The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982): Chaos seen as a Shape-Shifting Alien and a Bizarre Metaphor for Pandemics

This cult film directed by John Carpenter has become a classic of cinema. Nevertheless, it has been seldom analyzed. I will not go into detail on the movie’s plot, but mainly point out some important points. This film shows us a team of scientists in Antarctica fighting an otherworldly creature, the Thing. It first entered their base as a dog, and the characters involved soon discovered that it was a creature that could assimilate other living beings, and that it came to Earth in a spacecraft some 100,000 years ago, hibernating all that time in Antarctica, waiting for a living being to assimilate.

Now, what is curious about the film is the theme involved. It shows us a shape-shifting alien, but this can be understood mythically as a personification of chaos. Chaos is what is really unknown. Usually, in sci-fi films this unknown is shown to us in wonder and awe, as something to be explored, conquered and sometimes even humble ourselves. But in films such as The Thing the unknown is shown to us as an unbearable truth. This unbearable truth, ultimately, is something horrific: not comprehending a large and cold universe. It is not by chance that in the film The Thing the explorers in Antarctica are scientists: they are trying to divine the mysteries of the universe (in this case, the unexplored and cold Antarctica).

This type of horror was best developed by H.P. Lovecraft in his various stories where he described creatures and situations that surpassed human logic, sometimes known as cosmic horror. The constant theme was the universe was meaningless for humans and the true motivation of the dark beings in his stories is never known.

Something peculiar about The Thing is that it serves as a unique metaphor to understand pandemics. The scientists feared the Thing because it replicated living beings, and thus able to replicate humans and behave like them. There was a constant fear of the Thing getting out of Antarctica and then assimilating (meaning: conquering) the Earth. This became an important point along the plot, because people could not trust each other. Who was assimilated? The characters in the movie developed a way to detect the Thing (I will not discuss it here). Likewise, people behave the same way during a pandemic. The fear of the unknown makes people distrust each other and act, ultimately, in irrational ways. This is also a small manifestation of cosmic horror.

The movie had various effects novel for the time, without the use of CGI. Maybe it was in obscurity for so long because such cosmic horror are of very little interest for the general public. But in later years it has become a cult film and is praised as one of the best sci-fi films of all time. For me, it is a film that serves to explain cosmic horror and human behavior when faced with the unknown.