1h 49m
Director: John Carpenter

An alien can perfectly copy and mimic any creature. It could be anyone. We don't know who's next.

The setup for this movie is a bit like the recent multi-player game 'Among Us' where one person is nominated as the murderer and everyone has to determine who it is whilst they try to misdirect them. The horror side to all this, though one of the things that makes it an iconic film, isn't really all that necessary to the plot - you could dramatise the same story without any gore and achieve a similar result.

Although you see some great acting from Wilford Brimley (the doctor) and Kurt Russell as MacReady, I really like young Keith David (Childs) in this as he's by far the coolest character. The doctor understands the implications of having the strange creature that can mimic other humans living amongst them early on and his freak out about it makes sure the audience doesn't underestimate the seriousness of the situation. The computer predicts that if the infection reaches human civilisation we're talking about extinction.

MacReady shows he's comprehended it when he sets one of the infected on fire then blows him up with a stick of dynamite. Not exactly subtle, but reflects how seriously he's taking it and very entertaining to watch!

I really like the scene when they discover the first human infection and they realise that their friend is no longer human. Bennings falls to his knees, eyes black, hands mutated and lets out a scream before they torch him with a flame thrower. It's really creepy and that scream seems to be a reference to the 'body snatchers' franchise, you probably know that scene where Donald Sutherland does a similar thing!

It's not long before the group are conducting a rudimentary blood test as no-one can be trusted. It consists of dunking a heated copper wire into a petri dish filled with a blood sample and if the blood responds then it's deemed to be infected. That's a tension filled scene but it really helps to bring the mistrust to a head.

I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the cold war era but there is certainly a spy analogy here. Not knowing who the bad guy is and who you can trust quickly disperses the group cohesion and it's good the writer's start piling on the action straight away so you don't get lost when that load baring pillar falls away.

There is a slightly incongruous escalation in this movie where the characters in the film seem to take things very seriously extremely quickly and it sort of relies on the audience having seen the opening sequence where we see a UFO heading towards earth from space. The audience knows but our characters don't really, although there is some connecting tissue for them when we see them visit the origin site where the infection started. MacReady certainly sees the UFO crash site which is presumably why he takes things more seriously than the others.

The in-camera effects in this film have been the source of the discussion surrounding it for decades and I have to say, I thought they still hold up. Usually, when you're doing stop motion capture you get about 8 frames per second (so you expose every third frame) which gives a slightly jerky looking animation but here it looks much smoother, I don't know if that's because of more frequent exposures or some clever post-production tweening in the remaster.

Either way, like I said earlier you could do this film without the effects because it's such a solid premise so get stuck in!



Trailer: