Favourite Image analysis

This scene from John Carpenter's THE THING takes place just as the thing is discovered and the husky is contained in the cage. Here we are presented with the dog in alien form, who has the intent to kill the members of the research facility. The gore in this image is very prominent, the creature is covered in both blood and slime and looks very unearthly. The lighting of the creature is high key lighting to really capture the gruesome nature of this. This is my favorite scene because John Carpenter has created fear and shock through the use of household pet, and the pace of the transformation shocked audiences through the context of it all. The effects are credited to Rob Bottin, a special effects auteur who also later worked on The Howling and Seven.

Contextually the dog is an adorable husky and one of the character's is begging not to kill it, and then it mutates into this amalgamation of fear and gore. This is a favourite of mine also for the fact that Carpenter utilises the freedom of an 18 certificate to use gore a lot to get scares from his audiences, an example of this would be They Live (1988) in which the aliens have a flesh like texture over their faces when they are viewed through the glasses.

Janet Staiger's Audience Studies theory relates here, because a lot of monster movies were being pumped our around this time so audiences resonated well with the context of the alien movies and the transformation scene in reminscent of both American Werewolf in London (1981) and Rob Bottin's The Howling (1981).