While the horror of the 1930s was supernatural, haunted houses, caped foreigners with dark gazes and so on, the horror of the 1940s onwards was science. With the onset of a World War larger and more dreadful than the one before it, the creation of bombs that could level cities and war machines that could cut through soldiers like paper, the discovery of camps where people were burned alive by the dozens, mankind had finally reached the point technologically where it could destroy itself. Not just kill some people or destroy a town, we were doing just fine with that, but actually eliminate the human race off the face of the Earth, what little of it there would be left that was inhabitable. Unlike the modern day, where people are calling for america to nuke Iran or Iraq or any other country they couldn’t point out on a map, I imagine the idea of our planet erupting in a cloud of nuclear fire was probably was a pretty sobering thought.
In the world of Hollywood, that meant vampires and werewolves were out and mad scientists and aliens were in. As scary as science could be in the real world, audiences just couldn’t get enough of science-fiction. In the world of science-fiction, it seemed like invading tyrants from beyond the stars were showing up every other week, at least on the days when out all-caucasian crew were flying to Venus for the weekend. Robots were always murderous monsters, their bulky mechanical frames covered in buttons and blinking lights. Radiation can do anything, from healing the sick to granting superpowers and enlarging animals to gargantuan sizes (fire breath is optional). Despite that possibility of annihilation, suddenly it seemed like the world was awash with new opportunities and interesting possibilities, and that the time we were living in now was only a few steps away from that glorious utopia that Thomas More wrote about all those centuries ago. Hell, we were practically in a utopia already compared to the living conditions in 1516. Toilet paper would have blown their fucking minds.
Some of the big sci-fi movies concepts have survived the test of time, aliens, giant insects, radioactive waste that does something other than give you cancer, but here’s one that hasn’t been trotted out in a while: Tiny, minuscule and otherwise shrunken people. There’s been a few, Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage, DC and Marvel have played around with The Atom and Ant-Man, and Honey I Shrunk the Kids, but it seems like it’s died out in recent years I mean, there are plenty of movies where humans have to contend with something bigger than we are, insects, apes, lizards what have you, but what about when you are smaller than everything? In an existential sense you could argue that we’re all specks, but our world is the right size for us, and it is built with a sort of immutability of self in mind. If you woke up one morning and the bed that was once the right size stretched out like a football field and the pencil on the nightstand was as large as a redwood, would your bedroom really feel any less alien than Venus or the moons of Saturn? Top of the food chain to the family dog’s newest chew toy. How could that not be interesting?
That, I imagine, was American International’s justification for getting behind The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold back in 1957. Based on a novel by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson (who also wrote the screenplay), Shrinking Man tells the story of a writer named Robert Scott Carey, who is engulfed in a mysterious mist while on a boating trip with the wife. A bizarre but seemingly harmless incident, until Carey discovers the horrifying truth: He is shrinking at a steady rate, and there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do to prevent it. How can a man survive in a world that seems to grow more and more vast by the day, a world where a staircase would take months to climb or spiders seem to rival grizzly bears in girth? Well, if Carey does want to live he’s going to have to find out, because a world that’s hard enough for a 6 foot tall man is going to be pure hell for a three inch one.
I suppose what I’m impressed with the most about this film is how they went the distance. By the time the 50s rolled around I guess I assumed that pretty much sci-fi/horror films were doing their best to do as little as possible to sell a movie. You know, green screens, forced perspective tricks, monsters that look like trash bags with tentacles glued on them, that sort of thing. While there are a couple of camera tricks going in The Incredible Shrinking Man, a lot of it is just plain old practical effects. When Carey is living in a dollhouse, they really recreate the room of a dollhouse in life-size. Gigantic cake crumbs, matchboxes the size of sheds, nails the size of 2x4s, you can actually believe for a moment that Carey has actually shrunk. To be fair, like many sci-fi and horror films of the period you’ve got to wait to around halfway through to get to those bits I was talking about, but I still appreciate the commitment. Like I said, a lot of movies that came out around the same time wouldn’t have even bothered.
I also like The Incredible Shrinking Man for the fact that it doesn’t feel like a sci-fi movie, if that makes any sense. A sci-fi movie in the context of that era brings to mind images of Them or Plan 9 From Outer Space, cinematic elevator music that pile on the vapid acting, screaming women and square-jawed whitebread protagonists and still only barely manage to fill out 60 minutes. The studio didn’t think they needed a story to sell a movie, so the story in unimportant. TISM on the other hand actually feels like a classic science-fiction story being told in film form, where there’s a message trying to be conveyed beyond ‘buy something from the snack bar’. That Richard Matheson was a science fiction author as well as the author of the original story probably helped, although having the writer writing the screenplay doesn't always mean that the writer’s voice makes it through the adaptation process intact (just Harlan Ellison). The Last Man on Earth (the first adaptation of I Am Legend, starring Vincent Price) also featured Matheson on writing and also shares a similar tone to TISM, so I’d like to think the book-to-film process wasn’t as hard for him as it was for others.
Part Robinson Crusoe style man vs. nature, part philosophy on man’s place in the universe, The Incredible Shrinking Man deals with both subjects while managing to tell a compact and concise story at the same time. A hidden pearl in a schlocky B-movie sea basically, and that’s why it gets the recommendation from me. I know some of you out there probably aren’t a fan of older movies, some of you might not even watch a movie that isn’t in color, but if you are interested in delving into the archives of science fiction film, then I’d say this would make a worthy addition to your watch queue. Keep an eye out for any mysterious mists while you’re at it, you don’t want to end up sword-fighting with your bed-bugs.
Trust me on that one.
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