When King Kong climbs the Empire State Building or a giant octopus pulls down the Golden Gate Bridge, they're not just breaking box office records — they're breaking the laws of physics. In biologist Michael LaBarbera's entertaining essay, "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters" he analyzes classic monster movies, explaining that the physics of "scaling" means that size changes affect every aspect of an organism's biology.
Take the giantess who menaces Las Vegas in Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman (1958). At that size, her bones would shatter under her own weight due to a principle discovered by Galileo — when an animal's size increases, its mass grows much faster than the strength of its skeleton. LaBarbera says, even elephants are careful around small drops because "a fall of half a dozen feet would shatter the bones in their legs."
Here's an excerpt of his analysis of the terrific 1957 movie The Incredible Shrinking Man:
When the Incredible Shrinking Man stops shrinking, he is about an inch tall, down by a factor of about 70 in linear dimensions. Thus, the surface area of his body, through which he loses heat, has decreased by a factor of 70 x 70 or about 5,000 times, but the mass of his body, which generates the heat, has decreased by 70 x 70 x 70 or 350,000 times. He's clearly going to have a hard time maintaining his body temperature (even though his clothes are now conveniently shrinking with him) unless his metabolic rate increases drastically.
Luckily, his lung area has only decreased by 5,000-fold, so he can get the relatively larger supply of oxygen he needs, but he's going to have to supply his body with much more fuel; like a shrew, he'll probably have to eat his own weight daily just to stay alive. He'll also have to give up sleeping and eat 24 hours a day or risk starving before he wakes up in the morning (unless he can learn the trick used by hummingbirds of lowering their body temperatures while they sleep).
Because of these relatively larger surface areas, he'll be losing water at a proportionally larger rate, so he'll have to drink a lot, too. We see him drink once in the movie–he dips his hand into a puddle and sips from his cupped palm. The image is unremarkable and natural, but unfortunately wrong for his dimensions: at his size surface tension becomes a force comparable to gravity. More likely, he'd immerse his hand in the pool and withdraw it coated with a drop of water the size of his head. When he put his lips to the drop, the surface tension would force the drop down his throat whether or not he chooses to swallow.
As for the contest with the spider, the battle is indeed biased, but not the way the movie would have you believe. Certainly the spider has a wicked set of poison fangs and some advantage because it wears its skeleton on the outside, where it can function as armor. But our hero, because of his increased metabolic rate, will be bouncing around like a mouse on amphetamines. He wouldn't struggle to lift the sewing needle–he'd wield it like a rapier because his relative strength has increased about 70 fold.
Watch the dramatic spider fight scene here:
Previously:
• Remembering The Incredible Shrinking Man
• Watch 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' (1957) for free on the Internet Archive
• 10 interesting facts about The Incredible Shrinking Man (and a new Criterion Collection edition of the movie!)
• Ten horror movies written by Richard Matheson
