John Carpenter's "Thing" Is No "Halloween"

Rating: 8/10 (20 October 2009)

The man who showed the world how scary a movie he could make with nothing more than a shoestring budget ("Halloween" in 1978) demonstrates that less can be more when it comes to making a horror movie that will truly scare you.
John Carpenter gets quite a bit more money to throw at the screen and uses it to create all kinds of nifty makeup and creature effects in his 1982 cult classic "The Thing," but it's the movie's quiet early scenes, before anything much is actually happening, that are the most unsettling.
"The Thing" isn't exactly a remake of the 1951 classic "The Thing from Another Planet," though it shares the source material of that film. It's a reinvention and is largely better than the earlier version. Kurt Russell and a group of scientists working at the North Pole become prey to a shape-shifting alien that has the ability to look just like any one of them, and the real tension in the film comes from the mens' increasing inability to trust one another -- after all, who's an alien and who isn't? This adds an effective punch of psychological complexity that was missing from the 1950s version, which presented itself as a straight-up monster movie. In John Carpenter's version, the paranoia and claustrophobia that develops from being trapped in your own worst nightmare are as scary as any of the oogie-boogies running around in the snow.
But the film relies too much on its gross-out effects, which no doubt looked state-of-the-art in 1982, but which look silly and dated now. Carpenter didn't take to heart the lesson he taught audiences in 1978 -- that a person's imagination is going to cook up something ten times scarier than anything a filmmaker can actually show you on screen.
This is a worthy addition to the horror canon, but its quality has been overrated by fanboys.
Grade: A-