15 Favorite Horror Films - #8

The Thing - (1982)

     1982 was a good year for film.  Especially that summer.  This is the year that gave us E.T., Poltergeist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, First Blood, Tootsie, Blade Runner and Conan the Barbarian.  It was the beginning of a long popularity in action films, and continued the science fiction trend that had begun with Star Wars five years earlier.  However, one film that was darned good didn't do well in the box office.  The critics thought it was too dark, too gory, too depressing.  It came out two weeks after the phenomenal family-friendly success of E.T, and the same day as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.  That movie was John Carpenter's The Thing.

     John Carpenter had a very successful career up to this film.  His first film, Dark Star, done while he was a student at USC film school and written by Dan O'Bannon (he wrote Alien) wasn't successful.  Assault on Precinct 13 was a bigger hit than Dark Star, but was still mainly shown at drive-ins.  His big success would come in 1978 with Halloween, which has of course become a phenomenon.  He followed that up with the TV movie Elvis which was one of the top watched TV-movies of the time.  It also got Carpenter and Kurt Russell into a great friendship.  the great vengeful ghost story of The Fog, which gets sadly overlooked and is not the director's favorite film due to all the reshoots he had to do to make it effective.  Then came the successful Escape From New York which starred Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken.  The next year, Carpenter began work on this film.  A film adaptation of the novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campell Jr.  It had been adapted to film before in the 1950s as The Thing From Another World, however due to censorship and practical issues of the time, it strayed quite a bit from the original story.  Not so with Carpenter's version.

     The film is set in Antarctica, where after a Norwegian helicopter tries to shoot the dog of an American research camp, the Americans investigate the Norwegian camp to see why.  They get there and everyone is dead, but they do find grotesque bodies of warped humans and a hollowed out chunk of ice.  Something was in there but is missing now.  They go back to camp, and little did they know that the dog was actually the alien in disguise, which starts to transform.  The big element of the plot is that the alien can imitate any other life-form.  This may not sound very interesting on paper, but the way it's done in the film is quite effective.  The special effects are quite phenomenal for 1982.  Here.  Look for yourself.

     

     In fact, critics of the day bashed the film for it's gore effects.  This is something that I disapprove of critics doing.  They should not be there to moralize on if a film is gross or not.  Morally irresponsible?  Okay, they can do that.  But there's little that's morally irresponsible in this film.  Vincent Canby, one of my least favorite critics in the history of film criticism (And you can see why), wrote this about the film.  "a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other. Sometimes it looks as if it aspired to be the quintessential moron movie of the 80s."  Ouch.  And screw you Canby!  Even my goddess of film criticism, Pauline Kael, disliked the film.  However, this is one of the few films skewered in it's day that's come to be known as one of the best films created, sort of like The Shining or Rocky Horror Picture Show.  

     The scares of the film apart from the gory aspects of the animatronic and make-up work, come from not knowing who is really the alien at a given time.  The imitation is without fault, so it's hard to know.  There is a scene late in the movie where they figure out how to tell who the creature is, a moment that is quite effective, but for most of the movie they have to find out by other means, such as the creature unintentionally revealing itself.  The film is also frightening by having no means of help from the outside world.  These people are in Antarctica, for cryin' out loud.  And their radio doesn't seem to be working.  The weather is too bad to leave in the helicopter, and the alien ends up sabotaging that anyway.  It's set mainly after the sun has set.  It's claustrophobic as most of the action takes place in a bunker that only has a few rooms.  There are plenty of jump surprises and the score, one of the few not done by Carpenter himself but done by Ennio Morricone in Carpenter's electronic style, is suitably repetitive, quiet, and suspense building.  

     But the big reason this is one of my favorite horror films is that it's such a blast to watch!  I hope one day I can see it in a movie theater since they have started releasing older classics back into theaters for select dates.  Kurt Russell is of course one of my favorite actors, and I think this is his best role.  In fact, the actors all take it so dead seriously that I believe it's what makes the film work.  If this was done with an ounce of tongue-in-cheek, it'd be doomed to failure.  But it's so bleak, cold and methodical that it's right on par with the best of the Cold War/McCarthyism films of the 1950s, which is what the original version was.  Why don't I consider this a science fiction film?  Because it isn't.  It's earthbound, it's believable, it's grounded...  It could happen.  The only reason this could be considered sci-fi is due to it having an alien, which isn't enough for me.  This is horror, plain and simple.  It's there to shock you, make you think, and make you leave the viewing shaken.  It may not do that to many, as people don't get scared of movies anymore.  But it is effective in entertaining, of being a great film, and of having some of the best special effects in history.  Skip the prequel/remake that came out a few years ago which relied heavily on CGI.  CGI is of the devil and should be used sparingly.  To prove my point, here's a scene of this film with just regular physical effects.

I can't link to any of the clips from the new film, as Universal has disallowed that.  Still they are on youtube, and are depressingly stupid.  Watch this version.  It's great.  If you don't agree... Well... Sorry, but you're wrong.