Hey, I'm Joel Stein. I want you to close your eyes and imagine a pocket watch.

It's moving from side to side. You're getting very sleepy.

Great. Now that I've hypnotized you against your will, you're going to start liking long-form journalism.

Like so much. You're going to listen to a podcast where the host interviews a writer about their long-form story every week.

I'm that host.

Listen to Story of the Week on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time.

In this episode, I want to discuss a creature from Guillermo D'Ottoro's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a fabulous tales from the Crypt-esque horror anthology series.

In particular, I'll be discussing a creature from The Viewing, the episode directed by Panos Cosmatos.

So, fair warning. Spoilers follow in three, two, one.

In The Viewing, an eccentric and wealthy reckless, played terrifically by veteran actor Peter Weller, invites four strangers, each a stand out in their own field, to his secluded home for a special viewing.

As with such Cosmatos films as Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy, what follows is a beautifully rendered atmospheric slow burn, a journey into the psychotronic.

In short order, all of the characters converge in a luxuriously trippy 1970s din. Weller's Lionel Lasseter urges his guests to indulge in various brain altering substances in order to prepare them for The Viewing.

When the time finally arrives, Lasseter leads them into a special chamber containing an alien monolith, in due course the monolith essentially hatches and an orange ooze emerges.

It forms a pair of feelers or antennae which reach skyward. It unleashes a terrifying psychic attack on those around it and then becomes fluid again, engulfing one of its victims and rising back up as a conglomeration of ooze covered humanoid and twin tentacled slime creature.

This monster then ventures out into the world to better understand it, destroy it, or both its motivations are suitably unknowable.

Now these are just the major details regarding the episode. I can do nothing to capture the visual and sonic weirdness of the piece. You're going to have to watch it for yourself.

But of course the strange entity in this episode led me to wonder how we might interpret it via natural world biology.

Of course the fictitious creature in question is so utterly alien, so amazingly fantastic that we can't expect to find anything too much like it, but at least a couple of ideas emerge.

For starters, in terms of amorphous creatures developing feelers or limbs when needed, we can look to the single-celled organisms, Neklieria, Gluberi.

It makes its home in wet soil and lives a slow-moving life as an amorphous amoeba. But when stressed it grows a pair of flagella, hair like arms or appendages that allow the creature to swim around at greater speeds in something akin to a breaststroke, according to biologist Lillian Fritz Lailin, quoted in a 2010 MPR article on the organism.

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