throughout", one that "straightforward, macabre, and as startlingly original as a vintage Ray Bradbury short story, for all its peaceful and resigned conclusion—opens new vistas of cosmic terror". Bosley Crowther of The New York Times panned the film, writing that "unless a viewer is addicted to freakish ironies, the unlikely spectacle of Mr. Williams losing an inch of height each week, while his wife, Randy Stuart, looks on helplessly, will become tiresome before Universal has emptied its lab of science-fiction clichés." "Brog." of Variety commented that the film was not thoroughly satisfactory, but had enough good qualities, specifically declaring "unfoldment is inclined to slow down on occasion, resulting in flagging interest here and there". The review noted the special effects and cinematography were "visually effective", but that "portions of the background score are overworked", which distracted from the plot. The film was the winner of the first Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1958. Martin Rubin discussed the film in a 1974 issue of Film Comment and compared it to its contemporaries in the genre. He found it did not have the "schoolboy cynicism and moralizing of a Roger Corman film, nor any of the hysteria common to the Red-scare science-fictioners of the Fifties". He felt the story was well-suited to Jack Arnold, noting a "WeIlesian director would have overinflated this film and compromised its sense of the ordinary with shadows and angles, while a more accomplished stylist of almost any other order would have softened it too much—such attitudes are better off in the horror film." Rubin also compared it the other science fiction films Arnold made in the 1950s—The Creature From the Black Lagoon, It Came From Outer Space, Tarantula, Revenge of the Creature, and The Space Children—finding them competitively "interesting in patches", but lacking in comparison to the "unity and clarity" of The Incredible Shrinking Man, which "totally fulfills its central metaphor without being unduly constricted by it". Ian Nathan of Empire referred to the film as a classic of 1950s science fiction films, and noted how the everyday objects found at home are "transformed into a terrifying vertiginous world fraught with peril. A confrontation with a 'giant' spider, impressively realised, as are all the effects, for its day, has become one of the iconic image of the entire era." Tim Lucas declared that the film "remains one of the perfectly realized science fiction films", noting