The Incredible Shrinking Man

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) is Jack Arnold's science-fiction landmark, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Scott Carey drifts through a strange mist on a boating trip. Weeks later, his clothes no longer fit.

Doctors trace it to radiation crossed with insecticide, and the verdict is grim: Scott is shrinking, and nothing will stop it. Grant Williams plays a man losing his height, his marriage, his place in the world, inch by inch. His wife Louise (Randy Stuart) watches him dwindle and can do nothing. By the final act his own basement has turned into a hostile frontier, where the family cat is a predator, a leaking water heater becomes a flood, and a common spider is a monster to be fought with a sewing pin.

Richard Matheson adapted his own novel, and Scott's closing meditation on the infinitely small and the infinitely vast still gets quoted decades on. Made on a modest budget but staged with real ingenuity, the film unsettles less through effects than through a single question: what is left of a person once everything is taken away. Stream The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) online on iFILM.