Every July, hundreds gather in Phoenixville to return to the 1950s — by packing into a historic movie theater where their favorite ‘50s horror flick was filmed.
Blob Fest is an annual three-day celebration of The Blob, a 1958 cornball artwork starring the “King of Cool,” Steve McQueen. People dress up retro to catch screenings of the rebel-without-a-cause-style story at the Colonial Theatre, where the film’s climax takes place.
I took my Boomer parents, who were born two years after the movie’s release, to see the scene on Sunday. Though the event is meant as a blast from the past, the movie works just as well as a modern metaphor.
The film is a 1950s time capsule, featuring a cast of race-car crazed kids who must convince their straight-laced parents that an alien monster is threatening to kill off their small town. McQueen is the well-intentioned teen who first discovers The Blob, a gelatinous ball that looks mysteriously like a growing glob of Smucker's jelly after it crashes in his neighborhood straight from outer space. Everybody — the cops, the adults — think he’s pulling a prank when he reports his sighting.
“How do you get people to protect themselves from something they don’t even believe in?” McQueen (who is named, simply, “Steve,” in the movie) asks his girlfriend as they set out to save their city.
“Evidence,” she asserts.
The answer, in the end, is noise — not evidence. McQueen and company honk their car horns to warn everyone around them of The Blob’s spread. “We had to make this noise! We had to make this noise so you’d listen to us!” they plead with the sincerity of James Dean.
From a ‘50s standpoint, the story is about teenagers trying to break out as independent authorities amid a paternalistic, conservative culture. The kids have good intentions; they just don’t have their parents’ respect. The plot also matches a new issue facing the young people of today: How to sound the alarm on a global climate crisis created by the Blob generation.
The Blob is about group consensus and rebellious teenagers bringing their town together rather than dividing it. This is also what’s special about the movie-going experience: The Colonial Theatre audience knew the film inside and out, clapping in unison to the mambo track “Beware of The Blob” that kicked off the show and heckling in solidarity at every character who doesn't believe McQueen’s prophecy.
Shown ritually, I wonder whether the film’s long-lasting implications are lost on spectators. When McQueen announces, “We’re gonna go to the police. They’ll know what to do,” the audience collectively guffawed. I couldn’t tell if this was because we were all on the same page about the cops’ incompetence, or whether the whole crowd knew what came next: A zoomed-in shot of a police officer trying and failing to fix a stapler while the world around him burns.
The plot twist is when McQueen, trying to put out the literal flames encroaching upon him in the film’s final sequence, realizes that a C02 fire extinguisher causes The Blob to freeze in place. It turns out McQueen is a scientist, and climate control is the answer. The crew decides to transport The Blob north. “I don’t think it can be killed, but at least we’ve got it stuck,” the chief of police concludes.
“Yeah, as long as the arctic stays cold,” McQueen scoffs. A giant question mark appears on screen. Fin.
The special screenings at Colonial end with a reenacted “run-out,” where everyone pretends The Blob has returned and race out of the theater. The Sunday matinee skipped this part, but I still got snapshots of my senior parents slow-motion screaming outside the theater, under the classic “Healthfully Air Conditioned" banner that ironically donned the movie set.
In our fractured nature-facing global crisis, small-town solutions seem antiquated as young people lead a struggling fight for systemic societal overhaul. But as growing climate disasters steal community and lose us landmarks, the Colonial Theatre still serves as an intergenerational refuge for cinema that is old but not yet dead.
