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By Robert Scucci
| Published
Every once in a while, a classic horror flick like John Carpenter’s The Thing is making its rounds on streaming and reminding us how progressive it was by elevating such a simple story with next-level creature effects. Now that The Thing streaming in all its violent and nihilistic glory on Shudder, you can see for yourself how tense and nauseating it is for yourself.
From the remote Antarctic wilderness to the looming and ever-developing sense of paranoia that oozes from every sequence, you’d be hard-pressed to find a sci-fi horror film that will make you want to test the blood of everyone who lives in your house before going to bed just to be safe. Or, if you’re anything like me, your next watch from The Thing on Shudder you may or may not have read Amazon reviews for flamers.
Why It Works
Although The Thing predecessors A predator by five years, both films have one thing in common that makes them better than their peers, and the sense of order and camaraderie from an experienced crew that is disrupted by an outsider. alien forces. Kurt Russell’s RJ “Mac” MacReady has a relationship with the rest of the research crew that effortlessly lets the audience know how these guys generally trust each other and get along in any other circumstance before the events held at The Thingnow streaming on Shudder.
When an American team’s Antarctic research station is raided by a Norwegian helicopter (they’re not Swedish, Mac!), Mac and Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) decides to fly over to the attacker’s station to see what exactly started them. Their initial assumption is that the Norwegians had a case of cabin fever due to loneliness, and for reasons unknown they wanted a snipe out of one of the many sled dogs living on the American base. It doesn’t take long for Mac and Dr. Copper to find a badly burned body that appears to be a human in a state of delayed mutation after being burned by the Norwegian crew.
Searching for a logical explanation, Mac and Dr. Copper bring the body back to their base of operations, along with whatever research the Norwegians have gathered before things went south. Senior Biologist Blair (A. Wilford Brimley) confirms that the body is human despite its disfigurements, but has a change of heart when one of the station’s dogs turns violent while locked in the kennel. The crew now know that they are dealing with some sort of “Beth” that takes the shape of its host in order to assimilate and eliminate any living beings that can carry its DNA, and they tremble at the implications .
Although there were initially some doubts that they were dealing with an alien life form, it is hard for everyone to ignore the buried alien spacecraft that the Norwegians uncovered before they set off on their journey.
An Exercise In Futility
The Thing presents a moral dilemma that needs to be addressed immediately. Blair, growing in his paranoia, makes the executive decision that The Thing’s contamination and assimilation efforts need to remain isolated after predicting that whatever life form they are dealing with may take over the entire planet in a short while only years if it is let loose across the world. . He destroys the radios and the sleds, and kills the remaining dogs to make sure no one can escape.
Armed with flamethrowers and enough explosives to blow the research station sky-high, the crew is almost certainly not going to survive the winter. When Bennings (Peter Maloney) and Norris (Charles Hallahan) are infected, the surviving crew’s paranoia gets the best of them because they have no real way of knowing who else is infected by the A thing. Although Mac and Childs (Keith David) have more than enough reason not to trust each other at this point in the ordeal, they really have no choice but to put their heads together in their survival efforts.
Next Level Creature Effects
Emotional and existential turmoil aside, The Thing wowed everyone upon its release in 1982 because it was ahead of its time with its creature design and stop-motion animations, which still hold up when you stream it on Shudder. Special effects designer Rob Bottin needed a budget of $1.5 million (one-tenth). The Thing entire production budget), and used a mixture of chemicals, food, rubber, and mechanical parts to bring the eponymous Thing to life in its various grotesque permutations. If you somehow see this John Carpenter classic premiering in 2025, you might not believe you’re watching a 43-year-old film because of how well the practical effects are executed.
A Certified Cult Classic
The Thing is one of those creature features that actually benefits from showing its monster on screen, and there is no shortage of blood, ectoplasm, saliva and bone to get this point across. As each mutation becomes more intense, so does the sense of real the fear of his main cast which is made even more convincing by the cold temperatures on set, which probably kept the adrenaline levels high during production, giving the film an air of authenticity that I have seen it repeated so beautifully since then.
You can stream The Thing at the moment on Shudderand I strongly recommend that you do so the next time you want to see the world burn. And if you want to explore The Thing further, the GenreVision podcast is excellent analysis you won’t want to miss.
