John Carpenter: The Thing

Every Halloween, I end the night with a “comfort food” type of horror film. Films like Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Beyond, Suspiria, The Church, Psycho, or Alien may not be considered the best horror films (although most on that list certainly qualify), but they make for a nice, familiar end to the night. Another film I often consider to end the night on is John Carpenter’s brilliant science-fiction/horror hybrid The Thing. Ask me on the right day, and I might even tell you that I like The Thing more than Halloween. While Halloween — as we’ve already discussed in this retrospective — embodies everything that is great about the horror genre and is pretty much the perfect horror movie, The Thing, however, adds another, more cerebral, layer to both the horror and sci-fi genre. There are moments throughout The Thing that are so perfectly executed — that so expertly showcase the bleak tone and evoke such a perfect tone of dread — that I could be convinced that I’m looking at a more complete and complex (and yes better) film than Halloween.

The “complete and complex” part is easy to see, for Halloween is a horror stripped to its most simplistic elements — a boogeyman stalks its prey. The Thing, though, adds the element of paranoia to an entrapped group. We’ve already seen in numerous Carpenter films (Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13 most notably) that he loves the Hawksian theme of a group in close quarters facing some kind of outside threat, and it is executed to perfection in The Thing. The film opens with a beautiful aerial shot of a dog running through the snow. As the Norwegians in the helicopter frantically discuss their play to get the dog, the viewer very briefly thinks they’re simply just trying to retrieve their lost dog in this vast, expansive landscape. But, we soon see that the Norwegians in the helicopter are actually trying to kill the dog, which is an alien having reawaken from the snow taking the shape of the dog. When the helicopter lands outside of the American Antarctic research camp, it explodes. Curious as to what just landed on their doorstep, a few of the researchers inside, led by pilot R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) decide to fly over to the Norwegian camp to see what the deal is.

As they arrive at the camp, they come across an eerily quiet camp before realizing that all of the members of the camp have been killed. Upon their return to the base, the dog — having been caged — is going crazy, and as the research team looks on, it sprouts tentacles and begins morphing into a grotesque alien creature before being burned.  Of course, things are never that easy, and as a part of the alien escapes that cage, it begins to latch onto and overtake human form. And so it begins: the research team—and the viewer — are never sure which member of the team the alien has morphed into as the trust of this small, isolated community quickly deteriorates.

The idea of an evolving extraterrestrial was, obviously, not new at the time. Alien, released by Fox three years earlier, introduced audiences to the idea with their Xenomorph alien creature. and Universal — no doubt wanting to capitalize on the success of Ridley Scott’s slasher in space — believed they had their man in Carpenter to create a bigger, more intense (and profitable) version of Alien. The Thing (and Alien, too) is essentially an 80 minute version of Hitchcock’s example — in the essential text Hitchcock by Truffaut — of the difference between surprise and suspense. In the book, Hitchcock explains a scenario where two separate audiences watch the same film, but in one film the audience is privy to a bomb under a table whereas the second audience doesn’t know about the bomb. In this scenario, the audiences view the scene very differently. The first audience sits in suspense wondering when that bomb is going to off, perhaps altering everything they interpret in that moment. The second audience has no idea the bomb is there, so they will view the scene in an entirely different way until the bomb goes off, giving them a jolt.

The Thing is tremendous at introducing its “bomb” relatively early in the way it lets the audience fret over who is the alien because we know fairly early on in the proceedings that at least one of these guys has to be an alien. The audience is just never quite sure — like the entire research team — who it is, and it makes for a great paranoid thriller as well as a viscerally violent and jolting horror film. Whether you’re a viewer that prefers horror that surprises you (or a better word these days may be “shock”) or keeps you in suspense, one of the brilliant things about The Thing is that it has both in spades. Carpenter balances the two here better than in any other film he made; it’s really quite the feat.

Kurt Russell is great (once again) as MacReady. It’s probably my favorite Russell performance in a Carpenter film. It’s kind of a sneaky-good performance, too. On the surface, there doesn’t seem like there’s a lot for Russell to do in The Thing. It’s not as showy as Snake Plissken, and it’s not as big and campy and fun as his performance in Big Trouble in Little China, but it’s steady and Russell says so much with his face throughout the film. We can see the hopelessness in MacReady’s face. He has a plan, sure, but so what; what’s the point of having a plan in a situation that laughs in the face of such things. There’s a moment in The Thing where MacReady is recording his thoughts on killing the alien (pictured above), and there’s just this look of “so what?” on his face — a sign that there’s no way these men return the same after this ordeal, so, in a sense, they’ve already lost. Bleak, indeed. The rest of the cast is up to the task, too. Great character actors like Donald Moffat and Keith David are standouts here as is Wilford Brimley; it’s another example of Carpenter’s mastery with ensemble casts, especially those comprised of great character actors.

Teaming up once again with cinematographer Dean Cundey, Carpenter creates what is arguably his most atmospheric film. The long empty corridors throughout the research center or the snow-shrouded exterior shots have an eerie emptiness to them — as if we’re just waiting for something to jump out at us. But Carpenter, as per usual, is more interested in keeping his scares quietly (the one thing we can always appreciate about Carpenter is that he doesn't give you a cheap jolt with music stings) in the background (see the aforementioned screengrab), and, yes, there are a lot of upfront scares (the defibrillator scene is standout in Carpenter’s oeuvre), but these long, “empty” shots get to the heart of what Carpenter is really going for here: existential dread. Adding to that, I like how Carpenter builds tension with the use of fade out/fade in transitions that suggest a very unspecific passage of time; the story could be taking place in the typical 24-48 hour time frame Carpenter loves to set his stories in, or it could be much, much longer. Oh, sure, when it’s all said and done The Thing is a “just” a scary movie, but at times it feels like so much more. Leave aside for a moment the great effects shots and scares and simply look at The Thing as an exercise in cerebral horror — the film where the audience knows the bomb is under the table is just waiting for it to go off.  Here, the bomb is in the shape of 12 men trapped in a research center, unsure of who really is human.

The almost unbearable tension throughout is best represented by the scene where MacReady — after being left for dead on the outside — returns to prove that he isn’t the alien and to prove who is. The “blood sample” scene is so well constructed; it goes down as one of the very best moments Carpenter ever filmed. As the camera observes (quietly, it must be stated, as Carpenter and legendary composer Ennio Morricone know that a scene this tense needs to be observed in silent suspense, and they wisely use silence to their advantage throughout the film) the action, the audience (aware of the bomb under the table, to continue the metaphor) has been conditioned to believe, through a variety of horror tropes, that the person who is actually the alien is Garry (Moffat). And so we wait for the moment where MacReady tests Garry’s blood and reveals that he is indeed the alien. However, Carpenter is brilliant in how he gives us the jolt before we ever expect it. So, in essence, he has given us in one shot the suspense and the surprise.

There are countless scenes throughout The Thing that give the viewer a feeling of dread — both cerebral and visceral — and Carpenter and effects man Rob Bottin (with an assist from Stan Winston) do a great job of making scary what Carpenter called “just a piece of rubber.” Again, it’s a different kind of dread than is found in Halloween. Here, the dread is in the distrust of the community. There’s something deflating about how the longer the ordeal goes on, the more likely these people will never trust each other, leading to these men making some really stupid decisions ("Trust is a hard thing to come by these days” is one of the most telling lines from the film). Because of the more cerebral aspects of the film, the visceral jolts compound the suspense instead of rendering them moot with “look at me” theatrics. Certainly the “piece of rubber” is a thing to behold in how they pulled it off in 1982, but it never once overshadows the ultimate tone Carpenter is reaching for.

It all leads to one of the bleakest, most nihilistic endings Carpenter ever conceived. And it’s this ending that did the film in. A happier ending — with MacReady being rescued and having his blood tested to prove he wasn’t an alien — was filmed (at the suggestion of his editor, who rightly predicted that audiences wouldn’t go for such an ambiguously dark ending), but Carpenter didn’t use it. He preferred the bleaker coda to the film; an ending that suggests that MacCready or the only other surviving member of the group Childs (David) could also be the alien, and the only remedy is for the two of them to wait things out — no doubt freezing to death in the process. It’s a helluva an ending that is a great punch to the gut, but it’s easy to see why in the same year as E.T. (released by the same studio, too), The Thing — even though making a slight profit at the box office — was considered a failure.

At first, Carpenter didn’t quite get why horror fans shit all over his film. Perhaps the paranoid tone of the film went over their heads. Perhaps they weren’t ready for such a nihilistic ending in what came across as nothing more than a mere creature feature. Whatever the reason, the filmmaker was perplexed that audiences were unresponsive to the type of film he thought they were asking for. Again, Carpenter’s theories about having a monster in your movie (previously discussed when I tackled The Fog where he talked about putting the monsters “under lights”) is that if you can, you should show it. And Carpenter achieves something remarkable in how he’s able to make the monster an impressive effect and make a cerebral horror film; it’s the best of both worlds. So, yeah, it is a bit weird that the film was such a financial flop. E.T. may have had something to do with (people seemed to want friendlier aliens in their multiplexes), and it certainly had something to do with his odd choice of making the benign Starman. Had The Thing been released a few years earlier, it’s likely that more people (not just die hard horror fans) talk about it in the same way many now talk about Alien.

The film was the first major studio assignment for Carpenter. On the surface, it seemed like a home run: here the man who loves Howard Hawks more than any filmmaker gets the chance to remake one of his more famous genre productions. But the lack of continuity in crew from Carpenter’s previous films may have soured him on the big studio films. It’s still a “John Carpenter film” (he would never cede that), but it’s the first film where he didn’t write the script, compose the music, and work with his usual tight-knit crew. Some of those things are expected with a big studio film as the director’s duties are ratcheted up significantly on a studio picture. But Carpenter never seemed to be the same after The Thing. Because of the film’s “failures,” he wasn’t able to adapt the Stephen King film he wanted to make (Firestarter, which ended up going to Mark L. “Commando” Lester, so that tells you a little something about how the studio felt about Carpenter after The Thing) and was instead given a “lesser” King adaptation in Christine.  The Thing, thanks to home video, enjoyed a huge resurgence as not just a cult hit but as a major horror film and is now (rightfully) considered one of Carpenter’s best films.

Labels: Director Retrospectives, Horror, John Carpenter, Kurt Russell