The Thing vs. The Thing Part One

PART ONE

First published in the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction in 12 chapters, John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Who Goes There? (He used the pseudonym Don A. Stuart.) dates from the classic age of science fiction writing and, in retrospect, was a tale years ahead of its time in plot, ideas, and execution. Also printed in novella form under the titles of The Thing from Outer Space, The Thing, and The Thing from Another World, Campbell’s vivid, influential, and groundbreaking story told of a group of military personnel, researchers, and scientists stationed at an isolated scientific post in Antarctica, up against a hostile, shapeshifting alien thawed from a block of ice when its ship, buried in the polar icecap for 20,000,000 years after crashing into a snow-buried granite mountain, has been accidentally blown up by a team using thermite bombs that discovered it. The creature can absorb animal cells and thus imitate dogs and humans within the outpost. It is also telepathic and cunningly aware of how humans will react to its presence. The entire contingent of huskies and 15 out of the group of 37 men having been “changed” and killed, expedition second-in-command/meteorologist MacReady, physicist Vance Norris, and mechanic Barclay destroy the monster after it has taken over biologist Blair, who was in the process of constructing a nuclear-powered antigravity machine that would have enabled it to escape into the outside world, creating untold havoc.

Campbell’s intelligent prose and acerbic interchanges between the men at the mercy of something completely unknown and malevolent drips with icy menace, perfectly conveying the dank, claustrophobic conditions of the research post with its intermingling odors reeking of human sweat, dogs, and cigarette smoke, and machine oil, the polar wind incessantly moaning outside in freezing temperatures dangerous to both man and alien.

The extended version of Who Goes There, Frozen Hell, which is an additional 45 pages in length, was brought out by Wildside Press in 2019 after a completed manuscript was found among Campbell’s papers in 2018. It contains the missing initial three chapters (out of eight), in which MacReady, Norris, Barclay, and Vane uncover the alien craft and the unearthly passenger that steps out of it. The ship’s magnesium-aluminum engines blow up when the team uses thermite bombs to melt the surrounding ice, and the creature (“as big as a husky and weighing 85 pounds.”) is taken back to Big Magnetic base. There are differences between the novella and the novel version in the text. In Who Goes There? The ship is half a million years old, and in Frozen Hell, it’s 20,000,000 years; a few main characters differ, and the magnificent descriptive paragraphs that launch Who Goes There? are absent. However, Frozen Hell has more alien action, and the book is enhanced by Bob Eggleston’s brilliant illustrations, which show the Thing in all its hideous glory. Both novella and novel are genuine masterpieces of science fiction literature that make for essential reading.

Campbell briefly describes the unwelcome guest from outer space as having three hate-filled red eyes set in a face ringed with blue, mobile tentacles “like earthworms,” tentacle-like arms sprouting digits, a mouth filled with fangs and clawed feet, but doesn’t go much beyond that, content to let the reader’s imagination run riot and take over when the monster is undergoing metamorphosis from its natural state into that which it is absorbing; in fact, it’s virtually indescribable. And is the representation of its otherworldly appearance correct regarding the Thing’s natural state? The author hints that this may not be the case, that maybe the alien took on the guise of something else it encountered on another planet, or even, as a passenger or captive, imitating the beings who built the ship that buried itself in the ice shelf all those millions of years in the past.

The novella was ripe for filming, and in 1950, screenwriters Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht persuaded noted American director Howard Hawks to buy the rights to Who Goes There? for $1,250. This marked the beginning of the atomic age in American cinema, a decade that would see a surge in science fiction features.

The Thing from Another World (as it was known) was among the first to hit the big silver screen in April 1951. In the UK, the picture premiered in London in August 1952, bearing the British censor’s new “X” certificate, which had been introduced the previous year. Only persons aged 16 and over were admitted. RKO, having secured the movie rights, the main problem the filmmakers had to contend with was this: How would the shape-changing Thing be presented to a cinema audience? Special effects at the time couldn’t possibly have conjured up the tentacled monstrosity that stalked the pages of Campbell’s novel; in all probability, the alien might have appeared to resemble the Martian in Paramount’s The War of the Worlds or something similar.

The decision was therefore made to make the Thing humanoid in appearance (in some scenes, it reminded one of the Frankenstein monster) but vegetable in cellular structure. Six-foot-seven James Arness was hired to play the alien, and his commanding height and build, combined with Lee Greenway’s minimal makeup plus artful cinematography (Russell Harlan) and lighting (the Thing is mostly glimpsed in part-shadow or backlit shots), produced the desired effect of depicting a far-from-friendly visitor to our planet revealing aggressive, murderous traits in the extreme, totally unable (or unwilling) to communicate with humans on any level. The icing on the cake was a tremendous score from top Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin, one of the greatest sci-fi soundtracks of all time, which has resonated down the years as the masterful piece of music it most certainly is. And a first-rate cast gave it their all.

Who was responsible for directing the RKO classic? Christian Nyby was given his directorial debut to obtain his Director’s Guild membership and had worked with Hawks as an editor on To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948: he was nominated for an Oscar), and The Big Sky (1952), but The Thing has Howard Hawks stamped all over it: overlapping dialogue, rapid pacing and editing, the camaraderie between a group of men fighting against evil, and a very Hawksian feisty romance going on between likable Kenneth Tobey and lovely ex-fashion model Margaret Sheridan, harking back to the director’s romantic comedies of the previous decade, starring the likes of Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. In later interviews, Tobey claimed that Hawks produced and directed 90% of the movie; other cast members say differently. Nyby asserts that he studied Hawks’ unique style and copied it “from the master.” The truth lies somewhere in the middle: Hawks and Nyby contributed to what has become a bona fide classic, which was once voted the 87th finest American picture ever made.

Other liberties Hawks’ film took with the book: the action was transferred from Antarctica to the Arctic; in the picture, the ship had recently crashed, as opposed to being buried under the ice for millions of years; the team of 37 in the book was whittled down to a more manageable number to enable audiences to identify with each character; a female was added (Campbell initially considered this in his book); and none of Campbell’s characters or their names figured in the film’s screenplay which focused on sensible hard-headed military-man, Tobey, at odds with Robert Cornthwaites’ not-so-sensible idealistic and obsessive scientist; Tobey and his men regard the blood-drinking alien as a threat to mankind, while Cornthwaite, on the other hand, wishes to interface with the Thing, seeing it as a specimen of a far superior race despite its violent, ferocious tendencies. After all, it did man a spaceship from another solar system—or did it?

Scene by scene, The Thing from Another World has embedded itself in the psyche of legions of Baby Boomers, who were fortunate enough to catch it in a cinema during that time. The opening 12 minutes are set in Anchorage, introducing most of the people involved, Douglas Spencer standing out as garrulous newspaper reporter Scotty, on the hunt for a good story (and boy, does he get it!); the flight to the North Pole, Tobey informed that an object equivalent to 20,000 tons of steel is causing havoc with the polar magnetic field; Tobey and Sheridan engaged in typical Hawksian sexual banter, Dewey Martin, Robert Nichols, and James Young ribbing “their Captain” over his on/off romance with Sheridan; the encounter with the cause of the disturbance, undertaken in a howling blizzard (“We’ve found one. We’ve found a flying saucer!”), then locating a forbidding, though blurred, figure in a block of ice (“A man from Mars!”); the Thing breaking out of its slowly melting icy prison, causing panic at the base; deducing the alien is vegetable after examining its ripped-off arm (“An intellectual carrot. The mind boggles!”); the monster appearing in an open doorway, doused in kerosene and set on fire (this harrowing scene was one of the first of its type to feature a full-body fire stunt); Cornthwaite growing baby “Things” from seed pods shed by the alien, callously using blood from his dead comrades, a dog, and the base’s plasma supply; the final confrontation in the freezing Quonset hut, a rapidly beeping Geiger counter announcing the Thing’s roaring entry, Cornthwaite desperate to communicate with the alien (“You’re wiser than anything on Earth.”) who towers over the doctor before angrily brushing him aside in an uncomprehending gesture; the creature reduced to ashes, caught in a high voltage electrically-charged trap; and Spencer’s prophetic final closing words: “Keep watching the skies,” as Tobey and Sheridan cozy up in the background.

The Thing made a healthy profit of $ 2 million for RKO. While the New York Times observed that the film was “generous with thrills and chills” but was “not suitable for kiddies,” eminent science fiction author Isaac Asimov hated it, probably because it wasn’t esoteric enough for his tastes, being simply a horror film with sci-fi trappings. Leonard Maltin awards it three and a half stars out of four; Leslie Halliwell gives it two out of four, which is generous considering this is from a British film critic.

The Thing from Another World had a somewhat checkered release history in the United Kingdom. After going the rounds in 1952/1953, it disappeared off the circuits for years and never really formed part of the monumental horror/sci-fi/fantasy double bill boom that mushroomed in the UK from 1955 through to 1967; the movie eventually resurfaced in January 1967, teamed with RKO’s King Kong. In three weeks, I paid five visits to the cinema to savor every second of this truly mouth-watering double feature, a moment in my cinemagoing history that has rarely been bettered, before or since. Note: The colorized edition of The Thing is well worth a look, although, at 81 minutes, it is shorter than the original’s 87 minutes, with a few scenes trimmed and one sequence involving Tobey and Sheridan playing silly love games missing altogether.

Over the intervening years, successive generations have forgotten mainly the RKO movie and have been overshadowed by the two colorful and expensive reboots: John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s The Thing (2011). Young fans can usually recall these two movies, but not the original 1951 version. In a recent conversation with my 20-year-old grandson, a big horror and sci-fi buff, he claimed to have seen the two remakes but had never even heard of the Hawks and Nyby classic. But what would he make of it? (He has watched the picture since and found it “Okay.”) Both remakes, especially Carpenter’s take on the Campbell story, are buried under a welter of grisly effects; the original Thing hasn’t any. And if there’s one thing today’s generation laps up, it’s the gruesome effects. But do gory, in-your-face, blood, and splatter visuals make a good movie? If you take the two remakes as separate entities to the 1951 Thing, which was in black-and-white and produced 30 years before the Carpenter version, concocted in a climate where gut-wrenching special effects were to be a thing of the future, which of the two remakes is the better, more enjoyable film? I prefer the 2011 prequel, which I reckon stays more faithful to the spirit of John Campbell’s novel than John Carpenter’s blood-soaked vision. Reasons for stating this? Read on!

John Carpenter was first approached in 1976 to remake The Thing from Another World, and he eventually agreed to direct it, being a dedicated admirer of the Hawks’ picture. He was also impressed by Ridley Scott's Alien, which had enormous commercial and critical success, released in 1979. Armed with a budget of $11,000,000 (which rose to $15,000,000), a solid cast headed by Kurt Russel and special effects ace Rob Bottin (assisted by Stan Winston) on board, Universal gave the project the green light, and shooting took place around Juneau, Alaska and Stewart, British Columbia. Carpenter decided at the start to commence the action midway into the book and not only use the same characters in the story but elaborate on Campbell’s Who Goes There? by accentuating the description of the Thing as it changes from one form to another, rather than have a humanoid alien as in the 1951 original (“What I don’t want is a man in a rubber suit,” he said, even though he initially conceived the monster as a single entity). Mechanics, prosthetics, food products, rubber, buckets of slime, and gallons of bottled blood would achieve Bottin’s effects. But by following this route, Carpenter’s Thing became, in effect, an extreme version of Who Goes There?, which contained an excessive amount of dialogue and very little in the way of action. Shot in gleaming Panavision (cinematography: Dean Cundey) and containing a spare, doom-laden score courtesy of Ennio Morricone, the scene was set for a meaty, X-rated slice of sci-fi horror to equal the plaudits heaped upon Alien and set the box office on fire. Yet it failed to do so. Why?

There are several reasons for this public lack of interest. First, audiences, even diehard sci-fi buffs, were generally put off by The Thing’s bleak, humorless tone. Bill Lancaster’s screenplay patently lacks humor, unlike the 1951 version’s witty script or even Alien, which possessed dry, self-deprecating humor of a sort. Nobody smiles; everybody’s miserable and at loggerheads with everybody else. Secondly, viscera-coated X-classified Thing competed with Steven Spielberg’s saccharine-coated U-rated E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, released in December 1982; families flocked in their droves to ogle at sci-fi cinema’s cutest of other-worldly visitors (don’t count me among them. In British vernacular, E.T. didn’t “float my boat.”), And Carpenter’s adult-based opus was shunted into the sidelines. As a result, worlds (even galaxies!) apart from cuddly little E.T. and his young pals (how many lovable E.T. figures found their way into Christmas stockings that year? But Things? No way!).

The family-friendly Star Wars and Star Trek movies were circulating, drawing in the crowds. Also, three years after its release, Alien still played in major cinema chains, boosting 20th Century Fox’s coffers weekly - a tough act to follow. Critics, to a man, were not kind: “Boring,” “Junk,” “Phony effects,” and “A wretched excess” were some of the barbed comments aimed at The Thing, many griping that there was little in the way of suspense, the characters (apart from tough guy Kurt Russell) bland and poorly characterized, a lack of narrative fluidity and thrust, and sloppy continuity work. Others disliked Carpenter’s habit of suddenly fading out scenes to a black screen, likely done to heighten the tension. Above all else, the plethora of bloody, gory visuals fell on stony ground; it was all too much, so much so that the film suffered from its disgusting excesses. Leonard Maltin gives the film one and a half stars (out of four), stating “a nonstop parade of slimy, repulsive special effects” that “turn this into a freak show.” Britain’s Leslie Halliwell commented, “A remake filled with revolting detail which alienated many viewers,” and awarded it no stars.

I first caught The Thing at the giant Odeon cinema in Shaftsbury Avenue, in London’s Covent Garden area, in October 1982. London cinemas offered the discerning punter the absolute best in cinematic experience (many doubled up as theaters) and plush surroundings, but at a price. At that time, the movie poster depicted a large blood-red Quatermass-type blob, looking like a mass of bone and gristle, hovering over the silhouette of three men with the publicity blurb, “Man is the warmest place to hide.” This was later superseded by featuring a figure of a man with shafts of light radiating from his head, accompanied by the words “The ultimate in alien terror.” In my estimation, the first poster remains the punchier of the two. So, I sat in luxurious comfort (the auditorium was half full, but it was an early afternoon performance), and I emerged just over two hours later, vaguely disappointed.

The Thing commences in splendid fashion: a sleek saucer-shaped craft spiraling out of the vast starlit heavens; there’s an explosion, and it tumbles towards Earth, at which point Carpenter, to his credit, uses the same screen-burning title lettering that hallmarked the 1951 classic. The first 28 minutes grab the attention: the Norwegian helicopter tracking a lone husky across the icy wastes; the dog finding refuge in Science Station 4; Russell (MacReady, the helicopter pilot) flying out to the Norwegian camp and discovering a blood-stained axe in a doorway leading to a frozen corpse with its throat cut, then the empty block of ice followed by the mangled, burnt grotesque remains of two men; the stomach-churning autopsy on these steaming remains; and the alien dog metamorphosizing into something distinctly not human, the movie’s key sequence and a terrific one at that. “An organism that imitates other lifeforms and imitates them perfectly,” intones biologist A. Wilfred Brimley, calculating that if set loose, the alien could infect the entire world in 27,000 hours (“Voodoo bullshit. It’s different from us. It’s from outer space,” scoffs mechanic Keith David).

The biologist performs a second repellent autopsy after all hell has broken loose, prompting Russell, who has studied video footage from the Norwegian camp, and two team members to fly out to a site north of the Norwegian camp where they find the ruins of the saucer, buried under the ice for 100,000 years, and a cavity in the ice which housed an occupant of the craft.

Then, for the remainder of its 109-minute running time, The Thing goes slightly off the boil: there are distinct lulls, rampant paranoia, and a barrage of blood-and-guts gross-out effects taking over, the scenario concentrating on Russell’s determination to unmask who is “one of those things,” himself coming under suspicion. Richard Dysart’s arms are ripped off as he tries to defibrillate human-turned-alien Charles Hallahan, whose head detaches, sprouts feelers, and attempts escape. ”How do you know who’s human?” Russell is asked. The answer is to take blood from each man and prod it with a heated wire; the infected plasma will react violently to the heat. These tests commence at the 67th minute, as David Clennon transforms into a tentacled monster and is set on fire (another homage to the 1951 flick, where James Arness was doused in fuel and set ablaze). Brimley, locked up as a suspect, is busy assembling a flying saucer underneath his hut using cannibalized vehicle parts. The power generator is damaged beyond repair. The Brimley-Thing kills Donald Moffat, the station commander, and then manifests itself as a snarling, tentacled abomination rearing up in front of Russell, who lobs a stick of dynamite at it, destroying both the alien and its new craft, as well as parts of the research station. The final dispiriting shot is of Russell and David slumped down in the freezing snow, the camp on fire, sharing a bottle of whiskey as they acknowledge the futility of each other, mistrusting the other.

Why was the sense of dissatisfaction felt? Well, for starters, you never got to see what the Thing looked like (apart from those two muscular arms reaching for the roof rafters in the dog kennel?), either in its actual state or the configuration it was in when freed from the block of ice. All those tentacles, feelers, and other malformed visceral body parts left one puzzled about what this Thing was: a mass of different organisms with no form. There was nothing here for an audience to latch on to (Bottin wanted the alien to “look like anything”). Alien used subtlety to get its message across skillfully; The Thing hit you over the head with a sledgehammer, leaving sensitive souls wanting to bring up their lunch. And the sequence of the head scuttling away like a spider (“You’ve got to be fucking kidding!”) drew forth a few giggles from the audience—not the intention, surely (I found a few of the human/alien effects bizarre, verging on the comical). And why did Russell have to mouth off “Fuck you too” as he hurled the stick of dynamite at the monster? To appease a modern-day audience where swearing was all part and parcel of the current cinematic climate? Also, the movie wasn’t anywhere near creepy enough, apart from the sequence in the deserted Norwegian camp and the sense of isolation from the outside world. But despite this negativity on my part and the critical pasting, it didn’t stop me from catching the movie for a second time three weeks later at Reigate’s Majestic cinema, fellow buff Neil in attendance. On exiting, his opinions were on the same lines as mine: too many garish, nauseating sequences chucked in one after the other like the proverbial kitchen sink, a stodgy middle section, a lame (in parts) script, and no real “Thing” to get to grips with (“How could that conglomeration of tentacles and gunge ever pilot a spaceship?” he mused.). He added that it would also have been fantastic if the audience had been privileged to see the Thing inside the block of ice and then thawed out, to the team's dismay. That was a major faux pas by all concerned, he sniffed, and I had to agree with him on that matter.

The Thing eventually recouped its budget, bringing in $19 million, but compared to Alien’s worldwide box office takings of $110 million, it was a pale comparison. Carpenter’s adaptation of John Campbell’s novel is now regarded in a far more favorable light than it was at the time (the director claims it is his favorite film) but hasn’t received the classic status that Alien has garnered over the years; it is rarely seen on British television, whereas Alien is shown frequently. However, in 1982, Alien and The Thing were the only two heavyweight, adult-themed X-certified sci-fi feature films on the circuits, so a seasoned buff had to make the most of them. One can only surmise what would have been the result if Ridley Scott had been at the helm or the Thing had been a single entity, such as the creature in John McTiernan’s Predator (Fox, 1987), which presented to fans a deadly alien hunter using the cloak of invisibility to thwart its enemies. This marvelous creation has stood the test of time and has been featured in seven movies.

THE SPIDER/HEAD CREATURE FROM THE 1982 THE THING

THE LOVECRAFTIAN CREATURE FROM THE END OF JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING