The Creature Concept

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A natural, and perhaps necessary, place to begin is the creature concept developed in both films. For lack of better terms, the creature in the ‘51 film will be called the "Arness Thing" (because it was James Arness who was wearing the monster suit) while the organism in the ‘82 rendition will be referred to as the "Bottin Thing" (pronounced "boe-teen thing"), named after its creator and effects designer.

The Arness Thing is but one humanoid that is botanical and vegetative in nature. Its body contains multiple seed pods which need soil and mammalian blood for growth. At various places, especially the hands, there are chitinous projections that are pointed enough and hard enough to inflict wounds during hand-to-hand combat. The Arness Thing is capable of regenerating large portions of its body. The film, for instance, shows a disembodied hand with an attached forearm still able to move when given appropriate stimulus. Likewise, the creature is able to rapidly grow back these parts after they’ve been chopped off or, rather, bitten off by dogs. Also, the creature can survive a full dowsing of burning kerosene so that any burns heal quite quickly, and bullets have no seeming effect. It is also physically quite strong in that it is apparently able to rip through corrugated iron as well as killing huskies without any weapons. Finally, the Arness Thing is able to reproduce rapidly.

It is this last characteristic that gives the creature its most threatening aspect. At the rate shown in the film the Arness Thing would presumably require a few days, perhaps as much as a week, to bring others of its kind to full maturity. If left alone with enough of a blood supply, one of these creatures could probably mass produce itself by growing hundreds, if not thousands, of others within the span of half a month. Since each new Thing would presumably have its own seed pods, their overall numbers would increase at an exponential rate. There would come a point when whole armies of these creatures would be able to take on human civilization. Thus, the ‘51 film is able to inject an apocalyptic, end-of-life-as-we-know-it aspect to the fairly small battle between the humans stationed at the polar research camp and the single Arness Thing.

Being much more faithful to Campbell’s original creature concept, the Bottin Thing is one of the most -- if not the most -- ingenious alien designs to have ever hit the silver screen. Its very nature makes it almost impossible to describe sufficiently. It is an organism capable of morphing itself at will, so that it can grow tentacles, tendrils, appendages, gaping mouths, etc., with astonishing speed. Its most dangerous characteristic is the ability to copy or imitate other lifeforms -- both physically and behaviorally -- with such a degree of accuracy that the imitation is for all intents and purposes "perfect." The Bottin Thing achieves this replication by means of a massive parasitic invasion of a host, typically by means of tentacles penetrating the host’s body. Once inside the alien tissues are able to spread rapidly throughout the host’s systems, digesting and absorbing them, while simultaneously fashioning themselves to have the same shape, size, and texture as the original host’s tissues and organs.

This assimilation-duplication process is estimated to require about an hour for proper completion. In some cases, it may need less than a hour but the resulting imitation is not as accurate, e.g. when the meteorologist Bennings gets assimilated. When a Bottin Thing does achieve perfect imitation, humans cannot perceive any visible or behavioral differences between the original person and his or her alien replacement. Even a canine with all of its acute senses seems unable to detect the differences between an original dog and its copy. When the Bottin Thing sheds its disguises, changing into a larger form, it is capable of a large amount of destruction. It can push through walls, ceilings, and floors with relative ease. There is some question as to the organism’s abilities to replicate botanical lifeforms, and this is not addressed by the ‘82 film.

The Bottin Thing is revealed to be essentially a highly sophisticated colonial organism. Each specimen is not just one creature but is composed of a colony of potentially new and independent creatures capable of surviving on their own. When, for example, the main mass is under attack and is in danger of being destroyed, smaller portions will tend to detach themselves in an attempt to avert their own destruction. This kind of colonialism accounts for the Bottin Thing’s ability to initiate assimilation by inserting and leaving a small portion of itself within the host. The detached portion, being a complete animal in itself, is able to finish replication on its own without help from the parent body. The Bottin Thing’s colonialism also explains why some weapons work against it but others do not. Guns are ineffectual because, while bullets may destroy some tissue in a localized area of the creature, all the other sections remain perfectly viable, enabling the colony as a whole to keep on functioning. Only tissue destruction on a massive scale will ultimately kill the organism. Consequently, fire is a very effective measure especially when applied by a flamethrower. Care, however, should be taken even with this weapon since, if a small part of the colony survives, it can still regenerate itself within the burned remains. Nothing less than total incineration will do.

We can now make a few remarks concerning the two Things’ relationship to human blood. The Arness Thing requires blood for its germination, growth, and sustenance. This is certainly true for its young seedlings and is presumably true for the full-grown adult. Blood, however, serves a very different purpose in the ‘82 film. Withdrawing blood from a masquerading Bottin Thing is the same as detaching one of the colonial members from its main mass. The separated blood sample now constitutes its own colony and will act on its own accord. Thus, when a red-hot probe is placed into it, there is a spontaneous and visible attempt to get away. The newly formed colony lying in the petri dish could care less whether or not it’s betraying the parent body. Self-survival becomes its primary compulsion to the exclusion of all else, and so it will quite literally jump out of the petri dish to keep from getting burned. It is precisely this sort of "blood test" that leads to the destruction of one of the Bottin Things. We thus see a striking contrast between the role of blood in the ‘51 and ‘82 films. For the Arness Thing, blood is its life; to the Bottin Thing, blood becomes the means of its death.

As with the Arness Thing, the Bottin Thing brings an apocalyptic dimension to the struggle between the alien and the men of Outpost 31. The ‘82 film has the biologist Blair estimating that the organism would be capable of replicating the world’s population in "27,000 hours," a little more than three years, if it reached civilized areas. The threat is even greater than that posed by the Arness Thing, since the Bottin concept takes only hours, not days, to reproduce and would be able to infiltrate very quickly throughout the world without detection. It would be impossible to stop it once it reaches a large group of animals or humans -- the penguin populations at the Antarctic coasts, for example. This is why the biologist Blair is portrayed as destroying all vehicles that could be used to escape the research camp.

So which creature concept is the "superior adaptation"? Some would immediately object to the question. They would say that is it grossly unfair to compare the monster effects of two movies that are more than thirty years apart, even if they are based on the same story. The progress of technology automatically tilts the scales in favor of the more recent film. Indeed, the state of ‘50s movie effects could not possibly have brought Campbell’s monster to the silver screen in any realistic way. So it is inappropriate, they would say, to try and compare the two. One ought not to compare apples with oranges.

But this is not the point of the question. In asking it, we are not so much concerned as to which movie is better able to bring its special effects to the screen as we are with which one fulfills its horror-genre mission of instilling fear into the audience. Which creature concept is able to be more horrifying than the other?

There is a simple measure that provides us with an answer: we watch the reactions of the humans portrayed in the films as they respond to their creature antagonist. Since the audience is obviously supposed to identify with the people on screen, by observing the reactions portrayed in the films, we in turn can get a solid idea of how the audience itself is expected to respond. In so doing we come to a clear conclusion as to which creature concept is superior.

Next Section: Protagonist Reactions