The Thing from Another World (1951)

Let's get this out of the way immediately: John Carpenter's 1982 remake is miles better. That version gets under your skin, makes you paranoid, gives you genuine dread and one of the great practical effects sequences in horror history. This one, by comparison, is a lurch through the Arctic with a big bald bloke who moves like he's late for the bus.

That's the central problem with The Thing from Another World. The alien, this supposed terror from the cosmos, is basically a tall man in a boiler suit slowly advancing down corridors. I know, I know, it's 1951 and you work with what you've got. Budget constraints, technology limitations, all of that is real and fair to acknowledge. But knowing the reasons doesn't make the creature any less unimpressive to modern eyes. There's no menace there. No genuine otherness. Just a large, lumbering presence that the cast reacts to with more urgency than I could ever muster watching him.

And then there's the dialogue. Thick, overlapping, rapid-fire in that very particular RKO style where everyone sounds like they're trying to win a bet about how many words they can fit into thirty seconds. It's a house style, and fans of the era will recognise it instantly. Personally, I find it exhausting. It creates a kind of artificial energy that substitutes for actual tension, and by the halfway point I'd switched off from following it closely and was just letting it wash over me.

There's also a whiff of misogyny that's hard to ignore. The female characters exist largely to look worried and occasionally make coffee. That too is very much of the period, and I try to be fair about judging old films by old standards. But fair doesn't mean pretending it isn't there.

Where the film does earn a little credit is in its atmosphere. The Arctic setting genuinely feels cold and isolated, and there are moments, particularly early on, where the sense of something unknown being discovered in the ice carries a quiet unease. You can feel the blueprint for what better films would later do with similar material. I'd be surprised if George Romero wasn't paying attention when he made Night of the Living Dead, because the structure of a small group barricaded against an unstoppable threat, arguing amongst themselves about what to do, is all here in rough sketch form. That's genuinely worth acknowledging. The lineage is real. It's just that the original sketch is a lot less interesting than what came after.

The ideological tension in the film, the military man who wants to destroy the creature versus the scientist who wants to study it, is actually a decent conflict on paper. It's just handled too bluntly to carry much weight. Everyone is a type rather than a person, so the argument never really bites.

If you're working through the history of the sci-fi horror genre, you probably need to sit through this one. It's a piece of the puzzle. I'd also point you towards Invasion of the Body Snatchers from a few years later, which takes a lot of the same Cold War anxiety and does something genuinely unsettling with it. That one holds up. This one, honestly, doesn't, not as entertainment and not really as a piece of craft either.

One and a half stars. Watch Carpenter's version instead, then maybe come back to this out of curiosity. But don't expect to be scared.

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

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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)