I have just finished watching Howard Hawk's "The Thing" for perhaps the 25th time since it first appeared on commercial television in an edited version in the late 1950's.Nonetheless, this horror sci-fi classic unfailingly raises the gooesflesh and inspires dread and terror as if it were being viewed for the first time. "The Thing" masterfully earns its chills through its taut direction,eerily claustrophobic atmospherics, brisk, rapid-clip and often overlapping dialogue, a spine-tingling, other-worldly score and perhaps the most cinematically powerful use of light and shadow in its black and white cinematography since Welles' "Citizen Kane". As is usually the case with great films, "The Thing", carries along with is central plot of the world-in-the-balance battle in he Polar North between an inexorably predatory alien creature and a small band of soldiers and civilians, several integral sub-texts: dispassionate scientists vs. action-oriented soldiers, the military brass vs. the ordinary grunts, the press and military's mutual mistrust. Even the seemingly obligatory romantic sub-plot serves to subtly underscore the contrast between sensual, and sensuous, human beings and the implacable, emotion-free blood-thirsty creature. Not least of all the film's appeal is the sense of the WW11-era camaraderie, humor and genuine love and loyalty that the military men display toward one another. "The Thing" should be required viewing for all young directors who would aspire to create film terror. Hawks knew, as did Hitchcock, that as far as horror goes less is more -the more the director,is able to provoke the audience to fill in the horrific details with their imaginations, with no need for extravagant special effects, or spattering gore,the scarier the results. These were lessons obviously learned by Ridley Scott and James Cameron who in their "Alien" films walked us down those same dark, foreboding corridors toward unimaginable horror.
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