The Thing

A Norwegian helicopter chases a dog across a frozen, Antarctic wasteland into an American research station. While trying to shoot the dog, one of the Norwegians hits an American, and is shot dead in turn. A visit to the Norwegian's camp reveals their discovery of an alien spacecraft, trapped in the ice for thousands of years. The sole inhabitant of the craft is a dangerous shape-shifter, a hostile mimic that works its way through the American's dog pound before turning its attention toward larger prey…this is John Carpenter's icy masterpiece, The Thing (1982). 

The Thing (U.S.A.)
Released: June 25, 1982
Director: John Carpenter
Screenplay: Bill Lancaster

Tagline: "Man is the Warmest Place to Hide"

Cast:
Kurt Russell as R.J. MacReady
Wilford Brimley as Dr. Blair
T.K. Carter as Nauls
David Clennon as Palmer
Keith David as Childs

Based on the classic novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, John Carpenter's The Thing sticks much closer to the core narrative of the source material than it's predecessor, The Thing From Another World (1951), which starred James Arness and was produced by the legendary Howard Hawks. This version eliminated the shape-shifting nature of the alien menace and replaced it with a humanoid plant, a so-called "carrot." Carpenter's film looks and acts like the early films of horror guru David Cronenberg--wintry body-morphing with a Shore-style soundtrack. 

The discovery of the ruined and destroyed Norwegian camp, and the record tapes detailing the horrific discovery the scientists made in the ice is only the first tense moment in Carpenter's masterwork of frozen fear. When MacReady and Dr. Copper decide to bring back the inhuman, half-burned corpse of…something…it soon becomes clear that the Norwegians were not driven to insanity, but were right: an alien life force is loose in American Outpost 31. It is a chameleon who can perfectly imitate human beings right down to the minutest memories and speech patterns. Blair quickly calculates that after 27,000 hours from first contact with the civilized world, the entire planet Earth will be infected by the extraterrestrial shape-shifter. MacReady and the others at the base must now determine who is a Thing and who is a man, and arrange for a blood-serum test to help them identify the interloper (or interlopers) hiding in their midst. 

The Thing is the first of what Carpenter refers to as his Apocalypse Trilogy, the other two installments being Prince of Darkness (1987) and In the Mouth of Madness (1995), in which he pits humans against a potentially world-ending malevolent force in a confined space, his famous "siege motif." As with the case of all great horror, The Thing succeeds largely on the basis of the timely dreads it so gruesomely portrays. The alien in the film takes advantage of man's isolation from his fellow man, and of the extremely delicate and vulnerable nature of flesh, our species's link to the outside world.

Will the real "Thing" please stand up?

It's certainly not difficult to interpret the "invasion" by the shape-shifting Thing as an early harbinger of AIDS, a malady whispered about at the time of the film's genesis as a "wasting disease," or "the gay plague." In much more general terms, the film succeeds in raising hackles over the universal fear of contagion, of disease, the body subverted, co-opted, and deformed by an implacable and invisible intruder. If not AIDS, the invader could be cancer, another STD, or even old age itself.

The Thing represents such a quintessential, singular moment in the history of the horror film, all due to the titular monster. Never before had audiences experienced such an elusive, transcendent entity. The Thing is a life form in constant evolution and motion, never pausing, never stopping long enough for the audience to get a grasp of what it actually is. Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) is fascinating in its depiction of the alien life cycle, that cycle that still possesses, ultimately, a recognizable shape and a direction (egg, face-hugger, chest-burster, adult xenomorph), but in contrast, Carpenter's monster does not.

Gazing at the film today, one can see how it capitalizes on the political and social turbulence of the 1970's, from Vietnam to Watergate to the energy crisis to Three Mile Island. These and other events gave rise to a deepening sense of personal, community, and spiritual dissatisfaction in the America of the late 1970's and early 1980's, something that I think occasionally gets termed "the spirit of the times," whatever the hell that means. Regardless, many Americans began to feel deep misgivings about the status quo, and an increasingly untrustworthy, shallow, unjust, and material culture that was pinpointed as such in other horror films like George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror (1979). In these visions, the faceless masses at the local shopping mall were actually slobbering zombies, and monthly mortgage payments could run you out of your house faster than your average demonic possession. 

The true star of the film was Kurt Russell's beard

Since the 1960's, there had also been a rising sense in America that evil could live next door. Neighbors could be monsters in disguise and any stranger, despite all physical appearances to the contrary, could be harboring murderous secrets. Films like David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) tread more deeply into this idea and the "counter-urbanization" of the 1980's that saw a migration of peoples from metropolitan areas to rural or suburban settings. Of course, some of the "evils" of the big city also came back to the suburbs, some of whom had names; Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. On the surface: normal. The truth: monsters in human shape. The resulting ambiguity about what evil might dwell in the house next door created an age of uncertainty in which people didn't really know and therefore could not always trust their neighbors. The result: deeper alienation, suspicion, and even paranoia. This is why The Thing works so flawlessly.

Carpenter deliberately crafts his film in this world of estrangement and self-isolation. The men at Outpost 31 have left behind their home country to live a life in the absence of social norms. The wintry storms of the continent prevent almost any communication with the remainder of the world and their self-imposed exile in this frozen, inhospitable wasteland doesn't seem to provide much in the way of legitimate scientific research. Not once is the audience told about a single ongoing project being completed or processed at the base. The "work" life and nine-to-five routine that dominate the States is absent here. The men do not produce…nor reproduce, given the absence of women. They don't provide for themselves, as supplies are shipped in from elsewhere. We see them smoke weed, play computer-based chess, drink whiskey, and watch game show reruns on TV. The leisurely life of the men give way to petty arguments and exaggerated grievances. Nauls complains when someone throws his dirty clothes in the garbage. Bennings asks Nauls to turn his music down, but Nauls turns it up. The characters are generally unpleasant, self-interested individuals, as chilly as the Antarctic landscape they now call home. There are easy similarities that can be drawn between the men of Outpost 31 and the dissatisfied youths of the early 1970's who attempted to leave the American culture for new communal societies.

But upon the arrival of the chameleon, the impostor, the men are roused to find that missing common purpose. They choose to fight back against the shared enemy, but are already so alienated from one another and from life itself that their efforts are close to futile. Because the men don't trust one another, their plans to defeat the Thing continually fail. Despair and hopelessness wash over the characters one by one, each to varying degrees. MacReady is only able to keep loose authority over the group, and only because he is equipped with guns, flame-thrower, and dynamite. Whereas there is a sense of postwar triumphalism and camaraderie in The Thing From Another World, there is no brotherhood to be found in Carpenter's film, only distrust and cynicism. The film is speaking towards the dangerous end result of excessive alienation: powerlessness. The film carries an overall melancholy tone, with an ending as bleak as they come, even in it's ambiguity. Essentially three options are presented to the viewer, none of which are particularly attractive. 

Kurt Russell, on the other hand, is.

Carpenter's careful selection of visuals gets at the heart of alienation in artistic and intriguing ways. He often positions the camera at the center of a circle or half-circle, gazing out from that point so that the men of Outpost 31 are facing and essentially surround the audience in a kind of half-moon configuration. We search their supposedly human faces for signs of contamination or infection and can't find it. We don't what anyone, man or Thing, is thinking. Character expressions are often cloaked behind large goggles or shielded in parka hoods--a reminder that we cannot read a person's heart from their facial expression; evil can hide behind a pleasant and familiar smile. As viewers, we are constantly seeking hints of common humanity among those who surround us but are, many times in the film, denied a view of the eyes, the "window to the soul." Thus, in some small way, we come to understand the existential crisis at hand. The alienated men of Outpost 31 have squandered and ignored their common humanity for too long and now, when their lives are threatened, attempt in vain to reassert that bond.

You might think that a movie concerning the battle between an alien assimilator and emotional humanity would highlight the differences between species, but I think that the important takeaway from The Thing is that the alien is undetectable in our world only because we don't know our neighbors, where we don't understand each other, and where so many have "checked out" of the normal ebb and flow of daily life. The Thing's great power is not that it is invincible, but that it has found a place where it can successfully hide. It forces our own flesh to betray us. Even though our skin is supposed to be our "armor" against the outside world, Carpenter uses the film to reveal that it's a soft and weak porous border, easily violated. The setting alone renders skin useless. Flesh won't protect form Antarctic winds, nor the Thing. 

Carpenter takes great joy in using insert shots to hammer this point home, which was perhaps why so many critics derided the film for being overly violent and bloody, even though they didn't ask themselves why or what Carpenter was trying to accomplish with his  unblinking close-ups of grotesque wounds and other gore. The maiming, the ripping, the utter destruction of body and flesh is not atrocity for atrocity's sake: it's a catalogue of the flesh's pliable and soft nature. Perhaps, one at a time, a viewer might question each scene of  gore as gratuitous and unnecessary, but taken together they form a directorial tactic: a full-scale attack on mainstream sensibilities. It's a forced, and uncomfortable, realization that we are inherently fragile creatures operating inside fragile, easily damaged bodies. Many horror movies thrive on exploiting fears, but only the most taboo-shattering and honest works can assert so plainly the weakness of our human vessels, the nearness of mortality, and our real proximity to destruction.

If you don't have the stomach for it, don't worry…he doesn't either

This is all under normal "earthly" circumstances, of course. What the Thing does to human bodies is savage. A human chest becomes a gaping fanged maw. A head stretches from a burning corpse. We see the flesh that we cherish perverted to serve something alien. It's overwhelming because there's no sense of movie decorum about it. The special effects are so good, we don't sense trickery or phoniness. On the onslaught against flesh continues, the audience comes to realize how vulnerable we really ware to the invader from within, the disease. The suggestion that the film can be read as a metaphor for the mysterious AIDS epidemic unfolding in America in the early 1980's is the most popular reading of the text, that the fear that drives the film is of not being able to detect those who have been penetrated and replicated by the monster. The same-sex characters living a seemingly self-indulgent lifestyle could also suggest a common, if ignorant, view of homosexuality in the early 1980's. It is also critical to note the importance that the blood test plays in The Thing, the very test that in real life detects hepatitis, AIDS, and other illnesses. Another transmission method for HIV and AIDS involves intravenous drug use and shared needles, and Carpenter's film features several close-ups of syringes lancing human skin--also serving as another image of the flesh subverted. Even the Thing's style of attack, ripping through clothes--especially underwear--seems to connote some form of sexual aggression or sexual transmission. 

If movies, specifically horror movies, reflect the times of their creation, then The Thing--in selecting its disease-based Boogeyman--reflects the atmosphere of paranoia and dread about a new and unknown disease on the rise in the 1980's. The film works because it exploits this universal fear ruthlessly and without regret. We all dread getting sick; we all fear contagion. Of being cold and unable to get warm again. Of "burning up." And if we don't know our neighbors, how do we know they're not sick? In the film, humans are unable to distinguish between man and Thing even to a minimal degree. Ambiguity reigns, and the audience never truly gains insight into how a "replicated" or "imitated" human is different or inferior from the genetic source material. 

For instance, the Thing imitates Norris so perfectly that the imitation suffers from the same coronary condition as the original human being. The Thing has a heart attack. It's clear that the monster boasts the ability to absorb memories and speech patterns of the host organism, since its able to hide inside some of the men for considerable lengths of time. This raises an important question: if a "replicated" person is so accurate an imitation, down to memories and heart problems, how exactly is it different from us? If the Thing can copy us down to the most minute physical similarities and mental quirks, is it, in fact, us? Both are flesh and blood. Both possess human memories and feelings.

How exactly do we know we aren't living in a world composed of "things"?

Stay warm…for your guest

The Thing (1982)

5-Totally Terrifying

4-Crazy Creepy

3-Fairly Frightening

2-Slightly Scary

1-Hardly Horror

Horror History: Creature Features (The 1950's)

If the cinema of the late 1940's was typified by the high-contrast black-and-white of film noir, with shadows like pools of ink and protagonists slipping into near-insanity, the dominant tone of the early 1950's was semi-documentary grey, with heroes so relentlessly everyday and average that contemporary audiences tend to take them for seed-pods from outer space (and as most films would later reveal, some of them were).

As in the case of the devilishly handsome

Metaluna Monster from This Island Earth

The 1950's presented an image of back-to-business normality. Finned cars stocked suburban garages. New labor-saving devices were being fitted to every gleaming home. And yet this was the decade of the Cold War's birth, Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare, rampant fear of nuclear warfare, "juvenile delinquency," and rock 'n' roll. When the decade began, horror was most certainly out of fashion. And it's not hard to imagine why; the Nazis and the Reds had altered the public consciousness of what a true monster actually was. Gone were the days when Lon Chaney Jr. could don a bit of yak's hair and pass as a reputable envoy of the dark side. No, now there were more human faces attached to evil. Faces who had fought on both sides in a disastrous and brutal global conflict, faces who had developed things like the atom bomb and the death camp, mad scientists whose atrocities against humankind would have unnerved even Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau. A lone Count from Transylvania did not pose much of a threat now. 

Military action alone left 40 million dead when World War II came to a close, and millions more exposed to the full, sickening spectrum of man's inhumanity towards man. Homecoming heroes and bereaved widows had too many horror stories of their own to desire or appreciate big screen fantasies. The world would not and could not ever be the same again. And with the dawning of post-war posterity in the United States, a new breed of monsters, dressed to suit the new era and adapted specifically for survival in the second half of the twentieth century, emerged.

You can gauge how influential The Thing From Another World (1951) was based on subsequent science-fiction monster movies by looking at Edgar G. Ulmer's The Man From Planet X (1951), produced as a "spoiler" for the higher-profile film and rushed to beat it into the cinemas. This means that, uniquely, Ulmer's movie is a 1950's alien invasion film not made in imitation of Christian Nyby's soon-to-be-classic The Thing From Another World. Without any pre-existing model for a tale of a helmeted dwarf from outer space, Ulmer's film opts to look like an old Universal classic. The setting is an isolated, fogbound island--about as credibly Scots-like as The Wolf Man (1941) is Welsh--and the odd looking scientist played by William Schallert there makes first contact with an imp-like alien. When things get out of hand, obviously, the villagers pick up their various agricultural implements and flaming torches from whatever local Angry Mob Supply Store they've got, and harry the monster in exactly the same way earlier and more convincing mobs pursued the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy (though those chase sequences often involved footage that was recycled from Frankenstein (1931) scenes). Ulmer, who was also responsible for The Black Cat (1934), is a Poverty Row Expressionist if ever there was one: his films look like something from decades prior.

He may have been from Planet X, but he was hoping

that Earth was known as Planet XXX

The Thing From Another World knows it's in the line of noble descent from Universal's monster classics. It's alien-vegetable biped looks like a balding Frankenstein Monster in some sort of strange boiler suit and has the Dracula-like habit of drinking human blood for sustenance. The film does follow Sam Goldwyn's dictate by inventing a lot of new soon-to-be-cliches, however. The shadows of the menaced Arctic base may be deep, but in place of the angry mob we have a coalition of quick-thinking, good-humored, professional men, as well as a token spunky woman by the name of Nikki (played by Margaret Sheridan). Together, they show only sensible fear and treat the monster as a problem to be solved. As in The Man From Planet X, a weirdo scientist with a beard (Robert Carrington) wants to communicate with the implacable enemy from the stars rather than exterminate it--but even he isn't a madman in the purist sense, just a "fellow traveler." For five years after The Thing From Another World, almost every alien, dinosaur, or radioactive mutant on the rampage would be dealt with by the kind of straight-arrowed characters found in that darkened Arctic base. Kenneth Tobey, the lead, would go on to join the oh-so exclusive ranks of 1950' monster fighters with John Agar, Richard Carlson, and….yep. This, and the matter-of-fact semi-documentary tone of the film would be copied (less aptly) by many, many, many B movie quickies. 

Space ships alone were not enough to carry the 1950's sci-fi/horror hybrid (Destination Moon (1950) is probably the only exception). Almost every major motion picture at the time included a monster that threatened the peace and stability of earth: the intelligent and elegant The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) has its tall, enormously powerful robot Gort, adventurous and lusty 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) has its tussle with the giant squid, lively space opera This Island Earth (1955) has the bug-eyed, insect-limbed, exposed brain Metaluna Monster, and the philosophical Forbidden Planet (1956) has the roaring, invisible Monster From the Id. Even The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) doesn't forget to have its miniature hero menaced by an ridiculously gigantic cat and a ferocious spider. 

In terms of monster creation, you could say it was an era of great innovation and creativity, or an era limited by the shift in studio support, when the horror film was relegated well and truly to the B-movie category. This was mainly due to the fact that the major studios were attempting widespread technological overhauls (like universal color production, Cinemascope, Stereoptic sound, and 3-D) to keep audiences going to the movies rather than sitting at home and watching TV, a habit that was now on the rise. The big stars became reserved for epic dramas and musicals, films that were sure to draw big, sophisticated, middle-class crowds, and so the main audience for the horror film became teenagers. They flocked to the drive-in, not caring all that much for production value, plot integrity, or character development, to see two-movies-for-the-price-of-one in "double creature features." And they always got their wish. Radiation played a part in almost every major sci-fi/horror film of the decade, either enlarging life forms, as in Them! (1954), Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956), or Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), or shrinking them as in The Fly (1958) and The Incredible Shrinking Man. 

"Gee golly this movie is scary, let's make out to keep safe!"

Existing life-forms made better monsters, as they could be photographed using blue-screen techniques, or recreated in model form and brought to life with stop-motion animation. Otherwise, the tried and true method of a man in a suit--which was actually still used by James Cameron in Aliens (1986)--worked well enough if seen from a distance. Though schlocky by today's standards, these onscreen monsters were viewed as the cutting edge of movie technology at the time and their novelty was seen as a viable strategy for drawing audiences away from their TV sets. Newcomer and star practitioner Ray Harryhausen was the superior animator of the time. For The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), he crafted a radioactive dinosaur that gets thawed out by a bomb test in the North Pole. Gojira (1954), the Japanese semi-remake of the film, founded an entire genre of daikaiju (giant monster) pictures recently paid homage to in Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim (2013). 

Lone troublemakers like the Thing, the Beast, and Godzilla were quite common in the 1950's, as in Phantom From Space (1953) and Devil Girl From Mars (1955). This was primarily due to budgetary constraints, though every once in awhile mass invasions would occur, as when H.G. Well's Martians arrive in sleek, aerodynamic murder machines to terrorize Earth in War of the Worlds (1953) or when giant ants descended from the first ants irradiated by the initial atomic bomb wreck havoc in Them! But soon enough, in the spirit of Jekyll and Hyde, human mutations were resulting from atomic-era mad science, as in The Neanderthal Man (1953), The Fly, Monster on the Campus (1958) and The Hideous Sun Demon (1959). This helped mask-makers and stuntmen get back into the business, including Lon Chaney Jr., who goes on a rampage in The Indestructible Man (1956).

Universal, now Universal-International, once again found themselves at the forefront of the horror genre. With producer William Alland and director Jack Arnold teamed together, the studio made an alien-visitor spectacle, It Came From Outer Space (1953) and a giant-bug movie, Tarantula (1955), that enjoyed respectable success. Alland also produced Jack Sherwood's The Monolith Monsters (1957), one of several disaster movies that inflate natural phenomena into threats worthy of the "monster" tag. The Alland-Arnold team's most significant collaboration, however, was The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), which features a fish-human hybrid described as a "living fossil." The Gill Man became the final addition to Universal's pantheon of copyrighted and franchised monsters. The Creature returned in two sequels (how could it not?), Arnold's Revenge of the Creature (1955), and Sherwood's The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), and its gill-filled visage is on merchandise to this day. Arnold's best films tend to depict a sort of tension between the clipped, grey flannel, matter-of-fact style of science fiction and the poetic, lurid, sexualized, perverse feel of a classic monster movie. This is epitomized best in the masterful sequence in which the sinuous Creature swims just underneath the curvy heroine (played by Julia Adams) as she does the backstroke on the surface of the Black Lagoon, whose depths represent the unconscious mind as much as they do prehistory. 

And you thought Jaws did it first, right?

In the mid-1950's, there is a noticeable change in the content of horror films. This was around the time when films were now being churned out by smaller, grindhouse studios like American International Pictures (whom, fun fact, Stephen King credits the survival of horror as a genre), and targeting a completely teenage audience. To kids, heroes in uniform like Kenneth Tobey seemed square. As such, you start to see films like Invasion of the Saucer Men (1958) and The Blob (1958) in which grown-ups are useless and only misunderstood teens know how to combat the menace of bug-eyed monsters (yet again) and all-consuming red jelly, respectively. While the rare Universal effort like The Deadly Mantis (1957), an unrelentingly dreary movie, concerned themselves with some sort of plausibility, AIP took the opposite path, unleashing the imagination of young producer-director Roger Corman onto the big screen with unabashedly lurid, unashamedly entertaining and surprisingly quick-witted projects like It Conquered the World (1956), Not of This Earth (1957), and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that Corman's films are better than their titles suggest, or even that they live up to their posters, they have a healthy pace when compared to other offerings that sprung up in the second half of the decade, like Bert I. Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man (1957). 

This shift of the front line in horror, from the prepared military men and scientific experts of the early part of the decade to the home front of the latter years of the  decade, helped make room for Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), one of the most influential films in the history of horror cinema. Both Invaders From Mars (1953) and It Came From Outer Space had played with the nightmare potential of parents and authority figures mind-controlled by Martians or replaced my malign xenomorphs, but it took Invasion of the Body Snatchers to life this concept to the status of a sub-genre. Set in a small town where people come down with an epidemic of an unusual delusion--that their friends and relations have somehow "changed"--the film has been read as both a vision of Senator McCarthy's ravings of Communist infiltration into the heartland and an allegory of the way witch-hunting Red-baiters turned America against itself. Both are valid readings, but there are also deep psychological waves emanating from the film. The Body Snatchers, grown from seed, owe a little to stories of dopplegangers, all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson," and The Student of Prague. There are also undertones to the Snatchers that read as vampirism and demon possession. Regardless, the film has set out a modern myth, which has proved useless to the horror genre ever since. The depiction of an American small town, ripe for a real-estate ad, harboring nasty secrets, that is simultaneously penetrated from without and eaten alive from within by the monstrous is a trope that has surfaced time an again in the horror genre, from Jerusalem's Lot, Maine to Twin Peaks, Washington.

Certain studies imply that traditional gothic horror was dead after House of Dracula (1945) and was not resurrected until The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), having been obliterated by Abbott and Costello and the creature feature, but I would argue that this is not strictly accurate. You can see a tentative return to the gothic as early as Son of Dr. Jekyll (1951), or when Universal signed Boris Karloff back for minion roles in The Strange Door (1951) and The Black Castle (1951), which was a rerun of The Most Dangerous Game (1932). Then you have Andre de Toth's House of Wax (1953), a remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), that confidently set a new style with full color, stereoptic sound, and eye-popping 3D. The contemporary setting of the original was pushed back to the 1890's, complete with can-can girls and starched collars, and a plummy Vincent Price--who had flirted with horror as early as The Invisible Man Returns (1940). Price soon found himself elevated to full genre stardom from his role as the mad sculptor. He comes across charming and benign in his wheelchair as he hands out flowers to a terrified patron, adding a slightly more deliberate self-mocking comedy than Karloff or Bela Lugosi would have liked. But he also nips about nimbly stealing corpses and attempting to dunk Phyllis Kirk in wax. 

You're looking a little stiff there, my dear

There were other 3D horrors, of course. Price returned as The Mad Magician (1954), another old war horse was trotted out for Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954), and William Cameron Menzies's The Maze (1953) is actually remarkable by any standard. But the craze came and went quickly. The genre leaned towards specifically supernatural horror after the nine-days wonder that was the Bridey Murphy case, in which a hypnotist claimed he could regress a modern housewife to her previous life as an Irish servant girl. This was filmed as The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956), but also prompted pulpier efforts like The She-Creature (1957), Corman's The Undead (1956), and The Bride and the Beast (1958). 

Universal started to add a few old-style monsters to their roster as well. The snake-woman picture Cult of the Cobra (1955) reminded audiences that a creature didn't have to be atomic to worth making a movie about. Faith Domergue's avenging Cobra Woman pioneered a minor trend for pin-up mutants, followed by Maria English as the modern incarnation of the She-Creature and middle-aged matrons desperate for a return to youth (and damn all the side effects) in The Leech Woman (1958) and The Wasp Woman (1959). Relics of earlier decades still needed work, as Edward D. Wood found when signed Bela Lugosi for his own odd science-fiction/horror/melodrama/autobiography films. The last grasp of a gothic style which was about to get a shot in the arm came from England, with a bunch of quickies built around old stars (Lugosi, Chaney Jr., Carradine, Karloff) or ideas (19th century mad science, voodoo, mummies) either directed by Reginald LeBorg or produced by Howard W. Koch, who handled The Black Sleep (1956), Voodoo Island (1957), Frankenstein 1970 (1958), and Pharaoh's Curse (1958).

Britain's small-scale studio Hammer Films had made forays into semi-horror as early as the Lugosi vehicle Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1936) and the Jack the Ripper drama Room to Let (1949). Hammer became the first British studio to essay American-style sci-fi/horror in Terence Fisher's Spaceways (1953) and Four-Sided Triangle (1953). Their breakout genre hit was Val Guest's The Quartermass Xperiment (1955), adapted from a BBC TV series, involving Richard Wordsworth dragging himself over London waste grounds as an astronaut painfully transforming into a cactus-tripe-squid-creature which threatens to absorb all life on Earth, now considered a solid horror classic. The film was successful enough to produce both sequels (Quartermass 2 [1957]) and imitations (X--The Unknown [1958], The Abominable Snowman [1959]). Other UK producers got in on the act by adapting ITV serials made in competition with the BBC's Quartermass franchise: The Trollenberg Terror (1958) and Strange World of Planet X (1958) being among the most well-known. 

"My God! He's being pickled alive!"

American producer and monster fan Milton Subotsky pitched Hammer Films the idea of remaking Frankenstein (1931) in color, preferably with Boris Karloff in the lead. Hammer paid him off and took the project in another direction. Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), scripted by Jimmy Sangster, seems to have been constructed, probably on legal advice, to be as little like Universal's original classic as possible. This meant that the film was free to establish its own approach to familiar material and devise a look and a feel which would soon become a style of its own. At the time, most attention was paid to the colorful gore which was a new ingredient of the genre--we'd seen several limbs and brains in tanks before, but the blood spurts had not looked as red or the "grey matter" quite so pink. However, Curse of Frankenstein also stressed quality in art direction (compare the under-designed laboratory of The Black Sleep with Frankenstein's array of period scientific equipment), costume, cinematography, supporting cast, and music. Perhaps most importantly, the film also produced two new horror stars: Peter Cushing, who carried the film with his incisive, amoral, chilly yet charming performance as Victor Frankenstein, an aristocratic bastard who lets nothing get in his way, and Christopher Lee, cast as the Monster mainly because other actors demanded more money, and yet who brought a remarkably wounded animal presence to the character. Both men would come to be indispensable in the future of horror cinema.

With Frankenstein coining money, the return of the Count was inevitable. Horror of Dracula (1958) saw all the creatives come back, with Cushing again in the lead as a businesslike Van Helsing and Lee with eight minutes of screen time and no dialogue after his first scene as the black-cloaked and hissing king of the bloody fanged monster. Lee used this role to redefine Dracula as a far more dynamic, sexual being than the stolid Lugosi. Lust was almost just as important with Hammer as gore, and so there were plenty of plunging necklines and women awaiting the Count with open negligees to be found. Bosomy continental starlets and well-bred ex-models recur in British horror, competing with the tight-sweatered rock'n'rollers and white-swimsuited lady scientists of the American creature feature. After Frankenstein and Dracula had soared on their returns, Hammer went on a remake craze that felt a bit like jet lag: Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Mummy (1959), The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960), The Curse of the Werewolf (1960), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), and Kiss of the Vampire (1964), a film peddled as an original that is actually a rewrite of The Black Cat (1934) with vampires instead of Satanists. 

Hammer's gothic revival was soon imitated, often by filmmakers who hadn't taken the time to study the style and so resorted to earlier models or their own creativity. Hammer screenwriter Jimmy Sangster dashed off Blood of the Vampire (1958) and Jack the Ripper (1959) for producers Monty Baker and Robert Berman, but these blood-bolstered, theatrical melodramas sing of Tod Slaughter rather than Peter Cushing. When Baker and Berman signed Cushing for John Gilling's The Flesh and the Fiends (1958), Gilling remade a script he had written for a Slaughter movie, The Greed of William Hart (1948). Producer Richard Gordon, who had come to Britain to make mock-American science fiction films like the astonishing Fiend Without a Face (1958) and the Quartermass knock-off The First Man in Space (1959), also looked to the Slaughter style, and signed Boris Karloff to a couple of Victorian melodramas, namely Grip of the Strangler (1958) and Corridors of Blood (1958). He even found room for rising star Christopher Lee as a body snatcher in the latter film. Jacques Tourneur, in the UK after the fizzle of his post-Val Lewton career, directed Night of the Demon (1957), a busy yet influential film.

Time to send Gandalf to stake this fool

Producer Herman Cohen arrived on the monster scene at AIP and started a minor craze for mixing juvenile delinquency with atomic-age takes on old horror tales with I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1958). Cohen came to Britain and hooked up with Anglo-Amalgamated, an outfit that wanted to get in on the horror genre, so Cohen hired Michael Gough, a dreary hero in Hammer's Horror of Dracula (1958), and cast him in Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) as a limping, impotent, misogynist who is meant to be read as slightly gay and sadistic. He's also a megalomaniac crime writer who happens to have Dr. Jekyll's old potion lying around his house for whatever reason. If you've heard of Horrors of the Black Museum before, trust me, it's as extreme as all the critics say. The opening scene features a girl receiving a pair of trick binoculars that sprout eye-gouging spikes when the focus is adjusted. And Cohen and Gough continued their depredations in Konga (1961) and Black Zoo (1963), while Anglo developed more mutilation with Anton Diffring wielding a scalpel in Circus of Horrors (1960) and backed Michael Powell's still-jolting essay in psychosis, Peeping Tom (1960).

Back in America, the teenage-monster boom continued. Edgar G. Ulmer made Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957), Richard Culna contributed Frankenstein's Daughter (1958), Herman Cohen bowed to the inevitable and did a teenage vampire in Blood of Dracula (1958) and the low-rent Jerry Warren threw out Teenage Zombies (1960). Universal noticed their properties were back in business and made the low-key, contemporary-set Return of Dracula (1958), with Francis Lederer as a vampire with a cloak-like coat thrown over his shoulders. This disguised remake of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was the first film to bring Transylvania to small-town USA, but certainly not the last. The studio even tried a vampire Western, Curse of the Undead (1958). Much more distinctive were the films of the producer-director William Castle, famed for cementing Vincent Price's genre star status and catching the cynical, blackly comic tone of EC horror comics in House on Haunted Hill (1958) and The Tingler (1959). Castle would stick with the genre, but arguably never trumped the centipede creature, generated at the base of the spine by fear and prevented from killing the host by a scream, found in The Tingler--one of the strangest premises ever put forth by an American horror film. 

The return of Dracula & Co. was noted farther afield than in Hollywood. After the 1920's, "foreign" horror had been a matter of occasional one-offs like the Dane Carl Dreyer's arty Vampyr (1932) or the Frenchman Henri-Georges Clouzot's thriller Les Diaboliques (1955), a fantastic film that would be the inspiration for Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Now horror was truly becoming an international field. In Mexico, Germane Robles played a Dracula lookalike in The Vampire (1957), which seemed a south-of-the-border Son of Dracula (1943) in its monochrome Universal style, but led to far wilder Mexican efforts, featuring Aztec mummies, brain-sucking alchemists, and masked, monster-fightng wrestlers like El Santo and Blue Demon. It Italy, Riccardo Freda directed I Vampiri (1956), which features another matron who kills to enjoy renewed youth, and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959), in which an all-consuming blob crawls out of a Mayan temple. In France, Georges Franju, perhaps influence by I Vampiri, which is set in Paris, directed Eyes Without a Face (1959), a mix of pulp and poetry featuring a mad plastic surgeon trying to give his daughter a new face. In the Philippines, Well's Dr. Moreau inspired Gerardo de Leon's Terror is a Man (1959), which would trigger the "Blood Island" cycle a decade on. In Germany, mad science and cheesecake met in The Head (1959) and Horrors of Spider Island (1960), and Dr. Mabuse was on the brink of a comeback. Much like the genre itself.

Because at the end of the 1950's, horror was everywhere.

And you ain't SEEN nothing yet

Next in Horror History: We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes (The 1960's)

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

They've been doing it since the days of the Great Classic Monsters--Dracula and Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Mummy. They did it to death after the success of Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). They made it a yearly tradition after the first Saw (2004). It's THE SEQUEL. And it's not going to stop until it consumes every dollar you've ever earned. Fortunately for me, I had a gift card. Thus, when I took my seat in the theater last night I was able to console myself that I personally had not given money to a sequel/spin-off hybrid that I was sure would fall flat. And though Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014) was better than it had any right to be, this intriguing side story was still bogged down by cheap scares and little expansion of the franchise mythology, culminating in an obvious set up of the series's next entry later this year. 

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (U.S.A.)
Released: January 3, 2014
Director: Christopher B. Landon
Screenplay: Christopher B. Landon

Tagline: "You're one of us now"

Cast:
Andrew Jacobs as Jesse
Jorge Diaz as Hector
Gabrielle Walsh as Marisol
Renee Victor as Jesse's Grandmother
Richard Cabral as Arturo

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones tries hard to reinvigorate a franchise of increasingly diminishing quality that began with Oren Peli's original Paranormal Activity (2007), released worldwide in 2009, and followed by sequels churned out like clockwork every October. The first film, which caught on like wildfire, played around with original and eerie usages of the first-person found footage sub-genre made popular by The Blair Witch Project (1999) and used subtlety and pacing to craft a creepy slow-burning film whose tension mounts with each frame. Since that first foray into a demonic haunting caught on tape, the sequels have displayed bumpy levels of quality and scare factor while attempting to establish a cohesive story that explains the reasoning behind the hauntings of sisters Katie and Kristi and their respective families. These clues and explanations have always felt scattered, however, and unless you're going to sit down and cross-reference each of the sequels in turn, it can be hard to piece together a foundation of the series mythology.

Thus, part of what makes The Marked Ones feel so fresh and lively is that the focus is removed from the main storyline followed in the first four Paranormal Activity films and shifted onto 18-year old Jesse, recent high school graduate and apple of his family's eye. Rather than displaying a hidden camera haunting of another upper middle class white suburban family, this film takes the viewer to gang-controlled, Latino neighborhood of Oxnard, California, where Jesse's best friend Hector is documenting his friend's educational triumph on video. Soon after, Jesse and Hector discover that their estranged, elderly neighbor Anna--whose apartment is covered with newspapers and is a place of speculation and ridicule among neighborhood kids for the moaning that is often heard coming from inside--has been murdered, apparently by Jesse's friend and class valedictorian, Oscar. This strange event coincides with odd changes Jesse is noticing in himself, among them super strength and the ability to be caught from falling by an unseen force. And so the ordeal begins--for Jesse and for the audience.

As much as I give credit to the creative minds of the Paranormal Activity series for stepping out behind the confines of white affluential suburbia to give us new, fresh characters who live a much different day-t0-day life than the typical suburbanites in a challenging and culturally rich setting, the film just rings of untapped potential. This may be because, at this point in the history of the horror film, the well of the found footage film is all but dried up. It should be noted, however, that the film does do away with certain series staples such as quicktime showing of video footage depicting how long a person can stand in one space and sheets and doors moving while someone sleeps. Yet, at the same time, the middle section of the film where Jesse first begins to discover his new abilities and their connection to his neighbors murder is sapped of originality, taking elements from the movie Chronicle (2012), another found footage film. 

Demon selfies!

What makes The Marked Ones a bearable movie is that it is miles better than the dreadful Paranormal Activity 4 (2012), and that is due to personality. Jesse and Hector are likable worth caring about, much more three dimensional than you might expect from the fifth film in a horror series. They're not the most original or deep characters to ever grace the silver screen, but they do have a relatable and endearing humor that surfaces in the comedic moments between panicked ones that will make you smile along with them.

Sadly, even the well-drawn characters are not enough to save the film from the overused, easy-to-employ jump scares and peek-a-boo moments of "terror." The predominantly predictable sequences get old fast, and the once interesting story falters the longer the film goes on. There's virtually no tension or suspenseful build-up. The viewer worries for Jesse not because of what the film is doing but because of what the film is--we know that something bad is going to happen to him by nature of the ticket stub we have in our pocket, not because the film's atmosphere or mood has led us to believe this. I'll admit that jump scares can, at times, be very effective, and I'm not against them in the slightest, but they have to be used properly. A whole film populated by them might raise blood pressure, but it won't do much beyond that. The first Paranormal Activity, like any decent horror film, will find ways to make the terror onscreen frighten, disturb, and entertain both body and mind. This film sticks to the third category at best.

The interwoven stories from previous entries in the series also make the film feel a bit choppy. At times, references to the past four films feel forced, as though they were placed there merely to wink at the audience but not to contribute anything to the current plot. But the film does make use of the events of the first film in a somewhat clever way when it delivers it's coup de grace during the finale. Although labeled as a spin-off, The Marked Ones does not work well as a stand alone film, especially given the ending, which will require that the audience have knowledge of at least the first film in the series. A character from Paranormal Activity 2 (2010) also makes an appearance, so it may be best to have seen at least the first two entries of the franchise before tackling the latest chapter. 

Yes. Let us all cleanse ourselves of the dark presence

at work here--the SEQUEL

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones left me feeling afraid--not because of anything that I witnessed in the 90 minutes on screen, but afraid that writer/director Christopher Landon, who has done work on all of the franchise's films save the first, is going to corner the series into a corner that it will not be able to get out of, much like the Saw writers did with the intricately connected plot threads in the later sequels. While it does do some good work, and is overall a passable entry into this noteworthy horror series, I think for fans to believe that the franchise is back on track, this October's Paranormal Activity 5 will have to really knock the creativity and terror out of the park. Because, honestly, this one was just too left of the mark.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

5-Totally Terrifying

4-Crazy Creepy

3-Fairly Frightening

2-Slightly Scary

1-Hardly Horror