The Thing dir. John Carpenter
The Thing had been drifting onto my radar lately, mainly through hearing an interview with John Carpenter. I didn’t rush to watch it like I did Assault on Precinct 13 (as good as ever on a second viewing), probably because, while I hadn’t seen it in its entirety before, I had seen a few bits here and there when I was a kid; enough to arouse unpleasant, resistant feelings now.
It’s obvious now where those feelings came from; even watching it as an adult, The Thing is an unsettling trip from its opening frames. A helicopter pursues a husky that runs through the wastes of Antarctica, a rifleman repeatedly shooting out the door at the dog - a grotesque disparity of technological power and fleshly vulnerability. It feels like a sadistic game; as the animal nears an American encampment, you wonder if perhaps this is some arcane vendetta being played out by rival researchers who’d warned their neighbors not to let their dog near their property again. But when the helicopter lands and the man proceeds to keep firing at the canine, even when it means shooting at the camp members, it’s apparent that some measure of derangement is involved - a feeling clinched when the rifleman tosses a grenade at the mutt.
Our efforts to suss out this strange situation are now joined by the site members. A trip to the Norwegians' camp turns up a bloody scene of carnage and death; no one is left alive to tell the tale of what’s happened. There’s also a corpse of some kind that doesn’t look quite human, which they bring back to the camp for further examination. But lest you worry that they’ve brought back some unspeakable evil, fear not - that evil already lurks in their midst, in the form of the dog they think they’ve rescued from the crazy Nordic gunner.
The revelations of the creature in their camp occur in scenes that are variously shocking, nauseating, and all around creep-tastic. Thirty years on, the special effects are stunningly compelling. The first unveiling happens as the husky is penned in with four other camp dogs; the other dogs move from initial anger at the intruder in their midst to abject fear, one of the dogs actually trying to eat his way through the mesh of their enclosure rather than be trapped with this. . . thing. The metamorphosis that unfolds is fleshily eruptive and deeply grotesque. As the creature emerges out of the dog in a vaguely canine-like form, like an evil parody of biology, there’s a profound sense of violation, almost as if a taboo is being broken. When tendrils shoot out of its body, choking and absorbing a couple other dogs, you get a sense of a boundaryless entity that is purely predatory. This essential formlessness of the creature, combined with its amazingly depicted, gross mimicry of its hosts, is the fundamental horror of this film. This is a movie that successfully runs counter to the idea that the scariest things are those left to the imagination: I’m pretty sure that at least some of what The Thing shows us is worse than anything I could have thought up.
But setting aside its handful of tour de force freak-us-the-fuck-out scenes, The Thing unspools a tight narrative of suspense and paranoia. In part, this comes from the clever duality of the creature - it can taken the form of anyone or anything (hello, paranoia!), but when it reveals itself, it can do so with suddenness, and in unexpected forms (hello, suspense!). In particular, the film’s air of paranoia is so effective because at least some of the base camp members are competent and open-minded, so that when the reality of what they face seems to always stay one step ahead of their conjectures, it’s all the more gripping. And there are enough characters so that you get a bit of variety in people’s reactions, as well as a realistic sense of group dynamics. In a similar vein, the film’s suspense works so well because Carpenter gives us time to breathe, and maybe relax a little, at some crucial junctures. And I think we’re a bit more willing to roll with its incredible premise because it feels so grounded in its Antarctic setting - you get the sense of the cold and unforgiving world all around them, particularly in a couple outdoor scenes (something in particular about their occasionally awkward runs over snow really got me - a small but effectively tangible detail).
Setting aside the grotesquerie of the creature effects, The Thing also a good-looking film. I particularly enjoyed the nighttime shots of the base camp, eerie blue lights against the blackness, and the icy warrens of the climactic scene, lit with a mellow yellow glow. I think the more pleasant aesthetics work to set off the disgustingness of the amorphous creature.
In a twist that you can take as either uncanny or meh, my initial viewing of The Thing was disrupted by various defects in the DVD I’d obtained from the library. It finally gave up the ghost in the midst of the most terrorizing and well-known scene of the movie, in which the creature manifests as a gaping maw and dangles its head on a ceiling-high stalk. I ended up checking out a functioning DVD the next day and rewatching at least half the film. Overall, it was a prolonged and intense living within Thingworld that I would not recommend to the faint of heart; even now, I am still pinching myself as a reminder that I’m no longer stuck with Kurt Russell in that icebound base camp. . .