When I was maybe seven or eight years old, I watched The Blob (the original) on television one night. For some reason, the movie scared the hell out of me.

When I went to bed that night, I was convinced that a mass of cannibalistic slime was going to come oozing out of the heat vent just above my bed. I ended up sleeping on the floor that night, and the next day, I moved the bed.

This Blob Fear went on for weeks! I was always hearing creaks in the floor and walls at night and just knew that the creepy jello was just waiting to get me.

I got over that fear when I watched Godzilla a few weeks later, thus began a fear of giant lizards!

We went to see It’s Alive when it was re-releases in 1977 and it scared me so much, I had to leave the theater. Since then I’ve caught up with It’s Alive several times (including seeing Larry Cohen introduce it at the Walter Reade Theater in NYC).

I loved James Whale’s The Invisible Man as a kid, and still think it’s great.

I recently re-watched Candyman, and while it too has its moments, I just couldn’t get past some of the 90s cheesiness in it.

The Blob seemed like such a believable monster - I knew that vampires and werewolves didn’t really exist but who could say what might come from outer space? And The Blob’s ability to go anywhere made it the one monster that you couldn’t get away from. The only other movie monster to really traumatize me was the Smog Monster - that scene with it flying over a school yard and all the children dropping dead and decomposing was too much to take!

I haven’t seen The Blob since sometime in the mid-’80s or so and I forget what my reaction was to it then. I loved the ‘88 remake but while that was a more accomplished movie it wasn’t able to nail the primal fear of the ‘58 version. There was something about the texture and the color of the blob in the original that - in my memory, at least - made it look like one pissed off red glob.

I also loved Kingdom of the Spiders as a kid. Like all the eco-horror movies I watched in the ’70s, it seemed like it was within the realm of possibility. And it had much stronger scares than anything else I had watched up to that time - the shots of victims with their faces completely webbed over were genuinely nightmarish. And the fact that the horror was always escalating and that every attempt to beat back the problem failed made it very unsettling to me. At the time it was the most downbeat movie I had ever seen (the spiders won!).

I haven’t seen Kingdom of the Spiders in too many years to say how I feel about it today but the main reason I haven’t rewatched it is that I don’t want to see it again and realize that it really wasn’t all that scary, Shatner was too hammy, and that the last shot of the entire town covered in webs looked phony.

I might be wrong, but I have this awful, awful memory of seeing someone getting their hair washed in a salon, and the Blob oozing out of the faucet and onto their face. I may have completely imagined it, but the very thought of it absolutely horrifies me.

That film touches on a very primal nerve : the fear of being attacked while we sleep.

This was also the first apocalyptic story I had ever experienced.

The disturbing drone of the sound design that kicked in every time someone fell asleep.

The visceral nature of the alien bodies, the moving white body hairs.

The image of Donald Sutherland splitting his own face with a garden hoe, the way it exploded like a red filled melon. Or worse, the image of the dog with the human face. Specifically, the way the dogs tongue licked its own face.

Watching the film again as an adult, I was amazed by how virtually every scene - in fact, nearly every shot - is infused with a palpable sense of paranoia. This film continues to maintain my respect.

Oh, and Monster Squad is an absolutely terrible movie. The only thing I like is the quick transformation scene of the Werewolf in the phone booth.
And really, that’s it. A poor man’s Goonies.

So I watched it recently, and I was overwhelmed by how nonsensical the entire movie was, in nearly every single scene. Were the 80’s really so naive that you could present someone with something like a Mogwai and explain it away as being some weird Chinese animal? “Oh, it’s Chinese? That makes sense then since I know they have dragons and stuff too.”

Even the regular human interactions stymied me. “Wait, did she just threaten to MURDER HIS DOG? In front of all those witnesses??” The straw that broke the camel’s back was in the bar scene where the gremlins menace Phoebe Cates, and one of them is dressed in a little trenchcoat and flashes her. So where did this gremlin find a MINI-TRENCHCOAT? That just led me to think about how that one bit probably took like two days to film, and required a costumer to design and sew a mini-trenchcoat for a gremlin puppet, all so for a total non sequitur about sexual predation.

I couldn’t help but wonder what had been going through my parents’ minds when I watched this over and over, so I called my mom the next day and asked if she remembered the movie. “Yes,” she said, “It was too scary for me.”

“But mom,” I said, “The movie doesn’t make any sense. Like, from beginning to end, not one decision or line or detail of it makes any sense at all.” She laughed and said, “You’re right, it really didn’t make any sense.” So I asked, “Then why did you let me watch it OVER and OVER like that? Didn’t you find that strange? Shouldn’t I have maybe watched something else?” And she said, “Well, it seemed harmless enough.”

I know it’s just a silly movie; mostly I’m just astonished that I never questioned any of this when I was younger, I just drank it in and imagined saving my town with just a slingshot.