(ARTICLE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OCTOBER 7, 2021)
Whitney Walmer
Associate Arts & Culture Editor
Starting the spooky season of horror and festivals after being asked what I did this weekend, I told my friends that I watched “The Thing.” Which, of course, sounds like something made up on the fly, but it is so much more than that, a sci-fi body horror that takes the meaning of a parasite to a whole new level. Where the fear of something that cannot be seen or heard but felt when it is too late, and your body has been taken over.
Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elisabeth Winstead) is asked by Dr. Sandor Halvorson to join his team in Antarctica and help answer questions to a find that is considered to be out of this world.
As the team had found an alien aircraft that is supposedly 100,000 years old and the creature that inhabited it. Removing the creature from the ice had only made the investigation more dangerous for the team when they took it back to base for further analyses. After taking a tissue sample of the unknown entity, the team goes to celebrate the discovery and progress made when “The Thing” suddenly awakens.
At first showing its natural form with its large structure, tentacle-like appendages that it uses to take hold of its victim and absorbs its energy and form making it stronger. After what is thought to be the defeat of “The Thing,” the creature begins to take the form of its victims and even as far as imitating the cell make up. Resulting in the survival approach of keeping yourself alive and quarantining to root out who had been victimized, but a silent killer is going from person to person.
In means of survival, they are having to kill their friends for their own good, or they will be eaten alive by the “The Thing” until it is to be defeated regardless of the cost.
Horror created from the film is timeless, leaving the audience in shock or even disgust. For this being the film’s 10-year anniversary after its release on October 14, 2011, it is almost as if there is no sign of age. Through the effortless movement of the film and the special effects of gore featured, it seemed to be relevant and still to be a film for its time. After the original film came out in 1982, directed by John Carpenter, and myself being a fan of the classics, I find it hard to decide which version is my favorite. The only flaw I have is leaving the film ending with a cliffhanger, but hopefully all of my questions will be answered, as there has been word of a sequel continuing the horror of “The Thing.”
