The Definitives
The Thing (1982)
Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Kurt Russell, Keith David, Wilford Brimley, and Richard Masur
Rated: R
Runtime: 109 min.
by Brian Eggert
Entered into
The Definitives:
04/28/2008
Original Release Date:
06/25/1982
Lingering in the darkness brood all those horrible unknowns from where horror movies derive. Such scares retain their power because as much as we try to comprehend them, we fail to understand their form. Their veiled state preserves our fear by retaining anonymity, their presence felt but existing within a vast abyss. Frightening as these hidden creatures may be, they never emerge, allowing their only power over us, albeit significant, to be fear. We remain safe with their refusal to emerge. Should those creatures burst into the light, however, our illusion of safety disappears, and we become susceptible not only to our own fear but to a reality so terrifying our imaginations cannot grasp its fantastical truth.
John Carpenter’s The Thing inhabits those shadowy places inside the human psyche and emerges into frightening actuality to test the limitations of the horror genre; and indeed, it reaches the genre’s pinnacle. The very nature of his film’s alien threat transcends typical horror film tropes, which traditionally occupy either forthright exposure or concealed fear. Breaking boundaries in both thematic and cinematic production, though his film went ignored upon its initial release in 1982 for its shocking portrayals, it has since become a celebrated apex of the genre, and an archetypal philosophical approach to horror filmmaking.
Quietly tucked away in the Antarctic, an American research station finds itself exposed to an alien creature buried in the ice. Based on the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr., first published in pulp magazine Astounding Stories, the story was first adapted in 1951 by producer Howard Hawks into The Thing from Another World. Hawks depicted his movie monster as a large vegetable-man (played by James Arness), a pseudo-Frankenstein construct with defined humanoid features. As often as Carpenter’s film is called a remake, Hawks’ production substantially diverts from the source material, whereas Carpenter remains faithful to Campbell’s intangible cellular foundation for the alien intruder.
Carpenter approaches the alien as an organism able to reproduce human behavior without flaw. Victims are ostensibly digested and replicated by the alien, leaving anyone in the Antarctic camp vulnerable to exposure, thus making everyone a suspected alien. Brought onto the site by what seems to be a wayward Siberian Husky, the Americans witness the alien’s modus operandi hours later when the Husky attempts to absorb their own dogs locked in the station’s kennel. What they see is a creature without a set structure seeking to hide within the form of another. Though they attempt to destroy it with fire, each individual cell is its own organism with the ability to overtake victims. Isolated by miles of harsh wintry terrain, the Americans have no way of knowing who “the thing” has since converted and who remains human.
Their doctor, Blair (Wilford Brimley), calculates the possibilities that some of their crew has been infected, and then potential worldwide contamination; coming to a grim conclusion, he destroys all radios and transportation, hoping to quarantine the threat until extinguished. After subduing the panicky Blair, the camp agrees to lock him away in a storage shed, keeping him separated from the others in fear of his potential exposure when autopsying the alien’s burned remains. Wrought with paranoia, familiar faces become suspect. Anyone could be more than what they seem. Every individual is reduced to just that. As the camp’s pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell) observes, “Trust is a tough thing to come by these days.”
Carpenter paints the camp’s crewmembers, all men, with minimalist yet detailed brushstrokes, developing each, but keeping his distance to retain the film’s utter sense of claustrophobic autophobia. The ensemble includes noted film and theater actors, no extras, just the twelve all-male cast: Russell, Brimley, Keith David, Donald Moffat, Richard Masur, T.K. Carter, Richard Dysart, Charles Hallahan, David Clennon, Peter Maloney, Joel Polis, and Thomas Waites. Adapted from Campbell’s novella by Bill Lancaster (son of actor Burt Lancaster), none of the crew members feel arbitrary, though each contains equally ambiguous mannerisms. The cast became a collective during filming, complete with the natural camaraderie expected from a group of men shooting a horror movie in the deep cold of British Columbia. Their comfortable naturalism translates to the screen. John Polis, the actor playing Fuchs, described the cast as little boys playing with guns and helicopters and monsters, considering the entire experience an exercise in male bonding.
As for their characters, working in the Antarctic requires tolerance for isolation, which in turn requires personalities not sewn into extroverted societal fabric. The film’s crew is civil, quiet, and outwardly remote, choosing their work because seclusion remains a non-issue. During the film’s opening scenes, MacReady plays chess against a vintage computer program, though later scenes depict a game room with a pinball machine, a pool table, and ping pong. MacReady chooses to be alone, even when cut off from the rest of the world. The crew’s distant personalities provide enough doubt that the viewer cannot identify in which body the alien hides. The men exist not as horror movie clichés with background stories or forced character identifiers imbedded into their dialogue—they are Spartan, each almost tangible expressions of simplicity.
Composed by Ennio Morricone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), the film’s discreet music helps further isolate the viewer. With tonal inclusions added by Carpenter in post-production, who often writes the music for his own pictures, the score affixes scenes together without suggesting the presence of a Hollywood production. Steady beats create temperate momentum; the effect recedes into the background, as if the score were an ongoing, percussion-based heartbeat. Score the picture with grandiose notes punctuating every scene with an outside element, and the audience loses their sense of isolation. Indeed, that we barely notice the Morricone-Carpenter score places the viewer within the film’s draining, vacant environment, susceptible to each ensuing shock to emerge from the calm.
Having had the alien’s chameleon potential described to them by Blair, none of the station’s crew grasp the exactness of the monster in their midst. Only after Windows (Thomas Waites) breaks in on the alien consuming Bennings (Peter Maloney) and warns the others, does everyone see the alien’s potential. The group gathers, following “Bennings” outdoors. The creature’s digestion incomplete, “Bennings” looks wholly human, save for his fleshy hands and elongated digits. Encircling what appears to be their former friend, together they witness the horrible possibility behind the alien’s replication process. Who else among them has been turned in the interim since the Husky first arrived?
The alien’s most affront weapon is suspicion, as rampant distrust floods the camp. Someone destroys the camp’s blood stock, fearing its usage in a test to expose the alien(s) among them. As a result, they no longer trust their leader, Garry (Donald Moffat), who had access to the blood stock, positing that he too may have turned. With inoperable radios that are unable to signal for help, their isolation is complete. They dread close proximity to one another, yet are afraid to isolate themselves. We question even the protagonist MacReady, whose humanness becomes suspect when someone finds his torn clothes hidden away, suggesting his exposure and subsequent replication. Turning into a small mob, with their misgivings serving as rationality, MacReady becomes their target to be ostensibly lynched. During the commotion, Norris (Charles Hallahan) drops seemingly of a heart attack, preventing MacReady from having to ignite dynamite to protect himself.
Bottin’s conceptual agenda supports Carpenter’s cinematic thesis in exposing perceptions usually obscured within horror filmmaking, and yet the director retains his ability to involve his audience. Normally hidden behind a mask, with concealing camerawork, or inside a film’s mise-en-scène, blunt horror rarely engages audiences, serving instead as shock value. Horror movies often inhabit pangs of terror, infrequent but sharp, and seldom draw out direct exposure to their device(s). Should a movie destroy those boundaries and embrace an onslaught of ultra-violence (example: Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left), the audience becomes disconnected from the narrative (Craven’s film even used the tagline “It’s only a movie,” so audiences might get through the proceedings by repeating the phrase in their heads, disconnecting themselves from the events onscreen). The Thing’s scares are delivered between scenes about growing paranoia, as to avoid forcing us to leave overexposed and removed from the ongoing narrative due to pervasive gore. Instead, each revealing explosion of alien monstrosity works harmoniously with, versus superior to, the characters’ revolving suspicion.
Carpenter’s first exercise in defined, explicit, visceral horror, The Thing deviates from his earlier work, which by and large contemplates horror via an indefinite metaphysical force, expressing the subject ever so briefly to give audiences a suspenseful glimpse of the unknown. The director’s first few films maintain a composition relying on an either actual or conceptual disguised subject. Whatever the horror-threat may be, it remains obscured and indirect, present but contingent on suspense, as opposed to straightforward, unmasked confrontation.
His 1978 film Halloween, for example, never explains the deep-rooted fear Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) holds for Michael Myers, other than to say he believes his patient, Myers, to be evil. As Loomis explains, “I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes. The devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply… evil.” To be sure, Carpenter refuses to give his audience an explanation as to why Myers kills, rather considers Myers an unknown, faceless embodiment of evil that murders with an unstoppable drive and unexplainable will. Throughout Halloween’s script, co-writers Carpenter and Debra Hill refer to Myers as “The Shape”, an otherwise unidentified incarnation of evil representing something more ethereal than a disturbed mind. Furthermore, Myers hides behind a mask as a static, emotionless figure; his killings are filmed without buckets of blood dumped on his victims. The result is Carpenter’s most successful film commercially, largely due to the “safe” and non-confrontational use of suspense and bloodless violence.
After Halloween, Carpenter and Hill collaborated in 1980 to conceive another horror picture where evil remains hidden, this time under a literal cloud covering its grim possibility. The Fog represents evil by way of its transport, in this case, a thick vapor rolling in from the sea. In the Northern California fishing town of Antonio Bay, radio jockey Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) broadcasts from a lighthouse overlooking the inlet. When she notices an eerily radiant fog drift into shore, she warns her listeners that something subsists inside. Unsure of what, she nonetheless cautions people to stay away, speaking from a dreadful feeling that all is not well. We see shapes, silhouettes moving within the thick haze, only enough to know that Wayne’s intuition was correct. And when Carpenter does reveal the monstrosity within, he obscures it with shadow, offering only a pair of glowing eyes. Though the story explains that the fog comes from cursed lepers wronged by the town’s founders a century ago, Carpenter resists showing us their every dismal detail.
Even Carpenter’s 1981 venture Escape from New York contains an element of the unknown lurking within the title’s now-walled prison city: The Criminal Horde (which also appears in his debut feature Assault on Precinct 13). Ultimate anti-hero Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) cuts a pardon deal to rescue the president from his crashed Air Force One escape pod from the wild New York City criminal underground holding him hostage. Evil becomes not a single force, or Shape, but rather the individual-less crowd, the mass now in control of New York. Organized by The Duke (Isaac Hayes), Plissken and the government on the outside do not fear the host’s leader, rather the anonymous throng of criminality contained within the city’s walls.
The Thing marks a singular shift in John Carpenter’s career paradigm, as prior to this entry his themes purveyed concealed or unknown horror, whereas afterward, they exposed the unknown in graphic physical detail. He simultaneously embraces and guts Ambiguity, allowing its innards to spill out in a pile of frighteningly grotesque atrocity. Those dark places hidden inside the unconscious, represented by mere symbols in Carpenter’s early work, burst from the body in The Thing, literally tearing through flesh when discovered. Arranged between moments of calm and suspicion, when uncovered, Carpenter’s alien realization becomes a skilled special effects construction by Rob Bottin, incredibly real even twenty-five years after the film’s release.
Before the age of glimmeringly artificial computer-generated images, effects wizards built their creations out of foam rubber, latex, corn syrup, fiber glass, chemicals, the aforementioned sexual lubricant, and any number of available materials needed to breathe physical life into their movie monsters. Having apprenticed under makeup guru Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London), Bottin wowed Carpenter with his effects on The Howling and The Fog. His expertise would be drained on this project perfecting various edifices of “the thing” for months upon months. Indeed, his all-consuming task landed him in the hospital with exhaustion. These being his pre-Aliens and Jurassic Park days, Stan Winston’s effects company agreed to complete the film’s memorably grotesque dog assimilation sequence for the indisposed Bottin.
A wonder of makeup and puppet artistry, Bottin conceived the film’s most visually impressive, complicated sequence, which involves the rush to save Norris from his apparent heart attack. In the scene, Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) pumps the unconscious Norris with defibrillation paddles, until all at once the patient’s chest cavity caves in, revealing teeth at its edge. The toothed opening closes down on Copper, played by an armless stunt double, allowing Bottin to show the alien biting off the doctor’s arms. From inside Norris’ torso, a slimy, massive protrusion with a long ribbed neck leading to a second screaming Norris head ruptures upward and clings to an above air duct with crab-like legs. The Norris head, still attached to the torso, waves back and forth slowly, separating so veins pull and stretch and disconnect in a gooey mess onto the floor; its tongue wraps around a chair to drag itself clear of the greater torso, which is blowtorched by MacReady. From Norris’ remaining head, meanwhile, grow stalk-like spider legs and two tentacles on the end of which are eyes; the assemblage attempts to scamper out the door. The crew looks in amazement as Norris’ head creature scuttles away, and then MacReady sets it ablaze.
Bottin’s concept for “the thing” in this sequence illustrates each piece of the alien branching out and defending itself; the whole becomes an indescribable sum of individuals, rather than a single organism hiding within a host. Lit without restraint and shot in detail by Carpenter’s recurrent early-career cinematographer Dean Cudney (The Fog, Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China), the vivid horror realism of Bottin’s creation bursts off the screen, unafraid to expose its explicit, fleshy true colors, unlike other horror movies so dependent on the dark. Carpenter does something revolutionary by photographing the monster without a moderation of light, but simultaneously builds traditionalist suspense by leaving the audience blind to where the alien remains hiding.
As a result, the very next scenes in The Thing weigh heavily on the crew’s emotional uncertainties. With Norris’ transformation scarred in their minds, they look at each other with guarded, suspicious eyes. Who else, they wonder. MacReady develops the idea for the film’s most frightening sequence, one taken directly from Campbell’s novella: MacReady ties down the entire crew, takes blood samples, and exposes their blood to a wire heated by his blowtorch—his theory being that each part of “the thing” has an individual physiology, and when burned will crawl away. Each test involves unbearable suspense; subjects watch MacReady afraid of what their own test might determine, unsure of even their own humanity. Draining his own blood into a Petri dish, MacReady proves his humanness. Upon each negative result, he frees the subject. Listen to the low sounds amid otherwise menacing silence: the hum of the blowtorch heating the wire again, the sizzle of the wire in blood, and the eventual screech of the creature when exposed—sounds on which we cling to (or jump from) under Carpenter’ flawless management.
The Thing emerged in 1982, two weeks after Steven Spielberg’s decisive hit E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial landed in theaters to implant audiences and critics with a sudden syrupy outlook on potential alien life forms visiting earth. Carpenter’s film is the antithesis, suggesting with his alien visitation that an apocalypse hangs in the balance. Indeed, the last few lines of dialogue, which according to Carpenter were written by Kurt Russell, imply that one of the two survivors, MacReady or Childs (Keith David), may be “the thing”. Since Carpenter himself admits “the thing” represents an allegory for whatever the audience chooses, he concurrently suggests the susceptibility and weakness of humankind. “The thing” might be a disease, ignorance, war mongering, or suspicion—any of them could destroy civilization. He avoids playing make-believe by telling us all will be well, or that the threat is vanished—certainly a grim prospect next to taking a magical bike ride with a cheery alien in your basket.
Carpenter (left) frequently refers to The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness as his “Apocalypse Trilogy”, each with a potential end-of-days scenario signifying the vulnerability of the human body, race, or mind. Prince of Darkness sports genuine quantum physics rhetoric to hypothesize that for everything in the universe there exists a mirror reverse, in the film’s case, an anti-God hell-bent on destruction. In the Mouth of Madness, a superb frontal accolade to horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, blurs the line between fantasy and reality, suggesting we create our own reality, thus can destroy it whenever we decide.
After The Thing’s commercial failure (stemming from criticisms that his film was violence pornography), Carpenter’s faith in Hollywood was damaged, leading to his eventual defeatist attitude toward commercial filmmaking. Nevertheless, The Thing is Carpenter’s masterpiece, proven not by critic reactions or its box office haul, but by audience adoration over the years since its release. Achieving enormous success in the home video and television markets out from under the shadow of Speilberg’s giant, it has transcended mere “cult classic” rank into the stratum of horror masterworks like George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and Frank Darabont’s The Mist.
Carpenter’s post-The Thing oeuvre exhibited his genre mechanisms more openly. His movies became less scary; since his horror was rendered without abstraction, it lost the ability to involve the audience beyond the conceptual stage. He moved to pictures primarily dwelling on the exposure of evil from its hidden places, but upon exposure, what is there to be afraid of? Today, he has shown modest enthusiasm for launching new projects, which pains fans starving for more of his rare auteurist horror filmmaking.
The Thing’s brilliance rests on the equilibrium between implied and visceral horror, otherwise incompatible ideas that Carpenter stirs together. Because “the thing” lingers in the darkness of inscrutability with a human guise, we are nearly broken in suspense of its coming. When it arrives, horrifying monster effects manifest the interlaying metaphor externally with profound shape. Escaping into some safe place remains impossible; the dangers are both within and without, forcing us to cross into uncomfortable zones swelling with both transcendental and physical horror most directors would be afraid to explore synchronously. But not John Carpenter.
Recommended reading:
Billson, Anne. The Thing. British Film Institute Modern Classics, BFI Publishing, 1997.
Boulenger, Gilles. John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness. Spakenburg : H.O.M. Vision, 2002.
Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror. Routledge, 1990.
John Carpenter's The Thing: Terror Takes Shape. Dir. Michael Matessino. DVD. Universal, 1998.