It's SHOCKtober, kiddies, I.E. that time of FEAR when I regale you with yet another tale of how a classic horror movie scared the ever-lovin' shingles outta me as a young, aspiring horror hound!
In past entries I've talked about some early formative scares as well as my encounters with such scintillating cinema sins as An American Werewolf in London, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien, The Return of the Living Dead, The Evil Dead, The Shining and Dawn of the Dead.
Before the internet, the best way to learn about scary movies was via my aforementioned and much-loved horror movie books, such as Tom Hutchinson's Horrors: A History of Horror Movies, released in 1983.
Like a masochist, I'd flip through these hoary hardcover tomes, auditioning potential the next fright flicks to traumatize myself with. During every peruse, I couldn't help but gravitate towards the following off-putting image, which was from a film that had been released one year prior:
'Jesus shitly fuck,' I thought to myself. 'That is pure nightmare fuel!'
This was driven home by a macro view of the same scene on page 162:
My half-baked brain had a really hard time reconciling what it was looking at. My dread level was elevated when I read Tom's pearl-clutching description of the flick:
"The movie...offers enormous opportunities to the make-up and special-effects department, and Rob Bottin certainly makes the most of them, turning a dog into a hideous spider-like beast and causing a man to lose his head and burst apart at the seams. Yet for all its technical brilliance (the film) teeters dangerously on the edge of what is acceptable in horror films. It’s box office results were disappointing, perhaps because word-of-mouth indicated that the film was not just horrific, it was too grizzly and unpleasant to be viewed comfortably. No horror film should be viewed comfortably, of course. Audiences should always be kept on the edge of their seats or even halfway under them. But they should not be made to feel so uncomfortable that they feel sick and ill. It’s a debatable point but the lack of (the film's) financial success suggest there is some validity to the argument."
Even though I'd managed to make it through some pretty stomach-churning fare in the past, the very thought of watching this flick made my blood pressure spike. Indeed, the critics in these horror books seemed convinced that this movie was the absolute nadir when it came to good taste and restraint.
Here's Nigel Andrew's equally-excitable review:
"Mutilations and mutations occupy about equal screen time, as a group of Arctic scientists are picturesquely torn apart by alien forces. A decapitated head sprouts spider legs and scuttles across the floor; a dog's head spontaneously burst open like a bloody flower; and the climax features...a towering, roaring, slavering bouquet of limbs and innards and organs all lashing around like an escaped Hieronymus Bosch painting."
The funny thing is, I actually understood the Hieronymus Bosch reference because of this other horror book I owned back then...
Featured on page 15 was the artist's classic triptych: The Garden of Early Delights, including the following harrowing depictions of hell:
I didn't know it at the time, but ol' Nigel's analogy would prove to be spot on.
So, one fateful winter night, when I knew the 'rents would be away for the entire evening, I ran down to my local vidja store, the Video Scream, er...Screen, and picked me up a copy of...
THE THING (1982)
The movie starts our with a stereotypical "flying saucer"-style UFO hurtling towards our planet. This immediately triggered the thought that 'Hey, this flick isn't scary...it's space-y! It's like Star Wars!' but then I remembered the last time I assumed that, the movie turned out to be Alien, so I quickly jettisoned that hope like a xenomorph out of an airlock.
Segue to a bad-ass title sequence which saw "THE THING" slowly burning into my cathode ray tube T.V. screen and, subsequently, my increasingly-skittish brain.
After several picturesque but desolate establishing shots, I watched with budding interest (and discomfort) as the speck of a distant helicopter drew closer, winging it way across the stark, white, frozen, landscape. Eventually its quarry was revealed: a dog or, more specifically, an Alaskan malamute lithely running away from the whirlybird.
That's when the helicopter's passenger whipped out a semi-automatic rifle and start sniping away at the doggo. Rewatching the movie now, I can't but help to wonder if Sarah Palin was affected by this film as a child even more than I was.
Even at a very young age, I could recognize quality film-making when I saw it, noting director John Carpenter's awesome camera set-ups in this sequence. This was aided considerably by the legendary cinematography of Carpenter's long-time collaborator, Dean Cundey, resulting in one of the best- looking horror films in cinema history. Hell, even the slimy bits that followed later on looked good, in their own weird way.
As the dog and the pursuing chopper started to approach a remote-looking research station, I got a brief montage introducing us to the film's characters, including the legendary Kurt Russell as R.J. MacReady. Resplendent in his Snake Plissken-era long hair and prospector beard, Russell once again proves that he's a god among men within a few seconds of screen time. That is, until he loses his computer chess game and sulkily hucks what's left of his drink into its electronic innards, shorting out the "cheatin' bitch" in the process.
And, yes, back in the early 80's it was perfectly feasible to invest a ludicrous amount of money into a computer that did nothing but play chess with you. What can I say, back then we were all hidin' in caves and shit, terrified of the sun. Anyhoo, I digress...
I remember watching intently as the dog, arguably the best actor in the entire movie, entered the perimeter of the camp. By the way, I was already completely invested in the film by that point. Likely because the exteriors for this fictional setting of U.S. Outpost 31 in Antarctica, was actually a real set built on location in remote Stewart, British Columbia. Nowadays, most of this would be shot on a sound stage or with the actors standing in front of a green screen with a CGI snowbank comped into the background.
When MacReady blearily emerges from his watch post and stumbles out into this very real environment, I’m 100% sold on the illusion. This is really driven home when the cast gear up in their snowsuits and venture outside, curious as to what all the ruckus is all about. You can see their breath in the cold air, which modern special effects artists would just simulate with CGI. To this day, "simple" effects like CGI cold breath sticks out to me like a sore thumb.
The helicopter's frantic passenger jumps out and hurls a grenade at the dog about as well as Trump would theoretically throw a baseball. After promptly blowing both himself and the chopper up right some good, the pilot stalked up to the camp's perimeter, guns blazing, clearly hell-bent on killing the mutt.
Just before he can "Old Yeller" the poor pooch, Garry, the base commander, played by Donald Moffat, smashes out a window with his revolver and ventilates the babbling Nordic freak. Even this scene really disturbed me as a kid. I was used to seeing people flying back in an exaggerated way when they got shot in movies, but here, when the actor got tagged in the head, he just kinda face-planted into the snow as if the life was instantly sucked out of him. This rag-doll doll effect, accompanied by a final death spams, seemed subconsciously realistic to me.
That's when I was introduced to a flurry of characters, including physician Copper (Richard Dysart), chief mechanic Childs (Keith David), geologist Norris (Charles Hallahan), radio operator Windows (Thomas Waites), senior biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley), roller-skating cook Nauls (T.K. Carter), sardonic burn-out / assistant mechanic Palmer (David Clennon), assistant biologist Fuchs (Joel Polis), Clark the dog-handler (Richard Masur) and meteorologist / random casualty Bennings, played by Peter Maloney. Immediately, everyone seemed well-cast and inhabited their respective roles perfectly.
As MacReady and Copper wing off in the chopper to investigate the Norwegian base, Carpenter turns out attention back to the base. Accompanied by the eerily-appropriate strains of Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious", we see this foreign dog creeping around the base. Again, I'm an animal lover, particularly dogs. I've been around them all my life and I know when they're giving an unnatural performance. So, to you, Jed the wolf dog, I wanna say cheers, my dude. Good job creeping me right the fux out.
At one point, the dog slinks into a room and we see a silhouette turn towards the animal. Although you could probably parse out the identity of this person now by process of elimination back then I had no idea who that was. In fact, I'm pretty sure Carpenter pulled a fast one and used some random person's silhouette who isn't even in the cast. At this point, I started to pick up on all the subtle techniques that Carpenter was using here, including the frequent use of dissolves.
I feel myself shifting uncomfortably on the couch as MacReady and Copper arrived at the destroyed Norwegian base. Here's another example of the film's seamless production design. The place is a creepy, burned-out husk that clearly shows signs of a desperate struggle. Between the bloody ax driven into the wall and the incredibly gruesome sight of a dead body with it's wrists slit open and a Pac-Man like straight razor wound to the neck, Carpenter and company build an atmosphere that is truly unsettling.
I almost shut of the movie at that point, but I steeled myself and pushed on. Unfortunately the creep factor went through the stratosphere when Copper and MacReady came across a giant block of ice with a massive humanoid shape cut out of the middle of it. What was even more disturbing was the body dumped outside, a strange and twisted blend of charred limbs and melted faces. I almost had a conniption when the Doc suggested that they wrap the monstrosity up and take it back to the base for an autopsy.
"What are you guys doing?!" I muttered audibly to myself. "Does that Mr. Potato Head floral arraignment of half-melted body parts look even remotely normal to you two fucks?"
Oddly, they didn't seem to hear me. After they got this mangled stew of flesh back to the base, I was "treated" to a nauseating series of nigh-pornographic close-up autopsy shots, showing this weird, twisted, mishmash of human remains close up. The puzzled look of revulsion on the actor's faces pretty much mirrored my own at that point.
Even though Blair's autopsy leads him to conclude that the monstrosity has a completely normal set of internal organs, when the camera pans up to revel a warped and twisted face, we clearly know that something's rotten in the state of Norway. Later on, THE CREEPIEST HOBO scares the crap out of Bennings, so he orders Clark to put the animal in the kennel
The scene where the mystery dog is penned up with the other animals is absolutely amazing. I know I keep harping on this, but I really think this good boi deserves a posthumous Academy Award. He slooooowly walks in and methodically lays down, all the while doing this insane Willem Dafoe in Platoon 1000-yard stare, which understandably unnerves the rest of the pack.
As soon as Clark is out of sight, we see why the dogs are getting so spooked. I sat there in stunned wonderment as the Norwegian dog started to shake and then his head suddenly split open like a gory flower. I gaped, slack-jawed at the screen as the revealed skull just kinda fell off, revealing a massive lashing tongue.
At first I was just too flabbergasted to hit "STOP" on the VCR remote. Particularly when the dog's once-beautiful fur broke out into a rash of flailing calamari. I sat there, transfixed as this beautiful animal transformed before my very eyes into a Lovecraftian nightmare monster.
The other dogs, who could sense that shit was about to get very real as soon as their spooky new flat-mate moved in, are now desperately trying to get as far away as possible, even chewing on the wire mesh of the cage door. At this stage, limbs and tentacles are just lashing and splattering all over the cage. In a particularly sickening scene, the creature appears to power-jizz all over one of the crouching dogs.
And that's when I shut the movie off for a second, partially due to terror and partially due to nausea.
'Who the fuck decided that it was a good idea to give Carpenter a budget?' I thought to myself.
After pressing "PLAY" on the remote, I instinctively recoiled, expecting to see something even worse. Instead I watched as Clark headed back to the pen, clearly alarmed by all the ruckus. As soon as he opened the cage door to investigate, a dog came flying at him from out of nowhere. After spotting the writhing mass of rampant tentacles, he immediately kicks the door shut and locks it.
Even half-drunk in his quarters, MacReady can hear the growling and unearthly screams. He sounds the base alarm and dashes off to help. When he reaches the cage, Clark's testimony pretty much sums up the entire situation:
"I dunno what the hell's in there, but it's weird and pissed off, whatever it is."
We then see Bennings burst into Child's room, asking for the flamethrower. When a character in a horror movie invokes the "kill it with fire" clause, you know the shit is hitting the fan!
The next time I chanced a glimpse inside the cage, it was through a mesh of interlocked fingers. And, *spoiler alert*, the scene was predictably awful. By now, the creature has done due diligence in its effort to imitate and absorb this entire pack of dogs. The beast unleashes a hellish, ear-piercing scream as MacReady whips the gate open.
Both of us watched in astounded horror as the thing lashed out at one of the remaining dogs, practically mummifying the poor thing in a yarn-like ball of pulpy tentacles. I feel myself living vicariously through Mac as he snaps, blowing away the remaining dogs in what any rational man would see as a mercy kill.
Unfortunately, Clark isn't rational and he tries to wrestle the weapon away from Mac. This gives the creature an opportunity to morph again, sprouting a pair of grotesque, oversized limbs which reach up, crash through the roof and start pulling the bloody, skinned carcass towards the ceiling. That's when Childs finally had the presence of mind to step up with the flamethrower.
Unfortunately, he immediately found himself in a staring contest with a one-eyed horror show that unexpectedly split open and shot a tongue-and-tooth-covered rose petal of pure nightmare fuel in his direction. At the very last second, in an act of pure self-preservation, he finally triggered the flamethrower, instantly cremating the inexplicable threat.
I'm not sure what caused me to stop the film for a second time at this point. Was an assault by a monster who's penchant to terrify wasn't restrained by a set physical form? The genuine terror displayed by the cast? Or was it the creature's final death scream, a triumph of sound design that lingers in my nightmares to this very day? Whatever it was, it took awhile for me to voluntarily wade back into this visual abattoir.
Comes the dawn, and I immediately get another justification for skipping the popcorn. Wilford Brimley looks decidedly nauseated here as he hacks open the nightmarish amalgam of surreal flesh left over from the previous sequence. The scene fades out on his authentically-disgusted facial expression, the fade-out hinting at the time it took for both his and our brain to process what we've just witnessed. In the very next scene he’s regaling his buds with his theory about the creature:
"You see, what we're talkin' about here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and it imitates 'em perfectly. When this thing attacked our dogs, it tried to digest them...absorb them. And, in the process, shape its own cells to imitate them. This for instance. That's not dog. It's imitation. We got to it before it had time to finish."
This gives considerable weight to the following scene where he's administering a sedative to one of the surviving malamutes, all the while grilling Clark about his time with the alien doggo. Clark reacts defensively and it's almost as if Blair sees the writing on the wall right then and there. The paranoia has begun and, in a very real way, it's already game over.
The team reviews video footage brought back from the destroyed camp. Even though my stomach was beginning to settle at that point, the grainy images immediately made my skin crawl. With the video seemingly documenting that the Norwegians discovered a massive humanoid shape buried in the ice, MacReady, Norris and Palmer head off in the chopper to check it out.
Soon the trio find themselves standing at the site of a massive downed spacecraft, the same one we saw hurtling towards earth before the credits. This chilling scene is augmented by a stellar matte paining by the legendary artist Albert Whitlock as well as some truly eerie music by the equally amazing Ennio Morricone. It's a one-two punch to the nerves that had me dreading the implications of what's to come.
After MacReady reports his findings back at the base and Nauls scolds his team-mates for putting their "dirty drawers" in the kitchen garbage ("Hey, kids...it's a CLUE!"), we fade see Blair in his lab. In a gloriously-dated ode to Atari-era video game graphics, we see the doc run a "simulation" of an intruder cell attacking and copying a dog cell. Notwithstanding my suspicion that Blair is holding out on Mac and playing some unconventional mod of Asteroids, Wilford Brimley is absolutely riveting in this scene.
His computer then spells out something that I suspect he already knows: that there’s a 75% chance that one of the team members has already been infected. Worse still, we're told that, the entire world population will be infected within 27,000 hours of first contact if even so much as a single intruder organism reaches a civilized areas. After reading this, Blair calmly opens his desk drawer and takes out a revolver, clearly resolved to do take some extreme, but likely necessary, action.
Continuing my subconscious goal of gnawing my fingernails down to the quick, I watched as Bennings and Windows moved the remains of the morphed dogs into a store room.
"Talk about drawing the short straw!" I muttered to myself. "I wouldn’t touch those fucking things with a 10-foot pole!"
The paranoia, exhaustion, and tension continues to build among the men, as Fuchs corners MacReady and whispers a request for a private meeting. Clearly Windows and Bennings pick up on this, giving the two some stink-eye.
Windows can't resist taking one last peek at the twisted face under the sheet. As he covers it back up and turns away, the blanketed form starts shifting around in place. Then, as if that wasn't scary enough, Carpenter gives us a low angle and we see a narsty fountain of goo running off the table and onto the floor. Of course, that's when Windows says "sionara!", leaving Bennings to the niceties of what I could only imagine was a nicely-congealing, ten foot tall slime monster.
During their secret tete-a-tete, Fuchs tells a clearly-bored MacReady that Blair is concealing information from them and then drops the bombshell that the organic samples aren’t technically dead. Wheeee!!! That's when we cut back to Windows checking in on Bennings who, *surprise! surprise!* is nowhere to be seen. After finding a pile of bloody, ripped clothing, not unlike what Nauls found earlier, Windows gets a glimpse of something distinctly repellent in the corner.
Seeing that half-naked, blood-and-slime-covered, hentai perversion of Bennings immediately sent chills down my spine. But I didn't have time to dwell on it, as Windows wisely ran out to Mac and Fuchs and the three of them rushed back into the room. Naturally, the Benningsthing has already skedaddled, and, for a moment, I thought that Carpenter was gonna pull a classic Scooby Doo moment.
"Suuuure, you saw Bennings turning into the thing, Windows! I think you need to lay off on whatever Palmer's been selling to you, brotha!"
Fortunately we're spared this cliche when they spot Bennings run-staggering away from the storehouse. They give chase and pretty soon, everyone on the base has surrounded their irrevocably-altered colleague. By now the creature has turned itself into a near-perfect duplicate of Bennings, save for the hands, which are these surreal, elongated, skeletal and skinless mockeries.
In a haunting moment that recalls the finale of 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the creature balefully looks at his former friends and makes a noise that I immediately add to my audio book of nightmare fuel. When confronted with this hellish aberration, MacReady does what every self-respecting man would do: kick over a fuel drum and then light the fucker on fire.
My gleeful chant of "Yeah! Burn, bitch, burn!" was tempered somewhat by the next scene where a clearly-traumatized Garry tells Mac: "I know Bennings! I've known him for ten years. He's my friend!" Donald Moffat's performance here is heart-breaking, embodying a wide range of fear and helplessness. This is made all the more tragic by MacReady's cold retort: "We gotta burn the rest of him."
In a moment that even my teen-aged brain recognized as a classic example of "too little, too late", I watched as Mac and company gathered up and torched all of the bio-samples and then plowed them over. As the last one to leave the scene, Mac catches a glimpse of someone leaving the helicopter, which is parked in the distance. When he investigates, he discovers that the chopper's instrumentation panel has been turned into a mechanical version of what The Thing does to a human body.
I didn't have long to ponder The Mystery of the Disemboweled Chopper for very long. A gunshot rang out, signalling the start of THE GREAT WILFORD BRIMLEY FREAK OUT SCENE. To all those Millennials out there who think that Wilfred Brimley is nothing more than a "diabeatus" meme, just watch this glorious sequence and tell me that he doesn't serve up some of the juiciest line deliveries in cinema history. In my opinion, this is one of the actor's career highlights.
When Mac arrives at the communication room, it's pure bedlam. A dazed Windows is cowering in the corner, bleeding from a nasty head wound. Blair has gone completely apeshit, "axe"-ing every sensitive piece of equipment in the room a question. All the while he's delivering lines like "It wanted to be US!" and "I’LL KILL EWE!!!" like an octogenarian prospector strung out on bath salts. His rage, fear and conviction are all 100% real to me.
After Mac's famous "card table gambit", they overcome Blair and lock him up in the tool shed. Even slightly concussed and borderline nuts, Brimley wasn't done dropping some science on me yet. When Blair tells Mac that he "doesn't know who to trust anymore", Kurt Russell replies "I know what you mean, Blair" in such a weird, stilted tone. This line delivery was so odd that I seriously though that Mac was a "thing." It's as if deliberately trying to antagonize Blair, patronize him or make him even more paranoid.
Regardless, before Mac leaves the shelter, Blair tells him to "watch Clark and watch him close, you hear me?" Even back then I didn't give much credence to this warning since, in the prior scene, Clark is shown mourning the remaining dogs that Blair has deliberately put down and that didn't feel very "thing"-esque to me.
Just as rattled as the characters were at this stage, I watched as Gary, Copper, Childs, Fuchs and Mac had an impromptu strategy session out in the snow. After Copper proposed a blood test, this immediately led to another horrifying discovery: the untainted whole blood storage unit has been opened and destroyed.
Naturally, this ramped the ol' "Mistrust-O-Meter" up to "11", and pretty soon the accusations are flying like spitballs. Since Copper is the only one with access to the fridge and Garry has the only key, the spotlight is immediately on them. They don't do a very good job defending themselves, with Garry looking decidedly twitchy and sweaty and Richard Dysart's Copper offering up one of the most idiosyncratic line deliveries along with the kind of look that the Dramatic Gopher would consider overblown.
Just as they're about to come to blows, someone notices that Windows has dashed off. They catch up to him just as he smashed open a rifle cabinet. Garry shows up first, pointing his revolver right at the radio operator's head. Mercifully, Mac arrives on the scene and talks them down. At this stage, Garry's nerves are clearly about as shot as mine, so he resigns as the base commander so Mac takes charge, under a withering storm of suspicious looks and silent protests.
After burning the blood samples, MacReady gives one of his best soliloquies:
"I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it's won."
After isolating prime suspects Copper, Garry and Clark he orders Norris and Childs to tie them up in the rec room, shoot them up with morphine and watch them like a hawk. Kurt Russell then delivers an amazing solo performance, basically doing what amounts to a "captain's log" entry into a tape recorder. The level of exhaustion, weariness and resignation in his voice is just palpable. If there was any doubt that Mac wasn't our avatar in the film, it's dispensed with in this one scene.
At this point, the power inexplicably goes out, giving Carpenter another opportunity to show why he's a master of suspense. We see Fuchs in his lab light a candle and investigate a strange noise. As he creeps through the darkness, a dark figure suddenly whips past the foreground, accompanied by a jolting musical sting. Watching this for the first time as a kid, I nearly hit the roof. Normally, I hate jump scares but, when they're earned, they can be pretty awesome.
Fuchs follows the mysterious figure outdoors and stumbles across a fire pit which contains MacReady’s torn and charred overalls. With that, my disorientation got kicked up another notch. I think that's why the movie is so effective and continues to be potent to this very day. Screenwriter Bill Lancaster, son of the famous actor Burt Lancaster, doesn't bother to fill in every blank. When things start falling apart, he plants plenty red herrings and false leads to throw the viewer off-kilter.
Before Nauls can share this interesting piece of trivia with the group, we see that Mac's simplest orders are getting blow-back. When he tells Palmer and Windows to team up to search for Fuchs, the mechanic will have nothing of it, leading to a nasty confrontation which Mac is forced to de-escalate.
With a nasty storm bearing down on the camp, MacReady leads a group out to the tool shed to check on Blair. Once again, Dean Cundey lights this night-time scene perfectly and the use of color tones is extraordinary. In a lesser film, this whole sequence could have been a murky mess, but here it not only pops, it makes the viewer feel palpably chilled.
The visit to Blair is another surreal moment. Mac ask the scientist if he’s seen Fuchs but the Doc ignores the question, saying "l'm not gonna harm anybody and there's nothing wrong with me.
And if there was, l'm all better now. l'd like to come back inside.You got my promise."
When I was watching this for the first time, my young, over-clocked brain was thinking 'Um, okay, he sounds pretty sincere, but there's just something not right here.' The next time I watched the film I finally noticed THE FUCKING NOOSE HANGING IN THE FOREGROUND. Yeah, that kinda undercuts your "I'm all better now" claim there, Blair, ol' boy. I dunno, maybe he had it there as a precaution, just in case something slimy came to the door, looking for donations on a cellular level.
On the way back from the tool shed, Nauls spots a charred body just lying in the middle of the camp. They rush over and find the remains of Fuchs, his glasses still sitting next to the impromptu crematorium.
"Maybe he burned himself, before it could get to him!" MacReady speculates.
Ultimately, the circumstances surrounding the scientists's fate is undetermined. By all accounts, Fuchs had a lot more to do in earlier drafts of the screenplay, so I'm not sure if his role was truncated just for the sake of time. Whatever the reason, it feels like yet another deliberately planted mystery designed to further disorient and obfuscate the viewer. Speaking off, on the way back inside, MacReady notices that the lights in a shack are inexplicably back on so he leads Nauls up there while Windows heads back to report their findings to the group.
After another fade out and in, we're told that 45 minutes have clocked by with Mac and Nauls failing to return. With the weather getting worse by the second, Childs gives the order to start boarding up the outside doors. From his vantage point, Norris looks out the window and spots someone stumbling back towards the door. He also exhibits clear signs of a bum ticker, which, in my mind, instantly exonerated him from B.E.M. (bug-eyed monster) status.
Under protest, Palmer lets the prodigal son back in and its revealed to be Nauls. Breathlessly, the cook reveals that he found MacReady's torn-up jumpsuit up by his cabin, so he decided to "cut him loose" from their mutual tether and hoof it back to the base. That's when John Carpenter's camera zoomed in on a nearby door handle as it twists and turns, revealing that something wants in real bad. At the time, it also caused my teenaged heart to seize up in my chest.
Childs is adamant about keeping the door sealed but the debate is cut short when the sound of shattering glass can be heard coming from the store-room. The chief mechanic runs over and starts hacking the door down with an ax, intent on murdering the intruder. As soon as the door is breached, Childs stops in his tracks, as a ghostly-looking, frost-bitten MacReady is shown holding a stick of dynamite next to the idling spout of his flame thrower.
Nauls and Norris try to sneak up behind Mac and tackle him, but he fights them off. Norris falls back into a shelf and actor Charles Hallahan exhibits some pretty convincing symptoms of a legitimate heart attack, which I found disturbing in its own right.
While MacReady holds his accusers at bay, Copper tries to revive the ailing Norris using a defibrillator. Dysart has another great moment here, uttering a subtle little whimper when his first attempt to revive Norris fails. Seconds later we find out why the geologist wasn't responding normally, leading to one of the best set-pieces in the entire film.
As Copper comes down with the paddles for a second time, Norris's chest pops open like a bear trap. I distinctly remember watching this as a kid and physically recoiling away from the screen. Well, as you might expect, this impromptu, shark-like maw clamps down on Copper's forearms, biting them clean off.
The sequence is sold perfectly by a combination of Dysart's bloodcurdling scream and a tricksy illusion designed by special effects whiz kid Rob Bottin. Bottin brought in an actor with missing limbs, gave him fake forearms, and triggered the creatures "jaws" to chomp 'em clean off. As if that wasn't convincing enough, he made cast out of Dysart's face, crafted a lookalike mask and then put it on the amputee for the long shots!
Viewing this for the first time, I had no clue how it was done. I just knew that it looked 100% real. This prompted another pause in the film and the sort of silent affirmation that only an aspiring gore hound would say.
'Awrite, suck it up,' I said to myself. 'It's not real. Remember Dawn of the Dead? That was gory and you made it through. Get back in there, buttercup!'
As I pressed "PLAY" on the VCR remote, I'd soon be forced to realize that Carpenter wasn't gonna let me off the hook quite so easily.
Watching through partially-obscured vision, I saw the now-limbless Copper fall back from his "patient" who's chest cavity promptly exploded in an Old Faithful-style geyser of writhing tentacles and splattering gore. I sat there, dumbfounded, as the same ghastly image in my horror book manifested itself right before my unblinking eyes. Have you ever gone to one of those spook houses or haunted corn mazes and just frozen up like a deer in headlights when something truly terrifying pops up from outta nowhere? Yeah, that was me watching this scene. I was literally too traumatized to look away.
I audibly exclaimed "OH THANK JESUS!" when MacReady torched the slimy McNasty with a gout of fire from his flamethrower. We then cut away to a (way too) close-up on the operating table to see "Norris" twisting and writhing as he burns to death. But that's when something ten times worse started to happen. His head, his fucking HEAD, started to twist back and forth and shimmy across the table. The neck, now stretched to the breaking point, began to split off the body and rupture, revealing a nasty, green-and yellow, fibrous tangle of goop-filled veins inside.
When I watch the scene now, I'm amused by how close actor Kurt Russell is is holding the prop dynamite to the burning tip of the flamethrower. But back then felt like the narrator in an H.P. Lovecraft story, feeling my sanity ebb away a little bit as Norris's decapitated head gently touched down onto the floor via its gory bungee cord.
Then an impossibly-long tongue suddenly lashed out of the mouth, attaching itself to a nearby desk.
The head then used this impromptu tether to drag itself to safety, making a really creepy, otherworldly sound all the while. As the others rushed in to extinguish the blaze, I watched the rogue noggin' sprout six spider-like legs and two antennae-style eye stalks, peek out from underneath the desk and then skitter away like a giant cockroach. That's when I actually started chuckling to myself like a certifiable madman.
Carpenter must have suspected that this scene was so extreme that laughter would be the only defense against it. Moments later, MacReady and company slow turn around to see the spider-head gamely trying to make a break for it, prompting Palmer to utter the deathless line: "You gotta be fucking kidding me!" Thankfully, Mac roasts the abomination before it can make good its escape.
After witnessing this autonomy of body parts displayed in the previous scene, Mac comes to the realization that every single cell in the creature is its own individual organism. This inspires his theory that any tissue, even blood, will instinctively recoil away from harm if its threatened.
He starts barking orders at Clark, giving Richard Nasser a chance to deliver some truly patronizing line deliveries. Across the room. Keith David's Childs is cold as ice, practically daring Mac to kill him. He only backs down when Mac cocks the revolver and aims it point blank at his face. Clark then takes this moment of distraction to rush at Mac with a scalpel, but the chopper pilot whirls around and shoots his assailant right in the forehead.
Side note: since I'd only seen my first movie head shot at age 12 in Raiders of the Lost Ark, I was still pretty squeamish when it came to cinematic violence. So, as you can imagine, my inaugural viewing of The Thing was like the horror movie equivalent of taking someone who can't swim up in a helicopter, flying over the middle of a lake and then pushing them out the door.
Taking no chances, Mac ordered Palmer to lash Clark and Copper's bodies to the table and then got Windows to tie everyone else down. He then collected a blood sample from everyone, scraped the plastic coating off some copper wire, and then heated this up in the barrel of the flamethrower.
Thanks to John Carpenter's crackerjack direction and excellent editing by Todd Ramsay, what follows is one of the most tense and nail-biting sequences in cinema history. As Mac prepares his ad hoc test, we have no sweet clue who’s human and who’s a thing, even the characters themselves. Witness palpable look of relief on Thomas Waites's face when Mac dips the hot wire into his blood sample without any effect.
Carpenter then proceeds to serve up one tense "PSYCHE!" after another, to the point where even I started to doubt our protagonist's sanity.
"This is a crock of shit," Childs mutters, mirroring my own thoughts.
Just before the innocent Clark and Copper are are both cleared, Garry echoes the sentiment of Childs, declaring that "This is pure nonsense. lt doesn't prove a thing!" to which Mac retorts: "l thought you'd
feel that way, Garry. You were the only one that could have gotten to that blood. We'll do you last."
Just as Mac dips the hot wire into Palmer's blood sample, the contents of the dish suddenly lurches up, making an audible screech, not the xenomorph's scream in Alien. Stunned, Mac reflexively drops the sample and backs away. After the blood spatters to the floor it seems to rally, oozing away like a mini version of The Blob whacked out on Jolt cola.
The next few scenes hit me like multiple blows to the head with a railroad tie. Carpenter gives us a master shot of Palmer convulsing, his face expressionless and dead-eyed. Before he's replaced on screen by a Rob Bottin nightmare creature, David Clennon gives a chillingly-effective performance that literally had me wincing at the screen. Especially when Nauls, Garry and Childs, tied up next to Palmer, start screaming for their lives and desperately rail against their bonds. Idly, I couldn't help but think back to the poor dogs in the first transformation scene.
The following sequence is both a cinematic ballet of absolute chaos and a surreal blending of alien and human flesh. Via some powerhouse editing, Palmer starts to morph into another one of Rob Bottin's monstrosities, turning into a bloody, hyperactive scarecrow of amorphous flesh and flailing, overextended fingers. At one point, Palmer's distended skull splits open, a tongue lashes out, grabs poor hapless Windows by the throat and then pulls his head into its own trap-jaw noggin.
Carpenter then makes a strange choice, opting to shoot just the feet of the two men standing uncomfortably close to one another as their bodies start to meld into one. This was disturbing enough as some sort of psycho-sexual nightmare. With the Palmer-thing now merging with Windows at the hands and head, the radio operator's body starts flinging around the room like a ragdoll. All the while there’s blood and gore raining down all over the room, to the point where the greatest danger to the Palmer-thing is a nasty slip n' fall accident.
Eventually what's left of Windows flings off across the room and strikes a wall. Mac finally gets his flamethrower operational and torches the Palmer-thing. As it's incinerated, the creature makes a truly dreadful wailing sound, it's fractured, fang-filled head opening and closing like a giant Venus flytrap. Desperate to escape, the walking nightmare bursts through the wall and tries flee into the darkness. Mac pursues it doggedly, finally using his dynamite to blows it to smithereens.
Apparently this all left Mac just as stunned as I was, because it took him several beats to register the screams for help coming from within. He goes back inside and flames Windows, who's already starting to turn from his contact with Palmer. The brief moment of peace that followed was immediately shattered when both Nauls and then Childs start freaking out because they're still tied up with Garry, whom they're convinced is a thing. But, in a plot twist, the former base commander turns out is human as well, giving him an opportunity to deliver one of the best lines in the movie:
"I know you gentlemen I’ve been through a lot but when you find the time I’d rather not spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!!!"
When we fade back in, we see Childs staring at the window. Mac appears and tells him that they're going out to give Blair the test, adding: "if he tries to make it back and we're not with him, burn him." Well, to no-one's surprise, the tool shed's door has been opened from the outside and the famous oatmeal salesman is no-where to be seen.
Mac, Garry and Nauls discover that Blair has pulled up the floorboards and tunneled underneath the shed. In this movie about a shape-shifting alien creature, it's the only moment that stretches credibility and had me snorting in disbelief. Look, I can buy the fact that he dug a tunnel, especially if he's a "thing" now, but where the hell did he put all of that excess ice and snow?
The perfectly-sculpted, Hoth / Echo-base style ice corridor leads to which appears to be a makeshift workshop. Even as a kid, this scene was so patently unbelievable that I really couldn't wrap my brain around it. Clearly this scene is trying to tell us that the Blairthing has been stealing equipment parts from all over the camp to craft a miniature version of his flying saucer, but it comes across as pretty ludicrous. When did he get the time to do all of this?!?
Say what you want about this unlikely plot development, but you can't slight the bravura film-making that follows. Carpenter follows this up with a moody series of establishing shots, accompanied by the director's very own heartbeat-like electronic score. The camera slinks around the base, as if doing an impression of something that traumatized us in a previous scene. It really amps up the viewer's feelings of cold, desolate isolation.
While coming back from Blair's flipped tool shed, Nauls spots a figure what he thinks was Childs leaving the base, running out after something. Aaaand that’s when the power cuts out.
Mac posits that the thing has willfully knocked out the generator. After Garry writes this off as "suicide", Mac reminds him that the thing's best strategy now is to plunge the entire base into a deep freeze. Not only will this kill its human opponents, it'll give the creature a perfect opportunity go back into hibernation and wait for an unwitting new rescue team to come across it.
"Maybe we'll just warm things up a little around here," Russell growled in his distinctively bass-ass sorta way. "We're not gettin' outta here alive...but neither is that thing."
Our three remaining heroes use their remaining explosives to blow us Blair's Etsy project as well as every single other building on the base. As they moved into the generator room, an exchange between Mac and Garry really drove home just how fucked these guys really were.
Garry: "Generator's gone."
MacReady: "Any way we can fix it?"
Garry: "lt's gone, MacReady."
As Garry inched his way deeper into the bowels of the complex, his flashlight suddenly started to konk out. Natch. Back then I wasn't familiar with the set-up for every single horror movie scare, so when Garry fixed his illumination issue, turned around and then ran face-and-eyes into a ninja-like Blair, I just about shit a Trump wall worth of bricks.
This shock to the system was a quick reminder that Carpenter wasn't finished with me quite yet. Taking advantage of Garry's surprise, Blair clamped his ham-hock onto his former friend's face and then pushed him out of frame. I then watched in abject horror as Blair's fingers started to worm their way underneath the flesh his quarry's face. This led to the ghoulish sight of Blair dragging Garry's corpse away, his hand completely molded into the base commander's mush like a trailer hitch designed by David Cronenberg.
After Nauls just kinda fucks off, Mac notices the conspicuous absence of his peeps. He sets the remaining charge, sensing that something is lurking nearby. Then, after Carpenter builds an unbearable amount of tension by lingering on a static shot of the corridor for what feels like an eternity, the floorboards start to explode upward. Knowing that something big and ugly is headed right towards him, Mac leaps out of the way, losing his last stick of dynamite in the process. A storm of tentacles breaks through the earth, pulling the detonator back inside.
That's when the creatures bursts up through the hole and, let me tell ya kids, it's a doozy.
The Thing's final form is a massive, twisted-looking beastie with Blair's head on one side and a massive maw filled with sacrificial dagger-sized fangs on the other. The body itself is random patchwork of raw-looking human and canine limbs, bloody flesh and tentacles of various sizes and shapes. As it roars like a fucking kaiju, special effects lunatic Rob Bottin pushes an aborted-looking dog shape out of its flank, causing my stomach to do back-flips.
Mac, ever the hero, comes to his senses long before I would. He dives for the still-lit dynamite, picks it up, utters a pithy "Yeah, well, fuck you too!" and hurls it at the creature, blowing it to smithereens. A horrible screech, possibly human as well as alien, is heard amidst a chain reaction series of explosions, culminating in an impressive non-nuclear mushroom cloud.
"Whelp, they're all dead!" I cheerily said out loud to myself.
To my legitimate surprise, Mac is shown stumbling through the ruins, bundled up in a blanket and clutching a bottle of his precious J&B. He might have survived the explosion but he has the bearings of a dead man walking. He and I both know that, when the fires burn out, the base will plummet to sub-zero temperatures and his demise is inevitable.
As Mac settles into the nearest snowbank, Childs appears from out of nowhere. At first Mac is startled, but he quickly resigns himself to whatever might come next. The final exchange between these two is appropriately chilling, the perfect capper to a nigh-perfect film:
Childs: "How will we make it?"
MacReady: "Maybe we shouldn't."
Childs: "lf you're worried about me..."
MacReady: "lf we've got any surprises for each other, l don't think we're in much shape to do anything about it."
(after a pause)
Childs: "Well... what do we do?"
MacReady: "Why don't we just...wait here for a little while. See what happens."
Childs: "Yeah."
***
As the credit rolled I sat there, praising myself for getting through another rewarding, but clearly harrowing, fright film. Just like every other heavyweight horror flick I'd watched prior, John Carpenter's The Thing had subjected me to a unique and unexpected experience.
Gone was the implied violence and subtlety of Carpenter's tense but understated Halloween. Like Dawn of the Dead, this was a balls-to-the-wall gorror movie, but stripped of any sly, coal-black humor to soften the blow of the nasty bits. Indeed, watching The Thing was my graduate thesis. I'd evolved from a terror tenderfoot to someone who could deal with pretty much anything a director could throw my way.
In the intervening years, I've seen a lot of horror movies that have also creeped me out or disturbed me. But, after ten awesome years, I can finally end this series, knowing that I've given due praise to the movies that have made me an ardent fan of cinema as an art for and horror in particular. These movie taught me that, regardless of the genre, movies can't be a passive experience. They're meant to make to laugh, to think, to dream and to scream.
So, Dearest Reader, if you take anything from this series, let it be this: don't tolerate "entertainment" that's content to be nothing more than a passive product. Seek out the works of eccentrics, madmen and crazy people, knowing that when you've absorbed their works, thing-like, you'll emerge on the other side a more resilient, thoughtful, wise and interesting person.
Happy Halloween and thanks for reading!
EPIC DOC:
PREQUEL FAIL: Speaking of valueless non-threatening "product."
