The Thing from Another World (1951)

There are films that get remembered for what they started rather than what they are, and The Thing from Another World sits fairly comfortably in that category. Released in 1951 by RKO Radio Pictures and Winchester Pictures Corporation, the film drops a group of American Air Force personnel and scientists into a remote Arctic research station, where the discovery of a crashed aircraft and its preserved occupant sets off a very bad few days for everyone involved. The tagline, "Natural or Supernatural?", gives you a reasonable sense of the marketing pitch: this was science fiction dressed up with enough dread to play as horror, arriving at a moment when both genres were riding a post-war wave of anxiety about the unknown. Cold War paranoia, the atomic age, fear of invasion from places you couldn't point to on a map: the early 1950s gave Hollywood plenty of raw material, and pictures like this one and Invasion of the Body Snatchers were feeding off that cultural mood in roughly equal measure.

The film is credited to director Christian Nyby, though the producer Howard Hawks (whose name carries rather more weight in film history) has long been associated with the look and feel of the finished picture, leading to decades of quiet debate about who was really calling the shots on set. Nyby had worked with Hawks as an editor, and the film does carry certain hallmarks of Hawks's style, particularly in its fast, overlapping dialogue. Whether that's Nyby channelling his mentor or Hawks steering from behind the camera is a question film historians enjoy more than audiences do. The screenplay, drawn loosely from John W. Campbell Jr.'s 1938 short story "Who Goes There?", strips away much of the source material's more unsettling shapeshifting premise and replaces it with something considerably more straightforward. Kenneth Tobey leads as the Air Force captain, a competent and broadly likeable screen presence, while Margaret Sheridan, Robert Cornthwaite, Douglas Spencer and James Young fill out a cast that handles the material professionally enough. Cornthwaite in particular gets the thankless job of playing the scientist who insists on reasoning with the creature, a role the film requires you to find irritating, and he delivers on that brief.

The film runs a tight 87 minutes, which is genuinely one of its virtues, and it arrives loaded with the conventions of its era: military types being sensible and square-jawed, a woman whose competence is acknowledged then quietly sidelined, and a creature threat that the budget keeps mostly out of frame, for better and worse. For anyone curious about where a strand of American science fiction horror came from, this is a useful and historically interesting 87 minutes. Whether it holds up as a film rather than an artefact is another matter, and one worth setting alongside other horror pictures on this site, such as You Won't Be Alone and The Serpent and the Rainbow, to get a sense of just how wide the genre's range actually is. For context on the wider landscape of 1950s cinema, it's also worth remembering that the same year gave us pictures as different from this as Alice in Wonderland.

Not as good as the Kurt Russell version Typical RKO movie really. Super thick dialogue, corny adversary, hints of misogyny. I know they were restrained by 1950s technology but the Thing is basically just  a big bald man who slowly lumbers around. I'd be surprised if this didn't inspire Night of the Living Dead but honestly The Thing from Another World is pretty shit by today's standards.

And look, I don't think that's an especially harsh verdict. The Kurt Russell version, John Carpenter's 1982 reimagining, went back closer to the Campbell source material and is a genuinely different kind of film, the sort that gets under your skin in ways this one never really attempts. Watching this back to back with that would be instructive for anyone who wants to see what a rethought premise can do. For me, the main interest here is the archaeology of it: spotting the bits that filtered down into later horror, clocking the dialogue rhythms, wondering what the film might have been with a little more creative ambition. As a piece of genre history it earns its place on the shelf. As a film you'd choose to watch on a Friday night, it's a harder sell.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 1951  | Watched: 2025-04-26

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from the 1950s: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Invaders from Mars (1953)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)