 I loved the idea of being trapped in Antarctica, these people working up there for whatever reasons. Horrible winter, freezing conditions, cold, and is a monster lurking. The horror genre, like none other, sticks with me. Days, weeks, sometimes years after watching a horror film, I find myself returning to the same images that have been branded into my subconscious. One of my favorite horror films, and one that I return to year after year, is John Carpenter's The Thing. Released in 1982, it came out at the perfect time. Sensors were more willing to allow graphic content, animatronics, and special effects to reach new heights in large part because of the recent success of Star Wars, and Carpenter was able to take all these elements and combine them with the fundamentals of the horror genre to craft one of the greatest and most effective horror movies of all time. Today, I would like to examine how he incorporates all these elements together and explore the end result of The Thing. To quote Stephen King, there are three types of terror at the gross out, the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, and the last and the worst one, it's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear and when you turn around, there's nothing there. The Thing utilizes all three of these tropes to create terror. The most obvious one is gross out horror, there are no two ways around it. The Thing is a disgusting movie, much of the on set animatronics and makeup were created by Stan Winston, a special effects artist who loved to push gore to the extreme. To a lot of people, excessive gore may not be scary, blood, guts, and limbs isn't anything special, but everyone perceives fear differently and The Thing is a horror movie targets very specific triggers. It's an attempt to reach as wide an audience as possible. All that separates a thriller from a horror movie is terror. Take for example John Carpenter's film released four years earlier, Halloween. It's a very effective thriller, the music, the tension, the claustrophobia all put you on edge, but unless you're afraid of a man with a knife and a mask, the film probably won't terrify you. The Thing on the other hand goes after many different fears, all accumulating into one intense thriller. Rob Boteen, the designer behind the creature, chose to have The Thing be able to take the form of anything, which allows Carpenter to go after any and all potential fears. The Thing can look like anything. It doesn't look like one monster, it looks like anything. And out of this changing shape, this imitation comes all the creatures throughout the universe that The Thing has ever imitated. In addition, this helps to supplement the idea of gross out horror. Because The Thing is very hard to kill, it gives the characters more ways to harm it, and in turn, more ways to gross out the audience. The next thing that scares us is The Unnatural, and The Thing is full of this. The characters are forced to fight something inhuman, something that as aforementioned can take the form of our wildest imaginations or rather our wildest nightmares. Originally, Carpenter wanted The Thing to just take one form, but Boteen was able to convince him to have it take multiple forms. One, late in effect of this was figuring out how to stage, block, and light the different forms of the creature so the audience could see as much of it as possible. The first step was to storyboard everything. Mike Pluge and Mentor Hübner, with oversight by Carpenter, took executive control over storyboarding, going through scene by scene, shot by shot, to get every detail right. There are many scenes that play out as a perfect match on the storyboard and on screen. This made it much easier when it came time to actually shoot the scenes. Dean Cunney, the cinematographer, worked with Boteen to figure out the best way to light every creature to show off the unnatural terror that each one brings. I was really intrigued and challenged by the fact that we would be doing some things that hadn't been done up to that point. Of course, there is a very important balance to be struck between showing off the monster for maximum efficiency and showing too much of the monster so that the artificial nature comes through, breaking the illusion. One of the tricks with working with rubber is lighting it carefully so that it looks real. One of Cunney's ways around this was to backlight the creature showing off shadows and outlines that really helped to show off the terror of the creature. This also helped to influence the design of the different creatures. The low visibility found throughout the entire film is also used to help mask the creature, and it feels natural because even when we aren't seeing the creature, the film is still kind of hard to see, which always gives the illusion that the creature could be anywhere ready to attack. The last terror that King mentions is the psychological, because the horror of the thing doesn't stop with the monster. The idea of isolation in Paranoia is found from the very opening of the film until the end. The characters who are isolated from anybody and everybody else are clearly to an extent starting to lose it. They spend time alone from one another and don't have the trust for one another that is necessary to combat the thing. Once the creature is introduced into the equation, it plays on their mistrust of one another through its ability to turn into any one of them. Through this much deeper philosophical questions are asked about knowing other humans and ultimately about knowing yourself, but on a much more tangible level, this translates into the audience never knowing what is going to happen and knowing who to trust. We suspect that McCready isn't the thing, but we don't truly know until this scene. As for all the other characters, they could very easily be the monster. Carpenter very purposefully emits showing some scenes to the audience. We are withheld important information that would help to inform us who the monster could be. The characters don't know and we don't know. The film shows that as tension grows and as Paranoia builds, distrust of one another takes over. It shows how easily a community can fall apart. Given the release in the early 1980s, the film could be using this to discuss the US-Soviet Union Cold War. Maybe at how isolation hurts the group, or how McCready is more than willing to destroy everything and everyone, as long as it means the creature dies. The Paranoia and suspense in Psycho Horror all add to the story in the uneasiness of the film. We know that an attack could come from anywhere and at any point. The only questions are when and how. But so far I've only generally spoken about the film, so to end this video, I'd like to examine one scene that shows how all these elements work together to create a truly terrifying experience. The scene I'd like to examine takes place around two thirds of the way through the film. McCready is already isolated from the group. Paranoia is at its highest and the conflict is still building. Norris reveals himself to be the thing and in a few seconds, the first two of King's forces of terror are revealed. It's disgusting to see the internals of someone turn into a monster and of course it's very unnatural. Next, when McCready attacks up with the flamethrower, it reinforces how difficult it is to kill, again showing how unnatural this force of evil is. Next when Norris' head starts acting on its own, the same principles are reinforced. Gross out and unnatural. After the head turns into another monster, it touches upon the third area, the psychological. We begin to ask ourselves, is this even killable? Will our protagonist be able to survive? This reflects Lovecraftian ideas, comic horror that is so advanced, humanity is irrelevant, not a factor at all. The universe is so much bigger than we can comprehend and full of so much more. All these ideas are found within this one scene. In just a few minutes, all these elements come together. No matter what scares you or what makes you uncomfortable, something will be in this movie that impacts you and through the collaborative process of All Involved, this film was able to tap into the fundamentals of effective horror and the result was one of the greatest horror films of all time. Almost there's nothing you can do because here it comes. Hey everyone, I hope you enjoyed. The thing might be one of my favorite movies of all time. It's so effectively crafted and it just gets under your skin and stays there for months at a time. I love watching it around this time of year, right when it's starting to get cold and the perfect time for October. So anyway, I'd also like to mention that this video is made possible because of Patreon. If you're interested in supporting the channel, that's the best way to do so. There are a lot of great rewards over there including early access, a bonus audio commentary, and even getting a say into which videos come next. So if you're interested, there's a link on screen. There's also a link to my last video in which I looked at the Silence of the Lambs and some of the factors that worked together to make Hannibal Lecter one of the most terrifying and effective on-screen characters of all time. So if you're interested in that, check it out and thank you for watching.