The Thing Gets Bloody Disgusting (Yay!)

Timothy Sáenz

Blog Post – The Thing

Due: Friday, 2 April 2021

RIG – Monsters

Prof. Scott Johnson

MFA in Writing Popular Fiction

Director John Carpenter’s The Thing uses elements we have recently read about and discussed, like setting, isolation, and mood under the aegis of the single-effect theory to create the horror imposed by an alien being not known or understood and that cannot be tracked swiftly enough as it takes over each person or animal at a cellular level. Carpenter skillfully uses ambiguity to raise doubts about who is who, who can be trusted, and what motivated a character to take the actions he did.

The setting is a 12-man American camp (Outpost No. 31) on Antarctica in what was then present-day 1982. The really bad winter storms (apparently in February) and super subzero temperatures (to wax oxymoronic) are settling in. An estimation indicates the American camp is at least a hundred miles from the Norwegian camp, whose members discovered the alien and the flying saucer in which it had arrived on Earth. The cruising speed of the Bell 206 Jetranger helicopter was 130 miles-per-hour, though it may have been pushing the maximum to return to base before a storm’s arrival. The Thing protagonist and pilot, R. J. MacReady, tells the two others flying with him it would be an hour out and an hour in.

So we are presented with a remote camp staffed by an all male crew on a remote continent in which incredibly cold, harsh, hostile environmental conditions prevail in weather and topography. Though some of the men have rooms in the same main building, others live detached from it. For instance, MacReady sleeps in his own shed, an elevated tower split off from the rest of the camp. Aside from their duties, the men lack female companionship and can only divert themselves with the same card games, pool, pre-recorded videotapes, music, and computer games over and over again, producing a morose ennui.

One key signal occurs early on. MacReady is playing chess on an Apple II computer. He thinks he has the computer beat when she – yes, the voice is female! - announces her next move and checkmate. Frustrated, MacReady pours his scotch onto the computer’s circuit boards, ruining it. Some might say that confirms the ennui or typical anger at a computer. However, when he soaks the circuit board, MacReady utters the words, “Cheating bitch!”. The movie uses this personification as the first sign of an already developing paranoia.

It only gets worse for the crew.

The intelligent “Thing” owns the element of surprise, and the understandable ignorance of the men obstructs their comprehension of what they are up against. The men allow an infected dog into their camp, the dog at which the Norwegians have been shooting. The Americans mistake the meaning of a stray bullet that grazes one of their own, so they kill the Norwegian rifleman instead of the infected dog. When a three-member team led by MacReady visits the Norwegian camp, they retrieve a grotesque, partially burned and disfigured body, a heap of fresh, not completely frozen, twisted, gut-spilling gore, hauling it in by helo for an autopsy. The gore overflows so that the latex gloves of the examiners fail to cover their forearms from the encroaching blood. In short, every blunder they could commit to expose themselves to the alien creature’s nature, they do unwittingly.

That nature, conceived in the imagination of John W. Campbell Jr. in his novella, Who Goes There?, is a frenetic agglomeration of invasive, extraterrestrial life in every drop of blood, every cell from any part of its chameleon body and the bodies it has hijacked at the cellular level. This monster attacks the cells of another living creature, takes over them, absorbs their cell structure and information into its own, then imitates the creature to whom the cells once belonged so that its alien existence remains secret and safe. It is the ultimate subjugation and disintegration of personal identity. This absorption rends the human soul, eliciting the tortured screams and moans of each person forcibly transmuted into nonexistence throughout the film into the new organism dominated by the alien malignancy.

The quest to survive becomes a crapshoot as isolation, ignorance, mistrust, and finally paranoia take hold, aided and abetted by the creature’s feints. How do we know who is infected? How do we prove it? Who can we trust to do the right “thing”. All the characters suffer through this conundrum, but it is best exemplified in MacReady. He thinks Blair might be infected and confines him to the tool shed, but he listens to Blair’s caution, “Watch Clark”, and passes it on to the others. Clark, worried that MacReady is infected, later tries to move in and subdue an armed MacReady during a tense standoff. MacReady promptly shoots him in the head, believing the dog steward is attacking because he’s infected. Both men are wrong, but Clark pays with his life, and MacReady’s error draws accusations of murder. Good intentions go way bad in The Thing.

Ambiguity reigns amid the confusion. The group suspect either Capt. Garry or Dr. Copper sabotaged the blood supply because they were the two with access to the storage keys. Both die; neither was infected. While it is clear Blair becomes infected at some point, it is unclear when. He embarks on a successful rampage to destroy the helicopter, tractor, and communications equipment at the outpost, sealing it off from any departures. Blair knew if the creature made contact with the civilized world, it would only take three years to infect it entirely. Did Blair act to prevent the creature from leaving before he became infected? Or was it a ruse to prevent anyone from notifying the outside world of the creature’s existence? MacReady suggested the latter, positing the creature could afford to wait out the winter before a new group of ignorant people discovered it frozen again. That’s why he tries to blow up and burn up the whole outpost before his own (and Childs’s) inevitable demise.

Cinematically, the visuals of the creature are disturbing and horrifying, far more so and far more detailed than what we saw in An American Werewolf in London, released a year earlier. We are not sure what the original shape of the extraterrestrial is, but that it has a penchant for ugliness when it first tries to take over another creature is indisputable: something akin to an octopus, tentacles bursting out of a possessed husky, lashing out to lasso and infiltrate other huskies; a multi-legged crab whose arms and eyes push out from the head of a now-dead human to effect a skittering escape across the floor; a tower of pink and red flesh with stretched, howling human faces, pained eyes placed anywhere nonsensically, and heads or stomachs opening up like killer plants, exposing rows of long, serrated, ready-to-chomp teeth. It’s nauseous features shock and immobilize the most stalwart of men, and it’s easy to see how some viewers could become nauseated and utterly creeped out at the sights.

Carpenter uses sound, too: the crack and tear of bone and muscle, the grinding and wrenching of cellular discombobulation, agonizing screams, howling wind, and a fuzzy, heavy, heartbeat bass in the soundtrack pounding double beats to drive the sense of urgency and to ratchet up the tension: dum dum…... dum dum…... dum dum…… dum dum.

In short, everything Carpenter does and uses in the film executes Poe’s the single-effect theory and lays waste to our sensibilities and our sanity until terror overtakes reason!

The Thing isn’t flawless. Although a fair amount of money was spent on it, according to accounts, sometimes the production looks cheap, with the extraterrestrial bursting through walls made of pressboard and fire incinerating different forms of the creature… without setting the wooden camp on fire until the script calls for it at the end of the film! This leads me to reflect on comments I made about Alien and on comparing it to this week’s film. In spite of Ridley Scott’s grave plot weaknesses, the overall production of Alien is of a higher quality than The Thing. The casts in both films are strong, but I would have so say Scott’s direction made the acting stronger in his film, in spite of the presence of the legendary Kurt Russell. The characters are developed more in Alien, but then the cast is much larger in The Thing, which hampers characterization. On the other hand, the character reactions in The Thing seem more plausible to me. Brett’s leisurely stroll through the bowels of the ship to search for Jones the cat defied logic. In fact, the whole quest for Jones, which was quite deliberate, made no sense because it divided the few who were left and weakened their defenses. While Lambert’s fear in the face of the alien was understandable, I think the human instinct for survival would have propelled her on her way. Instead, she just stands and waits for the alien to kill her. I always had a hard time with that one.

Lastly, I am of the opinion that the extraterrestrial in The Thing was not the species piloting the flying saucer that wobbles out of control toward the Earth. I suspect this Thing's mischief began with another race of extraterrestrials more advanced than we but who also failed to contain the malignancy. Therein lies another story.