The Barbeardian

 

The Thing (1982)

The Thing.

The goddamned Thing.

The Thing is a lot of things. It can be anything, really. It can be your dog. It can be your wife. It can even be you.



The Thing is a 1982 horror movie directed by John Carpenter (shortly before his career went to shit) about a group of manly men stationed at a research outpost in Antarctica who are pitted up against an alien being. Kurt Russell is R.J. MacReady, the helicopter pilot with a penchant for being badass.

"Cheatin' bitch."

The men are going about their daily routine when, one day, a dog runs into their camp, followed shortly by a helicopter filled with angry Swedes (Norwegians, Mac!)--angry Norwegians with explosives and guns. They want this dog dead. But, since nobody at the outpost speaks Norwegian, they have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on. Long story short, the helicopter goes down and all the Norwegians are killed. The dog, however, is perfectly fine.

But the dog is not a dog.

The dog was consumed by the alien, who can imitate anything it "eats". Of course, the men don't figure this out until it's much too late--the Thing is already among them. The rest of the movie is pretty jarringly spectacular with scenes ripe with paranoia, outrageous gore and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. No way to call for help, temperatures way below freezing, and oh yeah: the guy standing next to you, the guy you've trusted for months, your buddy, your pal--he's now an alien, and you probably won't know it until he's on top of you, crawling down your throat.

The Thing is a lot like Heat, which I did an article on not too far back. If you haven't seen it, you're not a real man

ADDENDUM by Patrick

As of this printing, I've yet to see the recently released prequel to The Thing. All the reports I've heard however say that the new one has great nods to the original, and pays due homage to its roots. The criticisms, however, continue to talk about two things: the CGI and the scares.

The beauty of the original is that all of the effects are practical. The most "special" effect they had were the stop motion tentacles of the Blair monster during the final showdown. Even that was enough to throw me off, since nothing else in the movie looked like that, since everything else was real latex and slime. The problem with CGI, even good CGI is that it still isn't as chaotic as what real things look like. Splattering slime will always be random and different on every take, and it looks real--since it IS real. Even Avatar, the best looking fake movie ever still looked fake. Some of that can be attributed to the "Uncanny Valley" to be certain, but the fact that you knew it was computer graphics just doesn't let you buy all-in to what you see on screen.

Which is what makes 1982's The Thing so good. The guts and the grossness are so believable because they really exist in the world and react randomly to the physics. It sounds totally nerdy and nit-picky, but it's something that a computer program, so far, cannot replicate. A computer is too smooth and clean to be able to trick the subconscious part of our brain that tells us when something is real.

This ties directly into the second complaint about this, and most other modern horror movies. They aren't scary. Not at all. They're startling. They have violin build ups to get our bodies all tense only to give us that physical release of a loud bang and something jumping on screen. This isn't a moment that can stick with you for years. Something that upsets you to the core and changes your actual emotional state. Since all horror movies can AND DO do it, it's not unique or actually scary.

It's the feeling that equates to accidentally missing a stair and thinking you're going to fall. You grab the rail for a second, and watch every step on the way down. After the first jump, you know what kind of movie you're gonna be sitting through, and just ride the rail the rest of the way.

The Thing doesn't rely on jump scares. It relies, as Ian said above, on that feeling of unknowing and dread. Those are actually scary, scary feelings. Not knowing who's who, feeling alone and ultimately the understanding that you will most likely die. All of these things stay with you after you turn off the movie, and that return each time you watch it, since it's activating a part of your brain emotionally, not just a reflex at a loud noise.