When John Campbell published his collection of short stories Who goes there? in 1938 on a grand total of 3000 copies, he would nary have expected the influence it would have. The titular story led to two great movies,1 a video game, and even a blog post. Two blog posts now, because today we’re talking about the 1951 The thing from another world movie. It is very, very different form John Carpenter’s The thing, but one thing they have in common is a chess scene.
In this film, we see some member of the US air force playing chess in the mess of their arctic outpost. The film resolution is quite low, of course, because this movie is from the fifties, and the camera is never focused on the chessboard, so the reconstruction is rather problematic.
But I’ve never been scared off by things being problematic, so I gave it a shot anyway.2
At this point, some newcomers enter the base and attract all attention. The players were probably quite happy with that. After all, if the people on the base react with guns, fire, and high voltages to a space carrot trying to kill them, what extraordinary weapons would they deploy against people that end up in this position?
But perhaps something else is going on. This alien looks suspiciously normal.3 Okay, it’s on the tall side, but it has the typical human build with the typical human proportions. And I suspect that it is human and that the famous thing from another world — and the title — is actually this position.
Realism: 1/5 A humanoid vegetable from outer space offing sled dogs I can accept, but this is ridiculous.
Probable winner: White has an overwhelming majority, which I guess is unsurprising in the arctic region.
1. [And an apparently mediocre one from 2010. I haven’t seen that one and don’t feel inclined to.] ↩
2. [This thing to make diagrams is out of this world!] ↩
3. [If you’ve only seen Carpenter’s The thing, you may be thinking that this is a pitiful objection, but in this movie the alien doesn’t have the polymorph spell,] ↩