The alien invasion of 1982 came to us on two fronts. The first went almost unnoticed, and was swiftly forgotten. Two weeks later, the second one struck and we never heard the end of it for a long time ever after.
For all its years of ubiquity, ET: The Extra Terrestrial, though hardly forgotten, its place on the mantle of our movie memory seems very much in the past. It didn’t help when it was re-released with digital tampering some years back, to an almost universal chorus of displeasure. A chorus even its director, Steven Spielberg has since joined. That first forgotten invasion struck Ireland in November of ‘82, just under a fortnight before E.T. phoned home, and is, ironically, the one that had legs. Though, I grant you, they were huge fecking spidery legs sprouting from an unfortunate victim’s head.
It’s a testament to John Carpenter’s The Thing, that although it’s ostensibly a remake, there has been nothing quite like it, either before or since. Adapted by Burt Lancaster’s screenwriter son, Bill, from Howard Hawks' original 1951 production The Thing From Another World, in which a crashed spacecraft is discovered by a team of researchers near an isolated research outpost in the Antarctic. Taking the remains of the alien pilot to their labs, they slowly realise it may be not quite dead. In a smart narrative choice, Lancaster wrote his script almost as a quasi-sequel to the original story, with American researchers coming across what’s left of a Norwegian research outpost, after they have first discovered the spaceship.
Carpenter’s film deserves at least two Oscars. The first in the Worst Timing Ever category. In a summer of a cuddly, family friendly, emotionally manipulative alien, there was simply no place for a shape-shifting, flesh absorbing, Lovecraftian monstrosity in the stomachs of the general public, let alone their hearts. The Thing was hated. HATED. Despised by both critics and moviegoers alike. It quickly disappeared, and took with it Carpenter’s mainstream Hollywood career. He was quickly dropped from directing duties on his next planned picture, Stephen King’s Firestarter, starring E.T. graduate and newly minted child star, Drew Barrymore. It was a huge loss to us movie lovers, that Carpenter was never allowed the opportunity to work on such a huge innovative canvas again.
If you’ve never seen this film, it’s pretty much impossible for me to describe the jaw-dropping effect its literally transformative monstrosities will have on you. I was reminded of this back in the nineties when I was working the late night shifts at Tower Records. My back to the till, a voice asked me, "Where can I find CDs by the The Chieftains? I turned around and almost had a heart attack: it was Norris, spider-head in the flesh! I directed American-Irish actor, Charles Hallahan, towards the Irish music section and regained my composure. The man himself, sadly, did die of a heart attack a few years later, and is buried in Cork.
In the decades since the picture’s release, as cooler heads prevailed and CGI became ubiquitous, the mainstream critical intelligentsia came to realise what us geeks always knew: The Thing was so great, it was a classic of not just one, but two genres, both horror and science fiction. The second Oscar it deserved was for its creature effects. But for a couple of brief long shots, the effects are entirely physical and in-camera creations, spawned from the amazing talents - and these days mostly reclusive - Rob Bottin. Now so revered, he was hunted down and coaxed briefly out from his proverbial log cabin in the wilderness to oversee the graphic death of ….*SPOILER ALERT*…..King Joffrey in season four of Game Of Thrones.
In the end, what would you choose: making a film that earns billions at the box office, but ultimately fades from memory? Or one which is a financial flop at the time, but whose reputation and recognition keeps growing and growing with each generation as the years pass? Rob Bottin’s special effects, coupled with Carpenter’s oppressive Cinemascope photography, Kurt Russell’s beard, and Ennio Morricone’s near sadistically minimalist score, is the type of filmmaking that, well, defines film making.
Me? I’d sign on the dole and dine-out on The Thing.
The Thing screens at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin, on Saturday July 28th, as part of the Dark Skies season of sci-fi classics - more details here.
