“Why don’t we just wait here for a little while, see what happens?”

This Halloween season, I’ve been trying to watch more classic and iconic horror movies that I hadn’t previously seen. John Carpenter’s original The Thing is by far the best one I’ve seen thus far, and it’s not even close. It’s already one of my favorite horror films that I’ve seen. The fact that this was critically a flop back in the day is honestly astounding. Definitely one of the bigger surprise first-time watches this year for me.

I’ll get to what makes this movie the most famous later on, but I want to first touch on the story elements. I haven’t seen the original 1951 film or read the 1938 novella that this film is closely based on, but I have to say, wow, this was written well. The whole premise is that this mysterious alien organism has landed near a research station in Antarctica, and is able to infect living creatures and transform into them in pretty horrifying ways. It immediately starts off with a scene that puzzles your brain and gets you intrigued by the film, because it right away has you asking questions. At its core, it’s a very simplistic way to start off a horror movie, but it kicks off the mystery aspect from the beginning, and the mystery itself lasts for the entire runtime. Not only is this one of the best horror movies I’ve ever seen, but it's also surprising to me, quite frankly, one of the best mysteries I’ve seen.

I mean, I was on the edge of my seat from start to finish. The pacing was remarkable due to the very unpredictable way this was written, and it always had me switching back and forth between characters, with who I thought could have been infected or not. This was done so well that I even questioned our main protagonist, MacReady, played by Kurt Russell, which is definitely not a small feat. If a script can get you to become suspicious of the main character the way The Thing does, then that’s pretty incredible.

The characters themselves were written and especially acted pretty much to perfection as well. The characters aren’t necessarily deep, but they don’t really need to be because, similar to a movie I just watched being Alien, you’re right there with them. Their reactions to everything going on are both incredibly believable, which adds a grounded nature to the story that makes everything all the more terrifying, because the story on its own is very much science fiction. Everyone gives a perfect performance, and not even in an over-the-top way, but quite honestly, in a pretty subtle way. None of them are necessarily “Oscar worthy,” because picking one performance over the other would be pretty hard to say the least. Obviously, you have Kurt Russell, who is spectacular as the lead man, but all the side performances/characters are given equal attention to so picking just one would basically be impossible.

Not having any of the side characters necessarily stick out over any of the others was certainly a bold move, but one that suited this film perfectly and definitely paid off. Because you aren’t tied to one character over the other, each one of them is hard to truly grasp, which makes the mystery of “who is the Thing” all the more interesting and harder to guess. I truly mean it when I say that I found this movie basically impossible to predict. Not only with who was infected, but with where the story was headed. I don’t know that I’ve ever honestly seen a film as difficult to see where it was headed as The Thing.

And then let’s just get the obvious out of the way - the practical effects. Wow. I already knew this was known as one of the most influential practical effects movies of all time, but I honestly expected to appreciate the practical effects more than to actually believe them, if that makes any sense. But nope, everything here is completely believable, and not only that, but what they were able to achieve with just the flat-out unnerving, disgusting, and disturbing imagery was really on a different level. The way stuff looked, the way it moved, and the unnatural nature of it all made my heart pound every time it appeared on screen. And the way it was designed to look completely different from its initial infected person/creature, yet still maintained somewhat of a resemblance, was even more unnerving.

The last thing I’ll highlight that I didn’t really expect to be as good as it was going in was the score. It heavily reminded me of Alien, almost in a derivative way, but that’s not a bad thing to me at all. It definitely added an even more unsettling feel to the movie.

Really, the only negative I could pick out from this movie is absolutely a nitpick. I think that with having a cast of characters this big, it was kind of hard to keep track of each individual one besides Kurt Russell’s character, especially their names. Now, this absolutely did not affect my viewing experience whatsoever, but it is the one nitpick that I could find with the film.

The Thing (1982) is an absolute gem of a horror movie that never deserved to flop, and is already one of my favorite first-time watches of the entire year. And man, what a way to end the movie. I certainly didn’t expect that.