By Neil Healy
Nuclear Fallout? Deadly Mist? The Red Peril (communism)? A Bad Vacation? No matter why you think Scott Carey begins his terrible journey in to oblivion, mysteriously growing smaller an inch a day, it is terrifying. If you ask George Costanza, when he’s out in the Hamptons with Jerry Seinfeld, shrinkage is always bad!
The Incredible Shrinking Man! 1957. When you start with a Richard Matheson novel and add to it a solid director, Jack Arnold, competent actors, Grant Williams and Randy Stuart, and finish with expensive visual effects from Universal, you are definitely on the right track. Add to this a giant Doll House, a large and dangerous cat, and most horrifying, you must fight a spider, only this spider is as big as a house.
My brother took me to this movie when I was 8. Slightly older, he saw no issue with that. We both were sucked into this eerie construct and screamed during the fight-to-the-death with the spider, I came away startled by the ending dialogue which sums up the movie, delivered by our courageous hero;
“I was continuing to shrink, to become… what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close — the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God’s silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends in man’s conception, not nature’s. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist!”
FADE TO BLACK
The ultimate in existentialism. My 8 year old brain could only explode knowing that maybe some day I would disappear.
I liked it then and I liked it when I showed it to my son, considerably older than 8, and asked what he thought. “Outlandish,” is what I remember he said. We laughed and bonded over a ‘50s horror film that was truly petrifying in so many ways. Watch it.
Neil Healy is the founder of ScareTube, a lover of the mysterious, a New Yorker who’s found happiness with a native California women in Los Angeles and who has written most of his life. An early fan of the movies, he is dedicated to finding the perfect story.
