THE THING

What might be the most important feature of “The Thing” regarding its staying power might be that—much like the titular monster—the film is able to adapt to interpretation like no other. While much of this is due to the text of the work, it doesn’t hurt that horror is a genre which has historically been predicated on further context. Take vampires, for example, which, given their setting, can represent wealth, sexuality, foreigners, or in Chinese vampire films… fear of jumping? My point is that good horror movie monsters rarely come without baggage, because the easiest way to connect to the fears of an audience is to prey on the ideas that already make them shiver. Which leads us to “The Thing”, which might be the greatest testament to the power of body horror ever devised. It centers on a group of researchers deep in the Antarctic who, unbeknownst to them, have just released a parasitic alien that can take the form of any living creature it consumes. While this premise already breeds tension, what truly elevates the movie to its legendary status is what happens when you expose the Thing’s secret. When the Thing gets found out, it doesn’t just revert to its original form and give up.

Instead, it morphs into a sick perversion of its last victim; growing tendrils, oozing puss, and viciously trying to kill and infect as many men as possible before slinking off into some dark corner to look for its next host. The transformations in this film amount to some of the most disgustingly effective terror ever put to the silver screen, with each level of the monster getting removed like a morbid matryoshka doll. But grossness does not make a great film. What truly carries “The Thing” is raw artistic talent applied at just the right time in history. John Carpenter’s meticulous composition and pacing perfectly draw out the tension of each scene like razor wire, each frame is imbued with luscious color and precise framing that emphasize the cold and cramped conditions of the Arctic base, and the body horror is executed with near flawless practical effects by Rob Bottin, which still frighten today. This melding of talents results in a horror film that in other hands would be pulpy trash (as evidenced by the 2011 soft reboot of the same name), but because of the talent behind it, “The Thing” is equal parts artful and exciting. But what truly makes “The Thing” stand out in the modern horror landscape, even in today’s world of photo-realistic CGI and ever-increasing budgets, is that its meaning has been able to adapt to the cultural fears of each subsequent generation. In 1982, the film acted as an allegory for the Cold War Era paranoia of the

U.S. Back when nuclear annihilation was a real possibility, it was easy for regular people to feel trapped; each person around them, however normal they might have seemed, was a potential threat. Despite the timely themes, though, “The Thing” was not a critical or financial success upon release. Whether because “ET: The Extraterrestrial” (1982) was still fresh in the mind of Americans and cute aliens were more in style or because there was an excessive amount of gore and grossness, audiences did not sympathize with the movie. Alas, like most truly great films, time has only been kinder to its reception. Now that the Cold War is over and “The Thing” has had time to become a part of the cultural miasma, it has come to represent something more relevant. After nearly two years of constantly being on high alert that someone around us could have a potentially deadly virus or be inadvertently trying to spread it, “nobody trusts anybody now, and we’re all very tired” (as R.J. MacReady says in “The Thing”). If you want this specific feeling conveyed in one of the most perfectly plotted and immaculately constructed horror films— no, films in general—ever made, then I can not recommend “The Thing” highly enough. It’s the perfect film for our second quarantine Halloween.