THE THING (1982) is another fine notch on John Carpenter’s genre belt

Posted by Stephen Jannise

Four years after making one of my favorite movies of all time, Halloween, John Carpenter remade The Thing from Another World, the Howard Hawks film from 1951 that is playing on the television in certain scenes from Halloween. Clearly, The Thing was a labor of love for Carpenter, remaking one of his favorite films in his own vision, and that effort shines on the screen.

In what I think is his best performance, Kurt Russell stars as MacReady, the helicopter pilot for a team of American researchers living on an outpost in Antarctica. Before we meet him though, we are bewildered by an opening sequence in which two Norwegians in a helicopter of their own are chasing after a wolf, shooting at it from above. When the American researchers come out to see what all the racket is about, they are as confused as we are. This is a nice bit of surreal business to begin the film: why are these Norwegians trying to kill this wolf? The fact that no one on the outpost understands the Norwegians’ language means that it will be a while before we fully understand.

So this is what Norwegians do in their spare time.

In the meantime, though, Carpenter gets a great performance out of this wolf, which turns out to be an evil, shape-shifting alien life-form disguised as a wolf. When MacReady and the team’s doctor take the helicopter out to find the Norwegians’ base camp, the wolf stares out the window as the helicopter takes off, as if it’s thinking, “There’s two less I have to worry about.” Whereas Halloween’s Michael Myers lurked in the darkness of shadows and closets, this wolf prowls openly in the bright light of the outpost’s hallways, which acts as a nice contrast to Carpenter’s earlier film. This menace doesn’t need to hide.

Once the wolf reveals its true nature, a series of shape-shifting scenes follow throughout the movie, each one utilizing some amazing visual effects. Frequently, the team members start to kill the aliens in the middle of their transformations, resulting in a warped, half-blob and half-creature. At one point, the alien infiltrates a team member’s body and emerges from his stomach with a head exactly like that of the team member. After the other guys kill the alien, the team member’s real head dislodges from the body, now in the control of the alien, and lashes its tongue out at a table to try and pull its way into the clear. This is some amazing and inventive stuff, not just gore and guts for their own sake.

Yikes.

Of course, Carpenter does not need to rely on effects alone, as his talent for filmmaking is readily apparent. In the film’s most famous scene, MacReady devises a way to test everyone to make sure they are human and not an alien in disguise. He takes some blood from each man and burns the blood with a hot needle, waiting for a reaction. This is a tense scene that manages to have a shocking climax, first, and then a humorous one, reminding us that Carpenter’s talents went beyond simple scares.

The Thing is a film that takes the best Alien’s group dynamics and blends them with the Twilight Zone-esque paranoia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Though none of the characters are as fleshed out as Ripley and Ash were in Alien, and the film doesn’t strive for political commentary like Body Snatchers did, it nevertheless works as a combination of these earlier ideas and several of Carpenter’s own. It’s the kind of exciting, solid filmmaking that we expect from Carpenter.