Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 18 (2020) 47 The Thing in the Ice: The Weird in John Carpenter’s The Thing Michael Brown Upon its original release, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) was subject to notoriously scathing reviews. 1 It was spurned by audiences, while critics almost universally rejected what they saw as excessive gore; as one commentator put it, the film was ‘overpowered by Rob Bottin’s visceral and vicious special make-up effects’. 2 Others were quick to dismiss the film as ‘Alien on ice’. 3 Vincent Canby, writing for the New York Times, declared it ‘instant junk’, attributing its supposed failure to a lack of a central monster, insisting that ‘[o]ne of the film’s major problems is that the creature has no identifiable shape of its own. It’s simply a mass of bloody protoplasm.’ 4 The impulse to characterise The Thing as a monster movie that somehow failed because there was either too much or too little monster is crucial. That the creature that gives the film its title (or non-title, given the elusive nature of the entity it seeks to name) confounds recognition, and even lacks discernible mass, is precisely what distinguishes it from ‘creature features’ like Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), which displace human anxieties and concerns onto an anthropomorphised, vaguely humanoid Other. Rather than offering yet another metaphor for ‘Otherness’ (whereby characters contend with the familiar ‘category confusion’ of traditional horror and the gothic, testing and reaffirming the category of the human self against a threatening ‘outside’ located somewhere along a vector of difference), Carpenter’s The Thing, I demonstrate in this article, has much more in common with the cosmic horror of early twentieth-century weird fiction, whose chief proponent was arguably H. P. Lovecraft. The ‘weird’ (with its propensity for narratives that emphasise the incomprehensibility of a universe largely indifferent to human concerns) can be identified in Carpenter’s film precisely because the Thing’s paradoxical absence and excess of form, which early critics found so troubling, challenges human comprehension and categories of knowledge. Paired with an Antarctic imaginary that has, at least since early European exploration, been 1 The Thing, dir. by John Carpenter (Universal Pictures, 1982) [on DVD]. 2 Linda Gross, cited in Heather Addison, ‘Cinema’s Darkest Vision: Looking into the Void in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 41.3 (2013), 154-66 (p. 154). 3 Anne Billson, The Thing (London: British Film Institute, 1997), p. 8. 4 Vincent Canby, ‘The Thing, Horror, and Science Fiction,’ New York Times, 25 June 1982, <https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/25/movies/the-thing-horror-and-science-fiction.html> [accessed 9 July 2019].