Every year, nine thousand feet above the sea on the plateau of Antarctica, fifty people wave goodbye as the last plane takes off and winks out over the horizon. The women and men settle in for a gloomy winter, isolated February to October. Temperatures plummet to minus seventy Celsius, concreting cameras and morphing jet fuel into a solid. The scientists, galley workers, and unlucky endure at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in a near-hibernation inside a building on stilts, riding above the wind-blown snow. They will not see another human face for eight months.
On that first night of winter, the polar residents congregate in a gymnasium where they otherwise smash volleyballs, learn salsa, or duel at Kung Fu. When the supply plane has flown, the crew dim the gym lights and unfurl a movie screen. They sit and eat popcorn. Some, perhaps, cuddle. The words The Thing burn across the gym, a phosphorescence like an Antarctic white-out.
They settle in and watch movies featuring a polar station isolated and attacked by a shape-shifting alien during the first week of dark. The South Pole residents screen all three Thing films (from 1951, 1982, and 2011), each based on a novella, Who Goes There?, by John Campbell, about an alien that survives frozen winds, consumes human flesh, and secrets in shadow.
Of the three Thing movies, John Carpenter’s is the clockwork of terror. The story is “cyclical, mythical,” according to film critic Anne Billson, happening long ago and yesterday. It has birthed a prequel, novelization, video game, fan site, graphic novels, and a very fun board game. It is Carpenter’s favorite creation, one of Quentin Tarantino’s as well, who filmed self-described Thing homages twice, with Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight.
It is one of my favorite movies, yet it reminds me of my father’s cancer. I first watched this movie as a teenager when my dad was disintegrating from a tumor that had invaded his skull and clawed its way around his brain. Dad’s outer appearance morphed from weight-lifting, six-footer to a cornhusk who could barely talk.
I’m curious about the tentacles of The Thing and other body horrors, how they slither into our imaginations, how they squeeze us into panic yet earn fans’ ardor. Why do I watch a movie yearly that recalls my father’s demise just as those polar astronauts do when winter closes in?
•••
One-half of men and one-third of women will discover monsters inside their bodies. By this time next year, seven million people will have died from cancer. Soon, it will rise past heart disease as the most common way to wink out in the world. They say some horrors are universal.
Cancer is known as a “clonal” disease. It stems from an ancestral cell that duplicates and radiates, ad infinitum. A lifeform arises, a misbegotten child—a Frankenstein monster rampaging against creator.
Imhotep, a proto-neurosurgeon, described cancer in Egypt in 2635 BCE, finding a mass, a slithering crop of aliens bulging from a patient. “A ball of wrappings,” he called it. Incurable, ravenous. He noted how cancer swelled and spread and hardened, how there was nothing to be done.
Hippocrates, in 400 BCE, coined “cancer” from karkinos, which of course means “crab.” Some Greeks thought cancers moved around flesh like sea creatures. Hippocrates saw tumors entering swollen organs, pinchers radiating around, and he thought of a beach crab dug into sand. He believed tumors burrowed into bodies as if to hide inside.
Another Greek word migrated to mean cancer, onkos, or “burden,” from which oncology comes. Cancer is what we have carried from our ancestors, along with culture, across seven continents. What we will perhaps one day bear with us to the stars.
Archeologists have uncovered ancient skeletons that show clear signs of cancer. Some of the oldest digs in the world, buried 1.8 million years ago, reveal tumor scars volcanoing from bone. Cancer is not a new monster. Like a Hollywood screen killer, it has been inside the house all along.
•••
The Thing opens with stars. A spinning saucer burning towards Earth, a reference to Carpenter’s much-loved It Came From Outer Space (1953). A friendly Alaskan malamute arrives at an America’s South Pole Outpost 31. He is chased by grenade-tossing Norwegians in a helicopter. Later, the Americans fly to Norway’s burned out camp. They discover an iced coffin, a block housing a monster-sized hole. A doctor thinks it might be a fossil chopped out of Antarctica, an alien separated not by cosmos but by time. A thing gets into the American station; the residents aren’t sure what, or when or if it could be one of them. There’s a revving of paranoia, joint-twisting effects, a downcast, perfect ending.
What sits with viewers who watch The Thing most, I think, is the creature, the muck of existence erupting from bodies. 22-year-old special effects coordinator, Rob Bottin, spent a year on The Thing, doubling its effects budget. He led a crew of forty designers, illustrators, engineers, sculptors, and food artists. He worked seven days a week for a year. At one point he had to be hospitalized for exhaustion, pneumonia, and a bleeding ulcer.
Bottin threw everything at his creations: stop-motion, hydraulics, remote-controlled robotics, puppeteering, latex, fiberglass, rubber, K-Y Jelly, mayonnaise, gelatin, jam, and bubble gum. The Thing is a kaleidoscopic display of biology. It is “a writhing anatomical stew,” according to Anne Billson. Phenomenologist Dylan Trigg writes, the thing is “a synthesis of… evolution, a formless and grotesque realization of matter.”
The film displays destabilizing sequences of men falling apart, melted by unseen conquerors. In one scene, two Americans find charred bodies bleeding into each other like an aborted human mitosis. During another sequence, an angry flower erupts from a blood-lathered dog.
The monster becomes an intergalactic mongrel, an ecological nightmare, complicating the boundaries of bodies and environments. Trigg writes, “the creature…serves as an expression of the origin of life itself.”
•••
When the thing absorbs and becomes a human character Bennings, he is stripped and coated in an algae-like ooze. The Bennings-creature sports the same red hair, same beard, puts on Bennings’ coat and crashes through a window outside. Like a toddler, it loses its legs and collapses as other men circle, flares casting phosphorescent halos. The thing’s face is Bennings (American actor Peter Maloney), but his humanity disappears into his hands, snaking in cardinal directions, bent as with Rheumatism. The Bennings-Thing lifts these hands as if to implore the circling men to help him with a body that won’t cooperate, to help figure itself out.
This was the moment the film teleported me to my dad’s bedside, his hands curled to nubs, fingers unresponsive. The hands that once zipped across a keyboard at 80 words a minute as a sports writer, that threw footballs at me with quarterback precision. His limbs resembled burn victim hands as if melted together. Sometimes his finger sprouted black nails that bewitched their maker. The hands would scratch against and tear my dad’s skin. His hands betrayed him.
Once I entered his shared room at an elderly care center with his hands held up to the light. His milky blue eyes tried to examine the hands. His skin was so translucent you could see through it into the deeper reaches of flesh where sight was not meant to go.
At age 61, my dad lost his hands, his sight, and his voice. Words and sense escaped him, and at times he would just cough the indecipherable. Sometimes he’d yell. When Bennings becomes a thing, he stares at the camera, lifts his mangled hands and cracks his mouth open for a howl that hybridizes a wounded dog’s growl with a rusted gate’s groan. The creature utters this ghostly rumble, and I see my dad in the snow, hands raised to the flares, unable to make sense of who he was, how he came to be kneeling before these men, and why his misshapen hands could no longer help him.
•••
There are several theories about why audiences crave the system-shock of body horror. Philip Brophy coined the term referring to Carpenter’s monster. Brophy wrote, “The essential horror of The Thing was in the thing’s total disregard for and ignorance of the human body.” It doesn’t abide borders of identity written in flesh.
Many critics connect body horror’s 1980’s heyday with the AIDS crisis. Other theories on the genre’s workings stem from viewers who witness The Fly and other skin-freezers during MRI scans. Adrenaline levels jump, hearts beat like hummingbirds. It’s the quick-fix, roller coaster hypothesis. Gross-outs give viewers a bump. There is also the common theory of any horror-as-taboo-breaker. Horror lets us let our inner cave-person loose. For Carol Clover, author of Men, Women, and Chainsaws, horror is “the form that most obviously trades in the repressed.” It holds up a mirror that peers into our guts.
John Campbell, author of Who Goes There?, had a mother who was an identical twin. Her sister frequented the Campbell household, and it was impossible for young John to tell mother and aunt apart. He terrorized that who he was talking to was not the person he knew. For Jack Halberstam, gothic monster critic, the most successful monstrosities possess “a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body.” When a novel or film includes eclectic creatures, “meaning itself runs riot,” she writes. The horror of unreason.
The quaking at body erasure goes back to Medusa, the wendigo, Gilgamesh’s Humbaba, spanning human history and the globe. Japan’s Baku is one such chimera, mythologically created from the spare parts of other animals, feasting on human dreams. These beasts bleed past species borders, incorporating reptiles, plants, insects, birds, and nightmares. Humans grow less human, less individual. The Thing thing is not just a parasite but something that becomes a part of us, threatening our identities as people.
The Thing’s early tagline was, “Man is the warmest place to hide.” When I learned this, I recalled that each person secrets 100 trillion microbes many of which a human cannot live without because these tiny beings compost our food. We have entire zoos in our mouths and perched upon each eyelid. The average person walks around with a quart of more-than-human life. Our every mitochondrion have DNA separate from our own.
Stephen King writes in Dance Macabre that horror reaches us, “where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive.” Horror reunites consciousness with animality, science with dreams. Body horror will not let us forget that we are a grubby, animal, from and returning to soil. It brings us to an ancestral, biological soup in mind where we are in flesh.
Film critic Robert Cumbow writes The Thing is “an image of what we are rather than what we might become.” We are not just individuals, but ecosystems.
•••
In John Campbell’s time, when he wrote Who Goes There?, Antarctica remained uncharted. Even today it sweeps like a well of mystery undergirding Earth, a repost for fantasies and madness. The setting evokes the unknown, unplumbed, an “out there.”
The Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station is named for two men: early 20th-century Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and British naval officer Robert Scott. Amundsen was the first man to complete an expedition to earth’s basement in 1911. He and his Norwegian crew utilized skis, sleds, and 52 dogs, butchering many of the canines for meat en route. Robert Scott died trying. He made it to the pole five weeks after the Norwegians, but he and his men froze returning.
When Scott and his companions’ corpses were located, they carried the first ever discovered Antarctic fossil, Glossopteris: woody seed-bearing ancients, once stretching 100 feet tall. Glossopteris are hard to classify because they are a giant shrub and kind of a tree and related to everything. At first, taxonomists called them “ferns.” Then “gymnosperms.” Their name extends from Greek’s glossa, meaning “tongue.” Their leaves resemble the fleshy organs with which we speak.
Glossopteris proved that Antarctica was forested and joined to other land masses. Gondwana was its ancient collection, linked continents floating on a magmic tide. Glossopteris sprouted in all the lands of Gondwana and shriveled up into ice. They grew and died and evolved into many things, including proof that our lands were once one, that plant life, like humans, and even terra firma, is mutable, coming together and then exploding apart at the bottom of the globe.
•••
In The Thing’s tensest scenes, characters appear possessed or assaulted by some disease. One character seems to have a heart attack, and the doctor grabs the defibrillator. Another character concludes the film, white-bearded, limping, clutching a bottle of Scotch like an elderly man making his way down a wintery street.
Cancer, in its weird way, is an apex predator and a demon possessor, “a blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism,” as H. G. Wells once called it. It inhabits and reigns over. It tears bodies apart, feasts on our organs, becomes us.
Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in The Emperor of Maladies, “If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.”
I think I watch The Thing because it reminds me that the dangers I sometimes imagine lurking outside my body are already inside. It humbles me that identity, like the giant mass of Gondwana, is explodable, that my flesh will crumble. I don’t want this to happen, as I know my dad didn’t. But it’s supposed to, and in a way, like the function of clergy or last rites, The Thing prepares me for an afterlife.
Whatever thoughts I have in my brain and whatever love in my heart, at the end of my consciousness I am a shrub-tree about to be frozen in the Antarctic. I am, in a sense, that ancient arbor life, an amalgamation of parts destined towards a new order. Body horror reconnects me to my malleable, animal manifestation of matter. It creates space for me to contemplate my demise, as indeed watching my dad decompose while living did. There are no good deaths, just bodies frozen for a time before their elements are unleashed.
Perhaps explorers will one day discover me.
•••
There once lived a well-postured Minnesotan, Arthur Aufderheide, tall, perpetual wearer of bolo ties. He worked at the International Mummy Registry in Duluth Minnesota. He was known as the “Mummy Doctor.”
Every workday, Aufderheide dissected samples from over six thousand body parts in various stages of disintegration, harvested from hundreds of mummies. Even in a museum, the desiccated monsters are devoured by mold and time. So Aufderheide tooled quickly to extract what information he could from the long-dead. He had trained as a Paleopathologist, microscoping for disease within ancient skeletons and fossils. He wanted to see what took our ancestors, the secrets in their bones.
Aufderheide literally wrote the book on monster care, The Scientific Study of Mummies, which includes a nineteen step recipe for shrinking a head. He once called his work “salvage pathology,” because how can you ransack the husks left by time. It’s like finding a wreck on the bottom of the sea or an outpost in the South Pole and searching for clues. “Often,” Aufderheide said, “you’re working with an alphabet soup of broken-down proteins where there used to be organs.”
Much like the thing breaks down its victims, death breaks down bodies. Within minutes, a dead human begins eating itself, a process called “autolysis.” Cells rupture, their own enzymes devouring them. Once friendly bacteria turn on our stomachs. They climb the bloodstream and digestive tract and devour livers, lungs, hearts, and brains. This is what body horror is—things that were us now feeding on what’s left.
Ancient Egyptians knew enough to remove the intestines of the dead so they could mummify. But what are we without the organs and millions of species of bacteria that break down our food? What are we without guts? The Egyptians would also salt the bodies, coat mummies in pitch, and pickle them. Creepily, eyes are one of the last organs to decompose.
Looking at what killed mummies—medieval influenza, tuberculosis, spider-webbed craniums—helped Aufderheide reveal the sources of our plagues and the progenitors of our deaths. But only ten to fifteen percent of mummies divulge their cause of death. The rest tantalize, suffocate with mystery. Some mummies are indecipherable.
After my dad died, my sister and I called around medical facilities because Dad had willed his body to science. Yet none would take him because his organs were so wrecked from cancer, so changed by disease and the efforts to contain it that he was deemed unfit for scrutiny. My dad was cremated, which is what Carpenter’s characters do to Thing-torn bodies.
A dead body, given time, embraces itself. Lungs collapse back into the rib cage. Browning livers migrate up into the chest. Tongues shrink like browning leaves curl. Limbs contort inward. Aufderheide routinely found ears rolled like cigarettes.
But in 1990 he found another thing altogether. Aufderheide inspected the left arm of a 1,000-year-old mummy taken from Egypt. It was a woman in her mid-thirties at death. Her skin wax-paper, torso a melted and reconstituted candle.
Aufderheide held her left arm as one takes the hand of the elderly. Much like I walked my dad across the carpets of the care center, his skin sewn together snowflakes, liver spots streaking into scars.
Aufderheide held the old woman’s arm and found a mass. Something had erupted from her bone, hot lava in the form of a crab. It had broken her skin, a thing tearing its way out.
It was cancer, preserved. Mummified. That ancient monster that is also human, cells exploding from their frozen form. An instigator of autolysis, murderer of fathers. Civilization’s alien conqueror. A being not torn from space but waiting inside our bodies throughout time, ready to bring us into another world.
