The Thing Expanded

“Why don’t we just wait here for a little while… see what happens?” It was with this eerily ambiguous line, delivered coldly by Kurt Russell’s R.J. MacReady, that John Carpenter’s The Thing ended, in iconic fashion. Fans of the film have waited a good long while since 1982 for its reevaluation. Upon release, the film was a critical and commercial failure; now, 44 years on, it is widely and correctly lauded as a masterpiece — an achievement emphatically confirmed with The Thing Expanded, a vast celebratory ‘making of’ documentary.

This comes from writer-director Ian Nathan, who has crafted it in the same mould as his previous documentary, Aliens Expanded. (Full disclosure: Ian Nathan is a former editor of and writer for Empire magazine. This had no bearing on the writing of this review.) Like that previous film, this is stuffed to the gills with detail, overflowing with several new talking-heads interviews, and as such arrives with a runtime that far outlasts that of the film it is discussing. Where The Thing was a thrifty 109 minutes, The Thing Expanded — as the name suggests — runs to a buttock-threatening 312 minutes, or just over five hours.

For some viewers, that might mean it’s better treated as a miniseries than a movie, something to be digested — like the alien chest of Norris-Thing, devouring a pair of arms — in bitesize segments. But for fans of Carpenter’s sci-fi, it is worth the patience. This is something clearly aiming to be the definitive text on the film, and it’s hard to see what ground it couldn’t have covered.

The interviewees are the stars here. Nathan assembles practically everyone involved in the film still alive and willing for on-camera chats. John Carpenter, Kurt Russell and the surviving cast, most notably, make significant contributions; Carpenter — these days having a reputation for being more reclusive and irascible — is found in a happy, amiable mood, clearly proud as punch to still be talking about a film that critics mauled at the time. (Pleasingly, his interview is conducted with him sitting next to a scale model of Mrs Pickman from In The Mouth Of Madness.)

Key crew-members appear, too, including cinematographer Dean Cundey, editor Todd C. Ramsay, and producers Stuart Cohen and Larry Franco (who doubled as the Norwegian firing shots at the dog in the opening scene), and there’s below-the-line talent too, including make-up artist Margaret Beserra and Erik Jensen, the line producer on the special make-up effects unit. That’s not even mentioning the legion of famous faces waxing lyrical about the film, from Frank Darabont and Guillermo del Toro (in conversation with each other, for some reason) to Stephen Colbert (who declares it his favourite film), Eli Roth and Matthijs van Heijningen Jr, director of the much-maligned 2011 prequel. Along with writers, journalists, authors, an astrobiologist and even a winter manager at the South Pole (who shows the film to new arrivals every first goddamned week of winter) added to the mix, it amounts to nearly 30 contributors on screen.

So, few stones go unturned. While some stories might be familiar to die-hard MacReady-mad fans, there’s a ton of fascinating details uncovered. Nathan’s approach is chronological, but allows for plenty of diversions, with clips from important influences and reference points, from the claustrophobia of 12 Angry Men to the important sci-fi groundwork laid by Dark Star and Alien.

Tantalisingly, we hear of some of the tensions that existed on the largely male set. David Clennon, who played Palmer, offers this gem: “Peter Maloney was the right guy to play Bennings, I think.” Before adding: “And that’s not necessarily a compliment.” (Russell, diplomatically, calls him “sweet”.) The stifling masculinity of the shoot seemed to have got to them all. “It’s grim on an all-male set, let me tell you,” notes Carpenter.

Yet this is not an all-male documentary, with great insights from superfans like critic Anne Billson and filmmaker Issa Lopez, who point out that the only female voice in The Thing, the chess computer that MacReady tinkers with in an early scene, was voiced by Carpenter’s wife at the time, and posit the theory that the Thing itself is female — a writhing, twisting symbol of male fear and paranoia.

All that gorgeously practical writhing and twisting is given a full tribute, too — though Rob Bottin, the special make-up effects designer and “smartest man on the film” according to producer Stuart Cohen, is sadly not interviewed, having retired from the industry. His presence looms large, though: rather than share space on a Mount Rushmore of make-up artists, he “would have his own mountain”, says Darabont. We do get a good idea of just how ingenious his work was — among the most mind-blowing nuggets of trivia, we learn that 62 puppeteers operated the climactic Blair-Thing, and that the team regularly went to a local rendering plant to collect dogs and cats that had been euthanised or found roadkill, which would subsequently be taken to a taxidermist for use in the film.

There are tons of eye-popping details like this, more than even the most die-hard Thing fan would have previously encountered. The Thing Expanded’s enormous length might put off those who aren’t entirely die-hard, to be fair — but it is worth the time, even for casual fans. Like the great DVD extras of yore — the Lord Of The Rings Special Editions and their ilk — this is really a masterclass in filmmaking and film appreciation, an earnest and nerdy celebration of great art. “People write to me all the time, they know every frame of the film,” says Thomas G. Waites, who plays Windows. After watching The Thing Expanded, you’ll feel like you know practically every frame, too.