My favourite film: The Thing
I was 15 when I first saw John Carpenter's The Thing. It was a night of firsts: my first 18 certificate movie on the big screen, and my first date with the wonderful Morag. The night started well when my much-maligned bum-fluff moustache didn't so much as raise a titter at the ticket kiosk, though I personally think it was my Simon Le Bon-inspired spiky mullet that gave me that wee bit of extra gravitas. Or perhaps it was the leg warmers. Either way, Morag was clearly impressed, and that was before I ordered the large Kia-Ora and the wine gums. A fiver went a long way back then.
The Thin
TITLE: THING, THE (1982) ¬• YEAR: 1982 ¬• DIR: CARPENTER, JOHN ¬• REF: THI015AO ¬• CREDIT: [ THE KOBAL COLLECTION / UNIVERSAL ] Photograph: The Kobal Collection/www.kobal-collection.com
g came out in 1982, a few years after Alien had changed the horror landscape forever. While they are thematically similar, Carpenter's masterpiece is in fact a reimagining of the 1951 B-movie The Thing From Another World, in which an alien creature is discovered in the ice, thaws out, and then runs amok in an Arctic military base. While the central conceit remains, the earlier movie imagines a lumbering Frankenstein-monster clone, while Carpenter's is a shape-shifting chimera whose every cell is a living creature, and is truer to the source material, a short story by John W Campbell.
The Thing starts with a lone dog being pursued through the icy wasteland by a couple of enraged Norwegians in a helicopter who, in one of the movie's few comedy moments, are shot and blown–up respectively. The dog is then taken in by the staff of a nearby Antarctic survey base, the stock-in-trade disparate bunch of American character actors, soon to be monster-fodder. Plus Kurt Russell who, as chess-playing, whisky drinking, cowboy-hatted helicopter pilot RJ MacReady has never been better. He is the original cowboy versus alien, and is far too cool even for the Antarctic winter.
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Title: THING, THE (1982) ¬• Pers: BOTTIN, ROB ¬• Year: 1982 ¬• Dir: CARPENTER, JOHN ¬• Ref: THI015AL ¬• Credit: [ UNIVERSAL / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ] Photograph: The Kobal Collection/www.kobal-collection.com
o far, so good: Morag and I are holding hands and slurping loudly on our Kia-Ora – and then the dog erupts into a jaw-dropping myriad of tentacles, slime, mangled body parts and huge teeth, unlike anything I had seen in The Hammer House of Horror. I was petrified.
From then on Carpenter masterfully orchestrates proceedings. The menace of the dark polar night and the claustrophobic confines of the base are utilised to raise the fear, tension and paranoia to unbearable heights. This is a creature that doesn't just hide in the dark, but could be your friend, your colleague, or the girl beside you whose hand you are breaking in a terrified vice-like grip.
The movie is about the creature, which means characterisation and plot become secondary – but who cares? A man's chest becomes huge jaws that bite off a doctor's arms; a head disengages from a torso, sprouts legs and eyes on stalks, and then scurries off; a hairless, slimy dog head explodes from a man's chest. Throughout The Thing, man and creature merge in horrific, bloody contortions that would give Hieronymus Bosch nightmares, and almost everyone dies horribly. Brilliant.
By the end I was a quivering, sweat-drenched wreck, and soon afterwards was single once more. On the screen the two survivors sit and drink, and wait for the end, or for the sequel that never came. Until now. Strictly speaking The Thing 2011 is a prequel, and without Carpenter and Russell it has its job cut out as nothing can have the same impact as The Thing did over 30 years ago. Though I can't wait.
Morag, wherever you are, I forgive you. I'm not sure if you can still get Kia-Ora, but give me a call if you fancy some wine gums.