Monday Morricone Madness!!!
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
When Aneet and myself challenged each other to name our Top 5 favourite film composers recently(that’s the sort of crazy shit we get up to), rather interestingly, other than the legendary Ennio Morricone, subject of our regular Monday salutes, the only “scorer” we picked in common was John Carpenter. The horror and sci-fi master is a director of such overwhelming talent (even if he has gone somewhat off the boil in the last, say, 20 odd years or so) that it is often easy to forget what a distinct and ingenuous writer of film music he is. His uniquely sinister, synth-heavy compositions have helped to create nail-biting tension and menacing atmosphere in almost all of the many films and television programmes he has directed in his long career, with only a small handful of exceptions. One highly notable exception, however, is his 1982 film, The Thing, which is worthy of our attention today as he only went and got Ennio Morricone to do the music for him!
As we’ve already established, John Carpenter is one multi-talented git, particularly when it comes to music and films. In fact, he packed in his promising career as a rock musician in order to concentrate on directing his bloody brilliant films. Kicking off with groovy sci-fi fable, Dark Star (for which he composed an awesome country ballad title song), in 1974, Carpenter would write, direct, and score a bona fide classic every year or so for the next 7 years, culminating in 1981′s incredible futuristic thriller, Escape from New York. After exerting so much energy, not to mention displaying so much ability, for so long, you can’t blame Carpenter for wanting to share the workload on his next film. As already mentioned, Morricone was on board to provide the score, and the film itself would not be a Carpenter original, but instead a remake of 1951′s Howard Hawks-produced The Thing from Another World.
One of the, erm, things that first leaps to mind when I think about The Thing, is it’s eye-catching and distinctive logo, with the film’s title literally burning onto the screen (handsomely incorporated into the above revival poster, by American poster artist Tyler Stout). This logo and title sequence actually appear in the original version of the film, and indeed mega-Hawks fan Carpenter saw fit to use them to eerie effect on a living room TV screen in his horror classic, Halloween. It was a masterstroke of Carpenter’s to faithfully re-use such an incredible design, not to mention highly appropriate, as The Thing is that rare, um, thing; a remake that manages to be even better than the original, whilst simultenously remaining true to everything that made the original so great in the first place.
As in the original, the relatively simple plot of Carpenter’s film concerns an American scientific research team camped out in the Antarctic, which stumbles upon a malevolent and irrepressible, shapeshifting extraterrestrial. In both films the teams have to use their wits to destroy the dangerous creature, but the remake conducts this battle between man and alien in a much darker pitch. Even though Howard Hawks wasn’t fully behind the camera for the original, the earlier film still bears several distinctive “Hawksian” traits. The director is noted for his favoured pairing of charming, if often befuddled, male professional and pragmatic, yet eccentric, sassy “gal” as his lead players in almost all of his films (Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday being the most famous examples). The Thing from Another World also features this combination in the guise of news reporter Scotty and spunky secretary Nikki Nicholson, trapped together in their mission to destroy the sinister visitor. John Carpenter, quite correctly, doesn’t recognise the south pole as an appropriate, or particularly likely, arena in which to engage in a snappy battle of the sexes, and dismisses these characters completely. In their place we get likeable, wise-cracking Kurt Russell as a tough nut helicopter pilot who soon discovers he’s completely on his own, surrounded by shady boffins, with a terrifying, metamorphising monster on the loose.
The Thing from Another World is one of those films that’s often used as an example of sci-fi as allegory. Like it’s genre bredren, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, which appeared 5 years later, Hawks’ film is often cited as a metaphor for the imagined threat of communism on America at the time. Whether or not this really rings true, The Thing from Another World is a rather reactionary film, with the scientists involved in the expedition proving as villianous as the alien itself in their underhand mission to keep the interplanetary enemy alive for self-serving reasons. Carpenter does away with this mankind vs science riff also, and instead creates an atmosphere in which absolutely no one can be trusted, and the entire team share an overwhelming, apocalyptic fear of the creature reaching the outside world. The 1951 film has also been recognised as mirroring the cancer scare that hit America at the time, with the titular “thing” being read by some as a disease that can’t be cured (at least not at first). Similarly, some have seen the remake (released in 1982, remember) as being about the newly acknowledged AIDs epidemic, with a tense, hair-raising scene involving a round of emergency blood tests to flush out the creature, being the most apparent representation of this theme, and a typically, expertly directed Carpenter set-piece, to boot.
Another common trait between the two films is their use of special effects. The Thing from Another World was one of the very first films to have one of it’s actors appear to be on fire from head to foot. While this is common practise as a piece of stunt work today (and can be witnessed pretty much every Saturday night on Casualty), this was a staggering technical innovation in the early 50s, and had audiences screaming in terror. John Carpenter cleverly identifies the use of special effects as a real strong point in the original, and the ultra-gory anamotronics on display in his take on the tale have deservedly achieved a semi-legendary status. When I was growing up, The Thing was THE film for special effects, and even today they have lost none of their power to shock and disturb. The aforementioned blood test aside, the most famous effect is that of the camp doctor (as in RESEARCH camp, not Larry Grayson camp) in the process of defibrillating a wounded colleague. Little does the doc know, however, that the very man is he trying to revive is actually the shapeshifting thing, and a huge set of gnashers rip through the man’s body to tear the medic’s arms off! This unsavoury tour-de-force is a double joy to watch bearing in mind that not one single frame of it is computer-generated. The whole brutal ordeal is created by a combination of painstakingly put together stop motion effects, and the admittedly rather non-PC method of employing a real-life double amputee to stand-in for the freshly chomped doctor. They sure don’t make them like they used to!
So yeah, like Martin Scorsese’s take on Cape Fear (for example), a remake that actually manages to improve upon the original. How often does that happen? Sadly, about as often as John Carpenter makes a decent film these days. Immediately after the truly tremendous The Thing, his work wildly veered between the good (Starman, Big Trouble in Little China), the bad (Christine, They Live) and the so-so (Prince of Darkness, Memoirs of an Invisible Man). In the 90s he tried his hand at another remake, this time Village of the Damned, with markedly lesser results than The Thing, and his latest three films have all been truly awful (Escape from L.A., Vampires, Ghosts of Mars). Still, with some fresh work in the pipeline for the first time since the turn of the century, you wouldn’t rule out a comeback from one of the world’s greatest living directors. It’s also worth noting that Carpenter himself has recently been the victim of several turgid remakes, with spectacularly lazy and inferior rehashes of Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Fog all appearing in recent years. Next up, believe it or not, is The Thing. A remake of a remake!
But, what about Ennio Morrricone’s score? Aneet, shake that “Thing”!
I’d rather not shake any ‘Thing’ Alan but I will give you a rundown of Morricone’s ‘Thing’ hang on, that doesn’t sound right….
Anyway, as Morricone scores go, ‘The Thing’ is certainly one of the Maestro’s most unsettling, unnerving, and damn right scariest pieces of work to date. Perfectly complimenting Carpenter’s bleak visual landscape with eerie electronic menace it’s impossible to imagine any scene from the film without hearing the creeping horror of the score.
Morricone uses sparseness of sound to devastating effect. From the opening titles (Humanity Part 1) to the final scene (Despair), he manages to craft a sense of unease by conjuring up images of vast wilderness, loneliness and the fear of the unknown by making the compositions cold and stark. It howls and it leaves you with a real sense of desolation, claustrophobia, fear – and if you listened to it on your own at night like I just did scared shitless (sorry for the bad language – this is a family website after all). I personally think that this is one of Morricone’s bravest and challenging works of his career, since it highlights his incredible ability to adapt to different genres, decades and sounds with subtlety and intelligence which the film required.
‘The Thing’ should be recognised as one of the greatest horror film scores of all time. Since the film wasn’t well received (damn you E.T!) as well as the falling out between Carpenter and Morricone (I think there’s a theme going on here, Ennio) over Carpenter’s use of his own compositions for several scene cues rather than using Morricone’s entire score (well, Alan did say that John was a workaholic or control freak – you decide) led the film and music being misunderstood and overlooked.
So, go out and find the ‘Thing’ for yourselves but before I go here’s the brooding and chilling Humanity (Part 2). Be scared and keep watching the skies…..
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