Skip to main content

The Thing




Yesterday, one of my friends on Facebook posted that she was in the mood to watch an old sci-fi movie from the 1950’s and was looking for suggestions. A lot of people suggested The Day the Earth Stood Still, which is a fine movie in its own right, but the first thing that popped into my mind was The Thing, or as it was originally titled: The Thing from Another World.

In the movie, Captain Hendry is ordered to fly to an Air Force base at the North Pole and investigate the crash of a strange aircraft. The craft turns out to be a flying saucer (the movie was made in 1951 when flying saucers were all the rage). From the wreckage, they recover the body of an alien frozen in ice. Of course, the ice thaws, the alien comes to life and general havoc ensues. It is a cracking good monster movie.

The Thing was either directed by Christian Nyby or Howard Hawks depending on who you wish to believe. Hawks was credited as the producer and Nyby as director. Some say that Hawks directed it but gave Nyby the credit so he could earn his Directors Guild membership. In any event, Howard Hawks certainly contributed a lot to the film. The movie was loosely based on a 1938 novella by John W. Campbell Jr. entitled “Who Goes There?” Campbell was a giant in the early days of written science fiction. He was known not only for his writing but as editor of Astounding Science Fiction, later called Analog Science fiction and Fact (I believe Analog is the only magazine from the Golden Age of science fiction that still survives to this day).

The last time I saw The Thing was some years ago. My wife was away. I was alone in the house. As I got into this movie, it really started affecting me. I was getting creeped out by a 1951 movie! The dialogue may be a bit corny here and there, but most of the time it feels very real (unusually so, for a film from that time). The characters are well-developed and you actually want to spend time with them. The tone of the movie is expertly crafted. It is a taut, tension-filled thriller that could teach a few things to modern film makers. And in fact, it has been imitated by many other horror films that came later. In 1982 John Carpenter made a remake of The Thing. This one is closer to the original novella. The 1982 film has its merits, but for me, I would rather watch the old film. It was remade again in 2011. I have not seen the 2011 version, so I can’t comment on it.  There was also that episode on the X-Files called “Ice” which seemed to me to draw a lot of ideas from the Campbell story.

Now in the time of quarantine, it is a good time to find some old movies and watch or rewatch them. It is interesting to see how/or if these movies shaped things that came after them. As I was thinking about The Thing, I realized that my novel Star Liner had some unconscious similarities to the film. At least I was going for a similar sense of claustrophobic paranoia that comes from being in a confined space with an unknown evil. Whether I succeeded or not is up to my readers.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).


Link to Star Liner

Comments

  1. pious agnosticMay 23, 2020 at 2:27 PM

    The scene early on where the men spread out above the craft until they form a circle: perfect!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Empathy

  Websters defines Empathy as: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” Empathy is what makes us human, though lord knows there are many humans who don’t seem to have any. A person without empathy is like a caveman, only concerned for himself. Selfish. It is a lack of community and by extension, a lack of the need for civilization. The person who lacks empathy can have a bit of community, but only with others exactly like himself. It seems like societies go through cycles of empathy and less empathy. Sometimes a single event can change the course of society. Prior to America’s involvement in WWII, the general feeling in America was not very empathetic. We had our own problems. We were still dealing with the lingering effects of the Great Depression, and had been for years. That kind of stress makes it hard to think of others. Hitler was slashing through Europe. He and his fol...
1 comment
Read more

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Polar Bears and Entropy

  Extinction is a normal part of the evolution of life on our planet. You and I and all individual organisms eventually die. That is the way of things. Entropy happens. Entropy is a word from the third law of thermodynamics that basically means: things fall apart. The natural tendency is for things to become less orderly as time goes on: things break down, things erode, things rust, things wear out. Entropy is a measurement of how fast that is happening in any given system. Individual death is a natural outcome of entropy.   But an extinction is where all the members of a species are no longer living. Millions of species have gone extinct over the lifetime of our planet. There are natural background extinctions that happen continually. But sometimes there are events that trigger mass extinctions, where vast masses of species go extinct all at once (all at once in geologic terms, which might mean over the course of hundreds of years). There have been 5 mass extinctions over ...
Post a Comment
Read more