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We’re familiar with the old filmmaking trick of revealing the monster slowly, hiding it in the shadows as Ridley Scott did so famously in his 1979 sci-fi horror classic. I suppose that principle is what holds Event Horizon back so frustratingly, even though there is no ‘monster’–there isn’t much of anything. The problem with Paul WS Anderson’s horror outing pre-Resident Evil days is not within its premise necessarily, but the filmmakers’ treatment of it. There is nothing inherently wrong with the ‘hide the monster’ principle, as it worked so well in Alien, but the principle becomes an applicable principle to me when it descends into an irreversible part of film history, and filmmakers continue to carry on the tradition forever, so what we get is no monster at all until the third act. Ridley Scott would inadvertently spawn a legion of SciFi Channel Original Movies, which waste so much time with characters and plot and brief monster attacks scattered now and again, all leading up to a CG monster-filled third act, which to me says: this movie is an unforgivable but entertaining thirty minute film, stretched out into a 90 minute eye-gouge fest. Speaking of eye gouging…
It’s filmmakers who believe they understand how to work a proven formula, but are lost at the first sign of inadvertent complication, as in the case of Event Horizon, where they scramble with ideas and never really reach the sanctity of cohesion. The premise is summed up in three market buzz words: haunted house spaceship. Gothic horror in space, and remember folks, in space–no one can hear you scream (nudge nudge). From where I’m standing, which is typically outside the horror genre, haunted house movies should be about weird things going on, and the characters never really figuring out what’s happening, because it’s paranormal. Like in Paranormal Activity. It’s the classic case of characters not understanding the enemy threat, because they wouldn’t, and that makes it scary.
Unfortunately this movie exists in the hard realm of science-fiction. Trust me, this isn’t an endorsement of the stickler mindset of hard sci-fi, but for all SF stories, there is a requisite element of science. For those who don’t often traverse the speculative fiction genres, it might come as a surprise to find that science-fiction and fantasy actually mix very poorly. Star Wars is an anomaly. That’s what paranormal activity is, it operates on the principles of fantasy, and those simply don’t gel in a scifi setting, which implies more than ‘spaceship.’ Characters in this film, these scientists, can’t comprehend the hellish ongoings of the titular spaceship, the Event Horizon, so an explanation, except for a really shitty one at the end, is never given.
Though they try, and that’s the bulk of the movie’s action. Characters speculate and argue while being picked off one by one in different, usually pretty dumb, ways. What we have here is frustration born out of so obviously missed opportunities. The movie seems to struggle to figure itself out as the characters do, and we want it to get there, otherwise we’ve been investing somewhat in a pretty neat story idea for nothing. To have “Spaceship that’s gone to the end of the universe and back, who knows what it’s picked up” as a setup and reach no conclusion–or worse, the conclusion is somewhere between “this spaceship is actually a portal to hell,” and “this spaceship is alive, and hell,”–is incredibly jarring. You get to a point in watching the movie where you realize that the story’s actually done unfolding, and you’re disoriented, confused as to where you are.
What’s going on? You really missed it guys; the horror only comes out of guessing and imagining the setup’s payoff for so long; eventually the payoff has to come, and further horror exists in the payoff’s implications, or for its creation of further setups to Ten Little Indians death scenes. Because honestly, that’s what we came to see–an Alien ripoff. We have a crew in space, and they’re on a creepy spaceship. Instead of aliens, or demons, or biological military test experiments, we get something very intangible, something very close to ‘nothing.’ And Ichi the Killer, although Jason Isaacs hanging from hooks was actually kind a of neat effect.
Remember the good old days, buddy
So Event Horizon is broken as a horror movie, and long gone as a scifi movie. Does it entertain? Somewhat, but for incongruous reasons that aren’t even just ‘so bad it’s good.’ It’s another eclectic mix, which is a common thread I’ve found in the Paul WS canon. Take Resident Evil for example. Compared to its sequel, and I’d assume the rest of the sequel thrillogy, it’s practically the greatest movie ever made. But restrain yourself–it’s not. It’s a solid zombie movie with a few horror elements outside the shambling horde, like laser hallways and dogs, and one Licker, a mutant frog, if I remember correctly and icon of the games. It’s a pretty entertaining movie, but it’s not really a great film. I find that I enjoy it because of the laser hallway, the Licker, and Colin Salmon, but know that the story and art direction and everything is derivative, but not quite as slick as Doom. Good parts and bad parts, like a comedy movie that you laugh with and at, like 17 Again, if you’ve ever seen it. One or two surprisingly good jokes, but the rest is, you know, fucked.
Event Horizon has a great cast–Sam Neil, in one of his few roles, Laurence Fishburne right before The Matrix, Sean Pertwee from Dog Soldiers, and Jason Isaacs, from just about everything. There’s also the absurd stereotype black guy, who establishes himself very early on as the absurd stereotype, and never lets up–“I’m comin’ back, motherfuckers!” as the immortal line goes. Interestingly, this guy was played by Richard T. Jones, who you might remember as James Ellison, the best part of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In this movie, he plays a much less serious, much higher-pitched voice character, who must have decided that Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element was, I don’t know, a good idea.
Thing is, I kind of liked Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element, and I kind of liked this guy, because Event Horizon is a big dumb movie, and he fits right in. In a perfect world he would not, and Event Horizon would be an effective sci-fi horror, of which there are so few, although kudos Hollywood for Pandorum just a few years ago, which bettered this film, in my opinion, and for Sunshine, which wasn’t a slasher movie, but had that kind of spirit.
Event Horizon is compromised, but it’s a hard one to write off as a complete failure because the art direction is great, and it is generally pretty creepy. The jump-scares are lame, but otherwise I don’t know why more movies don’t go with the whole ‘people with no eyes,’ thing, because it’s totally scary. In fact, I knew there were eye-related things in this movie, which is why for the longest time I never watched it. Unfortunately I was much more frightened by the idea of Event Horizon than the actual movie. I’d rather just play Dead Space, and honestly… game wasn’t that fun.
There was a moment in The Thing when I did lose focus and begin to drift, started thinking that I couldn’t wait to get home and watch some more Party Down. Indeed after the opening moments where we see that this movie isn’t characterizing its scientists nearly as carefully as they did in ’82, it slows down to something of an odd pace. The alien is loose and running around, and so are the characters. Scenes from the first movie (of this ilk) are recycled; we get a sense of where they’re going with all this, but it’s not engaging. This continues for only about a half hour/forty-five into the movie. After that, the gloves come off, and I saw exactly what I wanted to see – and more.
In the original The Thing, there are three major Thing set pieces that always stand out in my mind: the dog, the spider-head, and the blood test scene. They’re all self-contained pieces of fantastic horror, and they do exactly what most horror films skip over. In the new one, there is exactly one scene like this – and it’s a pretty good one. Keeping spoilers to a minimum (ironically enough), it’s the origin of the two-faced thing that gets examined in the original movie. The rec room scene, I suppose I’ll call it, has got a great transformation sequence, a lot of Thing-related fatalities, and above all – and this is what the original did that few other horrors do – it was really intense.
Watch the movie for this scene, because this is when it’s most like the Carpenter version. That movie alternated between dedicated suspense and high-intensity terror. That formula didn’t translate wholly to the new movie, which tries its hand at the suspense part far more often, and doesn’t excel. The rec room scene is key though; writhing body parts split off and start skittering away as the face moans its alien moan, flamethrowers aren’t working, tables are being flipped, people are screaming in horror – it’s an expertly done scene, and it gives us a really cool Thing monster, something that I’ll touch on later, because presently it reminds me of what this scene, and the movie, is very reminscent of.
That’s The Mist, the wonderful Frank Darabont adaptation of God-knows-who, which had, like this movie, somewhat CG-obvious creatures, fire-axes being used to kill said creatures, paranoia, and a nostalgic monster movie sensibility. I believe that when Darabont set about making The Mist, he probably wanted to do what Kubrick did for science-fiction with 2001 – make the ‘proverbial good monster movie.’ That’s why there’s a black-and-white version on the DVD.
This is something that sets both The Thing 2011 and The Mist apart from modern horror movies. Attached to the new Thing was a trailer for Paranormal Activity 3, which shambles into theatres this month. That’s the type of horror movie the demographic (teenagers) wants to see. They’ve never been into creatures and monsters – it’s all about just people, just dying (the Human Centipede definitively does not count as a monster). That’s why Final Destination does so well, and Saw, and all those slasher movies that find creative ways to kill people. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but hey – I love a good monster every once in awhile.
I know what you’re thinking – The Thing wasn’t really about monsters, because the thing never got five feet without being fried. The horror came from the transformation sequences, and all the grisly, disgusting inventions it cooks up to escape the flame. This new movie decided, thank God, to take things a step further, and this is the real reason to see this movie before it closes shop without making its budget back. The Thing doesn’t mess around. He wants two things – to survive, and to kill. Due to the limitations of the animatronics back in the day a decade before Jurassic Park, the alien wasn’t limber, wasn’t mobile. It wasn’t much of a hunter.
People are often face to face with a dribbling, fangy alien with tentacle face, or hiding from it without nothing but an ineffectual knife – these moments were a pure joy and certainly worthy of comparison to the 1982 flick. It’s simple really: the design is cool. Though I’ve played the games, the aliens look a lot like, or take the principle of, the monsters from the Silent Hill series. You take a human body and twist it into a four legged tentacle monster. It’s really the most unnatural, unnerving thing you could ever imagine being in the same room with.
Luckily our intrepid heroine is able to take action, and she proves quite capable in this movie. Picking up on the creature’s game pretty quickly (she probably got a few pointers from Kurt on the sets of Sky High and Death Proof), she leads the charge as Norweigans are being picked off all around her. I never really got to know any of these people. I know none of their names, save Sanders and Peder, though I don’t know who Peder is, just that his name came up in subtitles a lot. These guys, heroine Kate Lloyd included, aren’t nearly as memorable as MacReady, Childs, Norris, Palmer, Fuchs, Windows and the gang. When they died I was really more interested in their transformation, and what mutants their bodies would provide. I wasn’t really upset or anything, except maybe for the younger looking guy and the dude who gets killed by the facehugger arm – everybody was just standing around watching as he died a slow, horrible death. Pobre bastardo.
There is an ending in this movie that will undoubtedly piss off the purists. It’s a sure case of ‘we never needed to know that,’ but it’s like Gears of War 2, for those who played it – they show you questions, meaning they do things that are cryptic and try to maintain that less-is-more legacy that’s served the genre so well. In Gears 2, that was plainly amatuerish storytelling. Here, very little is gained, as mystery is uncovered only to give way for mystery, but it all seems useless, because the first mystery was so good.
The Thing was the Avatar and the Machete of 2011 for me. While I wasn’t as excited to see this as those two, this one is so, so much better. Would buy again, and indeed sometime in the future I’ll revisit this one to talk about the ending, and some other things that require spoiling for elaboration on. So for now I’ll leave you with one final recommending comment: Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a total badass.
If you’ve seen The Thing from Another World, the classic Howard Hawks film from 1951, you remember the vegetable Frankenstein monster, the snowy setting, the 50’s charm, and the iconic line, “Always, watch the skies.” It’s a movie about the clash of ideals, here between military and science, about alien invasion and heroism. It may not be as intellectual as The Day the Earth Stood Still or as recognizable as Forbidden Planet (to use its contemporaries), but its an entertaining ride with a few great moments and wonderful characters.
It is, though, very light. The characters never seem to take the issue too seriously, and this reasonably reflects on the situation. There’s really nothing all that scary about Frankenstein’s monster in the year 1951 when one has access to rifles and electric floors. Never once did I feel like this creature would be victorious, or even half of the crew would be injured. This is where I come in and say that John Carpenter’s The Thing is so much different – and it is – but comparing these two seems almost wrong. Yes, they are two very different movies on a tonal and visceral level, but more than that, neither of these movies should have to live in each others’ shadow.
They’re both major entries in the canon of science-fiction film, but it seems that rarely do sci-fi fans appreciate both equally. I don’t. With the coming of a third Who Goes There? movie, I begin to wonder just what people will make of this unofficial trilogy sixty years in the making.
But that’s not important now. Merely musing…
We’re here to talk about The Thing, because this is not only one of John Carpenter’s best, but one of the very best science-fiction films. Certainly one of the best horror movies, though many would consider it second as horror/sci-fi to Ridley Scott’s Alien. Just like how Robocop owes its production to The Terminator from three years earlier, Scott’s sophomore picture is the reason why The Thing exists as it does. It showed a world hung up on Star Wars that space wasn’t such a nice place, and that science-fiction was more than a pretty face. It was an acne-scarred, sniveling one.
After the dreary sixties, and I suppose the dreary seventies, Star Wars reinvented pulp science-fiction, the romantic heroes who got the badguys and heroines who got kidnapped. I wouldn’t say that Alien is necessarily counterculture; it was born of a rather brilliant idea of O’Bannon and Shusett’s for a horror movie – what’s the scariest thing you can think of (the answer of course being rape by alien) – but possibly The Thing is. It’s aggressive, paranoid, violent, raw.
And yet, it’s a callback to the original short story by John W. Campbell. Carpenter wanted to do what Christopher Nyby and Howard Hawks didn’t: talk about what people do when thrown in an isolated space with the most frightening thing imaginable. This creature takes the identities of others, as well as their places, and this begs the question “who among us are human?” Since you can only be sure of yourself, this question offers Reason 1 why The Thing works.
The other is something of a controversial thing, the effects. Nobody can watch the The Thing and scoff at Bottin’s makeup and animatronic monsters. They’re a highlight in eighties visuals for sci-fi film, an absolute horror and joy to watch. Not only do they look freaky, they move around in ways you don’t want them to and do things to really mess people up. But some people are so understandably taken by these effects that they’re distracted, or come to think that they’re the reason for the movie. While the effects amount to Reason 2, they also did a lot to hurt the movie’s critical reception.
This is certainly an odd analogy but take for example Higher Learning, a film by John Singleton. Critics liked it, but didn’t think it had a strong enough romantic appeal (strong character relationships) and believed the characters were stereotypes. Essentially they wanted the movie to be more conventional drama. Having character drama about romance isn’t the movie’s point, that would definitely draw away from its message, which is all about how radical thinking is proliferated through generations, masquerading as education. Why is it that film is a medium that must conform to certain conventions and standards? Why must we always be entertained by these things?
The Thing‘s effects shouldn’t be tuned down. Perhaps that thinking stems from our appreciation of The Thing from Another World, which creates suspense with no gore. What works about the effects in The Thing is their service to atmosphere. There’s nothing more scary than Antarctica. Oh wait there’s nothing more scary than a creature that can take our identities. Now there’s nothing more scary than a stomach that eats your arms. We’re touring through a nightmare reality, a terrifying hallucination that is testing these men, seeing how long they’ll dangle over the abyss before falling off – snapping and turning on each other.
It’s a Twilight Zone-esque character study with a budget. We have characters thrust into a situation that keeps getting worse, where even survival seems pointless. In The Twilight Zone, the cheesy effects actually serve a purpose (whether intentionally or not), they create a layer for us to pierce through and see what’s just below the surface – they force us to investigate, and be rewarded, more often than not (some of those episodes are pretty aimless). The Thing does have the effects. No big-headed aliens, no Sasquatch thingy on the wing. We have an effective glimpse at not an alien creature, but at an alien world, and it’s scary as hell. I suppose it is forgivable for people to be distracted, but it’s the two elements that are absolutely crucial.
That of course is neglectful of the characters themselves, the script, the direction, the acting, and the music (though Morricone himself earned the film a Razzie, forever sealing that organization’s fate for me as “jokards”), all of which are astounding, especially for science-fiction film. Only rarely do we see attention to detail on all fronts in a movie with aliens.
Will we see it again tonight with The Thing (2011)? I know we’ll at least see the effects. They’re in the trailers, and they look great, if a bit Dead Space-ish (ain’t nut wrong with that). I assume that lip-service will be paid to the who goes there aspect of the story, but that’s just fine. As long as a body is on a laboratory floor morphing in the most horrifying ways only to be blasted by Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s flamethrower – that’s all I need.
Major spoilers for The Fly
I never could fully appreciate, as an audience member, just how frightening Cronenberg’s The Fly was until I watched it with someone else. By myself, I could acknowledge it as a classic 80’s gorefest, but with a difference, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with John Carpenter’s The Thing. The dead monkey, the nail scene, the silencing of Brundle – these are all great shocks. I think I was just too swept along by the climax of the movie to really recall all of these moments. Then I watched the film with the director’s commentary, and hearing the director explain how each trick was done certainly took some of the punch away, but that’s expected of director’s commentaries.
Finally I watched The Fly with Podcast Co-Host, who I’ve been able to spring one or two effectively gruesome movies on in the past – I think Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was pretty striking to him (as it should be to any sane person), and Crank 2: High Voltage definitely twisted him. I mean, the guy cuts his own nipples off. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to watch the scene in its entirety without turning away. But no reaction I’ve beheld of this guy has matched his reaction to Cronenberg’s masterful genre-mix of horror, science-fiction, drama, and comedy.
Geena Davis’ character, Veronica, goes to visit the abortion clinic with Stathis. They’re talking with the guy from Videodrome and he’s like “Are you sure?” and she’s like “I need this thing out of my body!” and he’s like “Okay.” Then we cut and the three are just standing in the next room, a very awkward cut that kind of pulls you out of the movie. I, in the audience, said something to the effect of ‘God, that was an awkward shot.’ Of course, I was expecting it, as I had just seen the film with commentary days earlier. Andy responds with, “yeah the filmmaking could use some spicing up.”
And there he sat, the critic, when Brundlefly crashes through the window and BAM! He jolted upright in an instant, releasing a quick “Oh my God!” before jumping out of his seat and towards the exit. He caught himself, and eased back. I laughed my ass off. I knew there was a shocking scene coming up, but damn, I didn’t expect that reaction. Such perfect timing. It was almost as if Cronenberg had inserted a kind of technically awkward scene to take you out of the movie, and then scare you right back in. In that moment, Andy went from critic to audience member.
It’s a strange beast, The Fly. When I watch it, I’m totally into it. As soon as it’s over, I’m kind of like, ‘well, it was pretty good.’ It exceeds in doing things that are amazingly effective during the film, but aren’t particularly memorable, like small character moments and disgusting horror sequences. I wouldn’t reflect back on The Fly like I would The Matrix or the Alien movies, just thinking to myself, damn those are good. And yet, this is one of my favorite movies. It’s really strange.
In terms of horror movies, I can name a few that would make a personal top twenty list – Jacob’s Ladder, Alien, The Thing, The Mist, and The Fly. Jacob’s Ladder is the philosophical and intense thriller, one of those quieting experiences that I would consider The Fountain to be akin to. The Thing is a classic, absolute craziness with Kurt Russell and Keith David. But The Fly works not for what it leaves you with, but what it does when it’s on, when it has you.
For example, I really dig the character Stathis Boranis. He’s a complicated man, and he starts off so easy to hate. He’s a stalker, a man fond of sexual harassment, and kind of a jerk. But as the movie progresses, we find that his love for Veronica is very real, just as real as Seth’s. And when the relationship between Veronica and Seth starts to break down, Stathis is right there. When Seth becomes the monster of the tale, Stathis takes the role of monster hunter, and this is an amazing moment, as he enters the laboratory armed with an antique-looking rifle. He’s taken a complete 180, and we’re actually behind this guy.
His characterization was so important because the emotional momentum in this movie is something that shifts constantly. We need to feel for his character as a broken hearted, hopeless romantic, in order to support his role as hero in the end, and when the Brundlepod struggles forward a horrific fusion of flesh and metal, he does so only to have himself killed – the final journey – and we discover that there are no heroes or villains, that there never were.
Indeed the main theme of the movie is man’s struggle with death, which perfectly adapts to The Fly storyline because we have a scientist battling against the unknown, an obvious metaphor made visually apparent and unique through the fly metamorphosis. A scientist loses his great mind over time, and it goes back to that idea that there are no heroes or villains – aging happens to us all; we can only be people in relation to it. When he becomes monstrous, it is a final, futile resistance to the inevitable, and we learn that coming to grips and finally accepting death is a better option that striving against it, as the latter option sees the harm of others.
Of course, neither is really a good thing, and this is why the ending is tragic, but not as outlandish as the premise of a man turning into a common housefly might inform. Because the science-fiction is grounded in the universal cold realities of aging and death, the effective dramatic elements are not left-field natives. I fully believe that the criticism of this film that ‘it tries to be too many things at once, dramatic, horrific, tragic, funny, but succeeds at none’ (jack of all trades, ace of none), is entirely superficial. I believe this because it’s easy to pass this over as a greasy horror flick.
Cronenberg himself even admits that the movie is quite extreme for a financially successful mainstream film (his most successful until A History of Violence, assumedly), and he was shocked to find how brutal some of the stuff was upon a repeat viewing many years after its creation. It certainly shows – the monkey in the telepod that didn’t quite make it but isn’t quite dead is only the beginning, and it really ramps up from there a la Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, which hits you halfway through the film and never lets up. The gore and effects were all practical, which for nowadays means that they possess an eerie quality. The melting of Stathis’ hand and leg are particularly effective, and the final metamorphosis, where all we see is the legs of Brundle and Veronica as they move towards the pod, and pieces of flesh fall all around them is intense.
That should however never distract from what is at the core of the film. In fact, I never could understand, and it is a recurring lament here on the Dreck Fiction, why people hate on movies that have good special effects in claim that they ‘detract from the story/characters/drama.’ In some cases, movies could theoretically be better off hiding special effects, but not in the case of The Fly. This is a case similar to Terminator 2, where the visual effects are a practical necessity, because they help construct the characters. The T-1000 uses the special effects, he isn’t used by them. Like in Videodrome, we can’t just be left to our imaginations to devise the things depicted here – it’s crucial we see them.
The horror we experience is the horror that the characters do. The scarier the images are, the greater the dramatic reflection in Seth and company. The two require each other, and this is what makes The Fly unique. Most horror movies, mostly the contemporary ones, draw fright from suspense. Here, the horror is out of an investment in the characters. We don’t want Seth to change, and when he does, it hurts because it’s so horrifying.
A good example of the masterfully engineered horror in the movie is a moment alluded to already, when Veronica accidentally tears off his jaw. Seth is trying to get Veronica into the Telepod, and his mutations have gotten so bad that is eyeballs are melting out of his head. There’s so much going on in this scene, where Stathis is dying in a corner, we have this countdown sequence initiated with an absolutely terrifying implication behind it (the fusion of Seth and Veronica), Seth is losing himself more and more to the monster, and finally, Veronica rips off his jaw in an attempt to get away, and lets out a scream of true terror. In this moment, out focus is compressed into a singular area, whereas before our minds were ticking with all sorts of terrifying what-ifs and of course, we were being affected by the visceral energy on the screen.
Powerful horror here is backed by emotional impact and the refined filmmaking of a true master, a literarily and technically affluent mind. Recently I sat through The Strangers, which was truly awful. It was ninety minutes of nothingspace – that is what the movie was about. In this movie, the characters crept around the house waiting to be scared by the masked killers, and this is where suspense kills the horror movie. There’s so much empty space where we’re just waiting for something to happen that the filmmakers must have forgotten what ‘content’ meant. It’s the antithesis of a movie like The Fly, which is all meat. Mutated, hairy fly meat.
Something that David Cronenberg stressed in the making of The Fly was each difference his film would have to the original adaptation of the short story. He wanted his scientist to be unmarried, his transformation gradual, and his themes… Cronenbergian. The most significant change of course was the actual fly metamorphosis, which is absent in the original movie. One could not imagine the 1986 version with a hastened transformation – the movie’s power comes out of the scientist’s struggle to rationalize and defeat what ails him, which of course as we know, is death. (Not AIDS)
It’s interesting – I watched a video review of both movies, where the man behind the Angry Video Game Nerd webseries commented that the original film benefitted from the scientist being flyualized instantly, and not being able to speak. He must find alternate methods, like writing on a chalkboard or using a typrewriter, to communicate. And then we have David Cronenberg, who believes that the scientist must be able to speak for most of the movie, until of course he gets his jaw ripped off during his final transformation. This reinforces the movie as a tragedy, and it is more emotionally distressing than frightening. Both approaches are sound, but I know which is more popular, and in my opinion, the remake is better for the revision.
The Fly is a great movie and a standout in both the horror and science-fiction genres. Rarely do either tap into such an evocative emotional force, while also managing to keep your mind ticking in classic SF fashion. Would I ever watch it again? Of course, but not before any other in my top twenty. Strange, for sure, but that’s just the name of the Cronenberg game.
Dreck Fiction 