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
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