I’m on a hunt for the scariest movies of all time! I’ll be looking at films of any era, from any country, and then reviewing them based solely on how terrifying they are.

If you have a suggestion for a horror movie, please let me know on Twitter.

Please be advised, spoilers may lie ahead!!

The Thing (1982)

Director: John Carpenter

Starring: Kurt Russell, A. Wilford Brimley

Throughout the three year tenure of this column, we’ve tackled some of the heavy hitters of the horror/thriller pantheon, including The Exorcist and Scream.

While the former commanded a five paw rating on the scare metre, Scream was only able to eke out but half a paw, serving as a reminder that iconic does not automatically equate to frightening. Today, we serve up another grandmaster of the genre, in John Carpenter’s seminal science fiction romp, The Thing.

Can it stand toe-to-toe with Regan MacNeil herself? Or is it destined to get kicked in the nads like poor old Ghostface? Pack your parka, because we’re taking a trip to the ends of the earth to find out…

First off, I’ll skim over the details for the most part, because this flick is now in its mid-40s, and needs little explanation. It follows a group of American researchers out in the middle of nowhere at a base in Antarctica, where they find themselves under fire from an angry Norwegian trying to gun down a doggy.

What we later discover is that this fellow hadn’t gone batshit crazy, as the pup was in fact the eponymous Thing in disguise; a malevolent alien creature capable of taking on the form of infected hosts. If you spoke Norwegian, you would know right from the get-go that things are not what they seem, but unfortunately our Yankee chums are fooled by the fluffy interloper.

This setup would make for wonderful viewing if you went in completely uninformed, with the apparent premise centring around the consequences of isolation and paranoia. While these themes play a major role, you wouldn’t really know the true threat until the crew attempt to place the dog in the kennel with their other canines.

At roughly the half-hour mark, it reveals its horrifying capabilities, morphing into a ghastly clump of mush that ensnares the helpless mutts with its tendrils. And yes, this is exactly what we all came for, as The Thing is a masterclass in practical effects. It looks downright awful in the best way; an eldritch mess of body parts and viscous matter.

In a refreshing twist, the crew don’t just gawk at the beast the whole time, and the gung-ho lead protagonist MacReady (Russell) takes to it with a flamethrower. It manages to escape through the ceiling, but this is more of a showing of how resourceful it is, instead of lucking out thanks to ineptitude.

This recurring theme makes for a compelling watch, as the crew members grow increasingly suspicious of one another, never quite certain which of them have already been taken over by the Thing. They would perhaps be better served not splitting up so much, but their otherwise competent handling of the situation really heightens the stakes.

Personally, I couldn’t shake the notion that The Thing is something of a companion piece to Ridley Scott’s Alien. They both released in a similar timeframe (1979 vs 1982), so some filmmaking conventions were bound to persist, but tonally, it’s really quite striking in its parallels. A group of humans overmatched against a stalking extraterrestrial threat, with their only connection to an outside perspective coming in the form of the advanced AI of their computers…

It’s why The Thing is one of the horror essentials in my eyes, despite its negative reception upon release. Its focus is on being a good movie as opposed to an outright scary one, which bolsters the significance of the growing tension.

The clear difference, of course, is that Alien had to go out of its way to obscure the limitations of the Xenomorph costumes, whereas The Thing gladly goes as overt as possible. The result is some of the most grisly examples of body horror you will ever see, a constant delight as the foe takes on more and more distorted forms.

Here’s the kicker, though: once you’ve seen it, it’s imprinted on your memory, and it can’t fool you more than once. The Thing is a victim of its own significance, with one of its few jump scares reserved for the defibrillator scene, followed up by not one but two distinctive shots of The Thing’s twisted interpretation of Norris (Charles Hallahan).

Long before I had ever watched The Thing, I knew about this scene. Yes, it looks as gnarly as ever and I adore it, but it loses its eek factor the more you’re exposed to it. I don’t normally dock a film scariness points based on how good its best scene is, but that’s simply the fact of the matter with The Thing. It’s pretty great as a piece of art, but it is more reliant on dazzling visuals than instilling outright dread.

As a result, I’m at something of an impasse here, trying to objectively gauge the scariness of a movie I can only identify on subjective terms. Without trying to get too granular, I believe that there are extra frights applied for anyone who is particularly squeamish, but to your hardened horror aficionado, it is technically impressive rather than terrifying.

Again, this isn’t to fault The Thing, per se, as it is very much utilising the fabulous tools it has at its disposal. What results is an eminently watchable movie, albeit one that doesn’t particularly move the needle towards sheer petrification.

Final Verdict

The Thing resides in a fascinating realm of the horror sphere, where its gross out visuals are appealing in their exaggerated distortion, but once you’ve seen it, there’s really nowhere left for it to go to try and affright you.

By my account, there is one good, solid shock — literally and figuratively — in the defib scene, where misdirection is applied brilliantly to throw you off the scent. It is rightly celebrated, but in the same way that Smile blew their best moment in the trailer, anyone who knows the slightest bit about 80s horror will already have this one burnt onto their retinas.

Would I have felt differently if I had seen this for the first time in a cinema in 1982? Perhaps, but short of a time machine or a particularly convenient bout of amnesia, I am incapable of reviewing this film in a vacuum. And in all fairness, if you’ve read this far, odds are strong that you couldn’t really say any indifferently.