“The Thing” is the kind of film that, decades after its release, finds strength in its ambiguity. Some watch John Carpenter’s seminal horror classic and see an allusion to the AIDS crisis of the ’80s. Others say it represents the inherent fear of the Other. It can be all of those things — and more if you think hard enough — as “The Thing” remains surprisingly timeless. That’s due in part to the theme that Carpenter chose to focus on throughout the film: not only did it give this story a clear through line, but it also helped Carpenter score his leading man, Kurt Russell.
Carpenter and Russell worked together twice before teaming up for “The Thing,” but the actor needed just a little convincing before joining the project. Russell recounted his early conversations with Carpenter in a retrospective with GQ, and the pitch that ultimately inspired him to join the film.
“I said, ‘Is it a monster movie or a horror film? What is it?'” Russell recalls asking Carpenter. As Carpenter was adapting “Who Goes There?” — a 1938 novella that’d already been adapted once before — the director needed to set his version apart from the others.
“He said, ‘The Thing’ was a movie 30 years ago, but I’m not doing that,'” Russell continued. “‘I’m doing a movie about paranoia.'”
‘We don’t even know if we’re real’
Russell apparently didn’t need much convincing after that initial pitch — and it’s easy to see why. There’s so much to like about “The Thing,” from its visceral creature effects to its immersive setting. But at the end of the day, it’s about a perfectly evolved parasitic alien, one that can take the form of any living organism, and the team of American researchers struggling to survive it.
Initially, it’s impossible to tell who has been infected by the Thing, and our heroes are slowly overcome by suspicion and alarm. Russell’s character, R.J. MacReady, wages a one-man war against the Thing, and by the time the dust settles, he seems to be the only survivor. That is, until Childs (Keith David), previously missing in action, emerges from the wilderness. There’s a high chance that he’s the alien monster in disguise, but MacReady could be infected too. Carpenter chose to end his tale on a maddening, nihilistic cliffhanger, but according to Russell, the director really struggled with that ending:
“John was never satisfied with that last scene. He didn’t want to … take the audience on a ride for two hours and bring them back to square one … In the end, I said ‘John, look, I know you don’t want to go back to square one but that’s kind of what it is. We don’t even know if we’re real. We don’t know.'”
That seed of doubt is precisely what makes “The Thing” so spectacular. The film is a non-stop exercise in paranoia, especially in its final moments. Even Carpenter was driven a bit mad by its ending — but in the end, he accomplished what he set out to do. People are still talking about the film 40 years on, after all, so committing to that ambiguity was certainly the right choice.
