- Director: Jack Arnold
- Writers: Richard Matheson
- Stars: Grant Williams, Randy Stuart, April Kent
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 21 Minutes
Synopsis
We begin with Scott and Louise laying out on a boat. She goes below deck to grab him a beer, and he remains behind as a mysterious white cloud approaches. Soon, he’s covered in what looks like glitter.
Six months later, Scott notices that his pants and shirt seem to be stretching. Did the cleaners do something to his clothes? He tells Louise to pick up a bathroom scale today. The doctor says he’s two inches shorter and has lost ten pounds. “People just don’t get shorter,” says the doctor.
But he is getting smaller, a little more every day. The doctor does X-rays with some time between them, and he confirms that Scott is getting smaller, but he can’t explain how or why. The doctor sends them to a research lab, and they do endless tests on him. They find that his cells are rearranging themselves; they think it may have been an accidental exposure to insecticide and radiation combined. They remember the incident on the boat. And some exposure he had later to a mass tree spraying for bugs.
Time passes, and Scott loses his job because they can’t continue to pay him to stay home. Charlie, Scott’s brother, suggests that Scott sell his story to the newspapers. He’s now only about three feet tall. He becomes famous as “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” Soon, there are reporters swarming his lawn.
The doctors come up with a serum that will keep him from shrinking, but won’t help him regrow to normal size. He gets depressed and goes out for the first time. He goes to a diner and meets Clarice, a “little person” who works in the circus. He starts to feel more confident in himself after talking to her, but he soon finds that he’s shrinking again.
Before long, he’s just a few inches tall and living in a dollhouse in the corner of the living room. Louise goes out, but accidentally lets the cat inside the house. There’s a few good “cat and mouse” chase scenes. He falls down the stairs into the basement. Louise returns and thinks Scott is dead, eaten by the cat.
Scott wakes up in a junk box in the basement and has to figure out a way to get out. He tries to get food out of a mousetrap, but it ends up rolling into he drain. Then there’s a “giant” spider. Life is rough when you’re small!
Eventually, the water heater bursts, and Charlie and Louise come downstairs, but they don’t see Scott. Instead, they unclog the drain. Charlie and Louise pack up and move her stuff out; she’s gone now. Scott wakes up after they’re gone. He decides that his only chance is to kill the spider, so he devises a trap that doesn’t work. Eventually, he gets still smaller, and he accepts the inevitable.
Commentary
The forced perspective and camera tricks are really good here, and it’s really the gimmick behind the entire film. Considering the age, the special effects are really good; sometimes it’s done with a screen, sometimes with giant props, and sometimes it’s done with forced perspective, and it usually looks realistic.
The spider and cat battles are the only real action (or horror) scenes in the film, and it works pretty well overall.
There’s not really much in the way of a plot other than watching Scott deal with his situation, but it is interesting. There’s also some kind of halfway explanation for the shrinking that involves insecticide being mutated by radiation. And where that radioactive cloud came from, we are never told.
The ending is pretty open-ended. They didn’t want to have an unhappy ending after all his heroic struggles, but there really wasn’t a way to have a happy ending either. Ambiguous was the best they could go for.