Critics reviews

There are many scenes in John Carpenter's masterpiece The Thing that make me feel, not just scared, but a chill deep in my heart – intensifying the icy environs these unfortunate men are surrounded by; permeating the picture with unexplainable horror and an all-consuming paranoia. A paranoia these men don't want to feel for one another. Anxiety, distrust, death.

For all of the Grand Guignol overload of its special effects, The Thing is first and foremost an atmospheric film... This is fitting material for director John Carpenter, who ironically used his biggest budget to return to the kind of small-scale, inward-looking horror of Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween. But if the physical scope of the film is narrow, its tone is one of vast, cosmic terror, influenced in no small part by H.P. Lovecraft.

That breakdown is presented in exquisite, gory detail, with some of the most lauded special effects make-up work in movie history used to depict people and animals mutating into hideous half-alien creatures and meeting even more hideous demises. This was Carpenter's first major studio film, and he took full advantage of the resources available to him. In addition to the first-rate effects, THE THING features a brilliant mix of studio sets and location shooting and a fine Ennio Morricone score.

This is one of the greatest and most elegantly constructed B-movies ever made, serious yet subtle in exploring themes of paranoia, mistrust, identity and camaraderie, and aces at scaring the hell out of you. Carpenter is one of the great film stylists of the second half of the twentieth century. He directs with no adjectives. He's clean, purposeful, direct, unhurried.

The very film is a Thing itself; at the core of this paranoid chum-bucket is a masculinist Western, and Ennio Morricone's spare, pulsing score emulates Carpenter's signature synths. Carpenter methodically alternates between the minimal (misdirecting with what little information he provides) to the maximal (an explosion of bodily stuffs accompanies every revelation). It's no wonder GWAR claims the frosty isle as their motherland.

The startlingly taciturn lack of panic or real surprise in the horror film's first act is incredibly inspired, as if knowing the audience already assumes the worst, so why make a fuss, and meanwhile the characters in the story have their own eerie, nihilist analog to this, as if they well know the worst is likely to happen to them, isolated in an Antarctic base that feels less an outpost of civilization and more like its last surviving colony.

By channeling Sartre through Hawks, Carpenter makes us sympathize more strongly with characters because they are not trusted than because they are about to be emasculated, which considering the unbridled lack of restraint exhibited in the set pieces, is no small accomplishment on the director's part.

A magnificent cabinet of grotesqueries, one of the decade's great works, a cycle of evil perpetually frozen and exhumed. Hawks' explorers finally break through and gaze ahead; Carpenter's sit in the void, depleted, waiting for the encroaching cold and darkness.