Pros: Fantastic story, great direction and cinematography, solid performances from an ensemble cast, a memorably haunting score, and some of the best gore of all time
Cons: It would be nice if the characters were slightly more developed
John Carpenter’s The Thing: Universal Pictures Rating: USA: R/UK: 18/ Australia: R
"This thing doesn’t want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It’ll fight if it has to but it’s vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies—nobody left to kill it—and then its won."—MacReady, The Thing
Here’s yet another example of why I often find genre film remakes infinitely better than sequels.
Based on John W. Campbell’s short novella "Who Goes There?" and the 1951 Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby film The Thing, John Carpenter’s (Halloween, Prince of Darkness, Escape From New York) The Thing is an intense, claustrophobic, and unsettling exercise in visceral horror—a film guaranteed to disturb even the most jaded genre fan.
Mac MacReady (Kurt Russell: Escape From New York, Big Trouble in Little China) and a small group of scientists/workers are stationed at a remote Antarctic research station. After a stray dog wanders into camp (being chased by what appears to be a stir-crazy group of Norwegians) strange things start happening. The dog isn’t really a dog, but rather an alien who crash landed here hundreds of thousands of years ago—an alien with the ability to imitate any life form it comes into contact with…including the men populating the research station. What ensues is a taut and frightening film as Russell and company try and determine who is really human and who has become a thing.
My plot synopsis doesn’t really do the film justice, but I don’t want to tell you anything more than what is necessary to get you interested. The Thing is one of those genre films that is best when it’s experienced—a simple verbal retelling will never manage to adequately capture the mood of Carpenter’s vision, nor the terror inherent in the situation. No, for the full effect, you’ve got to see the film.
The Thing opens with one of the most impressive and menacing sequences in recent film history—a Norwegian helicopter chases a Husky across an icy plain while one of the men on board tries to shoot the dog. We don’t know why the men are chasing the dog, and despite the beauty of the snow covered land, we can’t help but feel a sense of dread. Carpenter takes this simple image and infuses it with an almost palpable sense of foreboding—one that’s so strong that we find ourselves hoping the Norwegians do kill the Husky, because there’s something that’s just not right. We can’t put our finger on what it is, but we know this instinctively.
This feeling, a belief that something’s amiss just beneath the surface, is one of the driving forces in the film. Once we realize that we’re dealing with an alien who can become anything it comes into contact with, we’re always on guard—just like the characters themselves—watching everyone with a great deal of suspicion and always looking for what lurks just outside the range of our normal perceptions. This is perhaps the film’s greatest strength—that for an hour and forty plus minutes, it draws the viewer into its world—an isolated and desolate place—and makes us just as paranoid as the people who populate the film. We trust MacReady because, despite his flaws, he seems the most human of the bunch—but even that might be a mistake as we’re led to suspect everyone at various points in the film.
Carpenter’s direction is really incredible, probably even more impressive than his work on Halloween. Working with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Dean Cundey (who, for my money, is one of the best cinematographers working in Hollywood today) Carpenter manages to fill every frame of the film with a claustrophobic sense of dread. Even the shots of the wide-open snowfields seem to close in on you as they run on for miles with no change at all. The two also manage to perfectly capture the growing sense of paranoia amongst the crew—never having to actually tell us that no one trusts anyone (although they do, at one point), but instead making it brutally apparent in the fleeting looks the camera catches on the actors’ faces.
The actors themselves are a big part of why the film works as well. While Russell is the bonafide star (playing yet another one of Carpenter’s cool anti-heroes ala Jack Burton and Snake Plissken), this is really an ensemble piece. Wilford Brimley, Charles Hallahan, Keith David, and Richard Dysart all turn in credible performances, as does the rest of the cast. There are no women in this film, which makes for an interesting dynamic—there’s no need for the cliched love story, and there are no sexual politics to deal with…just men trying to kill something that they really can’t even comprehend.
And while the characters themselves are at least somewhat two-dimensional, they’re not the walking cliches that generally populate this kind of film. Unlike Ridley Scott’s Alien (which this film is often compared to), no one in The Thing does anything inherently stupid. Yeah, Russell and company do just about everything the wrong way, but it’s always justified and their course of action generally makes sense—meaning they never do anything so outlandishly dumb that it was obviously designed to simply help the plot along.
The film boasts some incredibly tense scenes, including the most infamous one where MacReady tests all the survivor’s blood. Mac has everyone tied to chairs as he takes a blood sample from each person. Since the thing has a very primal survival instinct, the blood should react if threatened—which Mac intends to do by sticking a heated wire in each sample. The scene plays out a bit differently than you’d expect, but still gives you quite a jolt when you reach the gruesome payoff.
And speaking of gruesome…The Thing has the distinction of being one of the most grossly disgusting studio pictures of all time. Rob Bottin (The Howling) handled much of the film’s elaborate gore FX. This film is clearly Bottin’s masterwork, as he pulls out all the stops in order to gross out the viewer. A dog’s head peels open, a chest opens like a vice then clamps closed on a doctor’s wrists—amputating them in the process, a head rips off, pulls itself along by the tongue, then grows spider-legs and so on and so on. Bottin spent over a year working on the gore FX for the film…a task that would place him in the hospital with a case of exhaustion after the end of the shoot. Still, it’s some of the most impressive gore work I’ve ever seen—and shows why CGI will never replace latex and Karo syrup for truly gruesome FX work.
Carpenter didn’t only use Bottin’s gore FX for the film, though. A plethora of different kinds of special FX were used for The Thing, including miniatures, matte paintings, and even some stop motion animation (which wasn’t used, but was commissioned—Carpenter thought the end result looked too much like stop motion animation).
Ennio Morricone (The Stendhal Syndrome, Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom) serves up a wonderful score. Carpenter normally scores his own films (and does so quite effectively) but he hands the duties over here with impressive results. The soundtrack is very provocative and intensely unsettling, with a really simplistic pattern of notes used to maximum effect.
The Thing has been released as a collector’s edition DVD with a ton of extras including an eighty-minute documentary, a commentary track with Carpenter and Russell, outtakes, deleted scenes, and more. The picture and sound are fantastic as well, making this one of the must own DVD titles available. Honestly, this is single-handedly the most impressive DVD I’ve ever seen.
Unfortunately, when The Thing was released in the summer of 1982, it faded quickly at the box office. Audiences were far more enamored with the cute and cuddly E.T. than they were with a shape-shifting monster who had the ability to become one of us. Luckily, the film has managed to develop a cult following over the years thanks to home video. The movie features one of the most nihilistically downbeat endings I’ve ever seen (and if you saw the TV version a few years back, you didn’t see the real ending) but it fits with the tone of the film. If you’ve never seen The Thing, what are you waiting for? This film is one of the greatest cult horror films of all time—one that deserves a permanent home in any genre fan’s video library.
John Carpenter’s The Thing gets my highest recommendation.
Based on both the short story by John W. Campbell Jr. and the 1951 film produced by Howard Hawks THE THING is John Carpenter's stunning masterpiece of...More at Family Video
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