Extremely Gory, But Extremely Intelligent

Rating: 8/10 (5 November 2006)

In an era where nearly every great horror film of the 60s and 70s is being remade for audiences weaned on horror flicks of today that are not too terribly good, it is instructive to look back at John Carpenter's 1982 opus THE THING, which itself is a remake--of a childhood favorite of the director's, Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi/horror classic THE THING FROM OUTER SPACE. Although Carpenter's film was not initially that big a box office hit when released in mid-1982, it has since garnered a very large following.
In fact, Carpenter's film is less of a remake of Hawks' film than it is a reworking, as he goes back to the original idea posited by the source material, namely the John W. Campbell story "Who Goes There?", in which a US scientific crew in Antarctica is menaced by a shape-changing alien thawed out from the ice after 100,000 years. Kurt Russell, who had starred for Carpenter in the director's 1979 TV movie ELVIS and the 1981 film ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, heads a cast of stalwart character actors, including Keith David, Donald Moffat, Richard Dysart, and Richard Masur, in this tension-filled exploration of paranoia, as the shape-changing "thing", which first comes to their camp in the form of a guide dog a Norwegian team is trying to kill, takes over each of them one by one. It isn't long before everybody in the camp begins to mistrust his fellow man. The ending of the film, in which Russell and David are the only ones left, has a disturbing and chilling ambiguity akin to the similar codas to both THE BIRDS and STRAW DOGS.
Almost universally, when the subject of THE THING is bought up, the emphasis is on the extremely gory special effects make-up and alien designs created by Rob Bottin, who had worked with Carpenter on the 1980 horror classic THE FOG, and on Joe Dante's 1981 werewolf film THE HOWLING. These effects are indeed quite spectacular and graphic, and even today, they can also be quite stomach-turning. But all of this would make Carpenter's film nothing more than a high-end splatter epic if the direction, the story, and the acting weren't up to snuff; and thankfully, each of them are. When he's not concentrating on the enormously gruesome transformation sequences, Carpenter builds suspense in the same Hitchcock-influenced way that informed his previous films HALLOWEEN and THE FOG, with cinematographer Dean Cundey's prowling camera-work, particularly through the corridors of the station, a significant help. The acting enhances an already-fine screenplay adaptation by Bill Lancaster; and we are also given a taut score by Ennio Morricone, whose work on director Sergio Leone's classic 1960s Italian spaghetti westerns is well known to all, including of course Carpenter himself. THE THING also features additional fine visual effects from Albert Whitlock (who worked on many Hitchcock films, including THE BIRDS), and Roy Arbogast, who worked on CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and JAWS 2.
Carpenter's film was not the success it could have been because Universal chose to release this graphic shocker a mere two weeks after it had released Steven Spielberg's far more family-friendly E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (not surprisingly, critics and audiences at the time favored Spielberg's excellent film over Carpenter's equally excellent but exceedingly different one). Also, most of the horror film box office business in 1982 was going to another Spielberg-produced film, POLTERGEIST. As a result, at a cost of $15 million, THE THING suffered from lack of attention in its time.
Over time, however, many have come to see Carpenter's film for what it is--an extremely gory but extremely intelligent combination of science fiction and horror, done with a great deal of flair and a true understanding of the psychological paranoia at the heart of its story. Though it is still quite gruesome, THE THING should be as much remembered for the skill by which the story is put together as it is for the gory alien designs and make-up effects; for it is the storytelling skill and the suspense that make it so memorable in the final analysis.