“The Things”

Illustration by Olli Hihnala. All images in this post were collected on Peter Watts personal website.

There are certainly Sci-Fi/creature feature/horror movies made throughout the ages where it may not be unjustified to question why an alien that is apparently intelligent enough to build a spacecraft capable of interstellar travel would land on Earth and immediately start acting like a violent, mindless animal. It’s a recurring logic hole generally papered over, thinly, in order to justify traditional genre entertainment. Even The Thing From Another World, the starting point for many of these extraterrestrial thrillers, only provides a vague sort of justification for its monster’s behaviour, and it actually does more plot logic legwork than many of the films that followed it. In general, the alien’s perspective is not always given a lot of thought in these things, although it’s an area where even an otherwise rote story can really distinguish itself…when there’s the motivation to do so.

Speaking of The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake is another one of those movies where the question applies, probably even more than the original. It features one of the most inventively-portrayed alien creatures in film history, but its true form is so incomprehensible that it seems almost impossible to imagine it piloting a spaceship—but it not only does that, it also has the knowledge to build another one from scrap parts. I’ve always thought of the titular Thing as being like an intelligent communicable disease, seeking only to propagate itself and absorbing whatever knowledge and technical skill it needs to do so. Other people have their own theories about this, but only Sci-Fi writer/marine biologist Peter Watts, author of the evocative first contact novel Blindsight, managed to get his version published in Clarkesworld, one of the leading English language SF publications. “The Things”, his re-interpretation of the dynamics of John Carpenter’s version of the story, focuses entirely on the alien’s perspective, giving us a surprisingly benevolent take on the shapeshifting flesh beast that infects everything around it—as it turns out, such a thing is possible.

Dark Star (1974)

As I’ve mentioned countless (countless!) times before, the early-to-mid seventies was definitely the weirdest period for Sci-Fi films, with the two biggest successes—and influences—on the genre being the heady 2001: A Space Odyssey and the grim Planet of the Apes. I think I can safely argue that this was the only point in time when a movie like Phase IV would be made at all. These bizarre and downbeat visions of the future would more or less be put out to pasture when Star Wars debuted, but the subsequent era of Sci-Fi movies still bore the mark of what had come before, sometimes in very direct ways.

Like previous subject Equinox, Dark Star was a short film picked up and expanded to feature length by The Blob producer Jack H. Harris, but this one was probably a much harder sell, and was only distributed briefly and in a small number of locations. Also like Equinox, Dark Star is the career beginnings for some of the most important people in creature feature history: director John Carpenter and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (with a special shout out to the late concept artist/designer Ron Cobb, who designed the titular spaceship), who a few years after their first project came and went would go on to separately redefine the horror movie. That’s all fairly well-known stuff at this point (as is the story of their tense working relationship and subsequent falling out, as told in Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value), and while Dark Star developed a cult following based on its initial showings, it would gain a bigger one after Halloween and Alien made the minds behind it famous—and it’s also fairly well-trod territory to suggest that Dark Star would become an antecedent to some of their more famous movies, Alien especially. It’s still an interesting thing to look at, though, and while it’s only partly a monster movie, the ways it reflects on (and parodies) present and past Science Fiction trends makes it one of the missing links that illuminates the through-lines of multiple genres’ histories.