they'll get you if they haven't already
The ambiguity that pervades this film contributes to its paranoid, claustrophobic atmosphere. We know so little, and so many crucial moments are held from us. We do not find out what happened in the Norwegian camp, though we find evidence of violence and destruction there. This terrifying and unknowable other challenges the stable form of my body and threatens my very identity. It is not hard to find subtext here: fears of queerness, racial purity, communism, and AIDS.
a thing unlike any others
The thing is intelligent enough to build a starship from scraps, but its intelligence is strange and nonlocal. A loose collection of cells in blood or within its own scorched carcass is entirely itself as much as when it is in possession of a complete imitation, and throughout the film it is difficult to count how many Things there are. At first a dog and a charred corpse, it escapes, consumes, evades, gathers its resources, and lies in wait. One or several like a ghost, uncountable, growing in size but also tiny. The threat does not exist in a location but in a betrayal, predicated by our relationships and enabled by the limitations of our own pitiful flesh.
a color out of space
Four colors define much of the film, and three are dominant: black, red, and blue. Blue is the cold, known, and inevitable inhuman threat of Antarctica itself. At all times it is a relentless but non-malicious threat to the human body. Reds are the human color, from the technology of flares to the intimacy of blood and flesh. Crushed black spaces, meanwhile, are the unknown unknowns. At night or in underground spaces it envelops the worried men, signaling their fear and paranoia. These spaces are pregnant, like the darkness of an attic to a child. There's always a monster there, even if it is always out of sight. The fourth color, green, is generally drab and mundane. It's the helicopter, the military-style clothing, suspenders, or whiskey bottles of the men in their camp. In the turning point of the movie the color suddenly flashes violent, bright, and wet within the viscera of the Thing itself. Shocking strangeness is written in the language of the familiar.
the doom of men
The terror is exquisite: rewatching and knowing exactly how this movie ends doesn't spare me the slowly burning dread. If anything, it makes the men's paranoia appear petty and useless as they do their macho struts and fail to do almost anything sensible until it is far too late. Perhaps there is hope after all, but not for them.
a queer body
This movie also gestures towards impossibilities that exist beyond the familiar or the safe. Watch this movie again, but aspirationally. Life as a thousand spiders on a planet with a purple sun, eyes capable of seeing ultraviolet. They can't kill us all. Fresh new illegible obscenities emerge, and my vulgarities and yours entwine.