A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness

As I get older I learn to appreciate John Carpenter as the old wizard he is. He works magic, waves his hand and the ordinary becames ineffable, uncanny, there and not there. Vampires would be useless in almost anyone else's hands, but he composes it perfectly. Starman, The Fog and Christine as well as, of course, The Thing grow in my heart everytime I think about them. Over at RogerEbert.com you'll find my essay on The Ward, which I think best illustrates the quandary of analytical cinema going. What do you want from your movies? I want experiences like John Carpenter fashions in The Ward. 

Favourite Genre Directors

In my effort to trump Andrew Sarris (Bazin rest him) as this country's preeminent list queen, I present my favourite directors of genre films. One needn't have worked exclusively in horror or westerns, but they need to have proved themselves capable of turning B-movie mill-grist into something at once personal and indelible. No one else performed the same magic when given a heist movie, an anti-western, a horror film or a revenge thriller. No one else had their eye for composition, their ear for dialogue, their nose for trouble. For better or worse, you know who's behind the camera. The list will probably evolve over time; this is a snapshot.

Barbara Peeters
Nicholas Ray
André De Toth
Byron Haskin
Stephanie Rothman
Jules Dassin
Sergio Martino
John Hough
Roy Ward Baker
Jacques Tourneur
Sam Fuller
Budd Boetticher
Fritz Lang
Michael Reeves
Michael Mann
John Carpenter
Walter Hill
Charles B. Pierce
William Friedkin
Robert Aldrich
Rian Johnson
Don Siegel
Monte Hellman
J.J. Abrams
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Jacques Becker
Joe Dante
Narciso Ibáñez Serrador
Joseph H. Lewis
Juan López Moctezuma
Teruo Ishii
Joe D'Amato
Robert Siodmak
Matt Cimber
Clint Eastwood
Ridley Scott
Takashi Miike
Jean-Pierre Melville
John Hillcoat
Seijun Suzuki
Kihachi Okamoto
Tobe Hooper
Joseph Losey
John Brahm
John Flynn
David Cronenberg
Jorge Grau
Sam Peckinpah
Dario Argento
Neil Marshall
Giulio Questi
Takeshi Kitano
Greg McLean
Nic Winding Refn
Kathryn Bigelow
Ti West
Jack Hill
E. Elias Merhige
Tomas Alfredson
Park Chan-Wook
Andrew Dominik
Ben Wheatley
John Dahl
Brian Trenchard-Smith
Oswaldo de Oliveira
Arch Nicholson
Ida Lupino


Aside: John Ford, John Huston, Guillermo Del Toro and Stanley Kubrick, all capable hands at genre films, seem somehow wrong on this list, despite being far above average in the game. So here they are as an appendix. This, I suppose, is a topic for further discussion.

The Heart of Salem

Rob Zombie is an anomaly. Not as polarizing, or as generally reviled as Eli Roth or Tom Six, as unfairly neglected as Greg McLean or Neil Marshall, nor as easily forgotten as James Wan and Darren Bousman, he is a horror filmmaker who has been nailed to many different crosses. Though most of us still remember when he made his living making metal music and the kooky videos that went with them, his switch from music to movies wasn't as inevitable (or, ahem, misguided) as the transitions made by Prince or Madonna, as enigmatic as David Byrne, nor as left-field and misguided as Fred Durst or Mr. Oizo. Zombie's a director without a steady cult, someone who's never made a film that we can all agree on. Unlike Roth or Wan his movies have gotten steadily better as he's steadied his craft and figured out what sorts of stories he wants to tell, even as he's often constrained by the demands of an increasingly horror-phobic studio system. But this past year, to my gratitude, the money was on his side, and he was given total creative autnomy on a project of his choosing and the result is Lords of Salem, a witch-burning film that despite clearly attempting to make it look and move like many others, speaks in a voice that could only be Zombie's. Mixing ghastly psychedelic imagery with disarming, effecting realism, Lords tells the story of a woman who falls prey to an ancient curse brought on by a coven of witches (played with Gleeful abandon by the always welcome Dee Wallace, Meg Foster, Patricia Quinn and a truly awesome Judy Geeson) and a satanic vinyl record. In other words, this movie speaks an old language. The question is, who's fluent these days? Lucas Mangum and I both gave it a whirl. 

Lucas Mangum So what did we think of Lords of Salem?

Scout Tafoya Even as I was aware of what was going wrong from a narrative standpoint, even as a few lines of dialogue struck me as Zombie trying a touch too hard to sound unforced and normal (which...what ambition!), even as he goes too far in his penultimate freak out into Altered States territory than the film can quite handle, I was equally aware that I liked the film too much to let the problems outweigh the overall effect. Or to put it simply, I'd decided I was going to love it and I did. I like Zombie. I like him as a person as well as an artist. 


I'll now refer everyone to my writing on Zombie's Halloween Films here only because Lords of Salem is the film I was wishing and hoping for when I walked out of Halloween 2. It's a horror film but the mean-spirit of his previous work has been channelled into something a little more watchable and understandable (drug addiction and sacrificial murder, as opposed to senseless murderings for the helluvit) and thus a more ambient, lived-in movie emerges. It's basically horror-as-status-quo, which is, far as I can see, kind of its own genre. The Witch Who Came From The Sea and Maniac are sort of up this alley, but they go from straight to crazy with no discernible attempt to shift the tone accordingly. Suspiria nearly achieves something similar, but I thiiiink that's because Dario doesn't speak great English or concern himself with, as he puts it, "Cartesian storytelling." Zombie is basically making an old-fashioned slice-of-life film, or maybe a better analogy is that he's making a 70s crime film, but he's replaced a heist with witch burning. Sidney Lumet efforts like The Anderson Tapes or Dog Day Afternoon jump out, because again, it's the lives of the robbers that makes the action worth watching.

I also share that piece above because I stand by the sentiments and think they apply to Lords, even if he has begun to learn from his mistakes. He's mostly maintained that beautiful unrehearsed acting style from his players, and given some of my favourite forgotten actors a chance to play it more or less straight - Ken Foree is perfectly cast, Bruce Davison and Maria Conchita Alonso don't strike me as the perfect married couple, but individually their performances are excellent and I liked the idea that Zombie thought they could convincingly play married. He's actually a far more romantic filmmaker than anyone gives him credit for - his depiction of married life is, when it's not relevant to show otherwise as in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Myers, idyllic and lovingly detailed. Also, dig the way he shows the hopeful romance/friendship between his leads. That wide shot of Whitey on the docks is heartbreaking, not to mention beautiful in that early John Boorman way.

And the Boorman quote brings me to the film's strengths. It takes its reference points in stride (the exception being the Ken Russell nods, which stick out more than they should, but, whatever, that's more a problem in mixing music video theatrics, Animation and Live action when the live action has been up to this point very well grounded - Zombie evidently didn't realize how well he'd been doing) and creates something purposefully familiar but also spins it in a way we've never seen. The compositions, those purposeful zooms, the truly bad-ass images of the witch sabbaths, we recognize them from staples like Argento, Carpenter, Coscarelli, Kubrick and Boorman (I love the shoutout to the Zardoz head!) but also lesser known influences like Mark of the Devil or Otakar Vávra's The Witch's Hammer. But the reason the appropriation works, for me, is because they're presented just outside the fringes of lives I buy, ones that involve flirtation, record players and NA meetings. He believes in his characters and their environments and sells them flawlessly. Even the villains are believably clique-y and lovable. That they're also played by genre regulars given straight roles to go to town with, the thing I liked best about his Halloween films, is icing on the cake. He's an actor's director, even if it looks like his images took years to dream up and choreograph. Just look at Dee Wallace and Patricia Quinn! They look like they're having so much fun! Wallace's hair alone is more shading than many characters get in their own movies. And how fearless is Meg Foster?! Furthermore, I feel like Sheri Moon, at this point in her life, wouldn't just take her clothes off just because - she's gotta love her husband and believe in his ideas. The space he gives his actors delivers a sense of his world view and what a giving director he is, to cast and audience alike.

In preparation for writing this I watched a film called Reverb, which takes a different approach to a similar idea. Made and shelved in 2007, it concerns a rock musician and his girlfriend given a cut-rate deal at a swank recording studio because a friend works there. They become obsessed with a song and in the wake of hearing it and falling under its spell the guy feels a creative breakthrough and follows his muse to strange ends. His girlfriend, freaked out by his obsession, finds out the origin of the phantom song and the creepy dude who wrote it. It's mostly nonsense, the studio's too clean except for a token echo chamber/kill floor, no metaphor emerges about the recording process (which is especially pathetic considering how easy that would have been) and the filmmaking's far too slick. In short, I don't know anything about the director from watching this movie. I know loads about Zombie from his few films and his muscular stylistic/grammatical evolution. He was out to provoke at first, but his worldview has since emerged through his constructions. I know the movies he likes, but I also know his opinion of people, his humanity, his ideas about what makes for a good life lived well, how far people can fall and still be up for forgiveness. And the more I learn about him through his movies, the more I like him. Plus...I mean, come on. Vinyl as the messenger of Satan? Witch burnings? Ken Foree as a DJ? Paisley wallpaper as a sign of impending doom? This thing was made for me.

Did you take to it as much as I did?


Lucas First, I have to mention that what stands out the most in the film is Zombie's adoration, not just of horror, but of film. From the wallpaper in the apartment to the camerawork, this is a guy who just loves the art of filmmaking. As much as I enjoy his music, I almost wish he would've devoted his earlier years to film, so we could have a larger body of work to explore. The dude is clearly educated on the medium and isn't afraid to show it. Hopefully we won't have to wait another four years for his next film.

I'm not sure if I like it as much as Devil's Rejects, because that film had so much to say about moral ambiguity and how a quest for revenge can really twist somebody. Lords of Salem, to me, was just him telling a story, which is fine because it was a damn fine story. If I don't like it as much as Rejects, it definitely comes in a close second. While his love of film and horror is ever-present, it never takes away from the story, never slides into being a mere tribute to the movies he likes. I'd dare say that the first two thirds are perfect. I liked the gray tint that the film has and even though I couldn't help but shake my head when I saw that Sheri Moon's love interest looks suspiciously like Rob himself, I really liked the two main characters and their dynamic. Their back and forth really revealed the complexity of their relationship and I felt like they were people I knew, which is a golden ticket for me whenever I'm reading about characters in a book or viewing them on the screen. Though he borrows liberally from Kubrick, Polanski, Argento, and even Paranormal Activity's Oren Peli (who also produced Lords of Salem), it never once feels derivative. Again, I think that's because of character, but that could just be the writer in me.

I had mixed feelings about the third act. I mean, I liked what I saw, but only because I'm a huge Rob Zombie fan. The freakout scene with the goat-riding, the grinding black metal dude, and the melting Jesus face could have easily come from any White Zombie video. So as a Rob Zombie fan, I liked it. As a movie fan, I'm kind of up in the air. At least when it comes to how everything played out in the end. I did like the final shot of Sheri though. There was something very humanistic about showing her that way after experiencing all the horror. It also gains points for being very deliberate, which a few years ago, his detractors would've surely said he wasn't even capable of pulling off. The three witches were great. The concept was fun. And the protagonists are likable, especially Sheri, who shows us that she is more than capable of playing a dramatic role. I'd say it's a winner.

I plan to watch it again and again, because there was something really refreshing about it.

Scout Agree, though this is definitely my favourite of Zombie's films, by a comfortable margin. Those compositions are...epic. Those alone place this in my tentative top ten for the year without breaking a sweat. As for your reservations, I concede that the Altered States style animation and the black metal dude were missteps that take us out of his leading ladies believable and perverse suffering, but these are forgivable sins, I think we can agree, because after all he's trying to unseat us. He just also accidentally unseats the narrative for a few seconds.

I think you're right to make mention of Peli. That guy evidently had enough money to produce a whole fleet of horror films (hence the slew of James Wans coming out left and right...jesus that man annoys me) and chose to fund a Rob Zombie in amongst the Chernobyl Diaries and Insidii (the plural of Insidious, of course). This is the smartest thing he's done since making Paranormal, and I like this film far better than Paranormal because I feel like that film took a little time and calculation and Lords took a lot of very specific detail and a very peculiar sensibility honed over many years. Again, I don't know shit about Peli from watching his movies, but I'm grateful that he chose Zombie to make something that ultimately has nothing to do with his particular brand of films. Brave choice considering how commercially iffy Zombie's been in the past and since it gave me this film, I'm grateful.

The more I think about it the more this film and its rhythms, sexuality drenched in hopelessness and the grainy look, the more it reminds me of the kind of outre desert horror films made in the early 70s. The title appearing next to the goat head is what first alerted me to the similarity, but the priest scene is a great example of capturing a feeling of hopelessness inherent in the films being made in the first place. The Wrong Way, Blood Freak, Bloodsucking Freaks, things that make Al Adamson movies seem not just professional but safe. Movies with no one who ever made another film in the cast, so there's no proof they weren't actually killed. I recently bought a Vinegar Syndrome double feature DVD whose A-side was The Suckers, the apparently legendary lost porn-version of The Most Dangerous Game. That film has the same kind of hopelessness but of course in the Zombie it's intentional, whereas in the past it's been because I've looked through the story (what little there is) and into the lives of the creators. There's always an edge to movies like that, like they shouldn't exist; like some bikers killed a guy for a camera and the resultant film was a confession.

Zombie captures a bit of that quesy magic here, more so than in Devil's Rejects, which is a little too production-designed to ever lose itself entirely in the mileau. No film with that ends with "Free Bird" could ever fool anyone into thinking there was any real murder in it. Lords has a kookiness to its images that occasionally takes you out of the professionalism and those delicious tracking shots and into the weird America of yesterday. You can't make a movie like The Suckers today because the danger and mystery of the production can't be faked. You cannot get lost in this country today; you're always accounted for. Lords harks back to a time when the 70s seemed especially long because movies would just appear in drive-ins and grindhouses with not a single name you'd heard before. It gets close to achieving that very much missed sense of despair that can sometimes come of watching American roughies of a certain vintage. And I think he gets there by not making this a routine scare-a-thon. He's not trying to scare us with his repeated image of topless, goat-headed women, or of witches flailing away by fire-light, he's just trying to fill our heads with evil, the way the catholic league of decency always assumed rock music did.

What do you think Zombie's ambition was for this film? Clearly it was sort of a commission, even if the ideas were all very obviously his, but do you think he was after something, a place in some particular canon?

Lucas I think he was going for something classic this time around. Not classic as in throwback, but I think rather than take the paths of more recent horror efforts, he was in it to give us a simple yet effective horror film. Horror over the last ten years falls into three categories for me. The first category is that of some sort of endurance test for the viewer; films like Saw and The Collection fall into this category, and Zombie himself has been guilty of it from time to time. The second category is the tribute/parody/remake where you have your Cabin in the Woods and Evil Dead. Then you have the low-budget stuff, which at best gives us Absentia and Paranormal Activity; at worst we get the stuff that just seems like a couple of drunks bought a DV camera and decided to run around an abandoned house with the night vision on. The most recent efforts that Zombie's film is comparable to would be Ti West's House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. I mention those films, because like Lords of Salem, they seem to really stand out from the majority of today's horror films. They look to the past, but rather than copy it, they pick up where the greats left off before the three aforementioned categories became such staples in the current state of the genre.

That's what I feel Zombie set out to do.

Scout And I think he achieved it, with flying colours.

Lucas You're absolutely right. It was a truly refreshing experience, and I think it will get even better with subsequent viewings.

My Favourite Film Volume 18

If I had to pick one film to show to an alien race to try and explain the concept of horror, specifically the horror film, I think I’d pick John Carpenter’s The Thing. It can be understood without any significant reading into the zeitgeist that produced it. You don’t need to be an American or have much understanding of the political climate of the early 1980s, you don’t need to have seen the Howard Hawks produced The Thing From Another World, of which Carpenter’s film was an ostensible remake, nor do you have to have read Who Goes There? the story by John Campbell, which both films take inspiration from. In fact you don’t need to know much at all. I was maybe 5 or 6 when I first saw The Thing and I connected immediately with its desperate characters and thoroughly enjoyed repeat visits to the cold Antarctic setting. As with Aliens, another childhood favorite, I could follow the action, enjoyed the brutality of both the heroes and the villain(s), the blunt poetry of the dialogue (casual swearing, a 6 year old's delight), the creature design, the relentlessness of the story and as I got older came to see it as a film so carefully designed and meticulously constructed that the idea of calling it a horror film doesn’t really do it justice. It is a story of paranoia, of loss, of Lovecraftian terror, of man’s multifaceted struggle with things he can only attempt to comprehend, of men trying to apply science, reason and finally common sense to the unexplainable. Though to be fair it is first and foremost the story of an alien lifeform that really wants to take over the bodies of twelve men trapped in an isolated location who in return really want to kill it. Because it is such a simple story, it’s possible to scour it for subtext (Vietnam, Reagan, AIDS and socio-feminist-related readings have all been offered) and while I think that’s a valuable and telling exercise, I’m going to simply judge it in terms of its place in the genre because it is in many ways the ultimate genre film.

The Thing

by John Carpenter

In the endless expanse of the Antarctic landscape, a helicopter and its two occupants chase after a dog. The dog looks back at them as they unload bullets and grenades feebly; it seems to be knowingly outfoxing them. The dog makes it to United States National Science Institute Station 4 before the two men can do much damage. The pilot accidentally blows himself and the chopper up with a grenade and though the survivor tries to explain himself to the Americans at Station 4. The only problem is he’s Norwegian and they don't understand a word he says. They understand when they’re being shot at however. When the Norwegian misfires and hits Bennings the meteorologist in the leg while aiming for the dog, Garry, the camp's lone military man. The guys take the dog in and begin wondering what it is that would have caused two men to want to kill a dog so badly. The men, besides Garry and Bennings, are Norris the geologist, Childs the mechanic, helicopter pilots MacReady and Palmer, physicians and biologists Fuchs, Blair and Copper, radio operator Windows, Nauls the cook and Clark the veterinarian. After stitching up Bennings’ leg, Copper opts to go find the Norwegian camp and gets MacReady to take him there. What they find is chilling, in every sense of the word. Looks like the fellow with one of Garry’s bullets in his crown got off easy - one of the men has cut his own throat with a straight-razor (but seems to have frozen to death before he finished bleeding) and another looks to have been burnt alive, though he doesn’t look all human either. They also find a big block of ice that looks to have lately held something big. They bring back the burnt man-like mass to camp where Blair attempts to perform an autopsy. Everyone watches in shock and horror as new discoveries are made but no one is more shaken than the dog. It’s almost as if he recognizes that burnt-up mass of flesh. When Clark the vet puts him in with the camp's other sleigh dogs that night, something rather unexpected happens. The dog quickly sheds it’s skin and becomes something unspeakably hideous and gooey and starts wrapping tentacles around the other dogs. The men burn it before it can lift itself into the rafters with the giant fists it sprouted from its back.

It takes some imagination on Blair’s part to discern what went on but considering that every man in the camp saw the transformation with their own eyes they’re willing to buy just about anything. Blair pulls the creature apart and finds evidence of it trying to look like a dog, like it was in the middle of imitating the camp dogs when they killed it. After inspecting some tapes they collected from the Norwegian base, MacReady and Norris head to the spot where they pulled the block of ice from the snow. Not only do they find where it was pulled out, they find the charred remains of a gigantic spacecraft buried beneath a hundred thousand years worth of ice. MacReady draws a timeline which the guys take with a grain of salt. He’s no scientist after all. The Norwegians thaw the thing out, it gets to some of their bodies, they try to contain it by killing whomever it touches (and themselves to prevent being taken over), but it gets out in the body of one their dogs, which tries to occupy other dogs. Though that makes a kind of sense, it’s hardly a comfort to the men at Station 4. How long before the man-thing defrosts and decides it would prefer, as the film’s slogan promises, a nice warm-blooded body to inhabit? And if it can imitate any organism it wants to, how will anyone know who’s human and who’s not? It’s either going to be a very long or a very short winter.

The Thing is John Carpenter’s best film, it is one of the best remakes of all time, one of the best genre movies of all time, features some of the best special effects of all time and one of the most terrifying and interesting premises of all time. Not bad for a little sci-fi/horror movie with three locations, is it? It is superbly crafted to ensure that every scene shocks and surprises and to make sure you never feel at ease. It is only on second viewing do you understand how loaded every gesture is (even the simple act of a dog licking your face becomes foreshadowing in the take-no-prisoner’s world of Bill Lancaster’s script and John Carpenter's direction). Every element that would ordinarily damn a film like this (simple sets, the odd bout of pseudo-science, the lack of female characters, the no-nonsense direction, a seeming reliance on effects over characterization [though under scrutiny this turns out to be false]) becomes a strength. The film had few allies upon its first release. If the critics of 1982 could see just what’s happened to some of the classics since Carpenter’s film, they’d perhaps have kept their mouths shut instead of trashing a film they didn’t understand. The problem was they were not willing to play The Thing’s game. They wanted a film that showed respect to them and to Howard Hawks’ original; Carpenter’s film does neither on its face. The Thing’s atmosphere is built in to every frame, the performances are invisible, everyone taking a backseat to the crisis on their hands, and the effects are quite gruesome. Carpenter’s characters are not exactly charismatic (though most are likable) and it's only when he kills them off at times you least expect it that you realize how much you like and depend on them. In some regards it seems like we have the makings of an Italian horror film. The scenes at the Norwegian camp resemble some gory painting halfway between Fulci and Argento, the Ennio Morricone music beautifully underscoring the action (of all his film scores that simple ‘dun dun’ theme gets the most impact with the least movement), even the characters seem drawn from an Italian film (Windows looks a touch like some Italian character actor, Fuchs like Richard Dreyfuss by way of Al Cliver in The Beyond, Bobby Rhodes made his career pretending to be as naturally cool as Keith David is here and thanks to all that hair Kurt Russell looks like a cross between make-up man Rob Bottin and Ray Lovelock in Let Sleeping Corpses Lie). Carpenter had shown his affinity for Italianate visuals and atmosphere in his previous film, The Fog, but The Thing manages to synthesize the visuals of his and his crew’s inspiration (Argento, EC comics, Lovecraft, Hawks, I detect shades of Jaws, but that could be because Spielberg and Carpenter were both students of first generation of film schools) and craft a language all its own.

Bottin’s visual effects are unrivaled, even today. He and Carpenter were both wary of staying away from H.R. Giger’s designs for Alien, still fresh in their minds when they began planning the film in 1981. I think it speaks volumes about their various successes that not only does The Thing not resemble Alien in anyway, it completely avoids seeming like a sci-fi movie. I for one have never really thought of it as anything in the universe of Alien as it speaks a different language (though check out the extra appendages on the queen at the end of James Camerson’s sequel; they’ve got Bottin’s signature writ large. That Stan Winston worked on the scenes with the dog thing I think could be seen as pre-proudction on Aliens). The stories have a lot in common, though Campbell covered the ground in Who Goes There? before Ridley Scott had ever read Dan O’Bannon’s script. First of all, Dean Cundey’s widescreen cinematography is half-business, half-mood, all great. The gorgeous snowy landscapes and the scenes of the camp at night have a kind of blue-collar poetry about them; this is truly the end of the world. And what was Ridley Scott trying to achieve with his space ship if not the kind of broken down and hopelessly average interiors that Carpenter’s characters dwell in? Also I think that Bottin’s creatures avoid looking earthly in a way no one’s ever seconded. For all the genius behind the design of Giger's titular Alien (of which there was plenty), it does retain a humanoid shape. The only thing human about Bottin’s creations is in their feeble attempt at looking human. The rest is so far from normal, so freakish and distorted that they become works of art in their own right. Everyone from Stuart Gordon to James Gunn has tried their hand at copying Carpenter’s work with Bottin but no one’s come close. The Thing was by Carpenter’s own admission all about the monsters. If they weren’t the most fucking awesome monsters you’d ever seen, the film wouldn’t have worked.

The reason I think that The Thing manages to be unnerving when we aren’t staring down the snout of some hoary beast, is because for the first and last time Carpenter and co. had total control over the look of the film; he had it once again on Ghosts of Mars but that film wound up a pale imitation in this and every other regard. Your average cinemagoer in the early 80s had no clue what an Antartic research station looked like so both the drab interiors (with their indefinably spooky corridors and maw-like doors) and the frozen exteriors all set the viewer on edge. The outside looks like a jagged and macabre ice castle in the thick of the weather conditions and the effective but natural lighting design is all manufactured blues and oranges. The frame jumps with strange colours once the action picks up and never rests. The film’s final location, the generator room is a special creation, the camp’s own inferno where the final and most terrible monster of all dwells. It is here that Carpenter and Botton hark back to Harryhausen as well as every creature we’ve seen thus far. The lighting, all hellish chiaroscuro, compliments the final clash with the unknown perfectly just in time for Russell’s final put-down. The blue-collar angle I mentioned before is most evident in the dialogue. When not in Hawksian rapid-fire-yet-lackadaisacal conversation, the men sound conspicuously like a couple of bored, stir-crazy working stiffs. How often do people attempt and fail at that sort of thing? I think Lancaster understood that when ordinary people take on something, their fight becomes your fight in a way it doesn’t if you’re watching he-men or detectives or gladiators taking on something supernatural. Those characters are more likely to rise to the occasion because they've been written to do so. Carpenter’s guys don’t want the beast to win but mostly they don’t want to get killed. An impulse I think we can all understand. Even as paranoia mounts and no one’s sure about anything, their dialogue remains refreshingly human. The film’s best lines are gut reactions to some pretty horrifying images; I don’t know whether Keith David's Childs, Richard Masur’s Clark or David Clennon’s Palmer has the film’s best line, but almost everyone gets an instantly quotable zinger that would just be so much swearing in any other film. What’s more, upon further inspection, you realize that no line gets wasted. Take the petty argument about who’s going to search for Fuchs with whom. Knowing what we do about everyone involved and who turns out to be a thing, it makes perfect sense. The dialogue and Carpenter’s camera miss nothing. In other words the film wastes no time, no words, no glances and no energy. Everything helps the action along, everything contributes to the miasma of mistrust and the end soon comes hurdling at us at lightspeed. It is efficient, grisly and creepy, like the organism at the core of the story. And just like the thing of the title it gets under your skin. In other words, it is a horror film par excellence, full of writhing shocks and spider-legged creatures from another world. Like the best of Lovecraft it knows no master, plays by no rules and scares you to death, but in the end I keep coming back for more.