The Thing (1982)

 

“Channel 4s 100 Scariest Moments” #17

 

 

The Thing

(1982)

 

Among the greatest remakes ever made, this film was initially savaged by critics and bombed in the box office, yet it is now near-universally recognized as a classic and also represents a there near-peak of Director John Carpenter’s career. It’s the eighth of a string of twelve feature-length movies he directed between 1974 and 1986, of which all but two (both TV movies I haven’t seen) are now considered either cult classics or unconditional landmarks, but there is no denying his powers began to wane after that.

 

Oh, but how this film was savaged at the time. Vince Canby, perhaps the critic who I most admire even though he just doesn’t understand genre cinema, put it this way, “foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other… a virtually storyless feature composed of lots of laboratory concocted special effects, with the actors used merely as props to be hacked, slashed, disemboweled and decapitated, finally to be eaten and then regurgitated as - guess what? - more laboratory-concocted special effects.

 

“There may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it.”

 

Well, first off, it isn’t “virtually storyless.” It is more a faithful adaptation of the original story, “Who Goes There” by John W. Campbell (originally published in 1938) than the earlier film adaptation, Howard Hawks’ “The Thing from Another World” (1951). The earlier film, also rightly hailed as a classic, retained only the story’s setting and Alien Invasion themes, but chose to avoid the original story’s deeply perverse paranoia (that era’s masterpiece exploration of that theme would be “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (also 1951)) and in doing so avoided the sticky issues of primitive special effects and the impossibility of getting the inevitable Body-Horror past the censors of the day.

 

It is set in the claustrophobic confines of an USA Scientific Base in Antarctica with a few scenes set outside in the vast emptiness of that frigid landscape. The opening sequence is a helicopter chasing a dog across that landscape, and we will later learn the helicopter (and its doomed crew) are from an already decimated Norwegian base and the dog is not what it seems. Allegedly, if you knew the Norwegian language, the desperate radio calls from the copter reveal later-to-be-revealed plot points, but the Yanks don’t understand the transmission, and innocently bring the dog into their outpost, and in doing so bring about their own doom.

 

You see, the dog isn’t a dog, but a shape-shifting, parasitic, Alien, that was buried in the ice for thousands of years, accidently thawed, and awakened hungry for hosts. It is an insidious infection, it gets in your blood, replaces your cells one-by-one, and in doing so, replaces you, imitates you, and then moves on to infect those around you who are unaware that you are not you anymore.

 

There is a good definition of Body-Horror in Wikipedia, “a subgenre of horror which intentionally showcases graphic or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body.” As a cinema sub-Genre it was all but invented by David Cronenberg in his first features (it is already evident in his famous student film “Crimes of the Future” (1970)) and distinguishes itself (or at least tries to) from other gory SF/Horror by embracing surrealism in its revolting images, addressing our discomfort with the changes we feel emerging within our own bodies, and making that discomfort a metaphor for our own moral corruption and the assault we feel from a outside forces.

 

Carpenter’s first big commercial success was “Halloween” (1978), which established the profitability of the Slasher film, maybe the dumbest of all gory sub-Genres of horror, though his film had surprisingly little blood. In this film he goes all-out with the disgusting effects (farther than anyone before him, including Cronenberg) because this film had radically different intents than “Halloween.” Here Carpenter wanted to make us all uncomfortable in our flesh, and as he achieved the goal of graphically exploring its violation, and he linked that to a threat to our very identities. One of the doomed men, Childs, played by Keith David, is the one that say this most explicitly, “So, how do we know who’s human? If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation, how would you know if it was really me?”

 

An interesting element is that the cast was entirely male, a rare choice in popular cinema and even in reality. Though the kind of work done by the characters in the film are male-dominated professions, by the time the film was made, having a scientific base with a staff of sixteen men and no women at a little unusual. This contrasts to the 50s version which has two women in the mixture of eighteen military and civilian personnel, though the reality of the 50s was that those women’s presence would’ve been extremely unusual.

 

Without the distraction of women, the men, mostly, embrace their inner slob (to reference “The Odd Couple” (play first produced in 1965) these guys are mostly Oscars, with the Felixes clearly outnumbered). Though there’s some hints of class-based-conflict, it’s not focused on the way it is in other Carpenter films (“Escape from New York” (1981), “They Live” (1988), “Escape from LA” (1996)). The outpost’s chain-of-command is pretty casual. That’s another contrast with the Hawks’ version wherein the military personnel are pragmatic, he-man, blue-collar heroes while the scientists are mostly presented as un-masculine egg-heads without the spine to make tough decisions and get their hands dirty, and the military chain-of-command is almost religiously adhered to.

 

Carpenter’s version has a comfortable feel of a cantankerous boys’ club with the strong collective identity out-weighing most individual personalities or their titles. When the menace emerges, these men who were so recently friends and colleges suddenly don’t know who is the monster in disguise and who isn’t, so there’s a feeling of loss woven into the toxic paranoia. Windows, played by Thomas G. Waites, hits the nail on the head when he gets hysterical over an unpopular but crisis-driven assertion of a stronger chain-of-command, “You guys are gonna listen to Garry? You’re gonna let him give the orders? He could be one of those Things!”

 

Garry, played by Donald Moffat, then cedes his command to McReady, played by Ken Russel, because he realizes he’s in over his head – but then, what if McReady is infected?

 

The handling of the characterization represents Carpenter’s best example of something he often struggles with, an entourage cast. Too many people without strong enough individual identities was one the more serious failings in his mis-firing “Prince of Darkness” (1987). Here the cast, almost all veteran character actors, create strong, quick, sketches of these men. Early scenes they create the immediate engagement of really good improv and inhabit their environment (Set Design by John M. Dwyer and Production Design by John J. Loyd, and easily the best examples of both in any Carpenter film). The men are distinct enough that as they fall, one by one, you know who each victim was. This is one of several echoes of “Alien” (1979) which is peopled by vivid characters whose textured inhabitance of their roles allowed believability without much exposition.

 

Everyone in the large cast is excellent, but I have three favorites:

 

Donald Moffat as Garry, the ineffectual Station Master. Another actor would’ve allowed this to be a one-dimensional role, but Moffat communicates a capable man, in over-his-head, humiliated by having to cede his authority to others even though he’d done nothing explicitly wrong. Making Garry sympathetic counts for a lot early in the film as the paranoia builds, but becomes really chilling near the end when Garry is absorbed, and the monster version of him expresses greater power than the decent, mistreated, man it replaced.

 

Wilford Brimley plays Dr. Blair, a quiet and unassuming genius who would’ve been the hero in a less-dark version of this same story. He figures out what’s happening long before anyone else, and Brimley conveys that knowledge is a burden to the Blair. Blair is devastated by his own decision the kill the infected snow dogs. Later, when he is the first to recognize that the outpost personnel must fatally isolate themselves to save the world, and then has an emotional breakdown. Perhaps because his brilliance, the thing targets him especially, and by the end of the film we learn he was absorbed -- but when? How much of the wise-sounding advice he gave were Blair’s insights, and how much was the Thing’s manipulations?

 

The hero was MacReady, played by frequent Carpenter collaborator Russel in what maybe his career-best role. A natural leader, which Garry was not, he takes command forcefully and admirably, except that he’s also an alcoholic and his impulsive decisions lead to at least two unnecessary deaths. Still, he stands above the rest because of his decisiveness and understanding of Blair’s insights, as he says to his comrades, “We’re not gettin’ outta here alive. But neither is that Thing.”

 

The film has three really standout scenes -- The monster’s first revel in the dog kennel is a major shocker; the climatic blood test scene when the men have reached their breaking point; and in between was an even darker scene, featuring no violence and MacReady alone:

 

MacReady, after drinking heavily, tries to make a record of the events. “Nobody… Nobody trusts anybody now and we’re all very tired.” He stops the tape, and takes a long pause, rewinds, listens to himself, and then rewinds again to record over it, “Nothing else I can do. Just wait.”

 

The film’s initial, financial failure can probably be attributed to three things:

(1.)      The unexpected levels of gore. Most similarly extreme films existed on the cinema margins (like Cronenberg’s early efforts) but this was a major studio film marketed as a main-stream product (Cronenberg’s first major studio film was “The Dead Zone” (1983) and had relatively little violence because, well, it didn’t belong in that particular story). Also, at the time, if a major studio went for gore, it was generally one really extreme sequence, like “Alien’s” chest-burster, while “The Thing” throws unsettling, surrealistic, horrors at you over-and-over.

(2.)      The equally shocking hopelessness conveyed in the narrative. Carpenter embraced to impossibility of resisting this Monster much more than original author John W. Campbell. Like George Romero’s under-rated “Day of the Dead” (1985), this was an oppressive, no-way-out, scenario, and not everyone liked that.

(3.)      Related to the above, it was released only two weeks after another, much more popular, SF masterpiece, which was also a much easier to accept. Said Carpenter, "I’d made a really grueling, dark film and I just don’t think audiences in 1982 wanted to see that. They wanted to see ‘E.T.,’ and ‘The Thing’ was the opposite."

 

As this was Carpenter’s first film with a major studio and a big budget and he took the film’s failure personally, “Here’s the thing: at that particular time I had unleashed this terrible thing about horror movies with ‘Halloween.’ All these imitators came out and threw every possible cliché up onto the screen—the body in the closet, the thing behind the door, all of that stuff. I suppose I was trying to get away from that and make this film better, or I just shot it and it wasn’t any good.”

 

Trying to unravel the hostile critical and audience response, he stated, “The critics thought the movie was boring and didn’t allow for any hope. That was the part they really hammered on. The lack of hope is built into the story. There is an inevitability to it, but that’s not necessarily a negative…[I]n the short story the humans clearly win, but then they look up and wonder if the Thing got to the birds and they’re flying to the mainland. It was just a question mark that [in the film’s last scene, if it was or] wasn’t quite the two men freezing to death in the snow to save humanity.

 

“I thought that was the ultimate heroic act, but audiences didn’t see it that way. I remember the studio wanted some market research screenings and after one I got up and talked to the audience about what they thought of the film. There was one young gal who asked, ‘Well what happened in the very end? Which one was the Thing, and which one was the good guy?’ And I said, ‘Well, you have to use your imagination.’ And she said, ‘Oh, God. I hate that.’”

 

The timing problem is interesting because this remake was easily a full decade in development and Carpenter was not the first Director considered. The key for Carpenter’s participation was that he fell in love with one of the many versions of the screenplay, specifically the one written by Bill Lancaster (son of a the famous Actor Burt) who had very few produced scripts to his credit, but one of them, “The Bad News Bears” (1976) was already recognized as a classic). Carpenter, a screenwriter himself, called it the best screenplay he’d ever read. “He was the one who came up with a couple of really key scenes. He came up with the scene where the doctor tries to shock another character and The Thing comes out of his chest. And we discussed the idea of the blood tests—that’s the reason I wanted to do the movie. That’s the showdown; that’s the big scene.”

 

But the ideas were not completely evolved at that point, “Bill wrote the screenplay with the monster in shadows, the old Hollywood cliché stuff, which everybody still talks about even to this day. Rob Bottin [the make-effects artist, who had previously worked with Carpenter on “The Fog” (1980)] was the guy who said, ‘No, you’ve got to put him in the light, then the audience really goes nuts. They really go nuts because there it is in front of them.’ I wasn’t sure, but that’s what we did.”

 

What Bottin achieved had never been done before and in retrospect should’ve been impossible in a pre-CGI era. It is not merely meant to evoke disgust, but also awe, the mutability of the threat is at heart of its unique Alien-ness; as a character in the film, Fuchs, played by Joel Polis, said, “It could have imitated a million life forms on a million different planets.” Many at-the-time reacted badly to a Monster which had no clearly identifiable form and no iconic singular image, it’s a wet, abstract, writhing, “something” in-between its mimicked forms. This is now understood as one the film’s singular triumphs, later critics comparing to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft (author whose first SF,F&H was published in 1916) who had a great trick of using highly specific language to explicitly state something was indescribable. Wrote Kyle Anderson, “The inability of humans to comprehend the physical form of these creatures is integral to Lovecraft’s cosmic fear. Carpenter continues this, not by hiding the monster from us, but by showing it to us in full light, because even though we’re looking at it, it’s still mostly indescribable. No image of the Thing in any of the scenes behaves the way something of this world would, and we share the characters’ astonishment, both by recoiling and staring.” At various points it appears insectile, botanical, crustaceous, humanoid, aqueous, serpentine, fungal, or all of these at the same time.

 

Carpenter responding to the criticism of the Creature design, “I’ve always thought that was somewhat unfair. I mean, the whole point of the monster is to be monstrous, to be repellent. That’s what makes you side with the human beings. I didn’t have a problem with that.”

 

The score was also notable. Carpenter had scored his earlier films, they were synthesized, minimalistic, and effective, but he wanted something bigger here. He chose the enormously-diverse composer Ennio Morricone, best known for Spaghetti Westerns but also worked with Master Horror Director Dario Argento on as many films as anyone except the Progressive Rock band Goblin. Apparently, Carpenter called on Morricone because he got married to a Morricone score (to actress Adrienne Barbeau, who has a sort-of cameo here). Morricone gave the film richly moody music preformed by a full orchestra, but continually referenced Carpenter’s dark minimalism; it reminded me a little of Composer Terry O’Reilly, and sounded nothing like anything else Marricone had done.

 

Carpenter is not as lauded for his use of color as much as fellow Director Argento, but perhaps he should be. Each film he’s made establishes a distinct color scheme which he then violates at key moments to destabilize the experience. “The Thing’s” color palette is initially cool whites, grays, and blues, but as violations of the flesh become more important to the story, sickening pinks and purples invade, and then red dominates several key, violent, sequences. The Cinematographer was Dean Cundey, who’d worked with Carpenter on other films and was nominated for an Academy Award for a Steven Spielberg movie.

 

Critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote, “This is one of the greatest and most elegantly constructed B-movies ever made…[and] Carpenter is one of the great film stylists of the second half of the twentieth century.”

 

And yes, Mr. Canby, there was a metaphor, in fact an obvious one, tied to the film’s heritage in 50s SF/horror.

 

Almost all 50s SF was informed by the related themes of the Cold War and the Atomic Bomb. “The Thing” merges the storytelling of the two older films mentioned above, “The Thing from …” and “Invasion of the …” Though “Invasion of…” was the more obvious metaphor for the era’s political fears, the largely apolitical “The Thing from…” could not help but mirroring some of those concerns either. The subtext of militarism over intellectualism was the best expression of that, and this reinforced by the fact that the lead scientist, played by Robert Cornthwaite, looked suspiciously like Vladimir Lenin.

 

Though Carpenter is not afraid to make political, even polemical, films, “The Thing” is, on its surface, as apolitical as the Hawks’ version, but, like the Hawks’, the era’s political fears bubbled underneath. In the 80s, the Cold War was heating up again (it was also coming to an end, but no one in ’82 could’ve known that). ‘50s SF took on new relevance in that era, and Carpenter embraced that, “[There’s a] lack of trust that’s in the world now. We see it all over: countries, people… We don’t trust each other anymore. We don’t know who to trust. [We’re afraid that when] we’re with somebody, maybe they’re our loved ones, and they may attack us. That’s what ‘The Thing’ is. It has a lot of truth in it, kind of dressed up as a monster movie.”

 

Carpenter’s boldest narrative move was in the last scene; after spending the entire film of encouraging you to trust no one, he gives his doomed heroes a plan to fight back that required at least nominal trust, and then he pulls the cruelest trick of all, setting up a scene where the only humanity-affirming option was unconditional trust, and not telling us if that trust would be betrayed or not.

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySvzHdtCiWE