How The Thing (1982) became a cult classic by failing first

In June 1982, John Carpenter's The Thing opened against E.T. — Spielberg's gentle alien against Carpenter's malevolent one. Audiences picked the gentle one. The Thing earned $19.6 million on a $15 million budget, was savaged by Pauline Kael (who called it "the quintessence of '80s slime cinema"), and by Roger Ebert's Variety-style two-star review. Universal moved on. Carpenter was, by his own account, "depressed for years" after.

What changed wasn't the film. The film was the same in 1992 as it was in 1982. What changed was the medium of contact between the film and its audience.

The VHS rehabilitation

In 1983, The Thing hit home video. The pacing that had felt punishing in a theater — the long, quiet stretches with the radio static, the dogs whining, the snow outside — became its own argument on a small screen at home, alone, at night. Rob Bottin's practical effects, which had looked ridiculous in 70mm to mainstream audiences (the dog kennel scene was reportedly walked out on at preview screenings), looked entirely different on a 22-inch CRT in a basement.

VHS rentals are an under-documented vector for cult formation. The films that succeeded there — Re-Animator, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, eventually Lifeforce — share a property: they punish in a theater but reward intimacy. The horror is granular. You want to lean in, not lean back. The Thing is a chamber piece disguised as a creature feature.

The slow critical reversal

By 1990, Cinéfantastique was publishing reconsiderations. The 1991 reissue of John W. Campbell's source novella Who Goes There? (which Carpenter had been faithful to) brought a fresh wave of attention. The Sci-Fi Channel — which premiered in 1992 — played The Thing regularly through the mid-90s. A generation of teenagers grew up encountering it through those airings.

By the mid-2000s the rehabilitation was effectively complete. The Atlantic ran a long-form piece on the film's belated rise. Roger Ebert revised his initial dismissal in private conversations with peers. Quentin Tarantino put it in his top ten 1980s films. The 2011 prequel arrived to an audience that no longer needed convincing the original was canon.

What this tells us about discovery

The lesson isn't that critics are unreliable. The lesson is that a film's first encounter with its audience is often the wrong encounter. A 1982 mainstream filmgoer at a multiplex was not the right viewer for The Thing. The right viewer was a 19-year-old in 1989 who had heard the title whispered by a friend, rented it on impulse, watched it at 1am, and discovered it was the best horror film made that decade.

The films we surface on this site — the deep cuts in our forgotten 80s horror and cult collections — are mostly films of this category. They didn't fail in 1982 or 1986 because they were bad. They failed because the multiplex audience was the wrong audience. The right audience exists, now, and is reading this.

If you haven't seen The Thing, watch it. Here's the film page. Read this after, not before.

Sources & further reading

• The Atlantic — How The Thing Became a Cult Classic (2018)
• Criterion essay on Cold War paranoia in The Thing
• Bissette, Stephen R., The Thing: A Cinematic History (Wildside Press, 2008)
• Carpenter's own commentary track on the 2008 Universal Blu-ray release