THE THING: John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trio, Pt.1- Destruction of Self

Editor's Note: This will be the start of an experiment here at Beyond Midnight. We've started a more light-hearted sister blog for shorter reviews of b-movies that are intended as palate cleansers between these much heavier, labor-intensive essays. Doing these one a day every week is a bitch, but this week I'm going to give three a try. Hopefully this will lead to a schedule of MWF for Beyond Midnight, with my sister blog uploading on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If this experiment turns out to be unsatisfactory, that schedule is likely to be inverted. However, with this weeks subject, it's the only way I really wanted to get it done. SO, without further ado...


PROLOGUE: ON TRILOGIES, PARANOIA, AND PANDEMICS

So this film is a bit of a first for me on this blog. See, for the first time since I've started writing on here, I didn't watch the film under discussion before setting to work on this essay. Seems unusual for a guy who reviews/discusses a movie not to bone up, right? Well, I have my reasons.

Chief among them being I don't need to.

This film is a part of me, an integral memory concerning why I love horror so much, why I love film so much, and why I love horror films so much above either of these two alone. I've been falling back on this kind of thing during my period of isolation, and finding them to be as valued a companion now as they ever have been. Especially in these times of rather intense paranoia, I found my thoughts turning to John Carpenter's The Thing.

"I SAID SIX FEET BACK, MOTHERFUCKER!!!"

But not just The Thing, but the entirety of what Carpenter refers to as his Apocalypse Trilogy: 1982's The Thing, 1987's Prince of Darkness, and 1994's In the Mouth of Madness. 

These three films aren't connected in terms of continuity, although I'm sure one of you super nerds and I could find ways they could be, or even theme. They're connected in terms of subject matter, tone, and film-maker. They're all kind of bleak, nihilistic, and concern one thing: the end. Of everything. One way or another. And other film-makers have done this kind of cinematic hydra as well, such as Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy (Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion, The Tenant), Terry Gillaim's Imagination Trilogy (Brazil, Time Bandits, and The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen), and of course Edgar Wright's Three Flavors/Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World's End) for the most modern example that readily springs to mind. And each of them has very little connective thread attaching them outside of occasionally shared actors and explorations of certain specific ideas. There's plenty in each of them to dive into and unpack, and maybe someday I will with each of them, we'll see how I (and you, of course, Constant Reader...) like this adventure.

Each of Carpenter's trilogy is about the destruction of one core thing in our world leading to the annihilation of everything else. And in our first entry, we explore the concept of weaponized paranoia;  how the world might come apart if we can't trust one another. If we can't tell who's infected.

When we can't tell if someone is even human...and neither can they...

PART I: THINGS COME TOGETHER- My Personal Feelings on The Thing,
or "It's gone, MacReady..."


Like I mentioned above, this movie was a big deal to me growing up. A bar that couldn't be topped and still rarely ever is, and quite possibly the strangest and most gut-churning take on that old beloved genre of mine: the Spam in a Cabin movie.

Frozen Spam keeps longer... Millions of years if you're lucky...

But it's also a film pretty much my whole family liked, even making it's way into casual conversation. Lamenting shitty weather or bad luck with a sigh, a shake of the head, then "First goddamn week of winter..." Or, to this day when something can't be fixed, we fall back to paraphrase my favorite exchange:

Garry: The generator's gone!
MacReady: Can ya fix it?
Garry: ....it's gone, MacReady...

and just say "It's gone, MacReady..." and chuckle ruefully while planning our trip to Home Depot.

When I was little, my family lived in a very isolated area. So much so, in fact, that getting friends over to visit was always a chore because I had to convince my parent to let them come over, and then  convince their parents to bring them all the way out and come get them the next day. We were far enough out in the sticks that getting them to come out for the day was out of the question, it was always a mini-staycation at the abode of the Alex from Beyond Space.

So, occasionally, especially in the depths of winter when there was a quarter mile of drifted over driveway between us and the highway before you could even try the three miles to the nearest town, or the fifteen or twenty to the nearest supermarket, I could really sympathize with the boys out at U.S. Antarctic Research Outpost 31. In fact, one year we were hit by a snowstorm so bad that my mom ended up marooned in the town where she worked delivering the mail, about 15 miles from us, and things were so bad that we didn't see her for a week or two.

We have a few family portraits that look eerily similar to this one.

So we didn't exactly have a lot of neighbors. I didn't have a lot of visitors. What we had was a lot of wilderness to explore, each other, and one other thing: dogs. We always had lots of dogs.

Most of these are good doggos. One of them is not.

So the feel of The Thing for me was always one of both fear and familiarity. I really liked and sympathized with a lot of the elements of the setting and the characters. But the story and the monster scared me senseless. Because this film, ladies and germs, was my first true introduction to the concept of Body Horror, which remains one of my pet fascinations to this day. But we'll get back to that in a moment.

For those of you who don't know, somehow, The Thing is a remake of the 1950's creature classic The Thing From Another World. TFAW was a very loose adaption of a short story by John W. Campbell called "Who Goes There?"

Side-rant:  The Thing follows a very important rule about remakes (which I summed up but did not name specifically in my lackluster analysis of the 2019 Pet Sematary). I call it Huston's Law, based on the quote of actor and film-maker John Huston "Why not remake some of our bad pictures and make them good?" In other words, if everyone agrees that something is an unassailable classic, leave it the hell alone. If it hasn't aged well, or could use an update to reach a new audience or find a fresh way to interpret the material (like say hewing closer to the original short story than a film from the 50s ever could), give it a try. But when doing so, don't be so anxious to revisit the past that you don't move forward. This is the movie I always bring up whenever somebody makes the blanket statement of "All remakes suck." Nah bud. You've just seen some shitty remakes. End rant.

In the wastes of the Antarctic tundra, in the "first goddamn week of winter", 1982 an isolated research station is suddenly under siege by man in a helicopter who is desperately trying to kill a dog. Once the apparent madman has been killed, the dog is taken in by the baffled team as they attempt to solve the mystery. From there the film unfolds into a tale of very personal cosmic horror as they discover the research station this man came from is abandoned, destroyed, and filled with corpses. and not all of them are even remotely humanoid.

Special shout out to the incredible Rob Bottin here, too.
 I still dream about this face now and then, man. Good job.

It becomes clear after the dog they took in explodes that night into a tentacled tongue demon that appears to have sprung from the slickest layer of Moist Squelching Hell, somewhere south of the Mushroom Fuck Jungle that they have taken in something horrifying. That which can only be called a Thing. A living nightmare that can assume any shape, imitate any life-form it has absorbed. It's multiplying. And it had hours alone with the men of Outpost 31.

And suffice to say it's from out of town...

Which is where you strap in hard for the ride that is going to take you to the conclusion of such a masterclass in building suspense. Because this movie isn't just about a shape-shifting alien. It's about the destruction of the Self, and how that leads to the end of all things we know...or at least recognize.


PART II: THINGS CHANGE SHAPE, or the Importance of the Self in Body Horror

As I mentioned earlier, The Thing was my first taste of Body Horror. For those who don't know, Body Horror is when a narrative revolves around a distinct physical change in it's protagonists or characters surrounding them to generate tension and shock, calling into question identity and sanity, and if it's even possible to return to a state of normalcy. There's a fair portion of this concept at play in the early days of horror, in subtle ways. The werewolf in film and it's ancestor the bifurcated demon known as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde bears elements of it. Societal tensions about Communism in the 50s became the Pod People of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The surreal heightened reality of 1958's The Fly had seeds of it that blossomed into the Body Horror masterpieces of David Cronenberg (including his peerless 1986 re-imagining of the original film) and lives on in more modern takes on it like 2014's The Hive or even comedic takes like 2016's The Cleanse or 2013's Bad Milo. 

But to call The Thing my first taste is a little underwhelming of a statement. That's like saying you got introduced to cars by driving in a demolition derby, or that you lost your virginity at an orgy officiated by three screaming naked Turbo-Caligulas on PCP.

It was my first all you can eat buffet of the bizarre and existential terror of not knowing what's real, who you can trust, even if you are yourself.

One of my favorite characters in the ensemble, Childs played by Keith David, at one point asks "If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation? How would I know?" and that sent chills down my spine for years. Does the Thing fool itself? Is it's cover so perfect it will sleep inside it's own cells until the time comes to defend itself? And for those of you who have seen it the answer is, of course, yes. One character is revealed as the monster because the alien went so far as to imitate his heart problems, and all the stress he believes he's feeling makes his (alien, shape-changing) heart give out.

Now, the Self in horror is an often-fucked-with notion. There are a few flicks I can point out where the Self is called into question to provide doubt in our Narrator (is this character they hang out with all the time even real or something else we do not talk about, for instance) or to reveal that our protagonist, far from being on the run from a killer, has been one the whole time. Hidden portions of the Self, hitherto unexplored recesses in our own minds and hearts, that's a playground for horror stories. And The Thing gives us just enough time with the ensemble at Outpost 31 to let you know them pretty well but not well enough to know if they're still them from one scene to the next. Obvious marks get revealed as innocent victims. Someone we trusted starts to crack then undergoes literal metamorphosis into a nightmare.

Where that comes into stark relief is at the beginning of the narrative when all our cast already have a sense of uniformity to them: they're all dudes. This wasn't initially intentional, according to legend there was one female cast member, but she dropped out before filming began and when the character was recast it was with a man. No info seems to exist beyond that, but it's a neat rumor.  But these are men who have lived together, cheek by jowl, some friends, some practically family, some indifferent, for months by the time our story opens. But along with their shared Y chromosomes, they also have that sense that I'm only truly beginning to appreciate now: they haven't gotten out in a while...

So despite this being a horror movie, the group scenes occasionally just look like a beer commercial.

I'm sure there's plenty of important research to be done and whatnot, but for the most part that's off-screen, not germane to the story at hand. So these guys have fuck-all to do and they've all gotten a little weird the way you can only get when you all know that if er'rybody smell like a monkey's butt, basically none of you do and it's no big deal. In fact, there is only one female voice even heard in the entirety of the film, when we meet our nominal lead, chopper pilot, and (in my head-canon) cousin to S.D. Plissken, R.J. MacReady, played by Kurt Russel.
When he plays video chess with the computer, it has a female voice reading out it's moves (and before MacReady uses the ultimate chess move of dumping a tumbler of ice and bourbon into the CPU, is actually voiced by Adrienne Barbeau, though she's uncredited, who at the time was married to John Carpenter).

The female lead of John Carpenter's The Thing, ladies and gents.

And one of the ways MacReady stand out from the rest of the cast, aside from his glorious beard which I appear to be catching up on, is he seems to be okay with the solitude of the outpost. According to Russell, there was some backstory worked up for MacReady that never made it into the film that he was a chopper pilot in Vietnam and was haunted by the things he'd seen there and came to the Outpost to get away from the world for a while. However, this background never makes it into the film, so it's canon is up to you, but I think it makes so many of his actions and his natural paranoia make sense. He's a man who knows how to function under stress because he's been doing it this whole time even before the alien monster showed up.

Other standouts are the aforementioned Keith David, who you might recognize as the voice of Goliath, Spawn, and any ad for the Navy you can think of. Also Wilford Brimley who, let's be honest here, you either recognize from this movie, Westerns you watched with your dad,  or the "dia-beet-us" memes. The others are all great though, bringing the natural chemistry to life between these guys perfectly. John likes to work with unknowns or actors he knows and that's one of the things he balances really well here, while keeping his cinematography with his longtime collaborator Dean Cundey loose and organic enough to make a lot of scenes of 4-8 men in a room talking interesting.

Brimley really does stick in the mind as Blair however, a forbidding presence amongst the men even before he understands the true nature of the threat we are dealing with. His comfort with the red stuff comes honestly, too. It was noted by the cast and crew that Wilford was a ranch-hand in his younger days, so when it comes time to dissect the charred remains of one of our downed monsters, he approached it in character as if he was just delivering a calf or castrating a bull, really selling the autopsy scenes and getting in there and getting messy and grossed out for our benefit.

Seriously, every creature Bottin made for this
needs to be put on display in a gallery somewhere.
Who'd go with me?

SO watching how each one of these guys and all the other deal with the threat of losing their humanity, their Self, is very revealing of how it happens to lots of people when they're faced with this kind of thing.
Blair goes full sicko mode, grabs an ax, and goes galaxy brain on the problem, making sure that the alien never gets somewhere it can infect a large population by destroying any means of communicating with the outside world. And later, when he's realized that everyone but him is probably fucked, and he's next up, we see him contemplate suicide.
MacReady goes in a similar vein, but never gives up, going combat mode against and unseen enemy being not entirely different from what Kurt Russell imagined for ol' R.J. in his backstory anyway...
But that their reactions are at their most individual early on is very much in line with their still retained humanity. It's when people start to rationally deal with this Lovecraftian beast in their midst you need to start questioning sanity and humanity in those around you.

Because as the movie goes on, all their (and thereby our) versions of the self are destroyed, taken away, or subverted. Their Group Self, who they are amongst friends, is robbed from them the moment the group is confirmed to be suspect. Their Moral Self is threatened when they have to contemplate killing each other, and the implications if they happen to be wrong about someone. And finally their Physical and Mental Selves are threatened by the creeping, amorphous horror that stalks them, being the utter antithesis of not only anything human, but anything we recognize as a traditional living being...

PART III: THINGS COME APART, or "I do not believe any of this voodoo bullshit..."

One of the most fascinating elements of the story in both the film and the original tale, is the nature of the monster.

Or the lack thereof...

The thing is never portrayed as being particularly intelligent. At no point does an absorbed person "break character" to reveal some deeper cunning or master plan for what to do with the people of the Earth. For the Thing, kayfabe is everything. It's nature is one of a skulking, hunting animal; most dangerous to you when you're alone, or asleep in the dark. If it's found out, then it's time to shape-shift into an appropriately deadly form to defend itself from hostiles, drawing from everything it has ever absorbed into itself for lethal inspiration.. Which is where the creature reveals it's true nature and why it's the prefect beast to threaten the nature of our inner Self.

The Thing is the Anti-Self.

 As we discover more about it's biology and abilities, we discover that each piece of tissue, each cell, is capable of autonomous action, of spontaneous adaptation. Which is a deeply weird concept for us limited, binary mono-forms. Our bodies can seem so unassailable. Our forms so unchanging, despite the odd love-handle or thinning patch of hair.

To imagine life as the thing is to imagine a body where such changes are second nature, where the Self is never fully dictated by the outer appearance, and can change at a moment's notice to deal with an imminent threat to the whole.  It's like imagining your finger growing teeth to fend off a paper cut, or your head, say running away from it's body after a fiery accident...

Have I mentioned the head crab is my favorite monster in The Thing?

It evokes some of the truly bizarre imagery in Japanese film, animation, and manga, such as the groaning, bio-mechanical body transformations of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, or the liquid, mutating flesh of the finale of Akira, the creeping disfigured monsters of a Junji Ito comic, and even the supernatural mutilations and body-horror/heroics of the characters of Go Nagai's Devilman. Again I find myself struck by the echoes of Carpenter through horror canon. Not all of these are direct influences, or things he directly influenced, but the similarities tell of a time when the mind of horror artists drifted to something that could strike anywhere, could move unseen amongst us, and change our world forever. Times where nobody trusts anybody anymore...

So y'know. Times like now.

It's really interesting to see so many parallels with The Thing and the situation today (April 2020, deep in Corona country, for those of you lucky enough to be reading this in the far future of really anytime that isn't now, you lucky bastard). Of course, these are very much in line with how the AIDS epidemic was treated in the 80's, as mostly a not our problem thing, especially when it was stigmatized into "a gay disease", but I feel the full power of what Blair was so scared of has finally come to bear on us as a species. Sure, it's not a deadly shape-shifting alien, but a virus we don't have any immunity to is pretty intense in and of itself. It puts into perspective our more ordinary fears for those of us who can grasp a thing like perspective. I look around and see some folks being like dinosaurs watching the meteor come down and mumbling, "Well, that doesn't look good for the economy..."

And it's speculated in The Thing that if the creature reached the mainland, total assimilation would be accomplished in something like a few years, a rather conservative estimate we're now finding out in the world of COVID-19.

But despite all this, it isn't the end of the world. Well, actually I hope it is. Not entirely.

Just as we know it.

I think I wanna send these out next year as Christmas cards...

Stay safe, stay inside, this is R.J. MacReady, helicopter pilot, U.S. outpost 31, signing off.


NEXT TIME: LIES, PHYSICS, AND A BIG JAR O'SATAN!!!!