The Swiss Army knife of what is horrifying

Rating: Null/10 (30 November 2000)

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** When I was a young lad still not of age to get into an R-rated movie, I used to look longingly at the lobby posters on my way into a PG film (this was in the days before PG-13, folks) and dream of better things. One such poster I lingered over was for John Carpenter's re-make of the 1951 black and white sci-fi flick The Thing.
For anyone who remembers said poster (or has even seen the cover art on the videocassette box, for that matter), the picture is dominated by a looming figure whose face is obscured by a burst of crystallized light. The figure is clad in a bulky snowsuit and gloves, reaching out towards the viewer. Friends, that poster scared the holy beejezus out of me. Come to think of it, that may be the only poster that ever gave me such a bad case of the creeps.
As for the film itself, talk about whetting your whistle: On a brisk Antarctica morning at National Science Foundation Outpost #31, the 12-man resident staff are surprised to see a sled dog being chased into their camp by a helicopter-borne pack of frostbitten, raving Norwegians, one of whom is plonking away at it with a high-powered rifle. The majority of this hunting expedition manage to blow themselves up (two lessons learned: one, short-timed explosives and deep, powdery snow don't mix; two: I don't know what word that Norwegian used just before the big boom, but I'm pretty sure it was a good bit stronger than "drat") and the one remaining gets shot through the eye by the camp commander Garry. Garry, we will find, is always ready to go for the head shot.
After a brief caucus, helicopter pilot MacReady and Doc Copper tool on out to the Norwegian base to scout for survivors of the presumed outbreak of cabin fever. What they find instead is a camp full of holes, ice and snow, with everyone dead by suicide or smoldering on a burn heap out back. While sifting through the scattered scientific knickknacks, they also happen across a large block of ice with a likewise large hole in it (watch for the precariously swinging icicle - I didn't know they did that).
The Norwegian's video logs lead the Americans to an excavation site near their own camp. The unfortunate Europeans apparently had uncovered a huge space ship buried for some hundred thousand years (I'm going to be charitable and only refer to it here as a "flying saucer", despite its perfect dinner plate shape) with the...er, top hatch open. A few dozen yards away is a rectangular hole in the ground more or less corresponding with the size of the block of ice at the shattered camp.
Back at home base, the dog that narrowly escaped becoming a bullet caddie at the hands of the Norwegians is put into the kennel with the other huskies. Once the nosy humans have departed, though, the newcomer begins to noisily and juicily (there really isn't any other way to put it) shed its skin and manhandle its more terrestrial counterparts. Hearing the howls coming from the kennel, MacReady sounds the alarm (smashing the glass facing with a can of Budweiser, how cool is that?). He and Garry pump a few dozen rounds into the mutating visitor before Childs flash-fries it with a flame thrower.
On a side note here, I wonder how many Antarctic research stations come with flamethowers. It's not exactly like you can de-ice your windshield with them. I think Alan Dean Forester's book touches on this point, but it's been so long since I've read it, I can't be sure.
With a heavy assist from MaCReady (pretty good, considering his penchant for the sauce), our boys put two and two together. The Norwegians had found an alien frozen in the ice, carted it back to their camp and thawed it out. The Thing (as it is unofficially dubbed) thaws out and wreaks the expected amount of havoc before beating a hasty retreat across the frozen wasteland. Enter our heroes.
The Thing, Blair hypothesizes, is able to absorb other life forms and reshape its own body to assume the appearance of anything it has ingested. The imitation is perfect and undetectable, at least on the basis of sight alone. As usual, animals are hip to the deception (the other dogs went wild when the newcomer was put into their kennel), but humans aren't so lucky.
Here the paranoia begins to take root. The Thing masquerading as the dog had been wandering around the camp for hours and could have infected any one of the team, perhaps more than one. The men eye each other with increasing suspicion as the disappearances begin. The race begins to find a way of determining who is still human and who is The Thing.
Security in my hometown theater was uncommonly vigorous back in 1982, so I never got the chance to see The Thing on the big screen. Instead, I was inducted via videotape in a basement den at three in the morning with four of my friends glued to the screen. Our nerves has already been raked over the hot coals by a back-to-back viewing of Evil Dead 2 and A Nightmare on Elm Street, somewhere between four and fourteen Cokes on top of no food (we'd spent all our food money on videos like responsible young people). By the time The Thing was over and our host was loading up another Carpenter opus, Prince of Darkness, we were looking at each other much in the same way that Jack Torrance looked at Grady in the washroom of the Overlook in The Shining.
The Thing is a masterwork of suspicion and paranoia. The problem is wilier than suspecting someone of being a pod person. Pod people, we have learned, don't show emotion, while The Thing can imitate emphatic speech, anger, hostility and all the other passionate emotions so as to be undetectable from a human being. The only person you don't suspect is MacReady, and that's only because most of us wouldn't think Kurt Russell would let an alien get the drop on him. But you never know...
The almost choking atmosphere is enriched by the idea of the location (an almost completely cut-off compound in the literal middle of nowhere) and the location itself. Carpenter includes many pointedly lingering shots of empty, poorly-lit hallways, giving an impression of both the vulnerability of the camp's inhabitants and the million or so hiding places available to the camp's invader.
As usual, Carpenter wrote the music for the film. This is a hit-or-miss practice for him, and here it is dead on the mark. The thudding, simplistic soundtrack is a perfect match for the increasing sense of dread as the story unfolds.
The acting is so solid as to be almost flawless. No one character is focused on as far as his background, motives, etc. are concerned. The only importance they have is what they contribute to the unfolding events. Carpenter realizes the necessity of this collectively light handling of such a relatively large starring cast (no one can be considered "supporting" here) and he manipulates each man's screen time like a professional puppeteer.
The Thing itself is a masterpiece of special effects. I have to pluralize that because it assumes several different shapes, and it's impossible to say which one is its natural form. These shapes vary from something resembling The Aliens Deadly Spawn to The Incredible Melting Man to a kind of demonically mutated Alaskan snow crab (think about that last one when Blair cracks the leg off). There's none of that hokey matting or baldly obvious CGI to be found here; rather, The Thing is all traditional foam latex, animatronics and gallons and gallons of trusty old stage blood.
It's rare to find a film, especially a horror film, that can stand the test of time to resist appearing dated after a number of years. Eighteen years later, the special effects in The Thing still blow me away. I seem to recall that when it premiered, said effects were so gruesome and over-the-top that Time magazine ran a pictorial with some of the choicer scenes. If Time acknowledges a horror flick within its hallowed pages,
you know Carpenter must have struck a chord.
Have no illusions, The Thing is a bloody film. It's not as graphic as some I've seen, but it can still carry its weight in the gore department. Definitely not the film to watch while eating room temperature raspberry pudding. Yet it is one of those movies that buffs refer to as a "must see." It has so much going for it on so many levels that I can overlook the minor stumbling blocks such as Blair's seven-shot revolver, MacReady's incredible disappearing snow hat and a few other inconsequential trivialities. A close scrutiny of this phenomenal blend of science fiction and outright visceral horror is an absolute necessity for anyone interested in either genre.
In way of an afterword, the following are some faces you might remember having seen elsewhere: MacReady: This, in my opinion, has been Kurt Russell's finest role ever, and stomps hell out of both his turns as Snake Plissken in Carpenter's "Escape From..." movies. Norris: Charles Hallahan here sports a slightly bushier head of hair than in Dante's Peak. Copper: Richard Dysart is no stranger to horror films, having starred in the John Frankenheimer flick Prophecy (not The Prophecy, just Prophecy!) as the eeeeeeeeevil paper mill foreman. It must be noted that in 1984 he also contributed his voice to the TV cartoon Challenge of the GoBots. Blair: Wilford Brimley (sans mustache), the guy from the Quaker Oatmeal commercial! Don't think the hot cereal jokes weren't being hooted fast and furious. Oh, yeah, and he was also in The Firm. Childs: Keith David has also given his voice to Spawn on the HBO animated series of the same name, although my favorite role of his was as Louis, the psycho garbage collection supervisor in Men at Work. Clark: Donald Moffat is another one of those actors along the lines of Lance Henrikson who has been in nearly everything, including It, The Believers and Nightmares.