Body Horror Cinema The Thing (1982)
The body-horror sub-genre — horror films whose central project is the betrayal, transformation, or dissolution of the human body — is one of the most-discussed strands of late-twentieth-century horror. The genre's central run of work was made between roughly 1975 and 1995, principally by David Cronenberg in Canada and by John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, Frank Henenlotter, Brian Yuzna, and Clive Barker in the United States. The Thing is one of the genre's foundational texts.
Cronenberg's parallel project
David Cronenberg's films through the 1970s and early 1980s — Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), and The Fly (1986) — were the body-horror genre's most consistent body of work. Cronenberg's premise across the run is that the body the audience trusts is not trustworthy: it can be invaded, overtaken, mutated, opened. His threats are internal — venereal, viral, psychic — and his protagonists are usually scientists, doctors, or media workers whose project is to understand the transformation as it happens to them.
The Thing was released in June 1982. Videodrome opened in February 1983. The two films were in production at almost the same time and on almost the same theme.
"The Thing and Videodrome are the two great body-horror films of the period. They are arguing the same thing — that the body is a place you can be evicted from — and they are arguing it at industrial scale. Cronenberg makes chamber pieces about it. Carpenter makes feature-length ensemble action films about it. Both are right." — Carmen Maria Machado, The Atlantic (2018)
What "body horror" actually means
The label is loose enough to be applied to most horror cinema involving physical transformation, but the genre's core run is built around four specific operations: the body opens and reveals an interior the audience could not have predicted; the body fuses with another body or with technology; the body's organs operate independently of the body; the body's identity is contested by something inside it. The Thing executes all four. The kennel-flower opens; the head-walk shows organs operating independently; the chest-mouth fuses Norris with the Thing; the central question of the rec-room sequence is which body's identity is the body's own.
The Thing's contribution
The Thing's specific contributions to the genre are: the practical-creature aesthetic that does not resolve to a final form (see Rob Bottin's Practical Effects as Body Horror); the verification-by-test logic of the blood-test sequence; the small-group-trapped-with-an-infiltrator structure that became the genre's most-imitated narrative shape; and the open ending in which the audience cannot verify whether the threat has been contained.
"The Thing is the body-horror film other body-horror films are trying to be. Cronenberg understood this immediately and said so. The Fly is in part a tribute to The Thing — Goldblum's transformation is the long, patient, unsentimental version of what Carpenter does in eighty seconds in the Norris scene." — Anne Billson, Sight & Sound (2010s)
The 1986 Fly
Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), released four years after The Thing, is the body-horror genre's other touchstone. Goldblum's transformation from man to fly takes the entire running time of the film and is shot as a slow medical-tragedy rather than a horror set-piece. The Fly is in dialogue with The Thing in two specific ways: it inherits the practical-creature aesthetic Bottin established (Chris Walas's effects work won the Academy Award), and it inherits the no-final-form rule (Goldblum's body never resolves to a recognizable insect; it is a moment in a process to the end).
"Carpenter's Thing made The Fly possible. We did not have to argue for the practical-creature aesthetic; we did not have to argue for the no-final-form rule. The Thing had argued for both four years earlier, and audiences were ready." — Chris Walas, Cinefex (1986)
The 1990s and after
The body-horror genre's run thins through the 1990s — Society (1989), Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1987–88), From Beyond (1986), Re-Animator (1985), and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989, Shinya Tsukamoto, Japan) are its principal late texts — and largely disappears from major-studio horror by the early 2000s. The reason is partly that the practical-creature aesthetic became prohibitively expensive after the early-2000s shift to digital effects, and partly that the AIDS subtext that gave the genre its political energy (see AIDS-Era Body-Horror Subtext) lost some of its specificity as the public-health response to HIV/AIDS shifted in the late 1990s.
The genre has had two recent revivals — Julia Ducournau's Raw (2016) and Titane (2021), David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future (2022) — both of which explicitly cite The Thing and Cronenberg's earlier work as foundational influences.
"Every body-horror film since 2010 is making the case that body-horror is back. The Thing is the film all of them are answering." — Mark Kermode, The Observer (2021)