What makes a good horror movie? May as well ask what makes a good movie of any kind. But we know quality when we see it, except when we don't, as in the case of 1982's The Thing, a movie that was critically panned and unpopular in its initial release. I think part of the reason for that is it's just so damned good. Sometimes things are better than they have a right to be. The trailers for The Thing probably made it look like a cheap knockoff of Alien. And, certainly, the Alien influence is there. Some would argue that it's a matter of The Thing and Alien having had the same influences, but the fact is a whole crop of movies were greenlit entirely because of the success of Alien. But more than any of the rest of such movies from the period or, really, since, The Thing took the effective qualities of Alien and pushed them harder.
The Thing is based on a novella from 1938 that had been adapted to film before by Howard Hawks. Both of those earlier versions are very much about paranoia, the sort of wartime thriller about not knowing the true nature of the people you work and live with. And that's certainly present in John Carpenter's 1982 film but it arguably draws quite a lot from H.P. Lovecraft as well. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, with its setting in Antarctica, was possibly an influence on the original novella, too, but Carpenter's film successfully channels the kind of horror Lovecraft's book excelled at--of encountering alien shapes disturbing not merely for how strange they are but for how they reconfigure normalcy.
Compared with Alien, I think what The Thing has is a very successful sequence of rising tension based on changing rules. We have this very normal, day to day world of humans established in this terribly remote location. People so used to a precarious existence they've become comfortable with it. Then it becomes more precarious as unpredictable things happen. The aliens in both Alien and The Thing, importantly, don't operate by completely arbitrary rules--you sense an underlying logic to how they live and act even if you don't know what those rules are. First it's a dog, then it's some kind of squid plant, then it could be anyone and everyone you know. It doesn't make sense and yet it kind of does, just like humans living comfortably in Antarctica.
And just as I can say these things are what make Alien and The Thing great horror films, it's still no easier for filmmakers to produce a reliable formula for making great horror films. The nature of formula is, in itself, deadly. It certainly killed the xenomorph and Ridley Scott was right to leave it out of Prometheus, the most successful horror film in the Alien franchise since the first film (Prometheus was another film that was better than it had a right to be).
It'd been more than twenty years since I saw The Thing when I noticed it was added to The Criterion Channel on May 1. I'll always love Alien but The Thing had the advantage of being a little fresher. It was much easier to be in the moment with MacReady (Kurt Russell) and the rest. I didn't remember who were going to be aliens when MacReady devised that test with the wire and the blood samples so I was entirely in sympathy with the shock of the outcome.
The very fact that the movie sets up a man who operates on gut instinct as the hero in contrast with helpless but diligent scientists is another part of the horror, too. It's too easy to second guess instinct, and sometimes instincts can be at war with each other. When instincts take charge while the doctor is getting his arms bitten off by a gut wound with teeth, it's frightening even when the instinct saves your life. When you start to rely on instincts, it means you have to be constantly on guard, never relying on a system to tell you what's going to happen next--those things constructed by the human capacity for abstract thought. The horror of relying on instinct is the horror of being reduced to an animal state. But we are all animals . . .
The Thing is available on The Criterion Channel.
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