The Thing and Who Goes There?

John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is one of my all time favorite movies. Somehow I had never read “Who Goes There?” (1938) the novella it is based on. Reading this story now is really making me appreciate the Carpenter movie all the more.

I was not expecting what’s in this book. Part of that’s the prose. We’ve come a long way with writing apparently. I’m pretty sure if I submitted writing like that today an editor would show up at my door and club me to death while shouting “Show don’t tell! Show don’t tell!” But the thing that really surprised me is in how much of the story is front loaded. Right away they know that there’s a thing, that it’s alien, and that if defrosted it can mimic life.

I think that’s the first thing Carpenter does better. Carpenter’s movie is a masterclass in parcelling out information only as needed. This serves multiple purposes. First, it keeps the audience invested. The audience are curious and in order to sate that curiosity they must keep watching. Second, by having the team learn about the Thing only after finding out what happened to the Norwegians, the fear and tension are dramatically amplified. The Thing already wiped out one team of researchers now it’s with us! There’s a reason that so many Role Playing Games start off with the party investigating what happened to an earlier party. If the monster drove the other team to madness, what will it do to the characters we’re just now becoming invested in?

The next thing I think Carpenter does well is the pacing. He never gives the characters the chance to sit around and discuss or at least not endlessly discuss. So much of the book is the characters theorizing. It feels oddly emotionally distant. The characters in the novella theorize at length about the monster and what it could do as if they aren’t there with it. In the movie there’s never time for this and it’s always clear that the monster is there and the danger is ever present.

I also think Carpenter made a good decision to make only about half of the team scientists. Sure there are moments in the movie where everyone is listening to the helicopter pilot for scientific theory, but even then MacReady points to Blair and says, “Ask him he’s the scientist.” Blair is present just long enough to give us the information we need that one or more team members are likely infected and that the Thing is not just a threat to the team but is an existential threat to humanity. That information delivered, Blair first goes insane and then gets mimicked by the monster. It makes us sympathize with our everyman hero MacReady all the more knowing the danger that all the scientists are now dead or aliens.

Still I have to give the novella some credit, it did after all inspire a great movie.