By JASON R. WALLACH
Recently RUE MORGUE spoke with author-director Ian Nathan about his first documentary with Creator VC, Aliens Expanded. In that interview, Nathan outlined the extended format and process he used to examine the James Cameron film. From developing a synopsis to breaking the film down scene by scene, Aliens Expanded is one of the most detailed examinations of the film to date. Following the outpouring of fan love for Aliens, it makes sense that Creator VC would set its sights on another sci-fi horror classic, John Carpenter’s The Thing.
The Thing, based on John W. Campbell‘s 1938 novella Who Goes There? first adapted for film in 1951 as The Thing From Another World, was released in theaters in 1982, during the “summer of ET” to mixed reviews and poor box office. The film was in production for over a year, and its lackluster performance led to Carpenter’s firing from Universal – ironically, a company built on monster movies. Originally considered a career-ruining film, The Thing is now considered Carpenter’s masterpiece. Thanks to home video, The Thing finally found its audience. Well ahead of its time, many people simply weren’t ready to embrace a film centered on fear and paranoia. Still, it remains perennially relevant as a metaphor for the social and political climate of our recent history.
Once again, we sat down with Ian Nathan – this time to discuss THE THING EXPANDED. Exploring aspects ranging from the Lovecraftian inspiration for John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? to the film’s enduring relevance through the decades, this interview is merely a taste of what the Creator VC team has in store for us.
Why did you choose to make a documentary about John Carpenter’s The Thing following Aliens Expanded?
That’s a very good question. Certainly, at the beginning of the Aliens Expanded process, when we were looking at the structure and the way we would go about this, the idea was for a documentary format that would be applicable to more than just one film. Aliens seemed to be the perfect starting point, but we knew we wanted to take it and apply it to other films. So, in a sense, Aliens was the canary down the mine. It was the first one we would do to figure it out. Even during the process of making Aliens Expanded, we did discuss – Creator VC, my producers and I – where we could go next and which films we would want to examine. You want your love to be part of this. You can’t go into the process of making a long documentary without having passion. And what would fit our structure?
We talked about films we’d maybe investigate. We went all over the map. We talked about Terminator and Terminator 2. We talked about Predator, and I mentioned Back to the Future – which I would love to make a film about. The one film that kept coming up again and again was The Thing. It’s the film that we were all unanimous on in the sense of what could work. And we all love it as a film. And we all thought about it in the sense that it works for Expanded. In fact, in some ways, it works even better than Aliens. It doesn’t quite have the same sort of passionate, beloved quality because it’s a much more cynical film. It came out in 1982, but it feels like a ’70s film … With Aliens, and this is called “the Cameron way,” you know what’s happening. What you see is what you get. You’re being shown the sequence of events, whereas The Thing is a mystery story. It’s hidden. The movement of the virus (organism) is hidden from us. And there’s this idea of who you can trust and who you cannot trust. This is the whole undercurrent to The Thing that’s paranoid and fascinating and endlessly debatable.
It’s well known that Carpenter won’t reveal his secrets. The actors didn’t quite know exactly where the alien was flowing at certain points. And we just thought that’s great because it opened a whole idea of debate and discussion within the documentary that was different from Aliens. It’s much more about ideas and theories that we could then put forward and throw them at Carpenter and throw them at the cast and bring The Thing experts in and have them debate it. And it might just be that we don’t answer these questions because they may be unanswerable. But there’ll be a great deal of joy in asking the questions and having the discussions. I liked the idea that it was a leaner film than Aliens. Aliens has a big cast, and The Thing is quite reduced. I liked the fact that it would have a different texture.
Obviously, there’s the special effects side to it that we would get into – the creature itself and its expressions. But even that is endlessly fascinating because what does the thing look like? What we see are just expressions of the various life forms absorbed along the way on this intergalactic journey. Is it purely a DNA strand, or what is it? And so, those became questions that we could involve ourselves in. In some ways, The Thing asks so many more questions than Aliens does, so it’s a different thing altogether. Aliens Expanded is more about why we love [that film] and why we keep going back to it and why we adore those characters. With The Thing, it’s much more about what is going on in the film and how does it work? And how the filmmakers imbued that into what they were doing. How did they approach that?
I watched it in the cinema again a few months ago. I went because there was a showing at the British Film Institute. It holds up very well – its atmosphere, its music, characterizations. It’s Kurt Russell‘s finest hour. It’s Carpenter’s finest hour, and it has these kind of gross-out elements… But I think we tend to think about all that stuff like that’s the whole film, and it really isn’t. They’re very concentrated in certain moments, and they’re extraordinary, but there’s so much more to it. So, the idea with Aliens Expanded, the format of breaking a film down into segments, into chapters, works even better with The Thing because there’s more variation on what those chapters are. It’s got very calm chapters, and then, there are completely gross Rob Bottin-fueled chapters. That kind of rhythm excited me.
It’s a far more evocative piece than Aliens, which tends to be more front and center with itself. It’s almost as if the film is like the Thing itself because it does hide, and it does keep itself away from you, but it does reveal itself at certain times.
This is perhaps its greatest quality, that it’s a withdrawn film. It’s all about suggestion, and you are put in the place of Macready; You are put in the place of these characters, where they have no idea. That’s almost an anticinematic way of going about things. If you think about it, it’s Hitchcock. His rule was showing the ticking bomb, then show the people around the ticking bomb so the audience is in on the secret, and they’re fearful – but the characters aren’t. This is the reverse of that. This is the audience at the level of the characters, and they do not know what’s happening.
I’ve been enjoying delving into the online community around The Thing to discover the intense sort of thought and mathematics that people have put into trying to work it out. You know, they’ve done timelines. They follow characters, and I don’t think you can work it out. I don’t think you can tell whether Childs is the Thing at the end. I don’t know if you can get there. We’ll debate it, and we’ll test this theory out in the documentary, and we’ll map out the timelines and who got it when and who messed up the blood and who’s the shadow on the wall, and all those kinds of questions. The other side of that, the counterpoint of that, is that if you listen to Carpenter, he says that’s a style choice. That’s a filmmaking choice. You’re not meant to answer the questions because the ideas of paranoia and fear and mystery and the unknown is what he wanted.
What I found – and find – truly frightening about the film is its relatability to modern crises, especially biological and political issues. Back in the 1980s, we had the AIDS epidemic. Most recently there was the COVID-19 pandemic, which also became overtly political. We were given bits of information, and there was a palpable sense of paranoia and fear.
Absolutely. The definition of great art is that it’s applicable throughout time. It’s a constant metaphor. It doesn’t have one meaning. It has endless meaning. So, it’s a great type of tool you use to interpret the world. I think that’s very true of The Thing. I said, at the beginning, it came out in 1982, but it feels like a film made in 1975, you know, the atmosphere. It feels like this is about Watergate. This is about Nixon. This is about a world you can’t trust. This is a bleak view of humanity. If you set aside the creature, these guys don’t like each other. Macready is our hero, but he’s a cold son of a bitch. With Aliens, you have Ripley and you have Newt and you have Hicks – and you love them because they’re decent people. You can’t say that of this bunch of men trapped in the middle of the Antarctic and not having a great time. There’s a lot of resentment. I think that speaks to the era of the ’70s when directors didn’t feel they had to have moral certainty in their characters.
What’s interesting is that once you throw them into a crisis where their very humanity is threatened, then we relate to them, and we still want them to survive. That’s very Carpenter. I think he’s very interested in the dark side of human behavior. The characters Kurt Russell plays, apart from Elvis, for Carpenter, you know, Snake Plisskin, for example, he just thinks the world is a shit place to be – and what’s the point in liking anything when it’s always going to backfire on you? These are 1970s tropes, and that makes it an endlessly interesting film in terms of using it as a metaphor. You can use it as a metaphor for the current political situation in America, if not the world. You could use it as a metaphor for the rise of disease – as you said, AIDS. That subsequently came and all the things that came after. You just look at it and realize this is a great film about mankind versus its issues.
And that open-endedness… Yes, I love Aliens, but it doesn’t have as much open-endedness as The Thing. Aliens is like a fairytale in a sense. It’s once upon a time, this happens. Here’s the ending, whereas The Thing is sort of like a documentary, and you meet the characters in the middle of something. This virus, if you want to call it a virus, attacks, and then you don’t know! It’s the genius of each subsequent moment, isn’t it? Then Carpenter does the blood test, tying them to the couch, and all those elements that are within the film come to life because they’re fueled by that cynicism and fear and rather bleak view of humanity.
It’s funny you should mention the blood test because that was something in my young life that really bothered me because not only are you in the presence of this thing that is hiding from you, but any means that you have of luring it out or getting it to show itself are about as intrusive as the creature itself. You must cut yourself open and bleed out.
It takes the concept of the blood test to a bleak extreme. It’s clever, isn’t it? It’s clever on a scientific level. It’s like they really reasoned about how you are going to be able to detect who is or who isn’t the Thing because ultimately, it forms a perfect replica. With the Body Snatchers, you become a pod person. And again, another 1950’s reference. A Communist reference this time. So, you must come up with an idea that definitively and cinematically tells you who’s what. And it’s going to try and save itself. It’s almost like a sentient germ that as soon as the hot wire goes in, it will leap out. I just love the idea. There’s so much tension in that it’s not just the results of their blood test. “Oh, it’s you!” You’ve got to make it something visual in front of the audience, and it’s kind of scratching in the petri dish. Finally, it leaps out of one of the dishes, and all hell breaks loose! It’s a brilliant concept, both scientifically and narratively but also just in terms of horror and what’s in front of the camera and shocking the audience. It’s a beautifully simple but terrifying way of announcing where the Thing is.
John W. Campbell, who wrote Who Goes There? was an admirer of the work of H.P. Lovecraft and was inspired by At the Mountains of Madness. It could be said that, essentially, what you’ve got in the film is a Shoggoth. What are your thoughts on this?
Obviously, Rob Bottin designed the creature effects, ut he and Carpenter were drawing on the kind of mythologies that came out of Campbell and then going back one stage further to Lovecraft. If you think about it, it’s the Antarctic. It has many tentacled beasts and the creatures are beyond hideousness. I think that Guillermo del Toro, who’s obviously a huge Lovecraft aficionado, would speak to this very well. Absolutely. The Thing is a Lovecraftian film. In all but name, it’s a Lovecraft adaptation. There’s something ancient about the UFO that they find embedded in the ice that is like At the Mountains of Madness. It’s like the hidden city. There are other similar motifs that exist within The Thing. Absolutely. That would be one key reference point that this is literary heritage. Campbell was an extraordinary sci-fi writer and a hugely revolutionary one because he went to MIT, and he was intent on scientific accuracy within the framework of stories. Of course, they were far-fetched, but they must be plausible if not accurately plausible. And Who Goes There? which is the short story that The Thing is based on, absolutely has that kind of scientific inquiry within it that gives it a brilliant authenticity.
I’ve been doing some reading about Campbell. His mother was a twin, an identical twin, and very close to her sister. As Campbell wrote, his aunt didn’t like him. His aunt wasn’t fond of children and didn’t seem to be fond of Campbell. He would come home from school and be greeted by either his mother or his aunt, and he wouldn’t know which was which immediately, except one loved him – and one didn’t. He’d be greeted by the wrong one, you know, and be like, “Are you, my mother? Are you not, my mother?” And that’s where this whole thing comes from – this idea of his mother being replaced by something that doesn’t love him.
Something I’m curious about is Rob Bottin’s possible involvement in this project, as he seems to have vanished from the film industry. Am I correct in assuming there were at least intentions to reach out to him?
Obviously, a big part of The Thing is its special effects. It’s a monument to practical prosthetic effects and where they could be taken at that time. Anyone who’s seen the prequel would tell you how bad CGI looks and feels in relation to what Rob Bottin did. And even if in some senses it has dated slightly, it gives it a kind of weirdness – that kind of movement of the Thing’s that is almost sickening. It has a quality in those limitations that add to the film It’s a work of art, and I would love to know from Bottin not only how he did it but how he thought it through –what the Thing was, how it worked, how it blossomed and how it changed. What was the transformation process? Why didn’t it just go from virus into a finished body? Why does it express itself as all these other things encoded within it?
One of the things we’ve talked about doing is a kind of montage of the different forms that the Thing expresses throughout the film. It’s almost like a list of aliens present in the film – a flower, a kind of a tentacle thing. We can always see traces of the intergalactic voyage of this virus by its different expressions. I would love to know from Bottin how he thought that through the design. We’re going to do our utmost to get him, talk to him about it and get his memories and stories. I want to talk to Carpenter and cast members as well to know how they acted with this stuff, what they were thinking. You watch the scene with the head spider. It sprouts the legs, the two eyes on stalks come out, and start thinking, well, was that a kind of creature on a planet? It has just expressed itself. Are the eyes of a different creature and the legs of something else? It’s just figuring it out. It’s a weird, instant evolution that’s going on, that this virus is adapting to the environment instantaneously. You get a strong sense that it knows. Maybe this is just fortune or just fun, but they’re giving the guy the defibrillation. Then, the Thing knows enough to become a mouth to bite his arms off. How has the Thing figured that out? And how has it worked that out? What’s the right shape to take at any one point? So, the question is, how sentient is the Thing? How knowing? And how much is it outwitting them? Carpenter may go with that, and he may not, but it’s something the documentary can do and discuss.
I think Bottin would be so good on that, so good on how he went about creating that idea. If you watch that film, every time, it does feel like a living thing. Yeah, it’s hideous, but there is some sense of life about it – and grossness – and that’s one of its palpable powers. It’s such a tactile film.
RM: It cycles through all these different possibilities, and that makes it even scarier when you think about it.
It’s great cinema. For one thing, you don’t repeat the same visual. You keep it varied. You keep the audience sort of mesmerized by kind of what could come next because you absolutely have no idea. And it’s one thing The Thing has that practically no other movie I know has is this constant change in the monster. In Aliens, the monster stays the same. All right. We got a queen, but it doesn’t vary. With The Thing, because it doesn’t have a form or a set form, it’s got this fantastic idea of never knowing what’s coming in the next scene. We never know what’s next. That thrilling sense of mutability and change is part of the fun of it. It almost becomes quite funny at times, and I think Carpenter knows that. It’s a blackly funny way that the creature can express itself.
It’s about biology as well, and it comes back to Campbell being a scientist, saying, you’ve got to have some kind of real idea within it … without it being totally plausible but scientifically credible. The idea of what evolution does is it experiments with form until one works in the environment it’s in. So, it’s an accelerated evolution that’s going on with the thing. That’s brilliant. We’ve had Covid only two to three years ago, and the terrifying thing about that was it kept mutating and turning into new variations that the vaccines couldn’t deal with. We felt we were kind of stuck, certainly within it, that, my God, are we ever going to be rid of this thing? Is it going to constantly change? And hey, that’s The Thing, you know. That’s exactly what The Thing is. It’s a prescient film. It’s got a kind of vision of what happens.
It’s a great idea, and it does go back to Campbell and his facility with science fiction. I just think Carpenter and Bottin really ran with that and created a kind of monument to the potential of the monster movie to be far more than just something that scares you. It’s a canvas on which you know all our fears. Our biological fears can be expressed.
As far as the documentary goes, what is the timeline that you are that you are looking at to go full throttle with it?
We’re in the formative stages, what you might call pre-production. So, a synopsis has been written and is online for people to see. That’s a very early document. It’s a list of the ideas and the scenes we want to do. It’s still very early, so that’s going to evolve – rather like the Thing. It’s going to change and mutate as we go into production. The next stage is the pre-sale, and that’s where we put forward to potential backers, which is everybody. But we obviously have a lot of people who’ve backed our documentaries before, so they get approached. We basically show them the synopsis. We have materials, posters, visuals, all sorts of things about how we’re going to go about it and say, “This is The Thing Expanded. What do you think? Do you want to back it?”
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