A Caucasian male lies on a table seemingly unconscious. His torso is opened from chest to stomach in the formation of a mouth with sharp teeth along the edges. A doctor attempting to revive him has both his hands inside the exposed, empty cavity. Do we really need to talk about the film also coming at the tail end of one of the greatest director's runs in cinema history ( Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, this), whilst at the same time representing somewhat of a departure for a filmmaker used to doing most things himself (writing, composing, etc)? A. Wilford Brimley takes on the role of Blair a doctor who works out what’s hell is going on and he’s not very happy with what he discovers. His is yet another excellent performance as we see him begin to lose his mind.

In the "chest chomp" scene, Dr. Copper attempts to revive Norris with a defibrillator. Revealing himself as the Thing, Norris-Thing's chest transforms into a large mouth that severs Copper's arms. Bottin accomplished this scene by recruiting a double amputee and fitting him with prosthetic arms filled with wax bones, rubber veins and Jell-O. The arms were then placed into the practical "stomach mouth" where the mechanical jaws clamped down on them, at which point the actor pulled away, severing the false arms. The effect of the Norris-Thing's head detaching from the body to save itself took many months of testing before Bottin was satisfied enough to film it. The scene involved a fire effect, but the crew were unaware that fumes from the rubber foam chemicals inside the puppet were flammable. The fire ignited the fumes, creating a large fireball that engulfed the puppet. It suffered only minimal damage after the fire had been put out, and the crew successfully filmed the scene. Stop-motion expert Randall William Cook developed a sequence for the end of the film where MacReady is confronted by the gigantic Blair-Thing. Cook created a miniature model of the set and filmed wide-angle shots of the monster in stop motion, but Carpenter was not convinced by the effect and used only a few seconds of it. It took fifty people to operate the actual Blair-Thing puppet. and crew exploring the film from a number of perspectives. This supplement was also included on the 2018 Shout! Factory disc and does includeA research facility in Antarctica comes across an alien force that can become anything it touches with 100% accuracy. The members must now find out who's human and who's not before it's too late. A creature bearing the face of a dog lies on the floor. Various unnatural formations such as legs and tentacles are present on its body.

The production intended to use a camera centrifuge – a rotating drum with a fixed camera platform – for the Palmer-Thing scene, allowing him to seem to run straight up the wall and across the ceiling. Again, the cost was too high and the idea abandoned for a stuntman falling into frame onto a floor made to look like the outpost's ceiling.[69] Stuntman Anthony Cecere stood in for the Palmer-Thing after MacReady sets it on fire and it crashes through the outpost wall. Vintage Product Reel – Contains a Condensed Version of the Film with Additional Footage Not in the Film (19:38, 480i) Principal photography began on August 24, 1981, in Juneau, Alaska. Filming lasted about twelve weeks. Carpenter insisted on two weeks of rehearsals before filming as he wanted to see how scenes would play out. This was unusual at the time because of the expense involved. Filming then moved to the Universal lot, where the outside heat was over 100 °F (38 °C). The internal sets were climate-controlled to 28 °F (−2 °C) to facilitate their work. The team considered building the sets inside an existing refrigerated structure but were unable to find one large enough. Instead, they collected as many portable air conditioners as they could, closed off the stage, and used humidifiers and misters to add moisture to the air. After watching a roughly assembled cut of filming to date, Carpenter was unhappy that the film seemed to feature too many scenes of men standing around talking. He rewrote some already completed scenes to take place outdoors to be shot on location when principal photography moved to Stewart, British Columbia. Sounds from the Cold – Interviews with Supervising Sound Editor David Lewis Yewdall and Special Sound Effects Designer Alan Howarth (14:53, 1080p) Vintage Featurettes from the Electronic Press Kit Featuring Interviews with John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, and Rob Bottin (13:20, 480i)DISC TWO: 2016 2K Scan of the Interpositive (1:48:34) Supervised and Approved by Director of Photography Dean Cundey In designing the Thing's different forms, Bottin explained that the creature had been all over the galaxy. This allowed it to call on different attributes as necessary, such as stomachs that transform into giant mouths and spider legs sprouting from heads. Bottin said the pressure he experienced caused him to dream about working on designs, some of which he would take note of after waking. One abandoned idea included a series of dead baby monsters, which was deemed "too gross". Bottin admitted he had no idea how his designs would be implemented practically, but Carpenter did not reject them. Carpenter said, "What I didn't want to end up with in this movie was a guy in a suit ... I grew up as a kid watching science-fiction monster movies, and it was always a guy in a suit." According to Cundey, Bottin was very sensitive about his designs, and worried about the film showing too many of them. At one point, as a preemptive move against any censorship, Bottin suggested making the creature's violent transformations and the appearance of the internal organs more fantastical using colors. The decision was made to tone down the color of the blood and viscera, although much of the filming had been completed by that point. The creature effects used a variety of materials including mayonnaise, creamed corn, microwaved bubble gum, and K-Y Jelly.

An argument could be made against The Thing being an Alien rip-off; it has its origins in an old sci-fi story and it creates tension by popping a crowd of people (note: all-male) on an isolated outpost (an Antarctic research facility) terrorized by an alien life form. John Carpenter was first approached about the project in 1976 by co-producer and friend Stuart Cohen, but Carpenter was mainly an independent film director, so Universal chose The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) director Tobe Hooper as they already had him under contract. The producers were ultimately unhappy with Hooper and his writing partner Kim Henkel's concept. After several more failed pitches by different writers, and attempts to bring on other directors, such as John Landis, the project was put on hold. Even so, the success of Ridley Scott's 1979 science fiction horror film Alien helped revitalize the project, at which point Carpenter became loosely attached following his success with his influential slasher film Halloween (1978). The Norris-Thing. False arms were attached to a double amputee, allowing them to be "bitten off" by the chest mouth. The first thing to notice is the richer, darker colour scheme of the image – slightly darker than the Arrow version, the vibrancy in these colours from the WCG employed, especially the dashes of colour dotted throughout the film, help give the image more depth and texture. Fine detail is considerably sharper and more noticeable, without ever feeling artificially so – the first clear examples include the establishing shot of the camp at 6:22 as the Norwegian helicopter flies over it when every mast is clearly delineated against the sky on the 4K disc, less so on the Arrow version; similarly at 8:26, the Norwegian with the gun screaming after the dog has razor sharp clothing lines on the 4K, a much softer version of which is on the Arrow disc; as MacReady arrives at the Norwegian camp by helicopter at 16:39, the crisp lines of the burnt clothing at the bottom of the screen on the 4K disc are nowhere to be found on the Arrow disc; and the list goes on…excellent depth and accuracy without absorbing detail or devouring shadowy elements within. General tones are far more vivid and pure. Viewers will

English SDH, Czech, Dutch, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish It then makes for great movie history trivia, that The Thing has gained such a remarkable afterlife on video, DVD and television. Both financially and critically. Carpenter's version is less a remake of the Howard Hawks' version than a more faithful adaptation of John W. Campbell's short story "Who Goes There?' (on which both were based), and critics today point out how well Carpenter plays his characters against each other. Kurt Russell will never top this one, and he gets a brilliant sparring from the entire cast. The Thing was storyboarded extensively by Mike Ploog and Mentor Huebner before filming began. Their work was so detailed that many of the film's shots replicate the image layout completely. Cundey pushed for the use of anamorphic format aspect ratio, believing that it allowed for placing several actors in an environment, and making use of the scenic vistas available, while still creating a sense of confinement within the image. It also enabled the use of negative space around the actors to imply something may be lurking just offscreen.Does the incredibly taut script, honed by almost laser precision into a simple propulsive mystery narrative that at once enables thinly drawn characters on paper, its almost impossibly insane special make-up effects work and breathtakingly visceral and tension-filled set pieces to all shine without detracting away from its clinical and hugely nihilistic simplicity need, ironically, any more words being spent on it?