Movie Review: The Thing (1982)

The Thing might be the most tense I have felt watching a horror movie from this era. Everything about it is built around being stuck, stranded in Antarctica with nowhere to go and no way to call for help, and that isolation sets the tone before anything alien even happens.

What stood out most was the paranoia. Nobody knows who is still human and who has been taken over, and that uncertainty becomes its own kind of horror layered on top of the gruesome alien stuff. It felt different from a lot of horror from that time, and true to Carpenter’s style, he leaned into it hard instead of playing it safe. I like that he is willing to try something less conventional to get a reaction out of people.

On top of all that, the practical effects still hold up. No CGI, no post production tricks, just puppets, prosthetics, and people executing the transformations for real in front of a camera. Knowing what they pulled off without any of the modern tools genuinely impressed me.

Then the ending just refuses to answer the question the whole movie is built on. We never find out if either or both of MacReady and Childs are infected. Honestly, I kind of love that. It puts the decision on me based on my own read of the characters and how I feel about people in general, and I get to land wherever my instincts take me instead of being told the answer.

The one thing that didn’t work for me was showing the UFO entering the atmosphere right at the start. It gave away too much before the story even got going. I would rather have discovered the alien presence and the crashed ship alongside the characters instead of already knowing what was coming. It surprised me a little since Carpenter is usually so good at leaving things to the imagination.

Originally posted on Letterboxd.