31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 9 (John Carpenter's The Thing)

Thou hast to be fucking jesting.

Sorry. Spinning our wheels a bit here and getting all the alien-themed spooky business out of the way. Just... three more days of that, and then the real fun will begin. Alternatively, the real fun was already here. This is John Carpenter's The Thing, and it's somewhat of a rarity in the movie world, I suppose. Nowadays the world looks at remakes and rolls their eyes a bit at them. God forbid they do something like turn the remake into an all-girl squad of leads, that's a one way ticket to Frothing Angry Opinion Man Town. There are remakes that work though, and this is one of them. Tomorrow there will be another but here we have John Carpenter taking some spooky B-movie about a frozen plant alien and making it into something altogether different. Something that is a lot like Alien, but ends up indulging itself as well. Alien is a near bloodless movie, when you think about it; the biggest source of gore is John Hurt having his chest blown apart. Unless you count Ian Holm oozing white oil everywhere out of his android circuits, but that's still only two scenes with a lot of blood. The Thing is a festival of viscera. Everything to do with The Thing is an oozing, bleeding, horrific monstrosity. Even the parts that are supposed to be dead! The parts that are still alive are even more gross! Now not only is the Thing oozing and bleeding, but it's writhing and snarling as well! Holy shit!

Of course, the Thing is basically a weird fusion between the xenomorph and the Wirrn. It does assimilate you into itself upon contact with it or its viscera, and the transformation is a horrific thing like the Wirrn. Unlike the Wirrn with their revenge motive, the Thing is a pure-minded beast like the Xenomorph; it only wants to survive and thrive. It doesn't hunt because it's a natural predator, it hunts in order to replicate itself. If it has a higher goal, we never learn it. The closest we come to seeing it thinking on the fly is when it shuts down the base's power, opting to freeze itself again because the members of the US Outpost are too clever in sniffing it out. How much of that is the Thing itself, and how much of it is the Thing using the intelligent thought pattern of humans is not explained. Good. No, what we have here is a totally tense and paranoia-driven horror thriller sort of thing. In Alien, the fear was about being hunted. In The Thing, it's the fear that half of these seemingly reasonable guys is actually a mimicking monster whose face will fucking melt into a pile of goop and then open up like a Venus flytrap in order to chomp on your face and absorb you. In the end, only like three of them turn out to be that but you honestly don't know which three it is! It's a great little movie with plenty of gross shit in it, and lots of unsettling stuff. Anything to do with the dogs makes me sad because dogs are innocent and pure, don't fuck with the dogs =(

Oh yeah, and while we're talking about remakes... this sort of got one? I mean, it shares the same name as this film but that's a deception. The Thing 2011 isn't a remake, but it's a prequel that goes into what fucked up the Norwegian base from The Thing 1982. I mean, this movie's okay. It's not as good as the 1982 one, but who cares? It's got its own two feet and it's a nice companion piece. Last Halloween I watched them one after the other and had a good time. Yeah, the CGI is inferior to the puppet work from 1982 but that's just true of most movies that have CGI vs. practical shit. Besides, there's some really great shit they do with the CGI in this one, like when the one Thing attacks the one guy and his face starts to merge with the Thing's face. That's fucked up and great and couldn't be done with puppets! More to the point, The Thing 2011 mostly avoids the trap that Prometheus fell into, which is overexplaining. Yeah, maybe we didn't need to see inside the ship, but otherwise it's just a lore expansion that slots right in with the other movie. These Norwegian pals got all fucked up, and here's how it happened. Also Mary Elizabeth Winstead was there, and she survives. That's right. Ramona fucking Flowers survived the Thing. That puts her at the same level as Kurt Russell and Keith David. One of those guys was basically the inspiration for Solid Snake, and the other one held his own for 10 minutes against Roddy Piper. Mary Winstead is on that same level now, and I can do nothing but salute her.

But, would she manage to avoid being duplicated by pods from outer space? We'll never know, but let's see how other people handled that.