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Spoilers Ahoy! Naturally.
John Carpenter’s 1982 classic remains one of my favourite horror films. It blends subtlety with shock-grotesqueness in an impressive fashion, periods of gore and spectacle are interspersed with a unique tone of foreboding dread and mounting paranoia. Much has already been written about the film’s narrative blurriness: who is taken when is usually left ambiguous and instead unravels as the plot develops. The heart of the film is in its ambiguity. The fully Thingified victims — Parker, Norris and Blair — are never shown being ‘taken over’ as the characters put it. Yet there are hints and visual tips that establish things aren’t quite right.
Carpenter is nothing if not an excellent technician. The Thing boasts a number of impressive images, such as the striking reveal of the giant spaceship, sitting ominously in a deep crater, surrounded by the desolate Antarctic wastes. Foregrounded — huge and imposing — as our tiny human figures climb down in the background of the shot. For a film that is centralized on such close-quarter action and drama, a passage like this adds an air of sci-fi grandiosity, in a rare instance where the ‘unknown’ elements add a degree of wonder as much as fear.
