The Thing

i) how many Antartic research bases have flamethrowers and automatic weapons lying around?

ii) how come their base seems to have normal 24 hour days, despite being below the Antartic circle?

The blood test scene is one of the greatest movie moments ever; terrific Morricone score (mostly electronic, IIRC, something of a rarity and an obv. trib to Carpenter); even Kurt Russell doing his Clint schtick was OK (I love the moment when he pours whiskey into his computer!) Plus a really sharp script by Burt Lancaster's son!

I used to really like Anne Bilson's film reviews in Time Out, although sadly her vampire nov was a bit rub. Still I think I'd like to read this too. What a great, great flick.

they need pistols and flamethrowers in case the norwegians invade (when amundsen landed in "scott"s sphere of operations" in 1911, there was serious if brief discussion of the possibility of invading the norwegian camp and disabling the amundsen exhibition = they had guns available, for stray polar bears?) (haha very stray: polar bears = arctic not anarctic) (and yeah, no flamethrowers) (but anyway don't the Carpenter lot soup up the flamethrower from some more ordinary oxy-acetylene torch gizmo?)

The Thing is a masterful horror movie, which improves upon Hawks original by having a better monster (after all that giant carrot...) This body horror has never been bettered - the actual melting of people.....

Want to read this book. I want to read Quirke's Jaws book. I want to see more of these films with themed canapes and bouze afterwards.

ho ho, I didn't realise I was making a joke... I just can't stop being funny.

I agree with the points about mechanical rather than cgi effects. and there is a lot to like about the film.

it was slightly ruined for me by seeing it in a room with a load of sweaty horror fans, preceded by a documentary on Carpenter that had all the best bits in it. Which was annoying... I'd already heard about the "you gotta be fucking kidding" bit but had been at great pains not to spoil it for special friend Irene, and then the cockfarming documentary did it for me.

The Thing is still not as good as Assault On Precinct 13.

(the secret nagging question is: SO WHAT IF THE THING IMITATES US EXACTLY? If we are all turned into exact copies of ourselves, what has changed? "Go with the flow maan, resistance is futile... gooey tentacloid palps? bring em on!!")

Arctic circle is a grebt place to set a vampire film btw.

i read the story when i was like 12 and it *really really* spooked me (the monster is described, apparently dead, in the first para, oh no!! it has THREE EYES!! OH NO!!): in the bit where they do the blood test, mcready is testing 35 ppl!! carpenter cuts it down to a slightly less pedantic four, i think

the gender thing she says was probably the last possible moment they could cast the way they did: actually not strictly speaking "realistic" (antarctic stations had been mixed sex since the 50s), it was for emotional-narrative focus as much as anything

the question of blair's infection is interesting, because so deliberately left ambiguous i. on hand he jumps to the "it's a shapeshifting alien much too quickly", ii. on the other, he destroys the helicopters/radio etc, iii. on the third hand he misdirects mac towards clark (who ends up being shot and then turning out NOT to have been thinged) => billson points out that the unspoken question is, if you become a thing and it becomes you, how much of YOUR behaviour wd be a mask and how much wd be real...

i suspect childs's thing-dom is kept exactly as ambiguous (and remember someone finds a bit of mac's torn clothing: so he's not out of the picture, just cz he's the hero => yes he's behaving mac-like, but then the thing-that-became-mac WOULD, to fool the others or fool us!!)

http://www.arahne.si/Arachne06.jpg

Any other films with absolutely no women in at all. Actually - nu thread...

(also it stars frodo)

(the caffeine (= coke obv) scene = brilliant loving parody of the scalpel/test-tubes scene)

http://www.hbo.com/films/laramie/img/photo_cast_clea.jpg

jordana = cookiecutter brunette "looker" zzzzz

Hott brasilian-american with wonderful hair
http://www.tiramillas.net/cine/atodo/jordana.jpg

and goth poseur(real goths have black hair)
http://www.hbo.com/films/laramie/img/photo_cast_clea.jpg

(Actually I only like her cos she reminds me of dreamy skate-punk princess Lois, who has way better hair)

coz ok i just watched the movie and then "remembered" this whole mark s bit where he's totally sympathizing with the "thing" and spins this great hypothesis about how mcready is clearly "thing" but has decided by the strength of his will to be human that it doesn't matter. and also about how the "thing" is always in us, and in fact is our mutual fear and at the end, reduced to panic, everyone is reduced to "fire cleans all" which is as unscientific as you can get (and clearly the surface-opposition is science v. grotesque).

also about how blair ceases to panic and becomes "okay" when he reaches the same conclusion w/r/t the "thing" -- i.e. that it doesn't matter.

all of which i guess is part of the "so what if the thing imitates us exactly" except it's also all the BAD things the thing does are entirely human. except the thing gets to make k-cool spaceships too!

i may also have read all this elsewhere.

okay I need to read the book and see "the faculty" now.

also the initial scene with the thing and the dogs is totally horrifying as is the arms-getting-chomped scene, and the way the narrative closure with the two burned stations kicks this whole "statement of human nature" thing into high-gear.

(if true, this is the coolest thing evah btw) (best aspect: it can be totally real and totally unproveable simultaneously)

I thought that Blair WAS a "thing" by that point, that it had assimilated him just before he could hang himself (a noose in the background, isn't there?). But according to this, realising a lack of difference between the thing and the not-thing = becoming the thing-in-itself?

so maybe I do like this film after all.

never entirely convinced that explosives are a helpful device round a THING: surely not all the little bits are going to be burnt beyond regeneration ??

Even setting them on fire and dumping the body in the snow to extinguish the fire seems un-thorough once they know that any wee giblet contains the full consciousness of the thing

full capability anyway

if it's full consciousness then THINGS have also to be somewhat telepathic IMO (which it was in the original story) (this is discussed upthread iirc)

One of the most unsettling images in the film imho is the drops of blood on the floor all moving around in unison when macready drops the dish during the blood test

I get the impression that the rampaging Thingses don’t have similar thought / consciousness to humans — it takes a good while after an absorption for a Thing to be able to pilot the speech and memories of a biped, and the way the doggie thing scopes out the base and picks a human to thingify might be a hint of telepathy too.

(Does the film specify whether the saucer was piloted by the Thing, by a Thing, by another species or class that was transporting the Thing, or was a drone?)

in campbell's version the ship is straightforwardly a THINGship: the one they dig out (no norwegians involved) had frozen within minutes of stepping beyond the crash 20 million years ago

presumably the thing that stepped out of the crash would have been in whatever form it had assumed the last time it took over a host, that of an e.g. alpha centauran given that to our knowledge there is no stable, ur-thing form

at least that's how i've always pictured it

ah reading back in the thread i can see we've already excavated this assiduously

https://i.imgur.com/jFDAlFF.jpg

Can the Thing spaceship change its form?

so what's the cons of being thingified? That guy who was thingied built an entire spaceship, seems like pretty neat skill to me.

quotation from campbell (note how he writes dialogue):

"I wonder if we ever saw its natural form. " Blair looked at the covered mass. "It may have been imitating the beings that built that ship ­ but I don't think it was. I think that was its true form. Those of us who were up near the bend saw the thing in action; the thing on the table is the result. When it got loose, apparently, it started looking around. Antarctica still frozen as it was ages ago when the creature first saw it ­ and froze. From my observations while it was thawing out, and the bits of tissue I cut and hardened then, I think it was native to a hotter planet than Earth. It couldn't, in its natural form, stand the temperature. There is no life­form on Earth that can live in Antarctica during the winter, but the best compromise is the dog. It found the dogs, and somehow got near enough to Charnauk to get him. The others smelled it ­ heard it ­ I don't know ­ anyway they wwent wild, and broke chains, and attacked it before it was finished. The thing we found was part Charnauk, queerly only half­dead, part Charnauk half­digested by the jellylike protoplasm of that creature, and part the remains of the thing we originally found, sort of melted down to the basic protoplasm.

this question is not resolved afaicr and plus i don't consider blair a reliable narrator-explainer: he's not yet thingified i dont think but it has telepathically got into his mind and is directing-confusing him; we are already guessing that it bewilders its prey telepathically and hypnotically

Blair's dialogue sounds like Campbell talking to one of his writers.

it's here if you want to enjoy the rest of the "conversation": https://wp.nyu.edu/darknessspeaks/wp-content/uploads/sites/3674/2016/09/who_goes_there.pdf

(i mean it's a good story but the expositionmeter is off the charts)

I watched this at the cinema on Sunday (part of a Morricone season) - was great to see on the big screen. We'd all seen it before loads of times but none of us could remember who was assimilated when they were testing everyone's blood so it was still pretty suspenseful.

Was just reading some theories about whether Childs was a Thing at the end - apparently not as John Carpenter has said the computer game is canon and in the game he is a human when he freezes to death.

anybody got a flamethrower suitable for use in an antarctic research station? it's for a thing

— mutable joe (@mutablejoe) June 23, 2022

it's very good at getting you to forget who is and who isn't bcz imo carpenter cheats lol: the spreadsheet will never clear!

haha xp

i've read a handful things over the years where people plausibly solve for X re:who is & isnt a Thing, when they get turned, etc, and theres never been one that has convinced me more than others, but i've also become convinced that carpenter made the movie with a clear blueprint in his head about who was human and what was happening.

a weirder little question than eg WHAT HAPPENS TO NAULS OMG!!11 is this: macready says "there's a storm hitting us in six hours" and then a couple of scenes later "the storm's been hitting us hard for 48 hours" -- what did they get up in between to for two whole days??!!

Was just reading some theories about whether Childs was a Thing at the end - apparently not as John Carpenter has said the computer game is canon

I had always assumed that Childs is infected, given that he appears not to be conventionally alive (no plumes of breath, unlike MacReady) - but looking at the Wiki page just now, I see that this "has been explained as a technical issue with the filming."
I have also always assumed that the reason that the saucer crashed on Earth in the first place was that the Thing had killed its crew. Its flight path in the prologue sequence suggests that it's out of control, I think?

i read a thing that posited that Childs is a thing based on the fact that he drinks from the bottle Macready passes to him, since previously been careful to prepare their own meals so a human would have balked at sharing a bottle with a potential Thing, and Macready's knowing chuckle at seeing him drink is Mac realizing that... which is interesting, but i also can easily see Childs being human and just doing it bc hes tired and dying and dgaf

watching childs actor keith david right now in an old law and order, playing a rival DA refusing to help unconvict an innocent man and quoting scalia = he is clearly a THING

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrZ7PnolbQ4

https://c.tenor.com/aLora3YAfDYAAAAC/pingu-noot.gif

Just grabbed tickets to see this in a local theatre - so pumped!!

nice. i guess once upon a time one would have said “hope it’s a nice print” but now i guess… hope it’s a recent blu-ray?

or at least hope it's better than this

I just got back from seeing John Carpenter's masterpiece at the Fathom Events 40th anniversary screening at the Universal Citywalk AMC... and I will never EVER see a Fathom Event again, and I recommend that you avoid them like the plague. pic.twitter.com/FQbkp1OjV9

— Mick Garris & The Post Mortem Podcast (@MickGarrisPM) June 20, 2022

I saw it and didn’t notice any of the issues that guy talks about - maybe they fixed it after he kicked up a fuss

lol this thread is 20 years old, anyway merry xmas ilxors whatever yr cells are up to

pic.twitter.com/wNrVs3not9

— Caligula (@TheHolyKnife) December 19, 2022

watching christian nyby's version for the first time in 40 yrs

it's p good but it's no THE THING

in conclusion: watch the skies!

clear up a debate for me re: this dialogue exchange

Macready: Blair, have you seen Fuchs?

Blair: I don't wanna stay out here any more. I wanna come back inside.
I hear funny things out here.

Macready: Have you come across Fuchs?

Blair: It ain't Fuchs. It ain't Fuchs.

to me it's obviously saying "the guy you think is Fuchs isn't Fuchs anymore" (either paranoia from real Blair or misdirection by Thing Blair, depending on if he's been turned yet.) The flipside to that argument goes, Blair is saying Fuchs isn't a "thing".

a shocking number of people online believe the latter.

anyway, a GREAT movie.

Just came in #3 in an '80s critics' poll:

https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/best-80s-movies/the-thing-1982directed-by-john-carpentershown-kurt-russell-2/

xp You're right.

I am in the camp that believes that exchange is Thing-Blair stalling so that he can finish constructing his ship and possibly needing to forage for more supplies.

I saw this film probably half a dozen times back in high school, mostly while shitfaced.

Nice list - I mean, it would be better with less American films but it's pretty good xps

Just read the Billson BFI book in one sitting. Really excellent stuff, and very interesting to me for its sections focusing on compare/contrast with the Campbell novella and the Hawks film.

She really has a good eye for Carpenter's directing and structure, too. The little moments of brilliant misdirection (Clark's scalpel, Childs and Garry pushing back on Mac during the blood test), the singularly excellent casting and characterization, the escalating isolation (winter, storm approaching, no one answering, destroyed comms), etc.

Not much of this is really extremely new to me, but it's still so fascinating and nice to read something from someone who was deeply, deeply getting it at a point when so many critics were still thoroughly missing the point.

Just saw this in the theater for the first time. It’s a totally different movie with a crowd.

Finally got round to watching this before the apocalypse

This story is an interesting take

The Things by Peter Watts

There is also Adam Roberts's THE THING ITSELF.

"This was one of the first movies where the Black guy lasts to the final scene. I don’t think I’m the only brother who’s ever survived in a horror or sci-fi movie, but I’m certainly one of the few. It was great foresight on John’s part"

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/25/john-carpenter-kurt-russell-the-thing-horror-classic

And in a situation where you don't really know which, between two people, actually "survived," adding to the fun