I’ve asked the question; What is Acid Horror? But now I want to explore it, prod it like a surgeon with a knife - pick apart the bits and pieces that make it up. Join me for this retrospective series of short essays as we explore the media which inspired the term ‘Acid Horror,’ and more importantly… what the subgenre can teach us about ourselves.
______________________________________________________________
“Watching Norris in there gave me the idea that maybe every part of him was a whole; every piece was an individual animal with a built-in desire to protect its own life. Y’see, when a man bleeds, it’s just tissue, but blood from one of you Things won’t obey when it’s attacked. It’ll try and survive… crawl away from a hot needle.”
-MacCready
We think of ourselves as individuals, but it would be more accurate to say that we are each a collective. Sure, the brain is given sway over choices which require manual input, but biological imperatives and genetic programming tick steadily on in the unexamined frontiers of our brains and bodies, unaffected by the opinions of their supposed host. The reality of what we are - the electrical arcs dancing across folds of gray meat, the dark tangles of red muscle stretching, pulsing, and twisting us into motion - is kept hidden from us until it begins to fail. Then, as wet reality streams out through a torn-open seam of jagged, flapping skin, or as the sharp point of a bone juts out through layers of pierced flesh and into the open air, we are forced to ask: is that me?
The knowledge of our own mortality, some would say, is what separates us from the animals. And while debate rages on in the scientific community about animal sentience, humans take it for granted that we are uniquely positioned at the top of the cosmic food chain. But if we believe, as is commonly thought, that the relative versatility of the modern human animal is what made us outlast the neanderthal, then why shouldn’t we believe that another, more versatile form of life will eventually come along to eclipse us?
In The Thing (dir. John Carpenter, 1982), the inhabitants of an American Antarctic research station are forced to confront the horrific reality of being evolutionarily out-competed, and worse, the possibility of mankind’s global assimilation and extinction. They react like cavemen, forming tribes against each other and using fire, mankind’s first and most primal creation, to flush out the hidden predator in their midst, which in turn has taken refuge among them in the shape of man’s best friend.
The Thing is fluid, adaptable, and biomorphically mechanical, a fundamentally fit form of life in any geologic age. It lives in the liminal space between our bones, blood, and muscle, seeping through the barrier of our cell walls and replacing the building blocks of who we are before we can even wrap our minds around its true, insidious nature. It is a mockery of intelligent life, a biological paradox; a simultaneous simplification and complication to the question of what it means to be human. It exists only to hide, to reproduce, to survive.
Similarly, the story of The Thing will live on, adapting over and over to fit its time in the way timeless stories often do. From its initial inspiration in H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, to John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? and its film adaptation The Thing From Another World (dir. Christian Nyby, 1951), and finally to Carpenter’s The Thing and the identically-titled prequel almost thirty years later, the story of a primordial battle of man against the elemental embodiment of survival itself seems unwilling to leave us. And whether the most recently-planned adaptation, under the tightly-budgeted auspices of Blumhouse, moves forward into production or not, there is no doubt that the story of The Thing will not soon be forgotten.
The idea lives inside us, because ideas are liquid; viral. They require no hearts, stomachs, or brains, and they spread through their collective hosts until finally they reach a critical mass and burst forth as a pulsing, wriggling expression of the cultural consciousness. Good ideas, more than anything, are that which drag the human race out of primordial shadow and into the harsh light of a dawning future.
Strangely enough, perhaps no one presaged the existence of a being like the Thing more than the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, born only a decade before the novella At the Mountains of Madness would introduce the world to the idea of a shape-shifting, ice-bound predator. Alongside Felix Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze theorized the existence of the so-called ‘body without organs,’ which he used to describe the potential of a human being unbound from the stratification of the flesh. Under the framework that all living things have a singular, inbound desire, Deleuze described the existence of a ‘body without organs’ as the direct manifestation of that desire. As an example, he used a bird egg - before it is a chick, the egg is nothing but a mostly-liquid mound of folded proteins, whose only programming and purpose is to slowly transform its primordial raw materials into the genetically-recognizable form of a bird. It is physically unbound, driving toward a singular purpose.
Deleuze and Guattari go on to use the idea of the ‘body without organs’ as a metaphor through which they can examine human desire. To them, the drug addict is a perfect example; the addict exists only to get the next fix, regardless of their physical reality. In the same way, the Thing exists only to survive and reproduce, first cell by cell and then body by body as it adapts to imitate complex life cycles.
Ultimately, what separates MacCready and the others from the Thing at the end of Carpenter’s film is their willingness to sacrifice themselves as individuals for the good of a greater whole. They, as single cells within the metaphysical body of their species, recognize that allowing the Thing to escape its icy prison is to expose the liquid body of mankind to a necessarily-fatal virus. They can think beyond the biological programming, whose only instructions are to survive and reproduce.
MacCready is an outsider, and as importantly, a true individual. He is contrasted against the other inhabitants of his station at the bottom of the world in his social isolation, oppositional and defiant even as the others turn against him until the final moments of his battle against a seemingly-undefeatable foe.
To protect mankind, he is willing to shed every layer that formed it. He will act as a white blood cell to purge the body of all that makes it vulnerable - it’s trust of man’s best friend, its desire for community, its innate horror at the destruction of its own kind. He can cut the Gordian knot of the DNA helix that the Thing is twisted into, because no matter how effectively it hides, no matter how ruthlessly it defends itself, it is ultimately only an animal, a cell - a collection of cells - but MacCready is something else.
He is a body without organs, overcoming biological imperative and driving himself towards a noble goal with nothing more than spite. But when all of mankind’s tools have been stripped from him, when he finds himself injured and exhausted as his only shelter burns, and all he has left is the choice to trust a familiar face, what choice does truly have?
All he can do is the same thing that cavemen have done since the Ice Age, the same thing all of us do every time we engage in friendly conversation with something that looks enough like us; sit across a dying fire from someone who tells you they won’t hurt you in the dark, and try desperately to believe them.
