"What can we do? What can we do?": John Carpenter's The Thing and Victor Salva's Jeepers Creepers

(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)

Two movies today.

I suppose that what separates the movies I'm watching and reviewing right now from the movies I'll be watching and reviewing once the official 13 Days of Halloween begin on Sunday is that these ones tend to lack that monumental horror-image that frightens me so. But there's more than one way to skin a teenager cat, and there's more than one way to visually demonstrate that something is going very, very wrong. The image may not be monumental in the ways I use the term, but it can be spectacular, and spectacularly horrifying too.

Such is the case with John Carpenter's The Thing, the 1982 reimagining of the 1951 sci-fi alien-invader flick of the same name (both are adaptations of the John Campbell short story "Who Goes There?"). Director Carpenter had previously pumped new, ahem, blood into horror with his phenomenally successful and influential ur-slasher flick Halloween. But that movie, for my money, has had much of its power stripped away by its imitators. Whereas slasher-movie copycats and general pop-culture rifferty tend to reveal the superiority of forerunners like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in Halloween's case they reveal the original's weaknesses, which are many. That film did precious little for me when I finally saw it. But Carpenter runs into no such difficulty with this, his second most-oft-imitated film, which is also his most frightening and visionary.

The plot is pure situational simplicity. The gruff, all-male crew of a remote American research station in Antarctica peek outside their windows to see a pair of frantic Norwegians in a helicopter, shooting at a fleeing sled dog. Within minutes, the two Norwegians are dead, the dog has been taken in, and the Americans are left wondering what the hell happened in the Norwegian research base the trio fled from, a full hour away by helicopter. Kurt Russell plays R.J. McCready, the bearded, heavy-drinking helicopter pilot who discovers that the Norwegian scientists had freed something from the ancient ice--and that that shape-shifting, alien something now walks among his crew.

Like several great horror films (Deliverance, The Exorcist, Texas Chain Saw), this film benefits greatly from its long, slow, tense opening segment. The frigidity and isolation of the snowed-in base is established in detail, as is the gruesome insanity of whatever-it-is-that-happened to the Norwegian, and as are the combustible personalities of the American crew.

Article Author: Sean T. Collins

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