That Thing From Another World (1982)

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Movie
German title The thing from another world
Original title The thing
Country of production United States
original language English , Norwegian
Publishing year 1982
length 109 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director John Carpenter
script Bill Lancaster
production David Foster ,
Lawrence Turman
music Ennio Morricone ,
John Carpenter (anonymous)
camera Dean Cundey
cut Todd Ramsay
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
The Thing

The Thing from Another World (Original title: The Thing ) is a science fiction and horror film by John Carpenter from 1982 . The film is an adaptation of the story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. , which had already been filmed as The Thing from Another World by Christian Nyby in a production by Howard Hawks in 1951 .

The film is about an American research team in Antarctica who is threatened by an alien life form. As a shape shifter , this creature is able to take on any form of living being and kill it instantly through physical contact.

action

The twelve members of an American research station in Antarctica receive a surprise visit from two Norwegians who are chasing a sled dog in a helicopter . Shortly after landing, one of the Norwegians accidentally blows himself up with the helicopter. The dog runs to the Americans while the pilot continues to shoot him; his warning calls are not understood. When one of the Americans is accidentally hit, the commanding officer Garry shoots the Norwegian. Not understanding the background to this alleged attack, the researchers keep the sled dog in the station.

To clear up the situation, the pilot MacReady and the researcher Copper fly to the Norwegian station. When they arrived on site, they found that it was almost completely destroyed. In the rubble they first encounter a strange block of ice, a little later they discover a burned, deformed corpse in the snow. They return to their station with the video recordings found and the strange corpse. An autopsy reveals that the organs are human, but there is no explanation for the deformations.

When the dog groom brings the sled dog into the enclosure, it mutates into a monstrous creature that attacks the other dogs. The researchers manage to kill the monster with a flamethrower .

The station members learn from the video recordings they brought with them that the Norwegians uncovered a spaceship that was probably hidden in the ice for over 100,000 years. The spaceship also freed an alien that is able to assimilate foreign cells and thus imitate other living beings. The researcher Blair fears that all of humanity is threatened if the alien manages to leave the station. Since he doesn't know if other members of the team are already infected, he can't trust anyone. To prevent the alien from escaping, he destroys the helicopter and the radio station and kills the remaining sled dogs. MacReady succeeds in incapacitating the apparently mad Blair; he is locked up in the tool store.

From Blair's notebooks, they learn the extent of the danger they are in. Copper suggests a blood test of all members and a comparison with previously taken samples from the mutated dog, but the supplies have been rendered unusable by sabotage. When Garry comes under suspicion, MacReady takes over the leadership of the group, which is gradually decimated by the alien. After MacReady realizes that each part of the monster acts independently, he forces the other men to give a blood sample, which he tests with a glowing piece of wire. So the alien can first be exposed and killed, but when the remaining members visit Blair to test him too, they find the tool store abandoned. Instead, they discover a tunnel in the ice where Blair built a small spaceship.

While they are destroying the spaceship, the fake Blair is sabotaging the power generator. Soon the entire station would be deadly cold and the alien could survive in the ice until the rescue team arrived. You decide to blow up the entire station with the alien in it. In a final battle, MacReady manages to destroy the monster with dynamite. In the end, MacReady meets Childs, who disappeared during the showdown . The last two survivors have a suspicious eye on each other until the end, but are in any case facing the obviously certain death in the ice. The question of whether one of the two men has been infected by the alien remains open to the viewer.

background

The film opened in US cinemas on June 25, 1982, and was released in German theaters on October 22, 1982. After director John Carpenter had previously celebrated two great successes with Halloween and The Rattlesnake , Das Ding turned out to be a flop. The reason for this was probably mainly due to the hard splatter elements (mask effects by Rob Bottin ), which were no longer popular at the time of the cinema release. In addition, the film was released in the USA two weeks after ET - The Extra-Terrestrial - it showed a completely peaceful alien, which was more in keeping with the zeitgeist of the time. In addition, Das Ding received negative reviews because of the explicit depictions of violence. Carpenter, on the other hand, described the film as one of his favorites in later interviews: "This is my favorite film, because I showed horror."

John Carpenter was not entirely satisfied with Ennio Morricone's music and, in collaboration with Alan Howarth , composed four pieces of music that were then used in the finished film. You can hear this very clearly in the opening title sequence of the film, which sounds like the score for Halloween III , which was produced in the same year. In 2011, a partially rearranged soundtrack by Alan Howarth was released, on which the additional music by John Carpenter can be heard for the first time.

The film (like John Carpenter's Dark Star ) manages without any female actors. The only female presence in the film is the voice of a computer, spoken by Carpenter's then wife Adrienne Barbeau .

At its theatrical release, the film ran with a rating of “16+”. After that, the release was increased to "18 and over" and the unabridged version was indexed on September 29, 1984. In August 2009 the Federal Testing Office for Media Harmful to Young People removed the film from the list of media harmful to young people . The FSK has re-examined the film after the de-listing 23 September 2009 on behalf of Universal and uncut released him with a Certificate "from 16 (sixteen) years." As long as the film was on the index, only shortened versions were allowed to be shown on free-to-air television. Nevertheless, the film had already been shown on December 12, 2006 with special permission from the FSF ("Voluntary Self-Control Television") by the private broadcaster Kabel Eins .

According to statements by employees of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station , both versions of The Thing are traditionally viewed together after the last aircraft left the South Pole at the beginning of winter .

The computer screen reads “27,000 hrs” until the earth is completely contaminated. In the German dubbing, this was mistakenly translated as "twenty-seven hours" (actually twenty-seven thousand hours = 1125 days, or a little more than three years).

John Carpenter, an avowed fan of Howard Hawks , bowed to the classic predecessor in Halloween - The Night of Horror (1978) by letting it run in the evening program.

Reviews

“The film that perfectly sets its science fiction and horror effects has little in common with its famous predecessor (1951): It was primarily an exhibition piece for the amazing possibilities of the trick and special techniques of modern Hollywood cinema, but in the face of it One can hardly appreciate such trick art of the disgusting scenes, blood orgies and corpse dissections produced with it. Carpenter is satisfied with the sensation, inner tension and ironic refractions are neglected. "

“The trick and mask technique has developed almost to perfect perfection. […] There is also a danger here - namely that the film only works because of its special effects, which generally only cause the viewer to feel disgusted and disgusted. Due to the almost inflationary occurrence of similar shock images in other horror films, a sad competition was initiated in which everyone tries to surpass the broadly painted atrocities of their predecessors. Halfway intelligently made horror should not be exhausted in unsavory show effects, but rather deal with depth psychological dimensions. "

“In the Hawks version, it was not the human fight against a destructive, apparently inevitable intruder that was the central theme, but the conflict between the conceptions of two opposing groups (soldiers / scientists), which the monster brought about as a catalyst. [...] But what a horror SF film of nerve-racking thrills about escalating panic and paranoia (who is still human or already a monster?) Could only have been a rather lame mechanistic shocker. Because Carpenter degrades his actors (Kurt Russell as the man at the flamethrower) to give cues for trick technicians in an experiment in terror. They are particularly brilliant when the monster transforms: when the bowels explode. But they also demonstrate that the new aesthetic of shock of the post-"alien" era is more drastic than ever, but that such potentiated effects of disgust create a more grotesque than gruesome impression in an emotional vacuum. "

- Helmut W. Banz

“The effects with which this is happening are indeed unheard of. The make-up artists, who are now apparently doing their apprenticeships in the slaughterhouses, are doing incredible things. But somehow revenging the unimaginable. As much as you admire the bloodthirsty spectacle of the maddening, bloody innards - I just winced when the men cut their thumbs open with knives to draw blood. Here horror caught up with my humble imaginations. [...] Such an idealistic rampage in the eternal ice has all the symptoms of threatening insanity. The sinister enemy will be burned out, no matter how close a friend they attack. The “thing” also acts as a hygienic obsession that turns into a murderous delusion of cleansing. The "thing" is attacked like the pious Christians once did the pagan Indians. "

Offshoots and other media

In 2011, the movie The Thing was released, a prequel to the film, in which the events in the Norwegian camp are told.

The film experienced an interactive sequel as a computer game in 2002 and was developed under the name The Thing for the PC and various consoles. The video game belongs to the survival horror genre.

Science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster wrote the novel for the film, which Heinz Nagel translated into German.

literature

  • John W. Campbell : That Thing from Another World . Festa Verlag , ISBN 978-3-86552-432-4 . The novella with the original title Who Goes There? formed the basis for the film adaptations.
  • Alan Dean Foster: That Thing from Another World . 5th edition. Heyne, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-453-01630-0 (English: The Thing . Translated by Heinz Nagel).
  • John Kenneth Muir: Horror Films of the 1980s . McFarland & Company, Jefferson, North Carolina 2007, ISBN 978-0-7864-5501-0 , The Thing, pp. 284–290 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed May 17, 2016]).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Certificate of Release for The Thing from Another World . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , September 2009 (PDF; test number: 53 288-c V).
  2. ^ Anne Billson: The Thing set on survival - Slated by critics on its release 27 years ago, John Carpenter's The Thing has since established itself as a modern sci-fi masterpiece. In: theguardian.com. August 27, 2009, accessed February 3, 2016 .
  3. ^ John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) Music By Ennio Morricone - Additional Music By John Carpenter In Association With Alan Howarth. In: examiner.com. October 11, 2011, accessed February 3, 2016 .
  4. The thing from another world unabridged on free TV , message published on November 14, 2006 on Schnittberichte.com , accessed on November 16, 2019
  5. ^ Image of the film screening on antarctic-adventures.de, from February 18, 2007.
  6. ^ Blog from "Iceman" (English) on antarctic-adventures.de, entry from February 25, 2007.
  7. The thing from another world. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  8. Heyne Science Fiction Magazine. Edition 6/1983.
  9. In the cinema: Mediocre in Die Zeit . Issue 45/1982 of November 5, 1982.
  10. ↑ Followed by a sequel in Der Spiegel. Edition 45/1982 from November 8, 1982.