John Carpenter's The Thing

I caught a showing of The Thing on the big screen in a movie theater in New Jersey, of all places, about two weeks ago.

There’s a bleakness to the film that comes from the setting. It tells you a couple things right away. The first is that help isn’t going to be coming for these guys anytime soon. They’re as alone as people can be and still be on the same planet. If there’s no help coming, then they obviously have to rely on each other for help in solving the problems that come up. They’ve got no one but each other. Except, once they figure out how The Thing operates, they can’t even depend on the other people around them. It makes me wonder how The Thing sees from behind the eyes of the victims it emulates. It’s only interested in hiding long enough to escape, but what does it learn about being human from its time spent as one of us?

This movie, like Alien, is great because it doesn’t bother beyond a certain level to explain the monster. What we learn about it comes to us slowly, as the characters learn it. It’s a very Lovecraftian monster in a few ways. The first being that contact with it is eventually completely destructive, both to human life and the social fabric of the men at the polar station. Any problems they might have had with each other are amplified as they deal with the stress of trying to figure out where the Thing is hiding and trying to eliminate it. The bleak ending also fits in with Lovecraft, in that while they may have defeated the creature, they will not survive their encounter with it. 

We don’t know beyond a certain level what exactly the creature wants. We know it’s after a means of escaping the cold, but what will it do out there in the world beyond the ice? Will it try to take over everything like the body snatchers of the Fifities, or will it just go into hiding and try and rebuild the space ship that the men destroyed?

I didn’t feel like the film needed to try and answer these issues though, because they weren’t the questions raised by it. The Thing is a monster with a mission, and once it accomplishes the mission, we’re not sure what its goals and desires will be. In some way, though, they don’t matter. The important part about this monster is the reaction of the people it comes into contact with, and I’m not sure humanity comes off looking so good. Once the trust between people decays to a certain point, they become obstacles rather than human beings. We see that when Macready kills the guy who’s sneaking up behind him, and then finds out its not The Thing, then he becomes a murderer, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Macready’s goal isn’t survival anymore by that point, he just wants to stop the creature from escaping, so anything that needs to be done to accomplish that is acceptable.

The end is dark and Lovecraft-ish. Having met and perhaps defeated the creature, Childs and Macready sit and drink whiskey and wait to freeze. There’s the chance that Childs is the creature, but both are too exhausted to fight on any further. My take on it is that Macready really did manage to get the Thing, and that Childs is just another human being. I don’t have any real evidence for this beyond my feeling that if the Thing had Macready, the man who thwarted its escape right there, then I don’t think it would have anything to lose by taking him out.  

Even a man who's pure of heart . . .

And says his prayers by night,

May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms

And the autumn moon is bright.

                  

Another full moon and another werewolf book.

To understand the remake, you have to look a little at the original movie. According to Classic-horror.com (link provided at the end), The Wolfman was made because Universal needed a new monster to promote. Karloff had stopped playing Frankenstein (and the Mummy), and the studio felt Bela Lugosi couldn’t handle a lead role anymore. Lon Chaney Jr was picked to be the werewolf. His make-up was relatively shoddy, because the MPDA (the MPAA of the era) wouldn’t allow him to look too bestial. They also disallowed any man to wolf transformations, though the end sequence was fine because it was wolf to man. Some of the werewolf “lore” that people think of as coming from old legends actually comes from the script of The Wolfman.

In the novel adaptation for the new film, Lawrence Talbot is a famous actor, loved by men and women alike, who goes home after his brother’s death and ends up succumbing to a family curse brought on by his father. I’m wondering if making Lawrence an actor is a nod to Lon Chaney Sr, the Man of a Thousand Faces, who played Eric, the Phantom of the Opera.

There are monsters in the Wolfman, but Lawrence Talbot isn’t one of them. He’s not a Reverend Lowe; he doesn’t like being a beast, and he doesn’t enjoy killing. It’s possible, but seems unlikely, that he would’ve grown to like it later on if he’d lived. Lawrence’s father, Sir John, actually likes being an apex predator and enjoys the hunts, though he’s fine with blaming the murders on Lawrence. India as the origin of Sir John’s curse is interesting; as that’s where it’s believed the Romani (Gypsies) are from in the first place.

Werewolves usually live a double life as man and beast, but there are multiple layers of masks here. Lawrence and his father are estranged, and need to be civil to one another, though I really do believe Sir John when he says he’s glad that Lawrence is home. Of course, as we learn later on, he’s glad because then he can infect him with lycanthropy and either have someone to run the night with or to blame for the attacks. Sir John hides the curse, and the fact that he murdered Lawrence’s mother. He also killed Ben because he was going to leave, but plays the protective father to Lawrence when the villagers come to take him in just so his secret stays intact.

Sir John is one of the real monsters here, hiding behind multiple masks from everyone, playing his son against his enemies and trying to get him to drop his humanity and just enjoy the hunt. The doctors and orderlies of the insane asylum are the others. The orderlies take too much pleasure in the torture to be actually trying to assist Lawrence in becoming well. The doctor, while he may have Lawrence’s best interest in mind, doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that Lawrence might be a real werewolf, as those things aren’t supposed to exist. Interestingly, in the original script, there is room for an interpretation that Larry only strongly believes himself to be a werewolf and doesn’t change at all, he just runs around on all fours and howls at the moon. The doctor, I think, is less of a monster. He’s only using the techniques available to him at the time, and while we’d say he fails to consider the idea that Lawrence could be a werewolf, well, I might not believe someone if they told me that today. I can’t fault him for his disbelief.

Lawrence never revels in being the Wolfman, even when he’s slaughtering the doctors and guards who hurt him so much at the insane asylum both now and when he was there as a boy. He’s kind of like the Alien in that regard, he does things out of instinct instead of pure malice because when changed he’s a beast and not a man. Sir John, on the other hand, understands and accepts his condition without trying to defeat it, which makes him much more like Reverend Lowe.

There’s a sense of decency to Lawrence that you don’t find in Sir John but that is present in Inspector Abberline, even though he’s in an adversarial role, and also in Gwen Conliffe. Lawrence Talbot isn’t a perfect man, but he’s good enough not to deserve the curse of the werewolf. That Abberline ends up with the curse is interesting and would be a good subject for a further book or movie.

The end confrontation between Lawrence and Sir John is really between a man fighting not to be a beast and a beast disguised as a man. (I was going to say wolf in sheep’s clothing but that was too easy.) Lawrence succeeds in defeating the murderer of his mother and Ben, but just like King Kong, its beauty who kills the beast.

Looking into a werewolf’s eyes and calling out the person’s name is an old remedy to turn the beast back into a man. In the stories it works, but not so much in the movies, because defeating the monster that way is just too damn easy. That’s what silver bullets are for.  

There are differences between the book and the final cut of the film. The director’s cut, which I haven’t seen yet, seems to be closer to the novelization, with richer characters and more development of certain elements, such as the love between Gwen and Lawrence. I have issues with Rick Baker’s werewolf designs; they look sort of like gorillas mixed with wolves, though it’s actually a good update of the Wolfman look as done in the original movie.

Find more info on the original film here: www.classic-horror.com/wolf_man_1941

Alien: In space no one can hear you scream.

Alien continues the 1950’s obsession about contact with life from other planets and the mostly horrific effects it ends up having for humans.
HR Giger’s design for the xenomorph is what makes Alien a cut above the earlier films and the imitators that would try and use the same formula for success (and usually fail miserably.) You look at it and know that it might have burst from the chest of a human, but its origin was not earth. The creature plays into two big fears that a lot of people have: bugs and the unknown. It also has aspects of body horror, since the xenomorph gestates inside a human host. Though there are only hints of it in this film, later ones in the series delve deeply into the idea of a horror coming from inside your own body.
In this film, we don’t know what, beyond killing the crew, the xenomorph wants, if it wants anything at all. It might just be killing the crew because they’re there. While this lack of motivation only adds to the mystery of the monster, it does point out something as well. The alien is more like an animal than a truly malevolent creature, like say the Predator would be. It’s not overly smart or even very cunning, it just hides and when people find it, kills them. It’s a nicely done Lovecraftian monster in that humans can’t interact with it except as its exterminator or its prey. We don’t understand it, there’s no way to reason or talk with it, and if you don’t kill it, then you may end up as an incubator for more of them.
The life cycle of the creature is the only understandable thing about it. It kills people, but we can’t even be sure that it eats them. It’s entire ecology is a mystery, and we can’t even be sure where it’s from originally, except somewhere in the darkest reaches of space. While we see the Queen in the next one, Alien is just one monster versus a whole bunch of people who are unprepared for the assault and have to find ways to deal with it and each other. There’s lots of talk of shares and money and what the crew is going to do with it when they get home. Once the facehugger attaches itself to that unlucky bastard, all that kind of thinking goes out the window and it becomes a struggle for survival. Even then, the crew has more unknowns than just the xenomorph to worry about.
It’s difficult, having watched all the other movies and read a bunch of the novels and comics, to keep straight what the film tells us about the creature and what all the other movies and things add to the mythology. What’s cool is that you can kind of see where the seeds (or eggs?) of the future installments were planted in this film, even if it wasn’t exactly known whether there would be more or not.
There’s about a million imitators of this film, from the absolutely cheesy, like SYNGENOR, (which was filmed in a hotel) to fairly decent stuff like The Abyss and Leviathan, (which is one of my favorites. I love the last line, which is yelled as Peter Weller of Robocop lobs a grenade into the mouth of the creature, ala Jaws “Say hi Mother____.” All of these films try to tap into the central themes of Alien, either in the same way or with twists and turns in the plot and storylines. This isn’t a sub-genre that’s going away anytime soon.
And then there’s the actual Alien sequels and the books and the toys, (I still sort of want an original Alien figure, though I have a deluxe Alien Queen that’s pretty damn cool.) and their ill-fated meeting with the Yautja (or Hish), what non-geek folk call Predators. The first comic AVP series from Dark Horse is pretty amazing, it’s light on people and heavy on monster vs monster action. The first AVP movie, while filling in some interesting plot points from Alien (we meet the Weyland in Weyland-Yutani, or the Company) didn’t really deliver enough monster mayhem, because for whatever reason, the movie people thought we needed a total rehashing of how the xenomorphs spawned instead of just dropping all three species onto a planet and letting us watch the blood and acid and green blood fly.
In a rather strange coincidence, my current mentor, David Bischoff, wrote Hunter’s Planet, book two in the Alien vs Predator novel series.
While some people may turn up their noses at it, Species is another movie that uses Giger’s designs and has sort of a similar theme of aliens perpetuating their races by using humans as nurseries, or in the case of Sil, extra DNA to produce a true mate.

And then, there’s this:

alienlovespredator.com/2010/06/02/cash-cab-time-machine/

alienlovespredator.com/2010/05/05/happy-smothers-day/

World War Z by Max Brooks

I heard Max Brooks speak at Wizard World Philly a few years ago, and of the first things he said to the assembled crowd was that “If zombies come in that door in the back of the room, it’s every man for himself. I’ve already got my plan for in here ready to go: I’m jumping off this stage, running through the door up here and barricading it so they can’t get me.” We all laughed, but kind of nervously, looking back over our shoulders to make sure there wasn’t a horde of undead flooding into the room.
There’s a great many things about this book that are interesting. It’s a lot like Romero’s films, in that there’s a social commentary element that can’t be missed (although purists would point out that technically, Romero’s “zombies” are actually ghouls, but who listens to purists? Incidentally, it was Return of the Living Dead that gave zombies their hunger for brains.) That’s what zombie stories, the good ones, anyway, are all about: holding a mirror up to the collective face of humanity and showing us what we may not want to see.
Brooks uses zombies as part of an apocalyptic scenario that he drew from historical accounts and extrapolated from his own research. Just like Zombie Survival Guide’s advice, the situations are realistic with or without zombies, though invading armies of people are less fun and maybe easier to deal with.
There were various responses to the outbreak in the book, but the two that interested me the most was the Redeker chapter and the one about the dogs, but for very different reasons.
The Redeker Plan chapter showed that sometimes when people need to go to extremes to survive the apocalypse, even if they save lives by doing something hard and cruel, there's still a high price to pay. This guy was so upset by the plan he'd come up with that it's execution actually drove him insane and made him want to be another person because he couldn't actually live with having come up with it. I was surprised when we learned at the end of the chapter that the person talking about Redeker was actually Redeker himself.
The chapter about the zombie sniffing dogs showed that despite the harshness of the new world that people lived in, some men and women would still value not only human but animal life as well. Despite how much the world had changed, some things didn't.
The zombies in this book serve more as a way to show the reader how the nations of the world and how individual characters will react to their threat, than a monster on their own terms. While I thought this was an effective use, it made them sort of boring as actual opponents, compared to a book like Monster Island by David Wellington, where the undead become much more than a mindless menace. Still, for what Brooks was attempting to do, I think the zombies as presented were effective.
There apparently, is supposed to be a movie coming out, though the script seems to be in rewrite limbo at the moment.
The audio book version is excellent, with many famous people doing the voices for various people in the book. Listening to it adds a level of authenticity that reading just doesn't generate. There's a graphic novel as well, but it only has select stories in it.

The Yattering and Jack by Clive Barker

In the beginning of this story, I don’t know who I was rooting for, Jack, hapless inheritor of a dark pact from his mother, or Yattering, the one sent to collect the soul. I started out siding with Jack, after all, it wasn’t his fault that Hell wanted him, but by the end I was firmly on the side of the demon.
It’s all Barker’s fault. He makes the reader feel for Yattering by showing you how rough he has it and how frustrated he is that Jack will not fall for his tricks. I mean, a creature from Hell should have a gleeful time torturing his subject, not be more trapped than the victim is. It’s not as if Yattering is some sort of demon slacker, he genuinely wants to complete the task given him. He tries quite hard to make Jack’s life as miserable as possible.
The Yattering may not come from the same Hell as Pinhead and the Cenobites, but it follows the same model: order over chaos. (This idea is the basis of the graphic novel Jihad ‘Cenobites vs Nightbreed’, which has no connection the Yattering but is quite awesome if you can find it.) Yattering’s got a job to do and the Lord of the Flies isn’t going to let him out of it just because he’s not having any success. It’s a lovely example of corporate mentality. I know I’ve been there, given the impossible job and told “just do it” with no extra resources or help. So once we start seeing the demon’s side of things, then we can decide whether we’ll side with or against him. While I wasn’t sure Jack deserved to be consigned to Hell
What turned the tide in favor of the demon for me is finding out that Jack, humble gherkin importer, knows the entire time what’s going on. I think Barker overplays his hand here and lets the reader find out too early that Jack knows. But I’m wondering, if without knowing that, would I still feel sympathy for the little demon? Jack seems like a stand-up kind of guy before we know what he’s up to; afterwards, he seems just as diabolical as the Yattering.
If you look at some of the things Jack does in light of this fact, he actually comes out crueler. He keeps bringing in cats, knowing that they’ll probably get killed, he lets his daughters be terrorized on a holiday. Some would say, yeah, he’s got a good reason to do all this, but it kind of makes him monstrous as well.
The end of the story makes me wonder if perhaps Yattering won’t end up claiming jack’s soul after all. It was Faust’s familiar who drove him to lower and lower depths by egging him on and increasing his depravity. If Jack acts like that to make the demon blow his top, what kinds of things might he do now that he’s got one in his control? There probably are rules for that too, though we don’t really get any hint of that in the story.
There’s a Tales from the Darkside episode made of this story. Yattering is played by Phil Fondacaro (a little person who’s been in a ton of movies and tv shows.) The cheesy red makeup and bad devil horns make Yattering look that much more comic, rather than imposing. I also found a piece of the script for the episode on Barker’s website: http://www.clivebarker.info/yatteringtv.html
Epic produced a comic too, and John Bolton’s version of Yattering looks a bit like the imp from World of Warcraft (though it was out loooong before. Besides, both are a fairly classic lower demon type creature) It looks better than the Tales from the Darkside one: http://www.johnbolton.com/bolton/comics/yattering/yattering01.html
I’m thinking that once someone points this guy’s magazine out to Clive Barker’s lawyer, their totally getting sued: http://www.heofthehouse.com/yattering&jack.html

Here’s a link to some Clive Barker comics: http://www.clivebarker.com/html/visions/bib/comics/index.html

In honor of the Yattering, this post is 666 words long.