at a lovers' lane when they see a meteorite crash beyond the next hill. Steve goes looking for it but Barney, an old man living nearby, finds it first. When he pokes the meteorite with a stick, it breaks open and a small jelly-like globule blob inside attaches itself to his hand. In pain and unable to scrape or shake it loose, Barney runs onto the road, where he is nearly struck by Steve's car. Steve and Jane take him to Doctor Hallen.

Doctor Hallen anesthetizes the man and sends Steve and Jane back to locate the impact site and gather information. Hallen decides he must amputate the man's arm since it is being phagocytosed. Before he can, the Blob completely absorbs Barney, then Hallen's nurse Kate, and finally the doctor himself, growing redder and larger with each victim. Steve and Jane return in time for Steve to witness the doctor trying to escape through the window with the Blob covering him. They go to the police station and return with Lieutenant Dave Barton and Sergeant Jim Bert, but they find no sign of the Blob or its victims. The skeptical Bert dismisses Steve's story as a prank. Steve and Jane are taken home by their parents, but they later sneak out.

The Blob absorbs a mechanic at a repair shop. During a midnight screening of *Daughter of Horror* at the Colonial Theater, Steve recruits Tony and his friends to warn people about the Blob. When Steve notices that his father's grocery store is unlocked, he and Jane go inside to investigate. The janitor is nowhere to be seen. The couple is quickly cornered by the Blob and they seek refuge in the walk-in freezer. The Blob oozes in under the door but quickly retreats. Steve and Jane gather their friends and set off the town's fire and air-raid alarms. The responding townspeople and police still refuse to believe them. The Blob enters the Colonial Theater and envelopes the projectionist, then oozes into the auditorium. Steve is finally vindicated when screaming people flee the theater in panic.

Steve, Jane and her kid brother Danny are trapped in a diner, along with the owner and a waitress, as the Blob—now enormous from the people it has consumed—engulfs the diner. Dave taps into the diner's telephone with his police radio and warns those in the diner to shelter in the cellar before the police bring down a live power line onto the Blob.

Dave and Bert plan to electrocute the Blob by felling an overhead high-voltage power line. It discharges a massive electrical current into the blob, which is unaffected, but the diner underneath it is set ablaze. When the diner owner uses a carbon dioxide extinguisher on the approaching fire inside, Steve notices that the Blob recoils. Steve remembers it also retreated from the freezer and realizes it cannot tolerate cold temperatures. Shouting in hopes of being picked up on the open phone line, Steve tells Dave about the Blob's vulnerability to cold. The firemen have a limited supply of CO2 fire extinguishers. Jane's father, high school principal Henry Martin, leads Steve's friends to break into the school to retrieve its extinguishers. When they return, a brigade of fire extinguisher-armed students, firemen and police drive the Blob away from the diner, freeing the five trapped there, and surround and freeze the creature.

Dave requests authorities send an Air Force heavy-lift cargo aircraft to transport the frozen Blob to the Arctic. Dave realizes that the cold will stop the Blob but not kill it, “as long as the Arctic stays cold”. Parachutes bearing the Blob on a pallet lower it onto an Arctic ice field with the superimposed words *The End* morphing into a question mark.

## Cast

**Steve McQueen** as Steve Andrews

**Aneta Corseaut** as Jane Martin

**Earl Rowe** as Lt. Dave Barton

**Olin Howland** as Barney the Old Man