Pitchfork
72
“The quintessential moron movie of the ’80s… too phony looking to be disgusting.” “About as impersonal as a movie can be.” “A great barf-bag movie.” “It qualifies only as instant junk.” Such was the critical consensus surrounding John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing, about a shape-shifting alien coated in “creamed corn, Jell-O, mayonnaise, microwaved bubblegum, and five-gallon pails of K-Y Jelly.” Opening the same weekend the world met a more benevolent beer-gut alien in E.T., The Thing was a box-office stiff at the time. Only in this century has pop culture thawed to its Antarctic plot. The Thing is now perceived as a classic of the paranoid Reagan era, and since bombing in theaters, the movie has led to a comic book, amusement park ride, action figures, prequel, video game, and Hugo-nominated short story.
After years of operating on shoestring horror movie budgets, The Thing gave Carpenter approximately $15 million for its gory effects and blustery locations. It also meant that—for the first time in a feature—Carpenter didn’t need to whip up his own score at the last minute. Unable to handle composing duties in addition to everything else The Thing required, Carpenter outsourced the music to the Maestro, Ennio Morricone.
Following decades of success in Europe and his iconic scores for spaghetti westerns, Morricone was only just making inroads into Hollywood. Despite having hundreds of credits to his name, Morricone’s scores remain instantly recognizable, be they the yips of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the stinging surf guitars of Danger Diabolik, or the romantic orchestral swells of The Mission. Watching the film when it screened at BAM a few years ago, it was startling when Morricone’s name emerged on the credits for The Thing—so minimal, restrained, and atmospheric is his score.
Waxwork goes all out with this deluxe vinyl reissue of The Thing, an exquisite package, right down to a breakaway “ice” slipcase. But those hoping to hear the telltale bum-bum that thuds throughout the film and chills the blood might be perplexed at first—those were instances where Carpenter and his frequent collaborator Alan Howarth added extra cues, and don’t emerge until late in the soundtrack. Instead, this reissue opens with Morricone’s “Humanity (Part 1),” a gossamer motif on violin and harp that appears nearly 20 minutes in, which then edges into a more foreboding low-end. It’s a stark piece, one as compositionally cold as the Antarctic landscape itself.
Revisit the film, and it’s the extra patina of electronics that remains most foreboding—the slow drones that make the skin prickle. (Cue the Thing’s arachnid emergence in the dog kennel and tossing a flare onto the tentacular Bennings, for instance.) At times, though, Morricone’s themes sound like the alien himself attempting to recreate Carpenter’s iconic analog synths. The relatively unmemorable “Shape,” with its bowed cello and brass, doesn’t bring to mind a particular scene from the film—nor does the frantic pizzicato of “Contamination.” And the bombastic lurches of “Bestiality” feel too pompous in the context of the minimalist film. Given that Morricone composed suites while only looking at an early rough cut of the film, it makes sense that his cues (some of which went unused) seem out of sync with the film’s frigid aesthetic. Separated from Carpenter’s Antarctic imagery, Morricone’s cues sound unfamiliar; one would be hard-pressed to recall their corresponding sequences.
Midway through, Morricone’s themes strike a balance between acoustic, human sounds and cold electronics. The strings of “Solitude” oscillate between anxious and vertiginous. Keys twinkle like melting icicles on the electronic-tinged “Eternity,” soon joined by a church organ line that seems to be perpetually in descent, ratcheting up the tension and creating a sense of the inevitable. A meandering synth piece, “Sterilization,” shows Morricone not altogether comfortable mixing these two distinct palettes together.
Only on “Humanity (Part 2)” do those forlorn electronic throbs emerge, paired with a desolate theme across woodwinds. It’s on this motif that the film’s frost-tipped dread is most closely felt—so it’s a shame that, after four minutes, it suddenly lurches back into an overstated organ theme. In emphasizing the seething electronics and excising all but crucial bits of Morricone’s original score, Carpenter proved that his vision for the film remained intact. History has bore that out and, unlike this original soundtrack, such barf bag junk has now attained its rightful place as a frightful horror classic.
Fri Mar 10 06:00:00 GMT 2017