The Thing
I think one of the things I love so much about John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” and why it has such an effect on me, is the setting. I feel as though there aren’t a lot of movies that really utilize snow as a big part of their story, but in “The Thing,” it’s an important part of the narrative Carpenter is telling. Set at an outpost in Antarctica, Carpenter’s alien monster movie amplifies its effect with the isolation our protagonists find themselves in as they uncover disturbing things in the snow.
I did not immediately love “The Thing” when I first watched it several years ago, and even watching it last year, I didn’t quite get up to feeling like it was the great iconic horror film a lot of people find it to be. But it has stuck with me, haunting me, over the past year in the same way my favorite horror movies- both old (“The Shining,” “Cat People”) and new (“The Witch,” “Hereditary”)- have over the years. It comes down to that location, the isolation, the sense of helplessness. Carpenter’s film doesn’t play by traditional horror rules of jump scares and shadow plays that he helped establish in “Halloween,” but that’s why it exerts a powerful hold now.
The film is based on a John W. Campbell novella, which also provided the basis for the Howard Hawks film, “The Thing From Another World” (which Carpenter shows briefly in “Halloween”), and follows an American research team at a remote outpost in Antarctica as they first find themselves confronted by a helicopter from a nearby Norwegian camp shooting at a dog, only to find something more unnatural behind things when they go and investigate. The Norwegian camp is destroyed, its members killed, and the dog, well, feels off. The more they uncover, however, the more the team finds itself outmatched by what they discover.
The screenplay by Bill Lancaster deals in rich, individual personalities etched with swift strokes of development. Kurt Russell’s MacReady is the star of the film, and thus, will be one of those left standing at the end, but he is hardly a hero in the same his Snake Plisskin was in Carpenter’s “Escape From New York.” Like Ripley in “Alien,” MacReady is an average guy just looking to do a job, and finds himself in an extraordinary situation. I think the reason the film doesn’t resonate in quite the same way typical horror films do is because Carpenter and Lancaster were looking more at “Alien” as a point of reference than the horror cinema of the day Carpenter had helped build with “Halloween” and “The Fog”- this is a slow-burn thriller where the real tension comes later. MacReady and Wilford Brimley’s Blair and Keith David’s Childs and everyone else in the cast- including Donald Moffat, Richard Masur, T.K. Carter, David Clennon, Richard Dysart, Charles Hallahan, Peter Maloney, Joel Polis and Thomas G. Waites- are smart, tough men doing scientific research, and battling the elements. True, the first thing we see MacReady do is destroy a computer because he lost to it in a game of chess, but having intelligent people be baffled and unsettled by the alien they encounter is what makes “The Thing” so startlingly effective the second we see it begin to assert itself on the camp.
I watched the Hawks film many years ago, and it was compelling, but I don’t think I had seen “The Thing” yet, and now that it’s inserted itself firmly into my cinematic memory banks, I think I want to watch it again, because I’m curious how much Carpenter pays tribute to it in his film. I do remember that Hawks’s film did not treat the alien the same way Carpenter does, and it’s the work from makeup effects master Rob Bottin (who also did “The Howling”) that really puts “The Thing” into a class by itself. As with the Xenomorphs in “Alien,” Bottin’s creation looks like nothing we’ve ever seen before, and a big part of that is how he creates the creature’s evolution from one host to another, assimilating the characteristics of what it is turning into to blend into its environment. The effects are brutal, but also unforgettable once you really watch the film for the first time. Yes, it’s gory, but not in the same way a slasher film is violent and blood-filled; this is Carpenter and Bottin giving us a glimpse at an unnatural biological organism from the inside out, and how it adapts to the elements. The work is startling and ever-changing, and shot through Dean Cundey’s chilly, and strikingly lit, cinematography with an eye for detail and full intensity of the image. More than just the isolation of the location, this is why the snow-bound setting is so perfect for a story like this, and a master like Carpenter, who has an undervalued visual style that he and Cundey show off perfectly here, is capable of exploiting it beautifully.
If there’s one thing “The Thing” doesn’t do quite as well as it’s that the film is, perhaps, TOO slow of a burn, and doesn’t really build to a pace that is assured to keep our attention high. The story will do that on its own, the characters will engage us fully, and Ennio Morricone’s score- with added compositions by Carpenter- pulls us into the suspense, but I think that’s part of why “The Thing” has felt at arm’s length with me, over the years; it takes its time to get going, and when it gets there, the suspense kind of ebbs and flows with what we’re seeing on-screen. Regardless, it’s difficult to deny that when John Carpenter made “The Thing,” he made it to stand the test of time, and that it does.
