John Carpenter's The Thing

A couple of weeks ago I watched "The Lady in Black" at my place, which is one of the latest horror films starring Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe and honestly the movie left a pretty bad taste on my mouth. This was something to be expected due to the fact that it's the first effort of Daniel to try to shake the magician's image. So after that fraud, my friends and I decided to watch a real jewel of the horror genre: John Carpenter's The Thing.

Almost nobody in my group had seen this 1982 classic, which is a virtually a flawless movie. The Thing is a piece of art, write from the beginning starting with Ennio Morricone's soundtrack, the music builds up a tune that captures your imagination and let's you know when there will be trouble. The group of characters is numbered at twelve and the film applies a similar formula than the one seen in Alien (yes, the original), of not highlighting anybody in particular, but to instead portray them as normal human beings with weaknesses and emotions. A very young Kurt Russell along with Keith David lead the pack, but just barely. The rest of the characters is so balanced that you have absolutely no idea who will the next victim be.

The script and plot of the movie are solid and well achieved. It is fascinating to think that the base of the film is a short story dated from 1931. In less than fifteen minutes, the tension element has been clearly established and from there and on it never diminishes at any time. On the contrary, it keeps building up, slowly but steadily with every passing minute and every scene. The climax of the movie is the actual ending of the movie, just like it should be in real horror movies.

However the most important achievement is definitely John Carpenter's direction. There are so many well done details that a huge fan base has grown across the internet featuring countless forums discussing every possibility of the many theories that can explain what happened in the movie. A few examples of the recurrent questions seen include:

• What happened to Fuchs?
• Why didn't Palmer and Norris assimilate MacReady at the crater?
• Who did Fuchs see?
• Who got rid of the blood?
• Did Childs really see someone outside the camp?
• What happens with the survivors?
• ...and the mother of all questions: Who is infected in the end?

This -in my opinion- is where the strength of The Thing lies as gently as a rose in a field of grass on spring. The Thing is not only a horror movie, it is a puzzle that leaves the viewer with a huge desire of trying to put the pieces of it together in order to understand it as a whole, pretty much like what happens with films like Memento or Mulholland Dr.

When praising the perfection of the movie, one has to discuss the theories that try to solve the puzzle, which leave us with no other option but to realize and conclude that The Thing (the actual creature) is not only a pissed-off alien that wants to systematically kill everyone on sight, but it's a cold-blooded, brilliant, smart, with a remarkable strategy that includes injecting fear in its enemies, spreading confusion and cultivating lost of hope. For instance, in the scene where Norris dies, why would Palmer point at the Norris-head-thing? The logical answer is that he wanted to generate trust on himself that he wasn't infected, because otherwise why would you point at your enemy? Hence MacReady's reasoning for the hot needle blood test. If Palmer wasn't a thing, then Norris-head-thing would knew that someone would have observed it sooner or later. This means that regardless of the scenario, the Thing ends up looking like a very brilliant entity, that calculates every move it makes. There are dozens of other examples, but I don't want to spoil the experience for those who haven't seen it yet.

The Thing is a terrific experience and I particularly enjoy viewing it two and three straight times, seeking to decipher the enigmas and riddles its plot leaves to us viewers. That is the main difference between The Thing and Alien -and I mention this detail for those who call it nothing but an Alien Refurbished-. When one watches Alien, everything is straightforward and direct, and there are no unanswered questions. In The Thing, one has to understand that the Thing plans how and when will it show itself and who will be its next victim, whether if it's a kill or a cloning process. The ending of the movie is breathtaking -for lack of a better word- and I have never met someone who hasn't felt angry at it for allowing the viewer to interpret the future events not seen onscreen. It's a frustrating experience that awakens our hunger of knowledge, and the first expression one can say is "awww, how can this end like this?!"

So if you like horror movies and mind boggling movies, John Carpenter's The Thing is your option.