For context, Psycho was released only 3 years later, so it isn’t as if there weren’t more modern horror films at least in the horizon. At the same time, this feels like a typical example of a 50s horror movie in many ways. Giant animals were pretty common, because those movies were easy enough to make with the technology available. This just goes the other route: Instead of radiation growing ants or lizards or something, there just happens to be a man who shrinks.

Spoilers for a 67 year old movie.

One day Scott Carey notices that his clothes are loose. Maybe he has lost weight, but it seems more than that. After a while, his doctor can verify this: he is in fact shrinking.

Now, the book this is based on was largely written as a series of flashbacks. The studio demanded that the movie has to be chronological. This has a very direct effect: Basically nothing happens in the first half of this 77 minute movie. Sure, there is some drama as Scott argues with his wife, meets an actual little person who is his height, and tries to contend with the problems of fame without proper compensaation. You can see the effects of the decision to make this linear.

Around the half point, Scott is small enough to live in a dollhouse. The problem is that the cat finds him. While trying to get away from the cat, Scott falls into the basement, where he is stuck with the most terrifying monster possible: A tarantula. In the book it’s a black widow, which explains why it has a web. Tarantula’s do make webs but their webs are on the ground and in their lairs. They don’t look anything like your true spider web.

In the basement we learn that Scott is actually kind of dumb. Well, really dumb. He finds a mousetrap with some cheese in it, but it takes him a while to figure out how to set off the trap and even then he fails to secure the cheese which is flung into the sewer. I get that people back in the 50s were inhaling lead from multiple sources, but he is just so slow here. Just a little later on he comes across a situation where he needs to cross a “chasm” by using a piece of wood stuck on the table with some paint. He thinks to himself that he must act, not think. Yet, what does he do, he stays there and thinks for long enough for the paint to loosen. Okay, so they needed something to happen in the movie and these are it.

And that’s the key difference here. You can see how audience expectations have changed. A few moments of peril in a 77 minute movie just isn’t enough these days. Even I, as someone who has watched a lot of Bela Tarr and Andrei Tarkovski, find this movie to be just too boring and slow. It doesn’t really help that the character of Scott is not at all interesting and that they left everything potentially controversial (Scott cheating, Scott using his small size to spy on a young woman, Scott being assaulted by a drunken gay man – maybe leaving that last one out was appropriate) from the book out of the movie.

At the same time I do feel that the modern movies are also boring in their own way. Not all of them (nor were all the horror movies from the 50s boring either), but so often the action is emphasized at the cost of the characters, which just makes the action uninteresting. You need to be invested in some way to like the action and so many of the modern movies fail at that.

Final note: There was a planned remake of this movie, but since it was to be directed by Brett Ratner and since he is one of the few people who’s cancellation has stuck, it is highly unlikely that it will happen at least in that form.