By Sophia Mandt

John Carpenter’s The Thing is a clear illustration of perspectives—both conscious and unconscious—held by individuals within modern culture. Since The Thing is a horror film, it vividly depicts a more overtly primal, anguished, and fear-mongering understanding of what it means to be human than other similar works of popular culture. Note that my views align with a professor’s definition of culture as the means by which humanity confronts and overpowers divergent societal values and belief systems.

In a 1982 interview, Carpenter was asked whether he viewed The Thing as pro- or anti-science. In response, Carpenter elected to call it “pro-human,” arguing, “it’s better to be a human being than an imitation, or let ourselves be taken over by this creature who’s not necessarily evil, but whose nature it is to simply imitate, like a chameleon.” These words underlie The Thing’s moral underpinnings, where it is better to be a human being than a cunning and artificial monster who lacks human nature and can only ever imitate it. 

In the film, a group of stranded and isolated Americans working on an Antarctic job site encounter a Norwegian from another outpost, who has apparently gone mad. The man is furiously and recklessly shooting at a dog, and he is fatally shot; the rescued dog is placed into the site’s kennel for safekeeping. After the bizarre incident, R.J. MacReady, the movie’s brave yet self-destructive protagonist (played by Kurt Russell), explores the ruins of the Norwegian camp. The destruction is utterly brutal and includes the gruesome remains of another man. Outside, MacReady stumbles upon the corpse of a horrific humanoid beast resembling a freakish Lovecraftian nightmare, convincing him that something otherworldly has been there. Soon after MacReady returns this sordid beast for study at the American site, the dog that had so terrified the ill-fated Norwegian morphs into an alien monster. The gory creature brutally kills the other dogs in the pen, and is only stopped once the men unleash a flamethrower upon it. The horrors committed by the creature are so terrible that none of the men know what to call this vile thing. 

Bennings, the outpost’s meteorologist, views the corpse of the alien beast and questions why it must be destroyed. “Why destroy it? This could get the Nobel Prize,” he claims. And yet, this statement, imbued with Babylonic greed, supports the theme that those who foolishly think they can overpower dark forces will be absorbed and murdered by the thing itself. The viewer learns that the Norwegians’ insatiable curiosity unearthed the thing from its slumber deep within the Antarctic ice. That both Bennings and many of the Norwegian researchers are cruelly absorbed into the thing after boasting of its power proves that there are boundaries humanity must never transgress.

“Why destroy it? This could get the Nobel Prize,” he claims. And yet, this statement, imbued with Babylonic greed, supports the theme that those who foolishly think they can overpower dark forces will be absorbed and murdered by the thing itself.

Despite transgressions like those of Bennings and the others, many Americans still profess a belief in some god and believe humanity ought not to act outside the commands of this higher power. Carpenter’s belief in The Thing’s fundamental pro-humanness speaks to the fact that on a basic human level, most people would acknowledge that struggles against humanness—decisions that trespass the proper bounds of humanity—are unnatural and even evil. Many preach an undying faith in transcending our human limitations. Yet the mere fact that the characters in the movie see the monster’s shape-shifting power as deceitful and disturbing proves that only the shelter of modernity prevents people from reckoning with the ancient, fundamental, and innate understanding of one’s humanity. In response to the thing’s perfect human disguise, MacReady tells the others, “I know I’m human,” a sign that he, too, subconsciously understands how his nature is different from this demonic alien creature. 

Many preach an undying faith in transcending our human limitations. Yet the mere fact that the characters in the movie see the monster’s shape-shifting power as deceitful and disturbing proves that only the shelter of modernity prevents people from reckoning with the ancient, fundamental, and innate understanding of one’s humanity.

As the thing absorbs everyone it meets into its grotesque body, the viewer increasingly realizes that the film mirrors certain cultural values regarding man’s relation to his universe. While even a cursory look at history shows that humans often transgress these limits to their peril, The Thing‘s stark classification as a “horror film” proves that humankind still values humanness when this humanness is explicitly depicted against a clearly evil and demonic force. If everyone came away with an interpretation of The Thing as an optimistic work celebrating a beautiful creature destroying worthless humans, the actual meaning behind the film would clearly be lost on the masses. This isn’t so. Humans are still human and experience the animalistic emotion of fear. How many would still dare to uphold overused platitudes of human potential and progress were they to come face-to-face with this demonic monster? 

Horror movies such as The Thing thereby serve to reinforce popular culture because basic human emotions like fear and a vague sense of impassable boundaries remain influential cultural values in America. That said, man’s increasing faith in the artifice of technology is a worrying trend, and one that strangely parallels the monster uncovered by the researchers in The Thing. It wasn’t a mere coincidence that the thing was found and unleashed in the technological era. The researchers were misguided in their initial desire to study something that should remain buried, in part because of their irrational obsession with the power and influence that comes from obtaining scientific knowledge. It is this desire that destroyed Bennings when he inched too close to the monster that consumed him. 

I’d like to suggest that the film’s alien stands as a subtle representation of the sort of chameleon-like synthetic organism we call technology. Invoking the French sociologist Jacques Ellul, film director Godfrey Reggio (who directed the experimental Qatsi trilogy) claims technology is the most misunderstood subject ever: despite being the most profound development of the last 5,000 years, its sudden development is painstakingly unnoticed. Reggio thinks we take the naive view that technology is simply something we use, a tool for good or for bad. “That to me is a very naive, though academic point of view,” he says. “Technology like all tools has built into them a politics or a direction or a determination. So technology for me is not something we use, it is the environment, it is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.” Eerily, Reggio warns us that we no longer live with nature. Our universe is now technological. “We are the aliens on the planet.” Does the monster not disguise itself as a more powerful and perfect being than the weakness of human nature? 

And yet viewers of The Thing never interpret the creature in this way. It is undoubtedly ugly. When it reveals its perverted form, the men become paranoid, with MacReady tragically admonishing how “nobody trusts anybody now.” The creature is thus so horrid that it fundamentally twists man’s connection towards his fellow man. Is technology then akin to some monstrously alien or even demonic force, an object appearing as an angel of light and yet rife with Luciferian undertones? The absorption of all human activities into a technological system mirrors the monster’s perfect shape-shifting disguise, much like the subtle snake found in the garden of Eden. Though the film industry is commonly and correctly perceived as an institution that presents cultural values as broadly antithetical to traditional interpretations of the universe (partially because it is itself a modern medium), horror films like The Thing presciently reveal how humanity remains at the mercy of these primordially ancient, unseen, and powerful forces. And yet, it is not a high art. The Thing remains popular because its baseline premise is easy for the average viewer to understand. While it is admittedly doubtful that Carpenter intended the film to mirror technology, The Thing ultimately functions as an agent of popular culture by unleashing concealed fears and realities that remain alive and well within the spirit of humanity, even in the modern age.