John Carpenter's The Thing

Director John Carpenter leavens the ordeal with a little bit of deadpan can-you-believe-you-just-saw-that? humor, but the sequence is anything but a joke. The film has created a foreboding atmosphere around the idea that one of the men stationed at a remote arctic research facility is really an otherworldly being that has stolen the physical form of a man. Having established a level of fear and tension in viewers to approximate that of the characters, The Thing then shows, in graphic detail, why you should be afraid. The explosive transformation sequence is so shocking, and so unexpected, that it can leave scars on your retina.

I first saw John Carpenter's The Thing as an impressionable teenager, on pay cable. HBO and Cinemax were godsends for a kid of my age, old enough to have a healthy interest in and understanding of horror films, but not old enough to get into a screening of said films unaccompanied. Even cropped from the original widescreen frame and reduced to fit on my 15-inch TV screen, The Thing made an impact that stayed with me, nearly undiminished, for more than a decade.

Universal has been kind enough to re-release the picture to laserdisc and DVD from a brand-new digital master that preserves Carpenter's Panavision framing and debuts a new six-channel sound mix along with a raft of supplemental information on the film. The spiffy new versions could hardly be more galvanizing than the grungy old ones, but they are more beautifully detailed, more atmospheric, and ultimately more involving. On DVD, the image is sharp and richly textured, with striking color fidelity and contrast -- no mean feat, since the film's imagery varies widely, from the claustrophobic menace of the darkness inside the compound to snowy, wide-open spaces that reflect the film's themes of isolation and the unknown. Some of the darkest scenes are blocky from digital compression on my player, but the image is very stable overall.

Produced from a deeply flawed screenplay by Bill Lancaster (son of Burt and writer of, um, The Bad News Bears), The Thing was blessed enough to have Carpenter at its helm -- a veteran of down-and-dirty action pictures (Assault on Precinct 13) directing an ensemble of fine second- and third-tier character players. The cast was led by Kurt Russell, a Disney alum who was just beginning to make his mark in genre films courtesy of his role as Snake Plissken in Carpenter's previous Escape From New York. (Previously, Russell had played Elvis Presley for Carpenter's TV biopic.) Working from the chilling SF concepts driving John W. Campbell Jr.'s original short story "Who Goes There?" (title notwithstanding, Carpenter's film is based on the Campbell short story, not the previous Howard Hawks movie), Lancaster created a fine setting for Carpenter's brand of monster moviemaking. What's missing from the screenplay is a strong sense of characterization and a plotline intricate enough to complement the film's sense of tricky paranoia.

Carpenter's just the director to make those serious shortcomings not mean as much as they should. From Ennio Morricone's brooding score (which seems to echo Carpenter's trademark electronic compositions) to Dean Cundey's finely tuned cinematography, all of the elements work in concert to create a mood of isolation and mistrust. From Halloween on forward, rhythm has always been crucial to Carpenter's ability to spook an audience, as well as to his dry sense of humor, and Todd Ramsay's film editing helps put the shocks in all the right places. Finally, it remains a minor miracle that Universal allowed a generously budgeted picture to go out with such a downbeat ending. Rather than reaching a climax, Lancaster's script just sort of peters out after a time -- but Carpenter makes a virtue of it, leaving the audience waiting for a comforting resolution that is solemnly withheld.

The Thing can clearly be categorized as part of a movement in genre film that dealt with biological horror. David Cronenberg was the ringleader of the biohorror school, which may have been seeded by that unforgettable shot in The Exorcist when little Regan's head spins all the way around. Ridley Scott's Alien and Cronenberg's Videodrome and Scanners remain essential, unsettling visions of anxiety over the physical nature of our bodies, and of the possibility that our essential natures may be changed by alien entities, by pollutants and disease, or even by TV programming. The Thing can be read as a parable of the self-destructive "witch-hunt" mentality, or of the ravages that an insidious killer like AIDS (just blossoming as The Thing was being shot) can wreak on the survivors, as well as those infected. The phantasmal imagery is stimulating enough on its own terms that it may have its own subtle resonance within each individual viewer.

Some of this stuff is considered in the supplemental section of the LD and DVD, including a commentary track featuring both Carpenter and Russell in an easygoing recollection of the days spent shooting on location in Nova Scotia and on the Universal lot in Los Angeles. A longish documentary is made up of contemporary interviews with the cast and crew, interspersed with behind-the-scenes footage and outtakes from the finished picture. It includes just enough information on how the special effects were achieved, and the highlight is no doubt the interview segments where make-up artist Rob Bottin (who was just 22 years old during production of The Thing) gleefully recounts the trial and error involved in making these images real.

It occurs to me that, if The Thing were made today, the special effects would be executed using computer graphics, and would thus be about one-tenth as effective. The horror genre never quite recovered from the influx of jokey gore flicks like Re-Animator and Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn, so it would also be goofy, with every special effects sequence punctuated by a wink to the audience showing that nobody involved was enough of a schlub to think they were making an important picture. The result might have been pretty good, or it might have been unwatchable. But it wouldn't have taken itself seriously, and that would make all the difference. The Thing looks, unblinking, into the abyss, where it finds our own anxieties, suspicions, and phobias reflected in the eyes of shapeless, unknowable monsters. A

Directed by John Carpenter Written by Bill Lancaster Based on John W. Campbell Jr.'s short story, "Who Goes There?" Cinematography by Dean Cundey Edited by Todd Ramsay Special Make-up Effects by Rob Bottin (with assist from Stan Winston) Starring Kurt Russell USA, 1982 Theatrical aspect ratio: 2.35:1 (anamorphic)

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