[CRITICAL] THE THING (1982)

T HE THING, as many of the films of John Carpenter, is a reference of the genre. That is not surprising, therefore, that this name is part of the programming of The Night of fear during the Light Festival. Remake of the (excellent) film by Howard Hawks called The Thing from Another World, and that itself gave birth to a remake honest but useless in 2011, THE THING has entered the popular culture and is often cited among the greatest horror films ever made. And it is easy to understand why, when from the stage of introduction, Carpenter immerses us in a desert, frozen, terrifying, and gives a new definition to the word “paranoia”.

If it is a thing to put in the foreground when we speak of THE THING, it is its atmosphere. By placing its action in the Antarctic, in a virtual camera, the filmmaker gives himself the means of his ambition, and gives out an atmosphere of anxiety in his work, however, tour in the studios of Universal. By staging a very sober, well away from the madness chaos In The Mouth of Madness, and helped by Ennio Morricone in top form, the director imposes to the spectator immobility weighing, which is shared by the characters of the story. Cutting to the perfection of his film, the director presents a fairly slow pace, perfectly suited to the context, and the suspense is increased tenfold. Every character becomes suspect, and very quickly the experience becomes nightmarish as successive changes of point of view and the sequences horrific hallucinating.

The special effects and the design of “The Thing” also have a significant share in the success of the film. More than thirty years after the release, they have simply not taken a ride. Yet, John Carpenter filmed frontally, his creature, does not bother with out-of-field if it doesn’t ; its realization is at the service of the atmosphere, and that is the undeniable success of the film. The idea of destruction, dear to the filmmaker here takes its meaning from a social point of view ; the group’s solidarity, which fights to survive against a common enemy, it switches to a picture of the proverb ” man is a wolf to Man “, and the individual survival becomes the prime objective. A vision very obscure to the human race unfit to coexist and understand each other in the face of an enemy, that John Carpenter explains in his entire filmography, and that here is pushed to its paroxysm.

“A required passage in the history of horror cinema.”

The huge success of the director, who makes no false note in its realization or in its intentions, is likely to be a chilling (pardon) on the Halle Tony Garnier, and THE THING is such a passage in the history of horror cinema that does not appear among the selection would have been a surprise. I can only advise you to jump on the opportunity to view this masterpiece in the dining room, to enjoy as much of the sound design outstanding as of the stage you can not upscale the master of horror.

THE OUTPUTS OF THE DECEMBER 2, 2015

THE BRIDGE OF SPIES, BABYSITTING 2, MIA MADRE, MARGUERITE AND JULIEN, THE PROPHET, THE THING (Carpenter, 1982) …

THE THING has been reviewed in the framework of the NIGHT OF FEAR, organised by the Festival Lumière, in Lyon. It will be screened Saturday, October 17th at the Halle Tony Garnier.