Incredible Shrinking Man

Born in New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, Richard Matheson made his professional writing debut in 1950 when his short story "Born of Man and Woman" appeared in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction". He broke into films in 1956, adapting his novel "The Shrinking Man" for the big-screen.
Since then he has written some of the greatest genre fiction of our time, with successful turns on tv ( the Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Night Stalker, Star Trek and Ghost Story ), as well as the cinema ( Stir of Echoes, Twilight Zone the movie, The Devil Rides Out and House of Usher ). His novel "I am Legend" has been filmed for the big screen 3 times ( four if you count "I am Omega" ), with a rumoured prequel now also on the way.
The plot to "Shrinking Man" is simple: after being exposed to a mysterious, possibly radioactive mist, Scott Carey finds he is slowly but inexorably diminishing in size. His pride, job, marriage and, finally, his very life are threatened as his relation to the world about him changes daily. The huge sets and props ( reminiscent of 70's tv classic Land of the Giants, but appearing about 20 years before it ), certainly provide excitement, but it is the strange for it's time script, a piece of almost philosophical whimsy, that supplies the real power to this film.

Modern man is forced to evaluate his complacency, and instead drift back to another time, surviving only by his wits and shear force of will. Once forced back to almost primitive levels of survival, and dwarfed by almost everything around him, Scott Carey has to develop a new understanding of the world, and in doing so finally discovers peace and meaning in the realization that everything in the cosmos, however small or insignificant, has its own place and worth. In his narration Scott says that he no longer hates the spider who has been threatening him during his imprisonment in the cellar. He understands that it has as much right to survive as he has. In Transcendental terms, he is saying that existence is neither good nor evil, it simply "is." The question that must be asked though, is that do people in California really have tarantulas in their cellars? A wonderful film. Certainly one of the best of it's time, and a strange message to come from 1950's America. Finally, in a move that I'm sure will impress no one, it appears that Shrinking Man is now also being remade. Unfortunately for us all, it's as a vehicle for Eddie Murphy, with a tentative 2010 release... sigh.