Reeling Backward: The Thing (1982)
Buried upon its release by another extra-terrestrial story, the GOAT remake perfectly blends science fiction and horror into a still-arresting symphony of terror.
“The Thing” has often been called the best remake in film history.
It helps that the original was a low-budget sci-fi flick from 1951 with cheesy special effects. The alien in “The Thing from Another World” was supposed to be a plant-based life form that looked like Frankenstein but sucked blood like a vampire. That movie is probably best remembered now for its closing line encapsulating ‘50s political paranoia and space obsession: “Keep watching the skies!”
But director John Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster had the genius to turn John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella into a horror movie with science fiction overtures, rather than the other way around — possibly inspired by “Alien” three years earlier. Its spareness, both in the Antarctic setting and in its bleak tone, compelled your attention.
My friends and I were completely mesmerized by it as youngsters when it was released, and I had no idea until recently that it was considered a box office bomb, barely earning back its $15 million budget. (About $49 million in today’s dollars, still fairly low-end for science fiction.)
A certain other film, also about an extra-terrestrial that comes to earth but with a decidedly more upbeat/humanist bent, buried it and a bunch of other movies that year.
It didn’t require a long time for reconsideration. Almost immediately upon hitting home video “The Thing” became a top seller of VHS tapes, and entire generations of filmmakers have cited its influence upon their own work. There was even a 2011 prequel released, which I had completely forgotten about, and with good reason.
Another discovery: I had somehow missed that the musical score was by the great Ennio Morricone. There’s actually not a ton of music in the movie, Carpenter milking the silence and the howling arctic wind to build tension. But Morricone’s score is a hypnotically redundant line of reverberating beats, akin to a pulse, which are sometimes joined by swells of chords that shift and bend into discord. Carpenter, who famously wrote the hauntingly simple theme for “Halloween,” also contributed some synthesizer pieces.
No wonder “The Thing” remains a still-arresting symphony of terror.
Many people remember the special effects, mostly practical creature puppets and very wet gore by Rob Bottin. Bottin was just 21 years old during filming and experienced a physical and mental breakdown, so Stan Winston was brought in for an assist. Despite nearly 43 years of time passing, it’s still incredibly gruesome and convincing stuff. They used rubber latex, hidden mechanics and even food products to achieve the effect of the shape-shifting organism.
Its exactly morphology is left intentionally indistinct, so it often seems to be bits ‘n’ pieces of other creatures it has previously absorbed.
What’s truly terrifying about the alien is that we come to realize it’s not really a single creature, but more like a virus that infects any living thing it touches, imitating its cells and taking it over. You can kill 99% of its current form, but if even a tiny bit escapes it can start the cycle all over again.
What impresses me even more upon a recent rewatching is how carefully and precisely the characters are presented to us. It’s a large cast, 12 members of the (fictional) U.S. Antarctic Research Program, and literally not one word is ever whispered about their backstories, their profession, families, etc. We simply pick it up as the story goes along, and yet each man remains very distinctive and memorable.
That’s hard to pull off.
Kurt Russell is the main guy as R.J. MacReady, the laconic helicopter pilot who spends most of his time up in his elevated shack overlooking the landing pad. Impressively bearded, drinking constantly and with an absurd hat that looks like a smooshed, sideways sombrero, MacReady is our instantly identifiable everyman hero.
Donald Moffat plays Garry, the somewhat weak-kneed commander, who acts as if everyone is undermining his authority and thus makes his fears come true. Keith David is Childs, the mechanic and resident grouser, who eventually becomes MacReady’s main antagonist when things grow tense, with just a hint of racial tension.
Copper, the station doctor, is played by Richard Dysart, who would go onto fame on “L.A. Law,” and is precise and deferential. This is contrasted with Blair, the folksy biologist played by Wilford Brimley, who’s the first to realize the true threat the alien poses and goes off his rocker, destroying the station computers and communications to ensure it can’t escape to infect the mass populace, and thus ensuring his whole team’s demise.
(If you want to play the “Cocoon” game, in which Brimley is revealed to always be much younger than the characters he’s playing, he was a tender 47 when “The Thing” was released, his first major film role.)
It’s an interesting question to puzzle out exactly when it is Blair becomes infected himself. Was it already so when he went nutso, smashing everything up? I’d wager it was later, when the rest of the crew locked him up in the supply shed by himself. At one point MacReady checks in on him, Blair’s pleading that he’s OK and ready to rejoin the rest standing in counterpoint to the hangman’s noose he’s looped together.
Later we learn the Blair/Thing dug a tunnel through the ice under the shack and is building a mini-space saucer for himself out of purloined parts from the station helicopters and tractors. So did he create the noose to ward off the other humans and buy more time for his activities?
Nothing is clear, and the ambiguity is delicious.
Thomas Waites is Windows, the lazy hippy-ish radio operator; Joel Polis is Fuchs, Blair’s assistant who becomes a helpful advisor to MacReady; T. K. Carter is Nauls, the station cook and one of the last to die; Richard Masur, then known mostly as a TV actor, plays Clark, the well-meaning but dim dog handler; David Clennon is Palmer, the assistant mechanic and another low-level malcontent; and Peter Maloney is Bennings, the bald, red-haired scientist whose on-the-move transformation into alien form, with floppy tentacle-ish arm-things and breathless scream, is an early high horror moment.
Charles Hallahan plays Norris, the geologist who stands out amongst the other men for his girth and nimbus of curly hair. It seems clear he’s the first human to be infected, as the sled dog/Thing that first invades the camp is seen going into a room with his distinct profile in shadow.
Incidentally, the featured canine actor, Jed, lived to an impressive 18 years and also played the main dog in “White Fang” and its sequel.
I was struck in this most recent rewatching at the deliberate pacing of the movie, which I had always remembered as very lean and fast. It’s a half-hour in before the first station member is assimilated, and things don’t really hit the fan until about halfway into the movie’s 109-minute runtime.
From observing the men’s interactions and speech, it’s clear that there really isn’t a whole lot of work to do around the station. The men spend most of their time drinking or smoking dope, playing games and scratching at each other. MacReady gets P.O.’d at the computer chess machine that keeps beating him — voiced by Adrienne Barbeau, then Carpenter’s wife, and the only hint of the feminine in the movie — and pours his whiskey-rocks into its electronic panel, shorting it out.
(And thus depriving all the others of this pastime for the long winter closing in.)
The main thrust of the movie’s dynamic is not so much the threat of the alien, but the hostilities between the men as they suspect each other of being infected. Cliques quickly form and old resentments are ratcheted up.
Everything builds to the marvelous scene where MacReady comes up with the idea of testing each man’s blood by sticking a hot wire into a petri dish of it. The tension is built piece by piece, which each test coming up empty, so that by time the lucky doppelganger is revealed, our patience has worn thin and we assumed either the test was a bust, or nobody was the alien.
“Nobody trusts anybody now. We're all very tired,” MacReady narrates into a tape recorder, already assuming they’ll all die and hoping to leave some kind of a helpful record.
I think that’s maybe part of the reason “The Thing” fared poorly at theaters. It’s just so damn bleak and even nihilistic. The protagonist quickly realizes there’s no hope and resigns himself and the rest to their doom. Compare this to how Laurie Strode and Snake Plissken (also played by Kurt Russell) fight for their lives against all odds in “Halloween” and “Escape from New York,” two of Carpenter’s most recent prior films.
Several happier endings were written and shot, but eventually the the ambiguous one was chosen, where MacReady and Childs, still not trusting each other, hunker in to slowly freeze to death, content the monster has finally been destroyed. “Why don’t we just wait here a little while, and see what happens?” MacReady morbidly offers.
It’s a very post-Watergate kinda vibe, and I wonder if the movie had been released a few years earlier, during our national “malaise,” it might have found a more sympathetic audience.