The Thing

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.

Dan I think the point is that it's just the two of them, so the "thing" could obviously just eat the other since there's no other people around to get in its way, or it could just wait until they both froze and only it would wake up, or etc. i.e. there's nothing to be done.

i like the dig at humanity: the ultra-perceptive dogs realize that the new dog is the thing within 20 seconds, we have to watch a 90 minute movie and still don't know!*

*i think we do know though... in the last scene when Childs takes a pull of whiskey, MacReady shoots him a kinda "knowing" glance, which i interpreted as "why the hell would the thing be drinking alcohol?"... the thing wants to proliferate, not impede it's spread by killing it's own cells with alcohol!

also, there's this i ran across while trying researching spelling.

RayM:
Also, do you think there's a clue as to where Blair gets infected>
short scene: the dog walks down the hall into blair's(?) room and the shadow of blair's head(?) turns his head real quick followed by a quick fade to black edit.

other thoughts:
i was impressed on how well the thing always cleaned up after itself off-camera because on-camera it was always making a bloody gooey mess.

A long time ago I did a report at school comparing The Thing to this book. (Probably terrible writing and I don't have it any more, but anyways.) I don't know if anyone ever explicitly acknowledged a debt, but there are big similarities. Maybe it's a case of second-hand influence or something. Regardless I think this movie in fact does more justice than any other movie to the style of HP Lovecraft writing. Which is really cool, seeing that aside from his cult followers- his stuff gets a lot less use than it should, after doing more than anyone else to influence the best and most popular of the horror genre like Stephen King. I've seen it written that many horror movie fans are waiting for the day when someone does a really good Lovecraft movie (with arguable exceptions like the comedic Reanimator or Dagon) but until then The Thing comes closest.

Occasional poster Matt Maxwell mentioned this in conversation to me a few years back; it's an understandable comparison to draw.

Enjoyed this but maybe the Hawks is still better

tying james redd to the rec room sofa and making him decide which film is better is my mcready moment

*pulses flamethrower a little, to test it has the juice just in case*

lmao

You're gonna find out what you already know, MacReady.

Have you watched the Norwegian prequel?

It’s pointless.

Yeah, seemed to be from the description

Hadn't realized John Carpenter had directed the Kurt Russell made-for-TV Elvis.

One thing this one has going for it is that Carpenter restored much of the original plot of "Who Goes There?" including the characters's names but also the shape-shifting aspects of the alien and the related testing at the end.

TIL (well YIL) that Charles K. Feldman was Howard Hawks's agent, that Hawks's business partner in the 1951 production Edward Lasker was married to Jane Greer (much to the consternation of Howard Hughes) and that Margaret Sheridan who played Nikki was a Hawksian protogée orignally slated to appear in Red River (where Nyby supposedly saved the day with his editing which is why he was rewarded with this directing job or credit) but was pregnant which is why the role went to Joanne Dru instead.

Also liked the homage of the title sequence image.

Really need to read that Campbell bio properly.

Which book says Campbell may have been somewhat inspired by Lovecraft, since "At the Mountains of Madness" was serlalized in Astounding, even though in general he disliked Lovecraft.

jules verne wrote a novel called THE SPHINX OF THE ICEFIELDS (1897)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/%27The_Sphinx_of_the_Ice_Fields%27_by_George_Roux_69a.jpg

that uh “sphinx” looks like the melted nazi from raiders of the lost ark

bad vibes imo

old-timey pictures of the sphinx which are terrible

That Jules Verne is a sequel to Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym, which is maybe proto-Thing as well?

https://pulpcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/13_astounding_1936_02_brown-600x849.jpg

proof if proof be need be

How do people feel about THE FOG?

Basically love it, with the possible exception of when I'm actively watching it

Heh

It's playing at the FF on Thursday.

I was being a little flip ... the moments I genuinely love about The Fog are actually the moments where it feels like the plot is refusing to kick in, like it's really going to just coast on vibes like the best parts of Halloween did

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTI1MDM5NDUwOF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTc1MzkxMQ@@._V1_.jpg

by John W. Campbell, Jr. (as Don A. Stuart) The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combated the musty smell of sweat-and-snow-drenched furs. The acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air.

same energy:
a: "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning."

b: "The room stank of demons."

lol

https://i.imgur.com/L3sg6Vg.jpeg

look i know it’s alien but i thought you guys would appreciate

an alienne cheftburfting vpon the table of a man

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

hello, I look like a man wearing a John Carpenter mask

Just saw that in my feed.

And thought the same about the mask

Wililam Tuttle iirc.

Although maybe that was one mask he didn't make

Meanwhile in real life: scientist’s ‘disturbing’ behavior, death threats at Antarctic base
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/scientist-disturbing-behavior-antarctic-probe-begins

https://i.imgur.com/1hf960g.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDIaL9Begao

throw me in the briarpatch baby