The Thing

“Nobody.. nobody trusts anybody now.” Remains the perfect movie for when it’s a whopping twenty five degrees and a wind chill of nineteen outside. What became most apparent on this rewatch is just how personal it gets between the organism and MacReady. The instinct is always to think of The Thing as an ensemble piece, and it probably is, but I would make the argument that it’s much more appropriate to look at it as this devastating struggle between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. And what makes that frame of viewing the film so interesting to me is when you stop and consider how Carpenter typically presents evil. John doesn’t typically get much into the business of playing fair and the monsters in his movies are often nigh unstoppable, preying upon a civilization that is utterly unequipped for it. Here, he does that again. The thing is that this time he’s got a protagonist that is as insurmountable as the monster. Aside from the scene where he’s leaving that recording for in the event of their demise, and that scene is perhaps the single greatest piece of acting of Kurt’s whole career, MacReady is depicted as being uncannily pragmatic and unconcerned with his own mortality when it becomes readily apparent that he’s probably going to face it very quickly. He has no prominent sense of attachments, and this is made apparent in the first few seconds we spend with him when he fries that computer, surely one of the only distractions from the isolation in that bunker. The titular Thing fucking hates MacReady and is terrified of him and very deliberately goes out of its way to fuck with him specifically, to get him out of the way without having to directly confront him. And yet it can’t kill him, despite trying several times. Very little, essentially nothing, is said about where MacReady came from to make him so unflinching. If you do your reading outside of the film, it’s been said that he was intended in the script to be a former helicopter pilot for the army in Vietnam. I think the idea of less is more works perfectly for this character, it makes him every bit an unknowable entity like the creature. It makes him the perfect protagonist for one of the most nihilistic films ever made. Can you imagine being one of the fools in 1982 who thought this was anything less than one of the greatest movies of all time? In a Rolodex that I think is full of perfect films, Carpenter’s crowning achievement couldn’t be clearer. Even his second best film is several steps behind The Thing and it’s one of our greatest failures that it was not immediately received as such. Been written about at nausea how groundbreaking those creature and gore effects are and yet your breath still gets taken away at the sight of them. Watching each and every one of these guys get chewed up and spat out by a demon from the stars never loses its power or its weight. When the Thing starts assimilating into Bennings and first locks eyes with MacReady, just before he burns it to a crisp, that bellowing scream it lets out is pure horror magic. Of all of Carpenter’s films, none of them really feel as doomed as this one. They never really have a prayer of actually surviving this situation. And the film never really gives you the idea otherwise. MacReady knows it, and the mission becomes to take it with him. Morricone’s score operates like a grim heartbeat, marrying to Cundey’s photography to paint such a bleak picture with no real hope at the end. And, in true Carpenter fashion, those closing few moments leave you wondering if any of it ever made a difference and if the evil is even really gone. It will always be so funny to me that this came out so close to one of the most sentimental and tender hearted films ever made in E.T. And Carpenter’s spin on visitors from outer space is one of the cruelest depictions of it, rivaled only perhaps by what Ridley had unleashed three years earlier. As MacReady and Childs sat out there in the dark, freezing to death in an inferno, I get left with this heavy feeling in my chest. I feel like it’s essentially a little counterproductive to theorize and analyze what the ending might actually mean. Fascinating, sure. But the glaring knowledge that all of this could have very well been for nothing and eventually the fire is going to dwindle is a concrete ending in and of itself. A blunt, foreboding conclusion to an hour and change of some of the most elegant and masterful American horror filmmaking ever committed to celluloid. “There's a storm hitting us in about six hours. We're going to find out who's who.”