This month at the ReelChange Drive-In we’re getting small. Two great tiny people classics will grace our one glorious screen, but you won’t see a single munchkin or even glimpse the stunted vistas of Tiny Town. The miniature people you will see on this screen are not variations of nature; they are accidents of science.

We kick our shrunken heroes double feature into gear with Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1940 mad scientist benchmark Dr. Cyclops. Boasting an impressive array of effects, Dr. Cyclops pits the title villain against a group of scientists and assistants who have been shrunk to just three apples high after finding out too much about some shady experiments. The title character isn’t actually a one-eyed people eater of any odd color, but a myopic researcher named Dr. Thorkel, played with threatening glee by Albert Dekker.

Schoedsack of course directed the ’33 King Kong, as well as Son of Kong and the technically superior but narratively inferior Mighty Joe Young. Certainly he was a set-piece and effects-focused guy, but the story never takes a turn only to justify an effect. And oh what effects they are, varying from intricate matte work to minutely detailed oversized props to simply masterfully chosen shot composition, and sometimes impressive combinations of more than one of these. Check out the eerie rippling light that he bathes the opening scene in. Those odd greens and blues predate any formal “comic book style” and yet somehow look more like a comic than 90% of comic book movies.

While Cyclops is a pretty straight forward Sci Fi / Adventure picture with little to no intentional subtext, our second feature of the night is one of the greatest metaphor movies in all of Science Fiction. For The Incredible Shrinking Man, genre master Richard Matheson adapted his own novel into a solid screenplay for Creature from the Black Lagoon director Jack Arnold.

The set up is pretty straightforward. After passing though a strange cloud of radiation, an everyman played by Grant Williams slowly begins to get smaller and smaller. First, he must simply deal with clothes that are a little too big and chairs that are a little too high, but eventually he moves into a dollhouse and must do battle with the family cat and a stray tarantula.

As one might guess from the title alone, this 1957 miniature man movie has some interesting subtexts about the diminishment of males in American society, fears of impotency, as well as some great last-man-on-earth-style philosophizing. The end is an odd one, especially for a pulpy picture like this, but it really plays strong and could, in a strange way, also works as a cool double feature with David Fincher’s Fight Club.

Both of these classics can remind us that, even back in the studio era and just after, effects were a big draw, and while they may have gotten a good number of tickets torn, a solid story and even really smart writing, in the case of The Incredible Shrinking Man, means that when the technical innovations are outmoded (and certainly not all of them in either of these pictures are by any means), the films still pack a punch 50 years later and more.

Special late feature: Tod Browning’s The Devil-Doll (1936)