Stan Winston, Rob Bottin - genius.

Critical reception

The film's special effects were simultaneously lauded and lambasted for being technically brilliant but visually repulsive. Film critic Roger Ebert called the special effects "among the most elaborate, nauseating, and horrifying sights yet achieved by Hollywood’s new generation of visual magicians", and called the film itself "a great barf-bag movie".[9] In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it "a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other. Sometimes it looks as if it aspired to be the quintessential moron movie of the 80's".[10] Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "Designer Rob Bottin's work is novel and unforgettable, but since it exists in a near vacuum emotionally, it becomes too domineering dramatically and something of an exercise in abstract art".[11]

It's interesting because the initial reviews have proven to have undervalued the movie, which many now see as the best horror movie of the decade. Indeed one of the greatest horror movies ever.

Another choice quote:

“Any makeup effects guy in the world that you talk to will say, ‘I got into that business because of that movie. Because of John Carpenter, because of Rob Bottin’s brilliant makeup effects.” - Greg Nicotero

Very influential.

It was all just so imaginative and creative and goopy and gross and I was really really impressed.

Like a lot of movies which are formally innovative the initial reaction tends to dismiss everything else because the new element is so radical and different. So it was seen as merely a series of gross out shocks.

Curiously, many horror fans now cite it more as an example of careful story telling, characterization and slow building suspense. Plus wild effects.

The bigger assessment though is that the movie hits on a particular kind of bleakness that is very hard to shake. It's a freaky dark vision that lingers with you.

This kind of sums up the critical re-evaluation of The Thing.

*********

If someone were to ask me (not that anybody ever would) what I thought was the most misunderstood horror film of the 1980’s, I wouldn’t need more than a second to consider my answer: John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. The professional, mainstream critics came down on The Thing like an imploding welfare high-rise the instant it appeared in theaters. “Gore for gore’s sake,” they said. “Nothing but one special effect after another,” they said. “No story, no characters, no soul,” they said. Hell, one reviewer went so far as to call Carpenter “a pornographer of violence!” And to my undying bewilderment, most of the hardcore horror and sci-fi fans seemed to agree. Like their more highly visible counterparts, they pointed to the version Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby had made back in 1951, and exclaimed, “Look, man— that’s how it’s supposed to be done!” No one seemed to realize that Hawks and company had taken an excellent pulp sci-fi story (John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”), excised absolutely everything about it that had made it good in the first place, and built an enjoyable but extremely simplistic monster movie around the tale’s initial setup. To be fair, the Hawks-Nyby The Thing was the first of its kind, and introduced all of the tired old cliches that litter its every scene; it thus merits a fair percentage of the esteem in which it is conventionally held, as it is unquestionably one of the two or three most influential sci-fi/ horror films of its era. As an adaptation of its source, however, it is an utter failure, and “Who Goes There?” spent the next three decades just crying out for somebody to come along, make a movie out of it, and do it right. That is exactly what Carpenter did (although screenwriter Bill Lancaster plays with the details of Campbell’s story in several intriguing ways), and it pleases me to see that finally, after most of twenty years, this movie has started getting some of the respect it deserves. Having been staunchly in The Thing’s corner for about fifteen of those twenty years, I’d like to take a moment now to say, “I told you so.”

From 1000 Misspent Hours. (a great website for horror/science fiction reviews, especially for a broad historical review. Check out his chronological listing of reviews to see how far back he goes.)

Like a lot of movies which are formally innovative the initial reaction tends to dismiss everything else because the new element is so radical and different. So it was seen as merely a series of gross out shocks.

I was surprised at how impressed I was because normally, when I see, as you say, "formally innovative" movies, I don't think it's that big a deal because I've seen modern movies do the same things so many times, often in ways I like better. But this was just like, what the fuck, I have never seen anything like this, I don't understand, wow.

Curiously, many horror fans now cite it more as an example of careful story telling, characterization and slow building suspense.

It was definitely good at building suspense slowly and playing with the audience, but I thought the characterization wasn't much better than any other horror movie.

The bigger assessment though is that the movie hits on a particular kind of bleakness that is very hard to shake. It's a freaky dark vision that lingers with you.

It's got that too.

I wonder how the prequel is going to go down.

One big strike against The Thing was that it came out just about the exact time that ET was ruling the box office. Talk about running smack up against the zeitgeist in a big way. It was the Anti-ET in just about every conceivable way.

And I saw ET once in the theater and never again.

Whereas I saw The Thing a couple times in the theater, again on VHS, and own it on DVD.

I saw ET when it came out and hated it. (I didn't like that the scientists were evil. Plus ET rising from the dead annoyed me.) A few years ago I bought a cheap DVD of ET and watched it again. I didn't hate it the second time, but didn't really love it either.

But ET inspired that "Trumpy" movie that mst3k did, so that's something....

Haven't seen The Thing in a few decades - need to remedy that.