Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Briefly: A polar encampment of soldiers and scientists discovers a strong magnetic field emanating from an area where there has been a recent meteor fall; the field is strong enough to throw all their electronic gadgets and gizmos off whack. Further, a camera designed to start shooting pictures when and if the normal radiation background count suddenly goes up has taken photos of an object which dips, swoops, and turns at high speeds-strange behavior for a meteor.

An expedition is dispatched to the spot, and it discovers a flying saucer buried in the ice.

The saucer, superhot on touchdown, melted its way into the ice, which then refroze, leaving only the tailfin sticking out (thus relieving the special-effects corps of a potentially big-budget item). The Army guys, who demonstrate frostbite of the brain throughout most of the film, promptly destroy the extraterrestrial ship while trying to burn it out of the ice with thermite.

The occupant (Arness) is saved, however, and carted back to the experimental station in a block of ice. He/it is placed in a storage shed, under guard. One of the guards is so freaked out by the Thing that he throws a blanket over it. Unlucky man! Quite obviously all his good stars are in retrograde, his biorhythms low, and his mental magnetic poles temporarily reversed. The blanket he's used is of the electric variety, and it miraculously melts the ice without shorting out. The Thing escapes, and the fun begins.

The fun ends about sixty minutes later with the creature being roasted medium-rare on an electric sidewalk sort of thing that the scientists have set up. A reporter on the scene reports the news of humankind's first victory over invaders from space to a presumably grateful world, and the film fades out, like The Blob seven years later, not with a THE END title card, but with a question mark.

The Thing is a small movie (in An Illustrated History of the Horror Film , Carlos Clarens quite rightly calls it "intimate") done on a low budget and as obviously done "on-set" as Lewton's The Cat People . Like Alien , which would come more than a quarter-century later, it achieves its best effects from feelings of claustrophobia and xenophobia, both of them feelings we're saving for those films with mythic, "fairy-tale" subtexts,* but as pointed out before, the best horror movies will try to get at you on many different levels, and The Thing is also operating on a political level. It has grim things to say about eggheads (and knee-jerk liberals; in the early fifties you could have put an equals sign between the two) who would indulge in the crime of appeasement.