One five-minute sequence at the heart of John Carpenter’s The Thing provides a showcase of expert special effects, direction and editing.
NB: The following contains spoilers for John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Critically pummelled at the time of its release, The Thing has since been reassessed as a cult classic. The elements that were considered black marks against it in 1982 – its graphic gore, terse set of characters and icily downbeat conclusion – are now considered to be among its greatest assets.
Rob Bottin’s practical effects work, in particular, was once considered too graphic for a studio movie, but is now rightly seen as some of the most imaginative and bizarre of the 1980s. In tandem with John Carpenter’s fluid direction and Ennio Morricone’s murmuring score, it all serves to create a masterpiece of horror and suspense.
But while The Thing’s splashiest set-pieces are often singled out for praise – the mutating dogs, the gnashing rib cage, the ambulating skull-spider – it’s a quieter scene that sums up the movie’s timeless brilliance. A five-minute sequence in which almost everyone involved in the film’s making combined their skills to create a spectacular moment of unease tipping over into outright mayhem.
You probably know the one we’re talking about just from the image above.
The residents of Outpost 31, a research station located somewhere deep in Antarctica, are menaced by an alien creature capable of assuming the form of any living creature it kills. With several of their number dead and amid an air of growing paranoia, gruff pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell) devises a test. He takes blood samples from each of his compatriots, puts them in petri dishes, then subjects each to the prod of a heated-up wire.
“When a man bleeds,” MacReady reasons, “it’s just tissue. But blood from one of you things won’t obey when it’s attacked. It’ll try and survive… crawl away from a hot needle, say.”
As MacReady talks, cinematographer Dean Cundy lingers over the reactions of his test subjects – each face a stew of resentment, fear and anticipation. We’re invited to speculate which of them might be the thing, and perhaps even wonder: does an imitation know that it’s an imitation? Does it think it’s still human right up until the moment it’s exposed, and the cornered alien bursts into view?
Read more: The Thing | The story behind Drew Struzan’s iconic poster
Morricone’s score is absent here; in its place, there’s the sound of a gale howling outside; the creaking of chairs, the icky slice of a scalpel through Nauls’ finger.
One by one, MacReady prods at the petri dishes with a length of heated wire. Each produces a squeak of metal against glass and a hiss of smoke. Windows (Thomas Waites) is revealed to be human, as is MacReady himself. Copper and Clarke, who unfortunately happen to be dead, aren’t alien imitations, either.
It’s here that Bottin and his effects team execute the first stage of an ingenious magic trick. From the moment MacReady tests Clarke’s blood onwards, he’s holding the petri dishes in his hand, the camera filming him from a low angle with his hand in the foreground, slightly out of focus.
Now it’s Palmer’s turn to be tested. Again, MacReady heats a piece of wire with his flamethrower, and we’re shown the same shot of him holding the petri dish. This time, however, MacReady discovers what happens when his test gets a positive result: the entire blood sample leaps out of the dish with an audible shriek.
Startled, MacReady drops both the petri dish and the flamethrower, marking the moment when the scene flips over from set-up to brutal pay-off: identity exposed, Palmer (David Clennon) begins to shape-shift in a bid to escape. The men next to him, still bound to the couch, begin to scream in terror. Windows freezes; MacReady struggles to activate his flamethrower.
The jolt of horror that Carpenter’s been building up to for almost four minutes, the sentient blood effect is brilliant in its simplicity. In those earlier shots of MacReady testing Clarke’s sample, Bottin has already replaced Kurt Russell’s right hand with a prosthetic. Like so many other elements in the sequence, it’s a clever piece of misdirection: a means of slipping the prosthetic hand past audiences before they see the intended effect. The blood creature that leaps up is, of course, hidden inside the fake hand and is forced into view through a hole in the petri dish.
All told, the entire shot lasts all of three seconds, from the moment MacReady touches the wire to the dish to his shocked expression as the blood comes squealing up at him. In the context of the whole sequence, it’s even smaller – a tiny piece of a jigsaw that takes in 58 individual shots, as this detailed editing breakdown explains.
An equally eerie shot afterwards, of the blood moving around on the floor by itself, was achieved even more simply: it’s a false piece of floor, rocked and tilted to make the blood appear to have a mind of its own.
A film functions a little bit like the thing itself: every part of it is a small part of a greater whole. Every shot and sequence is like an animal, to paraphrase MacReady, with a built-in function.
In The Thing’s case, its function is to enthral, captivate or simply scare the heck out of us.
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