Panned by critics on its release, John Carpenter's insanely gory 1982 sci-fi is the horror movie that can't be killed. And its blood runs right through Tarantino's chilling Western
When you think of the films that play into the work of Quentin Tarantino, the list of inspirations seems endless: crime flicks, French new wave, Hong Kong action pictures, obscure Italian Westerns, Blaxploitation and that film where Bruce Lee wears a yellow tracksuit (Game of Death). But, for his latest film, The Hateful Eight, the cinematic wish-list comes to the grand total of one.
“The Thing is the one movie that is the most influential movie on this movie per se,” Tarantino told Christopher Nolan during a recent Q&A). “It’s the only movie that I showed the cast. I even showed it to Kurt Russell. He loved watching it with the cast: ‘That’s mine baby, that’s what I did.’ And actually Reservoir Dogs was very much influenced by The Thing so it goes a long way…”
Set some ten years after the US Civil War, The Hateful Eight charts the story of eight ne’er-do-wells holed up in a snowstorm at stagecoach stop Minnie’s Haberdashery as they try and figure out who is double crossing who. The parallels to John Carpenter’s 1982 cult sci-fi classic are manifold. Both star Kurt Russell. Both are scored by the Italian maestro Ennio Morricone – The Hateful Eight even includes the composer’s unused cues from The Thing. Both see characters snowed into a hothouse environment. Yet there is something else that Tarantino wanted to replicate.
“It was the way I felt watching The Thing the first time I saw it in a movie theatre,” he continued. “I just really connected to it. This crazy suspense leads to terror to a place suspense rarely ever gets to…The paranoia amongst the characters was so strong, trapped in that enclosure for so long, that it just bounced off all the walls until it had nowhere to go but out into the audience. That is what I was trying to achieve with The Hateful Eight.”
Before it was ever a movie, The Thing started its icky existence as a novella by 28-year-old John W. Campbell Jr., written under the pen name Don A Stuart, and first published in the August 1938 edition of Astonishing Science-Fiction magazine.
In the short story, members of a US scientific team unknowingly revive an alien creature that kills and takes on the appearance of its prey. This notion of an outside enemy, with the seamless ability to infiltrate everyday existence, was a doozy as a metaphor for the Cold War paranoia playing out in ‘50s monster movies. Hence in 1951, The Thing from Another World, directed by Christian Nyby but steered by its producer Howard Hawks, hit the screen. When the film closed with the caution “Watch the skies”, it wasn’t just a warning about flying saucers.
The state of the art of special effects in 1951 wasn’t enough to recreate a shape-shifting beastie. Instead stuntman James Arness played the Thing as a walking carrot, a humanoid plant-based life-form that picked off its victims in dark corridors. As primitive as it was, it left a huge mark on Steven Spielberg – the working title for Close Encounters was Watch the Skies – and the five-year-old John Carpenter who watched the film on a re-release.
“It was so frightening that my popcorn flew out of my hand,” said Carpenter who included clips of the film in his 1978 box office smash Halloween. “The original story was like Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, with the creature imitating one or all of them. And that idea fascinated me.”
Creating a creature in line with Campbell’s conception was pushing the envelope, even for 1982. Carpenter was faced with a conundrum: keep the monster in the shadows like the original or take the bull by the horns and expose the critter in harsh fluorescent light.
“A lot of movies up to that point had always ended up with a man in a suit,” Carpenter recounted in the documentary Terror Takes Shape. “Even in Alien, as well done as it was, there’s one shot where this thing stands up and you realize it’s a big guy in a suit. Great suit, but still a suit. So the whole point of The Thing was to say, “Let’s do the granddaddy of monsters, and let’s actually show it.”
After his first monster maker Dale Kuipers was hospitalised in a horrific traffic accident, Carpenter reached out to 22 year-old Rob Bottin. Bottin had assisted make up effects supremo Rick Baker on Star Wars and in fact doubled as the tallest member in the Cantina band. He later branched out on his own with such 80s video shop fodder as Piranha, Humanoids of the Deep, The Howling and Carpenter’s The Fog.
Out of the film’s $15 million budget, $1.5 million was given over to the creation of the creature. Universal, the studio stumping up the money, must have been concerned by some of Bottin’s ideas. Five gallon vats of KY jelly were only the tip of the weird iceberg.
“We went a little crazy in the beginning,” Bottin remembered. “We had this whole series of dead baby monsters but that was waaaay too gross.”
While The Thing is now regarded as the pinnacle of practical prosthetic effects, its power comes equally from its oozy tactile quality and disturbing flights of twisted imagination; a dog splits in two, a chest undergoing an autopsy grows fleshy jaws and bites a surgeon’s arms off, a head sprouts spider-legs and toddles off. The Thing became became Bottin’s labour of love and it nearly killed him.
“I wanted this stuff to come out great,” he remembered. “So I actually lived at Universal for a year and five weeks, without taking a day off. I’d sleep on the sets, in the locker rooms, in the labs. I ended up in hospital at the end of the show.”
If the surreal, visceral nature of the horror was one stumbling block for a wide audience, The Thing’s black-hearted ending provided another. At the end of Campbell’s novella, humanity prevails, with a Hitchock-esque suggestion that the birds flying to the mainland might have been assimilated by the monster.
Carpenter’s film goes even further into the abyss: with their base blown up, Kurt Russell’s MacRready and Keith David’s Childs share a bottle of scotch resigned to their fate and to the thought that one of them might be ‘the Thing’.
Carpenter shot additional endings where Russell destroys the Thing and another where he merely survives, which Carpenter later dismissed as “cheesy’. Ultimately the director stuck to his guns with the downbeat finale, believing the two men freezing to death was “the ultimate heroic act.”
“I remember the studio wanted some market research screenings and after one I got up and talked to the audience about what they thought about the film,” he recalled in 1999. “There was one young gal who asked, “What happened in the very end? Which one was the Thing and which one was the good guy?” And I said. ‘Well, you have to use your imagination.’ And she said, ‘Oh God, I hate that.’ We were dead in the water. Dead.”
The professional reviews were similarly damning. “The quintessential moron movie of the eighties” screamed Vincent Canby in the New York Times. “The Thing is so single-mindedly determined to keep you awake that it almost puts you to sleep,” derided David Ansen in Newsweek. Adding insult to injury, even Christian Nyby, the director of the original, weighed in. “If you want blood, go to the slaughterhouse. All in all, it's a terrific commercial for J&B Scotch.”
When the film opened on June 25 1982 (the same day as Blade Runner, another flop turned cult), it debuted at number eight in the US chart, crawling to a measly $19 million at the US box office.
Perhaps it was the gore. Perhaps it was the film’s palpable dread and tough tunnel vision (The Thing spectacularly fails the Bechdel test by boasting an all male cast: the only female presence is the voice of Kurt Russell’s computer, provided by Carpenter’s ex-wife Adrienne Barbeau).
Basking in the afterglow of a warmer alien visitation – E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial had opened two weeks earlier and was charming everything before it – Ronald Reagan’s America rejected The Thing’s ambiguous nihilism wholesale. It was, in Carpenter’s words, “El Tanko”.
“It was unpleasant for audiences for deal with,” he later reflected. “I think the social climate in the country at that time had a lot to do with it. There was a recession under way and people rejected its downbeat, depressing view of things. They didn’t like the horrible inevitability of the movie.”
Yet out of the carnage, The Thing regenerated. Kick-started by Anne Billson’s BFI classics book, it found a critical reappraisal and currently sits at 80% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. It has mutated into videogames, comic books and a CGI heavy 2011 prequel to the events of Carpenter’s film.
It is annually the film of choice for the scientists arriving on the first night at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on June 2 (they end their stay by watching The Shining, perhaps when the madness has set in) and inspired a short story by Canadian writer Peter Watts that recasts the events of the film from the point of view of the Thing itself, struggling to understand why it is receiving such hostility.
Carpenter must relate but can take solace in Tarantino’s tribute. Not for the first time, The Thing refuses to die.
