Spooky Season Reviews: John Carpenter's The Thing

To say that The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of 1951’s The Thing From Another World, is an ahead-of-its-time masterpiece would be an understatement. Quite frankly, The Thing, if not Carpenter’s finest movie, is his finest film (though They Live and Halloween come close). It is at once a bloody, disgusting (in all the good ways) creature feature and a reflection of Cold War angst (who can we trust, who is the spy?), but also a rollicking trip through the typical horror trope of terror by isolation, taking place, in all places, the Arctic. It reiterates that, when Carpenter was on, there were fewer better at what they did. He could take an overdone concept – a killer stalking a small town, an alien invasion, an alien that can look like one of us, and make it something more, diving into the fears of the zeitgeist while also letting it remain a good horror picture.

            The Thing focuses on an American research team in Antarctica that becomes the prey of a hostile alien released by a Norwegian research team from its icy spaceship prison of presumably thousands of years. Unlike your average Little Green Man, this alien isn’t easy to spot, but can assimilate and assume the form of any living thing it chooses, entering the camp as a sled dog and eventually taking the form of the Americans. The film brilliantly entwines isolation horror – there’s nowhere to run to, our team is surrounded by thousands of miles of inhospitable cold – with cabin fever paranoia, both versions of the film released during flash points of the Cold War. Anyone can be the “thing,” it can look like us, talk like us, act like us. It results in a group of men essentially on lockdown, not knowing who they can trust, resulting in lots of tension and high drama as they hunt for the alien.

            The film, disliked by critics and a box office disappointment upon its release, has become a cult classic and rightfully so. It features special effects that are, pun intended, out of this world, that at the time must have been jaw-dropping to horror aficionados and repulsive to John Q. Public. Because frankly, they are a bit gross, but that is part of the point. More amazing to realize is that every one of these are practical effects, nary a computer-generated image in sight. The results are bloody awful sequences that still hold up to a modern audience.

            Like most Carpenter films, there aren’t a lot of stars in the movie, all the roles are played by good character actors (which is really a silly phrase when you think about it, isn’t it?), the result of which is a solid cast that plays well off each other. Carpenter staple Kurt Russel stars as MacCready, the edgy, typical 80s lead character. He likes his Scotch, he’s good with a gun, and he has a no-nonsense approach that serves him well as he hunts for the thing. The movie also stars the always-good Keith David as Childs, another familiar face to Carpenter fans.

            The true stars of the movie though, are the stark white location, the special effects, and perhaps Carpenter himself. I tend to think Carpenter, when he chose to be, was very adept at dialing in to fears of his time (see They Live) and is a sort of auteur in his own right. While his name will never hold a place next to a Spielberg, Coppola, or Scorsese, he was, and remains, a leading force of genre pictures that could be both entertaining and a little thought-provoking. The Thing is probably the best of them.