#233: Who Goes There?
Before “The Thing,” there was this thing…
This review was originally posted to Twitter on March 27, 2020.
Initial release: August 1938
Author: John W. Campbell, Jr.
There’s something about the polar regions that seem to attract horror writers. The extreme climate, the isolation; whatever it is, it keeps them coming back. John Carpenter’s classic 1982 body horror film The Thing is perhaps the best example of this, an embodiment of polar horror, but it wouldn’t have existed without John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?
Writing in 1938 under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart for the Astounding Stories magazine, Campbell crafted a masterfully paranoid novella about an Antarctic expedition that discovers a monstrous entity frozen in the ice — and its shapeshifting properties. Sound familiar? Though, yes, there’s actually been a few adaptations of this film (Howard Hawks’ 1951 classic The Thing From Another World being probably the first, with the 1972 Spanish-made schlockbuster Horror Express being a far looser but still entertaining take) it’s Carpenter’s film that most closely mirrors that of its source material, though even then it runs off on its own direction. Some characters you might recognize from the ’82 film are here as well, though in slightly different form. MacReady, Blair and a few others are here, though in different roles and sometimes with different spellings to their names. The basic plot remains the same, culminating in the blood test.
It’s a quick read, as genre fiction of the era tended to be, but while Campbell rushes us through the plot — a result of cutting down his longer novel-length work to novella size — he’s careful to linger on the paranoia and violence as group cohesion dissolves. It’s this paranoia that to me is the driving factor of the story, as it was in the film.
Of course, given that this was written in 1938, it might seem a little corny by today’s standards. Some of the science is a little suspect for example, or how about the mention of atomic energy as utilized by alien beings well before atomic energy became common in the real world? While it’s a clear attempt to demonstrate how much more advanced the aliens are compared to 1930s Earth, it loses some of its impact nearly a century later. But, corny or not, it’s a fantastic jaunt that builds on a tradition of Antarctic terror that arguably started with Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and was built on by H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. It’s a legacy with a long shadow.
