It’s conventional to talk of the great low-budget Sci-Fi films of the 50’s (Them, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.) as reflective of Cold War angst — the Rooskies sublimated into a dreaded, unstoppable menace from outer space. Although Body Snatchers is quite a good film despite its studio-tacked-on happy ending, some of them are so hopelessly cheesy that they give cheese a bad name. So I always assumed the Cold War resonances were just spontaneously generated by the zeitgeist of the times.
Apparently not in the case of era’s premier wad of Gorgonzola, The Blob, starring Steve McQueen. According to Jeff Sharlet’s The Family, it’s a deliberate work of anti-Commie-rat propaganda. Sharlet describes the movie as coming out of a meeting at the Family’s 1957 National Prayer Breakfast, where actress/screenwriter Kate Phillips met evangelical Christian filmmaker Irvin “Shorty” Yeaworth. Yeaworth had financial backing (from where is not exactly specified) to make a movie that would subliminally impart a “wholesome” anti-Red message. The rest is cinema history.
Digression: my favorite pulp sci-fi novel of this genre was Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, written well before Heinlein went off the deep end. It was made into a movie in the 1990’s (forgettable, even with Donald Sutherland, Richard Belzer and Yaphet Kotto in the cast). But think what a Spielberg could do with this story.
cleve callison’s blog 
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