Remakes and Re-imagination

Readings in the Genre - Week 10 - The Thing (1982)

When I first saw this film on the Syllabus I thought, ‘Wow that’s an old B-movie’.  It wasn’t until I realized that it was the 1982 remake of the B-Movie I remembered that I became a bit concerned.  I must say I always feel a great deal of trepidation about remakes and the re-imaginings of a story.  All too often we loved what the original did and find ourselves infuriated by the departures and changes.

‘The Thing’ from 1982 is a completely different animal from the ‘B-Movie’ that spawned it.  The original has many of the same plot elements… an alien found above the arctic circle at a remote science outpost slowly kills off the people that work there until they destroy the facility or kill the creature.  The mechanics of how the story is told however are immensely different.  We go from class B-movie science fiction in style to a darker more grizzly modern horror style for the remake.  It’s almost like a producer said ‘We want it darker and edgier’.

Darker and edgier… aka more horrific (not to say it’s bad but more like a horror story).  In our modern mainstream culture films and television seem to love to steal elements from the various genres and tie them together.  The whole ‘Darker and Edgier’ mantra of so many different shows these days comes from a conscious decision to use more horror and drama tropes in those stories believing it increases ratings.

With some plots and some universes that can lead to disaster, but when you’ve got a story that is already straddling the boundary between horror and another genre, it can be genius.  Like it is here, we’ve got many of the same elements as in the movie: Alien.  A remote and hostile location (in this case a science station in Alaska), a consuming alien entity that somehow adapts or consumes its host (being attacked by the body causes a researcher to mutate into ‘the thing’), and what essentially amounts to a ‘you lose’ solution instead of an ‘I win, you lose’ solution (destroy the science station to get the creature and succumb to the wilderness).  I almost have to say these facets are almost fundamental to the genre of sci-fi horror and perhaps horror as a whole.

Horror plays upon people’s most basic and fundamental fears, the juxtaposition of what you expect and what occurs, and a very real sense that not only is the protagonist going to lose but be turned to mincemeat or become the very creature he’s fighting.  The werewolf, the vampire, the Alien from Alien, and the thing are all monsters that were once a person and that fact alone seems to be a common element to so many stories we’ve gone through.