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It doesn’t matter how many times you watch The Thing, it still has the ability to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and forces you to the edge of your seat.
The dark, brooding atmosphere starts at the opening credits when the title burns its way through the screen. The eerie thudding music accentuates this and the tone doesn’t let up for the full running time.
Kurt Russell is superb as MacReady, the world-weary pilot stuck in the middle of nowhere with a somewhat motley crew. He is the key figure the audience clings to throughout the film, the one voice of reason that can be trusted. The brilliance of the film is that by the end you cannot trust your own judgement – is MacReady human or alien copy? We never know the answer and therefore you leave the film with the sense of dread dripping off you.
The special effects are a key feature of the film, and are a testament against the pervasion of CGI in the modern horror and sci-fi. The creatures drip and ooze and scuttle, their hideous forms visceral and the more frightening as they are real and can be touched. The key scene where Norris is revealed as a Thing and his body falls apart in hideous fashion is as unsettling the thirtieth time as it is the first.
The Thing is easily John Carpenter’s best work, and is an excellent example of tension, suspense and character study as well as horror. You can only wonder at what the new prequel will bring to The Thing canon.
