John Carpenter
La Cosa

U.S. Outpost #31, Antarctica, winter.

The cold begins to penetrate the flesh, defenseless and passive, and the constant trembling of my hands is a stupid, yet useless, consolation in my head. I am alive, at least for now. In front of me, Childs, the surviving colleague: he's either asleep, or most likely unconscious because of this damn blizzard, which seems to have no end; and of which I don't remember the beginning, damn it. The explosion is everywhere, the explosion has swept away the arctic base. Nauls, Palmer, Fuchs, Dr. Blair, Bennings, Clark.. They are all dead. My gaze is still fixed on the apocalypse, in the dark with the flamethrower and the fear inside. That hidden, unknown fear you could find in a corner of those damned corridors. Terror had turned all of us into hostages and executioners, a merciless and sneaky 'thing' that got into your guts. It explored and reproduced your organism, dominated the mind, and then exploded, literally. Evil is like a virus, despair increases contagion. Evil can reside in anyone, and suddenly come out. Manifesting, even in a gruesome way, after 'possessing' people. There is no hope. It scrutinizes us, observes us, and decides the best 'human' container. The fire around illuminates what remains of the night; I wait with the little strength I have left for rescue. Maybe they will never come, and I will die frozen next to my companion. The frost covers the eyelids, immobilizes the labored breath. I try to stay awake, pushing away and moving thoughts towards that unnameable and monstrous threat. Under cover, with only the incandescent light of a stick of dynamite, in the dark tranquility of a tomb. That alien horror could have belonged to anyone, deposited and grown. In the distorted faces and bodies of the nine missing researchers. Or, one day, in my grotesque face in the mirror. I will continue to be careful, out here. As long as I can. Despite everything, the 'thing' might still be alive. And annihilate me.

Tension and paranoia invade the screen in the cult remake 'The Thing' (1982) by John Carpenter, based on the short novel 'Who Goes There?' by John W. Campbell Jr. like the 1951 classic by Howard Hawks (credited to editor Christian Nyby), which has always been an important reference for the director born in Carthage, New York. Compared to the version thirty years earlier, the new screenplay by Bill Lancaster (who was helped by Tobe Hooper) did not include female roles because, according to Carpenter, the story would have a greater impact. The impressive special effects of the then twenty-two-year-old Rob Bottin, and the music by Ennio Morricone, visually integrated the best of the claustrophobic and distressing crescendo of the film. Carpenter, fresh from the success of 'Escape from New York', had a rather rich budget from Universal, compared to his standards, and decided to make the film calmly; in fact, the shooting lasted over a year, on the glaciers of British Columbia in Canada, where the base camp of the story was set up in six months.

The narrative technique of Master Carpenter meets Lovecraftian nightmares and paranoid hallucinations in the rigorous and tense account of a scientific expedition in Antarctica, led by the tenacious MacReady (Kurt Russell, a true fetish actor and icon of Carpenter's cinema), threatened by a mysterious alien entity capable of taking any form. The 'thing' will gradually take possession of the scientists, and MacReady and other survivors will have to prevent the risk from spreading to the entire humanity. Isolated among the polar snow, using any means at their disposal. Released in the United States at the same time as Spielberg's blockbuster 'E.T.' (in the series 'good and gentle alien' versus the pessimistic and unsettling imagery of Our Film), the horror/science fiction film 'The Thing' was a great failure, and the costs exceeded the box office revenue. Even the American critics received Carpenter's film negatively, considering it a modest splatter remake only to re-evaluate it definitively over time (unlike Europe, which immediately considered it a cult movie): the fate, alas, often reserved for the greats of Cinema. Like John Carpenter.

I can barely breathe, I have a noose around my neck now. The cold has frozen my limbs. Fuchs, answer me, I don’t want to die in this gloomy solitude. I hope the fire and smoke in the sky draw attention. I scrupulously monitor my surroundings. I have preserved myself and others from that unnatural conflict of torn bones and tissues, assimilated into a grotesque and surreal replica. I will wait for a helicopter, dawn is still far away. The cold angrily envelops the soul, but I manage to hope, with presumption. I wait for someone, not 'something' to arrive..