It is the nature of certain creations that they influence the media that follows to such a tremendous degree that — for one — a viewer usually knows a lot about them before so much as pressing play. Two, the experience of watching, reading, etc. them is sometimes worse for the media in question having been turned into a cultural touchstone. This is unfortunately the case for Seinfeld and Friends, which were funny and groundbreaking in their own ways at the time but are hopelessly dated and formulaic now, for Night of the Living Dead and its once-revolutionary depiction of zombies, and increasingly true for The Avengers. (Don’t get me started on The Usual Suspects, either; I can’t stand that movie.) This is arguably even more true within horror, a genre that both seeks to shock and subvert and that loves its schlocky tropes, its cultural stand-bys, and its middling-quality B-movies and pulp paperbacks. So when I saw that one of my streaming services had John Carpenter’s The Thing, I figured, why not? I’ve heard so much about it. I might as well. But I wasn’t expecting a lot. I’d recently read an essay about it (Clinton Crockett Peters’ The Thing About Cancer) , and was intrigued; but I’ve also spent years hearing about the dog, the paranoia, Antarctica, etc.

I should also mention that if I’m not watching a movie with others, I sometimes struggle to sit down and watch something through. So it should be taken with particular import that I did not move. I was glued to the couch the whole way through, and that’s with knowing that this is a kill-em-all movie, knowing not to get attached to anybody. Consider it a stellar example of how spoilers don’t ruin a movie if the movie truly is that good. So with that in mind, if you are another person who’s only heard about John Carpenter’s The Thing in vague outlines that purported to be more, here is the sketch of the movie. Released and set in 1982, on an American Antarctic research base in the middle of nowhere, the film opens — after a brief teasing shot — with two men in a helicopter firing on a dog running through the snow. This, you may have heard about. It’s one of those brilliant opening scenes frequently discussed among the greatest hooks of all time; and rightly so. But what follows shortly afterwards is the character work that makes the rest of the movie just as brilliant — tiny sketches that give every character that little bit of distinction. There’s some stereotyping here, sure, but it’s more archetyping than stereotyping. Nauls, our cook, is an easygoing and relaxed young man on rollerskates (skates in a kitchen? Confidence or stupidity in spades!) who peppers his dialogue with Swahili and French. (Author’s note: I suspect Nauls is Louisianan but I don’t know enough to be certain — the phrase that comes up a lot is ‘Oui, bwana’ and all I know is that bwana is Swahili. But the place in the US where these two languages co-exist the most is Louisiana.) Palmer openly smokes his joint and talks about the ‘chariots of the gods’ with his feet up, and the surly, awkward, Clark keeps to himself but loves his dogs more than life itself. Chief of the base Garry is quick to leap to action when his men are threatened, knocking glass out of a window to shoot an intruder, but is clearly haunted by the decision; he and our lead MacReady have a similar world-weary, veterans’ weight on their shoulders, while cynic Childs with a chip on his shoulder is already affected by the darkness of the winter and seems ready to lash out at people even before the paranoia sets in. Bennings, Norris, Fuchs, Blair, Copper, Windows — It’s a massive cast, and yet every single character gets their little moments to shine, little moments as a brief main character in a crowded ensemble cast. Sometimes, like with Childs and Clark, it’s as an implied villain; sometimes as with poor Windows and Nauls, it’s as a nearly-feminized victim-hero figure backed against the wall; with the suffering Blair it’s as the scientist gone mad and trying to save the world at the cost of the lives of his friends.

It’s hard to say if these performances would land the same way without the gore of the Thing itself — because, of course, The Thing is famous as a body horror film. But at the same time, the effects of the film are forty years old. In still frames, they look a bit goofy; yet, partially due to the power of their practical effects and partially due to the strength of the acting, in motion they land as hard if not harder than any CGI effects today. Another underestimated factor is the sheer imagination behind the transformations themselves. An entertaining Tumblr text post goes more or less like this, “I’m about to watch John Carpenter’s The Thing and I bet I can come up with a better name for it! *two hours later* That sure was a thing.” It baffles, it defies description, it doesn’t just absorb or assimilate but destroys and rearranges. A dog’s head splits not in two but in four like a bloody flower (an effect that is either deliberately or accidentally referenced by the Demogorgon in Stranger Things decades later) — a head crawls like a spider, a ribcage opens like a mouth, a skull melts and sinks out of a face like a more horrifying version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You’re never quite sure what you’re seeing, so there’s nothing to compare it to and find it lacking — it is, as MacReady says, not like us.

All of this is treading well-trodden ground, even if I am a late and astounded observer to it. Watching the tracks of The Thing be followed into modern films, too, is an exercise in intertextual pleasure — Annihilation by Alex Garland paints with fractals and symmetry where Carpenter emulates Pollock and Goya, but the essence of strange horror is still there, a horror that follows but then subverts nature. (The idea of assimilation/corruption is distinctly present in both films, too — and the fact that Annihilation has an almost all-female cast as a foil against The Thing provides more food for thought and analysis than I can possibly get into without adding another ten thousand words.) But the other thing that struck me and my friend on our second watch was what was left unsaid. We are introduced to the Thing as a monster; a terrible diseased object that cannot be left alive. And certainly as the film proceeds, it doesn’t reject that narrative; but we are also, increasingly, made aware of its intelligence. It makes choices, in where it hides; it waits until it is unobserved to possess and devour people; it destroys routes of egress and builds a ship for itself. But too much is left unknown, both about the events preceding the film and many of those intervening what we’re shown. Does it lie dormant in the dead bodies retrieved from the Norwegian base out of calculation or fear? Does it react and devour Bennings out of malice or in response to Blair’s attack? What happened for it to be the only one of its kind, trapped in the ice? Was it the only one of its kind — or can it even be, the type of organism that it is? Does it even recognize human beings as sentient, or is transformation the only way it knows how to communicate? My interest in unpacking the racist baggage of Lovecraftian horror — in how lack of understanding as horror is rooted in linguistic and racial supremacy — means I’m motivated to look at the relative silence of the Thing(s) and take it not as tacit admission of monstrosity, but the opposite — an emptiness in the narrative. This doesn’t take away from the horror of the film, however. It only adds another layer, especially in the context of the movie’s Cold War backdrop. The paranoia that set the men of the base against each other so easily could very well be part of the film’s core conflict as well. Consider the number of aliens in Stargate and Doctor Who that do damage simply through their attempts to communicate and co-exist. Is the violence of The Thing inevitable, or is it another extension of war between peoples who — on both sides — have fallen back onto violence as their method of communication? Even the opening of the movie, even if unintentional, supports this; the Norwegian man is telling them everything they need to know, if they only had the ears to listen and the knowledge to understand. “It’s not a dog,” he’s screaming to people who only speak English, “It’s not a dog.”

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