The Thing

My first lurid introduction to the world of John Carpenter was issue #8 of 80s fanzine The John Carpenter File. I remember the cover being a green and day-glo pink, with badly-placed images of Halloween 4, They Live, and The Thing. Though it wasn’t the ghoulish image on the cover that stuck with me – it was the one inside, of a disfigured face, stretched diagonally as if mid-transformation, one of the many iconic works of art created for the film by Rob Bottin’s visual effects department, charged with the daunting responsibility of bringing a completely new and unique alien lifeform to cinema screens. It wouldn’t be long before I saw The Thing, and from this little teaser, I knew it wouldn’t disappoint.

As a pre-teen ripe for being scared and thrilled by the cinematic luminaries of the time (not that I knew their names, but I certainly knew their films), it was the likes of Cronenberg’s The Fly, Scott’s Alien and Carpenter’s Halloween that satisfied that adolescent urge to watch films you weren’t supposed to, the Simon Bates BBFC warning at the start of these 15 and 18-rated films creating as much palpable tension for those not-quite-yet-of-age as the films themselves. Admittedly, when I first watched Halloween, I couldn’t have been a day over 10 or 11, and I had to have the landing light on every time I went upstairs for a good couple of months, lest Michael Myers was hiding behind a bedroom door. The Thing may not have frightened me quite so much – it’s a film brimming with tension and alpha-male frustration, fear of the unknown in a pressure-cooker environment, rather than an outright horror played for (what would become) clichéd scares – but it had a lasting impact on me that has made repeat viewings a joy. Halloween can’t hold a candle to this bad boy.

Kurt Russell headlines a twelve-strong cast that in any other horror film would be metaphorical cannon fodder who the viewer simply doesn’t need to know much about. The myriad genre films of late that knock off secondary characters without so much as a second thought make you think that, well, maybe the filmmaker simply doesn’t have time to let you get to know them – but Carpenter does. In two panic-fuelled hours, you invest as much in Russell’s MacReady as you do in the entire cast, in particular Wilford Brimley’s Blair, who ends up comically locked in a shack for his own protection – and for everyone else’s, not that they quite realise that when they close the door on him. The blood sample testing scene, carried out by a strung-out MacReady with what remains of the ice station crew tied up to chairs and sofas, is a masterclass in how to ratchet up cinematic tension, ending in geysers of blood being sprayed through walls of fire and giving the audience one of the best lines of the film (I certainly won’t spoil it for those of you that haven’t seen it).

High praise indeed for a film that is itself a remake, praise that one finds hard to give to the constant slate of horror ‘reimaginings’ that seem to litter multiplex screens these days. Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes label has a lot to answer for, teens and pre-teens reared on what amounts to MTV celebrity wannabes getting CGI’d to death, leaving them with no idea of the long string of filmmaking talent that flourished in the horror genre in the 70s and 80s, showcasing moments of brilliance and flashes of genius to a cinema audience who simply had never seen anything like it before. The Thing takes you to the far reaches of the Antarctic and makes you pray for a happy ending, long before the credits have rolled… whether you’ll get one though, well, that’s another thing entirely.