The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

One of the greatest sci-fi horror films of all time

It’s virtually impossible for me to write about The Thing without first mentioning the season one episode of The X-Files, “Ice”. Written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, “Ice” was inspired by the same source material as the movie (the novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell) and is widely regarded as a most successful The Thing ripoff.

I say all this because I had watched the X-Files episode many, many times before I saw The Thing, and while I could certainly see the similarities, I found the two to be remarkably different beasts. True, both are set at isolated scientific stations, both deal with an undetectable infection, both deal with increasing paranoia and mistrust among those stranded together in close quarters. But whereas “Ice” executes perfectly on a TV budget, The Thing has a lot more cash — and blood — to splash on the screen. And splash it, it does!

The movie opens with an astonishing helicopter chase across the expansive white Antarctic landscape. A dog is pursued by two Norweigians, but manages to evade their shooting long enough to seek refuge at a US base, where the Norwegian’s arrival of violence and mayhem is taken as a sign of madness (one of them is killed as a result of a fumbled explosive, the other is shot given the reasonable belief that he is a threat).

But why were they shooting at the dog? Intrigued enough to fly in less-than-ideal weather, helicopter pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell) takes a doctor out to the Norwegians’ fire-ravaged base where they discover evidence that the Norwegians had excavated something from the ice. They also find the body of a horribly mutated person who was seemingly one of the targets of the fire.

Before anyone is able to properly put the pieces together, however, the dog that started this whole chain of events explodes into a nightmarish tangle of blood, guts, and tentacles, causing all the other dogs in the kennel to, understandably, go absolutely batshit nuts. MacReady and his colleagues witness it too — although the very sight of it is utterly unbelievable.

Finally it all makes sense: whatever the Norweigians dug up was an otherworldly shapeshifting parasite that can pass undetected while containing to infect and replace others. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Polymorph from Red Dwarf, then split the difference.

The point is: There’s a monster among them and there’s no way to know who it is, nor how many of them there are.

Each of the crew lean into their own area of expertise as they scramble to come up with a strategy to detect the impostor(s) and survive the long winter ahead. But tensions soon reach breaking point, individuals go crazy, and the alien creature continues to attack in a variety of disgusting and disturbing iterations.

In order to survive, each of these distinct characters must rely on each other. The only problem is that, given the nature of their predicament, none of them are able to trust each other.

Rightly regarded as one of the greatest sci-fi horror films of all time, The Thing is loaded with taut atmosphere, creepy dread, and intense paranoia. The practical special effects are astonishing — and wonderfully gory and goopey. The direction, the actors, the cinematography, the score, the production design — every element of this film is absolutely on point.

It is a masterpiece.

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