The Blob | 1958

“it creeps, and leaps and glides and slides... Be careful of the Blob” – songwriter Burt Bacharach lets his hair down with a campy theme song, by the Five Blobs.

Low budget sci-fi with carnivorous jello from space feasting on bit part players in a small town until a young (well, 28) Steven McQueen pops it into the freezer.

The terrorised town is largely Phoenixville, 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Most of the movie interiors, and some exteriors, were filmed in the Valley Forge Studios.

The home of the doomed Dr Hallen, where Steve Andrews (Steven McQueen) takes the old guy with the alien parasite growing on his hand, is still recognisable on the northwest corner of South Main Street at 3rd Avenue, in Phoenixville.

Still there, too, is the cinema where the kids watch the late-night spooky show, which is the Colonial Theatre, 227 Bridge Street.

The school, from which fire extinguishers are collected to fend off the crawling glob, is Barkley Elementary School, 320 2nd Avenue at Lincoln Avenue.

Jerry’s Supermarket (where the Blob is played by a weather balloon – for much of the rest of the time it’s a chunk of silicone wobbling about on miniature sets) has now gone.

The Downingtown Diner, scene of the movie’s climax, stood at 81 West Lancaster Avenue in Downingtown, about 12 miles southwest of Phoenixville. There’s still a diner on the site but it’s unfortunately not the original seen in the film. A brand new Downingtown Diner opened here in 2013.

Don’t forget the annual BlobFest at the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, coming July 8-10, 2016

The – surprisingly – not-half-bad 1988 remake was filmed in Abbeville, southern Louisiana.

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