Words by Riley James // photograph by Paula Mahony
When John Carpenter’s film The Thing was released in 1982, there were mixed responses about the alien-horror special effects. Some critics thought they ruined the film, others thought they were the best thing ever.
More than forty years later, most critics agree that the enduring appeal of The Thing lies in something else: namely, in the terrifying human drama of the film—the paranoia and mistrust between key characters in a remote Antarctic outpost as they battle for survival.
Certainly, this is what made the strongest impression on me and provided the inspiration for my novel The Chilling.
Carpenter’s film tells the story of a research team that discover the burnt remains of an alien lifeform and bring it back to base. When the alien thaws out, they realise it’s still alive and capable of perfectly imitating other lifeforms, including the expeditioners themselves. Gradually, the thing starts to absorb and assimilate each of the team members in turn, until nobody can be sure their friends really are who they say they are.
A critical failure upon release, The Thing has since spawned several films, TV shows, and fictional works that pay homage to its paranoid brilliance. Originally inspired by John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella Who Goes There?, the film has influenced not only the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, but also Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and one of the best instalments of The X Files, an episode titled “Ice”, in which Scully briefly suspects Mulder of murder in a remote Alaskan research base.
I love The Thing and I adore The X Files episode. Scully and Mulder pulling down each other’s shirts, and caressing each other’s backs, to see if they’ve been infected by a wormy alien parasite? The premise provided a great source of early tension in the series.
Like Carpenter’s film, my own book The Chilling takes place in an Antarctic research station. The drama begins when a stranger, the lone survivor of a fire-stricken ship, is brought back to base. Soon afterwards, dark and disturbing events start to occur: an expeditioner goes missing, another person dies, and a strange illness takes hold.
The crew have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and nowhere to go for help. No one can hear you scream in Antarctica.
It’s up to our heroine, Kit Bitterfeld, to work out what’s going on before the winter darkness sets in. She’s strangely attracted to the surviving man—geophysicist Nick Coltheart—but she’s deeply mistrustful of his motives and deeply sceptical of his memory loss. Who goes there? It’s a question someone might ask when they’re startled by a shadow in the doorway. It’s the question Kit continually asks herself about Nick: who is he? Is he friend or foe? Why hasn’t he revealed what happened to his colleagues?
Like The Thing, I wanted The Chilling to speak to themes about the fragility of trust between human beings. Some studies have shown that we calculate whether we can trust someone in the first ten minutes of meeting them. But it’s a wholly different question whether we ought to trust them. People show us the outward signs of trustworthiness, but we can never get inside their heads and confirm what they’re really like. Other people are fundamentally alien to us.
At the same time, in a remote and hostile environment, it’s absolutely essential to trust other people. You want companions you can rely on, people who will have your back (and caress it too!), people who will haul you out of a crevasse if need be. You want to make sure that in that quick ten-minute calculation, you get your trust right, because your survival could depend on it.
For me, then, it’s no surprise that the key ingredients of The Thing—disaster striking in a remote location and companions who fail to trust one another—keep recurring on screen and in fiction. They make for great drama.
I think the film also gives expression to a universal source of human anxiety: in this lonely world, when death hangs over us and everyone else is scrambling to save themselves, who can you trust? Is self-interest always going to rear its head, like a slimy pink skull from a canine corpse, or are some human beings going to be capable of benevolence and self-sacrifice when it matters?
The horror and uncertainty of other people will always leave a stronger impression than any special effects ever could.
The Chilling is out now through Allen & Unwin.
