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Devils In The Dark

In this corner! A shapeless alien mass that dissolves everything it touches! And in that corner…another shapeless alien mass that dissolves everything it touches! Yep, this monster battle features two dueling acidic masses. May the best monster murder lump win!


Some nine years after The Blob’s release in 1958, Star Trek more or less stole its malevolent amorphous antagonist wholesale. The 1967 first-season episode, “The Devil in the Dark” is set on a pergium mining colony where more than 50 miners have been murdered. The culprit is a mysterious (ahem) blob. Said blob is impervious to phaser fire, and burns humans to ash, leaving behind only fragments of bones and teeth. Eventually, the miners figure out that their nemesis is a Horta—a silicon-based creature that secretes a powerful acid and can move through rock like humans move through air.


The Horta is similar to the Blob in murderousness and to some extent in shapelessness. Still, there are important differences. The Horta is less jelly than a mound. Thanks to an inventive special effects team with a limited budget, it looks like a roughly human-sized mottled red-brown rocky heap with some fuzzy tendrils. It doesn’t ooze like the blob, but shuffles. It’s kind of cute, in a fearsome featureless alien way.


The Horta isn’t just more adorable than the Blob. It’s also a lot more intelligent. Though the miners think that the Horta is a monster or animal at first, it quickly becomes clear that it’s sentient. Shortly after our heroes from the starship Enterprise land on the planet, the Horta steals the miner’s main circulating pump, the one key piece of equipment that keeps the planet oxygenated. Without it, humans have a short timeline to evacuate or die.


The episode’s climax is when Mr. Spock, the ship’s alien Vulcan science-officer, mind-melds to create a telepathic link with the Horta. He discovers that the Horta is a peaceful creature; it only became violent because the miners broke into its birthing chamber and inadvertently destroyed thousands of its circular, silicon eggs. The “devil” in the dark is not the Horta, but the rampaging human colonists, committing unwitting genocide. When the miners realize their error, they agree to stop destroying eggs, and the Horta returns the pump. It and its children also agree to use their amazing burrowing abilities to help find more mineral wealth. Happy humans, happy Hortas.


Critics have argued about whether The Blob is meant as a Cold War analogy. But whether or not the red space invader is supposed to be a Communist threat, it’s clear that the movie sees cross-species relations as a zero-sum game. The Blob can’t be reasoned with or even spoken to; it just blorps and expands and eats. Humans can destroy the Blob or it will destroy them. There’s no third option.

Star Trek, though, filmed during the US war in Vietnam, was, consciously, looking for other solutions to alien contact. The mining base is explicitly a colonial outpost—it’s set up to extract minerals and wealth from foreign territory. At first, the consequence of imperialism is conflict and demands for genocide; the Horta is the last of its kind, and the humans are trying to eliminate it in order to get its gold. But thanks to Spock’s skills at translation, colonizer and colonized come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. They can live together and everyone can thrive. “The Horta aren’t bad once you get used to their appearance,” one miner comments. To which Spock replies that the Horta expressed a similar thought. “She found humanoid appearance revolting, but she thought she could get used to them.”

Of course, the Horta/Human détente isn’t exactly equal. The Horta is no better off than it was before humans came. It gets to live its life in exchange for making humans rich, but doesn’t get a ton of benefit otherwise. Colonists and colonizers don’t have to kill each other off—as long as colonizers get everything they want without killing. The kill-or-be-killed logic of The Blob is not so much abandoned as provisionally put aside, until the moment when the Horta decide they want to control their own planet, or, perhaps, demand a share of the profits. If that should ever happen, you can easily imagine the miners calling the Enterprise back to put down the Horta Liberation Movement with sweeping, ruthless force.


So what would happen if the Blob fought the Horta? Maybe the sensitive, intelligent Horta could figure out a way to communicate the sort-of-similar Blob. They could compare acid formulas and commiserate about those tasty but irritatingly violent humans. More likely, though, the mindless, ever-growing jelly would just eat its counterpart. The Horta is lovable, but the logic of imperialism is that there can be only one Blob.

Devils In The Dark

In this corner! A shapeless alien mass that dissolves everything it touches! And in that corner…another shapeless alien mass that dissolves everything it touches! Yep, this monster battle features two dueling acidic masses. May the best monster murder lump win!


Some nine years after The Blob’s release in 1958, Star Trek more or less stole its malevolent amorphous antagonist wholesale. The 1967 first-season episode, “The Devil in the Dark” is set on a pergium mining colony where more than 50 miners have been murdered. The culprit is a mysterious (ahem) blob. Said blob is impervious to phaser fire, and burns humans to ash, leaving behind only fragments of bones and teeth. Eventually, the miners figure out that their nemesis is a Horta—a silicon-based creature that secretes a powerful acid and can move through rock like humans move through air.


The Horta is similar to the Blob in murderousness and to some extent in shapelessness. Still, there are important differences. The Horta is less jelly than a mound. Thanks to an inventive special effects team with a limited budget, it looks like a roughly human-sized mottled red-brown rocky heap with some fuzzy tendrils. It doesn’t ooze like the blob, but shuffles. It’s kind of cute, in a fearsome featureless alien way.


The Horta isn’t just more adorable than the Blob. It’s also a lot more intelligent. Though the miners think that the Horta is a monster or animal at first, it quickly becomes clear that it’s sentient. Shortly after our heroes from the starship Enterprise land on the planet, the Horta steals the miner’s main circulating pump, the one key piece of equipment that keeps the planet oxygenated. Without it, humans have a short timeline to evacuate or die.


The episode’s climax is when Mr. Spock, the ship’s alien Vulcan science-officer, mind-melds to create a telepathic link with the Horta. He discovers that the Horta is a peaceful creature; it only became violent because the miners broke into its birthing chamber and inadvertently destroyed thousands of its circular, silicon eggs. The “devil” in the dark is not the Horta, but the rampaging human colonists, committing unwitting genocide. When the miners realize their error, they agree to stop destroying eggs, and the Horta returns the pump. It and its children also agree to use their amazing burrowing abilities to help find more mineral wealth. Happy humans, happy Hortas.


Critics have argued about whether The Blob is meant as a Cold War analogy. But whether or not the red space invader is supposed to be a Communist threat, it’s clear that the movie sees cross-species relations as a zero-sum game. The Blob can’t be reasoned with or even spoken to; it just blorps and expands and eats. Humans can destroy the Blob or it will destroy them. There’s no third option.

Star Trek, though, filmed during the US war in Vietnam, was, consciously, looking for other solutions to alien contact. The mining base is explicitly a colonial outpost—it’s set up to extract minerals and wealth from foreign territory. At first, the consequence of imperialism is conflict and demands for genocide; the Horta is the last of its kind, and the humans are trying to eliminate it in order to get its gold. But thanks to Spock’s skills at translation, colonizer and colonized come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. They can live together and everyone can thrive. “The Horta aren’t bad once you get used to their appearance,” one miner comments. To which Spock replies that the Horta expressed a similar thought. “She found humanoid appearance revolting, but she thought she could get used to them.”

Of course, the Horta/Human détente isn’t exactly equal. The Horta is no better off than it was before humans came. It gets to live its life in exchange for making humans rich, but doesn’t get a ton of benefit otherwise. Colonists and colonizers don’t have to kill each other off—as long as colonizers get everything they want without killing. The kill-or-be-killed logic of The Blob is not so much abandoned as provisionally put aside, until the moment when the Horta decide they want to control their own planet, or, perhaps, demand a share of the profits. If that should ever happen, you can easily imagine the miners calling the Enterprise back to put down the Horta Liberation Movement with sweeping, ruthless force.


So what would happen if the Blob fought the Horta? Maybe the sensitive, intelligent Horta could figure out a way to communicate the sort-of-similar Blob. They could compare acid formulas and commiserate about those tasty but irritatingly violent humans. More likely, though, the mindless, ever-growing jelly would just eat its counterpart. The Horta is lovable, but the logic of imperialism is that there can be only one Blob.

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