So, the great horror/sci-fi/fantasy/ author Richard Matheson passed away last Sunday and I’ll have to admit that I hadn’t thought much about him lately until a few months back when on of Jack Arnold’s best films popped up on TCM at an ungodly hour and I sat glued to the TV once more with a fine bit of top shelf “B” movie bliss . I hadn’t seen The Incredible Shrinking Man in a few years, so I was glad to stop the clock on the work I was doing and spend a little time catching up with a few old friends.
Matheson and an uncredited Richard Alan Simmons wrote the film (from Matheson’s own novel The Shrinking Man) and unlike a lot of 50’s sci-fi featuring gigantic radioactive mutated versions of normal creatures, it’s lead character Robert Scott Carey (a great performance by Grant Williams) who gets scaled down in size after his radiation exposure. I recall the novel was even darker in tone and had some scenes that certainly wouldn’t fly past the censors of the era, but I’ll let the readers in the crowd find all that out on their own time.
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 