Critical Reception and Legacy (The Thing) The Thing (1982)
The Thing opened on June 25, 1982, and was the worst-reviewed film of John Carpenter's career to that point. It lost money. It was credited within the industry as the film that ended Carpenter's run of unbroken commercial momentum. Forty years later it is widely considered one of the great horror films of the American sound era and is the subject of a continuing critical reassessment that began in the late-VHS-era home-video releases and accelerated through the Blu-ray and 4K UHD restorations of the 2010s and 2020s. (wikipedia)
The contemporary reviews were brutal
Critics in 1982 reviewed The Thing as gross, joyless, and vastly inferior to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which had opened two weeks earlier and was the cultural event of the summer.
"The Thing is a great barf-bag movie, a horrible-looking pastiche of paranoia and special effects, with the emphasis on the effects. It is a genuinely awful movie." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1982)
"More disgusting than frightening, and most of it is just boring. Carpenter has constructed a movie that is meaningless and confused, that wears down the audience instead of involving them." — David Denby, New York magazine (1982, archived in print)
"It qualifies only as instant junk." — Vincent Canby, The New York Times (1982)
The trade-press review in Cinefantastique, a magazine that had championed Carpenter's Halloween four years earlier, asked on its cover whether The Thing was "the most-hated movie of all time." See Carpenter's Worst-Reviews-of-His-Career Reception for the longer essay on the contemporary reception.
The box office was a disaster
The film opened at $3.1 million on a budget that has been variously reported as $11–$15 million; it ended its domestic theatrical run at $13.8 million, well under the studio's break-even calculation. The same opening-summer corridor produced E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ($792 million worldwide), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ($97 million), Poltergeist ($121 million), and Blade Runner ($33 million domestic and a long second life on home video). The Thing was the box-office disappointment of the summer. See 1982 — The Year of E.T. and The Thing and The Box-Office Failure and Cult Restoration.
VHS and laserdisc were where the reassessment began
The film's reputation began to shift through home-video release in the mid-1980s. The VHS edition was a steady rental performer through the late 1980s; the laserdisc release in 1989 was the first widely available 2.35:1 letterboxed presentation, and it was the laserdisc that began to be circulated in horror-film criticism circles. By the 1991 Criterion laserdisc release, the film was being treated as a genre classic in print.
"I think I've watched The Thing more often than any film I have ever owned on home video. There is a moment in the rec room where you suddenly realize the movie is a chamber piece about trust, and that moment never gets old." — Anne Billson, The Guardian (2010s)
The 4K UHD restoration is the film's modern reference
Universal supervised a 4K UHD restoration of The Thing for theatrical re-release in 2016, with a Blu-ray release in 2017 and a UHD Blu-ray in 2021 (Universal U.S. / Arrow Video international). The 4K master was struck from a 2K-supervised 4K scan of the original camera negative; the colour-grading pass desaturated the snow exteriors significantly relative to the 2008 Blu-ray, in line with Dean Cundey's stated preferences. See Physical Media Releases (The Thing) for the full release history.
The 2010s reassessment
The Thing was named to the AFI's "10 Top 10" list of the greatest American science-fiction films in 2008 (No. 9). It was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2024. Most of the critics who panned the film in 1982 — including Vincent Canby's successors at The New York Times and Roger Ebert himself — have published reassessments. Ebert added The Thing to his "Great Movies" list in his published archives in 2007.
"I missed it. The Thing is one of the greatest of all horror films, and I called it junk in 1982. The film does what horror is supposed to do — it puts a knife under your ear and asks you what you think the world is. I had decided in advance that I was going to dislike it, and I disliked it. The picture has been waiting for me to come back, and I am back." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com — Great Movies (2007)
Influence
The Thing's specific contributions to the language of American horror cinema are easy to enumerate and hard to overstate. The dog-thing kennel transformation set the standard for practical creature effects for a decade and was directly cited as an influence by Guillermo del Toro on Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017). The Norris head-walk has been homaged in Idle Hands (1999), South Park (2002), Rick and Morty (2014), and dozens of other texts. The blood-test sequence is the structural model for the trust-test scenes in Reservoir Dogs (1992), The Mist (2007), and 28 Days Later (2002). The two-shot of Childs and MacReady at the burning camp is the most-discussed open ending in 1980s American horror; it has been copied in The Mist, Resolution (2012), and The Endless (2017).
"The Thing is the most-imitated horror film of the last forty years. Every paranoid-isolation horror film since 1982 is in some sense in conversation with it. The genre's grammar of the small group, the trust-test, the open ending — all of it comes from this picture." — Mark Kermode, The Guardian (2002)