The Thing

John Carpenter’s The Thing is probably my favorite horror movie of all time. We’ll get into why shortly but first let me tell you another short, personal story.

For the first year after I moved to Pennsylvania, I lived in what could charitably considered a two-story house with a backyard bordered by a cemetery. Creepy, no? A thousand plus dead people right in my backyard. Anyway, setting aside, circumstances dictated that we had no cable and thus no television. We also had no VCR but instead could only watch movies on the computer’s DVD player (this was 1999). We owned roughly six or seven movies, and among a lineup that included The Prince of Egypt and Conan the Barbarian was The Thing.

Point of this story? I watched The Thing probably 25 times that year, and that’s a conservative estimate. I never got tired of watching it, and I relished the opportunity to revisit it for this course.

First off, you’ve got a top notch, all star cast that includes the likes of Kurt Russell, possibly the manliest man alive, and Wilford Brimley, who plays a character very unlike any of his other roles. You’ve got an almost subterranean arctic landscape which lends the film an eerie quality in and of itself. You’ve got special effects that are groundbreaking for the film’s era and which stand the test of time. You’ve got the requisite creepy soundtrack very much like the one in the other film we’ve watched for this course, Alien. You’ve got a facility inhabited by a crew that doesn’t much trust each other from the get go, a situation that never improves and only gets worse. All of these factors combine to lend this film the isolationist quality that makes it work so well.

Throw into that mix the monster itself, a monster terrifying because it can assimilate into anyone or anything. When the dog first arrives at the station, it seems so harmless. By the time it’s discovered that the dog was in fact a “thing”, the tension is palpable and real, and we as the viewer immediately – like the crew – become distrustful of every man in the station.

Carpenter (and his cast) amp up the tension in every subsequent scene. When MacReady and Copper visit the deserted Norwegian station and stumble upon the space ship in the snow, we feel the dread that will soon infiltrate the American station, and we realize our heroes are doomed. From then on, the film is roughly akin to a roller coaster ride. Even at the end of the movie, when MacReady and Childs are the only survivors, we know they too are certain to die. There will be no happy ending; they will never make it to safety and in fact they shouldn’t for the sake of the rest of humanity.

In a nutshell, I very much enjoyed having the chance to watch this film again, and it’s no less terrifying on my 30th viewing than it was on my first.