The Thing (1982) Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Bill Lancaster. Starring Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, Keith David, Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat, and Jed the very good wolfdog.
Most people more than passably familiar with sci fi and horror movies know that John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) was panned by critics when it first came out and has only become a beloved sci fi horror classic in the decades since. Even so, it’s a little surprising to read contemporary reviews and see just how vehemently critics hated this movie.
They despised it. The critical vitriol was free-flowing and nearly universal. The New York Times called it “a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie.” The Washington Post dismissed it as “a wretched excess.” Time said, “The weird lad down the block, the one who is always fooling around with his chemistry set, will love The Thing. The rest of the neighborhood is likely to find it more of a squeamer than a screamer.” A review in the sci fi magazine Starlog wrote, “It has no pace, sloppy continuity, zero humor, bland characters on top of being totally devoid of either warmth or humanity.”
There’s something fascinating about the tenor of these reviews. It’s not just that critics didn’t like the movie. It’s more that a lot of them seem outraged that the movie isn’t what they expected when they went into the theater. They expected blood and gore, but not that much blood and gore. They expected special effects, but not gory, gooey, and grotesque special effects. They expected horror—but not, apparently, horror that would make them feel bad.
Audiences didn’t embrace the movie at first either. The Thing did poorly at the box office; it earned back its $15 million budget, barely, but not much more than that. It was such a failure that it risked destroying John Carpenter’s career. Universal bought out his contract rather than following through on their agreement to have him direct Firestarter (1984) and other films. He has spoken several times over the years about how his career would have looked very different if The Thing had been a success.
A lot of moves get a chance at critical reassessment over time; our cultural and social relationship to art is not static, nor should it be. But it’s rare for a consensus to swing so completely from one extreme (“a wretched excess”) to the other (“a peerless masterpiece”).
Also, I suspect The Thing is the only film to have undergone such a drastic of positive critical reassessment that features a scene in which a man’s chest cavity sprouts teeth and chomps another man’s arms off.
I love The Thing. Let’s just get that out of the way. I never make any claims to objectivity, but especially not today. I love this movie. The Thing is pretty close to my platonic ideal of sci fi horror: the isolated and inhospitable location, an ensemble of people just trying to do their jobs, the discovery of something awful that can hide in plain sight, growing distrust and paranoia, so much body horror, and an ending that leaves us unsettled and saying, “Well, shit.” (I know all of those things also describe Alien. I love that movie too. We’ll get to it in the future.)
Sometime in the ’70s, producers David Foster and Lawrence Turman decided they wanted to make a second film adaptation of John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella Who Goes There? The first adaptation is The Thing From Another World (1951), a well-liked film from the ’50s sci fi monster era, so a remake was always going to be compared to the original. There was some shuffling around about the rights, as the rights to the book and the rights to the remake sort of bounced around (separately) for a while before finally landing at Universal. Then it sat in development hell for a few years, as these things do. It was rewritten by several screenwriters and considered by several directors—including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper—before the studio finally settled on Bill Lancaster’s screenplay and John Carpenter as director.
But let’s talk about the man behind the camera: cinematographer Dean Cundey. He’s the director of photography (DP) not only in a number of John Carpenter movies, but also in the Back to the Future films, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, one of the most cleverly filmed movies ever), Jurassic Park (1993), and Apollo 13 (1995). So this is clearly a DP who knows his way around extensive special effects. But he didn’t start there. He had worked on a bunch of low-budget movies before first collaborating with Carpenter on Halloween, followed by The Fog and Escape From New York.
We’ll talk more about Halloween in a few weeks, but if you’ve seen it before you probably recall the distinctive, unsettling way the cinematography highlights the lurking, voyeuristic nature of the threat as it slowly builds. The DP’s work in a film is always important, and it’s especially important in horror movies, where decisions regarding perspective and visual information can highlight the contrast between what the audience sees and what the characters know to establish a specific tone and ramp up tension.
In The Thing, this starts at the very beginning. The scenes of the Norwegian helicopter chasing the dog across the icy landscape is one of those great opening sequences that builds tension by making less and less sense as more is revealed. (Those who understand Norwegian have a bit more information, but still not the full story.)
The exterior scenes were filmed in British Columbia and Alaska. The research base itself was designed by art director John Lloyd and built outside of Stewart, B.C., during warmer weather and left to sit until it was covered with snow. (The same location stars as both the American and Norwegian bases, filmed before and after fiery explosions.) The crew filmed the exterior shots in November and December of 1981, in freezing temperatures and often at night; it was so cold camera lenses would crack. The daytime shots are often framed to make the camp look and feel very small, almost trapped, by the expansive landscape.
Quick aside: The distant and close-up views of the alien spaceship embedded in the ice are a series of matte paintings credited to Albert Whitlock, a renowned matte painter with a massive list of credits in movies that range from 1950s Westerns to Star Trek: The Original Series to David Lynch’s Dune (1985) to John Landis’ Coming to America (1988). But it’s not entirely clear how much of the painting Whitlock actually did for The Thing, as Carpenter recalls that most of the work was left to his assistants. Carpenter and Whitlock, it seems, did not get along.
The nighttime exterior shots take that landscape-induced claustrophobia even farther. Cundey and Carpenter also made the choice to use the abundant flares and flamethrowers as a primary light source, which means the characters are limited in every sense: they can’t always recognize each other in their cold-weather clothing, they can’t see farther than their limited light allows, and the base itself has ceased to be a source of safety and instead contributes to the danger.
That last bit is key. In a frozen wilderness, the interior of the base with its warmth and electricity and locked doors would normally offer a modicum of safety, at least at the beginning. But that’s not the case in The Thing. In the progression from the clean, windswept exterior to the ramshackle base exterior to the cluttered base interior, the camera work is drawing us in to more and more restricted spaces without offering any safety or protection. There is no place to rest in this film.
In an interview with American Cinematographer, Cundey discusses the technical choice he and Carpenter made to use anamorphic lenses for the film, even though a great deal of the movie takes place in very claustrophobic spaces and close quarters. They made a choice, Cundey explains, to prioritize wide-angle shots for scene-setting and inclusion of the ensemble cast, rather than the more typical dramatic close-ups. There are close-ups, of course, particularly of MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Blair (Wilford Brimley) at key moments, and of the Thing itself in various horrifying shapes and forms. But it’s interesting to notice just how many of the scenes in the movie are framed to include every character present, even in quite small rooms.
This isn’t about getting the whole cast on screen. These guys aren’t the Avengers. They are, by design, nobodies. Just a group of guys trying to do their jobs. Those curiously wide-angle ensemble shots of them arrayed around the infirmary or the rec room are never about eliciting feelings of camaraderie. It’s all about ratcheting up the sense of paranoia, about emphasizing the distrust that reigns when the men are together.
A significant part of the way a horror movie builds tension is in how it makes us feel even before anything obviously horrifying happens on screen. In The Thing, this encompasses everything up until the monster reveal—and that includes a number of scenes where there are no humans on screen, or where humans aren’t the focus, because the camera is following the dog.
I love that the film never uses any of the usual “something wrong with this animal” signifiers. The dog isn’t acting erratically or violently; there’s no barking or lunging or snapping or growling like we usually see when a movie wants us to be suspicious of a dog. This dog is nosing through doors, lingering under tables, listening in on conversations, walking slowly down hallways while checking every room, watching through windows, with the camera lingering knowingly on him all the while. He’s acting like a person would be acting, if a person were skulking around the base for nefarious reasons, and the camera is treating him the same way.
The dog is so unsettling on screen, but off-screen everything about his role in the film is so wholesome. Multiple cast and crew interviews for The Thing feature one or more people showering praise on the dog. His name was Jed, he was a wolfdog, he was adopted from an animal shelter, and he was a very good boy.
Over the years, the cast and crew have spoken about how Jed’s close bond with his trainer, Clint Rowe, made it remarkably easy for them to get those key cinematic moments out of him. Richard Masur, who plays dog handler Clark, specifically mentioned the way Jed would obey commands without looking to his handler for treats—which, on screen, translates into that eerie, self-assured calm that characterizes the dog’s movements. It’s remarkable how effective it is, and even more so when you notice the absence of normal friendly dog behaviors as well, because he’s not wagging his tail or twitching his ears or getting distracted or anything like that. I don’t know how they found Jed during the casting process, but I feel pretty confident that The Thing wouldn’t work quite so well if they didn’t have such a gifted trainer-dog duo on set, and a dog so good at coming across as not a dog. That gives the film the freedom to focus a great deal of the opening act on the dog that wasn’t a dog, building up our unease and uncertainty as we wait to figure out exactly what’s wrong with that beautiful fluffy boy. (He’s so beautiful. Movie star beautiful! After his star turn in The Thing, Jed went on to star in 1985’s The Journey of Natty Gann, the movie that convinced me and many others of my generation that we should have been riding the rails with our trusty wolfdog during the Great Depression.)
But, alas, the dog is very decidedly not a dog, and we can’t talk about The Thing without talking about, well, the Thing. And what a Thing it is.
The man behind nearly all of the garish, gooey, gruesome prosthetics, sculptures, and creature effects in the film is Rob Bottin. I know this is the story for a lot of the special effects people I talk about in the column, but it’s true here too: Bottin is now a Hollywood legend for his special effects work, but in 1981 he was a 21-year-old who had already been working in the business for a few years, ever since he had sent a fan letter with some of his own drawings to special effects artist Rick Baker. Baker wasn’t terribly well-known at the time either, but that changed when Baker, with his fourteen-year-old apprentice Bottin, worked on a little project called Star Wars (1977), doing the makeup and prosthetic for the aliens in the Mos Eisley cantina. Bottin also makes an appearance on screen: he’s a member of the cantina band.
Like many 21-year-olds, Bottin took on a bit more than he could handle with The Thing. He talks about how he worked himself to sickness and exhaustion on set. Nearly all of the horrible (wonderful) sculptures and creature effects in the film are his work. The one exception is the initial monster reveal in the dog pen. That transforming dog-thing was outsourced to Stan Winston, who had previously visited unforgiveable cinematic crimes upon the world by helping to create 1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special, but would go on to redeem himself by working on The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), and approximately one million other big sci fi films.
The special effects work on The Thing helped Bottin (and Winston, for that matter) on the path toward a wildly successful film career, because both industry insiders and critics did recognize the tremendous skill and craftsmanship that went into creating the many grotesque forms of the Thing—even if they still hated it. The consensus was that it was very skillful work, but it was too gross, too gory. There was too much melting and tearing and ripping. It was too outlandish. (I don’t understand what’s outlandish about a human head sprouting legs and scurrying away. Seems normal to me.)
Bottin and Cundey were apparently constantly bickering on set about how to light the creature effects—Bottin wanted less light to hide the flaws, Cundey wanted more to show off every gruesome detail. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect Cundey won most of those debates, because we can see everything.
It’s so gross and so gory. It’s revolting. The Thing is so incredibly uncomfortable to watch. From the first monster reveal with the dogs all the way to the end, it’s a constant onslaught of unnatural violence inflicted upon bodies, and it remains breathtakingly gruesome no matter how many times you see it. Carpenter was apparently called a “pornographer of violence” because of The Thing, and even though that’s a totally metal epithet, it wasn’t meant as a good thing. (Note: I’ve found several interviews where Carpenter refers to reviews using that term, but I haven’t been able to find which review actually coined it.)
That’s a curious insult to choose, I think, that says very little about the movie itself and quite a lot about how critics were trying to contextualize their dislike of it. Because it’s true that a lot of horror movies do eroticize violence—but The Thing is sure as hell not one of them. (I mean. If it works for you, cool. This is a judgement-free zone for monsterfuckers. Your Kink Is Not My Kink and That’s Okay. But it’s pretty clearly not the intention. This movie is not trying to achieve the same thing as, for example, a sorority house slasher.)
Now, I happen to think that using the creature effects to push the gruesomeness off the charts is brilliant. I think that starting with the dogs is brilliant, as well as a thoroughly nasty and effective way to start us off wrongfooted. We expect humans to die in horror movies, but an entire kennel full of a cute, fluffy dogs who have done nothing wrong? There really, truly is nowhere safe in this film. And I think that having every transformation look completely different is also brilliant, because the Thing doesn’t follow the rules of familiar biology, but it still is recognizably biology, with all the blood and viscera and tendons and flesh that entails. I even think that the pitch-black gallows humor mixed into the horror is brilliant. The head scuttling around on spider-like legs, the way the blood-testing scene flips from agonizing tense to all-out chaotic with the men tied to the couch, the arm-chomping toothy chest cavity—it’s supposed to be too much, too over-the-top, too alien and wrong for us to do anything but gape and say, “What the fuck?”
I think that’s all brilliant. I love it. Wouldn’t change a thing.
And I don’t think the grossness is the main reason The Thing went over like a lead balloon when it was released. It’s part of the reason, sure, but a peculiar element about initial critical reaction and the subsequent critical reassessment of The Thing is that it’s actually hard to pinpoint why the movie was so very unpopular in the first place. It’s easy to find people who say they can explain it simply, but scratch the surface and it’s always more complex than it seems.
A lot of critics do cite the gore as being very off-putting. But bloody, gory films already existed. Body horror, splatter horror, monster horror, those already existed. That’s not to say The Thing didn’t level up what could be shown with makeup and creature effects—it did that, and with a truly admirable dedication to tearing and deforming bodies in new and unique ways. But it wasn’t the only movie around doing terrible things to human bodies on screen.
And, of course, the retrospective position tends to be that the primary problem was that The Thing suffered from historically bad cinematic timing. It came out just a few weeks after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which is warm and wholesome and safe, all the things The Thing tries very, very hard not to be. It also came out on the same day as Blade Runner, and two bleak sci fi movies coming out in a summer when American audiences had decided to embrace cute and friendly sci fi was more than moviegoers wanted to handle. (And, remember, Blade Runner’s theatrical ending was supposed to be a lot more darkly ambiguous—like The Thing’s—but investors threw a fit and forced Ridley Scott to change it.)
It doesn’t get brought up as often as E.T. and Blade Runner in these discussions, but I think another significant point of comparison from the movie-rich summer of 1982 is Poltergeist, which was one of the most successful and critically acclaimed movies of the year. Even more directly than E.T., Poltergeist provides an interesting contrast to The Thing. It’s a horror movie, but it’s bright, suburban, and family-oriented. It’s about parents saving their cute little moppet of a child. It’s rated PG. There is an explanation for why the house is haunted. There is somebody to blame. It’s a horror movie, but it’s familiar and comforting. The kid and her family survive. The family dog survives.
None of the dogs survive The Thing. Doesn’t go so great for the humans either. We don’t know what will become of MacReady and Childs (Keith David) at the end. We don’t even know if they’re human or not. The ambiguity is deliberate; Carpenter toyed with other, more decisive endings, both good and bad, and chose this one on purpose. He knew before the movie’s release that it was going to piss off audiences, and it did. People want there to be clues that lead to an answer. People want movies—especially horror movies—to be clear about how we’re supposed to feel at the end.
The Thing brazenly denies us all of that. Is the Thing destroyed? We don’t know. Is one of the men now the Thing? We don’t know. Is the world safe? We don’t know. We have no idea.
This ending, like the ending of Escape From New York, is often described as nihilistic. I think a good argument can be made that “nihilistic” fits Escape From New York, but I don’t think it’s quite the right word for The Thing. In spite of what the critics said at the time, the movie is not devoid of heroism, even if the characters don’t go about it in a particularly admirable way. It is a heroic act when MacReady, Nauls (T.K. Carter), and Garry (Donald Moffat) prepare to sacrifice their only chance at survival to kill the Thing. It’s even a heroic act, albeit a misguided one, when Blair smashes the radio to isolate the base and prevent the Thing from reaching a more populated area. (Misguided, maybe, but totally awesome. Every movie should have Wilford Brimley with an ax.) Even amidst all the distrust, paranoia, and terror, the men are actually trying to use both knowledge and action to kill the Thing before it can do more harm. If they weren’t trying, and we weren’t invested in their attempts, it wouldn’t make audiences so angry that we don’t find out whether they succeed.
I do think the criticism that the movie’s characters are a bit too thin is justified. Even the cast knew that at the time; David Clennon, who played Palmer, has spoken about how he mentally compared their characters to that of Alien and knew The Thing’s ensemble would fall short in comparison. The characters have no backstory, no external ties. Nobody mentions a wife or kid back at home, or even a home back home. Their only connections are to each other, and those are strained before the Thing shows up.
This is another similarity to Escape From New York: We don’t know who these characters are outside of this very extreme circumstance. That’s not always how horror movies work. A lot of horror movie tropes rely on shorthand that lets the audience know whether the people who die are good or bad, innocent or wicked, virginal or slutty, selfless or selfish, loved or hated. The audience wants to know if character deserve to live or die, and there is satisfaction when somebody deserves to live. The Thing strips all of that away. Without backstory, without context, the characters can’t be filed into deserving and underserving. They’re just a bunch of guys. The violence inflicted on them is not tied to whether they are good or brave or bad or cowardly. If we want them to survive, it’s because they are human, not because they deserve it more or less than anybody else. They’re just a bunch of guys, and they are outmatched.
I think that is what lies beneath the vitriol in a lot of the contemporary reviews of The Thing. Critics mentioned the gore, the confusing ensemble of characters, and the bleak tone, but there is also a strong thread of reviewers seeming almost angry that the movie isn’t showing them a version of the world they want to see. The world that American audiences in the summer of 1982 were craving is pretty clearly laid out by films like E.T. and Poltergeist: scary things happen, and the unknown disrupts peaceful lives, but family is sacred, love and friendship are powerful, and the world is fundamentally fair for nice, ordinary people trying to live nice, ordinary lives.
So it’s not really that strange, in retrospect, that critics and audiences were so repelled by the movie, nor is it strange that opinions have reversed almost completely over the past forty-odd years. The Thing blasts a flamethrower in the face of that desperate, almost hysterical ’80s-era yearning for comfort, clarity, and normalcy. It doesn’t tell us who deserves to live or die. It doesn’t tell us if anything the characters do matters in the end. It doesn’t even tell us what we’re fearing and hating, because the Thing has no shape of its own. All of the paranoia and distrust the characters experience is reflected right back at the audience, because we don’t know, and that’s the scariest feeling of all.
Man, I could write so much about this movie. This piece could have been 10,000 words long, but the editor would have killed me. I left out so much.
What do you think about The Thing and its place in pop culture, then and now? I’m sure somebody will bring up “The Things” by Peter Watts, so I might as well link it for you to read, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Next week: I guess sooner or later this column was going to be faced with discussing a mainstream hetero romance. I’ll do my best. Watch Starman on Apple, Amazon, Microsoft.
No wonder Tumblr likes this movie. I saw a post the other week about how easily you can make it a queer allegory, which could be very tasty.
While I might be too squeamish for it, I almost want to watch just for the dog.
Things With Beards, Sam J. Miller. https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/miller_06_16/
Fabulous article. I saw The Thing in preview, in a smallish screening room before it opened in theaters. I’ve never been able to watch it again, as the body horror really got to me.
But articles like this always make me want to rewatch it and I will, one of these days.
I think it came out at the perfect time to be rewatched, repeatedly, on cable and reassessed there. Cable is where I saw it, several times.
” they can’t always recognize each other in their cold-weather clothing”
When I was in the Army in Korea in the winter of 85/86 the cold weather gear didn’t have nametags like the regular uniforms, we all had the hoods up, and we all wore sunglasses, and the only way you could really recognize someone was if they had a distinctive walk.
Yes! I should have mentioned that in the article, but you’re exactly right that this is one of those films that benefited hugely from wide VHS and television distribution. That absolutely opened the door for opinions to shift over time.
I was not born when this movie came out but was blessed to watch it on HBO/Prism when I was a kid.
I definitely got Thing vibes when reading Tchikovsky’s Children of Ruin and Children of Memory.
Great times.
I don’t think the “pornographer of violence” description was meant to suggest that Carpenter eroticized violence; the term “pornography” can be used metaphorically to refer to anything that’s excessively graphic, gratuitous, and disreputable, prioritizing visceral sensationalism over artistic merit or good taste. The reviewers were saying that it was crassly overindulgent and tasteless, not that it was sexualized.
A literal definition of “pornography” is art that is created specifically to meet a market demand, that is made expressly to be sold. Of course, that encompasses practically all of popular culture…
In context, the label placed on Carpenter seems intended to classify him alongside grindhouse specialists like Herschel Gordon Lewis, which is plainly absurd.
Hmm, no, the literal meaning of “pornography,” etymologically speaking, is “depiction of prostitutes.” You can backtrack the Greek word for prostitute, pornē, to the earlier meaning of “purchased,” but the Greek word pornographos referred specifically to a person who depicted prostitutes or sexual activity.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=pornography
Still, you’re not wrong that part of the intent of calling someone a pornographer is to accuse them of selling something immoral for profit. It’s not just about meeting a market demand, but specifically about pandering to the public’s basest urges, encouraging vice for the sake of profit.
I suspect that the Internet has mainstreamed hardcore porn to the extent that the word “pornography” has largely lost the stigma of vice and obscenity that it’s traditionally had, and people have come to see it as merely synonymous with erotica.
I just happened to watch the DS9 episode “The Adversary” the other evening, and it’s bascially the Star Trek take on this story. They even had the blood test scene. Sadly no dogs, though.
Speaking of the dogs, I have to fast forward through that every time I rewatch this. I don’t know what the filmmakers did to get that reaction, but they seemed genuinely freaked out. Poor pooches.
Other than that, a great flick.
The Starlog review really feels like someone who had a strong negative reaction looking for reasons, I can see the argument for “bland characters” but I don’t see much wrong with the pacing, and the claim it has “zero humour” seems like the reviewer had decided against it by the time we got to moments like Garry’s feelings about being tied to the couch.
I agree very much about the pacing and the humor. The humor is dark, but it is very much there. And I think the pacing is great–it cranks up slowly until it reaches the “everything that can go wrong will go wrong” stage and doesn’t let up. The tied to the couch scene is a perfect example, too, because it’s real edge-of-your-seat tension right before everything goes crazy.
I wonder if there was ever a short story where the wolf-dog actually was an alien who badly wanted to be in an Earth Horror movie :)
I think THE THING is better than ALIEN.
I actually think Ash was a hero of sorts—space truckers trying to kill off what he considered an endangered species. Had Ash really wanted to do what the Company wanted—he would have followed Parker’s suggestion and frozen Kane and put him on the shuttle-problem solved.
But I digress.
Palmer, Fuchs, Blair—the cast of THE THING are every bit as interesting as the cast of ALIEN…which, in the end—was a man in a suit.
I’m so glad I watched The Thing in the late 80’s on VHS tape rental. I’m too much of a coward to watch it again on my 4K Dolby Vision Pro big screen TV! I remember a number of reviews were critical of Carpenter not being more faithful to the original movie. After seeing Carpenter’s The Thing I was able to find Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? at my local library and discovered that Carpenter was closer to the novella than The Thing From Another World.
Right! I didn’t go into this because it’s kind of complicated, but the movie is mostly supposed to be an adaptation of the novella, not a remake of the first film. There was a situation where the people who held the novella adaptation rights were different from the studio that held the film remake rights, but both eventually ended up with Universal.
But the project went through a lot of rewrites and changes, and when Carpenter brought on he was wary about adapting the original film because he liked it a lot. So he was the one who went back to the novella to sort of get back to the core of the story. He talks about it in this interview here: https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/the-thing/
There was even a plan to electrocute The Thing…Fuchs was to be killed with a shovel and Bennings to be stabbed…more a murder mystery.
On the other hand, one individual wanted to show a victim dragged under the snow and transforming each time he surfaced.
There is a fan site called OUTPOST 31…yet the site was called Station 4.
Never did figure that out.
I was lucky enough to rent the DVD from Netflix back when they mailed them, and it had a version with cast and director commentary. I remember it had lots of great stories about how awesome Wilford Brimley and the wolf were. The wolf kept giving the actors heart attacks because it would walk up behind them in complete silence (unlike a big dog). And Wilford was a real cowboy.
No one who saw Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Mr. Carpenter’s film about a random robbery turned existential survival quest, would have been overly surprised by The Thing. Even the body horror was presaged with the deliberately splashy murder of the little girl looking for sprinkles on her ice cream cone.
I wonder if the lampshading in The Thing (such as the spider head’s appearance provoking the line, “You gotta be fucking kidding me!”) was intrinsic to the script or was added at the insistence of the studio. I am guessing the latter.
I haven’t dug into as much because it’s not sci fi, but from what I’ve read, some reviews (mostly American) of Assault on Precinct 13 did do a lot of tsk-tsking over the violence and bleak view of humanity. But other reviews (mostly Brit and European) loved that about it. I’m not anywhere near knowledgeable enough about this to draw any conclusions, but I’m also curious about Assault’s place as a revisionist western (Carpenter himself has always said it’s basically just Rio Bravo in a different setting), during a time when people already expecting that level of cynicism from westerns…
Now you’ve got me all curious, though, because you’re right that the signs were there all along.
From what I’ve read of interviews with the cast and crew, there doesn’t seem to have been much studio pressure at all, and the interior scenes with the special effects were filmed pretty early in the process. I’m not at all sure, but I wonder if those moments are more likely to be ad-libs that came out of the cast discussions/rehearsals. Apparently the cast spent a lot of time talking about the Thing and how they would react and what it would feel like and all of that.
Considering that this is a rare horror film to feature no female characters, maybe those angry reviews translate simply to “no boobs?”
I’ve always wondered if that bottle MacReady offers Childs in the final scene wasn’t one of his Molotov cocktails, still filled with gasoline.
Clearly, our “devoid of warmth or humanity” reviewer didn’t get the memo.
Enjoyed the article.
For me one of the greatest SF movie adaptations. Good cast and performances, unequalled special effects, Carpenter’s direction, Carpenter / Morricone music, and clever screenplay by Bill Lancaster that hews closely to the John W. Campbell Jr novella but goes for a darker ending.
The article echoes much of my own thoughts on the film. The movie is diametrically opposed to the mainstream horror / SF movie ethos of the period, which accounts for its very negative initial reception. No cliche characters with a filler background, no comforting explanations or outcome; just ordinary people in a terrible place. The audience is confronted with an escalating horrible scenario and there is no pressure release.
Given the grit, the realism, and the decidely non-meta moviegoing experience, I often think of the screenplay and the movie as the step-children of New Wave cinema and the 1970’s New Hollywood aesthetic. The cinematography definitely reflects that realistic approach via framing and lighting that eschews the shiny / artificial in order to make the viewer actively look and observe. When MacReady’s face is lit by flare or flamethrower you get a sense of the Hell in which the characters find themselves.
I was too young to see this on initial release. I first watched it during the 1980’s VHS boom and didn’t grasp everything but for me MacReady’s WTF reaction to the spider-head-thing was an electric moment of audience identification. Allegedly it was ad-libbed by Kurt Russell and many of the cast reactions to the critters were genuine. I have the DVD release of this movie with the added features of cast and crew commentary / interview. Of note was the pervasive cold – the cast drank whiskey to stay warm – and the use of real flamethrowers – drunken cast plus flamethrowers plus surprise special FX , what a wonderful way to get on-screen verisimilitude.
I’m going to mention a point that I’ve seen discussed a number of times. I’m unconvinced by the idea that the movie is a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic. Its release in 1982 seems too early for that argument to hold. Nevertheless I see how it could be interpreted in this way – Blair’s computer model, the all-male cast, the paranoia – but for me that’s too much like squinting to make shapes out of clouds.
On a more upbeat note, around our house this is one of two regular but unorthodox holiday season late night movies. As a Christmas movie The Thing really does make you grateful for a warm fireside and a good single malt.
That’s a good point about the ’70s aesthetic, and I think you’re right. One interesting detail that kept coming up in interviews was how much they discussed how realistic the Thing should look. They had discussions about the colors of the innards, the hue of the blood, how to light it, how the MPAA would react if it looked too real, whether it would look too cartoonish if it didn’t, all of that, which I think is an indication they were very aware of the impact of making the most unreal element of the movie look realistic. Everything outside the creature is grounded in that sense of realism–like the flamethrowers you mention, which serve as a practical light source but add so much to the unease.
There are definitely genuine cast reactions in there, yes! I don’t know if any of them go quite so far as, say, the Alien chestburster scene, where nobody knew what to expect, but I do think they had moments where the effects were used to shock the cast. Sometimes by accident–apparently some of the effects were more flammable than they expected.
I agree with you about the AIDS metaphor. I think the timing is wrong, and I also think that Carpenter has, historically, been not at all shy about just outright saying when his movies are intended as a political allegory or metaphor. We’ll get into that more when we watch They Live in a couple of weeks, but it was also true of Escape From New York. But of course the director’s intent is very different–and doesn’t always have to be tied to–what people take away from, and that is an interesting retrospective interpretation.
I love that this is a Christmas movie for you. Man is indeed the warmest place to hide!
“apparently some of the effects were more flammable than they expected.”
Heh. I remember a production of Henry V that had that happen.
If you’re making a joke about the 1613 performance that burned down the Globe Theatre due to a cannon misfiring, that was actually King Henry VIII.
“I’m going to mention a point that I’ve seen discussed a number of times. I’m unconvinced by the idea that the movie is a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic. Its release in 1982 seems too early for that argument to hold. Nevertheless I see how it could be interpreted in this way – Blair’s computer model, the all-male cast, the paranoia – but for me that’s too much like squinting to make shapes out of clouds.”
Yeah, the timing’s all wrong, given that the script had been in the works since 1979 and the final draft script is dated July ’81. The epidemic wasn’t declared until June ’81, late in the process.
Of course, there have been many disease epidemics throughout history, so many horror stories are allegories for the fear of disease and infection. Most works of fiction that appear to predict the future are really just drawing on the past, because there is nothing new under the Sun.
Now I have to rewatch it and pay close attention to the dog…
Excuse the pitch – the movie is an adaptation of the classic short story Who Goes There? by John W Campbell. An incomplete manuscript of the expansion into a novel was discovered a few years ago, finished, and published as Frozen Hell. There’s a companion collection of new short stories, Short Things, and, now, a sequel, The Things From Another World.
Spoiler alert:
The ending is not ambiguous, one of the two characters is the thing. Rewatch the linked video looking at the exhaled breath. It appears they filmed and edited the movie to only have normal looking foggy exhales from one character. This is subtle and easy to miss, but after rewatching, I think there’s a very deliberate decision to show who is the thing.
Keith David discussed the movie and end scene in an Entertainment Weekly video. David’s thinking evolved over time, and I do wonder whether he’s ever asked Carpenter about the condensation.
https://youtu.be/iY5N9d645po
Saw this originally in 1982 in a local cinema. It was half full, the same as it was when I saw Blade Runner there. However packed for ET and Poltergeist. But I honestly loved BR and The Thing more than ET (to saccharine) Poltergeist was ok, except for the clown. Clowns are evil.
I even liked the 2011 “premake”
The Thing was more agile being CGI—my head cannon is that the dog-thing, being hungry, ate a bit of radioactive material which led to slower, more painful and more gooey transformations seen in Carpenter’s film.
Today’s CGI is much better—and would be perfect for a transformation in a comic book sequel.
There was an Argentine base, and you see one person’s flesh melt and flow down his clothes leaving hair and beard behind on top of empty clothes.
The Thing—a moving flesh-puddle with two eyes and a gaping mouth is trying to flow away.
The frustrating thing about the 2011 prequel (which I’ve never seen but read about, so it’s only second-hand frustration for me) is that the filmmakers put great care and hard work into creating cutting-edge, realistic mechanical effects like the Carpenter film had used, but then some executive insisted they replace them at the last minute with rushed, much worse-looking CGI.
haven’t seen this since 83/84. on the mess decks of USS Glover (FF1098). back in the day when we had movies on film, delivered to the ship when opportunities presented themselves.it’s been a minute.
don’t remember that much of it, but those gorgeous shots of the high north were awesome.
Excellent article, one of the best I’ve read on this movie (and I’ve read a few). Focusing on why the critics and viewers hated it so much in 1981 and why that’s since turned around so dramatically is a great way to get into the innards of both the movie the audience.
I am a big fan of The Thing; it’s my favourite Carpenter film (and he made some amazing films in the 70s and 80s). The entire feel of the movie is unsettling, in a good way: I find the isolation of the Antarctic very unsettling to begin with, but the nature of the alien lifeform, the inability to trust that anyone else is who they appear to be, combined with some of the best practical effects EVER, really makes for a cinematic masterpiece. The scene where they test the blood has to be my favourite; it is SO well done, with so much tension, it’s just brillliant.