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"Do you think that Thing wanted to be an animal? No dog is gonna make it a thousand miles through the cold! You don't understand! That Thing WANTED TO BE US!!"
The Method pays off sometimes. I've seen The Thing a dozen times since it is a Core Text in any horror nerd's education. But until this month, I had never seen the 1951 The Thing from Another World. I never noticed how of that original movie was referenced thirty years later by John Carpenter. Flamethrowers, dogs, mad scientists, it's all here. This is a remake that stages itself like a sequel in interesting ways. The footage of the Norwegians standing in a circle around the crashed ship is a direct reaction of a Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks shot. We see the block of ice which was torn open from the original movie. Only there are no brave men telling the world to watch the skies. In this Thing, the monster won.
This is the third time that John W. Campbell's novella Who Goes There? has been adapted to the screen. I'm not sure if Carpenter was aware of Horror Express, but he also wanted to bring a more Agatha Christie mystery element to his version. The Thing is the most faithful adaptation of the source material, set in the same Antarctic setting. Most character names are right from the text: Blair, Clark, Copper, Garry, McReady. From Campbell he got the ideas for a blood test and the goofy spaceship hidden under Blair's cabin.
Let's put the body horror and special effects aside for now. The Thing is a landmark movie, don't worry, I'll tell you about the juicy and squishy reasons why it is so well-remembered.
The big change Carpenter brings to the material is his vibes. The 1979 film Alien, itself heavily inspired by The Thing from Another World, also has a dirty working class vibe. The Thing is one of the few films with an all-male cast and for good reason. These are not men for romance. They're not handsome, there is not much comradery. They're cast-aways. Nobody mentions a family or anything waiting for them back home, or even much hurry to get there. This station is like a men's club, severely divorced energies. The main concern seems to be the battle against boredom. We see VHS tapes, chess computers, arcade machines, pool tables, dope, and lots and lots of alcohol. McReady (Kurt Russell) either has some Scotch in his hand in every scene or is openly wishing to get back to his cabin to drink more Scotch.
There is a large cast. There are some character actors who stand out, but many guys are just here, without too many quirks. Still most of the guys have their "thing". Nauls (T.K. Carter) roller skates and listens to music too loud, Palmer (David Clennon) smokes a lot of weed and believes alien conspiracy theories, Childs (Keith David) is a hot head, Fuchs (Joel Polis) is bookish, etc. (Btw, Fuchs has no relation to this blogger.) Still, it is very easy to lose track of just who is who and what was where. There are Youtube videos dissecting this film scene for scene to find out who was infected when, ultimately all that precision does not matter. The Agatha Christie mystery breaks down when the killer can be anybody at any time, which is made profound by the ending, but we'll get there in a minute.
One of the big shifts from the '51 movie is how the scientist shifts. Typically, these characters have been the cold, analytical types, the ones whose souls most connect with the aliens. Blair (Wilford Brimley) instead saves the day by causing so much chaos. He's seemingly mild-mannered until the terrible realization hits him of just what has come to their station this winter. His PC magics up some calculation that the Thing will infect the entire world in just weeks. And then Blair explodes in violence, cutting off the crew as systematically as Jack Torrance cuts off Wendy and Danny in The Shining. Blair understands before anybody that he's in an Alien movie, they might all have to die to keep the alien away from the Earth. Brimley is a surprisingly quick for such an older and large gentleman, and his rampage is iconic.
Later though, after Blair is sequestered away in a rather roomy tool shed, he's suddenly meek. "I want to go back inside" he tells McReady. The real Blair had a noose tied up. It is clearly in frame with Brimley's face through the window. Blair knew exactly how little hope there was. Whatever is talking to McReady now about being "alright now" is not the same man.
Okay, so now the gooey parts. Get hype, boys. Rob Bottin does the special effects for The Thing, which are a work of art. The very first creature we see is a sculpt found at the Norwegian base of two human heads merging together, screaming together. It is like a horror painting, something out of Goya or Ilya Repin, these lurid colors and arch twisted gesture frozen in time. Reports say that Bottin drove himself sick over the year he spent working on the effects for The Thing. The more impressive fact is that he was only twenty-one at the time. The Thing imagines a whole new kind of alien: one that does not merely body snatch humans but amalgamates them. These are new fantastic forms of life, fusions of random parts of human, spider, dog, and some kind of flower. The alien from The Quatermass Xperiment had similar abilities but we never saw how "creative" it could be. Summoning jaws out of stomachs or growing legs out of a decapitated head.
The Thing is a new frontier for cosmic horror cinema. Lovecraft could write about these unspeakable things from beyond the void, but The Thing actually does depict nightmares of a universe gone mad. This is an infection, a violation of the flesh. It is one thing to be replaced by an alien, to have your humanity erased, it is something worse to be made into a limb of it, becoming just a part of its vast arsenals of depravities.
Also, the ending is great. For how different and terrible The Thing is depicted, we end with the base destroyed, all the monsters slain, and just two men freezing to death in the snow. Of course, there's a bottle of scotch. McReady and Childs are the last ones left, with Childs' story being untrustworthy, but also, we cannot know what's happened to McReady between cuts. Maybe they're both human, maybe one is an alien, maybe both are aliens and there's no point in transforming anymore. The paranoia and mystery has ended with a bleak detente.
The reception of The Thing in 1981 was not good. The reviews were bad, the audiences did not show up, the movie barely made back its budget. The Thing would gain a cult following, and today calling that fanbase merely a "cult" is to underplay it. This sits with Alien as one of the all-timers of beloved movies in this genre. Today, in a world where our ideas of horror have been so reshapened that The Thing is fundamental to our filmic ideology, we can never take ourselves back to 1981 to understand those audiences. They might as well be Ancient Mesopotamians, those people do not share our culture.
Carpenter never made a sequel, but the Fangoria crowd must have loved this movie all through the Eighties. Things like From Beyond, The Blob, and Society owe a lot to The Thing for the ground it broke. There was a video game sequel made in 2002 for Xbox and PlayStation 2 which was ambitious failure at least. A prequel was made in 2011 showing the events of the Norwegians before this movie. I've seen it, the effects are not even the problem, the movie is just not interesting. They made The Thing again but worse. That's the worst kind of sequel. The Thing knew how to be a great remake of a classic, and the 2011 version did not.
Next time: Maybe this movie wasn't quite gross enough, you know? We can get so much worse in Xtro.
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