Melton1 — 2 months ago(January 11, 2026 12:41 AM)

I like The Thing a lot but I don’t love it like many do.
Gorehounds go crazy for it, and while I like a certain amount of grue, this film is just too puke-inducing for me to really enjoy. The creature is disgusting, and the gore from the attacks is OTT. In fact it’s almost cartoon gore, with doctor’s arms getting bitten off complete with ‘mozzarella’ skin, and Windows getting his head chewed by a razor-toothed Thing-head, tossing around what is a very obvious puppet.
I can do without seeing the doctor pulling several human organs out of the Thing-corpse in graphic close-up. It’s amazing that the guy who gave us the very restrained Halloween decided to go gore-crazy a few years later, in what really should be a suspense piece.
Whereas Wes Craven’s Scream did a fantastic job of combining horror with the whodunnit, constantly playing with our expectations and dropping clues, red-herrings and twists along the way, this ultimate whodunnit concept with a monster tailor-made for the genre never really explores its possibilities.
Firstly, the creature’s powers are never established clearly. Does it aggressively ‘eat’ its victims and become malevolent clones of them, or does it work more like a virus as Blair’s computer shows us? It also appears that it can separate into as many pieces as it wants (‘crawling’ blood), if that’s true then why does MacReady want to blow it up and turn it into a hundred chunks that can go and hide in the ice, waiting for the rescue team? To this day people are still debating ‘assimilation or infection?’ We needed an answer. In Predator we understand the monster’s strengths and vulnerabilities before the final battle, that is exciting, The Thing is confusing.
Anyway, the film never really settles down into the who-is-it suspense piece it could have been. Perhaps there are too many characters. Perhaps we needed to see an assimilation so we the audience know who the Thing is and watch with terror as the other characters unsuspectingly interact with it. You could have that and then also have some surprises as other characters are revealed to be Things as well.
Instead there’s lots of yelling, people go missing, one guy goes crazy, gallons of blood are spewed. It would be nice if the film slowed down for a bit and let us sit with characters as they try to work out who’s who…