Reviewed by: Jonathan B.
Originally Posted: 10.15.12
Book or Movie first:
John Carpenter’s The Thing was the thing that first piqued my interest in such things.
…
This is going to get confusing, isn’t it?
What we got into:
A similar thread connects all the narratives. Something vaguely flying-saucery, at some point, falls from the stars and lands in an inhospitable, snowy hellscape. Eventually, whether minutes or millennia later, a gaggle of people stumble on what remains and haul what appears to be the frozen pilot of the craft into their base for research purposes. The alien whatsit awakens and isn’t very friendly, preying on the men and their dogs in whatever manner that particular version sees fit. The body count rises, as apparently the creature’s prime directive is “Be a dick as much as possible to as many things as possible.” Plans are made, plans fall apart, and my exasperation with the 1950’s continues unabated.
A look at the Book:
John Campbell’s novella, Who Goes There, begins with meteorologist and all-around badass McReady explaining how our intrepid scientists with the Second Magnetic Expedition came across a butt-ugly alien corpse frozen in the wasteland. Norris, one of the physicists, wants to eliminate it, not only for entirely practical reasons – deadly microbes which may be present in the body – but also because the thing is displaying a nasty tendency for psychic prodding and horrific nightmare… causing… aptitude. At the forefront of emotions that it’s poking into the minds of those present is an insane hatred which, as anyone familiar with politics, is a great way for getting fringe voters but not a lot of friends. The team biologist Blair is absolutely certain there’s no harm that can come from it – after all, he keeps insisting only low forms of life can survive freezing.
You know… like, um… the bacteria that could cause a worldwide pandemic.
… huh.
Anyway, they decide to keep the corpesicle because science. As the thing is sent to thaw, the men go about their business doing whatever it is they’re doing at the ass end of the planet. Something about cosmic rays. Long story short, the thing escapes and secretly infests one of the crew before attempting to consume and imitate the station’s dogs. The men find it in mid-absorption and burn the shit out of it before the dogs tear what remains to pieces.
It becomes very clear that this alien can essentially eat and imitate any form of life it comes into contact with, turning it into a pretty terrifying predator. If that weren’t bad enough, it manages to take on the memories of all of its victims – it’s less a mimic and more a perfect carbon-copy. Well, a carbon-copy full of goo that absorbs life. There’s earnest attempts at explaining the physics behind it, but that takes a backseat to the more pressing issue: anyone could be an alien.
There’s attempts to figure out a way to detect who’s who via a blood test, but one of the various things fucks it up (as amorphous blobs of sentient protoplasm are wont to). Men and animals are disappearing, Blair snaps with guilt and is placed in confinement, and the sense of paranoia and dread is palpable. McReady, being the stone-cold badass he is, eventually deduces a way to figure out who’s real and who needs to be turned into pan-blacked alien.
It involves blood, a petri dish, and a heated wire. And it is awesome.
After having murdered the shit out of the things present, McReady and a couple others go to test Blair who, it turns out, was a Thing far longer than anyone realized. After burning the Blair-Thing to death, they discover that it wanted to be left alone so it could build a device in order to flee… or worse.
A line from the Book:
“If you can judge by that look on its face – it isn’t human so maybe you can’t – it was annoyed when it froze. Annoyed, in fact, is just about as close an approximation of the way it felt as crazy, mad, insane hatred. Neither one touches the subject.”
A look at the Movie (The Thing From Another World, 1951):
An American-controlled base at the North Pole sees what they believe to be a flying saucer crash. They investigate, retrieve the body of an alien, and bring it back to base. It thaws due to a character’s profound stupidity and proceeds to be an ungrateful houseguest by attacking the station’s dogs. It’s discovered that the visitor ingests blood to regenerate and that it reproduces via seed pods. It drains a couple of people of their blood in an effort to turn the station’s greenhouse into a horrible alien buffet.
Oh, yeah, that whole cool concept of a shape-shifting alien? Dropped. It’s now a mother fucking plant monster played by James Arness, Peter Graves’s older brother, in prosthetics and a costume that make him look like an angry penis in a black leotard.
One character even jokingly refers to it as “An intellectual carrot,” a line which has enough lasting power to be literally the only thing my mother remembers about this movie. The whole “plant physiology” thing is also the rationale behind why bullets can’t hurt it – ‘cause god knows plants are so goddamn durable .
Alright, there’s some tension between the characters, an insufferably stupid 1950’s-mandated love plot, and the big bad is electrocuted. Can I go now?
A line from the Movie:
“An intellectual carrot. The mind boggles.”
A Look At The Movie (John Carpenter’s The Thing, 1982):
A dog is being chased by helicopter toward an American outpost in Antarctica. The passenger of the vehicle leans out and opens fire with a rifle before trying to use explosives to blow it up. The dog makes it unharmed to the base, where a bunch of confused researchers approach the landing helicopter. In the confusion, the gun-toting passenger aims at the dog and misses, hitting a researcher in the leg. The commander of the expedition kills the gunman before an errant grenade blows up the helicopter.
The Americans realize that the helicopter must have come from the nearby Norwegian outpost. Not quite sure what the fuck, stone-cold badass and pilot R. J. “Kurt Russell” MacReady travels to the base. He discovers the smoldering shells of building, a smattering of documents, what looks like an ice coffin, and endless signs of violence. But most disturbing, perhaps, is a body out in the snow which looks like the amalgamated form of two human beings screaming in rage.
MacReady and his ‘copter-buddy bring the body back to base because… um… science? The biologist, Blair, makes a cursory examination of the Thing and everyone is pretty wigged out. Eventually, the dog guy puts their newest sled dog in with the base’s present team. Everything seems alright at first, but as anyone who has ever seen this movie can tell you, shit gets very real very quickly (link not safe for work or if you’re eating sandwiches).
What follows is a decent into paranoia and terror as it dawns on the men that this Thing copies living organisms down to the cellular level. Utterly perfectly. Men’s memories and personalities are at the creature’s control, and it wants to live very badly. One by one, the men fall, to each other or to the Thing. Blair pulls his crazy act again, disabling all the means of escape and killing the dogs. Down to the last few humans, the alien cuts the power, determined to freeze itself so that when help arrives in the spring, it can live again.
But, like I said, MacReady is a badass who gives no fucks.
A Line From the Movie:
“Se til helvete og kom dere vekk. Det er ikke en bikkje, det er en slags ting! Det imiterer en bikkje, det er ikke virkelig! KOM DERE VEKK IDIOTER!” (Credit to IMDB, of course – I don’t have the patience to figure that out)
“I don’t know what the hell’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.”
“Yeah, fuck you too!”
A Look At The Game (The Thing, 2002):
A rescue team is sent out to the set of the first movie and discovers the remnants of the outpost burned beyond recognition. They discover some neat little Easter Eggs for fans of the film, but it takes approximately five minutes before the “game” becomes an absolutely terrible Resident Evil/Half-Life rip off, sending your chunk-head military protagonist against special forces trying to use the alien creatures as weapons or some such rot. Every human you run across is either an asshole trying to shoot you or an alien in disguise. Those that wait to rip out your entrails will proclaim how they don’t trust you, will vomit all over the place, and possibly wet themselves. Because paranoia and fear were important parts of the 1982 movie, you see.
Long story short, this game has a great IP but is a buggy 3rd person shooter because programming is hard. I’d like to say the monsters were appropriately horrific, but they looked a touch like a pile of meat with numerous red penises flailing off of them. Except, of course, the last boss, which is simply a giant syphilitic dong with a spider on the end.
A Line From the Game:
“Maybe if we make an awkward gameplay video , people will buy it?”
“Nah, let’s just go with the short version .”
A Look At The Movie (The Thing, 2011):
Apparently in a proud tradition of refusing to deviate from the word “thing” in the title, the fifth iteration of The Thing story line is a prequel to the events of first movie, telling what exactly happened at the Norwegian base.
Starting with the discovery of the alien saucer and it’s gooey driver, the crew send out for paleontologist Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). They dig out the organism from the ice and haul it back to base. The head researcher wants a tissue sample, but Kate is understandably not too keen on the whole thing. The creature escapes, absorbs the one sled dog off screen, and manages to spear one of the crew (Henrik) in front of his buddy Olav when they stumble on it hiding under one of the buildings. The team set upon the slimy and spiky visitor and set it on fire, killing it. An autopsy reveals that the Thing wasn’t quite digesting its victim, but it did remove a metal splint from Henrik’s body and “spat it out” as it were. Analysis under a microscope reveals that the alien cells are still attacking Henrik’s and imitating them perfectly.
When Kate finds dental fillings in the shower room next to a stall smeared with blood, she quickly comes to the conclusion that the Thing is still alive. An emergency helicopter evacuation of Olav turns out very poorly when, indeed, one of the converted crew attacks from within the chopper. Kate’s desperate pleas about something going horribly wrong are ignored, except by the only other woman on staff, Juliette. Convinced there’s something wrong, they form a plan to steal the keys to the tractors – only to have Juliette transforms and attacks Kate.
From there, tests are hypothesized, Things attack, large swaths of the Norwegian base are set alight, and the end of the movie is literally the beginning of John Carpenter’s. It’s pretty neat.
A line from the Movie:
“So, I’m going to die because I floss?”
Book Compared to the… OH GOD… SO MANY… WHY DID I DO THIS:
First thing’s first, the book spends a lot of time telling you how this nasty alien ends up on the station. And I mean literally telling you. Most of it is McReady yammering on and on about finding the Thing, and then digging it up, and blah, blah, blah. The first chapters do not really do much except set up the narrative in the most direct way possible. I do understand why, mind you. It is a novella, after all, and not a full-length novel. But, and I say this as a fan of slow-burn horror, not being a part of the expedition along with McReady and the others is kind of a letdown.
Once the alien awakens and starts wreaking havoc on the base and the men, the novella becomes a lot more fast-paced and lively. Campbell does a really good job at building up the tension, feeding on fear and generating a lot of uncertainty. Some of the ideas come off as a touch silly – I think making the creature telepathic was a bit dumb, personally – but overall it’s such a great experiment in body horror. The idea that one’s own body, or the bodies of those they love and trust, can be converted into a noxious mass of writhing death is effective and terrifying – and above all, gross.
See, that’s the biggest strength of this franchise. It’s viscera, it’s biology. It’s not about a serial killer hacking you to pieces and dying, it’s about something worse. It’s about being converted down to your very brain, and you may not even know what’s happening. Sure, there’s hints of what’s going on, but the idea of our bodies turning against itself – whether by cancer, disease, or whatever – is ultimately the pinnacle of terror. We can’t understand it, we can’t diagnose it, and there’s a good chance that we’d never even see it coming. Cancer is an asshole, to be sure, but imagine if it hated the concept of humanity so much that it would seek you out. That’s what real nightmares are made of.
Which is why the 1950’s version fucking sucks.
Okay, it doesn’t suck in the traditional sense. It’s all very well-crafted and executed. The special effects were good for their time. Compared to other sci-fi movies, the pacing and action were exceedingly brilliant. The story itself is pretty watered-down, however. Even something as simple as the inciting incident – the creature is awakened because corporal dumbass leaves an electric blanket on its icy tomb, thus thawing it – makes the movie seem naively dumb. In many ways, they took what made Who Goes There bloody scary and threw that out for a walking allegory for communism.
In fact, the entire movie stumbles over itself to scare its audience about leftists.
It takes place at the North Pole instead of the South Pole (because, omigod, RUSSIA’S RIGHT FUCKING THERE YOU GUYS). The journalist, in his best gee-whiz golly-gosh attitude, tells everyone to keep their eyes on the sky because that’s where communist missiles will come from! The “evil” doctor – the symbol of those pesky college professors and their wildly indignant thoughts of progress – looks like Vladimir Lenin’s kid brother Biff Lenin.
This wouldn’t be a problem if it was faithful to the source material’s idea of what makes something scary. Instead, it focuses on what they know will make a shit-gazillion dollars.
“But what about special effects at the time? Surely you can’t expect them to have the money to do such things?” First, I expect them to try. When Coleman Francis couldn’t afford a makeup guy, he just had Tor Johnson wander around the desert screaming at kids. Yes, it turned out incredibly poorly, but it was something. Second, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released five years later. A similar story, but without James Arness staggering around like a dork. Third, dear god, it’s about something which imitates human beings – you know what you need to achieve that effect?
YOU HIRE A FUCKING ACTOR LIKE JAMES ARNESS.
The big problem here is that The Thing From Another World is a terrible adaptation. Outside of the setting, there’s nothing really to identify it as a movie version of Who Goes There. In all honesty, the Roger Corman shitfest Night of the Blood-Beast is far more faithful to the novella – and it takes place in fucking California. I see a lot of wasted potential here.
So it’s a good thing that The Thing (1982) came along to pick up the slack. Thirty one years after James Arness stumbled around as a bullet-immune rutabaga, John Carpenter unleashed a gross, disturbing, and ultimately horrifying movie. The atmosphere of the film isn’t the same Red Scare-laced sci-fi of decades prior. This was a dark, foreboding movie, oppressive and full of dread. In fact, I would say that it’s the last good, apocalyptic sci-fi of the era, emphasizing powerlessness and uncertainty in the face of a shifting, formless aggressor. A perfect beginning for the era which would inspire American Psycho.
As an adaptation, this movie excelled. It took an absolutely amazing premise and ran with it, not simply recounting events from the book. The Norwegian base is added to the narrative, adding an element of mystery to the proceedings. The first sight of the living Dog-Thing is a moment seared into my brain (and, if you clicked that link, yours too). As certain characters turn and others are killed outright, it just seems like the world is going to end as the Thing inevitably gets loose. Inevitable, perhaps, only if Kurt Russell wasn’t on the case.
Whereas the body-horror of Who Goes There more pertains to societal fears of syphilis and gonorrhea (the Tuskegee Experiment began six years earlier, mind you), I think that The Thing’s rendition of it perfectly reflects growing social concerns about HIV/AIDS. At this point, the disease was misunderstood and terrifying. Few knew how it was transmitted, others believed it was only confined to the gay community and drug users, and there was a general lack of federal response to it. But the fact remains that it was ultimately viewed as a potential apocalypse in a bottle. This film, about a group of men (and only men) and what amounted to a sentient, super-infectious disease captured that terror in less than two hours. This was probably entirely unintentional, mind you, and perhaps a bit premature (AIDS was only officially recognized in 1981) – but it does not make it any less awesome.
But moving onto more practical readings of the material, let’s talk about the characters. The difference between MacReady (movie) and McReady (book) is pretty subtle – if anything, they’re much the same character. McReady is a touch more of a plotter than a spur of the moment type of guy, but ultimately, they are mirror images of one another. Almost like… a carbon copy… clone… twin? Man, there’s gotta be something I can do with this… if only there was an alien organism which copied things at their cellular level…
Anyway, it’s less about the character and more about how they’re presented. In Who Goes There, there is no doubt that McReady is the hero of the story. In The Thing, MacReady is important, yes, but he’s part of an ensemble. He only emerges as the hero later in the film, and even then, it’s because of narrative necessity. It’s one of the film’s strongest points: a film like this, where you get the sense that anyone and everyone could be the creature, relies on the audience believing that even the stars could get whacked.
It’s subtle genius.
You’ll notice that I didn’t really bring up characters in The Thing From Another World. And that’s because they’re generic. Ultimately, they’re just stock characters – the journalist, the cautious scientist, the stoic Air Force guy, the woman, the scientist-who-goes-too-far, the idiot with the electric blanket – they fill their roles in order to get the moral of the story to the audience more effectively. James “Body Condom” Arness is honestly the most sympathetic, and that’s because he’s murdering everyone else.
Back to the 1982 movie, I have only a couple of quibbles. Some of the sound effects are pretty goofy, coming across like they belong in a cartoon rather than a bloody sci-fi horror film. But that’s only some – for the most part, the sound design is amazing. Toward the end of the film, due to odd editing, unimpressive special effects, or both, one character just kind of up and vanishes. One of the flame throwers malfunctions at a pivotal juncture, causing a character to die/be converted for no real reason other than to increase body count. Despite things like this, though, the film succeeds at almost every level. It spawned a couple of comic books as well as a fantastic short story that puts the events into the perspective of the Things (called, unsurprisingly, The Things ).
But it also spawned the video game.
Oh, did it ever.
Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka at Something Awful does a much better job of tearing this game down to its component atoms and making it cry. I will keep this nice and short, then, out of deference to the man. I will also refer to it as The Shitty Thing, just as he did, so the others are not tainted by the feculence of this game.
The Shitty Thing is a sequel to The Thing but a sequel-sequel to The Thing. It stars a generic military guy doing generic military things in a generic white wasteland. All the things that made The Thing awesome are present in the same manner that grandma is “present in the living room” when you have a painting hanging over her urn. AI-controlled squad mates tell you they’re scared when they aren’t busy urinating/vomiting. Sometimes they won’t trust you until you give them a gun. They will always, however, turn into The Thing at specific points in the level unless you can complete a level with one in tow – in that case, they simply disappear from existence.
I’d mention the story of The Shitty Thing, but I’m pretty sure there isn’t one outside of wandering around a surprisingly heavily-populated Antarctica and shooting everyone/lighting every Thing on fire. And when I say heavily-populated, I mean it. Seriously, I think the U.S. government got the Umbrella Corporation to loan them their spare bases, because goddamn. On top of that, evil government storm troopers are apparently very dumb. You can shoot one in the face in front of his friend and his buddy will watch him fall, decide that’s totally normal that someone’s skull disappears like that, and walk away. Get it? The AI’s stupid.
Anyway, The Shitty Thing doesn’t even work in the canon that it proclaims to represent. If the bad guys had access to “the Thing gene”, where did they get it from? The saucer? How did they have this massive operation going without the Americans or Norwegians noticing? Why does everyone vomit in terror? Why the fuck is the main character immune to the Thing’s conversion attempts? Why have my eyes rolled back into my skull?
Ultimately, they sought to make an action/adventure game out of a license which doesn’t work like that. Yes, there’s action in The Thing and Who Goes There, but the main goal is to scare. It’s that feeling of helplessness and paranoia that clouds judgement and makes people behave irrationally. Having a super-scripted game wouldn’t have been so bad, but it needed to revolve around the characters and have a strong plot to make it worthwhile. Instead, we’re left with Biff Ironjaw’s dipshit cousin Merl and his adventures in snow. With this in mind, you can understand my wariness when I heard that there was a new movie on the horizon. Cleverly named The Thing and not something stupid, like The Thing: Origins or Patient Zero, hints that it was a prequel and not a proper remake began to circulate around the Internet. But I still refused to see it. And, as silly as it seems, it was because I thought they were going to sexualize it with the addition of female victims.
You see, The Thing: The Older Sequel kind of ruined horror movies for me. There was no sex, but there was unrelenting paranoia, fear, and death. It was an awesome tour-de-force of emotion. The inclusion of potential victims being women meant, to me, that the director was going to do something disgusting involving vaginas or tits. Body horror is all well and good – but horror movies and their obsession with subverting sexuality is just stupid. I hate that Friday the 13th and others try to have some kind of “message” about teens’ sex lives.
But, because I am faithful to my reader (hi, mom!), I watched it.
And it wasn’t bad. Actually, it was quite good. And no, there wasn’t a rent boob or seeping vagina anywhere in sight. I mean… outside of the vague vagina dentatas that constituted the various Thing maws.
Watching the commentary, it was clear that everyone involved in the film had a great deal of respect for John Carpenter’s version. The amount of detail in the film – from camera movements, to background designs, to subtle character interactions – are a great joy to watch. This can lead to some silly moments, however, when homages take precedent over telling the story. At the end of the day, though, these moments are few and far between, though when they do happen it can be pretty annoying – like when a flamethrower malfunctions at a pivotal moment when it means the difference between life and death. You know, just like the exact thing that will happen on the American base 48 hours from then.
But the movie does a very, very good job when it differentiates itself. The heroine, Kate, is awesome and played to perfection by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Kate’s practical and intelligent – a pretty big turn-on for a horror film heroine. One of the narrative’s biggest problem is actually the same one exhibited by the story that started it all, though: we know from the beginning that Kate is the protagonist. If this had been hidden until later in the movie, I think it would have been a lot more effective at being scary.
Some questionable editing choices do stand out, despite the amazing proficiency of almost every aspect of the production. When the audience gets to see one Thing in the process of converting a hapless victim, the fully transformed alien attacks only to be immolated. In the actual movie, the scene ends and they move on. A very quick deleted scene shows them returning to the hall where the partially-converted body should be, only to see that it has gotten up and hid itself in an office until it could fully assume a human shape. Then it gets burned. I don’t know why they would have taken it out – pacing, perhaps? – but it added another creepy moment to a creepy story. Another major deleted scene would have been nice to more fully tie the prequel to the sequel, but judging by what remains of that particular part, the CG Thing-effects possibly did not pass muster to the director.
And speaking of CG, we can’t have a proper discussion until we include the other big stars of the show: the various beasties and critters made out of people parts that are running around. I was really pleased with the heavy use of practical creature effects. It was nice to see people being able to (for the most part) respond to something terrifying in their midst as opposed to just pretending that something is there . It’s not all perfect, though. Toward the end, the CG “enhancements” go from pretty cool to cartoony. Which is a tragedy, namely because we’ve been building to the conclusion and the glisteny-Uncanny Valley effect was a bit much when we figure out where Split-Face comes from.
The thing is (did you see what I did there?), the very best creature effects go to The Thing (1982). Who Goes There has what I’m assuming to be an original form of sorts – a noodle-haired, three-eyed annoyed alien thing – which I guess is frightening, but the slippery and goopy pseudopodia are far more disturbing. The Thing (2011) starts off really awesome, but then relies too much on the too-clean CG models. Even with modern technology’s benefits, nothing can beat the 1982’s bloody puppets and makeup artists. This doesn’t mean that older is automatically better: a bald guy dressed like an interpretive dancer is not frightening. Infinite processing power and limitless human imagination is also pretty disappointing: The Shitty Thing contributes nothing to memorable creature designs.
All this talk of the scariness of monsters aside, the worst part of the 2011 film is that it isn’t scary. Not really, anyway. There’s a couple of really good jump scares, but there’s a great sense of drama hanging over this movie. And, as one person working on the film described it, it’s because it’s an autopsy. We know how it all ends before we’ve even seen it – it’s just a matter of figuring out how. I think that this actually works to the movie’s favor in the end. There’s a tragic ambiance that underscores every interaction, every moment, and it’s sadly beautiful.
And the winner is:
In terms of best overall quality and keeping with the theme…
1st – John Carpenter’s The Thing
2nd – The Thing (2011)
3rd – Who Goes There?
…
…
7th – Night of the Blood-Beast
8th – Thing From Another World
9th – Moby Dick
…
…
113th – Finding Nemo
114th – Twilight
115th – Pong
116th – The Shitty Thing
I think that about sums it up.
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