Not sure quite how I managed to make it so far through my life without having seen Carpenter’s The Thing. Nonetheless, it belongs to that small but influential set of films which I have read about many times, whether in sf criticism or broader social-theoretical works; as such, I went in knowing exactly what I was getting into with regard to the actual story.

Interestingly, I can recall very little of the critical-interpretative stuff, which I presume is a function of the film having been a standard text for so long that there are dozens of readings one might pick from, all of which have now blurred into some vague sense of anxiety about masculinity and/or mutability, the hybrid and the Other.

I’m sure someone else has already made the more contemporary gesture, but nonetheless: there’s a very obvious reading in which The Thing becomes a parable of the academy in the age of Large Language Models. The descent into paranoia and mistrust as a function of uncanny mimicry is, sadly, already everywhere to be seen, even from the vantage of my little camp in the edgelands. One hopes it might not reach the point of having to blow up the entire research station… although (to overstretch the analogy a bit) the precarious dependency of the station on the homeland meant that there wasn’t a lot of resilience going spare when the monster turned up. Besides, the civilian population back home already features enough enthusiastic hybrids that there’s little point in worrying about it escaping containment. Might as well light the place on fire and get drunk enough not to feel the blood freezing in your veins, eh?

All that aside: what a great little movie! Despite knowing the plot back to front, I found myself wound very tightly the whole way through, which is testament to Carpenter’s mastery of tension (with, I suppose, more than a little help from the least Morricone-sounding Morricone score I’ve ever encountered).

I guess I can now return to the episode that the Weird Studies lads did on The Thing, which (with characteristic puckishness) they elected to categorise as a Christmas movie, on the basis that it features snow and a dog…