Bloody Extra: The Thing

The End? The Thing (Universal, Carpenter, 1982)

To start, I have to make the expected comparison to 1958’s The Blob (Paramount, Yeaworth) in the way both films involve one-ness, consumption, absorption, and ruddy-jellied-everything in each of their narratives. They are readily alike in titular twinning: the indiscriminate blob and thing. The monsters themselves are formless in different ways: one morphs, takes on different appendages, different presences altogether; the other grows, takes in bodies and makes those bodies to become as it is and appear as it does. 

To the question of inspiration/homage, the films are loosely connected, at least in premise. Each extraterrestrial terror arrives at earth by falling/flying in from outer space. And at its end, the Blob is flown and thrown into remote arctic ice, supposedly contained, although the film ends with a question mark. This is not to suggest they are the same monster, only to note that with the amount of remakes/sequels/prequels amassed by each we might be able to assume that they were feeding off each other in some way.

While the parallel (and the punning) is likely overdone, the comparison does benefit the conversation of infection v. absorption. Is the experience of fear different in each case? How does being taken over compare to being taken in? The concept of contagion, as it appears in The Thing, is more menacing because it is inner. Secret interiority seems a threat to commonality because it can’t be readily known and subsequently protected against. The point made about our being inhuman and not even knowing it— flesh-persons, flesh-monsters, where is the difference?—makes even that commonality suspicious. It suddenly more urgent that we try to know who’s who, and equally disturbing that we can’t know completely.

With respect to the scene mentioned in class of Doc in his isolated bunker, the unavoidable focus was on the noose, hanging clean and unused in the center of the frame. There is something else to note here: when he comes to the window, light from the flare washes his face in the red we would expect to see were he to be writhing and drenched in blood like any other metamorphosis we’d seen up to this point. Visually, he looks the same aside from this hint. Behaviorally, though, his unusually composed demeanor and repetition of please-just-let-me-out (human parroting or almost like following alien code?) lead us to suspect that he has already been changed. I think that thin film of color is a further indication that something isn’t right.

There is a discussion to be had here about audience intuition as well—how attention is captured, fed, exploited; how the film hands us certain clues as well as false starts, and where our participation exists in that. Even when confused about characters, blood types, and so on, there are points where we have a better inclination, I think, to what happens unseen. We think we know, we often think we’re onto something... it’s interesting to consider how we sense certain things, how we can be wrong, and whether the alternative is worse.