Hollywood - and a piece of Alaska - are doubling for Antarctica in John Carpenter's remake of THE THING.
By Ed Naha
The corridor is long and narrow, illuminated by a dim overhead lighting fixtures and cluttered with unopened packing crates stacked haphazardly against the walls. A group of haggard men are huddled at the far end of the hallway. They appear nervous, alert. Two comrades, bundled in parkas, enter the area from a nearby steel door; blasts of snow swirl in their wake.
Suddenly a third figure bursts out of an unwatched portal.
"He's got a gun!" someone yells.
There is a mad scramble for the weapon. The pistol discharges.
"Okay, cut," calls out a tall moustachioed man hidden behind a nearby motion picture camera. He is the director, John Carpenter.
The men in the hallway relax. "I'm not sure about my arm motion," one of them says. While a technician attends to fake snow, which fell from the rafters when the door slammed, Carpenter strolls past the narrow catacombs of the set, housed in Universal's Hollywood studio. He is putting together his most ambitious film to date, a big-budget remake of THE THING. Firmly established via the success of such modestly budgeted epics as HALLOWEEN, THE FOG and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, Carpenter is finally entering the big leagues, backed by a major studio and a budget of more than twelve million dollars. Accordingly, he's pulling out all the stops to make THE THING his most striking work yet.
Based on John W. Campbell's 1938 classic novelette "Who Goes There?," Carpenter's film-unlike Howard Hawk's famous 1952 screen adaptation-will adhere to the original plot. His film will therefore present the terrifying tale of twelve men stranded at a U.S. National Science Foundation outpost in the Antarctic. In the midst of a hard winter, they are confronted by an alien life force with the uncanny ability of duplicating the shape of any earthly organism it devours.
Enhancing this premise will be the special physical effects of Roy Arbogast (JAWS), special visual effects by Al Whitlock (an Oscar winner for EARTHQUAKE, THE HINDENBURG, and DR. DOOLITTLE), and bizarre makeup designs by Rob Bottin, who, last year, masterminded the hair-raising transformation in THE HOWLING.
Despite the excitement generated by so ambitious a project as THE THING the mood on the set is one of weariness tinged with claustrophobia. Since practically the entire studio is filled with small, cramped sets, both actors and technicians alike have problems walking from point A to point B without bumping into someone or something en route.
As Carpenter chats with Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat, and Thomas Waites at one end of the debris-strewn hallway, the movie's star, Kurt Russell, squeezes past them and heads for an abandoned chair in the corner. With shoulder-length hair and a full beard protruding from the hood of his parka, Russell looks more like rock hero Jim Morrison than a science fiction stalwart.
"Excuse my snow," he smirks, sliding out of his flake-laden jacket and slumping into the chair. Russell seems quite immune to the low-key atmosphere on the set, displaying the same sort of jaundiced humor he did as Snake Plisskin, the outrageous antihero of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.
"I love this movie," he says earnestly. "It has a lot of great elements in it. There's a strong horror angle, there's a lot of dry humor . . . and paranoia!" He nods in the direction of the mazelike set. "I mean, look at that place. It reeks of paranoia! Our THING is a creature that is able to physically duplicate other organisms. That's how it survives. It blends in with the existing population and stalks it's victims one by one by one."
Russell flashes a sly grin. "By the time the men on the outpost realize there's an alien roaming around, some people are not who they appear to be-but we're all still housed together in the same building. For the rest of the movie, we're trying to figure out who is who. THE THING, meanwhile, just keeps growing and growing. Relationships break down. Friendships dissolve. Paranoia runs rampant. These men are totally on their own. Stranded. Helpless." The grin becomes a smile. "I like that."
Russell is admittedly mesmerized by what he considers the intricacies of the new THING'S plot line. He's not at all worried about having it compared with the 1952 version, either.
"I just saw the old THING for the first time a couple of weeks ago," he shrugs. "This film has nothing to do with that. It's more in tune with the book-almost identical, in fact, except that our characters are more developed and our THING doesn't have telepathic powers like the book's creature.
"I'm not a horror or a science fiction film connoisseur, so I don't know why the first THING is considered a classic. I don't know if this movie will be classic or not. All I know is that, as far as horror movies go, this is a good one.
"The first movie? I mean, jeez, James Arness came out and he was a big carrot. They fried him. Great! But classic?"
Russell leans forward in his chair. "Everyone talked about the first movie being relevant to the political period, the McCarthy witch hunts. I saw the movie, and I'm not sure whether that's valid or not. It's subjective, I suppose. John's film isn't at all relevant to today's political climate, but it is relevant to the human condition. People today are experiencing a certain level of paranoia in their lives. It's being stoked by the headlines in the news. They're wondering whether this stranger on the street is going to be the one who'll rob them or kill them.
"John's movie takes that sense of paranoia and lets it run wild. Nobody trusts anybody else in our story. I think my character is pretty interesting because he's in the outpost group but not of it. He's not connected with any of the scientific research. He's just a helicopter pilot out to make a lot of money in a very short amount of time. He's a Vietnam vet, and he's isolated from the rest of the group. When the THING causes conditions in the camp to break down, he has the leadership of the group thrust upon him. He's as scared as the others, but the war has taught him how to act instinctively. The script pits an outsider against another outsider, the pilot against the alien."
Russell becomes more animated as he tries to explain the film's theme. "Its survival, man," he says, "plain and simple. Personally, I like our monster. It's not an evil monster. It doesn't possess you. It doesn't try to take over your mind and turn you into a slave or a zombie. THE THING is a creature, stranded on an alien world, just trying to stay alive.
"There's a direct correlation between the THING'S species and the human race. No matter what kind of an overview you take on various Earth civilizations, one goal was common to them all: they all fought hard to survive. THE THING may be from outer space and be pretty strange looking, but it's only trying to do the same thing: stay alive. When it takes a man over, it's incredibly grotesque to watch. It's horrible. But the way the humans behave in reaction to it is probably just as horrific to the THING. Horror is in the eyes of the beholder. There is no good and there is no evil. It's just two species trying to survive. One has to eliminate the other in order to do so."
According to Russell, this primordial element will be reinforced by the movie's physical appearance.
"This is rugged. Period. There's no role for a woman in it. In Antarctica, women are rare. The first film worked in a female love angle. We haven't. One of the strong points of John's film is that it's primarily male: a dozen very solitary men just trying to maintain their sanity. From scene one, nerves are frayed. The overall feeling will be pretty brutal. The weather is harsh, the look is harsh . . . and the alien organism itself is pretty gross!"
Russell begins to chuckle when he tries to describe Rob Bottin's top-secret alien makeup designs for the film-a deft blend of cosmetic and mechanical savvy. Russell attempts to be as obscure as possible in his description; there are Universal publicists hovering nearby, studio minions dedicated solely to the task of keeping Carpenter's secret alien "look" just that.
"Rob's stuff is amazing," says Russell. "This is my first horror movie, and this may sound weird, but it reminds me of the Disney films I did as a child. You're dealing with stuff that's out of control half the time. Some of Rob's stuff is very experimental. You have to be on your toes because you don't know how the creature is going to react, physically, during a scene. You have to make the dialogue fit it's actions sometimes."
Before Russell has a chance to elaborate on the THING'S workings, he is called back on the set and asked to run down a corridor half a dozen times.
"The set is pretty confining," he says between sprints. "Claustrophobic. It creates a feeling of tension that, I guess, is helpful. The scenes we're doing now are pretty paranoid. You instinctively want to stay away from everybody, but as you can see, that's physically impossible. You find yourself feeling compressed on and off camera. It's tough sometimes."
A buzzer sounds and a mantra of "Quiet, quiet, quiet . . . " is chanted on the set. Immediately afterward, a new litany of "Rolling, rolling, rolling" echoes across the studio.
Russell, back in his snow-encrusted parka, sprints down the hall. After reaching his mark, he extends his arms in the classic runner-across-the-finish-line pose. There's scattered applause from the crew.
Next to the corridor, three cast members read the Los Angeles Times and Variety. "Did you see where Burt Reynolds was bleeped on the Tonight show for saying the word 'Jew'?" one of the THINGS'S future snacks remarks to no one in particular.
Meanwhile, back in the hallway, Carpenter instructs his technicians to alter the position of the overhead lights. While this is being done, he takes a breather at a makeup stand nearby and chats amiable about his newest project.
Why choose to remake THE THING when the original Hawks film is remembered so clearly by moviegoers all over the world? "Because it's one of my all-time favorites stories," he explains. "I loved the first film. I thought it was great. But they left a lot of Campbell's story out of it. I read the story before I saw the film. I guess I was about ten. Even then, I realized that the whole nature of Campbell's THING was different than that of Hawks'.
"Actually, ALIEN borrowed quite a bit from Campbell's concept of the creature. Now, I suppose, when this movie is released, it may be compared to ALIEN. I'm not worried about it, though. I mean, ALIEN was one of the few effective monster films to be made recently, and it only took snippets of Campbell's ideas. We have the entire story."
Carpenter's THE THING is reminiscent in theme to his first professional film, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, a taut tale of survival in which a soon-to-be-abandoned police station and it's skeleton staff are continuously assaulted by an army of marauding street toughs. The movie fared poorly, and Carpenter is still surprised. "I was really amazed about that," he shrugs. "I thought it was really hot."
"Then again, my whole career has surprised me," he says with a smile. "The success of HALLOWEEN really caught me off guard. I didn't actually catch onto what was happening until THE FOG came out. Then I realized what I'd started. Phew!"
"I was very flattered that HALLOWEEN spawned a slew of imitators. I didn't think that people would find the movie all that relentless. I had filmed it that way, but I assumed that people wouldn't pick up on it. I mean, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 was shown at a British film festival, people went crazy for it. It got big reviews in big papers. It played over there for three years, and when HALLOWEEN debuted, it was billed as 'another film by the director of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13.' The critics didn't like it as much."
Carpenter turns to watch his crew struggling in a corner of the set. "I like relentless movies," he says. "I enjoy suspense films that keep you on the edge of your seat. The movie was written by Bill Lancaster, the fellow who wrote THE BAD NEWS BEARS, and there's a lot of grim humor in it.
"Suspense and humor work well together," he adds. "My favorite comedies are all very suspenseful. Look at that classic scene of Harold Lloyd hanging from that oversized clock in SAFETY LAST. You laugh at the sight of it, but at the same time you hold your breath, because you're really worried that he's going to plunge to his death. Laughter is the release of tension. Suspense builds tension."
We pause as two technicians push a stack of boxes down the corridor and accidentally bump into each other.
"This is a tough set for everybody," Carpenter remarks. "It's a realistic approximation of what it's like to live down in Antarctica. There's no room to move. Actually, our set is bigger than it would really be. As it is, working here gets to everybody after a while." He arches an eyebrow and smiles. "Wait until we go up to Alaska for location work. People will really hate this movie then!"
Though Carpenter tries, at every opportunity, to speak of THE THING as a suspense film, a "psychological thriller," it becomes obvious, after only a short time on the set, that the film's impact will depend upon the death-dealing effects concocted by Whitlock, Arbogast, and Bottin. Rob Bottin's multifaceted THING may well turn out to be 1982's Critter of the Year.
Carpenter, however, is reluctant to play up the effects angle. "I don't see the effects as being all that big a deal," he says. "The movie is really a study of the effects of fear on a human being. There are very elaborate displays of pyrotechnics, but they don't run the show."
As for Bottin's alien, Carpenter is all but mum on the subject, and won't allow any photos of the makeup. "No one is going to know what the THING looks like in advance," he states emphatically. "Even if I showed you a photo of it, I'd have to say, "This is sort of what it looks like,' Our creature doesn't look like anything; it looks like everything.
"That's part of the surprise. We have a whole group of THINGS. They're all very delicate, and to shoot them requires a lot of patience and time. But when they're fully realized on camera, they're unbelievable. They're hard to work with because they're mostly prototypes that didn't exist before this film. No one, not even Rob, had thought of them before. They should really startle you. I'd hate for people to leave the theater saying, 'It was okay.' I want them to leave saying, 'Jeeeezuz, I've never seen anything like that before!'"
A crew member yells "Okay, J. C." the lanky director nods and gets ready for the next take. The actors are resuming their places in the corridor once again, primed to wrestle with the gun-toting traitor.
There's silence on the set. The actors tense up. The cameras roll.
This time out, when the pair in parkas bursts through the metal door, no fake snow falls from the rafters. The door, however, bounces open after being slammed shut.
The scene is stopped. Someone begins fiddling with the metal door.
"I guess there's no getting away from it," says Carpenter, by way of afterthought. "This is a monster movie. It has a lot of suspense and some wonderful psychological aspects, but what it comes down to is 'There's a monster from outer space loose!'" He smiles. "That was my favorite kind of movie when I was a kid. There haven't been many good ones made in a long time. Heck, I wouldn't mind seeing more of them made if THE THING'S a success."
One week later, however, after most of the corridor confrontation scenes are in the can, the director looks back on his monster-, murder-, and ghost-laden cinematic career and offers this enigmatic view of the future:
"You know what? I'd love to do a Western. I love Howard Hawks' Westerns. I could do about fifteen or sixteen Westerns in a row-do them for the rest of my career-and be perfectly, perfectly happy."
