The Thing From Another World

It is useless to judge a movie that belongs to a specific genre according to the standards of a different genre. What is required of a comedy – that it must be funny – is, one might think, obviously inapplicable to a suspense movie or an action movie. This rule wasn’t so obvious to the critics who, in 2012, voted Hitchcock’s Vertigo as the greatest movie of all time on BFI’s Sight and Sound poll, demoting Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, which had been #1 on every prior poll since 1962, to second place. Were they trying to argue that Vertigo was more than just a great suspense movie? (In 1960 Stanley Kauffmann said it was “an asinine, unredeemed bore.”) 

As Halloween approaches, horror films abound. Cable TV channels are serving up the usual fare, from 90-year-old classics like Dracula and Frankenstein all the way to more recent chillers like Insidious (2010) and Mama (2013). The only way to properly assess any of these movies is by gauging their effectiveness at being scary. The only movie that I can recall being genuinely frightened by was William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Even people who are skeptical of the existence of Satan were frightened by it, because the skill with which it was made created the possibility at least for the length of the movie. (Many movies scared me when I was a boy, but only because I was a boy.) 

I first saw the 1951 Howard Hawks production of The Thing from Another World when I was a boy – when space travel was still in the planning stages. It was based on a story first published in 1938 in a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Today we look at the science fiction movies from before World War II and try to keep ourselves from laughing, but as a literary genre it was already highly developed. 

I haven’t read the story “Who Goes There” by John W. Campbell, Jr but a synopsis makes obvious that it was more complex than Hawks’s film adaptation. The 1982 John Carpenter remake of The Thing gets much closer to the story. (1) Howard Hawks noticed the popularity of science fiction stories after the war and bought the rights to “Who Goes There” for his production company Winchester Pictures. When the screenplay was written, by Charles Lederer, the story was drastically simplified: the “creature” was transformed from a 4’ tall 3-eyed blob that had the ability to alter its form by absorbing other creatures into a 7’ tall vegetable life form (played by James Arness) that must propagate its species in blood-soaked earth – the blood to be harvested from animals and humans. 

A reporter, Ned “Scotty” Scott, arrives at a snowbound Officers Club in Anchorage Alaska (Elmendorf Air Force Base was established after the war in Anchorage, but the name of the base isn’t given). He’s looking for a story and within minutes he’s handed one when Capt. Hendry is ordered to fly north to a camp on the ice near the north pole where an expedition led by Dr. Carrington has reported the crash of a mysterious “aircraft.” 

Upon arriving at the camp, Capt Hendry takes some of the scientists and flies to where the crash took place. They discover a round craft that melted through the ice on impact and froze there. An exposed piece of it is made of an unknown metal alloy. When they attempt to blow the craft out of the ice with thermite charges, it catches fire and explodes. On further inspection, they find a body has been thrown clear of the craft and quickly frozen in the ice. The men use axes to hack out a slab of the ice in which the body is deposited and take it with them back to the base camp. Due to a mishap involving an electric blanket, the ice melts and what was frozen inside it comes to life and escapes. The creature is attacked in the snow by sled dogs and when the men retrieve the dogs’ bodies, they find the creature’s severed hand. When they bring the hand, covered in the dogs’ blood, inside, it comes to life. Dr. Carrington notes that it was the blood that revived it. Later, the creature breaks into the camp’s greenhouse, kills two scientists and hangs them from the rafters above seedlings it has planted, using the men’s blood as nourishment for developing alien pods. When Capt Hendry decides that the creature has to be destroyed, Scotty says “This is the biggest story since the parting of the Red Sea!” Dr. Carrington suggests that they mustn’t destroy the creature, and that they should instead try to communicate with it. Trying to appeal to Capt Hendry in the name of human progress, Carrington tells him “We split the atom!” To which the pilot Lt. Dykes replies, “Yes, and it sure made the world happy!” 

The movie is science fiction only tenuously. The threat is just as supernatural – non-human – as any vampire or werewolf. In straight parlance: the Boogeyman. What is missing is a Doctor Van Helsing or a gypsy woman who knows what’s needed to neutralize the threat. Instead in The Thing there are scientists who attempt to make sense of the creature and a “mad” scientist whose stupidity almost gets everyone killed. A romantic storyline between Capt Hendry and Nikki Nicholson – one of only two women in the script – is thrown in for comic relief. (Margaret Sheridan is given top billing in the end credits. None of the actors are identified in the opening credits.) 

The movie moves along surprisingly quickly. The only scenes that drag are the two between Kenneth Tobey (Capt Hendry) and Margaret Sheridan (Nikki Nicholson). There is zero chemistry between them, but the failure of their mutual attraction to ignite isn’t the fault of the actors. Such scenes serve to increase our concern for the characters when they become imperilled. James Arness was cast as the creature because of his 6’7” stature. After landing the role of Matt Dillon in the Gunsmoke series, Arness, who is the brother of Peter Graves, refused to talk about his role in The Thing. 

In several scenes the dialogue overlaps – the actors deliver their lines before others are finished talking. This is supposed to be a characteristic of Howard Hawks’s direction, and some critics jumped to the incorrect conclusion that Hawks had directed The Thing besides producing it. Since the U.S. Air Force features prominently in the film, the producers tried to enlist their assistance in the making of the film. The Air Force declined because they didn’t want to be associated with movies about flying saucers. 

Not having seen the film for a few decades, I found it extremely well made - better, in fact, than I remembered it. Despite its age, I doubt that audiences today could keep up with it. It's creation and manipulation of suspense is masterful. How many horror movies since it was made have "borrowed" from it? Ridley Scott's Alien would've been unthinkable without it. Even if the "thing" is a little simplified for an alien, it has a powerful presence even when it's not in the scene - just as Scott's alien, whose proportions were cleverly concealed from view, had. Unlike too many classics, The Thing is worthy of the title. 

In 2001, The Thing from Another World was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry. 

(1) In 2011, a prequel to Carpenter’s film — also entitled The Thing — was released, while a new feature based on the original “Who Goes There?” story was announced in 2020.