235 - The Thing '82

Slashin' cast.

Welcome back, fiends, to Handle with Scare, presented by the Slash and Cats Podcast Network, where the show that dissects horror through the primal fears that fuel our nightmares exploring what terrifies us both on and off the screen. I'm your host, Emily Drunk, and uh tonight we are wrapping up our closer look at Terophobia and the fear of monsters.

As always, I'd like to extend an invitation to join our community of fiends. Every Tuesday and Thursday night at 7 30 p.m. Pacific time, we host our weekly watch parties over on our Discord. Tuesdays focus on the movies we'll be talking about here on the podcast, while Thursdays focus on brand new releases, allowing us to digest the genre's latest offerings as the year unfolds. You can say connected with us over on our Discord at bits.ly forward slash handle with scare.

With me here tonight, as always, it's because Grindhouse Zombie and Zombie. Uh we basically saved the granddaddy monster movie all them all for, I mean, 99% of you know horror nerds out there. Um and I feel like last night's watch party was like one of the only times where I I will say the conversation felt a little light, but that's primarily only because a movie like the thing.

Speaks for itself. I felt like everyone was so busy locked in and paying attention and just enjoying the moment as the night went on that it was Uh I I don't know if that's gonna be like another thing that we're going to be able to duplicate in uh upcoming watch parties, but it's definitely an interesting turn of events compared to, you know, what the normal you know Tuesday or Thursday night is for us.

Yeah, so for my f five plus years now of having done this, I've never talked about this movie and it when I thought about it, it was kinda strange. Like, how is that possible?

But then to your point last night, yeah, our normal jokes and a lot of the back and forth banter, a lot of it was either just non existent or just fell completely flat because people were watching the movie and This isn't really a movie where As you watch it you pull out jokes and I mean there's a few that still hit, you know, but for the most part this is one where you just it you're kinda laser focused on watching it and I mean for good reason. It it deserves your attention.

And this is certainly one of the movies where the closer you watch it, the more you pick up. Um, I'm fairly certain every time I watch this one I I pick up something new and I think this last watch is what has cemented my idea of who the thing was at the end. And you know, I think I'm in the minority in in terms of what I think. So um, you know, that's gonna be that's gonna be interesting.

For a movie that came out in eighty two, I bet you I probably saw it for the first time in eighty three or eighty four on again on videotape,'cause that's what we had. Um, even back then for me, a as just as a horror movie fan, it was It was something new and it was something electric. And it was what I've always thought of as a really good cast of characters.

that spend a lot of their time, let's be honest, running around being mad at each other and trying to figure out what's what. But then at the same time it's also a movie that's completely bathed in gore. And I think for the time was one of those things people just weren't ready for that. They were not ready for the amount of gore this movie had. And to your you know, to your point from pre show discussion, the practical effects in this

All these years later, forty forty four fuck I'm old. Forty four years later. The effects still hold up. Now can you see some of the edges and things like that? Well of yeah, of course you can. Movie's forty-four years old. Okay. There are practical effects that are done today by people that are are good at it that are not as good as this forty four year old movie.

So w when it comes to talking about the characters, talking about the creature, talking about just about anything, we talked about it, I think it was maybe on our feast episode, when you have a movie that is sort of laden with sub genres. And I I think in a way If you were to really detail this movie out, you can say that this one's got a few subgenres in it. It really does.

Because it's horror, it's sci-fi. If if you wanna go down even more from there, it's uh it's a it's a fear thing, it's a trust thing, it's an isolation thing. So there are so many really ultimately themes going on in this. But in the end it's who's who That's really what it is. And for I've probably seen this movie a hundred times. I mean easily a hundred times. And it's good every single time. And watching it with the fiends last night.

And like I said, so how there was sort of a drought in the conversation, that it tells me that it's that good because people were just watching. Yeah.

Absolutely. So synopsis for this is a research team in Antarctica is hunted by a shapeshifting alien that assumes the appearance of its victim. So again, this came out in nineteen eighty two and at that time computer generated effects were still primitive. You know, they could perform basic functions, but their integration with the real world did not evolve to the point of believability.

And as the technology had advanced, it continuously exposed the age of earlier work, making films look dated and cheap only a few years after they had been released.

By contrast with practical effects, uh those had been the standard since cinema's beginnings, you know, because they were real. They didn't need to hide. They could act and react in actual space, whether it was costumes, makeup, or even miniatures. Uh Those were just a few of the tools talented artists had used to bring fantastic creations to life on the big screen. So coming out of Star Wars, that spawned ILM, which was an entire effects company. Uh, and due to its staggering volume of work.

encompassing everything from stop motion to elaborate costumes. Uh, you know, in in American Werewolf in London, we had a Rick Baker who had deployed animatronics and makeup to portray, you know, a man's horrifying transformation to a beast. But it was Baker's assistant

Rob Bowden, and his work on the thing that produced effects that were so viscerally gut wrenching that they still make audiences shudder today. This was a twenty three year old artist who would work seven days a week Throughout the year, and when production had wrapped, he chucked himself into a hospital due to the fact that he was exhausted. And as a result of that was an innovative alien horror that matched director John Carpenter's tastes for the grotesque.

Well, you know me, and I oftentimes like to cite numbers or statistics that I think really put a pinpoint in what we're talking about. So this movie had a fifteen million dollar budget. They spent 10% of it on practical effects. 10%. Now, Tell me a movie's th these days, tell me a a thirty million dollar or a fifty million dollar movie that spent ten percent of its budget on practical effects or fuck on any sort of effect.

Now I'm not talking like the locations and having to have guide wires because you're up high in a building or something. We're talking about 10% of the budget on rubber, latex, mechanical parts. uh you know, wires to pull things along and move things. It's

It's unheard of. Um and and as we discussed pre-show, it's probably a big part of the reason that when this movie for whatever reason was effectively a flop at the box office that John Carpenter got fired um from the next movie he was working on. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, I would argue that shortly after he did Christine and shortly after he did Prince of Darkness, which are two of my absolute

Long time, if it's on TV, I'm stuck until it's over. Just perfect movies that I love. But it also tells you that, you know, even back then the the people of Hollywood were, well, kind of assholes. And if you didn't hit the mark, than you were out on your ass. And I would um honestly argue that it's probably a little bit more lenient today. I think there's probably a a few more second chances in this day and age than there used to be.

But it still just blows my mind that some somebody had the nerve after seeing this movie to say, Yeah, you're fired. We don't y your services are no longer needed And it's like Did we watch the same movie? Because hey, mister uh corner office suit guy, you're a fucking idiot. Um and I mean and John Carpenter's proved that in the last forty forty years that he's anything But a bad direct.

Yeah, one of my favorite quotes um about the thing from Carpenter was I didn't want to end up with in this movie was a guy in a suit. See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and monster movies, and it was always a guy in a suit. And my fear was they'll laugh at us.

So when I saw that stuff coming out, I was like, Phew. Uh so Carpenter's version is a world apart from its predecessor, the thing from Another World, which came out in nineteen fifty one, uh, where obviously practical limitations reduce that alien to kind of like a veggie Frankenstein dispatch. uh by electrocution, uh exactly what Carpenter wanted to avoid. You know, Carpenter and Boatin created a monster with no fixed form.

and the sheer variety of effects produces in ever changing monstrosity that more closely resembles its source material, uh, which is John W. Campbell's uh novel of Who Goes There? Each individual cell behaves like its own creature, constantly mimicking in order to survive, so to anchor this amorphous concept, Bouteen created molds and statues from the outset, establishing the thing's shapeless visual identity immediately.

I honestly think when it comes to Let's call it modern filmmaking. And as often as we do uh computer simulations and things like that. The funniest part of this one is For nineteen eighty two you could call the simulations that they showed of the thing taking over a cell. You could call you could call them kinda cheesy. You could they had a little bit of a Atari feel to them. But when you watch him today

And I don't know if it's maybe just me and that I'm just an old son of a bitch, but they come across really well. It's not one of those things where someone tried to take a technology and make it so so complicated. And just it and and and puts you in a place where you have to struggle to understand what's happening and it's like, nope, the one cell just goes or the other one and it grabs it and and the s very

I I would call it ingenious way of just going from red to blue and then back to red to blue and then the little red string comes out and then that one goes to red for a sec but then it's blue again. It's This might sound stupid, but it's so easy to understand, but visually it comes across really well. Where you're like, Okay, because but it also in a way it makes it kind of stand out in the fact that they've got some technology, right? And it's not

This is not just a bunch of country bumpkins out in a fucking hut in the middle of nowhere doing God knows what. These guys are actually scientists. They actually have some things. And even when we get into like some of the autopsies and things like that, when Blair is do doing some of those and it's like like yeah, this is

the pile of normal human organs. And it's like well yeah, okay, great, but how come the outside's so fucked up? And it's like and then they they start to think about things and they start to come up with hypothesis on on why things are happening. It feels for lack of a better term, like really natural. Like these are what these people would do. I mean, they're up there to do something, right? They're up there to study, to do whatever else, and it just happens that they've got something

really interesting for a change to study as opposed to let's pull another ice core. Let's pull another ice core. You know, and just do this over and over again. So as a watcher of the movie, It's one of the rare ho horror movies that you watch it and watch what these people do and you actually feel like as a watcher you get smarter as you go as opposed to dumber so often. Because we've got so many movies where it's like

As you're going on, it's like I know the characters are getting stupider because that's just kind of what happens in most of the movies, but it's like as a watcher, you feel yourself getting dumber and it's almost kind of a disappointment. And in this one I I hate to say it, but it almost feels like you learned something. Whether it's about the human body, whether it's about, you know

another culture as you know, you know, the whole time Max always called him, Hey Sweden even though it's Norway. I I still laugh about that every single time I hear it. And somebody in the movie always corrects him too and he just doesn't give a shit. So that's kind of awesome. But between the story, between what the team is trying to do, between the effects.

It's it's one of those movies where we've talked before and and probably at nauseum about the lull in a movie and how the lull can kill it. This is another one of those movies. There's no lull. There's always something happening. There's always some action. And whether you're a character in the movie or you're a watcher, you do often feel like you're just trying to keep up. And when you're doing that, that tells me that your movie is full of energy.

And it's gonna just continue for y it for years and years, you know, this is movie's gonna keep drawing people in. There are there are twenty two year old podcasters out there going, Have you seen the thing? And it's like in my head I'm like, Yeah, where the fuck have you been been, dipshit?

But at the same time, it has that draw. It has that and it's not because it has star power. This movie is not loaded with star power. At the time, Kurt Russell was only five or so years removed from doing like TV and shit like that. And I mean I think he did was Escape from New York earlier than this? I don't remember. I think it may have been. But if it was, not by much. But I mean he wasn't uh

he wasn't like a super knowing face. I mean he definitely came across and like did a good job. Yeah, it was one year before. Okay. Eighty one. So But it's like he didn't have the he wasn't a box office draw face like he spent a lot of years being. So you know, and in in this Time period, it's like if you wanted to watch an alien movie, it's like, what did you have? You had this, and you had E.T., you know, because

And I I think I've explained to you, you know, being just a tiny bit younger than I am, that movies weren't like this, like they are today back then. A movie would be in the theater for anywhere from three to six months. That was the movie run. And so, you know, going to the movie theater every weekend could be done, but then

Too often you were seeing something old because they would do old movies too. So it you know, seeing something new every week was just like impossible back then. And if you were to tell people back then, like, hey, yeah, I live in a time where there's there's three moon movies every week, people would just be like, Oh my god. They just wouldn't be able to even process it, I don't think.

And so with that kind of competition where you've got, you know, this really kind of friendly, cute alien and then we have this w other one over here that kills everybody. I I mean For the time, it people weren't drawn to that. It was and I don't think people even know what to make of this movie, whether to call it a horror movie or a sci fi movie. I think people just kinda they read it and they just kinda went, Yeah. Um mm. And they just didn't go, and that's why it flops so badly.

So with the toolkit for the practical effects in this, it included just about everything imaginable, whether it was mayonnaise, strawberry jam, foam latex. And KY Jelly. Uh I'm on some of the ingredients. uh were used to, you know, make the monster so palpably sickening. You know, Bowton didn't

work alone. You know, at one point, uh just overwhelmed by the sheer number of effects that were on display in the Thane, he called on his friend and fellow effects artist Stan Winston to create the Thane Dog hybrid that first introduces audiences to the horror ahead. Uh and of course that is just in impressive sequence. You know, Winston had crafted this creature that appeared to be constantly evolving, you know, unfolding in unrecognizable massive eyeballs and tentacles.

Winston had offered the alien's head with his arm in an elaborate puppet while other crew members had controlled the various moving parts of the writhen beast. The team also used reverse footage to the Uh rubber hose like tentacles were pulled through the alien model, and the film was reversed to create the illusion of grotesque appendages growing out.

And that sequence culminated in the only reasonable conclusion of Keith David dowsend a creature with a fully functioning flamethrower. Okay, so weapons in this movie.

There is such an interesting and honestly especially for where they were supposed to be. I mean so when you're in in a habitat like you're supposed to be in in, you know, Antarctica. Antarctica is often compared at least in in inhospitability. Inhospitability? Whatever, whatever the word is. It's often compared to space. And so often uh the biggest the biggest absolute biggest threat to space is fire. So it does kind of shock me that

A all these guys were, you know, ripping heaters all the time, but then also like their main weapon was a flamethrower. So that that always kinda threw me a little bit like, wow.

And then the other thing I always wondered is why do these guys have so much dynamite? Like it's I mean, like I know that you're in the Arctic and you're you're doing whatever you but like that's a lot of fucking dynamite. And As a person who is, you know, sort of a gun aficionado and things like that, I inevitably ask myself those questions and go, huh.

Now, does it detract from me an and how much I like the movie? No, not at all. The the only real problem I'll say that I have with um we'll call it the guns in this is that after the helicopter lands and the pilot basically accidentally blows up the helicopter Uh his passenger is still shooting at this dog. He wounds one of the guys and then our our uh you know formidable commander Gary breaks out a window of their habitat to shoot at this guy.

Now this is the s this is the same place where there's a point where McCready says, Uh, in a couple hours it's gonna be a hundred below out here. Well, doesn't it seem like you might want a window between you and that temperature? So there are some tiny things in here where I am left scratching my head a little bit. Like how come they didn't think about this? But at the same time, there's seven hundred positive things that outweigh that. So I just I very frequently just let it go because

I if you get to a place where you judge a movie by the little things that happened in your mind, then you're just kinda wasting your time. Like why bother to watch it in the first place? But the weapons in this and how the weapons are used, it is the one place where I was like, Well, it's not exactly what I would have done. But I still kind of understand why you did it. But it's it it leaves a little bit of head scratching slash

Wait a minute. Just wa wait, you know. But at the same time, The way that it starts, it it really kinda starts that way with you, you know, these people in this helicopter throwing bombs at a dog and shooting at a dog and It comes out of the gate screaming and it lets you know pretty much right away that in some way, shape or form there's going to be a battle. And it might be with a gun, might be with a flamethrower, might be with a bottle of J and B. You never know.

Yeah, the thing for me, uh and the true appeal of it really lies within, you know, the thing's formlessness. You know, it morphs and imitates constantly, capable of becoming any living creature, you know, it assumes its mannerisms, its memories, its form entirely. So we have these scenes featuring the monster that required intricate rigs that split apart to reveal entirely new horror.

And of course one of those More prominent scenes is, you know, when Norris collapses from an apparent heart condition. So as his panic colleagues rush him to the doctor who begins to fibrillation, uh Norris's torso suddenly splits open, and we have this monstrous chasm snapping shut on the doctor's arms, severing them at the elbow.

So as others rush in to help, we see the chest erupt in this green media explosion. And of course we have this spider-like creature, Baronoris' deformed face, clean into the sealant vent. Uh while the men subdue it with the flamethrower, Norris's original head stretches, you know, tears free from his body, drops to the floor, sprouts spider legs, and just scurries away.

That sequence is difficult enough to follow in the imagination, so executing like every effect in gory detail required three separate monsters and even more rig. Hellahan had spent ten days with Botin just, you know, creating this complete lifelike mold of the actor to house this hydraulic jaws that would serve as a creature's mouth. No, it was rendered so realistically that Boten even matched Hallahan's chest tear pit.

So that scene and they had with the spider legs is still one of the creepiest.

Slash scariest things I've ever seen in film ever. Now have you ever watched uh a series called the Santa Clarita Diet? No. Have you watched that? I I've not. I'd spin it on my radar, but not not when I've Okay, so it has uh Droop Arrimore and Timothy Olifant in it and long story short, she's a zombie. Part of her becoming a zombie, this process is that she pukes up this red ball thing.

And because they are who they are, she puts this red ball thing in the freezer and just leaves it. And they only come to find out later that if they take the red ball thing out and let it thaw out, it eventually springs legs and starts crawling around. Totally stolen from this. Totally. And it's not even it's not even subtly stolen. It just is completely stolen. And it's stolen because it's so fucking good. There there's no

Watching a human's head detach itself from the body, flop on the floor, and then grow legs and crawl away. I I've seen a lot of scary shit in my life. I you know, I d I watch hundreds of horror movies a year. That is still probably in the top five of even now, I watch it and I just I get goosebumps, I get shivers, and I'm just like, you know. And that is not only a hard thing to pull off in the moment in a movie.

It's a hard thing to pull off and have the effect last for forty fucking years. That's impressive.

Now with some of these other spots and I have to I have to tiptoe back into the weapons thing just for a second. And the gratuitous use of a flamethrower. So have you have you ever had the uh opportunity to use a flamethrower in real life? Oh I have. I'm not going to explain now, but I have. And so an old-style 80s legit flamethrower, they're really effective. They're really effective. But there's two caveats to that.

A, they go through fuel like a motherfucker. So I wonder how much fuel these guys actually had. And two, effectively, what the flamethrowers spits out as a a slightly more runny version of napalm. So every time they use these flamethrowers in this place, they would have burned the entire fucking place to the ground. I mean it would have been an ashtray. Now

Creative license, it's a movie, you gotta take the good with the bad. But it goes back to that thing in my head where I'm like, Yeah, I know how this would have gone and you guys just you guys would've all been standing outside freezing your asses off and like that was a bad idea, wasn't it? Yep, it really was.

Uh so that notwithstanding, the moments in this where they they're put together as a group and whether When you start at the beginning and it's s sort of maybe seven or eight on two. And then as you go it's maybe you know six. And then it kind of dwindles down, and and pretty soon it's five on one. All these moments. I think the beautiful part of it is that they they very rarely let a moment pass where there's gotta be a decision and something explosive doesn't happen.

And it's part of what keeps the energy in this movie so high. And for me, I think the reason that the end is so perfect.

is that it's that final moment in the movie where you finally get to go. Whew and you finally get to take a breath. Now and again as we've said, it i it leads to conversations about who's what and what's what and who went where and why. But the fact that the movie is cognizant enough of itself.

To get to a place where after everything's exploded and there's flames everywhere and whatever else, the moment or the movie purposely gives you a moment to breathe. It wants you to breathe. Because then it wants you to digest the well Which one? And then here we have a 45 year old discussion, right? Um, but yeah, it just I think for me Probably one of the creepiest scenes is

Um, I gotta try to remember I'm gonna wanna get the character right. Oh, it's Palmer, yeah. Palmer whose blood jumps out of the Petri dish. Till the end of my days, that scene is going to get me. And it makes me push away from whatever I'm doing, fold my arms across my chest and just go every single time. And

I've watched movies where they use eighty thousand gallons of fake blood to do a scene. And and th those are less impactful than that two ounces of thumb blood that come from that movie. And that scene. And and it's a Again, it just goes back to

Every scene in this movie was purposeful. Every scene in the movie was meant to make you feel a specific way. And if you didn't feel the specific way that they wanted you to feel, at the very minimum you were so goddamn uncomfortable that it almost didn't matter.

Yeah, of course with uh the practical effects in this, you know, they did pose some challenges, especially when it came to the separate arms that were being posed, uh, during the chestper scene. Uh so rather than filming the Doctor and the Effect in separate shots, the team had fitted fake arms onto a double amputee and created this hyper realistic mass.

of Dr. Cooper, you know, banking on the chaos of the scene to prevent us from noticing that there was a substitution in the first place. No, the mask was so convincing that the co-stars initially believed production had simply just found an amputee who happened to resemble uh the doctor. So the work was so accomplished that, you know, it liberated the crew to explore shooting possibilities that they might otherwise have been ruled out.

Well I mean special effects in general are sleight of hand, right? Mm-hmm. They that's what they've always been. And when you can convince the movie watching audience that a thing like that has happened And then go so far as to convince the crew and the actors that something like that happened. I mean you're really you're really pulling off something special. And with this movie, scene to scene

You can honestly tell that a lot of care was taken to make things as good as the people there thought they could possibly be. And in the end, the final product was almost exclusively better than they thought it could be.

I think the if there's one scene and I'm just gonna be a nitpicky son of a bitch here. If there's one scene that doesn't hold up quite as well Well, as I remember it holding up, it's the um When I th is it no I think it's when Norris is being given they're they're working on him so hard and they're giving him C PR. Mm-hmm. And then they they go at him with the paddles. That's probably the one scene that doesn't quite hold up to like how good I remember it being year upon year upon year.

'Cause it's just at least when initially when the when the the abdominal mouth opens, there's a little bit of me when I'm just like No. It's it's just not quite there. But then from the hands being bitten off and everything from there, it's still fantastic. But the the abdominal mouth opening It's finally that one place where I'm gonna be like, yeah. But at the same time, it's been forty four years. So what the fuck do you expect, right?

Yeah, the the chest eruption was a different kind of beast entirely because, you know, it was meant to be the single shot, uh, but ended up consuming a full day of shooting due to the difficult setup and lengthy reset time, uh, which ended up being about ten hours per attempt.

Uh though it was meant to be done in one take, Carpenter had felt that The first looked too much like a fountain, uh so Botine secured it on the second try, but you know, it really illustrates how precarious each effect for the thing was, uh particularly given how much weight they carried in establishing the film's tone.

I mean there's a lot of that, but I think there's also at least from my perspective and as we go through the you know, the who's who and the You know, who can you trust and there are so many back and forths in this whole thing. And especially with You know, McCready. Because in i in a way, I mean, it they established it pretty early that he's already a bit of an outsider, right? You know, he has his own little cabin.

you know, that he spends most of his time in and he's just kinda there to fly the helicopter. So in in a sense he's he's already somebody who doesn't fit in with the rest of the group. But at the same time a lot of what they're able to do and a lot of what they're able to do depends on how far they can fly. It's really up to him.

So it as much as there's a point in the movie where he sort of takes command, uh in a sense he's kind of already in charge. I mean, or at least plays a r really, really significant role in that. And I think for for me watching it. When they go out to McCready's shack And he's out there with Knowles and you know, Knolls finds something and then basically just cuts him loose in a snowstorm and is just like, Yeah, it was McCready, but don't worry, he's dead.

And oh no, hey, guess what? McCready's not dead. You know, it kind of establishes him both as this kind of badass fighter guy, but it almost completely cements the whole, yeah, I'm an outsider, I don't trust any of you. And that's kind of really when we start getting into our what we're gonna see what's what going on here. And I still like like I said, I still loved. The whole testing scene, but there's something about the scalpels, it the scalpel and the thumb that just it

To this day it makes my asshole pucker up every time I see it. And maybe that's not a fair way to explain it, but that's what happens to me when I see it.

And that that whole scene where where we finally were able to be in a place where we're for lack of a better term, we're trying to get a little bit of clarity on a situation. And the finding out of the who's who I mean, even though we we kinda find out, we also know that, well, you know, we've got one person who's not in this group and that's Blair because he's locked out in McCready's cab or his cabin.

And so for as much as they were seeking clarity and really trying to get down to brass tacks, they sort of only did it a little bit. But I think that's what

As the scenes go on in this movie, that's what they're trying to do. They're they're getting closer and closer.

Like to finding their own perfection. Like the first couple of times it's like, Yeah, we don't know what the fuck is going on. Let's let's lock up the dogs. Oh, then the dog eats the other dogs. And every single time and every sort of iteration of this process they're getting better at trying to figure out who's who and, you know, the going out to find Blair, it's, you know, kind of their

Kind of their last big swing at it. And after they go out to do that and they figure out that And if you if you're ever bored, you can find there's a great timeline. on this movie. Um and it's very visual and it's about who turned when and who they were turned by.

And when you look at it it it's it's a little bit of a mind screw'cause you'll be like, Well well well wait a minute. It's like looking at the movie that you saw. It's like looking at the triangle breakdown of all the different iterations of the trick.

Correct. Ex exactly. Exactly right. And but then we get to a place where one of the characters is not only probably a thing

Um and they cement that later, but I mean you get that but you also figure out that he's trying to build a small spaceship. Like in the like desert frozen basement of this place and he's just stealing parts off the helicopter and off their snow cats and whatever else and it's like my only thought and this is just like the me'cause I'm a pain in the ass and I've been around forever and it's like

Are you telling me that we've had the we've had the ability to build a fucking flying saucer forever now and we just haven't done it? Like what are we doing as people? You know, we're building fucking cyber trucks that are ugly and useless, but we're not building flying saucers. So it's like Son of a bitch Anyway, uh going through the whole thing and

It's not a new Well, I mean, maybe back then maybe it was a little bit new, but it's not a new phenomenon to have a cast of characters that get slowly picked off for one reason or another, right? I mean that's Almost horror 101. It's not even 101 at this point. It's like horror preschool, right? But with this one, because we have characters that kind of pop in and out.

here and there and it's like, Oh, you were gone for a while. Oh no, you were gone for a while. It it it kinda takes that and turns it on his head. And as the watcher, I mean, you have to train yourself to sort of casually step back and see the bigger picture. Because if you don't, you're missing something, but y you don't know what it is and you don't know which character and you know, in the end, who do you doubt and

I think even as a even if you were a casual watcher, you could say, Oh well, this happened and that happened, yeah, whatever else. And if you're somebody who watches through the lens that we watch through, it's like

Well wait a minute here. A couple of very specific things happened and it this happened and it's like and that kind of didn't make any sense unless you factor this in. So It's one of those movies where you can't I don't think you can watch it without having the ability to talk with somebody about it after you watch it because otherwise you're just gonna be floundering as a person and it's gonna suck.

So when it comes to the head tear and sequence, um, you know, there were these melted chemicals and bubblegum that were sanded in for these alien innards. Uh so the crew had readied themselves in a small room that was fill in with toxic fuel. Uh because let's be honest, practical effects were not always health conscious. Uh, you know, they were giving off fumes like paint thinner.

So this concoction, you know, produced these flammable gases. So when John Carpenter had called for fire effects for continuity, you know, the entire body mold had gone off in Which required yet another full day reset for a shot that would appear on screen for, you know, no more than five seconds.

Uh, and to transform the decapitated Norris head into, you know, the spider creature, you know, Botane had used the same reversal technique from the kennel sequence, and we had legs being pulled over the head and the footage reversed. So that illusion of movement was completed by mounting the head on a remote controlled vehicle, while a separate set of animatronic legs sold the effect of the creature scarying away.

All the effects in that scene, you know, took boat in months of ruin work and, you know, in the end the you know, only occupied like less than three minutes of actual screen time. But when it comes to, you know, everything in this movie, you know, everything was so time consuming and meticulous. But that care is precisely what makes a difference in the lawn.

The fact that you had someone crafting each effect by hand and that they still inspire, you know, genuine horror decades later, is a testament to what practical artistry can achieve.

You know, in recent years we've had this saturation of last minute patchwork CGI, and that's increasingly substituted for meaningful practical contributions. Now we have grown so accustomed to these computer effects. Uh that real tangible ones have become this rarity and many audiences no longer notice the difference.

Because good effects are designed to be invisible, the extraordinary work behind them has become widely overlooked. So you know the thing is this brace and reminder that real blood, sweat and tears will always have a place in cinema.

It's amazing that you say that and how how few minutes the the it was actually on screen because when you watch this movie, because even if it's for fifteen seconds, they give you such a clear view so many times of the creature. And Yeah, I mean let's admit it here. Uh oftentimes it's anamorphic, it's not completed, it's not one specific thing, it's a mixture of a bunch of different things.

But at the same time, if someone were to say to you, Okay, write down on this piece of paper what the thing looks like, what would you say? I don't think you could realistically. But I think in your head, you can see the thing very clearly. Which I think is a is probably the biggest piece of magic of this movie. Is that I c I can see it in my head constantly. I could not tell you exactly what it looks like.

It it does remind me i i in some ways. Um and this is after, so that's okay, but the film uh Leviathan. Where they've got, you know, this uh again, another anamorphic thing that absorbs and tries to be human and and does all these things. But the way this was done and the way it was so masterfully done and not

And and whether it was in a scene where the people were showing up to another place and the quote unquote monster was already dead. It was already dead and just kind of laying there, they didn't shy away from showing you what it was. There was no you know, the the the sort of weird steamy or filmy shots where you go over and it's like you just get this kind of, you know, the heat roiling off but you don't really see any detail. They showed you detail and it was

such a weird uh amalgamation of things. Like it was well, over here I see a human, but over here I see a dog and it's like, what's like what's trying to happen here? And so I think ultimately the thing, whatever the monster is It sorta becomes whatever you want it to be. Or in it in more point in fact, whatever you need it to be for it to be a monster. And it's probably the most beautiful part of this movie is

You know, we start out with a dog and I think most people love dogs, right? There's people that don't. Um most people love people. There's people that don't. And if you look at those two things, if you look at man and man's best friend and then you look at everything that could possibly fall into the middle of that, That's a lot of ground to cover in terms of, you know, a creature and what a creature could be.

And so it it it ultimately leaves it more up to you to decide. What the horror is because if you're semi-introverted like I am, on any given day horror can just be people in their existence. It isn't even what they did. It's just the fact that they're there and they won't leave you alone.

At the same time, maybe horror to you as a creature from outer space. So I it's it's kind of the beautiful thing about that is that is for as much horror and blood and guts and things that they show you, they leave you this sort of emotional space to fill yourself and as you fill it yourself the movie gets scarier um and it gets to a place where you start to ask yourself, Well, you know, what's a creature to me? What's what's horrific to me?

And then I I think when you get down to that that basis equation, you start looking in the mirror and going, Well wait a minute, is it me? And that's what the movie wants you to ask of yourself, is Am I the monster? And when you when you get to a place where you ask yourself that, you've made a profound movie and you you have a way of rattling people that almost no other movie has ever recreated.

Yep, and uh you know the thing has one of the most enduringly discussed endings in cinema history. history. You know, this is a dilemma uh that opposes is, you know, binary enough to be snappy yet elegant enough that it usually serves as a little more than an excuse to rewatch a film with a keener eye, uh which is no bad thing. Uh so just a quick summary, uh McGready defeats the thing. We have this giant explosion and a result in Inferno leaves little doubt that it's truly destroyed.

You know, with all shelter gone, rescue impossible, and his own humanity inherently uncertain. McCready is hopeless, but at least he can die believing he probably succeeded. And then we have Childs who appears and complicates everything. Known all the chaos, we've likely forgotten about the only other survivor who hasn't been seen dying or transforming. He's been unaccounted for uh long enough to invalidate any prior blood tests that confirmed his humanity.

His alibi is flimsy, though anything he said to Exonar himself would seem suspicious regardless. Uh so we have these two in this moment. who share this world weary acknowledgement of their impossible situation. So even if Charles is human, he has no way to confirm that McCready is.

Neither man can be entirely certain of the other. You know, the film establishes the Thane's capabilities clearly enough to provide basic understandings, you know, but leaves them just vague enough to make trust in anyone, even oneself, feel Untenable.

So the theories, the rumors, the details, the the whatever, whatever. So last night I mean and I I've done this before, so this is not like a new exercise, but I I sort of went out to the to the interwebs and rehashed all of the things that say this is this and this is why. Now for the longest time there was an argument that Child's character doesn't ever exude any breath into the cold. So, um, you know, he's the thing. All I can say to that one is watch the fucking movie because yes he does.

Um and I triple verified that last night. He his character is breathing. You can see the the fog coming out. Okay, so that's not A it's not a good uh use of the of the excuse meter and at the same time if these things completely assimilate and become us it would still breathe anyway so it doesn't yeah that's not that doesn't make any sense. The biggest one that I come down to is that very earlier in the movie, there's there's a point made where it's said, hey,

So everyone should prepare their own food and prepare their own things to drink because otherwise somebody else could contaminate it. And from my perspective Because I still think McCready is probably, even if he's been completely assimilated, he's still the camp badass, right? He's still the guy that. Gets things done, always figures out a way.

And so at the end of this movie, when he takes a swig off of the the bottle of J and B and then passes it over to Childs, and Childs just takes it but kind of stares at him. To me, that tells me that McCready is the thing, and Childs is the one who's wondering if he should drink out of the bottle. Now, I think I'm in the minority when I say that. I think everybody else on the fucking planet thinks it's childs. Um

And and that's fine because I I f for for me that's just that's just hero bias. Okay? McCready is basically our hero, he's basically our badass, and everybody wants to think that the hero is the hero and he's the badass. I just tend to disagree. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so the film ends with this, you know, half spoken acknowledgement of futility. You know, both men are going to freeze to death before any sort of rescue is gonna be able to arrive. You know, so scrutinizing each other is pretty much pointless. Uh McRady offers the final line, you know, they'll just wait here for a little while.

And see what happens. You know, it's Gallo's humor. You know, if both are human, there's nothing left to happen except death. You know, if one of them isn't, you know, the outcome is only slightly less obvious. You know, the dialogue is equal parts sinister and sad, depending on your interpretation of it. No expressions of inevitability that become threats if one of them isn't affected.

So the film closes on a shot of, you know, our burn-in research station from afar. You know, it's accentuated by its smallness against, you know, the inky dark. So when the fire stop, that darkness will swallow it entirely. You know, among its remains we have you know two veterans of an impossible conflict who can neither trust nor distrust each other because both acts require energy that they no longer possess. What's left is death or plain dead.

So the question of humanity's survival remains unanswered, as does the survival of the organism through the two questions effectively answer each other. As for McCready and Childs, you know, both men are due. And if they are both men, they have stopped Karen. You know, they've earned their rest at that point.

And when you talk about a wider context of the film, you know, this sort of ending really brings the thing's paranoia psychosis to a fitting close. as the last survivors resigned themselves to a slow, uncelebrated death, you know, were left to carry that burden. You know, the debates that follow were natural and inevitable. You know, it's child's the thing. It's McCreedy. Are either them? Or in a grimly comic twist, are both of them. Well, I mean, let's be honest here.

So many movies leave you in a state of ambiguity because it's a setup for a sequel, right? This was not that. I I honestly believe that the the ambiguity at the end of this was set up to get people to talk about the movie. Now, did the people that made this movie think that people would still be talking about it 45 years later? Probably not. But again, that's why the movie's so good.

Now if you put it in the strictest of terms, if you if you put this into a chart and you have McCready and you have Child. And going back to when you were in middle school and you had biology class and you had all the the blood types. You know, you had A, you had B, you had O and y So if they're both human, they're both dead. If one is the thing, the other one is human, There's no humans left.

If you flip that around and one is the human, the other one's the thing, there's no humans left. If they're both the thing. Well, then they get to go and crawl into the ice and wait until somebody else because i if if the movie emphasizes nothing else, is the the thing is patient. If the thing has been buried in the ice for the hundred thousand years

um that the original uh what the fuck is his name? I can remember the name. The original doctor says they were. He he he estimates that they're it'd been in the ice for a hundred thousand years. The thing is patient. It has time. At the same time, we have that, you know, that computer that works through its hypothesis that says that if this thing were to get away from this place, it could assimilate the entire human race within a couple of years.

And I think that that is the scariest thing, that it would take that small amount of time. But at the same time it might be a hundred thousand years from now, so it puts you into that place where it's like I'm not sure I have to care. But I sorta feel like I should.

But but going back to that chart, that chart's gonna tell you everything that you need to know and it's the one question that's never been answered, the what's what. And to have that question be lingering in the Zeitgeist and go unanswered for 44 years. That's just something else. And as much as I wanna give John Carpenter a middle finger for it, I also love him for it. I just love him for it that he's You've given the people that love these movies something to talk about, something to debate.

Realistically a reason to rewatch your movie seven hundred times to look for even the slightest detail as to why you what you think may be right or what, you know, your friend thinks may be wrong. At the end of the day, that's just fucking brilliant. And so here we are, you know, all these years later.

Definitely my first discussion of this movie. And and and I think what I think about the ending and but I'm also smart enough to know that I might watch it one more time and I might pick up one more thing that might completely change what I think. And that is why this movie i is

At to this point i it I mean it's it's gone beyond a cult classic. It's it it lives in horror infamy. Um And I I think you and you and I have said it before, so many movies they come out of the gate and they stumble at the box office and they go on to great things.

I think in this day and age there's movies that stumble at the box office and they stumble for a reason. Because we haven't really had I mean what was the last horror movie that like just fell flat on his face at the at the box office but then became just uh a superstar ten or fifteen or twenty years later. Now arguably you could say, well, Grindhouse, ten or fifteen or twenty years hasn't passed. You're right. Okay. But I think about things like Iron Lung, for example.

I still love the fact that it got made, I still love the fact that somebody was able to finance it and get it distributed. Doesn't change the fact that the movie sucked. Doesn't it doesn't change that fact. the the thing from the perspective of a movie goer. I know people that don't like horror movies at all and think this is a great movie. They see it. They see it for what it is. Now are they gonna watch it once or twice a year like I do? Probably not.

But it it hangs on. It it oozes greatness. It it it oozes fear. I mean, it it it attacks people at some of their just their basic core instincts. And so many movies over the course of time have tried to replicate this and no one's even honestly come close. And With things like this and especially be from its time and because It it didn't have anything Ugh I gotta back up. Movies are really funny these days. You can have a movie that can have story power or can have star power.

And movies that have star power, like the Barbie movie, for example, it makes gazillions of fucking dollars. Now, at its core, was that a good movie? No. It was dog shit. It was absolute dog shit. Now was it a little bit entertaining, whatever? A little bit, yeah, but it was a dog shit movie. It was a dog shit movie made for morons. That's that's what it was.

And then you look at some of the horror movies that come out horror movies at their core, they're sort of made for a niche audience, right? But you can overcome that. Let's look at a movie like oh I don't know Sinners. Okay? Sinners was a fucking masterpiece, but it was a horror movie. And if you want to get specific, it was a black horror movie. I s I still completely fucking reject that because it's just stupid. It was just a great fucking movie. But to take a movie like The Thing that has...

At its core, the thing is simple. It is very simple. Some guys in a place find a thing. That's that's all it is. But the nuances of this movie, the The the nihilism of this movie. The the practical effects where you feel like you're right there and you're glad that you can take a step back and not get splattered on because you feel like you could. Just about every single facet of this movie is so well done. So well thought out and so much passion put into it that for even the things that

strictly through technology and the way that we do things maybe a little bit haven't held up. It doesn't matter. It honestly doesn't matter. The movie is a masterpiece. It is a masterpiece of horror. And while I will argue that it's not a masterpiece of storytelling. I will tell you that because it's a masterpiece of horror, it doesn't have to. Horror is horror. Ed

The one beautiful thing about horror is that it lets you come into it and it does not tell you what to be afraid of. It lets you decide what you're gonna be afraid of. Or moreover It worms its way into you and it finds its way into your greatest fears and picks those apart and just makes you unnerved.

And you just have your own little personal freak out. And and this movie does all of those things. So for anyone that thinks that this is not a good movie, well, I would argue watching again because you're fucking wrong. Yeah, this is one of the few movies where it's like You're constantly playing the investigator throughout. Uh, but when it ends, you know, we kind of like lose the arbiter of the narrative.

You know, we can no longer be told, you know, whether we're right or wrong. You know, just as our characters stop being anxious about what might happen, the weight of that burden transfers to us. So like McCready and Childs, you know, there's nothing we can really do about it. You know, these questions still hang in the air. Oh, for 43 years later.

And having that sort of end in is kind of a conundrum that gets complicated by everything that precedes it. You know, this is a story with enough internal logic to feel, you know, tantalizingly close to hiding this critical clue. But which never quite gives it up. You know, answers seem just out of our reach, attainable if you could get an inch closer, only to recede the moment you do. You know, it has a rhythm of Lucy pulling the football away before Charlie Brown can kick it.

You know, horror as a genre is often sympathetic to mystery. You know, both gravitate towards perceiving this kind of internal machinery within the plot. You know, one that is either gradually understood or forever inarticulate. You know, the thing sits somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. You know, it oscillates, you know, whenever the mind feels settled. And rewatching it is an exercise and shifting a pace.

You know, anyone who loves this movie has probably seen it an unhealthy number of times, ourselves included. You know, it's a film that compels you to return with greater clarity, you know. What rather than diminishing on a second view, and it seems to pulsate with a fresh desire to confound you. You know, watching it again with. The explicit intention of tracking who infects whom only reveals that. Even with prior knowledge, it's remarkably difficult to arrive at anything conclusive.

And that's intentional. You know, the illusion of grandeur, comprehensible machinery within the film is just that. It's an illusion. You know, it's an organism that operates on instinct above all else. So any rigid structural approach would reduce subsequent viewings to this dry autopsy of nothing if no of no in, uh who gets got and when.

So what the thing does instead and what very few monster films have been able to replicate is maintain this convincing impression that the creature is an animal. You know, you never feel it teleported to these convenient, scary situations, you know, that patentrobiological rationalization creates this urge to find patterns. however imagined they may be, you know, in its behavior. It produces this uniquely alarming effect that blurs intentional mystery and happy accident.

So if you try to engineer that quality deliberately, you know, you're almost certainly going to destroy it. Well let's put horror movies in a Petre Edition here and and culture it and and see what comes out. And good horror almost exclusively puts the viewer at a crossroad. I mean that that almost ultimately is the goal. And it's a crossroads of what would I do? And we can use something like the saw movies, what would I do? Or you could say

Who do I think is to blame? And there's a lot of movies and it's uh the early fight of the thirteenth. Who do I think is to blame? You can put'em in the crossroads of who do I root for? Do I think it's do I have more in common with the bad guy or the good guy than this? And as people, it takes all kinds, right? This is one of the few movies where you get to the end and you don't do any of that. You have to fold your arms, you have to sit back and watch what happens next.

And the beauty of it is you get to the end of this and for everything that you've seen, you get to the end and you have so little information, you can't do anything with it. And most movies in general don't do that.

Almost exclusively horror movies don't do that. It it's it's a pitting of the good against the evil. Um the the right versus the wrong. Uh and with this one the kind of person that I am, I watch this movie and I say to myself, Well, what's so wrong with this thing wanting to propagate itself? It's uh a lot of times the transformation to me

Feck watching an early eighties teenager movie where they all line up outside the horror house and they're going in for the first time. The only difference in this movie is that nobody gave anybody a chance to finish. Mm-hmm. So if you had, and your only goal as a as a being is to propagate your existence. What's so wrong with that? It it's just because it landed on Earth and we as Earthlings have all this free will and all Okay, so what? So with this one getting to the end and it's like

Because I don't know who's who, what I may feel or m what I may think is is basically irrelevant because I don't have a place to put my energy. I can just sit back and observe. That's all I can do. It's a very rare thing for a horror movie to do, to leave you in a place where all you can do is watch. Movies in general, horror movies specifically, want you to come out the other end with a very specific feeling.

Um the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, you know, the heaven and the hell, whatever it might be. And this one leaves you with nothing. And so in a lot of ways It's almost like a bad prom date. Where you you do all this planning, you go through all these things and for some reason your limo gets a flat tire or you know

she's on the rag or the restaurant's out of steak, whatever it might be. It's in a way it's like a profound disappointment, but at the same time it's like also a new place to be and you don't know what to do with it. And it it it confuses things as a human, as a human who who who watches movies and takes in stories and it's like most stories there's a very defined ending. And with this one

And I don't know if it was their intent. I I don't know if it was John Carper's intent to fuck with people for forty years. But well fucking played, sir. Well played. I probably will watch this movie a hundred more hundred times more before I die, and I will enjoy each time just as much because this movie is that good.

Yeah, there's there's just so many like happy accidents in the final scene alone. You know, does Childs drink gasoline instead of whiskey? Probably not, but the fact that he willingly drinks from McCariti's bottle says something about how little he cares about the possibility of infection. You know, as you mentioned, you know, people have long talked about, you know

The breath being visible while, you know, Charles produces no fog at all. You know, it could just be a light influke, but just imagine just that quiet satisfaction of discovering that unintentionally happened in your movie. I went frame by frame last night. You can see his bre I went frame by frame. You can see it. So that one's bullshit. That's all I can say.

Whether he drank gasoline or not, but I mean it does then beg the question. It's like so if if it was one thing giving another thing something. But it just it just keeps the question spiling to the point where you're like, I gotta stop thinking about this because I'm gonna drive myself nuts. And then pretty soon, much like last night, it's two o'clock in the fucking morning and I have to go to work and I'm still thinking about this.

So that's why it's brilliant. Because I, you know, you and I are both thinking, feeling people. We both have things to do in our lives. We both are very easily able to compartmentalize things and go on to do other things. This movie fucks with you. And the fact that it does that, the fact that it was maybe not necessarily created for that purpose, but the fact that for all these years that ability to do that still lingers. I I I

I'm I'm happy if I can stink up a gas station bathroom for for ten minutes. Okay. This is Over forty years worth of debate and discussion and conversation and for some people a lot of animosity because you're just fucking wrong and In the end, I don't care who's right and who's wrong. I like the fact that people are still talking about

Yeah, so most readings at the end and even the ones that have become pretty well worn at this point, you know, it circles back to affirming just how great the film is. You know, the distinction that matters is the tone. No, when conversation evolves into debating whether child was attacked by something off screen, you know, it can become this litmus test for uh People who understand the purpose of, you know, ambiguity, you know, not just in the thing, but just in storytelling generally.

No, the essential principle is that none of the linger questions can be answered and that that was all by design. You know, this isn't an episode of Colombo with the beginning and the end being removed, nor is it a true mystery story with this hidden solution. No, if audiences could access an answer, the characters couldn't, you know, the film would lose something pivotal. Now crucially the characters themselves stop trying to resolve it.

And that surrender is precisely what makes the ending so brilliant. No, sure, McCready could try another blood test, you know, they could hold their arms over the fire, they could attempt to kill each other. But even a definitive conclusion would prove nothing meaningful to them. No, it would just be an act of survival instinct, nothing more. No, these two were never friends. They barely tolerated each other before any of that had happened.

You know, no matter how much we care, they make no effort to soothe our anxiety. You know, McGreedie's laugh belongs to a man who expected to die heroically and, you know, haven't survived can only chuckle at how anticlimactic you know his actual death will be. Well to get to the end of the whole thing and the other being that survives is effectively your camp nemesis. I mean there's no

There's no other way to put that than it's like it's kind of a giant middle finger to both characters. Because either one of them would have preferred to have been left with anybody else. So the just the The kind of overarching hypocrisy of leaving And I I I hate to use the term, but it makes sense to to to leave black and white together. I the the two opposite ends of the spectrum together to face this thing down. Only to understand that there actually is nothing to face down. They're screwed.

If they're like we said before, if they're human, they're dead. If one of them's an alien, the human's dead. If they're both aliens, well, they're gonna go into the ice and wait until the next human comes. And given the disaster that happens at this facility, I'll tell you what, more humans are coming. So With the creature and what it learns about humans, it it seems to me that at the bare minimum it would have picked up that

This is a facility. It's on the very, very, very outskirts of society where people generally don't go, but you know, it's it's like Star Trek, boldly going where no one's gone before. And the Probably the weakest part of our humanity is that when we put people on these outskirts of things, whether it be space, whether it be uh under the ocean, whether it be somewhere off in the ice where conditions are inhospitable.

The one thing that we have as people is compassion. So when something bad happens, we inevitably send more people to try to help the people that something bad happened to. We're always gonna do that. That's what being a human is. Like it's not what I would do because I I'm just me. I that's not what I would do. But I think inevitably it's what society does. And you and you have to look at these things on a societal terms and a s from a societal station.

And that's just what would happen. So if the thing has absorbed enough people by now, it has to know that. So no matter what it does, it's one. You know, if it's completely dead and there's just two humans left, well then it's at best a draw. So no matter what happens in this movie The humans lose. That's I mean, that's what boils down to. And you can attribute that, you can call it whatever you want. You can call it.

war, you can call it famine, you can call it whatever else. Anything that attacks the basic point that when when humans start butting against things hard in the world, the inevitable outcome is if they lose. A and this movie kinda just caps that off, but it just also happens to throw an alien in there. Yeah, this is one of those movies where when everything is said and done, you know, it it it reminds me of the phrase, you cannot squeeze blood from a stone.

Definitively solve a you know polynomial without knowing at least one variable or determine who is or isn't the thing. You know, if John Carpenter doesn't want you to. So, you know, why do people keep talking about it? You know, some might argue that wanting an answer just might miss a point. You know, that instinct is correct in spirit. But the word want is important. When it comes to ambiguity in narrative, uh it generally exists because the storyteller knows you want answers.

And that tactically withholding them will produce this meaningful effect. You know, for the ending to work, we have to want it resolved. You know, it drives this shard of glass into your brain that never quite dislodges. You know, if we weren't unsettled by the lack of closure, the end in itself would have no power. And wanton, you know, wanton is human. You know, you cannot avoid it any more than you can avoid eating or sleeping. You know, what inspires uncertainty also inspires debate.

But there are spectrums to want in something in the fiction. You know, what critics of Obsessive Theorizing are often, you know, really arguing is that fixating on that final question tends the crowd out. everyone else and are frequently right. You know, there's so much more to the thing than that final scene. Which in itself the culmination of everything that precedes it. You know, when you fixate on infection timelines, you know, you risk missing the film entirely.

Uh, you know, cause I speak from experience, you know, haven't spent so many di different viewings completely missing the greatest joke in the movie, which to me was Blair's uh casually unmentioned news. Oh yes, where they walk in the cabin and they just kinda push the news out of the way and discover the creaky boards. It's like Yeah, you look around and like anybody else see that? But see, I think that moment that moment actually might I don't want to use the word counter, but

I think there's a difference between people wanting and people needing. And I think there's a need to eat, a need to have water, a need to have shelter. And I think something like the truth is less of a need and more of a want. But again, it's also of very human nature. But Not having the truth is not gonna keep us from existing. But not having food or water will keep us from existing. So the very end of this thing is it's like with the movie, it's like, do we need the truth?

Or do we want the truth? As someone who's watched this movie over a hundred times, I'll be honest, I don't fucking know. I don't know. And that's what makes it beautiful. And I think it's one of those things, to be perfectly honest, that if I actually knew the truth and not because I needed it, not because I wanted it, just because it was given to me, I think it might ruin the movie for me. So I think

Yeah, y y you made the the the casual comment yesterday, like the only way you're gonna know is if you send uh John Carpenter a check and it's like, you know what, please nobody write that check. I don't wanna know. I I think my life will be better if I don't know. Because I'll always be able to talk to my friends about this movie. And we get to have the debate. I had I had the debate at work today. I had it. And moreover, I'll be able to show this movie to someone who's never seen it.

Let them soak it in and then have the debate. And it will just continue to be one of those things where it becomes sort of uh enigmatic of just Of horror and of storytelling and and moreover, of great fucking stellary or storytelling because we've gotten to this place and you and I've discussed this more times than I can even count. Movies like this are getting rare. They're just rare now. I think we could say that.

uh of its caliber, I think like centers, I think centers is of this movie's caliber. Now it did it f it did it far faster and got all the recognition up front, but I think they're of the same caliber. They're both great movies. But then go back two years, three years, five years, ten years. Put up your scale. What's gonna match it? Next to nothing. So when you have these movies that are once or twice in a decade and that they're this good

I mean, A they're worth talking about because we're horror nerds, right? That's just what it is. And these are the things that we find fascinating. And I will always, in at least in my own head, be happier talking about X horror movie than I ever will be about

X car that somebody drives or X purse that somebody owns or X this or X that. There's so many things in life that don't fucking matter. And I know there's a lot of people that are gonna say, Well it's just a horror movie. Why does it matter? And I I would say i because a horror movies speak to me on a level that almost nothing else does.

And because it does that, it brings me into a group of people that I otherwise would not have met, and it leads me to conversations that I otherwise would not have had. So if you break that down, you break if you peel away all the onion and if you peel away all the bullshit, this is stimulating. It's stimulating and it kinda makes me want to know more in the end.

And that I think is what what is worth it, Nien, when it comes to like a really good horror movie. It's the never ending discussions. And there's there's a few other movies like this. There's there's a few, there's uh The Exorcist, there's The Shining. Um, misery. Uh, the first saw movie I think really generates a lot of conversation. The first scream movie, I think, generates a lot of conversation.

And but they're in pretty quiet company. There's not a ton of movies that are like just this spectacular. Um I for me I'm just I'm glad it exists. I'm glad that after all these years of doing this, we've got to talk about it because this movie just has so much going on and it's very easy to set it aside as just a gore fast. with an alien. It's it's it people people do it. Um i i it's unfortunate that they can't look a little deeper into this and see just between

how bleak the movie is, just the nihilistic approach it's just taken. But then also from the perspective of what it takes to be a person who's a scientist and is able to put yourself away in this like really solitary environment and deal with all the bullshit that comes along with that. There's a as a human, there's a lot going on in this movie. Then you break it right down on the end and it's you look at the whole thing and it's like Is there any human left anyway? I don't know, man. I don't...

And another um I would say I wouldn't say necessarily say underappreciated, but another thing that I wanna talk about is just the remarkable sound design of the thing. You know, when you hear You know, people analyzing, you know, what the film accomplishes with its audio, you know, which animal noises were being sampled and why they were likely chosen. You know, it permanently like changes how you describe sound in any movie.

And I think for me, like the particularly striking thing about it is just the idea that the Benin's theme scream is this collection. of overlapping noises as though every creature that the organism has ever assimilated is screaming simultaneously. You know, we re watch the film, you know, you notice just a little bit.

how every element in this communicates with the cold. You know, it's not simply that they filmed on location so it looks cold. You know, it's the use of color, the lighting, the decision to shoot on location. You know, they're all deliberate choices. So when a character shivers, you know, you sense that it's barely acted. You know, you notice details like that. It's essential to, you know, learning to read a film beyond just literal screenplay.

Well this was made at a time where and uh very few movies will do this now where they actually put their actors in a situation That's gonna be far different from the trailer that they sit in before it's their time to shoot. Now this was most of this was formed or was filmed rather uh around Juneau, Alaska, and then parts of it were also done in Canada. What I can say w without a doubt is that it was cold as fuck. And

It's not something where a lot of movies and especially I mean, let's face it, filming a movie in the winter is a challenge. Um And so I think a lot of what we get for background and for scene shots and things like that, yeah, they th they're done in a place where it's winter. Uh but we're also in a place where People that make movies now put a lot of effort into keeping their actors comfortable.

And this movie didn't even do that for a second. It was like, guess what guys, it's cold. You're gonna go hungry, you're gonna go thirsty. Every time you walk outside, someone's gonna shove an icicle up your ass and you're just gonna have to deal with it. But it comes across on screen. It comes across in how hard the environment is. And even from the places like going from McCready's cabin underneath into that tunnel system and

Arguable point. They seemed very comfortable with that tunnel system, although it seemed like nobody knew it existed. Everyone knew where to go. Little weird. Anyway, the overarching thought though is that

You felt the environment. You felt it. It felt like it fucking sucked. Going to the creature. If there's if there's one place where you're gonna pull a guy in and you're gonna make a guy hurt about a creature, you're gonna use a dog, right? That's just what you're going to do. You think about all the movies we've seen, fundamentally no one's gonna give give a shit if it's a cat, right?

There's no other creature on the hierarchy of creatures other than humans where you're gonna get a person to care as much. And whether it's the initial sled dog running kind of across the the tundra or it's the other sled dogs or the the burning of the sled dogs and the the the noises that they make, it's it's nothing short of horrific.

And it it as a human being, I think it was designed to make you feel things and it was designed to make you uncomfortable and and chisel away at a little bit of your your emotional fortitude. And as that gets chosen away over the course of this movie, it you just you get brought to a lower and lower and lower place.

And by the end of the movie where you're you're brought to a place where as a human being and and you know anyone who goes out in the world or or goes to work at we all have a nemesis. I have a nemesis right now. I I don't like this person.

But when you're reduced to a place, you can see that the first one is a little bit Where you've gone through all those other things and now you were sitting by the burning remains of your environment knowing that you're probably gonna die and the person that you have to die with is your nemesis? I mean what bigger giant cosmic middle finger is there than that?

Uh So when it comes to observations about filmmaking and techniques, you know, so many times those are being weaponized and one of the stories that has circulated for a long time, uh about like

the reveal, I I will say, comes from the cinematographer, you know, Dean Gundy, who had claimed that you can identify infected characters by the absence of a glint in their eyes. That was a theory that had circulated for years. You know, that theory even reached John Carpenter, who just flat out replied that Cundy was full of shit. You know, even until recently, you know, even those who dismissed the theory treated the underlying claim as factual.

Uh so I just briefly want to talk about what had happened during uh the sequence. Uh so what Kandia was actually describing was this technique that was used in a specific scene in the movie that was during the blood test sequence. Now as Palmer is moments away from being exposed, we have this close up of his face.

and in that particular shot, you know, the lighting was adjusted so that none of it reflected in his eyes. You know, it was an effect that was cold and flat And it was incredibly unsettled in retrospect, as though whatever is wherein Palmer has already stopped pretending, you know, uncertain whether McCready's tests will actually work.

And, you know, it tells us something real about how a cinematographer can generate this sort of like spontaneous visual meaning while a film is already in production. And it's the kind of detail that is just too subtle to plan in advance. You know, you'd be in that room filming that scene, watching a light sit against an actor's face, and suddenly just think like, Oh wait, stop, hold on. You know, it was just a cool thing that he did. You know, it was not announcing that he had this.

You know, master key that unlocks the entire film's internal logic. You know, he was illustrating how movies get made. You know, meaning immersion in the moment, you know, not delivered wholesale from this blueprint.

I think ultimately the with the whole movie. I think part of the ar overarching story, at least for me as a viewer, was to sort of dull or to uh knock the shine off of what it is to be human. And when we have all these scenes where All these all these uh uh characters are fighting amongst each other. That honestly is just kind of like step one, right? Step one is let's fight amongst each other. Step two is how hard are we gonna fight? Step three is who are we gonna sacrifice?

And and so it's a at its core it's a de evolution of what it is to be human. And one of the simplest things to do is to just take someone's face in their eyes and just remove the humanity. And I've always liked that sort of rumor. We'll call we'll call it a rumor. I've I've always kind of liked that, that they talk about that and it's like it has the shine. But I mean if if you go through his whole entire movies

There are so many people in this that are backed into a corner, are up against the wall, i realistically looking for the shine in someone's eyes and then how the lights were set. It's a little bit far-fetched. But the point is the point still holds true that that we have to watch these people, watch their de evolution and Whether it's a group of friends, whether it's a family, whether it's a country, i these things are not unfamiliar.

Things fall apart. And as a as an author, I like frequently quotes, the center does not hold. And when you have that happen, uh this is a uh absolute great depiction of what you see happen in the end. But with this group of people The interesting thing to me is that when something bad happens and th the first bad thing that happens is somebody flies into their camp, blows up a helicopter and shoots at them. Right out of the gate, they're at each other's throat.

And for a movie that's forty years old, it feels very today. People people don't bother with conflict resolution. They don't bother with You know, asking the person that they have some kind of a conflict with, hey, what's actually behind this? And is there some way we can mitigate this before one of us kills the other one? Nobody bothers with that anymore. It's you did this thing, bang, you're dead, and I'm going to prison. That's just that's our society now.

This is a this is a great look at it. Back in a time when Maybe if we had asked a few more questions we could have fixed some things. And we just we just did. We just continued to devolve. And now here we is where we find ourselves and you look around at the world today it's It's not the most comfortable place to be anymore. Um th there's a lot going on that uh you know, a as a human being I I shake my head at and I I don't know what to do with. Um

But that in the end is kinda like this movie. I look at the end of it and I I I don't know what to do with it. And Maybe that was the point. Maybe that was the point is to is to leave you walking away asking questions because if you spend enough time asking enough questions eventually you can find a resolution. And whether it's time, whether it's patience, whatever else, people just aren't asking the questions anymore.

Yeah, so I I really don't want to talk about what happens in the prequel. I I will just say this. I don't think a film like twenty eleven's that they can do much by existing You know, what it does clarify almost despite itself is the destructive potential of prioritizing information over trauma.

and the inverse truth. You know that information shaped by drama has the power to illuminate, you know, tell interesting stories and provoke genuine emotion. You know, if an artist doesn't show you something, It's genuinely to a specific end. You know, if they clearly have no intention of ever showing you, there's a reason.

You know, uh deliberately ambiguous fate invites us to wonder, you know, to exercise our own creativity in the space the film leaves open. No, there's no pleasure in ransacking a movie to force its meaning. So if you value, you know, a golden egg, you know, it's a poor strategy to kill the goose. In art, what exists beyond the frame tells its own story, you know, and the artist communicates by withholding as much.

As by showing, you know, and refusing to acknowledge this is the same as choosing not to hear most of what they're saying. So as for the question of who, if anyone, is the thing at the end of the nineteen eighty two, you know, the most satisfying answer remains Carpenter's instinctive response when he was asked, you know.

He he just handled it with easy grace, saying that you know, anyone who wants to find out can send him a check in the mail. But I will say since since then, and I don't know how many people have actually played it, um If you are someone out there who prefers a more definitive resolution in the two thousand and two video game, which is also titled The Thing. Um and this is considered canic like in canon by John Carpenter himself. You know, in it

We have uh you know, players find a record and from the creedy, you know, resigned to his and child's fate. You know, they discover child's body, you know, he died of hypothermia. McCready survives, appearin' at the end to help defeat the thing before escaping with the pilot. You know, it's this heartbreaking answer and a legitimate one for those who needed it. Now that being said, I know A a lot of people haven't played it. A lot of people don't even know it was a game, so

In the end, it it doesn't really matter. But like if it's one of those things, like if you're a completionist, if you wanted to see you know, what happens after then I urge people to seek out it on Steam. Uh I don't even know if it's on sale but I I haven't gotten around to it yet. But the answer is there. But I know for a lot of people, you know, it's a completely different medium. So it's like we can't treat it as just a continuation. It's its own separate answer.

Oh sure. The canon versus the medial plane. Yeah, no, I get that. Um yeah, you know, twenty eleven the thing, um, I think I'm one of the people that doesn't actually hate it. So why don't I hate it? Well, I mean Mary Elizabeth Winstead is reason number one. Uh reason number two is uh C reason number one. Is it great? No. It's not. It's not great.

If you pretend that the first movie never existed, is it a passable sci fi slash horror movie? Yeah, it actually is. Um, so I I think people just have to give movies credit, you know, where credit is due. Now, was it a box office flop and whatever else? I mean it no, it was a fucking bomb. It was an absolute bomb. uh still it was not a terrible movie and to me it's to this day it's it's still pretty watchable. Now is it anywhere I mean I mean i i the movie the thing wiped

The movie The Thing from eighty two wipes the thing from twenty eleven off the heel of its boot when it walks into a saloon and orders a drink. Yeah, that's just how things are. Um But this theme that just because it was a you know, we're gonna make a break wall these years later and whatever else it just I think there's a lot of people that they just think it has to be crap and I would say watch it first and then decide. So because I I still sorta don't hate that one.

As far as the canon goes in the whole video game thing, yep, I've I've I've deep dove that. Um and I don't think that because one's a movie and one's a game, you can necessarily discount it. At the same time until I see uh Kurt Russell doing a particular thing. It's not real. It's just not. And I I I I might be uh just a completely hypocritical prick because of that, but you know what? I don't fucking care. I I just don't.

I I think I will go to my grave loving the ambiguity. I think I will love it because It's one of those things where it takes the story and whatever the vicious tornado it is that like is sweeping through your head. Um I think it keeps it up in the clouds and it keeps it always there. And It's not something that you're thinking about every day but

On the on the average day when maybe the winds slow down a little bit and a g couple of things from the upper atmosphere get to fall down a little bit, you go, Oh, yeah. Do you think about it? And then what do you do? You you finish your day at work, you go home and you watch a movie. And that I think is the vicious tornado of storytelling and slash horror. And For a lot of other people it might be storytelling and rom coms or storytelling and sci fi's or

storytelling and drama or storytelling and uh uh historical documentaries, whatever the fuck it may be. But that tornado and being able to exist in the top layers of that tornado and just flutter down every once in a while. And be pulled out and you're like, I need to go back to that. And that's the thing. That's what it is. It it It's atmospheric. It it's always going to exist. It it's it's

Going to be a never ending thing. And even if I send John Carpenter a check, and I I I'll admit I find myself wondering how much that check has to be before he actually tells me. And if I could start a GoFundMe and enough people would like Here here's a million dollars, John Carpenter. Tell us and he just was like, Oh shit, a million bucks, okay, sure. And then he'd go, it was the sled dog. They're like, Ah, fuck you. You know? So uh

I enjoy the fact that I don't know. Um Because in a strange way it it it keeps the it keeps the IP, it keeps the story, it keeps the characters interesting and I hope that I can watch this movie a hundred more times and maybe at this point every other time or every third time pick up one little more detail that I just didn't see the first time or the third time or the hundredth time and

It just makes my appreciation for the movie all that much better. Yeah, and I always appreciate the fact that even after all of these years, um, we still have the actor Hamming up the endon too. Uh, because I remember, you know, Kurt Russell had noted that, you know, he and Carpenter tried different approaches to the endon, you know, and found that.

simply just having the two men sit together was as he put it just called for. And more recently, at Carpenter's Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, you know, Keith David uh had address the question with characteristic directness. You know, he's like, first, let me clear this up. It wasn't me. You know, whether he was joking or not, it aligns with, you know, what the two thousand two game had already established. So um at the end of the day

You know, the thane has and always will be one of the most approachable genre movies, whether you're a fan of the genre, whether you're not. This is one of the few movies out there Akin to like a Night of Living Dead, as I mentioned this prior episode where, you know, this is just a universally seen movie. And I'm sure forty years from now This conversation is still gonna be happening. We're never gonna get a definitive answer. And you know, the community just needs to learn.

to accept it. You know, if you love the thing, the best thing you can do is just learn to listen to it. You know, as enjoyable as the theories are, you know, they don't really hold up under scrutiny. So I don't know if this is gonna be one of those scenes that is ever going to be put to rest. Um, but it's just one of those questions that's just been hanging in the air, you know, which is exactly where I think it belongs.

Horror movies in the end. Well, let's say. All movies. are like going to the bar and deciding what it is you want to drink. And sometimes you want an easy night and you hang out with your friends and you just drink beer. Some nights you wanna have some hard stuff and really, you know, party it up and What movies like The Thing are, it isn't whether you want beer or liquor. It's the shelf that you pick from.

And the thing is top shelf. Okay. The thing is not bottom shelf. The thing is not Pap's Blue Ribbon. It is not, you know, Jameson or Jim Beam. The thing is top shelf. And much like the top shelf in our in our most of our normal lives, it's not something that you go to every single day. And and there's always a a reason for that. It could be time, it could be money, whatever else.

But it's good to know that on the day that you need them, on the day that you need that top shelf, that it's there and it's waiting for you, and it's gonna be as good as the first time you had it. Yeah, I mean I I I I that's a a great way to put it. Um and this is definitely one of those movies that could fit any number of phobias, I will say. It even would've fit with what we have planned for next month. But you know, since it is the quintessential

monster movie. Um, you know, it just it felt fit in to be the bookend of Terophobia. Um, so that being said, looking ahead, uh, we have Claythorophobia coming up throughout March. which is the fear of being trapped. Um and

I know we've covered a couple of movies that have could easily have fit in this, but you know, that's the nice thing about having different phobias. Uh it allows us to, you know, seek out some other titles that uh are gonna be interesting to talk about because I know I got a couple of ones in our like decisions phobia coming up that a lot of people aren't too fond of that I thought like they're not that bad so that we'll we'll circle back to that at a later date

But since, you know, Eli Roth uh you know, continues to churn out movies and, you know, he's got some stuff in the pipelines. I thought it was fitting. We should circle back to Cabin Fever. Of 2002. Um, another one of those I mean the bath the shaving sequence in that movie is always gonna get me in regards to like modern horror movies. Uh and it's just like that whole scene just

Makes me shiver every time I see it. Uh so looking forward to that next week. Uh I hope you have a great vacation, grind house. Well uh we'll be watching Captain Fever on uh Tuesday. And again, watch parties, Discord, Tuesday, Thursday, 7:30 p.m. Pacific time. at bit.ly forward slash handle with scare. So with that being said, guys, that will do it for us here tonight. We will see you back next week. Have a good night.