The modern moviegoer so reviles remakes that even the complaints about them are rehashed every single year. But these fan-issued fatwas come with an implied carveout, as remakes sometimes so eclipse an original that source material once considered untouchable is quietly shuffled off to a home for retired film reels. When people say Ben-Hur is a classic, who’s referring to the 1925 version?
That’s the fate that befell The Thing from Another World, which celebrates its 75th birthday today. While John Carpenter’s 1982 remake was initially dismissed as an empty, nihilistic gorefest, The Thing (née Another World) has since been reevaluated as one of the greatest science-fiction films of the ‘80s, and certainly one of the most influential. To horror fans who grew up with Carpenter’s version, its predecessor can look dated and dull; but there’s a reason Carpenter questioned his own ability to surpass the original.
Set in a remote Alaskan research facility that’s just detected a crashed alien vessel, our military and civilian heroes fail to recover the craft but do manage to haul back a tall, strange body frozen in the ice. Dr. Arthur Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) wants to dissect the corpse, but Captain Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) orders it held until a storm passes and the base can reestablish contact with his superiors. One mishap with an electric blanket later, however, and the creature is revealed to not only be alive, but hostile.
While both films are adaptations of John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella “Who Goes There?” The Thing from Another World drops its central premise of a shapeshifting impersonator, recasting the Thing as a lurching Frankenstein’s monster that, as the station’s scientists discover, amounts to a sentient, bloodsucking vegetable. It’s an understandable decision, given the special effects available in 1951, but an underwhelming one, and the obvious target for improvement in Carpenter’s far more faithful remake. Throw in the stately pace typical for the era (the movie is only 87 minutes, and it takes around half an hour for a threat to emerge), and you can see why some modern viewers scratch their heads.
With the monster just another monster, Another World lacks the paranoia and infighting the story is now famous for. Dr. Carrington cracks up, but everyone else remains stoic and focused, the revelation that carrot-people might be trying to conquer us met only with jokes and steely determination. In retrospect, it really does feel like a first draft destined to be written over. While not without its cynical side — the movie casts doubt on distant bureaucratic authority and the noble intentions of science — humanity’s largely bloodless triumph is never in doubt. It’s reminiscent of another ‘50s classic later surpassed by a bleaker remake, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Still, an open-minded viewer can appreciate both the craft on display and the revelations the movie offers about the state of sci-fi at the beginning of the 1950s. Riffing on the era’s UFO craze with its saucer-shaped alien craft (Kenneth Arnold triggered the frenzy by claiming to have seen UFOs near Mount Rainer just four years earlier), casually joking about the world-changing nature of the atom bomb, and musing on what modern science has to offer man, The Thing from Another World had the pulpy sensibilities of a B-movie but the budget of a marquee picture. When The Day the Earth Stood Still hit theaters five months later, the films hinted at the two arms the genre would evolve over the coming decades: artsy musings and omnicidal Terminators.
A first draft, after all, can still be a decent one. A witty, cross-talky script (His Girl Friday director Howard Hawks was a heavily involved producer) delivers a sense of constant activity as our heroes bustle around their facility, an installation that, despite the sometimes obvious artifice, still communicates a convincing sense of chilly isolation. An attempt to destroy the monster with fire produces a remarkably ambitious sequence that practically begged to be reimagined by Carpenter, while quieter moments, like the use of a Geiger counter to track the creature, presage Aliens and other future imitators. It’s no wonder that Carpenter was just one of several prominent directors to later praise the movie and riff on its ideas.
Perhaps Carpenter’s fandom is fitting, as The Thing from Another World was also met with mixed reviews before later being judged one of the great sci-fi chillers of the ‘50s. Maybe some of the seemingly unnecessary adaptations and remakes being pumped out today will enjoy a similar fate. And while talk of another reimagining seems to have dried up since the story broke in 2020, a modern director could do worse than throw Carpenter fans a curveball by shifting back to the bloodsucking vegetable angle.
The Thing from Another World is streaming on Tubi.
