Login
The scariest thing about The Thing isn’t the gore effects or the threat of infection. It’s the escalating sense of paranoia and the confined interiors that forces them to huddle together while stranded out in the wilderness far away from the rest of humanity. There’s no true way to know who is infected and who isn’t, or even how it manages to transfer from one organism to the next.
It helps tremendously that John Carpenter took a detached, remote tone from the material. There isn’t much heat on display, from the icy tundra of the landscape to the clinical approach to the gore and scares, The Thing is a scary movie done expertly. Many of the great special effects scenes in the movie are still highly impressive, but they still manage to disturb and give you a good jump-scare. But it’s the coldness of feeling that allows for the brutality and paranoia of the story to flourish and really ensnare the viewer.
Let’s go back and discuss those practical effects for a few minutes. They are highly disturbing and immensely memorable for just how surreal, deranged and violent they are. The crawling head that sprouts legs and moves around like a spider from hell is something I’ve never seen anything quite like that before, and it is as nightmarish as it sounds. Or the torso that opens up into a giant Venus flytrap and devours someone’s entire forearm? That is frightening stuff which will haunt your dreams for days afterwards. But it’s also incredibly well done; at once grossing you out and making you wonder just how they accomplished that illusion. It’s a bit of a joke and a shame that Rob Bottin and Stan Winston didn’t win the Oscar, or even get a nomination. The Thing had the unfortunate timing of coming a few weeks after E.T. and getting lost in that behemoth.
But it isn’t just purely aesthetics that make the film a success. Much of the credit must go the ensemble, led by a minimalist but terrific Kurt Russell. He manages to project an alpha-male posture that slowly begins to crumble and fade away leaving only the instinct to survive this. The other standouts are Keith David, always a welcome character actor whether it is his great voice work or his actual physical performances, and Wilford Brimley, managing to make a fat middle-aged man with thick glasses the most physically intimidating and chilling character in a room. The rest of the cast does solid work, but they’re not blessed with characters so layered or complex. Their anonymity works in the film’s favor as it makes their eventual demise seem all the more a forgone conclusion.
But when you get right down to it, The Thing is a film about mounting distrust and how men break in the face of an unseen and unknown danger. The greatest fear is the darkness within our souls, and how our paranoia and quest to survive will allow for us to perform and engage in some questionable actions. Film as petri dish to watch the dormant mental and emotional disease within ourselves flourish and destroy everything in its path? No wonder this is now considered a classic.
