Some films take a while to find their audiences, and some directors aren't appreciated until they've essentially retired. So it is with the 1982 version of "The Thing" and its director, John Carpenter. Audiences at the time were looking for optimism and affirmation, and were not in the mood for a bleak, paranoid horror thriller set in Antarctica. However, in the years since, "The Thing" has gone from box office bomb to cult favorite to one of the undisputed horror classics.
I want to talk about the special effects up front. Rob Bottin put himself in the hospital for exhaustion due to his extraordinary efforts to bring the creatures of "The Thing" to life. Though initially criticized as too gruesome, his work set the bar for prosthetics and practical effects for the next decade. It's hard to describe film without just eventually reciting a litany of violent horrors, each building upon the last. There's the head that removes itself from a corpse, grows spider leads and runs away. There's the torso that suddenly grows teeth and bites a guy's arms off. Then you've got the blood testing and the dogs and the flamethrower scenes, all of them horrifically spectacular thanks to Bottin and his team. The impact of the monster effects has lessened over time, but the amount of work and effort that went into them is still visible in every bloody frame. One of the many poor decisions that doomed the 2011 remake/prequel of "The Thing" was using CGI effects instead of practical ones.
Much of what makes "The Thing" so effective is its simplicity. You have twelve men in an isolated research outpost who are attacked and killed one by one by an alien being. You barely know anything about them except their last names and occupations, and the monster could be impersonating any of them. Aside from Kurt Russell as the lead, the cast is made up of career character actors, including Keith David, Wilford Brimly, and Charles Hallahan. It's easy to forget they're actors as the bodies pile up and we realize that nobody is safe. John Carpenter was wary of stepping on the toes of the Howard Hawks adaptation of the same material, "The Thing From Another World," so the story was stripped down to the basics, with a focus on the bare mechanics of survival and the paranoia of dealing with the doppelgangers. We are shown where the alien came from, but nearly everything else about it is a mystery. The climate is inhospitable and the monster is clever. The action and suspense are pushed to the forefront, and a happy ending is not in the cards.
Long before I saw "The Thing" I saw its influence on other media. So many movies and shows about doppelgangers, isolated standoffs, implacable contagions, and creepy crawlies have been trying to capture that same sense of dread and disaster. The echoes of "The Thing" are everywhere, from other horror movies like Daniel Espinosa's "Life," to Quentin Tarantino's snowbound western, "The Hateful Eight" - which also borrowed the Ennio Morricone score for "The Thing" for good measure. The gory excess of the alien transformations broke some boundaries, but what really lingered in the cultural consciousness was the nihilism of facing a monster that could only be defeated through the cold obliteration of every living thing we see in the movie. John Carpenter would return to Lovecraftian cosmic horror several times over the course of his career, but never with as much impact.
Carpenter is often described as a genre filmmaker, which is fair, as he gave us classics in several different ones - action-comedy, horror, satire, and science-fiction. If I hadn't written about "The Thing," my next choice would have been "Starman," another film about an alien on Earth that is a complete tonal 180 from "The Thing." Most of his films were dismissed as B-movies and schlock upon initial release, but are well loved decades on. And Carpenter did have his share of hits, helping to ensure that he had a long and fascinating career that included tiny indie projects and major studio films. "The Thing" was one of the studio films, which gave him the resources to create a nightmare vision of grotesquery on a scale that had never been seen before. And frankly, nobody has really matched it since.
What I've Seen - John Carpenter
Dark Star (1974)
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
Halloween (1978)
The Fog (1980)
Escape from New York (1981)
The Thing (1982)
Christine (1983)
Starman (1984)
Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Prince of Darkness (1987)
They Live (1988)
In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
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