Shawnee Smith Fought Through A 'Brutal' Audition To Land Her Role In Chuck Russell's The Blob
The current generation of horror fans might know Shawnee Smith as the unstable Jigsaw protege, Amanda Young, in the "Saw" movie franchise, but older moviegoers remember the time she battled a supersized man-eating slimeball.
Chuck Russell's "The Blob" is one of the great movie remakes, retaining the small-town thrills of the 1958 original while improving elements like the incredible special effects needed to pull off the monster of the title. The story was originally inspired by the real-life accounts of two cops who, in 1950, observed something falling from the sky that, upon closer inspection, appeared to slowly propel itself. Irvin Yeaworth's atomic age feature was a highly dramatized version of said events, and by the time the 1988 version came along, the Blob went from an extraterrestrial substance to one engineered in a secret government lab. In Russell's iteration, Shawnee Smith stars as Meg Penny, one of the youths that go toe-to-slime with the creeping creature.
In a chat with JoBlo.com, Smith begins with memories of "pounding the pavement" to break into show business, trying out for commercials, films, and dance productions alike. looks back on her work in "The Blob" as beginning with a "brutal" series of auditions. It's nothing she wasn't used to. She recalls to JoBlo:
I mean, I was back so many times... I remember Chuck Russell... he's really grueling on the audition process. I mean, I fought for that role and I remember being in his office and he said, 'Okay now, the couch right here is the truck and you start back there,' and I was acting out the scene using the furniture and the room... like a big action-horror scene.
That meteor is man-made!
In his piece about special effects in "The Blob," /Film's Lee Adams calls the sci-fi/horror one of the great "melt movies" alongside "Street Trash" (this writer would add Robert Fuest's satanic B-horror "The Devil's Rain" to that pantheon). As it grows from lil' glob to big Blob, the substance's acidic makeup dissolves everything it consumes, and its victims get a front-row seat to the show before they, too, become fodder:
The gnarly effects were used to make their deaths observable within the Blob, and the Blob itself was orchestrated by Tony Gardner and a team of 30+ artists, including the revered Chet Zar. Plenty of Arborville townspeople are consumed by the maw; several are set up as though we'd follow them to the end of the movie but save for a couple of intrepid heroes, the rest get the Marion Crane treatment. But for a movie about an all-consuming mass coming to a quaint American town, a high body count is to be expected, and "The Blob" delivers.
A new take on the story has been in development for some time; as far back as 2009, funding had been secured for a Rob Zombie-helmed remake before "The Munsters" director dropped out of the project. Last we heard, "Con Air" director Simon West was bringing "The Blob" back, with the major bonus of having blockbuster movie veteran Samuel L. Jackson attached to star. Details have been sparse in the meantime, but we'll keep our ears perked and eyes peeled for the latest news.