The Incredible Shrinking Man

I can't remember.

I think he was bitten by a spider and that's how he died in the end, which also puts me in mind of another one from childhood, the film The Incredible Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson.

Oh, yeah.

That amazing scene where the little tiny guy fights a house spider and he's armed with a needle.

I've been dying to.

The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957.

Oh, good one.

The tagline, "A fascinating adventure into the unknown." The plot, a dangerous combination of radiation and insecticide causes the unfortunate Scott Carey to shrink slowly but surely until he is only a few inches tall.

Great stuff.

From 1957, The Incredible Shrinking Man is next.

Science fiction film directed by Jack Arnold based on Richard Matheson's 1956 novel, The Shrinking Man.

The film stars Grant Williams.

You definitely won't confuse the monster with the iconic makeup that Jack Pierce did for Lon Chaney in The Wolf Man, not at all.

The makeup for Monster on the Campus was done, however, by Bud Westmore of the famous Westmore family that included five generations of makeup artists.

So it makes me wonder, I mean, for a guy that's worked on everything from Man of a Thousand Faces, Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequels, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and The Munsters TV show, I'm gonna have to say that maybe the budget hampered his efforts in Monster on the Campus.

The effects just were not... [laughs] They just weren't.

We have seen his work before.

We discussed him when we saw, was it The Incredible Shrinking Man? Yep, The Incredible Shrinking Man.

In our Mad Science series and a story by Ray Bradbury, who obviously is a legend of sci-fi and a screenplay by Harry Essex.

But from what I hear, this is pure Bradbury.

He kind of replaced all the dialogue, but story, pure Bradbury, I think is my understanding of it.

Yeah.

And Ray Bradbury had had a real impact on Jack Arnold as well, because so Jack Arnold, the director who we mentioned, had directed The Incredible Shrinking Man.

He's got this legacy of doing lots of science fiction films, and those include like This Island Earth, like The Incredible Shrinking Man, like we said.

Between this flick and a beyond creepy poem my mom used to read to me, and the goblin's gonna get you if you don't watch out, I was pretty much messed up for life.

1957, another favorite, The Incredible Shrinking Man, one of the great classic movies of my youth, the perfect Saturday afternoon movie.

Scott Carey drives through a weird fog while boating, and the next thing you know, he's sleeping in a dollhouse.

a smart film that starts out with the obvious horror of seeing the family cat and garage spider become mortal threats, but ends with a metaphysical riddle about the nature of the universe and what it means to be a man.

That came out when I was 11, so that was a big impact, and I had al- been a big fan of sci-fi growing up.

I did a little Incredible Shrinking Man, you know, thing-

Yes

... where I shrink down and I become a Luke Skywalker counter action figure [laughs] running around.

It's body horror through the lens of paranoia, reflecting Cold War anxieties about conformity and infiltration.

And then there is The Incredible Shrinking Man from 1957, a film that explores bodily transformation as experiential crisis.

As the protagonist shrinks beyond human scale, the horror isn't just physical, it's philosophical.

What happens when your body no longer anchors you to the world? And there's tons more, but these early films established a pattern.

Whereas in 2001, you know, by, by deliberately emptying everything else out, that stuff was revealed to be the center.

The only exception I can think of, by the way, the o- the, the second most important philosophical science fiction movie, I don't know if you've done this one yet, Asia, I don't think you have, is The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Oh, we have.

Which is one of the most explicitly philosophical films, and a perfect example of what science fiction can do.

The

Incredible Shrinking Man? Was that

him? No, that wasn't Shatner.

I know that.