The Blob is a deadly Blob; it oozes and kills and makes you sob. But how much killing and how much sobbing? Just how many people have been absorbed into the giant red jelly at the end of 1958’s The Blob? Follow its gelatinous trail of death—if you dare!

The first victim is the elderly guy (Olin Howland) who finds the meteor which brought the Blob to earth. He pokes the little blot of ooze with a stick, and it crawls up that stick and grabs onto his hand. Then it starts to grow and redden and grow!

It takes about 24 minutes of run-time, though, before the ooze is finally big enough to swallow the old guy whole. Or as the horrified Dr. Hallen (Stephen Chase) exclaims when he comes back into his office and finds his patient replaced by a medicine ball-sized lump of jelly, “It must have absorbed the old man completely!”

So that’s one.

Hallen’s nurse, Kate (Lee Payton), throws acid on the medicine ball blob without any effect. Hallen goes for a gun, and while he steps outside, Kate screams, and that’s the end of her. Dr. Hallen’s gun doesn’t do much good either. Our high school protagonist Steve (Steve McQueen) comes back to the office to check on him and sees him getting blobbed through the window. “He disappeared! He was all gone!”

And we’re up to three.

After the doc, the Blob hits the road. It blorb around town until it finds a very chatty mechanic (Ralph Roseman) talking about his plans to go get drunk over the weekend. The mechanic is working under the car and doesn’t realize his buddy has left for the night. He keeps talking and talking with his legs sticking out until there’s—Aiiiieeee! We see his legs thrash, signaling four.

Steve and his girlfriend Jane (Aneta Corsaut) try to track down the Blob in the dead of night. They notice that Mr. Wedermeyer’s little grocery store is open far later than it should be. They enter and find the mop Mr. Wedermeyer usually uses to clean up, but it’s “spread all over the aisle” as if suddenly abandoned. They also find the Blob oozing around the aisles.

So, even though we never see Mr. Wedermeyer at all, I think we can put Blob and broom together, and get five.

The Blob leaves the market and heads to a movie theater, where it slides through a vent and gloms onto the hapless projectionist. This is actually the first time we see the Blob actually absorbing someone. All the other deaths are offscreen—the doctor reports that the old man is dead, Steve tells us he’s seen the doctor die, the Blob eating the guy under the car is hidden by the car. Here, though, we get to see the Blob clinging to the projectionist’s face and body as he thrashes in a dark corner for a couple of frames.  

That’s six. And that is every person we can say for sure that the Blob swallows in the movie.

However! It’s possible the Blob polishes off many more than that. After it does for the projectionist, it squishes and squooshes into the movie theater itself. We see lots and lots of patrons fleeing. But it’s possible the Blob caught some stragglers, especially since it grows when it eats, and it’s as big as a small diner after it gets out of the theater. At the end of the film when police lieutenant Dave (Earl Rowe) is calling in the cavalry, he tells them over the phone that,  “this thing has killed probably forty or fifty people since last night.” This means either he has more information than we do, or else he’s exaggerating the casualties a bit to encourage his interlocutor to take the Blob seriously.

The total Blob death toll, then, is:

—One, if you insist on only counting those actually blobbed before your eyes;

—Six, if you count all those where we have strong first-hand evidence of death;

—Forty or fifty, if you believe honest Dave is honest.

That’s a solid horror film body count, easily comparable to a Freddy or Jason slasher. The bigger number is even in the ballpark of James Bond, who averages 43 kills a movie. The Blob really is a deadly Blob. If it comes to a movie theater near you, run away!

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