The Thing

(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.

crucially, there are no mountains in The Thing, or giant penguins, or shoggoths.

-In Mountains of Madness, before discovering the mountains, the Antarctic expedition from Miskatonic U. used special drills and dug up what they thought were petrified remains of an unknown life form. The remains are left on a dissection table in a tent. They turn out not to be petrified at all, the heat allows them to revive, and they eat everybody in the camp. The 2 main characters have been away on a scouting trip in a plane, and they return and find nothing but tracks in the snow. For the rest of the book they are haunted by what might, or might not be the Old Ones hunting them outside in the snow (they can't tell if it's howling or just the wind.)

In the movie the frozen alien was left to thaw on a dissection table, and ate an entire Norwegian outpost leaving nothing but tracks. The two main character Americans figure this out after a helicopter trip. When they return to their base they are haunted for the rest of the movie by what might, or might not be the alien hunting them in the shape of their friends.

-If I remember right, Carpenter's vs. of The Thing has some kinds of hints that the shapeshifter was able to reach populated areas, but the two remaining characters are already going to die and can't warn anybody. A paranoid, doomy ending instead of a victory (like in the original movie) is a pretty Lovecraftian touch.

the ancient things in the Lovecraft story are not like the Thing (although arguably the shoggoths kind of are).

anyway, tekeli-li.

Really cool story, the movie retold from the Thing's perspective: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

The last line is pretty cringey though

re: Carpenter and Lovecraft: anybody seen In The Mouth of Madness? I watched it with some friends and the general consensus was that it did a great job of capturing the feel of Lovecraft, but we were all v. high and I am having trouble remembering specifics.

I knew about the reboot or whatever but wait a goddamn minute:

So what makes "The Thing" different? First off, the film isn't so much a remake as a prequel, or what the producers are calling a companion piece to the original. As "Thing" fans may recall, early in the film, trying to understand why a Norwegian helicopter had been chasing a runaway husky before it crashed, Kurt Russell returns to the Norwegian base camp where he finds evidence that its research team -- now all dead -- had dug something out of the ice, apparently awakening an extraterrestrial creature that had been buried for thousands of years.

"That's the story we tell in this film," says Marc Abraham, who is producing the movie with his Strike Entertainment partner Eric Newman. "We go back to that original Norwegian camp and try to figure out what happened. It's like a crime scene, with an ax in the door, and the audience gets to be the detective, trying to piece together what horrible things have occurred."

In the fine tradition of the prequel to The Exorcist.

except... that there was a fairly recent video game that covered all this ground already!

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/bigboxshots/4/457774_front.jpg

Kinda thinking about playing that at some point, just out of curiosity. I heard that it was kind of a buggy mess, but still interesting? It might already be too dated to go back to, though...

really great game imo. i bet it would still play great. has a nice squad system and manages to work in some nice scares. quite tough tho.

haha the biologist who goes crazy and builds a spaceship in a cave in the ice = called BLAIR do you SEE?

wait, um no I don't see!

what was Mark on about here...?

probably a Tony Blair reference...?

or the facts of life

I thought the game was a sequel rather than a prequel

if it wasn't though it should have been

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