The Thing / John Carpenter (1982)

John Carpenter is famous among normies for creating the terrifying, unknowable Shape from Halloween — a killer devoid of emotion, motive deferred across sequels. In The Thing he gives the opposite: a terrifying story happening to people ripe with feeling. Here, the emotion is the terror.

The cast is the best Carpenter ever assembled, no disrespect to Roddy Piper. Kurt Russell communicates the loneliness of a man isolated hundreds of miles from anywhere, bonded by necessity to people he can no longer trust. Keith David, T. K. Carter, Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat, Thomas Waites and Wilford Brimley — two years before the Brimley/Cocoon Line — becomes genuinely menacing. The performances in this film earn it a full star, it's not naturalistic Oscar-bait, but it's also not over-the-top horror schlock. Viewers feel the weight of the story pulling on every character.

Is it an action movie? Lovecraftian horror? Sci-fi epic? Yes. Readings of Cold War paranoia and masculinity only deepen its impact, but the film works entirely on its own terms. The film opens with a dog, escaping from an unknown group of Norwegian scientists who chase it and shoot at it, unsuccessfully. The Americans, led by Russell's MacReady, take the dog in. Soon, the dog begins revealing that something isn't right, and within the first act, the crew is facing a cage full of mutated dog creatures.

Rob Bottin's creature work with Dale Brady create truly frightening spectacle. The creature and it's various mutations are scary and gross in a way that viewers can't look away from. There is blood and viscera, but it's never gratuitous. As with the rest of the film, restraint is the tool most carefully deployed.

If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies. Nobody left to kill it. And then it's won.

Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey let the actors and the close quarters do most of the work. Cundey's more than 100 credits as cinematographer and director of photography are a ridiculous list of some of the best films of the 80s and 90s including Back to Future series, Jurassic Park and his collaborations with Carpenter, Halloween 1-3 and Big Trouble in Little China.

In The Thing the camera moves very little. Lighting is dim indoors; exterior snow and white skies feel equally like a prison. In the first five minutes, viewers know there's nowhere to run.

What closes in the crew is not just a monster of unknown origin and powers, but distrust. Each man is stuck not fighting the creature, but also growing suspicion that the thing has already gotten to his comrades. The tension increases in every scene, as carefully blocked setups have each actor calculating their distance from a door or a weapon, not that there's a weapon that would guarantee safety.

In Halloween, Carpenter introduced what have become the core tropes of the modern slasher. Here, there are no rules that a smart-ass like Randy can cite as rote twenty years later. The creature, and also its prey, are totally unpredictable. There are nods to race, class, age disparity and authority but the film isn't interested in preaching or providing any guidance. Who is in charge? Who should be? What does it mean to be lost at sea, or in this case, the Arctic. Carpenter, it turns out, does not care.

As they come to terms with the stakes, some men fight the creature, some fight each other. Some grab for power and some retreat from it. It's an interesting psychological study in response and counter-response within a closed group. They're all–MacReady included–facing the same situation, but he is presented as one of two able to keep a clear head in the face of wildly escalating violence and shock. But Carpenter doesn't over-intellectualize the psychology of the men. He gives the audience credit for intuiting a lot that would be explained through boring exposition if The Thing were first made today. There's no past trauma, the story is as isolated as the men themselves.

Unlike Big Trouble in Little China and Escape from New York, Russell isn't playing a caricature. In fact, those roles might the caricature of MacReady, the rugged, ever-prepared leader, ready to use his wits or fists to solve the problem. Where the film leaves the crew, and MacReady, at its conclusion speaks to Carpenter's view of the ability of the rugged American man to face down problems. In the end, the audience is in the same place as MacReady. Uncertain of success.

Key scene

Spoilers below.

The blood test scene is the film's apex: To identify who, if anybody, has been infected by the creature, MacReady tells the surviving members of the crew that each will submit to a test. He'll collect blood from each and shock each sample with electricity to reveal potential infection. One by one, in silence, thumbs are cut over Petri dishes. The tension is almost geometric in its precision, as each crew member looks on in deepening horror. Then Palmer's sample hits the wire and everything breaks. Everything. The energy of the film spikes here.

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