Alien Nation

The loss of magnitude has not, however, translated into a loss of stature: During the ninth annual BlobFest, a steady stream of devoted fans climb the stairs to the third floor of the Colonial Theater to glimpse the amorphous alien, inert as a tiny placid cranberry sauce lake, in the very building where the famous sequence of the blob providing a late-night audience unexpectedly corporeal scares was shot. Harry Houdini and Mary Pickford both performed at the Colonial in its vaudeville heyday, but no appearance is as celebrated as this bucket-dweller’s.

“When I first saw The Blob, I liked that it wasn’t Frankenstein or one of those movies where the monster is some guy in a rubber suit,” says Wes Shank, the self-described “caretaker” of the blob, shooting a quick apologetic look over at Ricou Browning signing autographs a few yards away. Browning, a burly man who donned the scales and gills for the 1954 classic Creature from the Black Lagoon (screened in 3D at BlobFest), appears for a moment prepared to mount a defense of rubber-suited villains. He opts for silent deference instead. This is, after all, the coagulated glop’s day; let it have some birthday glory.

Shank purchased the blob and two of the miniature sets used to make it look gargantuan on screen from the film’s director, Irwin “Shorty” Yeaworth Jr., in 1965, and clearly revels in the modest celebrity of owning a piece of movie history. He regales fans ad infinitum with semi-trivial trivia–no, there was never enough blob to cover a diner–as his wife sold blob-themed knick- knacks. A picture of him and his ward hangs in the theater lobby. Shank signs it, “To the Colonial–one of the blob’s favorite dining spots!” There is something endearing about a guy who can’t seem to believe his own luck: “Honestly, when I bought the blob,” Shank marvels, “I thought I would be the only person in the world who cared!”

He isn’t. Thousands of fans clog the closed-off main drag of this quiet town 30 miles west of Philadelphia for BlobFest 2008. Pins on a map representing visitors predictably cluster around southeastern Pennsylvania, but locales as far away as Alaska, Texas, New Mexico, and California are pricked as well. Several screenings are sold out, with rambunctious audiences gleefully booing square cops, gasping at the monster, and cheering star Steve McQueen in his first starring role–as a heroic teenager, at age 28.

Nearly 600 wildly gesticulating fans participate in the “Running of the Blob,” a reenactment of the aforementioned Colonial Theater scene, as thousands more line the street. Dozens enter the Scream and Tinfoil Hat competitions, the latter judged on “originality, craftsmanship and .  .  . ability to protect the wearer from alien rays invisible.” A long snaking conga line forms behind Bryan Bickhart, winner of the Steve McQueen lookalike contest, for the Fire Extinguisher Parade–a celebration of the weapon that finally did the blob in–clapping and snapping all the while to the film’s theme song written by Burt Bacharach, “Beware of the Blob!”

It creeps and leaps and glides and slides. Bickhart-McQueen punctuate verses with blasts of a fire extinguisher. A woman dances with a dog in a tinfoil hat. Pictures are snapped in front of a fire engine used in the film. Vendors hawk everything from vintage blob books and T-shirts to “collectible” worn plastic Pillsbury Doughboys and lava lamps. Booklets of Blobkus–sample: “Remakes, sequels, sure / But at least the Blob never / Did Hollywood Squares”–are handed out.

“On a scale of one to 10, with one being throw-Jane-at-it-to-give-myself-time-to-escape, and 10 being save-the-town, I’d come in around a five,” Bickhart muses when asked how he might stack up against the real McQueen in a blob fight, adding that he has donned the fake mole for the contest mostly at the urging of “a cute girl” and isn’t very drama-oriented. “Maybe I can just chill out front and smoke cigarettes. That’s what McQueen would’ve done, right?”

The vast majority of the crowd is manifestly in Phoenixville for the nonstop camp. Others, however, seek to imbue the proceedings with a Larger Meaning, much as filmmakers once injected red dye into clear silicone to create a man-devouring alien. The BlobFest press pack, for example, includes an artist statement from Andee Miskiewicz, sculptor of the newly installed looming bronze blob plaque in the Colonial balcony, in which she bemoans blob-inspired art becoming “more about process than portraiture.”

While admitting that her own attempt to capture its essence has been “confounding in many ways,” Miskiewicz nonetheless regrets that so few recognize the blob for what “He”–its gender inexplicably not quite so confounding–truly is: “a movement, a shadow, a lovely transparency.” And if you’re wondering why she added a “rub me for luck” feature, it was so the plaque could double as “a mythic symbol people can share with their children, lovers, visitors, etc.”

The constant frisking of the blob, figurative or otherwise, for mythic import or cultural symbolism is how (I suppose) a gaggle of anti-global warming activists from Richmond came to arrive in Phoenixville dressed as bloodied elves brandishing rubber disembodied limbs and signs emblazoned with slogans such as “Blob Eating Coworkers” and “Rudolph Missing?”

“The Blob is fun and silly, but seen another way, also very timely,” Elaine Church, hoisting a “Save Santa” sign, explains, conspiratorially referring to the final scene of The Blob wherein we learn the military is airlifting the frozen monster to the North Pole, and McQueen remarks that humanity will be safe as long as the Arctic stays cold.

“What’s going to happen when the Arctic warms?” Church demands. “The answer is we don’t know. It could kill us all!” An ornery Santa finishes a television interview, saunters over and declares, “If you’re against fighting global warming, you’re against Christmas–and on the naughty list.”

Ironically, a dueling interpretation of the film suggests it is advocates of containment who historically belong on the naughty list. In his recent book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Jeff Sharlet confidently derides The Blob as the “Cold War’s most ridiculous metaphor for communism,” designed to “subliminally broadcast” a fundamentalist Christian message while simultaneously stoking the Red Scare by portraying an “amorphous fight that absorbed ideological nuance as it grew bigger, grosser, and more ravenous for the hearts, minds, and economies of two dueling empires.”

A profound interpretation! And also–profoundly wrong.

“It’s total hokum, up there with people listening to the Beatles backwards hearing Paul is dead or believing ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ is encouraging toddlers to smoke marijuana,” says Kris Yeaworth, son of the film’s director and a grip on The Blob set. He pauses, then adds with a laugh: “Now, my family certainly believed communism was a godless scourge. But that was a completely separate matter.”

Shorty Yeaworth, along with his wife Jean, did focus on making spiritual films–with Billy Graham, among others–both before and after The Blob. And many extras and set builders on the production were culled from the Phoenixville Presbyterian Church where the director led the choir. Nevertheless, when producer Jack Harris asked Yeaworth to make The Blob, the debate among board members at Valley Forge Films was not how best to hypnotize viewers for Christ, Kris Yeaworth recalls, but whether they should shoot a film bereft of a spiritual message.

Ultimately, the opportunity to be paid to learn how to shoot 35 millimeter features won the day. Creating a Trojan horse to sneak commie-hating theocracy into the soft, fertile brain soil of America’s children? It never entered into the discussion. Howard Hawks’s 1951 The Thing From Another World was more of a direct inspiration than the Bible, and the only subtext Irvine Millgate (the man who originated the basic idea) hoped to instill in the film was influenced by his work with the Boy Scouts: Teenagers could be upstanding, if misunderstood, citizens at a time when tales of juvenile delinquents dominated screens.

“Everything is raised to apotheosis,” Henry Miller wrote in Tropic of Cancer, and so it is probably only a matter of time before we are told The Blob is actually a trenchant analysis of for-profit health care (“Now, take it easy old timer,” the doctor coldly snarls at the first victim as the blob digests his arm) or a proto-feminist tract (“My name is Jane–just Jane,” McQueen’s love interest snips when he insists on calling her “Janey girl”).

“We all relate to The Blob in our own way,” blob scholar Dave Lentz writes in the BlobFest program, and you needn’t look further than the German version of The Blob poster in the Colonial lobby to see the truth in that: The slight, preppy McQueen of the film is replaced with a muscular übermensch, shirt torn asunder, ready to tap the primordial ferocity necessary to repel the Angriff Aus Dem Weltall (“Attack from the Universe”). The modern world being what it is, though, the one thing the blob will probably never be again is a hungry, senseless alien that just happened to crash on our planet.

Phoenixville has embraced The Blob as tightly as the monster globbed onto the vagrant’s hand in the opening of the original film. Blobs fashioned out of red cellophane or fabric hang off many downtown buildings. A café serves blood orange Blob Sorbet, while the Sly Fox restaurant advertises a BlobFeast. A wellness center scatters red foam and rubber exercise balls in its window and hangs a sign that reads “Blob Family.” A local art gallery showcases the tinfoil hats. The Chamber of Commerce rechristens itself Blob Buster HQ. During the self-guided tour through Phoenixville and nearby Yellow Springs, friendly locals point you in (presumably) the right direction.

By most accounts, not long ago Phoenixville (population 14,788) was something approaching a ghost town. Settled alongside the Schuylkill River in 1732, it once boasted thriving steel and iron mills, making nails, railroad rails, and Civil War cannons and later helping to feed the 20th-century boom. A mural of a foundry scene occupies a place of honor downtown, although the once-sprawling Phoenix Iron Works was shuttered in the mid-1980s. Like many industrial towns, Phoenixville endured some wilderness years at the end of the last century as it struggled to find a workable economic model.

While no one would credit BlobFest for the turnaround, the event is an outgrowth of the town’s reorientation toward seeking and exploiting attributes that would draw visitors.

“I’m sure every town has something unique, something that is theirs alone,” Karin Williams of the Phoenixville Chamber of Commerce says. “Our town happens to have a monster from outer space.” Kris Yeaworth, a talented film producer and musician in his own right, captures this sentiment in an upbeat, guitar-driven song, “One Night in ’57,” which debuts at BlobFest:

It is a bit disappointing, Yeaworth admits, that of all his father’s accomplishments, from his other feature films–the sci-fi thriller 4D Man, for instance, and the gritty Way Out–to the theme park he was building in Jordan at his death to foster understanding between Muslims and Jews, one six-week shoot in 1957 is what defines him to the world.

“My father said The Blob was going to follow him to his grave, and it has and beyond,” Yeaworth sighs. Of course, a $130,000 investment that nets a $10 million profit is a tough act to follow. And while few of us are remembered for exactly what we might prefer, most will not be remembered at all. That’s life: imperfect–but better than the alternative. John Stuart Mill said that it is “better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” and he wasn’t kidding.

Yeaworth, a quick-witted, garrulous fellow, understands this. “Does it bother me that I’m always introduced as the guy whose father directed The Blob?” he asks. “Not really. It’s gratifying to know something my family created gives people so much joy. And it’s also better than people saying, ‘Hey, this is Kris. His father was the Boston Strangler.'”

“I daresay it’s the only 1950s movie monster that still exists,” Wes Shank says. “What’s truly scary is that it is going to outlive both you and me.”

Shawn Macomber is currently at work on a book about global class warfare.