The Thing

The Thing (1982) is now counted among the peaks of horror cinema, and on release it was rejected by critics and audiences alike. An American research station in Antarctica. A dog arrives, fleeing a Norwegian team. The dog is not a dog: it is something that can produce an exact copy of whatever cells it enters. Twelve men are left, and none of them can be sure the others are human. The real subject is not the creature but distrust. The blood test scene exists for that reason, and the tension is generated by the men in the room rather than the thing. The effects were made by Rob Bottin, who was twenty two. He worked seven days a week for over a year and was hospitalised at the end of it with exhaustion, double pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer. Part of the dog transformation was done by Stan Winston. None of the effects were made on a computer, which is why they still convince forty years later: what you see was actually there. One reason it failed commercially was timing. E.T. had opened weeks earlier and audiences were arriving from a friendly alien. The ending is deliberately left open and has been argued about for four decades. It runs 109 minutes. Good for: horror, science fiction, and practical effects. Less good for: the gore is extreme, the scenes involving animals are distressing, and there is no hope in it.