“This thing doesn’t want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It’ll fight if it has to, but it’s vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it’s won.” - The Thing
John Carpenter’s The Thing is one of a great many brilliant 80s movies to have suffered upon original release. Critics hated it, cinema audiences didn’t connect with it, and so Carpenter’s first foray into film-making on a major studio budget bombed. He was particularly devastated about this, since he considers it even now his finest movie. Begun as a remake of the marvellously cheesy 1951 Howard Hawks monster flick The Thing from Another World, what whet Carpenter’s interest in Universal’s remake was reading its original inspiration, the 1938 novella “Who Goes There?”, by Golden Age Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell. The blood test scene, already there in the short story, clinched it.
In retrospect, we marvel that this movie was not immediately recognised as a masterpiece, given its incredible monster sequences by 22-year old special effects genius Rob Bottin (with just a little help in one scene from fellow SFX wizard Stan Winson). If the alien invasion story had been done a hundred times since its debut with H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, it had seldom reached to the vertiginous heights of paranoia that this film achieved, although special mention must be given to the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which comes close. Carpenter’s gift for the visual and love of the macabre comes together with an eclectic cast who deliver such a compelling picture of succumbing to madness and distrust as to make The Thing forever after the benchmark for silver screen paranoia.
Yet beyond what this film achieves as a sci-fi horror flick, The Thing also reveals something about who we are as human beings by tapping into a fear far older than the alien invasion yarn this story relies upon. Note that, in the background of the infamous blood test scene can be seen a World War II-era poster (shown above) warning “They Aren’t Labelled, Chum”, referring to the risk of having unprotected sex with prostitutes. Right at the heart of this tale is a fear of contagion, here amplified to infinity by the claim that if this monster ever reaches civilisation, humanity will be destroyed in just 27,000 hours.
The fear of contagion not only strikes in the context of disease, however, but metaphorically in the realm of belief and ideology. The rampant paranoia that ultimately destroys the entire Antarctic research base and its crew in The Thing is only a few steps removed from the quagmire depicted in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which uses the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the fear and distrust unleashed by the McCarthy hearings. The conviction that the United States had been infiltrated by Communists who were destroying the nation from within plays out a theme that sadly is eternal. The enemy among us has different names, different natures, but the blinkering terror induced by this contagion is just as deep and ineradicable as the fear of literal infection.
After the destruction of the World Wars, a new foundation for international relations was forged, the world of human rights. It sought to set a limit to what individual states could do to their citizens and to create guarantees that it would not solely be as citizens that we would qualify for these protections. Yet in the paranoid atmosphere of the twenty first century, we have gone beyond undermining these protections, we have reneged on these promises in our terrorised pursuit of the new enemy among us, whoever or whatever they might happen to be.
But the truth is less exciting than the mythos. Donald Trump was not dug out of the Antarctic ice, and will not destroy us that much faster than the other terrible Presidents on offer. So-called ‘popularist’ parties like Alternative für Deutschland do not control a fleet of alien spacecraft standing by to rain death upon us. And whether we are afraid of Christians, Muslims, trans folk, refugees, the unvaccinated, or anyone else, there are no pod people infiltrating ‘our democracy’, ‘our nation’ who are going to destroy us from within. No, the true danger - then, now, forever - lies within ourselves, in our fear of these monstrous others we have conjured from the depths of our own souls.