The Thing: BFI Film Classics

An alien entity that can take any living form invades an isolated scientific research station in the Antarctic. John Carpenter’s The Thing is best known for some of the most startling visual effects – surreal, lurid, shocking perversions of the human body – ever committed to celluloid. At London’s National Film Theatre in 1995, Quentin Tarantino named The Thing as one of his favourite films. Yet when it was released in 1982, it fared badly against another alien encounter movie, E.T., and critics panned it. But The Thing has aged well, and its influence can now be detected in everything from Seven to Red Dwarf and The X Files.

In her elegant and trenchant study, Anne Billson argues that The Thing has never been given its due. For Billson, it’s a landmark movie that brilliantly refines the conventions of classic horror and science fiction, combining them with humour, Lewis Carroll logic, strong characterisations and prescient insight. The idea of an alien species mutating and inhabiting humans resonates all too chillingly with today’s new and ever more powerful genetic technology.