Another round of additions is ready to join the ranks of the 4xblu online store’s offerings. Today’s trio of titles consists of David Cronenberg’s “Shivers,” Prince’s “Sign ‘o’ the Times,” and Jack Arnold’s “The Incredible Shrinking Man.”
Starting with Lon Chaney pictures like “The Phantom of the Opera” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” in the 1920s, then achieving tremendous success in the 1930 with monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy, Universal’s tradition of horror films had been building for decades by the time Jack Arnold came to work at the studio in 1949. However, by that point it was time for Universal to enter the atomic age. Throughout the 1950s, Arnold was the pre-imminent director of Universal’s sci-fi / horror / monster films, cranking out such now-revered titles as “It Came From Outer Space,” “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” “Tarantula,” and “The Incredible Shrinking Man.”
Although Arnold would eventually parlay his brilliance on these low budget classics into A-list assignments, it’s his work on the Universal pictures of the 50s for which he’s best known today, a development that he’d hardly anticipated. Speaking of those films’ reputation, Arnold once said, “I didn’t set out to make pictures with anything in mind that 10 or 20 years from the time they would still be looking at them and call them classics. I just did the best I could and they turned out well and people liked them.”