The Greatest Films #13: The Thing

The Film: The Thing

If you haven’t seen this little masterpiece from John Carpenter it is avaiable right now on netflix streaming. If you like the survival horror genre you really have no excuse. It is a masterpiece and might even have no equal.

Alien? We’ll, maybe, but that really isn’t fair. The Thing is deeper. More twisted. More psychological. It is also astonishingly unforgiving when it comes to its gore effects. If you were ever curious what films inspired Guillermo Del Toro’s career, you can start and end at this one.

What it’s about:

You’ve definitely seen a movie like The Thing before, but never with such audacity. A group of researchers in the Antarctica come across a dog that is being chanced by a group of Norwegian researchers from a facility many miles away.

The Norwegians are killed, but the dog somehow remains alive. The dog is actually an alien entity disguising itself to hide from predators. Slowly and surely the research team falls apart when members accuse each other of being a monster.

Why it is a great film:

There is a huge tragedy that John Carpenter’s career took such an odd turn. He was the master of the genre movie throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties.  Making almost half a dozen movies that should be cherished and hailed as masterpieces — such movies as Big Trouble in Little China, Halloween, They Live, Escape From New York, In the Mouth of Madness, and the list even goes on. The Thing might be my favorite of all of those because of how grim the story is.

There was definitely a moment where Carpenter had to choose between having a bigger audience and giving a happier ending or going with his gut and making the movie the way it deserved to be made.

Moreover, what stands out to me the most is the movies special effects, which are still not dated. They’re still vile and shocking by today’s standards, I can’t even imagine what they must have been like almost thirty years ago  The creatures slither and wiggle, tear apart, grow bones and joints suddenly from odd places. It still makes me cringe to this day.

All of this is on top of a great performance from Kurt Russell, who plays the reluctant hero. It is a disgrace that, like so many other of Carpenter’s films, the movie did poorly and was rejected by critics only to resurface years later to critical accliam and finacial success. His career was destroyed by this trend and the whispers are that he is mounting a comeback with his new movie The Ward — though I’ve heard critics have slammed the movie.

I can hardly wait.

-Collin