My Thoughts On A Sci-Fi Horror Classic (And a Not-So-Classic Sequel)

1982's The Thing and 2011's The Thing are two of my all-time favorite movies, both in the scifi genre and the horror genre, and the subgenre from those two. I recently watched both of them again, and I got my pondering on the films themselves as well as the sources they draw inspiration from.

First, a word about the movies. Since both films share the same name, I'm going to refer to the 1982 film as the Old Thing and the 2011 film as the New Thing. The Old Thing was, I think, one of John Carpenter's best films. He directed the film, and it stands as one of the pillars of 1980's creature horror. Practical creature effects did a great service for the film, including one scene in which a paraplegic was hired so that the film could have a believable amputation scene. Coupled with the sets and the on-location filming in Alaska and British Columbia, the film adeptly conveyed isolation and panic while maintaining a slow burn punctuated by surprise reveals. There were some campy moments, such as at the end when R.J. MacReady, the film's main protagonist, squares off with a monstrously large version of the Thing and says "oh, fuck you, too!" before blowing it to hell. However, the movie never hams it up.

The 2011 movie served as a prequel to the first film, detailing the events that were referred to in the first. The Thing was actually an alien that crash landed around 100,000 years ago in the Antarctic, and it was later discovered by a Norwegian science mission based on the continent. While staying very faithful both to the original film and the time period it was supposed to be set in, I think this second film lost quite a bit of its luster with its reliance on CGI. I, for one, enjoyed it, but there is something that practical effects add to the overall feel of the film. Actors actually interacting with props in real space seem to me to create a much greater sense of reality, such that it's easier for the audience to suspend disbelief. Ultimately, though, it was a well-done film, exploring an entirely different scenario and setting than the first film. Taken together, they tell a full narrative that never lets up on the paranoia and terror associated with its story.

The films were directly inspired by Don A. Stuart's Who Goes There?, a story to which the Old Thing hews pretty closely. While some of the details are different, such as having a larger cast of characters and more of the cast turning out to be imitations, along with a more hopeful ending, the story beats are very similar. That story, in turn, was likely inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft's work is much different than the films or Who Goes There? concerning not an alien organism, but rather ancient terrors trapped in the Antarctic ice behind mountains.

Really it's Lovecraft I want to talk about. It's enough to say Stuart's book ties directly to the films, and, despite some modernization from 1938 and some differences in execution and pacing, the films stay pretty faithful to their immediate source material. Lovecraft, while on a different tack than Stuart, I think touched on the underlying terror that permeated Stuart's work. Put simply: it's the fear of the unknown.

Lovecraft is renowned for creating terror that digs into the psyche, and it's all based on describing the indescribable. This is evident in At the Mountains of Madness, where the protagonist of the story, a hapless researcher trying to find the lost crew of his outpost, stumbles upon an ancient, massive city full of intersecting parallel lines and "non-Euclidean" geometry. The monstrosities within the city are explained in such a way as to capture the terror they invoke, but there is very little in the way of definite description. And it is precisely in this unknowable quality that Lovecraft reaches the height of his ability to convey terror. It's what initially drew me to his works, as I found that theme to be the most terrifying kind of horror. I've always been fascinated by it.

Despite the story differences and the more grounded narrative of both Stuart's novella and the films, they all stem from that same unknown terror that Lovecraft was adept at creating. The creature in the Thing(s) is terrifying not simply because it consumes and destroys people. It's terrifying because it is anyone, or everyone, or no one at all, and there is no way to know before it's too late.

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