The Blob vs Body Snatchers – Jelly or pods?

They Live in Fear!

Horror is rooted in the fear of the unknown. With the transition of the United States along the road of a technological society through the 20th century, the locus of the unknown shifted increasingly moving from gothic themes, from demons, legendary monsters of superstition and curses to scientific experiments gone mad. technological monsters and creatures from beyond the solar system.

Horror had always resided in the fear of the unknown. As the world became known, its forests mapped, its cities lit by electric light, its deserts and jungles photographed and each corner of the globe surveyed by satellites from space, the unknown had to come from the mysteries of scientific laboratories, radiation and of course outer space. Science replaced myth as the wellspring of terror and is doing so its discoveries, methods and processes became terrifying.

Modern man increasingly knew there were no demons lurking beneath the stairs, but he couldn't make sense of what all the eggheads with their numerous degrees were on about. He didn't understand the rapid pace of change accelerating with each new technological innovation. He didn't trust any of it and didn't understand the science behind it and that made science itself the object of his horror.

Frankenstein had already prefigured this change, emerging as Victorian Science Fiction that drew both on the Gothic elements of the 19th century, a preoccupation with mortality and death, fused into the suspicion of medical research as transgressing against fundamental dictates of those sacred elements of life that fall into the category of 'That Which Is Not To Be Touched.'

Increasingly though medicine became demistified. The very same silver screen and television set that delivered stories about mad doctors, also delivered stories about kindly ones. The scientific laboratories produced household goods and everyday medications. If the average man was not significantly more scientifically literate, he was more comfortable with the Science he did not know. The bounty of the laboratories and the sheltering hand of medicine had become wedged into the everyday routines of his life.

With the world explored and the laboratories lit and the demons driven out, one more dark place still remained as a refuge for terrors, a reservoir of mystery and suspicious, a fount of the unknown. The darkness of space. The new terrors might still be under your floorboards, but they would no longer be put there by a gypsy's curse or a mortal sin, but an alien visitation. The unknowable realms of space had become the great question mark of horror, the singular mystery of the beyond that would always go unanswered. Man might stomp in hiking boots across all the previously unseen lands of the earth, from forest to mountain and jungle to desert. He might even, if it suited him, climb into a submarine and dive to the bottomless depths of the deepest oceans and seas. But the universe was too great a creature for him to ever fully know. In it the sum of man's knowledge and the farthest borders of his piddling kingdom were nothing more than a teaspoon of the ocean of the universe. In that darkness of outer space there was fear, but also a curious kind of comfort, for in displacing our terrors onto mysterious realms, we thereby detach them from ourselves.

Movies would go on being made about curses and werewolves and vampires, but they would, pun intended, lack bite. They would always be curious antiques, relics of bygone superstitions when men dwelt in twilight villages by the side of wolf haunted forests and spirit haunted streams. The real terror would now come... from Outer Space.

The Blob

As you can see in the poster on the right, The Blob is described as "indescribable", again pun intended, and indestructible. Nothing can stop it. In a world where a hail of bullets can seem to stop anything and even werewolves must bow their hairy muzzles to the silver bullet, the only things that cannot be stopped must come from the realm outside of human knowledge and understanding. From Outer Space.

Analogies have been made suggesting that The Blob is an analogy for cancer. Certainly when it was made, cancer was indescribable, an object of fear and terror, indestructible, nothing could stop it. In many ways it still is. Take cancer outside the body, make it macroscopic instead of microscopic, and it becomes the Blob. An amorphous devouring blob that consumes human beings. That unstoppably devours all flesh in its path.

The Blob supersedes the terror of cancer by being contagious and possessing will. Unlike ordinary tumors, it functions rapidly consuming its host within mere hours, and it will then deliberately seek out new bodies to devour and consume. Where cancer is an impersonal predator, The Blob is a personal one. That is both more terrifying and yet more comforting, in the way that horror movies by putting a face on mortality, make it accessible and something that we can deal with.

The premise of a movie like the Blob can itself be traced back to famous Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell's story "Who Goes There." Like the blob, the creature that attacks the arctic expedition in "Who Goes There" can devour and consume flesh, but it can also take their form.

The second half of the terror of the unknown is not merely fear of dying, but fear of being replaced or taken over by it. The fear that the monsters of the unknown, will transform you into a madman. (As I've pointed out in my review of Monsters and Madmen, available here.) John Campbell's novella did both. The Blob splits the difference giving us only the devouring monster. It will then take "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" to fulfill the other half of... The Terror From Outer Space.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Possibly the most terrifying thing you can imagine is to open the door and see yourself looking back at you with a stranger's face. The more dehumanizing our industrial culture becomes, the more anonymous and corporate the social entity in which we reside grows, the greater is the terror of a loss of identity. The loss of our identity.

The real aliens don't come from outer space. They are already here, in the sense of alienation, that is one of the greatest terrors of modern man. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" plays on that fear by portraying alien pods that duplicate the form of humans and then kill them.

The alien pods recreate a society where conformity is all there is, where humanity and human identity is stripped from us, leaving only a cold exterior routine. The lost identity is the true horror. The terror that we have become someone else, someone alien to us. That we have given up everything in ourselves that made our identity worthwhile and that the Body Snatcher is what we see when we look into the mirror.

Terror From Outer Space

Whether it's blobs or body snatchers, pods or jelly, the terrors from outer space often really come from inside us..Metaphors for disease and mental disturbance garbed in the cloak of the alien visitor not so that they would be more disturbing, but that they would disturb us less by making them difficult for us to recognize. The real terror is always inside us, it's what we feel, it's ourselves.