The Real Reason John Carpenter's The Thing Flopped At The Box Office

John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing is widely considered to be among the greatest horror movies of all time. A loose remake of the 1951 creature feature The Thing from Another World — but in actuality, a more faithful adaptation of its source material, the 1938 John W. Campbell Jr. novella Who Goes There? — the film tells the story of a group of researchers at a remote Antarctic outpost who find themselves stalked by an extraterrestrial entity capable of imitating any living being.

Carpenter had already established himself as a maestro of horror and suspense with flicks like 1978's Halloween, 1980's The Fog, and 1981's Escape from New York, and in the summer of '82, anticipation was high for his new fright fest, with its killer ensemble cast featuring the likes of Kurt Russell (a past and future Carpenter collaborator), Keith David, Wilford Brimley, and Charles Hallahan. But when the flick arrived in theaters, a funny thing happened: It wasn't quite received as the classic as which it's recognized today. Rather, audiences stayed away in droves, and critics absolutely savaged the film, pegging it as little more than an egregiously gory freak show with flat characters, a drab visual sense, and a relentlessly bleak tone.

Of course, we now know why Carpenter made some of those choices. The Thing was meant to be bleak, an examination of the frailty of our trust in our fellow human beings set against an impossibly claustrophobic backdrop, with even its macho male archetypes finding that there are some problems that you can't punch, burn, or shoot your way around. Still, how on Earth did a flat-out horror masterpiece strike every wrong chord imaginable with every conceivable audience — even hardcore horror fans — upon it release? Let's take a look at why John Carpenter's The Thing flopped at the box office.

The Thing's astonishing visual effects, depicting the monster's assimilation of dogs and humans as well as its tendency to warp into all kinds of bizarre and disturbing forms, were created by then-22 year old Rob Bottin, the protégé of the legendary VFX artist Stan Winston (Winston even pitched in on a few shots, though he declined to be credited). So grueling was the shoot that, after his work was completed, Bottin was admitted to the hospital with exhaustion, double pneumonia, and an ulcer — and for his efforts, he was rewarded with his creations being labeled as borderline obscene by some critics (via WBUR).

Perhaps the two most prominent reviewers of the day excoriated the movie due in large part to Bottin's insanely innovative effects. "The Thing is a great barf-bag movie, all right, but is it any good? I found it disappointing," wrote the great Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times. "[It's basically] just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen." Ebert's peer and friendly rival, Vincent Canby of the New York Times, was far less kind. "The Thing is a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other," he wrote. "It's entertaining only if one's needs are met by such sights as those of a head walking around on spiderlike legs; autopsies on dogs and humans in which the innards explode to take on other, not easily identifiable forms; hand severings, immolations, wormlike tentacles that emerge from the mouth of a severed head, or two or more burned bodies fused together to look like spareribs covered with barbecue sauce ... It qualifies only as instant junk."