“I know I’m human.”
The Thing is my favorite horror movie. I love it more than The Shining, or The Exorcist, or anything else that is included on the watch list for this month. I only bring this up to let you know that there will be zero objectivity in this writeup. The Thing is so good that it makes all of John Carpenter’s missteps forgivable, even Vampires and Ghosts of Mars.
The film is similar to Alien in the way that it uses a foreign, otherworldly element to tell a version of a classic story. Whereas Alien was a haunted house movie set on a spaceship, The Thing is a locked-room mystery, in the mold of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. The main difference is, in The Thing everyone knows what the killer is, but not who it is. Or what it is, for that matter – the opening sequence has a Norwegian research crew in a helicopter, pursuing and shooting at a dog. It becomes even more foreboding on a re-watch, once you know that the pilot is shouting “It’s not a dog! It’s a thing! It’s imitating a dog!” But soon the Norwegians are dead and the dog is inside the American Antarctic research station. At the time of its release, The Thing was derided for its bleakness and hopelessness, but without those elements it would be a much different, tamer film.
The sense of isolation that Carpenter creates is absolute. There’s the remote location, sure, but look at the cramped hallways the crew has to maneuver, and the fact that all the crew members are male. Even Ennio Morricone’s score, insidiously replicating the sound of breath and footsteps, sounds like it’s following the characters rather than accompanying them. There is precious little diversity (the only female in the film is a computer program with the voice of Adrienne Barbeau), but it doesn’t make The Thing feel dated; rather, it makes it a kind of examination of masculinity and sacrifice, as these dozen men are have to face something to which they are hopelessly unequal. Tellingly, we first see MacReady (Kurt Russell) while he is playing chess against the computer, which presages how the rest of the film will unspool: a fight against an entity with superior intelligence, who knows your every move and forces you to adapt and improvise.
Carpenter wisely never shows the alien’s full form, relying instead on Rob Bottin’s brilliant special effects. Bottin, only 22 when he supervised his crew on The Thing (what did you do in your early twenties?), created some of the most memorable, horrific images ever put on film. There’s the man’s face splitting open; the stomach that turns into a gaping, ravenous mouth; and the head that sprouts spindly legs and scurries away. It defies convention and logic, and The Thing is still impressive 34 years later (I’d recommend buying the Blu-Ray, which in its crystalline transfer will let you see Bottin’s creations in all their eldritch glory). Even Carpenter must have known what a magician he was working with: Bottin’s name is listed right there in the opening credits, a rarity for special effects supervisors.
As the paranoia and distrust between the crew increases, The Thing becomes almost unbearably tense at times. Even MacReady, positioned as the film’s paragon of masculinity, falls victim to it (in the story on which The Thing is based, John W. Campbell Jr.’s “Who Goes There?” MacReady is referred to once as “the beard,” which makes sense given Russell’s glorious facial mane here). This culminates in the film’s best scene, and one of its greatest contributions to the horror canon, and that’s the blood testing scene, purportedly the scene that drew Carpenter to the film in the first place. It’s innovative and nerve-wracking; you know the thing is going to reveal itself at some point, and it does at the worst possible moment, with Childs (Keith David) and Garry (Donald Moffat) tied to a couch next to it. It combines the slow dread, explosive horror, and hopeless inevitability that are this film’s most distinctive traits.
And I love the ambiguity of the ending – really, it’s the only honest way the film could end, with MacReady and Childs sharing a bottle of scotch in the smoldering ruins of the research station, wondering which of them isn’t human. “Why don’t we just sit here for a while and see what happens?” MacReady says, in the film’s perfect closing line. That’s what they do, and The Thing never tells us which of them is still human – but I don’t remember seeing the plume of Childs’ breath.
On paper, The Thing (2011) has a pretty kick-ass premise – after all, who doesn’t want to see what happened to the Norwegian research base before Carpenter’s film began? Unfortunately, Matthijs von Heijiningen’s film works better in theory than in execution, because once you get past the initial setup, The Thing is more of a remake than a prequel.
The first thing the film gets wrong is disturbing the unity of setting, which is what helped make Carpenter’s film such a classic. We start in America, where paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is enlisted by Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen, giving a performance as intriguingly dispassionate as Ian Holm in Alien) and his research assistant Adam Finch (Eric Christian Olsen, who says a lot of scientific-sounding stuff but never comes across as a scientist) to travel to Antarctica to examine an alien specimen the Norwegian crew has just unearthed.
Okay, I have a few problems with this.
The first is: why the hell couldn’t this be handled in an expository manner, say, during Kate’s helicopter ride to the base? Second, I like Winstead, and she does no-nonsense well, but she’s about as believable as a paleontologist – i.e., someone with a doctorate – as Ross was on Friends. Since Kate assumes much of the MacReady role, one wonders if the most novel thing screenwriter Eric Heisserer had up his sleeve was gender-swapping the protagonist. One also wonders if this film was made for people who didn’t want to watch the original, because a lot of von Heijiningen’s film plays like a greatest-hits reel of Carpenter’s film.
Whipping tentacles? Check. A mouth made out of a human stomach? Check. A head growing spider legs? Check. Hell, at one point a blood test is suggested. Somehow, despite 29 years between Carpenter’s film and this one, the monster effects actually look worse. It’s not a travesty, mind you, but The Thing is sorely missing the immediacy of Rob Bottin’s effect work; more often than not you want to applaud the actors for performing so well opposite a tennis ball.
My main problem with the film is its “more, more, more” sensibility. Take the spider for instance: take something that worked in the original, make it three or four times bigger, and it’s therefore better, right? The film’s climax takes place on the thing’s actual ship, and it’s audacious in its scope, but it ultimately left me cold. To me, the thing is scarier the less you know about it, and an over-the-top boss battle doesn’t do much for the film on the whole. Especially because it gives Kate the perfect opportunity to sacrifice herself – because she’s, you know, not in the original – and then wimps out, fading to black and evoking little more than irritation on the part of purists like myself (I told you in the first goddamn paragraph that I wouldn’t be objective).
There’s a lot about this film I like though, in spite of the last few hundred words. The cinematography (by Michel Abramowicz) is stunning; even in its most horrific moments, The Thing is never hard to look at. There’s clearly some slavish devotion to the original at play here, and if nothing else, von Heijiningen clearly has loftier ambitions than producing a mere cash grab. Smart touches abound; the research base is a perfect replica of the original, and we even get to see how the axe gets lodged in the door. Also, there’s one scene I would call beautiful without reservation; after Kate arrives at the base and sees the alien specimen, she looks up at the stars and muses, “I’ll never look at them the same way again.” The ending – the actual ending, not the unforgivable cop-out that sees Kate surviving – is impressively bleak, with Lars (Jorgen Langhelle) hopping into a helicopter to hunt down a dog, the same way Carpenter’s film begins.
The Thing does as much right as it does wrong, but ultimately I don’t know if it makes a strong case for its existence. But consider this: on its own merits, The Thing would be a decent horror film. Not great, not terrible, but smarter than average and bolstered by imaginatively horrific visuals. But it has the poor luck to live in the shadow of one of the greatest horror films ever made.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead (2004)
10/2: The Exorcist
10/3: Pontypool
10/4: Hocus Pocus
10/5: The Orphanage
10/6: Rosemary’s Baby
10/7: Alien
10/8: Scream series
10/9: Scream series
10/10: Cujo
10/11: The Cabin in the Woods
10/12: Pulse
10/13: The Babadook
10/14: Friday the 13th
10/15: The Last House on the Left (both versions)
10/16: The Thing (both versions)
10/17: Little Shop of Horrors
10/18: Hush
10/19: Silent Hill
10/20: The Shining
10/21: Funny Games (2007)
10/22: Evil Dead series
10/23: Evil Dead series
10/24: The Mist
10/25: The Ninth Gate
10/26: The Fly
10/27: A Nightmare on Elm Street
10/28: The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/29: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later
10/30: It
10/31: Halloween (either version)
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