First Thing
Reading John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? (1938) the source novella for both Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World (1951) and John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is instructive, enjoyable and inspiring.
Campbell was a major science fiction editor, if rather prescriptive, who undoubtedly elevated the genre. His writing is often quite fine, though he's over-fond of the adverb: "Abruptly it rumbled disapproval throatily." And the story feels like a serial which has been carelessly patched together, with weird breaks in scenes and text that seems keen to recap what we just read. Other than that it's terrific, suspenseful, atmospheric.
The first movie, produced by Hawks, but mostly directed by his editor Christian Nyby, and scripted by Charles Lederer with uncredited input from Hawks and Ben Hecht, jettison everything but the basic concept of an Antarctic base menaced by an alien monster thawed from the ice. The whole shape-shifting concept was apparently judged too challenging from a visual effects standpoint, but maybe Hawks wouldn't have enjoyed the idea of Campbell's "who-is-it?" paranoia and suspicion: what we get is his usual group unity, with the untrustworthy egghead who admires the alien horror as the only one who's not part of a smoothly functioning team.
The script tries to maintain the alienness of the monster by stating that it's of vegetable origin ("An intellectual carrot? The mind boggles!") and subsists on blood, cheap world-building/creature-building that can be established via dialogue. And it can grow a new arm. But when we finally see it, it's basically James Arness in a bald cap and jumpsuit.
Nevertheless, Hawks' version is suspenseful and shocking and goes at a fair clip, and the characters, paper-thin, generic and devoid of star names or charisma, are somehow likeable.
It's almost shocking how faithful to the story Carpenter's version, scripted by Bill The Bad News Bears Lancaster, is. As in the story, a character goes mad, but maybe not. We never know which of the men has been substituted by the titular Thing. A very unusual blood test is devised to identify the infiltrators. The creature is halted in the act of building for itself a mini-saucer to escape to a greater population center, from which to establish world domination. Beat after beat is carefully reproduced.
Interestingly, for a film which was first denounced, then celebrated, for its graphic visual horror, the Carpenter movie never presents us with the key act at the heart of the story, the absorption of human characters and their replacement with alien copies. We see, in gory detail, the Thing attack huskies and men, and morph into different forms before our goggling eyes (in a welter of magnificent practical effects by Rob Bottin's skilled team). But we're told that when the Thing actually replaces you, it happens when you're alone with it, and then only evidence is that your long-johns get all tore up.
This makes the attack sound like a rape (and Carpenter's film, unlike 1979's Alien, has an all-male crew). And the fact that, in a film of such explicit horror, this is the one act we never see, makes it seem even more so. This unshowable act — Hollywood, outside of rare exceptions like Deliverance (1972) has been loathe to depict or discuss male-on-male rape, a contrast with assaults on women which have regularly been exploited, almost celebrated) -- retains a powerful nucleus of dread at the heart of the movie.
Campbell, by marked contrast, puts us right there in the room when his defrosted beast (frequently referred to as "the thing") claims its first victim. But because he puts us actually inside the mind and experience of that victim, we're never precisely sure what's actually happened. Campbell's Thing is telepathic, and seems able to mesmerize its prey, and it's an open question whether you actually know you've become part of it...
Campbell was big on telepathy — he believed it had been proven to exist and was the one true correct subject of science fiction. The mentalism angle explains, to a degree, how the Thing is able to imitate not just a human's appearance, but also their personality, movement, and speech. Nobody really wonders about that in Carpenter's adaptation, a less intellectual work (Movies, Carpenter has asserted, are primarily about emotions, not ideas).
Intriguingly, with the dormant Thing in their midst, the men are all tormented by nightmares in which they glimpse aspects of its nature: telepathic leakage from its reawakening mind, infecting their thoughts.
Another key difference in the movie is how the humans react to the threat. For all their understandable fear and mistrust in the story, the team work efficiently and competently to battle the foe. Some go crazy, but those are individual weak links. The group itself (thirty-seven men in the story!) remains functional. Carpenter and Lancaster's guys freeze with terror at key moments, squabble, kill one another. Though they don't turn into scream queens exactly, they do display the hysteria and disunity usually attributed to women in horror movies.
Where Carpenter really scores is in his bleak ending. Campbell's characters do consider the prospect that maybe preserving mankind will require them to lay down their lives. Carpenter's characters have to actually face this. Campbell actually anticipates a major trope of forties and fifties st movies, by giving thanks to the Creator at the finish of his yarn. Carpenter's conclusion, bleak, chilly, and open-ended, is altogether less reassuring. Campbell has characterised his alien as hellish, demonic. ("That thing grew up on evil, adolesced slowly roasting alive the local equivalent of kittens,") Carpenter's characters never put this into words, but his surreal visuals are eloquent.
As magnificent as both adaptations are (we can disregard the 2011 prequel/reboot, though Peter Watts' short story The Things, recounting the events of the Carpenter version from the Thing's viewpoint, is terrific), there's enough clever stuff in the source story to suggest that yet another version could productively be turned out, though the qualities it would need to draw from Campbell — slow pace, intellectual rigour, the enlisting of the imagination -- are sadly out of step with modern film fashion.
by David Cairns