Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (South Korea, 2005)

This version of Swedish singing sensation Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend,” by another Swedish band, Erato, will not scare you, unless you are totally terrified of Swedish women. Its simple sweetness is part of the reason I’m including it here. This version of the song is an acoustic take on a nearly distressingly synthy original, and as you can see, features three ladies sitting around a kitchen vocalizing to some kind of dairy container instrumentation. The laptop-on-the-kitchen-counter filming technique and black-and-white filter just underscore the song’s supposed innocence. But the lyrics are more complicated: a woman is telling her new boyfriend, who has thus far failed to extricate himself from a previous entanglement, to end it now, with care and compassion. More or less, it’s a love song from one woman to another, it’s just that neither of them know it, distracted as they both will be by the guy in the middle. “Don’t you even try to explain how it’s so different when we kiss,” the narrator warns, offering a best practices tutorial on leaving someone for someone else. They’re lessons clearly hard won through experience: “You just tell her that the only way her heart will mend is when she learns to love again, and it won’t make sense right now, but you’re still her friend.”

It’s an arresting song, not about female companionship—these women will never be friends—and not about girl power, exactly. It is a song about how women can demand what they want, but minimize damage to other women. And it is a song about how best to utilize men in service of these desires. In short, it is a song that offers a model for creating feminine allies from women enemies. Not something you can find easily scrolling through the pop charts.

The original is great, too, but this cover version so nakedly displays our vocalists’ compassion and comfort with each other it makes a much better basis for discussing Chan Wook Park’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, the final installment in a trio of films on the subject of retribution.

The truly horrible turn that lies at the heart of this one, however, isn’t that vengeance is ever meted out, and humanity thus fails us all in a general way. Nor is it that some poor orphan is, or is not, left to suffer for years while her mother survives prison, and then executes her revenge upon an individual for that lost time. It’s not even that the killer here is a woman. No: the truly horrible turn here is that “the killer”—Geum-ja Lee, played by a very malleable Yeong-ae Lee—is feminine, and uses stereotypically feminine approaches to achieve obscene justice.

Having been wrongly imprisoned for 13 years for the murder of a young boy, Geum-ja Lee is released, and free to track down her daughter, who’s since been adopted by an Australian couple. Morally conflicted about her future relationship with her offspring, Lee has fewer qualms about stalking the actual murderer—and none in regards to sleeping with the young son of her new boss. Her time in prison, too, was spent meting out justice: rapists were poisoned, the innocent protected. A third of the film has Lee calling on these now-freed innocents to assist her in her cause. There is little ambiguity in this mode of vengeance: most of the women imprisoned had been victims of grave and long-standing injustice—sex work, domestic abuse, poverty—and the crimes that put them in jail were merely retributory. When Lee locates her victim, an English teacher named Mr. Baek, a serial murderer of young people, it is clear to all that he does deserve what’s coming to him.

The mode in which he receives it, however, is not the stuff of slasher films or torture porn. For Lee, with all her advance planning and assistance, finds ultimately that her own individual vengeance will not here accomplish the task she seeks. She is not a plodding, thoughtless murderer, intent on harm and ultimate destruction. She is an emotionally affected person, a mother. That she suffers any maternalistic pang of guilt for her intended victim I do not believe—more likely she does not, rationally, think that vengeance is due her alone. So in a most horrifying moment even within the horror genre, Lee forms a committee of those most affected by the killers misdeeds, and a large group of people, as calmly and as rationally as possible, set about seeking vengeance upon a single man.

Shot with hesitation and a half-tic of compassion, the lengthy death sequence could have been played for gore or chills, but the cumulative effect of the group’s collaboration—largely administered by the women involved—is much more upsetting. As in the Erato video, the collaborator/murderers use whatever tools they have on hand. There is no need to be elaborate. A group of people, working together toward a common goal, can always find a way to achieve it.

And the manner in which they do opens up whole possibilities for inducing fear. Our male killers tend to be individualists—they speak loudly, and for themselves. Or plod toward you in a menacing manner with a dripping implement wet from a previous victim. Their success and volume are rewarded with notoriety, but the fact is that you always know when they are coming for you, because they tell you. A taunting phone call, a giant flash of knife, a chilling threat, a scrawled drawing, a newspaper clipping tacked to a wall with your picture on it. In horror movies, our fear is largely constructed from visual and sonic cues. Of course! It is a medium of sight and sound. But what if the ability to commit terror were distilled: What if it could come from anywhere, and involve anyone, and you would deserve whatever they did to you? The less elaborate, sometimes, the more terrifying. And, worse: what if those seeking vengeance against you were truly acting out of love?

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Like “Call Your Girlfriend,”  is a love song you don’t want to be on the wrong side of.

Treevenge (USA, 2009)

A hilarigusting if flawed little film, the 16-minute Treevenge did not top my fave holiday-themed horror finds of 2011. Director Jason Eisener’s short is a tad too long, the tricks and characterizations to make us identify with the original victims of violence a bit too cloying, and the sound effects and subtitles set too consistently to wackadoo!.

Yet the payoff, when it comes, does what even great literature can barely do under the best of creators: Treevenge will cause you to look at Christmas trees—maybe all conifers—fundamentally differently for the rest of your life. Askance, probably. Possibly in slight fear. It’s not even just the depiction of those plants seeking revenge: what the filmmakers imagine people do at home, alone, with their holiday decorations by minute 11 nearly undoes the insipidity of the first 10 minutes of the thing. Bonus: some of the most creative kills in horror. In fact, the whole murder spree comes off as downright joyful.

I contend it’s the most important potential of fiction, however rarely achieved, to create a universe so tangible it affects the way we perceive our own. Yes, horror’s reliance on shock and fear and gore should make it more commonplace, that we would become scared to see trees, or dolls, or hockey masks. But it isn’t. And it might be because the joy has gone out of the horror film murder spree.

Saw II (USA, 2005)

When they turn into a series with the first sequel – and it’s evident immediately that the second film is attempting to set up a series – the Saw films shift, drastically, in tone.  Improbable, distracting, plot convolutions aside, the appeal of the first film comes from its close identification with the victims. Reduced to its essence, or at least the essence of what was, you know, good about it, Saw asked its audience, more or less directly, if they would be able and willing to saw their own feet off to survive. (Then there was the whole thing about killing someone else too, which, like the whole obsessed detective half-assed red herring plot, is an unnecessary complication to a story whose appeal should be in its bald, irreducible simplicity. One of my primary objections to the series as a whole is its never-questioned equation of self-sacrifice with murder… which could provide enormously fertile ground if anyone in the films ever really called Jigsaw on his bullshit.)

Whatever else you think about the film and its sequels, that premise is remarkably potent. Danny Boyle and James Franco obviously thought so – although 127 Hours seemed rather unpleasant, and I never made it to the theaters for that one.  The broad strokes are clearly drawn from Kevin Spacey’s theologically-driven serial killer in David Fincher’s Seven, but where that film might not go far enough in challenging its psychotic hero’s righteousness, the Saw films don’t really even attempt it. Any and all objections are quickly dismissed by team Jigsaw, and, it seems, the films themselves. Most horror series are defined by their monsters: it’s Freddy and Jason (or at least the Voorhees line) and Michael Myers that make it a Nightmare/Friday/Halloween movie, and a spare Donald Pleasance or Heather Langenkamp helps maintain continuity but is clearly unnecessary.* Jigsaw is an absent presence in the first movie. The film gives glimpses of a mysterious all-knowing, all-seeing type watching over everything from hiding places or through cameras. It keeps him off camera, present mainly in audiotapes espousing both his ideology and the rules of his torture scenarios, with the visual representation of a creepy doll on a tricycle. The second film puts Jigsaw front and center, and that, of course, changes things entirely.

In some ways, the Saw films’ embrace of Jigsaw as a new-age-y spiritual guru – Actualize yourself by cutting an arm off and killing your business partner! – is baffling and troubling, more disturbing that even the series’ most gruesome gore effects. Jigsaw’s appeal seems to be that he offers answers to the morally confused, in all sorts of ways. Desperate pleas like “Why are you doing this to me?” and “What did I ever do to deserve this?” frequently populate horror of the recent era, and Jigsaw, with his ironic Dantean punishments and barely-questioned moral authority, tells you: it’s because you did such and such, and didn’t love life enough. And as the series goes on, the victims’ crimes seem less and less relatable, more villainous in and of themselves. It goes without saying that in real world terms his message is bullshit, that physical trauma does not lead to spiritual growth, and that murder for the purposes of self-preservation is, well, rarely understood to be emotionally productive. In movie terms, it’s something else.

Okay, so all that ideology is just an excuse. It’s a pretense for the “games” and traps, and is probably understood as such by most of its fans. Fair enough, but I bring it up not just to scold but to point out the shifting identification that happens with the second film. First of all, there’s a clear hierarchy of good-ness among the victims. Most obviously in Saw II, a large ethnic man serving as an immediate villain who deflects Jigsaw’s responsibility for the death of the more innocent-seeming among them. Second, Jigsaw’s moral authority counters the relatively simple identification with the victims. The first film victimizes people who take things for granted a little bit and are kinda sleazy, while the second attacks outright criminals and murderers. Are these people victims deserving of the intense empathy that any scene of pain would urgently demand from its audience, or are they villains receiving fitting punishment?

The sequels convolute the original, simple formula (the foot-sawing one) by asserting Jigsaw’s moral authority. I can only assume this is based on a misunderstanding of their own film’s appeal – maybe a willful one, since horror films sometimes embrace this sort of dilution, too much intensity might make box-office unpredictable, and few films have the guts to forgo the over-explanations and backstory that take the mystery out of horror. But, from then on out, when the series gets interesting is precisely when it gets ambivalent about both Jigsaw and its characters. The most horrific aspects of the sequels come when a film entertains the possibility that Jigsaw is both wrong and right, that he’s monstrous and evil but that the victim has done something to bring this on him/herself, but in a way that does not make a monster of the victim (unlike the large ethnic man in Saw II). That feeling of vague, guilty anxiety is often too readily resolved by the Saw films when it provides explanations and justifications for its punishments.

But I do want to point something out about this series. The dirty little secret of horror movies – like all sorts of movies in which monsters or men with weapons threaten people – is that the genre already implicitly shares the Jigsaw philosophy of self-improvement. Traumatic horror and threat of bodily harm are routinely the narrative structures around which a reconciliation or newfound appreciation of something or other are built. The Saw movies foreground it, make it the text of the film. You’ll love your wife and/or kid and become a good person again if you pass this test. (The number of horror films that take trauma seriously – real trauma, scarring its victims emotionally even if they survive – is surprisingly rare.) Alien invasions and ruthless killers have been reuniting Hollywood’s broken homes and bringing lovers together since the silent era.

* The Scream movies insistence on maintaining their core group of heroes is unusual in this regard. Those who have seen Scream IV’s unfortunate choice to have all the original protagonists survive and kill off everyone else shows where such a tendency can lead: if the basic situation of your horror film is that any character might be killed at any time, but the three main characters are seemingly untouchable while all the other characters are disposable, then your films grow stagnant very quickly. Regarding the Halloween films, I’d say that Laurie Strode is significant because she provides motivation for Michael, more than anything else.

Halloween H20 (USA, 1998)

It was 40 minutes after this movie ended before I realized that the name Halloween H20 referred to it being the 20^th anniversary of the first Halloween movie and not to some wacky underwater sequence that, somehow, I imagined involved Michael Myers and a submarine that was really fucking cool. In my mind. On the screen, what I can tell you happened is: not much, because truth be told, it was 40 minutes after this movie ended before I realized this movie had ended. Here’s what I did instead of watching this movie:

• Sexted my friend.
• Berated my cat for sharpening his claws very loudly on the rug.
• Folded laundry.
• Engaged in a microblogging debate about a sporting event I was not watching.
• Yoga.
• Invented a new kind of tea.
• Considered taking up smoking, and I really hate smoking, but I was really fucking bored.

I assume that this was not a very good movie. In fact, the only positive thing I remember thinking while looking at this movie was, “How long have I been jealous of Jamie Lee Curtis’s biceps? I think a long time. I wonder if I should Google Jamie Lee Curtis’s biceps? I’m not sure why that would help. However, it would be vastly more interesting than this movie.”

The Crocodile Man (Cambodia, 2005)

The Crocodile Man (2005)

The story of The Crocodile Man, I gather, starts in the distant past, where a rich and powerful king-like man with a penchant for murdering defenseless crocs oversteps his bounds and steals off with a young neighbor woman and then maybe sometimes turns into a man-eating crocodile? Or perhaps that only happens after he dies. Unclear. No matter. This is not a film to immerse yourself in: this is a film to delight in, from a great distance away.

Probably I should explain that it is in Khmer, occasionally translated through delightful subtitles that do not always match the film’s action nor, for that matter, standard American English. Spelling is inconsistent: the word “literature” is constructed in three different ways in the film, the word “beautiful” has at least four variations, and at one point the words “spear” and “penis” seem to have been exchanged. Sometimes, however, you cannot see the subtitles at all because an advertisement for a local radio station will flit across the screen. It is also true that my detectiving skills have thus far failed to uncover the exact title of this release. Yet I assure you: if you can find it, you will greatly enjoy it.

Back to our storyline. The plot concerns—well, the plot concerns me. Resurrected in the present day, the Crocodile Man shifts between two states—human, and human-consuming beast—and a group of “litterature” students in the mean time have come to ask the hunter Khek to bring them to a local temple, where they intend to study ancient engravings. The temple is rumored to be haunted, and hunter Khek’s two assistants are duly frightened when they discover where they are headed. Nonetheless, the group continues into the woods, encountering beasts and adventure, eventually stumbling across the temple.

The two assistants form an important plot device. An argumentative comedic duo—Fat and Thin, let’s call them—soon wander off and discover a giant crocodile skull with a massive diamond tooth. This isn’t until almost halfway through the film, however, so you may have found yourself wondering by now if you had picked up the movie Let’s Wander Through the Woods and Get Attacked by Animals by accident. Fat and Thin hide the head in a cave. Thin sneakily extracts the tooth (actually made of a patterned silver foil) behind Fat’s back, and the Crocodile Man wreaks his revenge upon them, later turning his terror toward the others in the group. As predicted when a mysterious shaman-like figure appears three-quarters of the way through the film (no English explanation is given for his presence), the Crocodile Man is finally felled by the power of human emotion. (“You will be died by love,” is the exact admonishment.)

Sound boring? It would be, were it not in fact an incredibly inventive and charming little horror film, largely devoid though it is of genuinely scary moments.

Another film, possibly also called The Crocodile Man

Real animals, for example, get as much screen time as our Crocodile Man, and when they attack, genuine chaos occurs. The soundtrack, likely dubbed from an American horror movie chase scene and put on a Garage Band loop, is droning and repetitive, and totally inappropriate for scenes in which, say, a snake lunges at our heroes but they get away handily. I have no desire to ruin this film for you, but since I doubt you’ll ever be able to track it down, I must explain that the subtitles for these animal attacks look like this:

[INSTINCT]

I have no idea what it’s supposed to refer to, and I don’t care. It is simply too brilliant to question.

Also strangely present are heavy breathing sounds of the actors. Probably this was a production mistake. Maybe it was done purposefully as a way of ensuring the viewer that the characters remained alive. I’ve spent a lot of time with cultural producers in Cambodia in the last few years, and neither answer would surprise me.

Similarly, the special effects deserve particular consideration: no attempt is made to integrate them into the storyline, nor do they seamlessly trick the viewer into an otherwise impossible experience. Scenes that take place at night were seemingly shot at night—maybe for purposes of authenticity, sure, but this technique does convey the distinct discomfort of, you know, not being able to see what is happening in the movie.

Such attempts can only be read as a delightful desire to communicate truthfully, even if unnecessarily. “We’re seeing the water,” one scripted line goes, as the camera pans across a nice stream. It is a film you will never understand, even if, Cambodians assure me, you speak Khmer. It is instead a joyfully constructed little film that is not intended to scare you. It is intended only to remind you that horror exists. It is just very, very far away.

Another film that may or may not be called The Crocodile Man

Martin (USA, 1976)

George Romero’s Martin is, to follow Michael Powell’s description of his then-reviled masterpiece Peeping Tom (1960), a very tender film. But while Powell would maintain that his film had little to do with the horror genre, defined at the time by the gothic fantasies being produced by Hammer Films, Martin proudly declares its affinities with the genre before tearing it down from the inside.

The film’s hero may or may not be a vampire. Or, rather, he may or may not be a supernatural creature. His superstition, heavily-accented uncle thinks he is, while Martin insists that he’s fully human. He is, he claims, sick, and that illness necessitates the ingestion of human blood as its only remedy. Martin is a pathetic hero, deserving of the audience’s pity, and yet Romero does not shy away from any of the horrifying details of Martin’s feedings. There is indeed nothing supernatural, or even romanticized, about Martin’s nighttime activities, and Romero is remarkably clear and direct in showing his murders. That is why I love this movie so much: it contains all the moral and existential angst of his Dead films, but scaled down to a more intimate, personal – even private – scale. I don’t think I’ve seen a film that so unflinchingly depicts its hero as a monster without excusing or recuperating his actions or redirecting the audience’s sympathies. The only other film I know of that has a similar tone is the aforementioned Peeping Tom.

The big distinction between the two films is that one hero is a serial killer whose psychosis is revealed to originate from an emotionally abusive childhood, while the other is given a back story that walks the line between supernatural (vampirism), physiological (the “illness” Martin describes) and, less fully explored, psychoanalytic (the implication being that Martin’s behavior comes from his superstitious family’s mistreatment). It is crucial for the movie that the discussion revolves around supernatural monstrosity, because the question that Romero returns to again and again in his films is this: is there a distinction between human and non-human, and does it matter? And, each time, Romero seems to decide that there is nothing particularly special about humanity, no transcendent soul or privileged spiritual status that separates man from other forms of life that might approximate. The new, the monstrous and the aberrant are granted the right to exist in the Dead films, as in Martin, and the great tragedy is that peaceful coexistence with humanity is impossible. (In all of Romero’s films, the shrinking distance between human and monster runs both ways: monsters are revealed to be, if not fully sympathetic, then at least pathetic, while humans behave cruelly and violently.) Romero can’t quite get to the place where he can imagine a “mixed” society not based on bloody antagonism, but with Land of the Dead (2005), he came close – but only because the schism within the human order proved to be greater than that between human and zombie. Romero is something of a liberal anti-humanist, or a humanist whose sympathies extend to the most monstrous humans as well as to the somewhat human monsters that terrorize his characters.

So, does it matter if Martin is a magical creature or not? The film shows that he is a killer (unless, as some have suggested – plausibly but without much evidence – that his kills are merely twisted daydreams), and his violence is shown as graphically here as in any horror film of the mid-1970s (it was the first film for which Tom Savini created make-up effects). Significantly, the violence, and its graphic depiction, is not limited to Martin’s feedings. Other ills are shown in equally explicit detail. The overall effect is to create the sense of a world in which violence is part of life, but for which the invention of monsters or special classes of villains is not only necessary but a distraction. Martin, clearly sick in some sense, continues killing because his uncle can only conceive of a supernatural explanation and knows of no way to approach the problem with an eye towards healing Martin, or at least preventing further death. (My favorite detail of the film is that his uncle acknowledges and tacitly allows Martin’s violence as long as he only hunts outside of their neighborhood community.)

Whether or not Martin is a vampire, he is a monster, in the most human sense of the word, but Romero understands that this does not make him unworthy of understanding, or sympathy.

Paranormal Activity 3 (USA, 2011)

The first horror film I’ve seen with a visible debt to avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow, Paranormal Activity 3 clearly understands and capitalizes on what was most effective about the first two films in the series. In an era plagued with lazy referentiality – an allusionality characteristic of all contemporary genres, and maybe most contemporary film, but one that is especially striking in horror, already very self-aware, and generically savvy – PA3 is one of the most knowing entries in recent American horror. Knowing in a good way, in other words. Knowledgeable. Smart. The makers seem to know how and why horror works.

What I like about PA3 is that it’s particularly effective in emphasizing the power of offscreen space – or more specifically, of what remains unseen but might pop into view at any moment. There’s a consistent, urgent danger that something frightening will show up on camera. Every move of the camera potentially reveals something shocking. It’s utterly unpredictable (a lesson I’m assuming the art school alums who made the movie learned from Snow).  I’m sure that many viewers will adopt the sort of paranoid viewing style that I did, in a state of preparation for the shocking image that might arrive onscreen at any moment. That anxious state of expectation is exactly what makes the film so effectively frightening.

The handheld stuff works better for me here than it did in the previous PA films. Here, in all the footage, we are always aware that these are not the optimal views of the action, and there’s always the danger that we’ll miss something HUGE. The major advantage of what’s being called “found footage” horror movies (the faux-documentary style of The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield) is that a viewer can never be confident that he/she is seeing the most important narrative elements. THE GHOST IS ALREADY IN THE ROOM, maybe.

(Btw, I think it’s very important that the recent POV camerawork in horror is largely limited to scenes in which there is an actual camera within the story producing the image, a diegetic camera. The older style of POV camerawork associates the device with the eyesight of the killer, but although that is useful for keeping monsters and killers offscreen in a similar way, these are usually controlled, privileged views that are being offered. There is none of the potentially frantic fallibility of the handheld camera.)

Briefly, on the monster: We get shadowy glimpses of something like the monster, but what we’re shown is female (a seemingly Victorian woman, along the lines of a ghost seen in another of producer Oren Peli’s recent credits, James Wan’s Insidious), while everything we’re told about the ghost names him as male (“Toby”). There are other contradictions. We’re told that Toby is very tall, and one of the shots near the end seems to indicate a giant presence. However, we do see one seemingly child-sized manifestation earlier in the film. I don’t think that these contradictions detract from the film. On the contrary, the confused picture we’re given of the ghost or ghosts are perfectly in line with the partial explanation and the partial view we’re given of everything, and these make the situation seem that much more unfathomable and frightening. Even though this movie does indeed explain the origin of and reasons for the hauntings in the first two films, it leaves major portions of the story entirely unexplained, and that’s entirely to its credit.  The haunting is given a very concrete explanation at one point (witches!!!), as it is in previous installments. Here, however, that explanation does nothing to limit the possibilities of what might be going on. Okay, so witches and some sort of entity that steals male babies, but… what is this thing that is sometimes playful and sometimes seemingly pure rage? What does it want with the little girls? By the end, we can make a pretty well educated guess, but it’s not made overly clear. This uncertainty is what seems to make the first two work so well (when they do work), but the third film employs uncertainty and the resulting anxiety as a structural principle.

(Also, this is film in which an invisible ghost places a blanket over its head to dress up as a ghost, and that is beautiful and brilliant.)

The Thing (USA, 1982)

John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is an intentional throwback to an earlier era of genre filmmaking. An homage to a production by Howard Hawks (famously, Carpenter’s favorite director, whose Rio Bravo was an obvious inspiration for Carpenter’s earlier feature Assault on Precinct 13), the Christian Nyby-directed The Thing from Another World (1951), The Thing eschews the teamwork and solidarity that characterized the earlier film in favor of a story about paranoia and isolation. Reaching back to Hawks and Nyby’s source material, John Campbell, Jr.’s short story “Who Goes There?”, The Thing tells the story of an Antarctic research facility that is infiltrated by a shape-shifting alien. Each inhabitant of the station is potentially an alien imposter, and the small group remains tense and suspicious throughout as, one by one, the members fall victim to their intruder.

The Thing does not delay putting its monster on the screen. The first scene of the film introduces a dog that we soon discover to be an alien. (In case the threat associated with the dog is not conveyed to the audience by the ferocious violence of the Norwegians who have pursued it to the American base, a tracking shot resembling an unattributed POV shot directly precedes the dog’s late-night entrance into the sleeping quarters of an unseen man, associating the dog with the sort of danger specific to the horror genre.) Less than thirty minutes into the film, once the extent of the damage to the Norwegian station has been assessed and the possibility of an extraterrestrial presence acknowledged, the dog changes its form. Tentacles erupt from its body in every direction and fleshy new appendages sprout, dripping with slime. The men quickly mobilize their arsenal and burn the transformed dog creature to death with a flamethrower, but not before a new creature of indeterminate form climbs into the ceiling and disappears.

This monster is clearly an entity that cannot be fit into our current understanding of the universe and is therefore, per Noel Carroll’s formulation, a cognitive threat. The rest of the movie will provide some gesture towards scientific explanation for the monster’s capabilities,[1] but the fantastic nature of the alien prevents the explanation from ever being sufficient. When MacReady, the film’s protagonist, is questioned about how the monster can possibly change shapes or survive a thousand years in the ice, he replies: “I don’t know how. Because it’s different from us, see? Because it’s from outer space.” The subsequent scientific explanations of cellular activity and the visualizations of the monster in the process of transformation basically function to support MacReady’s point: the monster is different from us, belonging to a different order – but there is some rational order to which it belongs even if we are not privy to its basic workings.

Rather than focus on those explanations, which reveal how the film tiptoes the line between science fiction and horror, I’d like to emphasize the displays of the monstrous alien bodies. The film puts the monster on display at semi-regular intervals, and yet, the horror is distinct from the more strictly monster-based horror that characterizes older horror, especially “creature films” (a cycle spawned, in fact, by the original Thing From Another World). The earlier horror model is very much about containment of the threat: within a terrible place and within a monstrous body. The abjection associated with the threat is spread through attacks, but its containment or limitation within physical or geographical boundaries ensures that some extraordinary action must take place to unleash it.[2] (Later horror films move the villain – Jason, Michael Myers, even Freddy – offscreen, relying on the horrific sight of victims’ bodies to scare and disgust more than the intimidating physicality of a monster.) This is very much true of The Thing as well: the alien was, we learn, encased in ice for tens of thousands of years only to be thawed out by an expedition from Norway. However, this is part of the back-story that we, along with the Americans, piece together during the course of the film. The film begins after the monster has already been thawed out, after its escape from the Norwegian station – the opening scene of the film chronicles its entrance, in the form of a dog, into the American station.

Nothing about the monster’s physicality, however, is contained. It both ingests – through ad hoc mouths that appear in the middle of torsos or foreheads, the victims pulled in with squirming tentacles – and infects others. Its attack is characterized by the scientists who try to study it as both an assimilation of the victim into its own body and an imposition of itself into its victims. (This is kept somewhat vague, as we see and hear explanations of both modes. At one point, one scientist notes that “even a flake” is enough to infect someone, advising the men to start preparing their own food, and to eat only from cans. Meanwhile, confrontations on either side of the sequence that contains this insight shows the alien swallowing another being and generating a new, simulated version of its victim from inside its own body.) It drips and spews slime and goo of various colors and consistencies. Furthermore, its status as a singular entity is called into question: MacReady correctly guesses that each portion of the alien functions as its own separate entity that will protect itself when threatened, whether that portion is a simulated human body or a few drops of blood. As the monster spreads to new bodies, and as those bodies are destroyed or broken into pieces, it is wholly unclear how the monster’s self should be understood: is it a conglomeration of sentient cells that work together, or perhaps a being that asserts new consciousness whenever a new body is created or separated from a previous whole, or perhaps the multiple bodies are all part of the same organism somehow working together though physically distinct? The film raises these questions without ever settling on an answer: what is important is that this monster violates every possible boundary between a subject and its environment, and between one entity and another. And it does so with great, disgusting messiness.

After one of the men collapses from an apparent heart attack, the station’s doctor attempts to revive him with a defibrillator. As the electrical charge is placed on the man’s chest a second time, the chest opens up, sprouting teeth, and bites off the doctor’s hands. Quickly responding with a flamethrower, the man on the operating table, now spurting yellow goo from a hole in his chest, as well as a semi-formed being with a recognizably human face that has suddenly emerged, are burned. As those creatures burn, the men don’t see the head of the man on the operating table stretch and then break off from the rest of its body, falling to the floor, using its tongue to pull itself away from the fire. This still human-looking head then proceeds to sprout spider-like legs and two antennae with eyes on their ends. As it crawls towards the hallway the men stare in disbelief. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” Palmer offers, before MacReady burns the creature with his flamethrower.

This scene perfectly illustrates the line between what can be understood as the comprehensible and incomprehensible aspects of a monster’s physicality. Palmer’s line, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” expresses a sense of disbelief that nonetheless acknowledges the physical reality he has just witnessed: it’s hard to believe, but we’re actually seeing this. This baffling transformation also marks the moment at which MacReady begins to understand the physical laws governing the creature’s existence: it can be divided, it infects and digests, and fire kills it (but, of course, because each small part can exist independently, the entire body must be burned through). This scene marks a working-through of the irrationality of the monster’s physicality, an incorporation of its category-defying body/bodies into an expanded understanding of the order of the universe. More than the specifics of its internal functioning, however, this is the scene that reveals one of the central tenets of modern horror: if the monster has a physical existence, if it is embodied – even if that body is utterly extraordinary and unprecedented – then physical means can be used to repel, defeat or escape it. Its specifics may be incomprehensible, but the fact of its physicality, a basic materiality, is affirmed, and it is, in this sense, rationalized. The precise nature of the monster’s appearance is in constant flux throughout The Thing, however, which enables the repeated displays to avoid the sort of physical stabilization that one finds at the end of slasher films or other embodiment narratives.
The film builds up to a final confrontation between MacReady and the creature, however, that sees it not as the dispersed, camouflaged threat we’ve grown familiar with throughout the film, but as a giant, conglomerated entity with various human and animal features visible throughout its messily, incoherently formed body. That is, this final confrontation effectively embodies the previously-dispersed whole of the threat in a single entity, a giant, terrifying monster. This grotesque manifestation seems to collect all its previous manifestations into a body, and contain them within it. MacReady sets off an explosive, destroying the body and the rest of the camp. However, the film explicitly acknowledges the inadequacy of this narrative solution; the threat, which has existed far beyond the limits of a single bodily containment for most of the film, has potentially survived. The film ends on the same paranoid note that has persisted throughout. MacReady and Childs sit in the cold, freezing to death, neither knowing for sure if the other is an alien, or if the alien has somehow managed to survive the multiple explosions that have left the camp a smoking wreckage site.

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[1] This is a distinguishing characteristic of science fiction for Vivian Sobchack in her book on the genre, Screening Space, but The Thing is an example of what she calls a “creature” film that blurs the lines between horror and science fiction genres. As is, she claims, the Nyby-Hawks The Thing From Another World.

[2] Innocent victims are of course commonplace for the classical horror film, but some sort of transgression must take place before they are put in harm’s way: Frankenstein must bring the monster to life and fail to keep it locked away, Renfield must enable Dracula’s relocation to the modern West, Carl Denham must transport King Kong to New York, nuclear testing must create giant mutant ants.