By Robert Scucci
| Published 9 seconds ago

Every once in a while, a classic horror flick like John Carpenter’s The Thing makes its rounds on streaming and reminds us just how ahead of its time it was by elevating such a simple story line with next-level creature effects. Now that The Thing is streaming in all of its violent and nihilistic glory on Shudder, you can see for yourself just how tense and nauseating it is for yourself. 

From the remote Antarctic wilderness to the looming and always building sense of paranoia that drips from every single sequence, you’d be hard-pressed to find a sci-fi horror film that will make you want to test the blood of everybody living in your house before going to bed just to be safe. Or, if you’re anything like me, your next viewing of The Thing on Shudder may or may not have you reading Amazon reviews for flamethrowers. 

Why It Works 

Though The Thing predates Predator by five years, both films have one thing in common that make them superior to their contemporaries, and it’s the sense of routine and camaraderie from an experienced crew that’s disrupted by external alien forces. Kurt Russell’s R.J. “Mac” MacReady has a rapport with the rest of the research crew that effortlessly lets the audience know how these guys generally trust each other and get along in any other circumstance before the events that take place in The Thing, now streaming on Shudder. 

When an American team’s Antarctic research station is raided by a Norwegian helicopter (they’re not Swedish, Mac!), Mac and Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) decide to fly over to the attacker’s station to see exactly what set them off. Their initial assumption is that the Norwegians had a case of isolation-induced cabin fever, and for reasons unknown wanted to snipe out one of the many sled dogs living on the American base. It doesn’t take long for Mac and Dr. Copper to find a severely burnt corpse that appears to be a human in an suspended stage of mutation after getting incinerated by the Norwegian crew. 

Looking for a logical explanation, Mac and Dr. Copper bring the corpse back to their base of operations, along with whatever research the Norwegians have compiled before things went south. Senior Biologist Blair (A. Wilford Brimley) confirms that the corpse is human despite its deformities, but has a change of heart when one of the station dogs violently mutates while locked in the kennel. The crew now knows they’re dealing with some sort of “Thing” that takes on the shape of its host in order to assimilate and eliminate any living being that can host its DNA, and they shudder at the implications.  

While there are initially some doubts that they’re dealing with an alien life form, it’s hard for everybody to ignore the buried alien spacecraft that the Norwegians uncovered before they went on their rampage. 

An Exercise In Futility 

The Thing presents a moral dilemma that needs to be immediately addressed. Blair, growing in his paranoia, makes the executive decision that the Thing’s contamination and assimilation efforts need to remain isolated after predicting that whatever life form they’re dealing with can take over the entire planet in just a few years if let loose across the globe. He destroys the radios and sleds, and kills the remaining dogs to make sure nobody can escape.

Armed with flamethrowers and enough explosives to blow the research station sky-high, the crew is all but certain that they’re not going to survive the winter. When Bennings (Peter Maloney) and Norris (Charles Hallahan) get infected, the surviving crew’s paranoia gets the best of them because they have no true way of knowing who else is infected by the Thing. Though Mac and Childs (Keith David) have more than enough reason to not trust each other at this point in the ordeal, they really don’t have a choice but to put their heads together in their survival efforts. 

Next-Level Creature Effects 

Emotional and existential turmoil aside, The Thing shocked everybody upon its 1982 release because of how ahead of its time it was with its creature design and their stop-motion movements, which still hold up when you stream it on Shudder. Special effects designer Rob Bottin required a budget of $1.5 million (one tenth of The Thing’s entire production budget), and used a mix of chemicals, food, rubber, and mechanical parts to bring the eponymous Thing to life in its various grotesque permutations. If you’re somehow seeing this John Carpenter classic for the first time in 2025, you may not believe that you’re watching a 43-year-old film because of how well done the practical effects are executed. 

A Certified Cult Classic

The Thing is one of those creature features that actually benefits from showing its monster on screen, and there’s no shortage of blood, ectoplasm, saliva, and bone to get this point across. As each mutation gets more intense, so does the sense of real fear from its principal cast that is made all the more convincing by the frigid temperatures on set, which in all likelihood kept the adrenaline levels high during production, giving the film an air of authenticity that I haven’t seen replicated so beautifully since. 

You can stream The Thing right now on Shudder, and I strongly recommend that you do so next time you want to see the world burn. And if you want to explore The Thing further, the GenreVision podcast does an excellent breakdown that you wont want to miss.