Why The Thing Is The Best, Most Relevant Film to Watch Right Now
Sometimes you have to douse your bro in kerosene and light him up lest he infects everyone with an alien pathogen, sometimes you don’t. That’s life in Antarctica.
Image: Universal Pictures
If you’re reading this today — February 16th, 2021 — and you live in Eastern Canada or Texas, then look outside.
Done?
Here’s the score: The shit soup that was 2020 wasn’t enough reason to stay in, so now you have that whiteout to seal the deal.
Big swaths of Ontario and Quebec got levelled with well over a ruler’s worth of snow last night, but quelle surprise. This is Canada, where it snows and snows, and like Bane would say, we were born in it.
But Texas?
Things are weird out there, and yet it’s getting weirder. Ever since March of last year, that ominous sense of not knowing what comes next hasn’t once let up. Virtual classrooms. Smart cities. Commercial space travel. Big, oncoming, yet nebulous resets. Close your eyes and you’ll see it — we’re all marching, hand in hand, straight into a great, big unknown.
But what else can we do but cede to fate and hold on tight?
What may come will come, and really, there’s nothing more human than that
Whether for survival, exploration, or invasion, humankind has always flung itself into the abyss if, for nothing else, to see just how far it goes.
To celebrate 35 years of The Thing’s release, Printed in Blood published a 375-page book in 2017 with artwork influenced by the film. It’s aptly named The Thing: Artbook and Carpenter himself features with a memorable afterword.
Image: Printed in Blood
Think of The Terminator director (and native Ontarian) James Cameron. In 2012, the guy roamed the deepest known point of our oceans, the bottom of the Marianas Trench, in a pressurized submersible called the Deepsea Challenger. Cameron piloted the thing by himself and he travelled 35,787 feet down before touching bottom. For perspective, that’s not far from cruising altitude for most airliners when starting at sea level. Not many of us would do this, which is why we ought to laud people who do. Without them, we’d still be in the stone age.
Our species thrives on danger to live. Our bravest have often gone beyond that which we know to find something, anything that can save us. This is what drove the plot of Chris Nolan’s Interstellar, and it’s even inspired SpaceX’s mission to Mars.
All of this is to say… When you’re kicking back after all the shovelling, crack a cold one and invest 108 glorious minutes in John Carpenter’s 1982 Sci-Fi-meets-body horror masterpiece, The Thing (not to be confused with the 2011 prequel, which was meh).
What’s best about this classic has nil to do with its titular monster, an alien that splices itself into horrifying half-human, half-arachnid crawlers, one that spews white bile and sprouts random human limbs, one that assimilates grown men either by mere physical contact or swallowing them alive (it’ll decide), and it gets them one by one, in private, so that by the time its done, you can’t tell who’s who. And that’s what makes The Thing great — it’s a whodunnit, only of the most deranged sort fathomable.
It’s also about doing anything you can to dodge an infection. There, relevance.
There’s not much to the plot of Carpenter’s film, at least not on paper.
When the story starts, we meet a tired crew of 12 American researchers stationed at a remote outpost in Antarctica. Some major archetype boxes get ticked off, among them one “MacCready,” a one-line slinging chopper pilot played by a teenaged-looking (and biblically bearded) Kurt Russell, a hard-nosed mechanic in “Childs” (a role owned by the great Keith David, or Warren’s step dad from There’s Something About Mary), and the pious “Blair,” our lead biologist played by A. Wilford Brimley (otherwise known as the moustachioed guy from those Quaker Oats commercials). Without spoiling anything — because the uninitiated need to watch this flick — one of the men make contact with a parasitic alien life-form that’s been cryogenically slumbering for who knows how long ‘till this very moment.
What’s worse, this alien won’t just sneak up on you and eat you à la Ridley Scott’s Alien. It’ll find a way to touch you, then creep its way into your bloodstream and copy your cells before mimicking you. That is until you start acting weird and screaming like a Mac truck horn. Then it’s death by fire for you.
Watch out for those pesky arachnids with severed heads for torsos.
Image: Universal Pictures
Oh, what a beautiful film.
The Thing’s based on a 1938 novella called Who Goes There? by beloved American writer, John W. Campbell, a lover of all that’s odd who cut his teeth as long-time editor of Astounding Science Fiction (the Holy Grail of Sci-Fi mags in the 20th century). It’s known Campbell himself was a big fan of explorers, too, especially former American naval officer and storied adventurer, Admiral Richard Byrd.
Sci-Fi novelist and biographer, Alec Nevala-Lee, wrote a book last year on Campbell’s life, and he noted the late writer might’ve been inspired by another guy who couldn’t help but peer into places we shouldn’t — H.P. Lovecraft.
If it’s true, this can’t be a coincidence. Lovecraft himself loved monsters and like the ones in his stories, he saw them not as separate beings or deliverers of random harm, but manifestations of the unlimited nature of our nightmares. To Lovecraft, monsters were that thing we see when the abyss stares back at us. They are what happens when ego takes over from curiosity, when you’re tempted to keep going, even when you’ve gone too far.
Much like the horrible Cthulhu (Lovecraft’s mile-high tall sea monster), The Thing is what happens when you go too far. No one forced those 12 men to go to the end of the earth, where temperatures plummet to minus 100 at night. They went themselves, and they knew the risks, whether it be an interplanetary threat or good, old cabin fever. Cabin fever compounded by claustrophobia and interplanetary threats, that is.
Again, there’s not much to this film, and that’s why it’s perfect. The Thing vanquishes any sense of security from the outset with a simple, but effective message: These guys are in the middle of nowhere, and it’s just going to be you and them for a good while. Throw in an assailant that prefers attacking via virus form and you’ve got a film about trust.
Deep down, The Thing’s real horror is about losing trust in your fellow human, and the terror of not knowing what’ll happen as a result.
The “Thing” itself’s the co-star, not the main show here. The crew’s descent into inhumanity is what makes this movie worth every second. It asks, “What are we without trust? Monsters, probably.”
And in a cruel twist of irony, the men who went out there in the name of exploration indeed found something worth finding, only it wasn’t at all what they’d expected. And for all their paranoia and attempts at eluding the “thing” that stalked them, for all their tries at quarantining this guy or that guy, doom would tread on and do its… thing.
For some people, the mind can’t help flirt with what’s dark to learn what matters.
Sometimes, one must wander where they shouldn't to learn why we shouldn't.
And sometimes, when the world’s on lockdown all you can do is live and wait, it’s best to take a breath and just let it come.
Talk about a paradox, right? Eat shit and you’ll find it tastes like shit.
Our primal need to face the worst — even while knowing it could end us — is as human as the need to survive it.
If you get past the monsters, great spoils can be had. The way lush land’s worshipped once a ship’s crew’s borne a bad storm, such is how we feel when we beat the odds.
And even when all seems lost, we’ll still trudge on to see what comes next.
Or, like Mac says to Childs during a key moment in The Thing — one in which it’s clear all’s going downhill — “Let’s stick around and see what happens.”
We walk the line, us humans.
We’re strange things. But you’ve got to love us.
After all, pandemic or parasitic aliens, we’re still here.