There the thing expands its repertoire to take the form of the men in the outpost, leading to a toxic atmosphere of fear and distrust-and the now-famous blood test sequence, wherein the men attempt to discover which of them is infected by dipping a heated wire into dishes of each others’ blood.
Several million years later the thing is thawed out, and first seen as a dog taken in by a group of scientific researchers stationed at a remote outpost. The thing, as viewers of the film well know, is a shape-shifting extraterrestrial monstrosity that arrives on a spaceship that crashes in Antarctica. Clearly those effects were conceived after the screenplay draft Foster used, as the thing in this book tends to exist largely as (to quote an oft-used description) an “indistinct mass of protoplasm.” Foremost among the latter are Foster’s descriptions of the titular thing, depicted in the film by Rob Bottin’s stunningly imaginative special effects. Campbell novella “ Who Goes There?”Īnother worthy facet of this novel is the fact that it was taken from an early draft of Bill Lancaster’s THING script, and so differs from the finished film in quite a few aspects.
The text bears quite a few pratfalls common to movie novelizations (oft-hasty prose, perfunctory descriptions, an overall first draft feel) yet is easily the most inspired Foster novelization I’ve read, nicely synthesizing both the Carpenter film and-to a lesser but still-noticeable extent-its inspiration, the 1938 John W.
A novelization of John Carpenter’s1982 classic THE THINGby the prolific Alan Dean Foster (who also novelized DARK STAR, ALIEN and-pseudonymously-STAR WARS).