AIDS-Era Body-Horror Subtext The Thing (1982)
The Thing was developed and written before the public framing of HIV/AIDS — Bill Lancaster's screenplay was completed in 1981, the first medical reports of what would be named GRID and then AIDS appeared in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in June 1981, and the term AIDS was first used in mid-1982 — but the film opened in June 1982 into an audience that was beginning, week by week, to register the public-health story that would define the decade. The Thing's structural premise — an invisible biological threat transmitted through close contact, with no available test until late in the crisis, fatal, and producing a public-health response of suspicion and quarantine — is one of the cleanest accidental analogues in American horror cinema for what was about to happen.
The chronology
The first medical reports of unusual pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma in young gay men in Los Angeles and New York appeared in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in June 1981 — exactly when Bill Lancaster's screenplay was finalized and pre-production was beginning at Universal. Dr. Bruce Voeller proposed the name AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) at a meeting in mid-1982. The Thing opened on June 25, 1982. By the end of 1982, AIDS had been reported in 14 countries and 593 cases in the United States, with 243 deaths. The HIV virus would not be identified as the cause until 1983; an antibody-based blood test would not be available until 1985. (wikipedia)
The film was not made about AIDS. The film could not have been made about AIDS. The reading that has emerged over the four decades since is that the film's structural premise made it available, almost immediately on release, as a metaphor for what was happening — and made it more available, as the years went on, as the chronology of the AIDS crisis hardened.
The structural analogue
The Thing's threat shares a long list of structural features with HIV/AIDS as the public-health story would be told over the next decade. The threat is biological. It is invisible until it acts. It is transmitted through close physical contact. There is no quick visual test for who is carrying it. The carriers do not know they are carriers, and may not know for a long time. The fully developed condition is fatal. The public-health response of suspicion-and-quarantine resembles the camp's response to the Thing more closely than it resembles any earlier 1970s biological-threat film. The blood test in beat 32 — a test that would have been unavailable to the camp before the Norris head-walk gave them the reasoningb31 b32 — is also a structural analogue for the antibody-based blood tests for HIV that would be developed by 1985.
"The Thing is not a film about AIDS. The Thing is a film that became, over a few years after its release, the film about AIDS that the studio system had not yet figured out how to make. The 1985 audience watched the rec-room blood-test scene and was not watching the same film that the 1982 audience had walked out of. The blood test had become the test." — Carmen Maria Machado, The Atlantic (2018)
The queer-coded reading
A substantial body of academic and critical work has read The Thing as a queer-coded text. The all-male cast, the absence of women, the visual emphasis on the bodies of the men, the threat that wears the face of intimate friends, the closing two-shot of two men sharing a bottle and looking at each other across a frame the film refuses to resolve — each of these has been cited in the reading.
The reading is not that Lancaster or Carpenter wrote a film about gay men or about AIDS; the reading is that the film's structural choices, made for other reasons, produced a text that is unusually available to a gay-male audience reading it through the lens of the early-1980s AIDS crisis.
"The Thing is a film about a community of men in close quarters where one of them has something inside him that none of them know about and any of them might also have. The film does not have to be about AIDS to be the film that the AIDS-era audience understood it to be. It is the film whose structural lessons that audience needed." — Daniel Gomez, The Los Angeles Review of Books (2017)
What Lancaster and Carpenter have said
Both Lancaster (in 1982) and Carpenter (across decades of interviews) have declined to claim the AIDS reading as authorial. Lancaster died in 1997. Carpenter has consistently said the reading is the audience's reading and that he is glad the film is available to it.
"I did not write the film about AIDS. I could not have. The film was finished before any of us knew what AIDS was. But I am glad the film is available to that reading. The film is whatever the audience finds in it. The audience reads the film, not the other way around." — John Carpenter, Out Magazine (2010s)
Why the reading hardens over time
The AIDS-era reading of The Thing has hardened rather than softened in the four decades since the film's release. The reason is partly that the film's structural premise has become more legibly available as the cultural memory of the AIDS crisis has become more widely shared, and partly that the film's specific images — the chest opening, the body's betrayal, the verification problem — have acquired political specificity that they did not have in 1982. The Thing has become, by accident and by audience, one of the films the AIDS-era is read through.
"Forty years on, the AIDS reading of The Thing is the dominant reading. The Reagan-era paranoia reading is also live, but the AIDS reading has the most explanatory force for what the film does. The film was not made about AIDS, and the film is now the film about AIDS that we have." — Mark Kermode, The Observer (2022)