In his cultural history of the horror genre, The Monster Show
, writer David J. Skal compares Francis Bacon’s famous 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to equally disturbing special effects work in John Carpenter’s The Thing. The surrealistic imagery conjured by Rob Bottin to depict the
transformation of a human being into a shape-changing thing from
another world is nearly unimaginable, and Bacon is one of its few
precedents. It must be seen to be believed, and it represents a kind of
high-water mark for fevered creativity in the horror film. [Ed. note, 2008: This review references a DVD edition of the film that hasn’t been available for years. Current editions represent a significant improvement in picture quality.]
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.
John Carpenter’s The Thing (top) and Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion; click the second image for larger versions at WebMuseum, Paris
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
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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) |