Got around to watching John Carpenter's The Thing last night. This is one of those movies that, being so well-known by friends and family to be a hopeless lover of horror flicks both amazing and atrocious, I am embarrassed to have never seen. I can be embarrassed no more, for I have now witnessed the flick and I have to say that it's an excellent example of how a horror movie should be made.
Jenny turned to me and said that she liked it, but it seemed a little like every other horror film she's ever seen. There is a point to be made by this comment, though the point is quite the opposite of the comment. It's not that The Thing is like other horror movies. Other horror movies are like The Thing. Carpenter is a master of the horror genre which gets just enough nose-turning to make it seem like it's not something one can be master of. But those who turn their noses at these nose-turners would cite The Thing as a major point in their argument.
Of course, The Thing takes an awful lot from Ridley Scott's Alien, released three years prior, but that's not such a bad thing, is it? The pace is sluggish, but it builds the tension. It builds the fear. The Thing has all the elements of "classic" horror.
Watching the film made me think about the qualities of horror that segregate the bad ones from the good ones.
I hate it when a horror movie attempts to frighten its audience by using cheap scares involving something ugly rapidly entering the frame accompanied by an orchestral lurch in the score. It's simply a given that the audience will jump. It's a defense mechanism our bodies have. The adrenaline blasts through our veins and our muscles tense. It's not hard to do that. But it leaves the audience with a feeling not unlike going on a rollercoaster. We zoom off on a guided track, helpless against the force of gravity which tugs us upside-down on loops, ties our guts in knots as we spiral through corkscrews, peels the skin to the front of our faces as we are suddenly braked to a stop. And you know what? The next time you ride the coaster it's gonna be the same. And the next time you watch the movie it's gonna be the same. But it's a movie theater we're in, not an amusement park, and we're all going to leave thinking the same thing: "I've been cheated."
The kind of horror that really gets to people is the kind that attacks you in a way more than physical. It gets at your own fears. It wrenches your own psyche. When a movie can wrangle the truly terrifying into a context that we don't have to make very forgiving leaps and bounds to believe, it transcends the cheapness onto a level that grabs us and doesn't let go when the lights come back on.
Stephen King usually works this type of magic by writing his characters and stories into small towns or isolated areas, and then makes the characters seem just like us. The Shining takes place at a snowed-in hotel. There is no escape. There is no hope of rescue. Jack Torrance is a regular alcoholic falling back off the wagon. When he's finally done in by the isolation, his victims have nowhere to go. They can hide, but Jack can find them easily.
Carpenter is working with an adaptation here. There's the B-movie from '51 (The Thing from Another World, Howard Hawks), but initially, even that movie was the spawn of a short story by John W. Campbell called "Who Goes There?" The story seems somehow modern by the insertion of some brief mentions about the titular monster's cellular manipulation. Admittedly, I know not if these factoids were in the original story or older movie, having partaken in neither of them. Adaptation or not, the idea of isolation comes into heavy play and goes a long way toward making the story believable. An alien existence that a team of scientists has no reason to know about crash landed in the frozen antarctic terrain many thousands of years ago and has been thawed out by a similar team of Norwegian scientists. As the alien presence grows more menacing, a storm blows in, efficiently trapping the band in their forty-below-zero, limited-sight, guide-rope-necessary surroundings.
There are two sequences in particular that show off the true confines of the encampment. The first is the opening sequence. A singular helicopter rages closely over the landscape, its two passengers firing at a sled dog from the air. You know something bad is happening, but you can't be quite sure what it is. And the fact that a singular dog is the only non-human life in the area instills a feeling of desolation in the audience. Later, a crew member frantically crosses between buildings by grabbing and following a guide rope. The line is his only direction to his destination, which has no shape, only beams of glaring white-blue light that could be close or could be a quarter-mile away.
There is one cheap thrill in The Thing, but it's surrounded by such tension from the crew (who, by this point in the film, cannot trust any of the others for fear that they're really the harbinger of extraterrestrial doom) that it does more than just cause an unavoidable, natural jump. It briefly opens us up to the cold, to the fear, to the true meaning of failure.
The Thing failed at the box office, something which is largely attributed to the release of the infamous E.T. The Extra Terrestrial a couple of weeks previous, but it has certainly found a welcome home on the shelves of cult movie enthusiasts across the country. Perhaps this is where it belongs. Let those who cherish this should-be acclaimed film have it, and give the others One Missed Call.
Jenny turned to me and said that she liked it, but it seemed a little like every other horror film she's ever seen. There is a point to be made by this comment, though the point is quite the opposite of the comment. It's not that The Thing is like other horror movies. Other horror movies are like The Thing. Carpenter is a master of the horror genre which gets just enough nose-turning to make it seem like it's not something one can be master of. But those who turn their noses at these nose-turners would cite The Thing as a major point in their argument.
Of course, The Thing takes an awful lot from Ridley Scott's Alien, released three years prior, but that's not such a bad thing, is it? The pace is sluggish, but it builds the tension. It builds the fear. The Thing has all the elements of "classic" horror.
Watching the film made me think about the qualities of horror that segregate the bad ones from the good ones.
I hate it when a horror movie attempts to frighten its audience by using cheap scares involving something ugly rapidly entering the frame accompanied by an orchestral lurch in the score. It's simply a given that the audience will jump. It's a defense mechanism our bodies have. The adrenaline blasts through our veins and our muscles tense. It's not hard to do that. But it leaves the audience with a feeling not unlike going on a rollercoaster. We zoom off on a guided track, helpless against the force of gravity which tugs us upside-down on loops, ties our guts in knots as we spiral through corkscrews, peels the skin to the front of our faces as we are suddenly braked to a stop. And you know what? The next time you ride the coaster it's gonna be the same. And the next time you watch the movie it's gonna be the same. But it's a movie theater we're in, not an amusement park, and we're all going to leave thinking the same thing: "I've been cheated."
The kind of horror that really gets to people is the kind that attacks you in a way more than physical. It gets at your own fears. It wrenches your own psyche. When a movie can wrangle the truly terrifying into a context that we don't have to make very forgiving leaps and bounds to believe, it transcends the cheapness onto a level that grabs us and doesn't let go when the lights come back on.
Stephen King usually works this type of magic by writing his characters and stories into small towns or isolated areas, and then makes the characters seem just like us. The Shining takes place at a snowed-in hotel. There is no escape. There is no hope of rescue. Jack Torrance is a regular alcoholic falling back off the wagon. When he's finally done in by the isolation, his victims have nowhere to go. They can hide, but Jack can find them easily.
Carpenter is working with an adaptation here. There's the B-movie from '51 (The Thing from Another World, Howard Hawks), but initially, even that movie was the spawn of a short story by John W. Campbell called "Who Goes There?" The story seems somehow modern by the insertion of some brief mentions about the titular monster's cellular manipulation. Admittedly, I know not if these factoids were in the original story or older movie, having partaken in neither of them. Adaptation or not, the idea of isolation comes into heavy play and goes a long way toward making the story believable. An alien existence that a team of scientists has no reason to know about crash landed in the frozen antarctic terrain many thousands of years ago and has been thawed out by a similar team of Norwegian scientists. As the alien presence grows more menacing, a storm blows in, efficiently trapping the band in their forty-below-zero, limited-sight, guide-rope-necessary surroundings.
There are two sequences in particular that show off the true confines of the encampment. The first is the opening sequence. A singular helicopter rages closely over the landscape, its two passengers firing at a sled dog from the air. You know something bad is happening, but you can't be quite sure what it is. And the fact that a singular dog is the only non-human life in the area instills a feeling of desolation in the audience. Later, a crew member frantically crosses between buildings by grabbing and following a guide rope. The line is his only direction to his destination, which has no shape, only beams of glaring white-blue light that could be close or could be a quarter-mile away.
There is one cheap thrill in The Thing, but it's surrounded by such tension from the crew (who, by this point in the film, cannot trust any of the others for fear that they're really the harbinger of extraterrestrial doom) that it does more than just cause an unavoidable, natural jump. It briefly opens us up to the cold, to the fear, to the true meaning of failure.
The Thing failed at the box office, something which is largely attributed to the release of the infamous E.T. The Extra Terrestrial a couple of weeks previous, but it has certainly found a welcome home on the shelves of cult movie enthusiasts across the country. Perhaps this is where it belongs. Let those who cherish this should-be acclaimed film have it, and give the others One Missed Call.
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