The Thing is John Carpenter’s 1982 science fiction horror film, written by Bill Lancaster from John W. Campbell Jr.’s 1938 novella Who Goes There?, and it is 109 minutes of men in a research station at the bottom of the world discovering that they cannot trust the man next to them. It was a failure when it opened. It is now, by the widest possible agreement, one of the greatest horror films ever made, and this paper’s score for it is about as high as we go.
The Thing Itself
A group of American researchers in Antarctica encounter an extraterrestrial life-form that assimilates other organisms and then imitates them perfectly. Any one of them could be the Thing. All of them know it. The film is about what that knowledge does to a group of men who were barely holding together before it arrived, and the paranoia and conflict that follow are the real horror. The monster is the excuse. The suspicion is the film.
MacReady
Kurt Russell plays R. J. MacReady, the station’s helicopter pilot, and he is the closest thing to a hero the film allows: a loner who is good in a crisis and not much use otherwise. Russell plays him without vanity, and the performance is the reason the film’s ending lands. Keith David’s Childs is his foil, Wilford Brimley’s Blair is the scientist who understands first what the creature means, and Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat, David Clennon, T. K. Carter, Richard Masur, Charles Hallahan, Peter Maloney, Joel Polis and Thomas G. Waites fill out a station where every man is drawn clearly enough to be a suspect.
The Effects
The creature effects are practical, and they remain, four decades on, the most disturbing transformations ever put on film. The Thing does not look like an alien. It looks like the men it has been, coming apart. Carpenter shoots them in full light and holds on them, and the refusal to cut away is the film’s confidence.
The Cold
The station is a trap and the weather is the walls. Carpenter uses the isolation to strip away every option the characters might have, and the film’s pacing, slow and then sudden, mirrors the way the men’s trust erodes. The score, spare and pulsing, does the rest.
The Ending
The film ends without an answer, two men in the snow waiting to see what happens, and it is the perfect close to a story about not knowing. Audiences in 1982 hated it. They were wrong.
What Others Might Hold Against It
The characters are types more than people, drawn in strokes rather than histories. The film’s all-male cast and its clipped dialogue keep the viewer at a distance that some find cold. And the effects, magnificent as they are, are occasionally so much that the horror tips into spectacle.
The Verdict
The Thing is a masterpiece of paranoia, craft and nerve, a film that trusts its audience the way its characters cannot trust each other. It is the best thing its director ever made, and we would not change a frame.
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