tries to protect West. An infuriated West kills the security guards and stumbles away. After collapsing against the side of a building, he slowly, and completely, melts away. The next morning, a janitor finds his gory remains and casually mops them into a garbage can. Enthusiastic radio reports announce the next crewed mission to Saturn. Cast Production WritingThe Incredible Melting Man was written and directed by filmmaker William Sachs. The idea for the film came to him when his mother, working in the office of a spray paint company, showed him "gooey stuff" which was used as a basis for spray paint and jokingly suggested that he should do a film featuring that material. During writing, Sachs was influenced by The Night of the Living Dead and wanted to give the film a 1950s horror film feeling. But the final film, with its structure changed by the producers in post-production, has been described by some sources – including the film magazine Cinefantastique and the 1995 book Cult Science Fiction Films – as a remake of First Man into Space (1959), another film about an astronaut who becomes a monster after an accident in space. Science fiction film historian Gene Wright suggested that the final film was heavily influenced by The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), a British horror film about an astronaut who begins mutating into an alien organism after a spaceflight. Sachs, however, had never seen either of those films, and his original screenplay had a very different structure. He had originally written the script for The Incredible Melting Man as a parody of horror films. According to Michael Adams, a film reviewer who interviewed Sachs, this was the reason that the film mixed horror with comedic moments, such as when Steve West's detached ear gets stuck on a tree, and when a janitor sweeps West's melted body into a garbage can at the end of the film. Adams claims that this explains several comedic lines of dialogue otherwise inconsistent with the rest of the film, including one moment when homeless men notice the melting West and say to each other, "You think we've got trouble, look at that dude". In Sachs' original version, the film opened with the wide-angle shot of the nurse running through the hallway; this would not have been in slow motion, unlike the final film, where the producers played it back slowed down. Only later would