The Incredible Shrinking Man: The Existential Sci-Fi Peak

The premise sounds like a gag reel. A man is exposed to a strange mist while out on a boat, later gets a dose of insecticide, and begins to shrink. Universal-International, 1957, black and white, eighty-one minutes, a tarantula in the third act. Every commercial instinct of the decade says this ends with a scientist announcing a cure and a wife weeping in the doorway.

Instead it goes somewhere no other creature feature of the decade would touch, and it gets there by systematically refusing every exit the genre had built for itself. Nothing else in 1950s American science fiction ends where this ends. Jack Arnold directed; Richard Matheson adapted his own 1956 novel The Shrinking Man; Grant Williams plays Scott Carey, and gives a performance that has been underrated for seventy years largely because he spends the back half of the film acting against furniture.

The first act is a divorce film

The thing nobody tells you about this picture is how long it takes to become a science-fiction film. The opening movement is a domestic drama about a man losing his standing in his own house, and Arnold plays it completely straight. Scott’s clothes stop fitting. He goes to a doctor, who is reassuring, then to specialists, who are not. He is measured. He is photographed. He becomes a case.

And as he gets smaller his marriage inverts. Louise (Randy Stuart) has to reach down to him. He has to look up at her. The film understands, with a clarity that its era generally lacked, that Scott’s real terror is social — the wedding ring sliding off the finger, the newspapers on the lawn, the money running out, the wife becoming the one who carries things. Arnold shoots the house from Scott’s rising eye level a degree or two lower in each scene, so the ceilings creep up on the audience before anyone mentions it. By the time Scott is small enough to be cruel about it, the film has earned every ugly line he says, and Williams plays the cruelty without asking to be liked.

The interlude with Clarice (April Kent), a performer with a carnival who is briefly his own height, is the hinge of the film’s argument. For one sequence Scott is a man talking to a woman on level terms, and the relief on his face is the most moving thing in the picture. Then he wakes up and he is shorter than she is, and it is over. The film is saying that his problem was never size. It was the direction of the gaze.

The cellar, and why it is a silent film

The back half is a survival procedural with almost no dialogue in it. Scott, a few inches high, is stranded in his own cellar after the cat gets in. He must eat, drink, cross open ground, get up a height, and deal with a tarantula that lives near the food. He has a pin and a length of thread and a matchbox.

Arnold shoots this as pure physical problem-solving, and it is the best work of his career. The effects are giant props, forced perspective, travelling mattes and rear projection, with Clifford Stine running the special photography, and they hold up because Arnold obeys a rule most films of this kind break: he keeps Scott and the giant object in the same shot whenever he possibly can. A composite is a promise the audience is invited to inspect; a boy on an oversized set with a real, physically present flight of steps is a fact. The cellar is a huge build and the film uses it as architecture. Distances are established and then honoured.

The tarantula sequence works for the same reason the shark works in Jaws. Arnold has spent twenty minutes teaching us the geography — where the food is, where the water is, where the pin is stuck in the pincushion — so when the spider arrives, the audience is already solving the problem faster than the character. The fight is a real animal, composited, and a man swinging a needle, and the reason it does not play as camp is that the film has never once winked. There is a voice-over throughout, Matheson’s prose, and it does something a modern film would not permit: it narrates the interior life of a man reasoning under pressure, so the cellar becomes a lecture on competence delivered by someone who is losing.

Note also what has vanished by then. No scientist appears. No cure is discussed. No authority is coming. The genre’s usual cavalry — the government lab, the general, the last-reel announcement — simply drops out of the film and never returns, and the absence is the point.

The case against

The middle sags. There is a stretch around the doll’s-house sequence where the film is marking time between set pieces, and the score can be heavy-handed in exactly the way Universal scores of the period tend to be. Louise is written thinly; Randy Stuart is asked to be patient in a dozen scenes and given nothing else to play. Scott’s brother Charlie (Paul Langton) exists to deliver plot.

The science is a shrug — a mist, a spray, a reaction — and I would defend that as a deliberate choice rather than laziness, since Matheson clearly wants the cause to be arbitrary, but a viewer who needs a mechanism will not be satisfied. The film also cannot quite decide whether the cat is a horror sequence or a chase, and it plays a little broad next to the spider.

What it fathered

The real ancestor is not another shrinking picture. It is It Came from Outer Space and the rest of Arnold’s run, where the director had already been quietly training an audience to look at the wrong scale — the desert too big, the creature too close, the frame too empty. Arnold spent five years learning how to make space itself the antagonist, and this is the film where the technique found its subject.

The novel’s author is the other lineage, and the more important one. Matheson wrote I Am Legend the year before, and the two books are the same book from different ends: a man alone, losing the world by degrees, narrating his own diminishment with terrible lucidity. Everything Matheson touched afterwards carries it — the Twilight Zone scripts, Duel, The Night Stalker.

Downstream, the obvious heir is The Fly. Cronenberg’s film is this film’s structure exactly: a man who charts his own transformation in stages, keeps notes, loses a relationship to the changing body, and reasons his way to the end. Both films are about a mind watching its own vehicle fail. Fantastic Voyage took the miniaturisation and made it an adventure; the whole body-horror lineage took the dread. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids took the props and threw the philosophy away, and Downsizing in 2017 tried to get it back and could not.

Where to find it: Universal keeps it circulating, generally in the studio’s science-fiction sets, and the black-and-white transfers on the recent discs are strong. Watch it in one sitting, at night, and do not read the last page of the novel first.

Spoilers below

Scott kills the spider. He gets the food. And then he keeps shrinking, because the film’s cruellest structural decision is that winning the fight changes nothing about the trajectory.

The last sequence is unlike anything else the decade produced. Scott is now small enough to pass through the mesh of the cellar window screen, and he goes out into the garden, at night, under the stars. He knows he will keep going. He knows there is no floor. And the closing narration — Matheson’s, delivered by Williams — takes the position that the universe has no smallest unit that matters, that the infinitesimal and the infinite are the same fact seen from different distances, and that to God there is no zero. He still exists.

The studio wanted something else. The well-documented account is that Universal pushed for a restoration — a cure, a reunion, Scott back at full height in the doorway — and Matheson refused to write it and held the line. He was right, and the reason he was right is structural. The film has spent eighty minutes systematically removing every source of rescue from the board: medicine fails, marriage fails, authority never appears, the brother is useless, and the last act takes place in a cellar nobody knows he is in. A cure arriving at that point would be a lie about everything the film had shown.

What replaces the rescue is the only honest option left: acceptance without consolation. Scott does not defeat his condition and he does not make peace with the people he lost. He simply stops needing the frame of reference that made him a failure. His marriage collapsed because he was smaller than his wife; his terror in the cellar was that he was smaller than a spider; and the final speech dismantles the whole apparatus of comparison by pointing out that smaller than what is a question the universe never asks.

That is a startling thing to find at the end of a Universal creature feature with a tarantula in it. It is also why this is the peak of 1950s science fiction rather than merely a good example of it. The other films of the decade end on an ultimatum, a sermon, a mushroom cloud, or a man at a window saying watch the skies. This one ends on a man who has lost absolutely everything, standing in wet grass at a scale where grass is a forest, looking up — and finding, in the arithmetic of his own annihilation, a reason to keep walking. Arnold shoots him from below, against the night sky, the same low angle he had been using on the desert for five years. Scott walks out of the frame and the stars stay.