(4) SF: THE THING

(1982)

My fourth place entry is The Thing – not the original 1951 The Thing from Another World or the 2011 prequel but John Carpenter’s classic 1982 film. Once again, we’re back to Wells’ Martians and Morlocks, with some Lovecraftian Mythos a la At the Mountains of Madness thrown in for extra horror, because The Thing is at its core a horror film. Of course, in this case, we’re dealing with a Martian – not literally Martian but alien. And holy crap – every other alien in cinematic science fiction (including those of another entry on this list) are positively cuddly compared to the alien…thing in The Thing. That…thing doesn’t just invade our bodies – it assimilates them. Violently. The Thing is a shapeshifter, absorbing its victim’s body into itself, yet able to retain the appearance of (and mimic) that victim, seemingly extending to any lifeform.

Fortunately The Thing is confined to an American Antarctic research base, but then so are its targets subject to the body horror of the thing itself – it takes the hostile environment and inescapable isolation of the setting and raises it with a full house of paranoia, as the Americans desperately try to figure out which of them have been assimilated (against the background of the grim calculation that if the Thing should escape the isolation of Antarctica, then all of humanity will be consumed), an uncertainty that continues to the ending itself.

Apparently, it’s an annual tradition for viewing by the winter crew at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station during the first evening of winter.

FANTASY OR SF?

SF obviously, from the very opening sequence of an alien spacecraft crashing to Earth – although arguably like the Lovecraftian or Cthulhu Mythos it resembles, it borders on fantasy, albeit not as much as beings like Cthulhu or other elements of the Mythos. I sometimes muse how it could work as supernatural rather than SF horror – with the Thing as something akin to a vampire or the demons in the Evil Dead films, except with shapechanging assimilation abilities.

HORROR

One of my three top ten entries which are also my holy trinity of SF horror – perhaps the most classic SF horror entry in my top ten, which has inspired or been referenced by films and other works of popular culture ever since. Like all good classic horror, it is essentially haunted house horror, substituting an alien for the ghost, and neatly solving the so-called haunted house problem – why don’t the characters just leave the house? – by virtue of its Antarctic setting effectively confining their characters to their base and isolating them from the outside world, the latter being something the more astute characters realize they have to maintain to protect the world from the Thing.

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)