Posts that just fundamentally misunderstand horror movies like The Thing, that have thousands of notes, are turning me into the joker.
"The thing is only acting in self defense because it gets attacked first"
The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.
You can imagine anything you want for the unknowns (before the movie starts, whether it can tell animals apart, etc), but you are fully wrong if you characterize its reception as being preemptively attacked. You can interpret things lots of ways, but saying the humans at the camp attack it first is factually wrong.
"None of the men know each other enough to recognize an impersonation."
The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.
There are so, so many completely reasonable ways to read ideas of social disaffectation, queerness, and more into the text of the movie without misrepresenting the factual text. I'm screaming and crying and throwing up blood, what else would everyone like to propose about horror movies that sounds great aside from being entirely spurious? Someone told me psychological thrillers are the only good horror movies an hour and a half ago, we could start there. I want people to think in these ways about horror but also talking about it in a way that depends on the the text of the film does require a certain amount of knowing the actual text of the film.
Actually I think this is important tags that speak to a larger idea about horror conversation:
The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.
That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.
And in a greater capacity, this is where I see things go very wrong when someone unfamiliar with or disdainful of horror tries to expound on the genre. It comes from a place of not wanting bad things to happen - not rose colored glasses or naivete - but not wanting the animal to die, not wanting the house to burn, not wanting the parents to lose a child. Not wanting to feel sick or hurt, a normal and human response to a genre which constantly steps over those lines, and quite often does so artlessly and with nothing but puerile shock at heart. That makes it difficult to examine in good faith, and wanting to see horror as something good for oneself leads most people to look for the places where horror doesn't stray close to the boundaries. Solving the problem of "bad horror" by presenting horror comedy or psychological thrillers as better side of horror, for example. But that's just another case of wanting to solve something that doesn't exist to have a solution. Part of getting the genre is recognizing not only that bad things happen in horror, but the ugly and awful and transgressive side is not a mistaken choice, not an error. It's part of what horror is, like a person, you can't understand it without understanding what you dislike along with what you like. Horror can't be corrected out of a set of flaws, those have to be accepted as part of seeing the genre as a whole.
Also, this isn't meant to suggest all horror is hopeless, mean, and cruel. Plent of horror is actually about having made one bad decision, having acted out of hubris, could have been solved by just talking reasonably and so forth. Those are all their own kind of horror plus loads of others. It's more that you can't fix the genre by decoding a right or wrong horror anymore than you can support an interpretation of The Thing where the base crew would have survived or mediated or so on. It's not a genre where a good version exists, because there's too much in it already which is either awful as a matter of fact like pain and death, or which is morally repugnant like racism and homophobia. It's useless to look for a way all of those things can somehow be retroactively solved. It's necessary to face all those things as a part of life. In horror, we have to acknowledge how much of it sucks (artistically) and was made by awful people and had deeply flawed examples of systemic oppression to actually like see the genre in a clear light. And similarly we also have to recognize how much of it is also necessarily transgressive in a way that cannot be anything except unpleasant, because that's part of things people find horrific. You can't have a respectable horror genre, is kinda the thing. There's too much going on, and trying to solve a flaw in like "too much gore" or "animal death" just ends up cutting off a necessary thing to the whole genre. The absolutely most bloodless zero death zero problematic element in the present day zero conflict good ending horror is still going to be uncomfortable because that's the point. Or it might suck. But lots of horror sucks, also, and sometimes that's also interesting.
