Film Review
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.
© James Travers 2010
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.