50 Days 50 Films - #4 "John Carpenter's The Thing" (John Carpenter)

Like most horror directors of his generation (George A. Romero, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, etc.), John Carpenter's track record is...well...pretty spotty. For every classic ("Halloween," "Escape From New York," "Starman") that he's made, there's a solid stinker ("Village of the Damned," "Escape From LA," "Vampire$") that serves as an unfortunate counterweight on his legacy. And, like most of his contemporaries, its his more recent work that tends to skew the batting average way down. David Cronenberg is the only one from that generation who seems to have made it out of the 80s pretty much intact.

So I don't know that I would call John Carpenter my favorite horror director, exactly. But I would say that his best movies come the closest to representing the type of horror movies I want to make.

This is likely because he draws largely from the same wellspring of inspiration as I do. His influences are my influences. He's as much a student of 30s-50s pulp fiction as he is of modern cinema. He's one of the first major directors to pull liberally from Lovecraft (obliquely in "Prince of Darkness" and  more overtly in "In The Mouth Of Madness") and Lovecraft-inspired work like "Quartermass and the Pit."

"The Thing" is Carpenter's undisputed horror masterpiece, and it's perhaps the best example of this somewhat literary bent. Ostensibly a remake of the 1951 Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks film "The Thing From Another World," it's actually a much more faithful adaptation of John W. Campbell's original 1938 novella "Who Goes There?."

What Carpenter understands — and what too many horror filmmakers simply don't get — is that what made the classic pulps so effective is what you don't see. Done right, suggestion and atmosphere can get under your skin way deeper than splatter. "The Thing" is often categorized as a gross-out film, and it's true that  effects artist Rob Botin's work is stunning, nauseating and visceral. But Carpenter knows when to hang back and show us just a piece of the shape-shifting creature — a distorted leg lost in shadow, a twisted mouth in the beam of a flashlight — and let our mind fill in the rest. What we create is way more terrifying than anything they could show us.

In Carpenter's and Botin's hands, the Thing itself is an almost perfect representation of Lovecraft's notion that "...all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large." Lovecraft was all about twisting reality into the impossible. He wrote often of "wrong geometry," impossible angles in alien cities that could drive a human being mad simply to look upon them.

Carpenter's Thing is an ickier version of that idea. It isn't a guy in a rubber suit. It's a Thing that simply should not exist.

Carpenter's best movies are known for their bleakness (see also "Prince of Darkness"). "The Thing" pushes that to an entirely new level. It was a box-office failure at the time, and many critics believe that was because it came out the same year as Spielberg's "E.T." and people simply weren't in the mood for Carpenter's nihilistic view of the universe and what might be out there waiting for us.