The Thing from Another World
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- Release Date: April 7, 1951
- Directed by: Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks
- Written by: Charles Lederer
- Runtime: 1 hour 26 minutes
- Series: The Thing
I really enjoy 1950s sci-fi / horror movies, but it took me a long time to finally get around to watching The Thing from Another World. I honestly don't have a good excuse as to why that is. John Carpenter's 1982 remake is such a classic, and I loved it so much as a teenager that I just never got around to watching the older version. I finally did watch it as part of a triple feature with other influential monster movies of its decade, being The Fly and The Blob. Now that I've seen it, I can safely say that I prefer the remake, but there are still a few things about this one that are worth taking note of.
The movie more or less follows the same plot beats as the original novella that it's based on. All of the familiar locations and situations are present here: the frigid Arctic base setting, the UFO crash site, the alien spending its time in hiding to ambush people, among others. With so many things being the same, I was really curious to see if this older adaptation would be able to pull off some decent scares with the ingredients it was working with. Sadly, one trait that this movie carries over from the book is its unmemorable characters. There are about a dozen people in the base who have to survive against the alien, but aside from their physical appearances and wardrobe choices, they have very little that sets them apart from one another. Because of that, it is a little hard to get invested in the protagonists of this story. The one exception is Margaret Sheridan as Nikki Nicholson, one of the few women stationed at the base. She has a very witty sense of humor, and her past romance with the main character Captain Hendry leads to a lot of cheeky flirting between the two of them. One scene that stood out to me had Nikki offering to buy a drink for Hendry if he wanted one, to which he remarks "You can tie my hands if you want to." It then cuts to him in a chair with his hands bound up as Nikki makes him a drink (which is clearly not the first that they've had at this point), and they have more banter as some of their old feelings are rekindled. It's a very funny moment, and her interactions give some playfulness and charm to Hendry, who was a little bland up until then. A lot of women in movies at this time were relegated to uninteresting supportive roles to the male leads, so it's a great change of pace to have a memorable female character from this time with some bite to her.
As for the titular Thing, he has a pretty fun design for a movie monsters from this time, with his blocky, bloated head and spikes on his hands. He's a lot more humanoid-looking than both the book and the later film adaptations, but given the limitations of special effects at the time, I really don't mind the change. He's only on screen for a few minutes of the movie, but because the base setting is largely made up of tight corridors, you never know when he might pop up when a character opens a door. This does create a fair amount of suspense, and it's very much in line with how the novella kept its creature out of sight for so much of it. He's also very smart, doing things like disabling the heat in the base in an attempt to freeze out the characters. There is one massive difference between this version and its literary source: instead of being a shape-shifter who takes the form of the humans it's hunting, this Thing is a plant-based organism that feeds on blood to reproduce itself and spread around the world. I didn't know about this change when I first watched the movie, and I was a bit disappointed when it was revealed that it was essentially a sentient alien vegetable. But honestly, shape-shifting would be an extremely difficult special effect to pull off with 1950s technology, and the idea may have been a little too graphic for movies at the time. As is though, it feels right at home alongside other plant-based alien invasion films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You may not get the extreme gore and body morphing that the later adaptation featured, but you do get some creeping paranoia and an awesome scene of the Thing being set on fire. There are enough special effects goodies here that more than makes up for the lack of bloodshed.
The Thing from Another World may pale in comparison to its monumental remake, but taken on its own, it's a pretty solid sci-fi movie for its time. In a decade where movies like this were known for cheesy flying saucers and outlandish-looking monsters, having an intelligent creature that can hide from and repeatedly outsmart its prey gave the movie a greater sense of suspense than a lot movies of its kind. I can understand why Carpenter thought this one would be hard to surpass, especially in the era that it was made. It may not be a perfect movie, but there is enough here that shows off why it was so influential to a generation of horror filmmakers.