Santa Sangre

SANTA SANGRE
(1989)
Dir - Alejandro Jodorowsky
Overall: GREAT
 
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a filmmaker unlike other filmmakers.  In fact, he does not consider himself a filmmaker in the commercial sense, instead labeling himself an artist who happens to make movies when he has something to make.  He has stated that he puts his entire soul, his entire being into his films and feels depleted afterwards, at which point he needs to experience life more to find whatever ideas are out there to put on celluloid again.  Jodorowsky has also stated that he does not make movies from his intellect but from his unconscious, opening himself up to the moment and following the muse into whatever wild avenues it takes him.  He is a filmmaker, (or, we should say, an ARTIST), that is in tune with a type of boundless imagination that makes his work singular and stimulating.  No one makes movies like him, no one makes art like him, and because of that, we have a film like Santa Sangre that no one else could have delivered.

 

It is interesting to note that as textbook Jodorowsky as Santa Sangre is, he did not birth the script for it initially.  It was in fact brought to him by producer Claudio Argento who developed the story with screenwriter Roberto Leoni, the latter inspired by his time spent working in the library of a psychiatric hospital where he had first hand contact with those suffering from debilitating mental illness.  This may seem like a place of tragedy for such a concept to emerge, but Leoni discovered something unexpected and uplifting in his time spent there, coming across people who had violent thoughts yet were able to suppress them.  When Argento and Leoni then contacted and met with Jodorowsky, (who both wisely considered to be the best man for the job), something serendipitous occurred.  While working as a cartoonist from his long downtime between projects, (Santa Sangre would be his first movie in nearly a decade), Jodorowsky has claimed to have met the infamous Mexican serial killer Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández by chance, learning that the former murderer had become fully rehabilitated and was living as a free man with a family and a law degree.  Thus a spark was fired, and Jodorowsky was able to contribute his own concepts to Leoni's story, concepts which ran parallel in taking a sympathetic approach to someone committing heinous acts.

 

Jodorowsky: A man inspired.

Having worked with his famous brother Dario consistently, Argento was sticking with what he knew, wanting to make a movie where a lot of women were brutally murdered on screen.  He settled for only two, as well as a musclebound man in drag, but more on that later.  Despite Argento having more of an exploitative agenda, Leoni and Jodorowsky's collaborative finished screenplay offered up something that steered clear of mere misogynistic violence.  It instead went into psychological terrain while humanizing the perpetrator of such violence, which was ideally suited to Jodorowsky's penchant for exploring the unconscious and putting an endless stream of wacky and, (if need be), controversial images on screen.

 

In Santa Sangre, we get a Folk Catholic cult who worships an armless girl that was raped and murdered while baptizing themselves in a pool of sacred blood.  We get an elaborate funeral procession for an elephant which is ritualistically dumped into a quarry where hundreds of local scavengers excitingly rip apart the carcass for its meat.  We get an overweight, drunkard, adulterer, hypnotist knife-thrower who gets sulfuric acid poured on his genitals by his wife when caught in the act with a fully tattooed woman, at which point he slices off the arms of said wife before slitting his throat in full view of his now permanently traumatized son.  We get a handful of people with down syndrome who snort cocaine, dance with cross-dressing prostitutes, and then party with an overweight prostitute.  We get our main character providing the arms for his now armless mother, slipping into her wardrobe behind her and doing everything from performing, to crocheting, to playing the piano, to eating breakfast, to murdering women.  We get our main character dressing up as the Invisible Man in his thwarted attempts to create a potion to actually turn into the Invisible Man.  We get our main character burying his victims while delicately covering them with white paint.  We get our main character luring a male wrestler with fake tits who is supposed to be a woman into a solo performance before attacking him/her.  We get clowns and a dwarf who spontaneously show up whenever our main character manifests them.  We get a giant python that emerges out of our main character's pants when he is aroused.

 

We also get Axel Cristóbal Jodorowsky doing whatever the hell he is doing here.

As one could gather from such an assortment of head-scratching set pieces, there are even more to be found in Santa Sangre.  This is Jodorowsky's M.O. after all, his former cult films Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain each littered with unforgettable images that are equal parts provocative, absurd, off-color, disturbing, insane, and hilarious.  Yet comparatively, Santa Sangre is a more straightforward movie in Jodorowsky's oeuvre up until this point, not counting his 1980 film Tusk which was made for children and had a noticeable lack of castration, blasphemy, gender ambiguous characters, murder, and nudity.  Narratively, we can easily follow Jodorowsky and Leoni's script and even guess the twist ending since the allusions to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and the improbability of many instances are readily apparent throughout.  In other words, it utilizes the "unreliable narrator" trope, almost exclusively showing us what our disturbed protagonist Fénix sees and experiences as opposed to what everyone that he actually encounters is experiencing.

 

As far as that disturbed protagonist is concerned, Fénix is portrayed by Jodorowsky's son Axel, the director's other sons Adán and Teo also appearing.  While Teo merely has a minor role as a pimp, Adán gets significant screen time as Fénix as a child, and both brothers look nearly identical to each other.  As opposed to almost every film which does not have the luxury of casting siblings as younger and older versions of the same character, Santa Sangre does, and it provides the movie with an eerie sense of believably that clashes wonderfully with how otherwise surreal and expressive the rest of it is.  Outrageous stuff may be happening in nearly every scene, but the casting makes it seem as if Jodorowsky was able to shoot the first act at one point in time, and then was able to wait about twenty years to shoot the rest.  Yet also consider that other characters from both timelines appear and seem to have not aged, which signifies to the audience that they may or many not exist in the "real" world and instead only in the tortured world of Fénix', something that proves to be all too true by the end.

 

A (bizarre) family affair.

This is a crucial element to psychological horror in general, providing images and scenes that disrupt the audience's expectations about how tangible reality works, throwing into question everything that we are seeing.  It is a surrealist tactic of course, and Jodorowsky being a surrealist knows how to offset the viewer as good if not better than most.  In Santa Sangre, he does this while treating his subjects with a level of compassion, and not just because it is his own offspring that we are seeing on screen.  Fénix is a tragic character across the board, one who was brought up in the circus life and treated brutally by both of his parents, (Guy Stockwell and Blanca Guerra, respectively), one who murdered the other before murdering himself all within eye-site of the young magician.  He is largely neglected by parents, painfully tattooed by his father in order to graduate and "become a man" and then beaten and made to worship the armless girl by his mother, a mother who has an open disdain for the father of her child and seems to only be sticking around due to said father's ability to hypnotize her.  Most of these dysfunctional family dynamics are deliberately left vague as the first act is more concerned with providing us with mere crucial plot points to get to the insinuating tragedy that sets Fénix off on his harrowing arc as a young man.

 

Providing some details is important, but providing ALL of the details as to how Fénix comes to such a fate is not a necessity.  After all, this is a feature-length movie, not a novel or a twelve-part miniseries.  Yet answering all of the "whys" is not something that Jodorowsky is interested in in the first place.  In the commentary track for Santa Sangre, journalist Alan Jones repeatedly tries to get the artist to open up in order to provide some rhyme and reason for any number of moments within the film.  Paraphrasing, Jodorowsky hilariously starts to fire back at him after awhile, saying things like "Why why why. Why?  Because I like it" or "Because that's what it is".  One could say that Jones should know better than in asking a surrealist to explain themselves, but he takes it in stride and after all, Jodorowsky himself went into considerable detail on his earlier commentary tracks for his other films, cluing us in on the specific symbolism that he utilized.  So it is not that ridiculous for Jones to question him as to the, well, ridiculousness of the work.  Of course sometimes though, the "whys" are not important, and in fact having the artist provide all of the justifications for things only robs the viewer of doing the work themselves.

 

And one has their work cut out for themselves here.

Also and as stated, Santa Sangre is a different experience than Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain.  Jodorowsky said that up until this point, he had never dealt with human emotions in his films, thus Santa Sangre was his attempt to explore such things.  His earlier movies were more like challenging and symbolic acid trips, done, (by Jodorowsky's own admission), by a man who was ambitious with his own pretensions.  Various Eastern philosophical influences were at the crust of Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, each movie dealing with spiritual enlightenment as their character's arcs had a forward momentum towards ascension.  We were not made to feel so much for the people on screen in these films; they instead served more of a symbolic purpose for the overall agenda to defy conventions and expand minds.

 

One must also remember that Jodorowsky is an absurdist as much as he is anything.  For almost a century now he has made it a point to say and do outrageous things to get people talking about him and his projects, and he does this while being a kooky goofball, no matter how eyebrow raising his statements are or how eyebrow raising his work is.  “Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles," “I was raping Frank Herbert but with love," “God does not exist, God is not good. All that awaits us is the cat who will urinate on our grave," etc.  There is such an absurdist stream running through Santa Sangre that is unmistakable, which is to say that the movie is not accidentally funny simply because of its eccentric nature.  The moments that are impossible NOT to chuckle at are there by design.  This aligns it with Jodorowsky's agenda to explore human emotions, since laughter is one of the most pleasurable and universal emotions that we all experience.  “Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together," another of his quotes that sums this up accordingly.

 

Comedy and tragedy, together indeed.

One can take a cynical look at the man and just write him off as a wacky eccentric, but there are way more quotes from him that affirm his optimism, his ambition, his belief in the power of art to change people and in effect change the world.  “Have a dream. Fight to do a dream. Don’t ask if it is possible to do something or if not possible. Try to do it!”, “Words don’t heal. Art heals!”, “Art gives to you a new conception of reality, opens your mind, opens your heart, opens your desire of action.”, etc.  So along with all of the absurdity is an agenda to create something uplifting, and in the case of Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky does this by presenting a scenario where a killer can be redeemed, where a killer can evoke sympathy even more than his victims, where a killer's tragedy can be alchemized into something beautiful.

 

Fénix is possessed by his mother's all-consuming spirit, broken off from reality and living in his own warped version of it where anything that arouses him and therefor challenges her must be brutally slain.  He provides his mother's hands, reaping her revenge or reaping what he perceives to be her revenge based on what he witnessed when he was a wee lad.  It is only through the one innocent person from his past entering his life again that he is able to break free.  The mute Alma is that person, portrayed as an adult by the actual hearing-impaired actor Sabrina Dennison.  She has likewise lived a troubled existence post her and Fénix's circus upbringing, being prostituted by her mother, the tattooed lady from all those years ago who provided the straw that broke the camel's back between Fénix' parent's dysfunction.  Once Alma is freed from her mother by Fénix murdering her in his possessed state, the two are eventually reunited, their union shattering the spell that his mother has had on him the whole time.

 

Whole lotta bird symbolism up in this movie.

 

After so much chaos and so much craziness, Santa Sangre ends as a lovely allegory of atonement.  When Fénix and Alma emerge from him being able to finally "kill" the influence of his mother and regain his own sense of self for the first time in his life, the police are waiting there to apprehend him.  Fénix will be captured and he will be punished for his crimes, a sense of justice will be attained.  Yet what does Fénix do when he is told to put up his hands in surrender?  He slowly looks at them in comprehension that at long last, yes, they are indeed HIS hands and not his mothers.  He smiles as he begins to lift them, content, at peace, and optimistic.  The story is over, the camera pulls back, the credits roll, and the audience is left dealing with a barrage of emotions, human emotions just as Jodorowsky intended to examine.

 

It is one thing to just make a film where a bunch of insane things happen that run the gamut between shocking, sickening, strange, and silly.  There can be no rhyme or reason to such things and one can still get a reaction out of an audience by using them.  With Jodorowsky though, there is always a reason.  Whether it is with the endless tarot references in The Holy Mountain or the Judeo-Christian arc in El Topo, Jodorowsky is exploring the human experience and reaching for something grand.  He does it with shock tactics to be sure since his small filmography is loaded with more unforgettable, unusual, and taboo-breaking images than most movie-makers would deliver with dozens more works under their belts.  Yet when Jodorowsky finally does get around to making a film, he does not fuck around.  Santa Sangre hits us on a handful of levels, presenting a full journey of one man overcoming the trauma of his childhood.  The road to get there is full of abnormalities, full of images from a warped mind, (both Jodorowsky's warped mind and that of his protagonist Fénix), full of moments so ridiculous that we can giggle in perverse enjoyment over them.  The film is a thing of beauty though, a masterwork from a French-Chilean renaissance man with ambition to change the world, an ambition that we can all applaud.

 

No matter who's hands are applauding.

Shivers

SHIVERS

(1975)

Dir - David Cronenberg

Overall: GREAT

 

The best Canadian horror film ever made continues in the tradition of humble beginnings, Shivers being the first non-experimental movie from up-and-comer David Cronenberg.  Like George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, it was an unassuming genre movie done on the cheap and helmed by a largely inexperienced director, yet it was also a movie that had a seminal impact on its genre.  Comparatively, Shivers is the more overlooked out of these examples, all works that came in the wake of both the New Hollywood movement and the era where regional filmmakers were taking chances and pushing boundaries with more harrowing, naughty, and eyebrow raising material.

 

While respected on its own merits, Shivers is still mostly seen as ground zero for Cronenberg's increasingly successful career as the godfather of body horror, with many pointing to his later and more technically advanced films such as Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, and History of Violence as being his finest.  Shivers belongs in the conversation though, since its low budget shortcomings were turned into advantages, and also because its director, (despite his inexperience and reservations during filming), proved to have a fully formed aesthetic right out of the gate.

 

As Horatio McCallister would say, "Rrrrrr, I don't know what I'm doin'."

Shot on a meager $179,000 Canadian dollary-doo budget and with most of it coming from the tax-payer-funded Canadian Film Development Corporation, (hence the movie's infamous early review by Robert Fulford where he proclaimed to the local reader "You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it"), Cronenberg was given an entire crew, a couple of established actors, and roughly three weeks to shoot everything at the grandiose Tourelle-Sur-Rive complex on Nuns' Island in Montreal.  It was a larger production for the director that what he was used to on every scale, yet still one that was low-budget by conventional means.  The subject matter was Cronenberg's own, (i.e. not a preexisting screenplay and/or something that was based on a novel), exploitative, and something that the Cinépix Film Properties distribution company, (described by Cronenberg as the Canadian version of American International Pictures), was interested in getting their hands on since they wanted to break into the U.S. market with something besides nudie flicks.

 

Though he had done two full-length movies in 1969 and 1970 respectively, (Stereo and Crimes of the Future), they were not narrative works and were instead shot silently and presented as avant-garde quasi-documentaries with Ronald Mlodzik narrating over them.  As the head of the Starliner Towers complex, Mlodzik and his effeminate lisp would be on board here as well, (as well as in a handful of other future Cronenberg films), but the movie oddly has no real star power or even any lead characters that it focuses on.  Sure Barbara Steel was brought in as a deliberate draw for horror aficionados, and Paul Hampton serves as the main protagonist, but this was more by default than anything, since he was merely the last man standing.  Shivers is not about the plight of the people on screen though, their individual arcs made inconsequential by the film's eerie concept of the human body being simultaneously invaded and freed by a man-made parasite.  This forms the core of what is frightening about it, that at the end of the day, something by our own design can be unleashed upon us to wipe out our troubles while sexually liberating us in the process, (both "good" things), yet also giving us a collective one-note consciousness that robs of us our individuality and in effect, our humanity, (both "bad" things).

 

As Frank Booth would say, "Baby wants to fuuuuuck!"

As opposed to other properties that have a similar premise at its core, (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, the Pluribus television series), there are differentiating layers to Shivers.  These mostly stem from the means in which the victim is infected by an organic and disgusting organism that intentionally looks like a cross between a dick and literal piece of shit, yet also one that finds its way into the body by the human host attacking them in a sexual frenzy.  The act of love making is then rendered repulsive and dangerous, (hello sexually transmitted disease allegory), something that is then emphasized by the film's dingy and low-budget production values.

 

As far as the cast goes, it is made up of interesting faces, some attractive, some unique, some ordinary, and some not so attractive, but there is nothing sexy about they way in which they become zombified.  Instead, people rip off or seem to be falling out of their clothes, writhing around each other, smearing food or other substances around them, and slowly lumbering at people like drunkards.  Their mannerisms are clumsy, their bodies often homely, and their behavior a combination of odd, funny, and terrifying all at once.  Most of the victims do not even realize the extent of what danger they are in until it is too late.  It is not like these "zombies" look like such; they are just normal people on the surface, just ones that are behaving in a concerning manner that allows people to stare at them curiously, thus allowing the infected to get up close and way too personal.

 

Yup, nothing unwholesome going on here.

Cronenberg litters the film with bizarre and deliberately off-putting moments.  There is an early scene where Fred Doederlein attacks and then slices open a young woman before slitting his own throat with the same device, neither of them exchanging dialog.  We see secondary characters doing disturbing things like an elderly man caressing his daughter and saying how much Hampton's Dr. St. Luc would enjoy her, a heavy-set woman in garish makeup lurching at a delivery boy and proclaiming that she is "Hungry...for love!", two nearly naked children being walked around on leashes, a horde of horned-up tenants inexplicably emerging out of storage units as if they were merely waiting for the director to say "Action!", Cronenberg coincidentally even appearing as one of those horned-up tenants.

 

Alan Migicovsky acts like a gross creep throughout the film, puking up parasites, beckoning them to frolic around in his stomach, acting like a total douchebag to his wife Susan Petrie, (the extent of his behavior which may or may not be entirely due to the parasite's influence since we realize that he was also having an affair with Doederlein's victim, hence his infection), and then trying to get her in the sack before his stomach turns into a nest of critters.  It is at this point when Joe Silver is attacked, the acidic parasites burning his face as Migicovsky tries to shove them into his mouth, both actors stumbling around a modern kitchen in a pool of bright red blood.  Hampton then bursts in and shoots the poor bastard, relieving both himself and the audience of any more of that particularly grotesque display of phallic turd creatures doing their nasty business, though there is plenty more to come.

 

Probably a good idea NOT to watch this movie when you sit down for dinner.

This only scratches the surface of what kind of nauseating horrors are unleashed in the film, but even the less over-the-top moments are given a permeating sense of ickiness.  Not surprisingly, the budget was not sufficient enough to hire a composer, but amazing, the library-cued music makes for ideal atmosphere setting.  Mood is crucial to any horror film of course, and the soundtrack plays a pivotal role in establishing this mood, whether it is going for deafening nightmare screeches like in Suspiria, the prepared piano ambiance in Kwaidan, no musical score at all in The Birds, or the goth punk new wave songs that clutter up Return of the Living Dead.  In Shivers, the assorted musical cues are underplayed, lingering beneath the surface while more alarming and ridiculous things continue to transpire on screen.  It provides a strange juxtaposition, clashing with the the ugly eroticism, crude gore and special effects work by Joe Blasco, as well as the contemporary setting of a luxury apartment complex serving as one that is otherwise pleasing to the eye.  It in fact comes off as charmingly dated now, with some loud decor in some of the rooms that the actual tenants of the location allowed the production to shoot in.

 

This gives the movie yet another layer, similar to Philip Kaufman's 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  It is a critique on the 70s "Me" generation of baby boomers who gravitated towards convenience after Watergate, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War had traumatized a nation.  Shivers takes place in a luxury apartment complex where the diabolical twist is that everyone gets trapped there by their own design.  The parasite is able to get to everyone not just because the human bodies that it inhabits can easily get within range and attack quickly, but also because everyone there is complacent, everything that they need is on site.  There is little desire for anyone to be out and about, little desire for anyone to flee at an earlier opportunity.  Usually when they are pounced upon or about to be, everyone just runs back into their apartment or tries to find a place to hide, and the audience can laugh at the futility of this since we know as well as they do that this will hardly keep them safe for long.

 

They even have a golf course, sign me up!

The film opens with a montage of still images as Mlodzik once again does his narration shtick, selling us hard on how the place has everything that one could want in today's comfort-seeking society.  He also ominously states that even though Montreal is only a twelve and a half minutes trek, "The noise and traffic of the city may as well be a million miles away".  This plays out while the soundtrack mildly yet menacingly caresses Mlodzik's voice, wasting no time in establishing that mood and directly implying that all of the modern niceties are going to come back and bite everyone in the ass by the time that the film is over.  When the doors are locked, the garage is locked, the phones are cut off, and all the occupants just want to get in your pants, you may as well be a million miles away from normal civilization indeed.

 

Though David Cronenberg's Crash is not a horror film even by a stretch, it does bare similarities to Shivers.  Both movies feature characters who are psychologically driven by perversity, ultimately to their doom.  Yet they also each contain performances that have a type of warped haze to them.  This is more pronounced in Crash where every person that we meet seems to be on a mixture of sleepy time tea and Spanish fly, but many of the roaming, infected tenants of Shivers also appear to be hindered by their newfound sexual appetite.  As stated before, this is what makes their behavior zombie-like, apart from the mere idea that like Romero zombies, they contaminate those whom they attack.  It would be less unsettling if they were jacked-up on horny juice, running towards their victims at full speed while flaying their tongues around and caressing themselves.  Instead, the infected in Shivers stumble around and take their time, which heightens the idea that they are on an island and can strand themselves there until the parasites have properly overtaken everyone.

 

"Eh, we'll get this guy later.  Ooo look, another tasty morsel!"

It is at this point in the closing scene where Hampton is finally overtaken by the horny horde, a fantastic look of desperation on the actor's face as Steel pulls him down into the pool, dozens upon dozens of residents enter from the outside, and the curiously alluring Lynn Lowry casually approaches him, delivering that final parasitic kiss as the frame slows down almost to a series of still images, much like the movie opened.  Then in the morning, the Starliner folk pair up in their vehicles with content smiles on their faces, venturing out into Montreal to spread the love.  Like many post-Night of the Living Dead horror films, Shivers has no happy ending.  Well, not a happy ending in a conventional sense, since once again we are left to ponder the question of the film's evil, its nature to turn the world into one "giant, mindless orgy".  Is this such a bad thing?  More to the social commentary point, is it the culmination of a sexual revolution that fought for free love?  The parasite victorious, it is now time for every human out there to lose their inhibitions, all taboos to be shattered, and in a sense, a warped, gross parasite-ridden, and naked form of peace on earth shall be achieved.

 

Cronenberg with his little Canadian tax dollar-funded B-movie that originally went under the title of Orgy of the Blood Parasites, (eventually being released as The Parasite Murders, They Came from Within, and Frissons, in addition to Shivers), asks some profound questions.  It also does so while winking at the audience, never shying away from its exploitative nature, delivering its singular mixture of nastiness, silliness, and freakiness.  The filmmaker would continue to explore the concept of the human body evolving and turning against itself, but Shivers is the first and perhaps best example of this, its lingering questions just as uncomfortable as its unflattering images.  It is a product of its era for sure, but it remains chilling, funny, and provoking all these years, (and more slick productions from Cronenberg), later.  Sometimes less than $200,000, a perverse script, and a nifty apartment complex is all that you need.

 

 

The man, the myth, the nice Canadian fella who makes gross stuff awesome.

The Thing

THE THING

(1982)

Dir - John Carpenter

Overall: GREAT

 

To get the elephant out of the room, yes John Carpenter's now seminal The Thing was considered a box office and critical failure when it was first released.  All these decades later, the film's legacy still seems inescapable from its initial commercial shortcomings, something that Carpenter is asked about in practically every interview that he has given since.  One can sense a tone of annoyance if not outright bitterness in the filmmaker when the subject is relentlessly brought up.  "So, everyone hated The Thing when it came out but now it's seen as a classic.  What's that like?".  Such hackneyed inquisitions are then followed by Carpenter once again pointing out that yes, everyone hated it and called him a "pornographer of violence", and that his career would have gone much different if people appreciated it then the way that they do now.  This is code for "I wouldn't have had to exclusively do B-movies for the next thirty years".  Now retired from movie-making and regularly pointing out how much of a pain in the ass the industry is, we can understand the man's frustration with the too-little-too-late of it all.  No wonder he just makes music with his son these days.

 

Yet obviously, The Thing's complicated commercial appeal has nothing to do with its quality as a film.  Context paints a clear picture as to why it irked more people when released than dazzled them.  It was put out in an oversaturated sci-fi summer, (even coming out the same exact day as Blade Runner), where it competed directly against the box office behemoth that is Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, its intentionally ambiguous ending and over-the-top gore set sitting uncomfortably with an American public that was dealing with Reaganomics and ignited Cold War tensions.  So in other words, great movie, wrong time.  Then again, that timing can only be viewed as detrimental due to how this was the antithesis of a feel good movie, which is to say the antithesis of E.T..  In point of fact, The Thing was exactly the right movie to come out in the summer of 1982, and a movie that only could be as it is due to the state of things at the time.

 

Yet another tragedy that we can and should blame this asshole for.

First off, consider John Carpenter's career in the early 1980s.  Not counting two well-received yet often overlooked television movies to close out the 1970s, Carpenter had three straight hits in a row, including his breakthrough Halloween.  The Fog made twenty times its budget and Escape from New York's $50 million take is nothing to sneeze at.  Neither of these films shared much resemblance to Halloween from a stylistic standpoint, (aside from Carpenter's excellent and unassuming synth scores decorated all three), but they were each done without major studio backing.  Carpenter had proved that he could get butts in the seats with both genre material and with minimal finances to work with, so the stage was set to see what he could do with a lot more money and Universal Studios behind him.

 

It is important to note that Carpenter easily could have ridden his own Halloween coattails with an endless stream of slasher movies, but he wisely left that to less imaginative hacks and/or up-and-coming imitators.  Though Carpenter did stay within the realm of B-movies, he chose not to repeat himself, going from masked babysitter killer, to ghost pirates, to Snake Plissken, to now, a doppelgänger alien.  Yet not just a doppelgänger alien, but a doppelgänger alien done with a budget more than double of what he ever had to work with, two weeks of rehearsal time, challenging exterior and interior shooting, and probably the most ambitious practical monster effects yet attempted by anybody.  Also, The Thing would be Carpenter's first remake, taking Christian Nyby's popular yet antiquated The Thing from Another World and revamping in it with an R-rating in a high-octane era of K-Y jelly monstrosities, profanity, and both human and dog bodies being ripped apart without the camera flinching away from the action.

 

Awww, I wanna pet it!

Also changing it up for his big studio debut, Carpenter insisted on not writing the script, nor composing the music.  That said, the results are still in line with Carpenter's auteur sensibilities.  This is not just because he added some atmospheric sounds to certain sections where composer Ennio Morricone's score proved insufficient, and also because he reworked aspects of Bill Lancaster's script, itself, (like the Nyby original), being an adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.'s 1938 novella Who Goes There?.  The finished product is still Carpenter-esque because the bleak outlook that is on the surface of The Thing, (enhanced of course by the bleak, isolated, and claustrophobic Antarctic setting), represents a steady point of view that the filmmaker likewise employed in his proceeding projects.  Just like Halloween offered up a world where evil was relentless and always lurking, and Escape from New York featured an antihero who oozes misanthropic cynicism, The Thing shows us the all too unfortunate and all too relatable outcome of distrust amongst our fellow man who instead of bonding together in a state of crisis, turn against each other in paranoia.

 

George A. Romero explored a similar idea in his Dead Trilogy, (two of which, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, had come out by this point), and New Hollywood in general was ripe with filmmakers delving into the more tortured and austere aspects of the human experience.  Movies without happy endings, movies that put both the characters and the audience in the uncomfortable seat, presenting a fallout to situations with no easy answers.  In The Thing, the crew of Outpost 31 live in arduous conditions on a good day, cut off from the mainland and huddled together for months on end as they steer off cabin fever, boredom, and the unforgiving climate of their surroundings.  So when a threat that is literally from another world gets unleashed upon them right at the onset of a crippling snow storm, it puts them in an even more compromised situation, which does not even take into account the fact that this particular alien threat is one that hides amongst their midst, only perceptible when its existence is threatened.

 

Make that EXTREMELY perceptible.

This brings up the film's most interesting parallel.  "The Thing" of the title takes over organic hosts in order to survive, and we can presume that it has been doing this across the cosmos for an untold amount of time.  Yet it is alluded that it does this not by malevolent choice, but by its very nature; the nature to survive.  In this context, is its behavior so different than that of the ragtag group of men that it faces up against?   Every organic form that we see on screen, (human, extraterrestrial, even dog), are reacting violently only when threatened.  That is to say, when their existence is threatened.  Everyone is out for survival, and when your neighbor may be your enemy hiding in plain site, hello paranoia!

 

Wilford Brimley runs a little experiment on his computer that gives him an approximation on how long it would take this particular alien life form to assimilate the planet.  We watch him quietly contemplating such dire information, staring at the screen with a forlorn expression until the next time that we see him, he is trashing the outpost with an axe, threatening to shoot anyone who stops him, and deliberately stranding himself and his comrades so that mankind can be spared its terrifying fate.  The survival instincts of Brimley's senior biologist are triggered, just as the canines in dog handler Richard Masur's cages are when the Thing attacks them, just as Kurt Russell's helicopter pilot is when he takes charge with a flamethrower and demands that everyone get tied up for a blood test.

 

Wilford Brimley - a man of reason.

So we can say that The Thing represents what happens when we become our enemy.  What we are trying desperately to stop from taking us over, we actually have something in common with.  This concurrently runs with the very concept of the monster, something that looks like us, acts like us, practically IS us and more to the point, acts out in a rage when it is backed into a corner, just like we do.  We may lose our humanity by being absorbed by the Thing since it literally destroys us, but what is left standing there with our organic facade can pass through a crowd and co-mingle so perfectly that perhaps it does not even realize that it is absorbed.

 

This idea is toyed with in the film and feeds into the paranoid trajectory, and it is also one that heightens how unsettling it all is.  Call it a fear of Communism or a loss of individuality, but the essence of what is going on is our failure to trust, our failure to use our humanity to overcome a threat.  That very individuality that we cling to is part of what pits us against each other, forces us to take a survival of the fittest approach to the situation as opposed to binding together and making a unified opposition.  All of that goes out the window when we are pushed to the breaking point, and at the end of the day, we look out only for ourselves instead of risking ruination by collaboration.

 

MacReady cannot even be a good loser against a computer, let alone trust his fellow researchers.

Carpenter has stated that his decision to fill the cast exclusively with men allowed him to not have to address the issue of what kind of dynamics a female or females would bring to the proceedings.  This is to say that there need not be any love interest for anyone, no flirtation, no "Will they or won't they?" tropes in a story that was not about such things.  A woman member of the crew would have been unnecessary baggage.  Some could see this as being a misogynistic move on Carpenter's part, but it actually adds yet another layer to what is going on.  It gives the movie a similar motif to John McTiernan's Predator from five years later, where a bunch of jacked-up, macho mercenary dudes get picked off by, (once again), an alien threat that all-too-easily outmatches them until the top-billed hero is left beaten but alive.  Yet whereas Predator had a clear victor in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch, (who bests the extraterrestrial baddie and gets whisked off in a helicopter), the finale of The Thing is neither clear-cut nor uplifting.

 

Kurt Russell is technically left standing once his entire outpost is blown to smithereens and the Thing in its monster form has likewise been exploded, but he is hardly in a position to celebrate.  As was his plan, he is not surviving this ordeal but also, neither is the alien.  Mission accomplished in this respect.  Yet what emerges during the closing moments of the film?  It is Keith David's chief mechanic, someone who has been missing during the last moments of action and seems to be less haggard than Russell, by comparison.  What has he been doing when the whole base was going up in a fiery blaze?  We are meant to wonder this just as Russell's character does when he is collapsed in exhaustion, drinking the official giallo beverage of J&B Scotch and offering it to David in an peace treaty out of necessity.  If David is assimilated by the creature, Russell is too wiped by the whole ordeal to do much about it.  Might as well both sit and "see what happens".  Neither man trusts the other, how could they after everything that they have endured and every way in which we have seen them react?  There is no rescue, no victor, just two men, (or possibly two aliens, or possibly one alien), collapsing in the freezing cold, downing some booze to steer off that cold in futility, and leaving the audience in a state of uncertainty.

 

"You gonna hog all that J.B. or can a potential doppelgänger get some?"

Of course, we cannot discuss The Thing without also discussing Rob Bottin's practical effects work.  It is a solid contender for the best that has ever been done, the artist working himself into a frenzy during production that resulted in exhaustion and pneumonia.  The twenty-two-year-old Bottin refused to take a day off for over a year, sleeping on the Universal lot and overseeing every aspect of creature design even though he had a team of more than thirty people at his disposal.  While the excessive work load may have been self-imposed in some respects and certainly detrimental to his health, the results solidified the man's legacy as one of the finest in the business.

 

The 1980s in general were the last great era of practical effects before computer generated imagery began overtaking things the following decade.  Logically speaking then, the practice peaked around this time, so Bottin was able to deliver outstanding results that the rest of the production knew how to best utilized.  This of course includes director of photography and regular Carpenter collaborator Dean Cundey, who not only captured the cold and sterile environment with blue lighting and muted costumes and decor, but also shot Bottin's effects for maximum impact.  The film's editor Todd Ramsay also deserves a good amount of credit for being able to linger on the less convincing shots just long enough as to not distract from their artificiality.  This includes David Clennon being revealed as the Thing and thrashing around with a Thomas G. Waites dummy in the air, an actual armless amputee stand-in wearing a Richard Dysart mask for half a second, and Randall William Cook's stop-motion animation which there was initially much more of yet only a few quick flashes made the final cut.

 

Just the world's hairiest man, making the world's best, (though less hairy), monster effects.

Carpenter has always been a fan of showing the monster, (as opposed to the old timey and still frequented "power of suggestion" motif), though to be fare, the director also knows when to lay back and let the audience do the work.  As discussed, the ending to The Thing goes out of its way not to spell things out, but there are plenty of other moments beforehand where suspense is cranked up in order to keep us guessing as to who is human and who is overtaken.  We see merely the silhouette of a crew member when the chased dog from the opening of the movie moseys into the same room with him, Brimley's character exhibits curious behavior to say the least, and his calm pleading to be let out of his exile since he is "alright now" raises plenty of eyebrows, plus the aforementioned blood testing sequence is as white-knuckled as they get.  Yet throughout the film, Carpenter makes it a point to get that creature on screen, and when you have Bottin's outstanding work to utilize, why would you not get it on screen as much as possible?

 

Thus, The Thing is a film that has its cake and eats it too.  Large portions of it go by where the ensemble cast is merely sitting around and going about their mundane routines, only to begin snapping at each other in a fever of distrust as their circumstances grow more and more dire.  There is mood setting throughout, heightened by Cundey's low-light cinematography and Ennio Morricone's Carpenter-like score.  The ending is made for contemplation.  Yet simultaneously, it is a smorgasbord for gross-out and heightened set pieces, with some of the most gnarly, gooey, and disturbing creature designs ever filmed.  A 1981 public may have failed to recognize how masterfully it was all put together, but there is a laundry list of movies that arrived with a thud initially, only to grow in stature as the years went by until they reached their rightful place in cinema history.  This is one of those films, and even though its misunderstood-to-lauded trajectory may have been an understandably bittersweet experience for Carpenter, thankfully the rest of us can just experience it as the gold standard of horror remakes that it is.

 

Bang up job gentleman, Big Trouble in Little China awaits!