The Thing (1982) - film review

In 1982, the staff of an American Antarctic research station are alerted by a Norwegian helicopter pursuing an Alaskan dog across the wintry terrain.  The helicopter’s crew are killed in the ensuing confusion, but the dog survives and is taken into the base by its unsuspecting American saviours.   Eager to discover why the Norwegians went berserk, pilot MacReady and a fellow crewmember fly out to their base, to find it in ruins.  The entire crew of the Norwegian base are dead, but the most chilling discovery is the charred remains of a hideous alien creature.  Back at the American base, the stray dog undergoes a horrific transformation and starts to assimilate the crew’s sled dogs.  The base’s senior scientist Dr Blair is the first to realise the terrifying truth.  Before they were wiped out, the Norwegian team exhumed an extra-terrestrial being that had been buried in the Antarctic wastes for thousands of years.  Once revived, the creature immediately began absorbing all the humans it came into contact with. Worse, it has the ability to transform itself into a perfect likeness of the thing it absorbs.  Who knows how many of the American crew have already been taken over...

John Carpenter’s reputation as the master of the modern American horror film rests largely on his influential 1978 slasher movie Halloween but a far more intense and frightening horror experience is offered by his subsequent sci-fi thriller, The Thing.  The film is based on John W. Campbell Jr’s story Who Goes There? which had previously been adapted as The Thing from Another World (1951) by Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks, a classic of the B-movie sci-fi genre.  When it was first screened, Carpenter’s film was panned by the critics, who generally found the film repugnant and shallow.  Like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, released the same year, The Thing was ahead of its time and is now considered far more favourably, widely regarded as a seminal work in its genre.  A prequel to the film, also titled The Thing, has recently been made by Dutch director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., and is scheduled to be released in 2011.  

The Thing was John Carpenter’s first experience of working for a major Hollywood studio (Universal Pictures), and the director made full use of this opportunity to push the boundaries of film horror as far as he could.  A tenth of the ample fifteen million dollar budget was given up to its groundbreaking special effects, most of which were created by the effects wizard Rob Bottin.  Even by today’s standards, the alien transformation sequences in The Thing are mind-blowing (and stomach churning) in their sheer visceral realism, gruesome enough to make you want to spew up your dinner, lunch and breakfast but so fascinating that you cannot avert your gaze for a split second.   Watching a rabbit being skinned and its internal organs pulverised in a food blender is nothing compared with the grisly sights that this film offers.  This surfeit of sheer visceral nastiness is presumably what so offended the critics and the audiences on its first release.  Back in the early ’80s, mainstream cinema audiences preferred a more fluffy bunny depiction of aliens, such as that offered by Steven Spielberg in E.T. (1982).  The alternative, Carpenter’s nihilistic vision of death by organ squelching absorption, was somewhat less appealing.  How times have changed.  Today, cute little E.T. wouldn’t even be offered a short-stay visa.  (He’d more likely end up in the food blender).  

Whilst The Thing owes its notoriety to its gory special effects, these are not what make it such a disturbing and compelling film.  Carpenter’s forte is in creating atmosphere and slowly ratcheting up the tension, drawing us into a dark and oppressive world in which we feel the gut-wrenching fear and anticipation of his protagonists as they fall under the shadow of a seemingly insuperable enemy.  What makes The Thing particularly suspenseful is the realisation that any one of the human protagonists may be the killer, having been already taken over by the shape-changing alien.  Think of it as Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Ten Little Indians.   There are some obvious similarities with Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) - each is a grim sci-fi variation on the Old Dark House idea - but Carpenter’s film offers a somewhat more convincing and therefore more chilling study in the psychology of terror.   The real threat that faces the crew of the Antarctic research base is not some hideous flesh absorbing alien, but the paranoia that overtakes them as they discover they can no longer trust one another, a frenzy of hysteria which makes the alien’s job that much easier.  There is a moral of sorts here, maybe.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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