Getting to experience The Thing on the big screen has many benefits. For one thing, having John Carpenter’s 1982 horror masterpiece fill up your entire line of sight really does enhance the eerie atmosphere of the whole movie. Now there is no escape in your vision from the terrors that this isolated research crew, including R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Childs (Keith David), also cannot evade. But having it projected on the big screen also allows one to truly appreciate the finer details of The Thing, including its sense of restraint on a visual and auditory level.
Critics back in 1982 widely disparaged this feature and dismissed it as grisly excess with no craft. But The Thing has endured as the masterpiece that it truly is, with its recent theatrical re-release offering an opportunity to underscore just how well this feature adheres to the philosophy of “less is more.”
The visual manifestation of this concept is apparent from the get-go when The Thing opens not in an ominous environment draped in the cloak of night, but on a Husky racing through the brightly lit landscapes of Antarctica. A helicopter following the canine closely makes it clear something is up, but The Thing isn’t immediately employing visual traits we associate with scary movies. However, as we follow this pooch sprinting through the cold, it’s impossible not to notice how vast this land is…and also its emptiness. There aren’t any other souls around for miles. Only the sound of paw prints hitting the snow-covered ground and the whir of a helicopter flying above break the silence covering this domain.
Without the audience even being conscious of it, Carpenter is establishing the stakes of what’s to come. While the souls trapped in the American research station in Antarctica eventually talk about how there’s nobody for miles to help them, we get to see their incredibly isolated situation firsthand. The vast emptiness of the frame in these early shots instills the soul with a sense of looming dread. There’s nothing on-screen that looks dangerous, but there’s also nothing on-screen that could provide help in a time of crisis.
This wise use of visual sparseness is carried over to when the Husky arrives at the research station occupied by MacReady and company. So often in The Thing, the members of this company are shown isolated or outright alone in larger rooms, with the empty space surrounding them quietly emphasizing once again how these characters are detached from the wider world. Even later intense scenes where several people are crowded in a hallway usually depict all those souls in one corner of the frame, with a vast gulf of space between them and a poor soul suspected to be the titular shape-shifting alien.
Some of these scenes depicting singular individuals, such as an early moment of the Husky walking down a hallway and surveying his domain, make great use of steady camerawork that lingers on a single shot for a prolonged period. Letting the image simmer on the screen makes the dominant use of empty space more apparent than ever, with the mind naturally filling in this visual void with whatever terrifying projections it can come up with. The sight of a canine just trotting around suddenly becomes eerie once an uncertain atmosphere and clever camerawork have got you looking for what’s lurking behind the emptiness.
The Thing is a movie where, much like with Jaws, what you can’t see is just as frightening as what fills up the frame. A similar approach is seen in the soundtrack of the feature, which often eschews Ennio Morricone’s score in favor of just relying on the natural sounds of the harsh snowy wilderness. The haunting howl of a massive wind or the clanging of debris hitting windows is often the only sound in the tensest moments of The Thing. These serve as constant reminders to the viewer and the characters of the relentless, unforgiving landscape they’re now trapped in. If this intergalactic shapeshifter won’t kill you, the natural elements of mother nature will do the trick.
The heavy presence of these natural sounds on the soundtrack underscores something else that’s absent on an auditory level beyond a wall-to-wall score: dialogue. There are plenty of lines in The Thing, but there isn’t constant banter between the characters that might drown out the wind in a traditional movie. The lack of trust between the members of the cast means there’s no communication between these people. They’re often just wielding weapons at one another, their intent apparent by holding up a knife or a stick of dynamite in a threatening manner.
The pronounced presence of all those natural noises potently reminds viewers how little unity there is in this group, but it’s not the only instance of sound work getting to have a shot in the spotlight in The Thing. Key set pieces involving the titular beast, particularly a memorable sequence that starts with a man’s head getting chopped off and culminating in a head scurrying around a lab, also often forego a score. Instead, all that the audience here is the crunch of limbs getting torn off or, most unsettling of all, the sounds of the cosmic monster itself.
Rather than having to fight against a loud score, one’s ears are now filled with the loud squelch of a neck bursting from a human’s body or the spider-like legs of that Thing skittering across the tile floor. All the focus, from an auditory perspective, goes onto the monster and the havoc it’s causing. Those unnatural sounds it produces put one immediately on edge and reinforce how otherworldly this organism is. It can be quite unnerving to watch these sequences unfold, but that’s a testament to the craftsmanship of The Thing’s sound design team.
Even Morricone’s score itself takes cues from the sparse sound design. The most iconic track created for the film, “Humanity – Pt. 2,” begins with a section of music largely consisting of just two thuds repeated over and over. Repeated throughout The Thing as a musical motif, it’s an ominous piece that sounds like it’s echoing across a vast empty space. Eventually, the track and other pieces from Morricone incorporate a larger array of instruments, but throughout his works, there’s a heavy emphasis on one instrument dominating the piece or even performing solo. Tracks like “Contamination” or “Bestiality” often begin with deep-sounding string instruments blaring all by themselves, a musical reflection of how isolated the human characters are in The Thing.
Committing so heavily to sparseness throughout The Thing, whether it’s in the soundtrack, the sound design, or the camera, speaks to how much trust the film’s creators have put into the audience. They don’t believe viewers need to be hand-held every step of the way, they can be expected to navigate the subtleties of this horror film. It’s that sense of trust that informs every frame of The Thing, including that iconic ambiguous ending. The cinematic vision of The Thing is one relying on sparseness, yet it still gives viewers so much to chew over…and, even more importantly, be frightened of.