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.
I'm using this post to add on why I keep a pretty safe distance between me and the media I'm a fan of, and the fandom. This is a useful place to start, because it's touching on the technical parts of fandom that drive me up a wall.
In brief, fandom seems to be predominantly comprised of people who only want to talk about what isn't in the media. There is a fandom for The Thing on tumble, and it's very much about ideas that come from the movie, but not about anything innthe actual film. The few times I've had the misfortune to enjoy media with a large fandom, I find almost exclusively shipping, fantasies about specific characters antithetical to the subject matter, and an almost oppositional distaste for any of the actual intended or unintended meaning in the media. None of those are a problem per se, because the world is a big place and it doesn't matter in the grand picture what people want to pretended about a book or movie or TV series. This is mostly a me problem, where I can be perfectly fine and ignore what comes across my dashboard, but this is also a me post, which means I can complain about the phenomenon.
Anyway, where I find it frustrating is the encroachment of fandom focus on what isn't in the media into my little wading pool of enjoying digging through the ideas that are in the media, when a "what if it was completely different" idea inspired by the media gains so much traction that it begins to be treated as a reflection of the text, sometimes even exiting its primary fandom, like The Thing, into general circulation. Which is how you get people discussing the "creature is misunderstood" not-present ideas of The Thing by fandoms, while effectively ignoring the vastly more significant elements of the film relating to the Reagan era 1980s, cold war paranoia, and so on. Once a fandom non-textual idea propagates far enough, it not only occludes the ideas inside the original media, in my experience it almost invariably excises anything that was challenging about it. For example, how rapidly fandom's latched onto the idea of Remmick in Sinners as a misunderstood tragic figure - rather than anything to do with what the film is saying about systemic racism. It feels like a companion behavior towards people whose take away from media like Breaking Bad, Fight Club, or Obsession is that the male protagonist is meant to be viewed in a positive light - because that is an easy and more comfortable option than for example treating any character who isn't a guy or isn't white or isn't straight as a vital, human person at the center of the film.
And to bring it all back to The Thing, that's why the fandom, who do not care about the text of the film, are such a source of frustration. Wanting it to be about a nice monster is also not wanting to sit with the way the film approaches human trust and the speed with which a belief in everyone being a potential enemy creates systemic breakdown. It's much less comfortable to examine human flaws inside best intentions, and fandom effectively pushes that uncomfortable idea entirely out of its sandbox.
