The Thing (1982)
Rated R
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Score: 5 out of 5
A strong case can, and has, been made that The Thing is a genuine rival to Halloween as John Carpenter's masterpiece, an opinion that Carpenter himself agrees with. It took some time to get to that lofty status, however. In its day, critics dismissed it as a pale imitation of Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi horror classic The Thing from Another World, one that focused on gore at the expense of plot, tension, and character development, with Carpenter referred to as a "pornographer of violence". The average moviegoer wasn't any nicer to it; competition from other, more lighthearted science fiction movies, most notably E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (which came out two weeks prior), ensured its burial at the box office. Its critical and commercial failure caused Carpenter to lose the job of directing Firestarter, with Universal going so far as to buy him out of a multi-film contract rather than risk another flop, an experience that left him bitter with Hollywood for years. However, as with many of Carpenter's '80s films, The Thing found its audience on home video and television, where a new generation was able to look at it with fresh eyes -- and they found a twisted paranoid thriller about a group of men going mad in the face of an inhuman evil, with the gore just being an added bonus. Critical reappraisals soon followed as this generation grew up into film critics and filmmakers in their own right, with many proclaiming it one of the scariest movies ever made, citing it for both its graphic body horror and, more substantially, the sheer, overwhelming, cosmic nature of the foe that its characters face -- what some have described as an almost Lovecraftian tone. Today, it is homaged by movies, TV shows, and video games, it has had a video game sequel and a cinematic prequel, it has been cited as an influence by numerous filmmakers, and at the start of each winter, it is screened at (fittingly enough) the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, together with the 1951 original and the 2011 prequel.
What I'm saying is, it's kind of difficult to add to the sheer volume of literature that's been written about Carpenter's The Thing without just repeating what others have said about it. The Thing is an incredible film, no ifs, ands, or buts. It is a masterpiece of slowly mounting horror even as it shows the monster early on, with the real fear coming from the paranoia among the protagonists as we don't know who, if anybody, to trust. There are scenes in this film that, even having watched them before, still give me the chills, and they have little to do with the grotesque special effects used on the monsters. And speaking of, it needs to be repeated: the special effects in this film are phenomenal showcases of well-made, creative, and disgusting practical work that still hold up to this day and will shock you on a purely visceral level, the appropriate punchlines for the horror that this film builds up to. The Thing truly does deserve the reputation it's built for itself over the years.
Set in Antarctica at the onset of winter, the film opens with a helicopter pursuing a sled dog across the frozen wastes, the passenger trying to shoot it. When the dog arrives at an American research facility that's hunkering down for the winter, the last plane of supplies having departed until spring, the Norwegians aboard the helicopter get into a confrontation with the station's staff, trying in vain to warn them before dying in a gunfight with them. The dog they were chasing, you see, isn't quite a dog, but a shape-shifting alien creature buried in the ice that the Norwegians dug up, only for it to thaw out and kill them; the two aboard the chopper were the last survivors, having burned down their own facility in a futile effort to stop the thing. Now, the monster is loose at the American station, consuming first the other dogs and then the human crew, leaving the rest, led by helicopter pilot R. J. MacReady, wondering who to trust in the face of a foe that can take the form of anybody it's killed.
It's this growing fear of the unknown that forms the heart of the real horror in this film. Despite the film's well-earned reputation as a gorehound's dream, the messy sequences where the Thing assimilates others and takes their form are used surprisingly sparingly, with long sections of the middle of the film going without the Thing ever appearing on screen. Instead, we see the biologist Blair destroy all transport out of the facility in a panicked attempt to stop the Thing from escaping, having figured that, if it ever leaves Antarctica, it will destroy the world. We see the crew come to blows multiple times as they suspect each other of being the Thing in disguise. We see the nail-biting blood test scene, one of the scariest damn things I've ever watched on film. This movie is gory as hell, to be sure, but it does more than just throw blood at the screen to scare the viewer. The gore only comes after a lengthy ratcheting of tension designed to make you fear for the lives of the characters, feel the Antarctic chill of the setting, despair in the hopelessness of the entire situation. When the buildup and the nasty release are combined, the sense is built that these people are going to die, and it is going to be brutal and horrible.
It helps that the characters are people we care about. While Kurt Russell as MacReady and Keith David as Childs get the greatest focus and screen time, this is an ensemble piece through and through, and one that operates on the principle of "show, don't tell". None of the characters are given much of any kind of backstory, but they are given distinct and recognizable personalities such that, after the first act or so, you can look at any of the characters and know their role at the base and how they act. You get the take-charge leaders, the scientists studying the monster so as to find ways to stop it, the panicky ones who lose their shit at the threat they're faced with, and of course, the people that you totally suspect of being the Thing -- and the ones you don't suspect until it's too late. The actors all do great work bringing these characters to life. Russell's MacReady is, together with Snake Plissken from Escape from New York, one of the characters that helped establish him as an action hero, even if he spends much of the film scrambling to stay one step ahead of the Thing. Keith David's Childs is almost a counterpart to him, a more conventional authority figure than MacReady's more roguish one but one who still tries to convey a firm grasp on a situation that he really doesn't have under control. Wilford Brimley was a standout among the supporting cast as Blair, the man who descends into madness at the thought of what he's facing, to the point of putting everybody's survival (his own included) into jeopardy. Together, our protagonists make up a group of fully fleshed-out men that you want to see survive, hence why you're scared that any one of them can be snatched up and consumed by the Thing at any moment, or hell, that any of them could already be the Thing.
Aside from the characters, John Carpenter directed this, and it's about what you'd expect from Carpenter in his prime. Filming in Alaska and British Columbia, he made the Antarctic wastes feel truly remote, conveying that nobody is coming to help the protagonists for a very long time; it's up to them and them alone to make sure that the Thing doesn't last long enough to hitch a ride on the plane come spring. It's a perfect environment for the Thing to hunt in; it's established early on that it can tolerate the cold, going into hibernation when frozen only to come roaring back to life when thawed out, and total incineration is the only way to stop it. This leads the characters, and by extension the viewers, to value the sources of heat within their facility even more than they normally would, and to use flamethrowers as their weapons of choice against the Thing -- which, of course, carry the massive risk of burning down the entire place, as we see happened to the Norwegians before the film began. Carpenter lent the music duties to Ennio Morricone, one of the few times when he didn't do the job himself, and the result is a soundtrack made for a cold, snowy winter night, using a sparse mix of synths and traditional instruments to drive home the feeling of desolation that the movie's deeper horror is built around, while breaking out the heavier strings for the more violent moments. I'm honestly not surprised that unused pieces from the score were used by Quentin Tarantino for The Hateful Eight, because it definitely does the job.
Set in Antarctica at the onset of winter, the film opens with a helicopter pursuing a sled dog across the frozen wastes, the passenger trying to shoot it. When the dog arrives at an American research facility that's hunkering down for the winter, the last plane of supplies having departed until spring, the Norwegians aboard the helicopter get into a confrontation with the station's staff, trying in vain to warn them before dying in a gunfight with them. The dog they were chasing, you see, isn't quite a dog, but a shape-shifting alien creature buried in the ice that the Norwegians dug up, only for it to thaw out and kill them; the two aboard the chopper were the last survivors, having burned down their own facility in a futile effort to stop the thing. Now, the monster is loose at the American station, consuming first the other dogs and then the human crew, leaving the rest, led by helicopter pilot R. J. MacReady, wondering who to trust in the face of a foe that can take the form of anybody it's killed.
It's this growing fear of the unknown that forms the heart of the real horror in this film. Despite the film's well-earned reputation as a gorehound's dream, the messy sequences where the Thing assimilates others and takes their form are used surprisingly sparingly, with long sections of the middle of the film going without the Thing ever appearing on screen. Instead, we see the biologist Blair destroy all transport out of the facility in a panicked attempt to stop the Thing from escaping, having figured that, if it ever leaves Antarctica, it will destroy the world. We see the crew come to blows multiple times as they suspect each other of being the Thing in disguise. We see the nail-biting blood test scene, one of the scariest damn things I've ever watched on film. This movie is gory as hell, to be sure, but it does more than just throw blood at the screen to scare the viewer. The gore only comes after a lengthy ratcheting of tension designed to make you fear for the lives of the characters, feel the Antarctic chill of the setting, despair in the hopelessness of the entire situation. When the buildup and the nasty release are combined, the sense is built that these people are going to die, and it is going to be brutal and horrible.
It helps that the characters are people we care about. While Kurt Russell as MacReady and Keith David as Childs get the greatest focus and screen time, this is an ensemble piece through and through, and one that operates on the principle of "show, don't tell". None of the characters are given much of any kind of backstory, but they are given distinct and recognizable personalities such that, after the first act or so, you can look at any of the characters and know their role at the base and how they act. You get the take-charge leaders, the scientists studying the monster so as to find ways to stop it, the panicky ones who lose their shit at the threat they're faced with, and of course, the people that you totally suspect of being the Thing -- and the ones you don't suspect until it's too late. The actors all do great work bringing these characters to life. Russell's MacReady is, together with Snake Plissken from Escape from New York, one of the characters that helped establish him as an action hero, even if he spends much of the film scrambling to stay one step ahead of the Thing. Keith David's Childs is almost a counterpart to him, a more conventional authority figure than MacReady's more roguish one but one who still tries to convey a firm grasp on a situation that he really doesn't have under control. Wilford Brimley was a standout among the supporting cast as Blair, the man who descends into madness at the thought of what he's facing, to the point of putting everybody's survival (his own included) into jeopardy. Together, our protagonists make up a group of fully fleshed-out men that you want to see survive, hence why you're scared that any one of them can be snatched up and consumed by the Thing at any moment, or hell, that any of them could already be the Thing.
Aside from the characters, John Carpenter directed this, and it's about what you'd expect from Carpenter in his prime. Filming in Alaska and British Columbia, he made the Antarctic wastes feel truly remote, conveying that nobody is coming to help the protagonists for a very long time; it's up to them and them alone to make sure that the Thing doesn't last long enough to hitch a ride on the plane come spring. It's a perfect environment for the Thing to hunt in; it's established early on that it can tolerate the cold, going into hibernation when frozen only to come roaring back to life when thawed out, and total incineration is the only way to stop it. This leads the characters, and by extension the viewers, to value the sources of heat within their facility even more than they normally would, and to use flamethrowers as their weapons of choice against the Thing -- which, of course, carry the massive risk of burning down the entire place, as we see happened to the Norwegians before the film began. Carpenter lent the music duties to Ennio Morricone, one of the few times when he didn't do the job himself, and the result is a soundtrack made for a cold, snowy winter night, using a sparse mix of synths and traditional instruments to drive home the feeling of desolation that the movie's deeper horror is built around, while breaking out the heavier strings for the more violent moments. I'm honestly not surprised that unused pieces from the score were used by Quentin Tarantino for The Hateful Eight, because it definitely does the job.
The Bottom Line
This sci-fi horror nightmare stands today as one of the greatest films of one of the greatest horror filmmakers, and a monument to the peak of his creativity even if it wasn't appreciated in its time. It's a film built for watching during nor'easters, before going on a camping trip, or just if you want to have the shit scared out of you, and the perfect response to anybody who dismisses horror remakes sight unseen. When the tagline promises "the ultimate in alien terror", it's not making an idle threat. See it.
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