Year: 1951
Director: Christian Nyby
Country: US
Language: English
There is something strange with seeing Howard Hawks name attached to the production of The Thing From Another World. You'd think we would never see the name of a Director associated with classic screwball comedies and manly westerns on a science fiction B-movie yet there it is. Although John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is considered a better remake, I feel Hawks picture is just a little bit more insightful.
In this film, scientists and American Air Force officials fend off a blood-thirsty alien organism while at a remote arctic outpost.
The script focuses on a group of people who share warmth and camaraderie with each other, and there’s the typical Hawks humor in the script. Amongst the horror and fear are cathartic moments of levity that allow the audience, and the characters to take a minute and find something worth living for. Most 50's sci-fi thematically connects to the fear of communism, but this film also tells us to fear science run amuck.
The creature in question can be best described as an intergalactic vampire. It is far more advanced than the humans it is hunting down - and the scientists wish to keep the creature alive to learn more from it. Ford-ism, which focused on the need to believe scientific theory as the gospel truth, was a huge deal during the 1950s and it’s safe to say a lot of paranoia was born from it. Only six years previous did we use our advanced science to nuke entire cities in Japan, so skepticism wasn't exactly bred out of ignorance.
While The Thing From Another World is smarter and more alienating than its remake, it doesn't evoke the same feeling of dread, doom, and gloom. The monster isn't as terrifying as other movie monsters mad before or after the film and the atmosphere just isn't that tense. If you're viewing the picture as "horror" it fails on many levels, but if you view from a more sociological perspective it is quite
satisfactory.
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