The Thing (1982)

"You've got to be fucking kidding..."

Little liked on its initial release, Carpenter's dark paranoid fantasy has since been re-evaluated as one of the director's best works. This effects-heavy remake of the 1951 classic The Thing From Another World returns to the original John W. Campbell Jr short story Who Goes There? for its inspiration, allowing Carpenter to utilise then state-of-the-art special effects as well as giving him ample scope to exercise his own concerns.

The Thing is the reductio ad absurdam of Carpenter's favoured technique - assembling a small group of disparate and ill-matched characters in a confined space and giving them something nasty to worry about. In Dark Star (1974), the crew had battled with their own madness and the beach ball alien; Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) was his most blatant exploration of seige mentality until the under-rated Prince of Darkness (1987); and the entire population of small towns were beseiged in Halloween (1979), The Fog (1980) and Village of the Damned (1995). In The Thing, Carpenter takes us back to the place-of-no-escape from Dark Star, a remote, forbidding wilderness that might just as well be outer space for all the help they're likely to receive from the outside.

Carpenter's forte is the minute dissection of fragile interpersonal relationships within that seige situation. Here, he extracts suitably twitchy and paranoid performances from a fine and dependable cast that manage to breath some life into cliched characters. The Thing quickly becomes a study in confinement, paranoia and loss of identity and it tackles its chosen themes with wit and accuracy. It eschews Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's original approach - wherein all American know-how and ingenuity save the day thanks to the gung ho heroism of its competent and decisive protagonists - for a more dour and pessimistic vision of barely stable personalities breaking down under the pressure. For all their macho bluster, Carpenter's characters are vulnerable and fallable. Macready tries terribly hard but simply can't get it right - when he hits on the brainwave of tying his fellow survivors to chairs and testing their blood, he endangers the lives of his colleagues who find themselves strapped to their seats while the man beside them explodes messily into the thing. Macready wants so hard to be the kind of Competant Man that stalked the great SF movies of the 50s but he's an altogether more realistic character, unsure of his own course of action and as terrified as the men who look to him for guidance.

Carpenter and Lancaster's (son of Burt, fact fans!) great coup of course was returning to the concerns of Campbell's original novella - no "intellectual carrots" for these guys! By taking on board the gist of Campbell's original, The Thing was able to benefit from the towering talent and imaginations of Carpenter and Bottin, who both pull out all the stops to create some of the most startling and unforgettable images the genre has ever provided.

Sadly, The Thing was not a great success at the box office - its relentlessly downbeat approach and apocalyptic overtones (the alien organism is so virulent it will only take 27,000 hours to infect the world's entire population) proved a little disconcerting for an audience looking to Rambo, Rocky and Reagan for their jingoistic cues. Macready and his bickering buddies were hardly the stuff of the early 80s American dream - US audiences (always and forever the arbiter of cinematic box office success) simply seemed unwilling to accept this rather hopeless, less-than-appealing and ill-disciplined mob as worthy standard bearers of American heroism and so the film died an unworthy death. The subtle, disquieting finale hardly helped - the last two survivors stare each other down across the ice, crouched in the ruins of the devestated base, waiting for each other to freeze to death, neither sure if the other is still human... Thankfully, the film has since been re-evaluated and its true worth has been explored and explained in some detail.

Those who did bother to see it all when it was first released all agreed on one thing - Rob Bottin's special effects are truly awe inspiring. Combined with Carpenter's trademark 70mm photography (with those fluid camera moves and almost chiaroscuro lighting), Bottin's effects wizadry conjures up one of the most memorably slimy and repulsively authentic monsters of the 1980s. The multi-faceted creature pops up everywhere, just when you least expect it - an attempt to revive a cardiac arrest victim ends in chaos as the 'patient' unexpectedly opens a gaping maw in its chest and hacks off the doctors hands; panicked by a blood serum test, it erupts from its latest host; most memorably, while the men look on dumbfounded, the head of one of its victims detaches itself, grows legs and scuttles nonchalantly out of the door...

In the final analysis, The Thing is Carpenter's flawed masterpiece. While it lacks the convincing characters of Assault on Precint 13 and sorely misses the viscously playful humour of Dark Star, it retains the breathless pacing and flawless timing of Halloween. Its strengths lie in its unswerving claustrophobia and its mounting sense of paranoia and distrust, paving the way for similar moves in Prince of Darkness, the under rated In the Mouth of Madness (1995) and Village of the Damned (1995).
KEVIN LYONS