Special Features



The Thing: 40th Year Anniversary of the John Carpenter Masterpiece



By AL J. Vermette



It was released on June 25th, 1982, and although shockingly a box office train wreck, it became one of his greatest movies and most beloved horror classics of all time. Based on the novella Who Goes There by author John W. Campbell, the film was in fact a remake of the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World, only the Carpenter film is much more faithful to the original story than the 1951 film.


It’s the story of a group of people in the middle of the Antarctica landscape who discover that a nearby Norwegian research station found something deep in the ice that they were never meant to find. Among the downed spaceship iced over, there is a creature frozen in the ice as well that the Norwegian team releases and is soon consumed by the creature's wrath. Now the beast is in the American camp and running amuck killing, eating, and imitating members of the team to the point that no one can trust their fellow man because he in fact may just be The Thing. ​



Starring Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, Keith David, Charles Hallahan, Richard Masur, and others round out the cast and the human meal for the title creature. Kurt Russell who worked previously on the movies Elvis and Escape From New York with Carpenter, was the director's first choice to play the lead of helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady, although up until that point, Russell was known for mostly working in Disney films….yeah can you believe that!


The creature and gore effects were produced by makeup legend Rob Bottin who crafted a creature unlike anything ever seen before. In fact the creature itself has many parts of a whole as it is not really just one creature but many split off from that whole. It was his work with on-screen in-camera practical effects that sells the movie's outlandish monster gore effects to the 10th degree. When you see the Thing changing its form it’s scary, nauseating, and oh so cool as the beast transforms before our eyes. No cutaways, nothing hidden in the shadows that you can’t see, no camera cheats of any kind, just all-out creature gore in full view and right in our face. The way only good special effects should be.


Rob Bottin worked with Carpenter on the movie The Fog two years before and so the director knew what the young effects artist was capable of pulling off. The 1951 movie The Thing From Another World had a single creature with a single form since at the time the film's budget and limited special effects of the time could not create the shape-changing creature that the original novella first conceived. But now with Bottin on board as effects wizard, the film could now, at last, bring the book's author’s vision to life. ​



As said before, upon this film’s release it was a train wreck at the box office and made only $19.6 million in the U.S. on a $15 million budget. And 1.5 million of that budget went to the special effects… a well-placed investment indeed. Still, the movie was a box office flop and it was hit hard by the critics who mostly gave the film negative reviews with the film magazine Cinefantastique saying that “The Thing was the most hated movie of all time. I don’t know what the hell they were thinking at the time but no one liked this movie….like at all.”

One of the reasons many believe that The Thing did so poorly in the theaters upon release is that it was competing with the more family-friendly movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The Steven Spielberg powerhouse was what people were looking to see in the summer of 1982 and not the horror gore fest that was The Thing. Yeah, I saw E.T. in the theaters that year and saw it only once…..I saw The Thing over the years about 40 times, so guess what movie I prefer.


However, after its theatrical release went so badly, when The Thing hit home video, everything turned around. People got to see what they didn’t go and watch in the theater and just loved the film and all its gory glory. And given a chance, one can clearly see that this movie is much more than just a blood gore show for the eyes but a psychological mystery that leaves you wondering who is the Thing and who is still human as the story unfolds. The very fear of not knowing if the man standing next to you is still a man or some immoral creature waiting to kill you at any moment is what makes this movie stand out among one of the greatest psychological thrillers ever made. Its paranoia is what drives this movie and its bleak and unfinished ending leaves the viewer speculating on who is the last man and who is the thing. Why the movie critic of the time couldn’t see that is always bothered me. Did they only see creature effects gore and nothing else? Come on, this movie has so much more than that….and yes, the effects are fucking amazing! But the film is well-acted, well-directed and shot. ​



The Thing is a movie that sits in a very unique category in that it is one of only 15 movies in history (so far) that do NOT have a single female character in the film. The cast is made up of only male characters who live in the research facility. Heck, even the 1951 classic sci/fi horror movie had at least one woman shoehorned into the all-male cast. The 2011 prequel of The Thing did change that as there is more than one woman in the movie's cast. I don’t think that The Thing was made to exclude women in the cast just for the sake of it, but I think in my opinion they went with an all-male cast because at that time most research stations located in the deep Arctic would not have too many if any women working at all. Not sexist, but before the 80’s most dangerous research facilities, would have been staffed by men… a sad fact but true.


Today The Thing is regarded as a masterpiece of horror and science fiction filmmaking and is easily my favorite movie by John Carpenter with Escape From New York being the other. It has stood the test of time and is still regarded as superior over the CGI-laced effects of the prequel film in 2011 despite how primitive Rob Bottin’s rubber, bubble gum, mayonnaise, and K-Y Jelly usage to make a monster was. Today The Thing is one of the best-loved horror/ sci/fi movies ever made and along with its 2011 prequel, it also spawned comic books, fan fiction, and video games. In 2020, Universal Studios said that they are planning a remake of The Thing and want to use elements of both the novella, The Thing From Another World as well as Carpenter’s film. For a movie that was said to be the most hated film of all time is now called number one of the top horror films of all time by the Boston Globe and other publications and media. Not bad for a movie no one liked or went to see! ​