There’s something off about The Incredible Melting Man. The film follows a lumbering astronaut leaking multi-colored ooze—his name is Steve, and he’s sort of a misfit. He doesn’t fit in with the atomic monsters, even though radiation is what transforms him into a sludgy ghoul. He’s different than iconic stalkers with messed up faces—there’s no mystery surrounding who he is, no lore or psychosexual trauma undergirding his need to kill. I thought The Incredible Melting Man reminded me of gooey splatter films from the 1980s like Slime City, but even that doesn’t feel right.
Because of disagreements during production, The Incredible Melting Man’s tone is uneven: there are laughs, particularly when the violence is outrageous (one deadly encounter results in a severed head floating gently down a stream), but The Incredible Melting Man is ultimately too much of a downer to work as a fun horror comedy like Re-Animator. The film’s fixated on Steve’s agonizing metamorphosis from heroic astronaut to a pile of quivering viscera that ends up in the garbage.
The Incredible Melting Man opens with a space mission, during which the crew aboard the Scorpio 5 witness a solar storm. Steve (in non-melting form) is unable to contain his excitement. "Magnificent! You’ve never seen anything until you’ve seen the sun through the rings of Saturn!” It’s at this moment that the astronauts are exposed to the radiation that gradually kills them.
The Melting Man has a melancholy aura that aligns him with classic monsters like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Wolf Man, or Frankenstein’s monster, but the marketing team behind the film branded the Melting Man the “first new horror creature” instead of looking to the past for a connection. At one point they thought the Melting Man might become a big deal—he had a mass-produced Halloween costume—but a combination of shaky execution and bad timing kept the Melting Man from connecting with audiences in 1977.
The poster for the film urges viewers to prepare for something new, something different from the bloodless, black and white monster movies of the past.
Although flawed, The Incredible Melting Man pulls off something better than any “elevated” horror film I’ve seen—it’s a fascinating text about trauma without broadcasting itself as such.
When I had this thought, I initially wondered if my brain was irradiated from watching too many creature features. But then I found that author and low-budget horror movie appreciator Ed Steck came to this conclusion as well. According to Steck, the loose narrative and slow pace of the film allow for “a metaphorical reading of the character’s slow-dripping degradation” to emerge. “I hesitate to call the Melting Man the protagonist of the film,” Steck continues. Rather, the protagonist is “melting itself”; the Melting Man is a signifier, “a vessel for slow death through trauma.”
Steck notes that the narrative is “ploddingly dream-like.” There are passages in The Incredible Melting Man that are strange and poetic, especially those of him wandering the hillsides at nightfall. Under an orange sun that renders the arid terrain otherworldly, the Melting Man stumbles in slow motion. He’s haunted by distorted echoes of transmissions received in the Scorpio 5’s control room. The last moments of his normal human life play on repeat in his disintegrating mind. Director William Sachs says he wanted to go further in this direction—he wanted the film to be more abstract and have more instances of the Melting Man experiencing sonic PTSD.
Eventually the unending pain depletes the Melting Man’s monstrous strength. He steadies himself against the wall of a building and lets out a bellow in the final scene. His eyes are barely visible under liquid layers of flesh and muscle disintegrating into goop. It looks like he’s suffocating. Gulping air, he looks up at the sky. We move to a POV shot, and see through the Melting Man’s eyes—he looks down at his rotting, pulsing hands. The camera moves in on his unblinking eye before it’s swallowed up. The Melting Man no longer resembles a man—he’s formless ooze.
Underneath the clip of this scene on YouTube (labeled “FINAL MELTING”) the comments are split between cracking jokes (@smithwesson1896: “I’m eating ice cream while watching this…”) and others moved by the Melting Man’s death cries (@sunzsu: “poor melting man ☹”). Perhaps there are plenty of people with room in their hearts for a mangled monster.
—Ed Steck’s article “The Somnambulant Body Melt of the Incredible Melting Man” can be found on thefanzine.com