The Incredible Shrinking Man

The Incredible Shrinking Man is a 1957 film based on the Richard Matheson novel originally entitled The Shrinking Man. It follows the adventures of Scott Carey, a husband (and father, in the original book) who begins to dwindle in size after exposure to a strange mist and a pesticide.

He visits doctors and scientists but they are unable to stop the shrinking, other than one time when he is about three feet tall--but it soon resumes. Scott has an argument with his wife Louise, as tension about his situation builds, and he has a brief friendship with a circus dwarf. The film then jumps ahead to a period where Scott is three inches tall and living in a dollhouse. When his wife leaves to go to the store, a cat gets in and chases him out. He winds up in his "cellar prison" where he faces a voracious spider, his own hunger, a flood, and the thought he may shrink down to nothing.

The film was directed by Jack Arnold and scripted by Matheson and starred Grant Williams as Scott and Randy Stuart as Louise. Unlike some horror or SF tales that take places in distant times and far away places, this one

applies to "the guy next door" whose life becomes more bizarre the smaller he gets. Special effects showed him being clawed by a cat, almost decapitated by a mousetrap, nearly drowning in a flood, and fighting a spider.