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This is a good place to warn you that despite the gripping suspense and taut dramatic tones, The Thing remains a horror film. When we see the creature assimilating other life forms it is a very graphic process, and although the visual effects are a little dated, they’re still difficult to endure. I have to assume that if you were making a movie in 1982 and you needed fake blood, purple slime, or foam rubber you were either out of luck, or they told you to borrow it from John Carpenter. There is definitely plenty of gore in this movie but rather than use it purely for shock value, Carpenter gives it a realistic edge and raises some basic questions. When a hungry lion tears a zebra to pieces it isn’t personal, nor is it merely a gratuitous spectacle. It’s survival, and aside from the obvious themes of trust and paranoia, The Thing is a movie about survival. MacReady and Blair and the rest of their men certainly don’t want to die, and the pathology of the human survival instinct is on full display here. But is it possible that an alien has found itself stranded in an inhospitable and unfamiliar environment and is just preserving itself the only way it knows how? It’s an interesting thought and it is one that helps The Thing pass one of the best litmus tests of quality fiction. It compels you to momentarily forget that you’re watching a work of fantasy and seriously ask yourself the frightening question, “What would I do, what would I think, and how would I react if I were in that situation?”

A rare mix of both the cerebral and the gory, The Thing is a master work of terror primarily because of what it is, who is in it, and where it takes place. It is part blood soaked nightmare, part chilling study on trust and paranoia, and I suppose it is also part Jack London survival tragedy on steroids. These are probably not the kinds of observations you’re used to seeing about a horror film, but more than any movie I’ve talked about in this column so far, this one succeeds at what it does on virtually every level imaginable. Its concept is simple, but terrifying. The characters and the men playing them are believable and accessible. Add an unforgiving environment from which there is no escape, an enemy for which there is no sure defense and one of cinema’s all time great endings, and you have yourself a flat out masterpiece. As someone who isn’t normally drawn to horror movies I can wholeheartedly say that The Thing is a “thing” all right; it’s a thing of beauty. The upcoming prequel has big snow shoes to fill, but with the story of those poor doomed Norwegians still untold there may be ripe dramatic fruit for the picking. If they stick to the rules of the game and manage to capture even half the greatness of the original, then they’ll have succeeded brilliantly.

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