Beautiful Creatures: John Carpenter’s The Thing

Looking at a list of horror and Sci-Fi movies someone showed me on FB this week, it seems pretty apparent that Hollywood has no intention of ever making a new film ever again. Saw, Insidious, Chucky, Halloween… the list of uninspired, recycled dreck being mass-produced these days is disgraceful. I read 20 titles on this list and they were all literally sequels or remakes. Even the superhero craze is starting to auto-cannibalize with yet another Spider-Man movie. For those of you who lost track, that’s six films -excluding the Captain America appearance- and three separate cinematic universes in 15 years. Honest to god it’s as bad as the 90s Batman films following Tim Burton’s 1989 classic. There’s even a World War Z sequel on there. And get ready this fall for a Madea Halloween. Ugh!

So, if we’re going to be stuck with this perpetual and utterly baffling series of uninspired catastrophes designed for the sole purpose of cashing in on the marketability of people’s nostalgia lets at least go back to a simpler time when producers were still concerned with making a GOOD movie.

Picture it, Antarctica, 1982. We were still over a decade away from the futuristic world of computer geeks arguing in chatrooms about Kirk and Picard and John Carpenter was busy trying to terrify us all.

The Thing (1982)

A film based on a movie based on a book that ended up truer to the source matter than the original ever could. So, before I tell you about Carpenter’s grand interpretation, the back story. Originally published as Who Goes There?  in 1938 by John W. Campbell, it’s the story of an American Antarctic expedition that discovers a neighboring camp has obliterated itself after unearthing an ancient, alien menace frozen for eons at the furthest reaches of the earth. Unbeknownst to them, they bring this virulent shape-changer into their own encampment where the creature systematically cuts them off, first from the outside world, then each other as it changes into one member of the expedition after another on its bloody rampage. The creature’s plan is ingenious; feast on the humans in the research compound, freeze itself in a human guise, and spread through the rest of the planet stronger than ever when help finally arrives for the doomed explorers.

Now, let’s jump ahead to 1951 when The Thing from Another World hit theaters. The story itself was nowhere near what Campbell had written just 13 years earlier. In this, an Air Force crew is dispatched from Alaska to the North Pole to recover a downed flying saucer and any remains of its pilot. The alien, it turns out, is a vegetable based humanoid Frankenstein’s monster doppelganger who survives on mammal blood and intends to conquer the world with seed pods growing from its severed arm. Que the Jackie Chan, WTF meme. In 1938 a man wrote a story about an alien virus that could mutate to consume and mimic hosts plotting to do what viruses do best. This became a plant man from another planet feeding into early Cold War/McCarthiest propaganda. I know, I know, you have to respect the classics but jeez!

So, almost 45 years after it was published, John Carpenter -yes, inspired first by the god awful original film- remade The Thing from Another World as The Thing using some of the best casting, writing, and most memorable special effects. Now, I’m not going to give you the synopsis. He literally took the original novella, threw in some nods to the ‘51 film, and did the 1980s version of the story that had originally been published in Astounding Stories a decade before he was even born. With Kurt Russell and Keith David as the principle characters, he brought life and terror to the screen with such a simple yet horrific possibility. It’s action from the start with a slow burn of suspense as each encounter with the Thing grows more bizarre, grotesque, and menacing with each passing scene.

As far as monster movies go, it simply has yet to be defeated. From the Things initial, sideshow freakfest attempts to mutate into dogs and people to waiting, biding its time on an autopsy table only to snap down with an open rib cage turned ferocious maw and chew up (then further copy and mutate) a hapless doctor the movie really does have it all. While it’s a remake, it creates an originality and image all its own, a sort of inspiration that seems to be lacking currently in the entertainment capital of the world.

Let’s face it, we’re all of us going to see the new Batman or the next installment of {insert title here} and I’ll probably laugh my ass off when Madea Goes to Mars hits Netflix. But if you want to see a master filmmaker turn a reboot into a unique original, watch John Carpenter’s The Thing.