Have you ever looked at a word with which you’ve been familiar all your life as if you were seeing it suddenly with new eyes… and it just looks weird?  I had that experience yesterday with the word “thing.”  Isn’t the word thing… well, a thing?  It says nothing, and yet it says it all.  You hear the word a lot in casual conversation, and probably more now than ever as language skills degrade.  “Get a thing of nuts,” a wife might say to her husband in the snack aisle of Ralphs, while a coworker might let slip that he or she has a thing for you. I hate how dependent our culture has become on nonspecifics … but I also love the word “thing.”  You can see my dilemma, can’t you?  Anyway, all this has prompted a flood of warm memories about horror movies with the word “thing” … or some-thing like it…  in the title.

Obviously, “thing” gets a lot of purchase in the horror genre and the association goes back well before the advent of cinema.  In Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610) beached prince Prospero refers to his animalistic amanuensis Caliban as “this thing of darkness” while Marcellus in Hamlet (1601) asks of the Dane’s ghostly father “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?”  A Scottish prayer of roughly the same vintage begs deliverance from “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night”  while Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner speaks of a “thousand slimy things” in a slimy sea.  In 1894, Ambrose Bierce published a short chiller called The Damned Thing and titled a collection of tales Can Such Things Be?, which is a clever play on words if you thingk about it.  The word “thing” cropped up with crepuscular frequency in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft but probably the first association of anyone reading this – of those who haunt Turner Classic Movies in general and The Movie Morlocks in particular, and who love old movies and are probably themselves old – is of the 1951 sci-fi classic THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, directed by Howard Hawks but credited to his assistant Christian Nyby.  In the film, a pre-GUNSMOKE (and pre-THEM!, it should also be noted) James Arness plays an intergalactic traveler who crashes to Earth in the arctic and is thawed out by an unwitting US military.  Deemed by scientists to be more vegetable than animal and yet half again as tall as a man and many times stronger, the extraterrestrial bleeds sap, regrows severed limbs, is impervious to bullets and fire and in almost every way earns the designation of “thing,” a word that dates back to 12th Century Germany, where it refered to “a matter of concern.”  Yeah, that pretty much nails it.

Far less classic is the downmarket Universal-International release THE THING THAT COULDN’T DIE (1958), the only feature film directed by short subject filmmaker Will Cowan.  In the script by David Duncan (whose name is stamped on a number of worthier projects, from THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD to THE TIME MACHINE, as well as the English language version of Toho’s RODAN), a girl (Andra Martin, the future Mrs. Ty Hardin and ex-Mrs. Ty Hardin ) with psychic abilities is drawn to a long-buried l0ck box on her family ranch, in which resides the severed head of a 16th century Satanist (Buenos Aires-born Robin Hughes, whom you might remember as the sweet talkin’ Howling Man from that classic 1960 episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE).  In many ways, THE THING THAT COULDN’T DIE is the same story as THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD in that the protagonists unearth something they shouldn’t, come face to face with an incomprehensible entity whose very existence baffles man and science and then devise a method to put the situation right.  Again, good triumphs over evil so that the cast of uptight white women and their four-square Eddie Attaboy sons and lovers can continue with their chaste, gormless Eisenhower era existences, untouched by anything like perversity or old world elegance (which the initially binary Gideon Drew had in spades, I’ll tell you what).  I guess you can sense some attitude from me about THE THING THAT COULDN’T DIE but here’s the thing… 9 times out of 10 in the horror game, you’re always sad when the monster is vanquished and in this case it really hits you head on.  Gideon Drew may have been infernal but he had class.  He’d never walk into Ralphs looking for “a thing of nuts.”

There’s something so deliciously crass about PYRO: THE THING WITHOUT A FACE (1964), the American release title of the Sidney Pink-produced FUEGO.  Despite the “thing” business, the film isn’t horror per se but rather a merciless revenge melodrama that’s really closer kin to Robert Florey’s THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK (1941).  As had Peter Lorre in the earlier movie, here Barry Sullivan plays an average Joe whose jilted mistress sets a fire that kills his wife and child and burns his face away in the bargain.  Escaping from the hospital and using his engineer’s brain to modge-podge a presentable simulacrum of a human face, our hero joins a traveling carnival to hag his ex-lover to her death.  Vincent Price was pegged originally to play the title role, which was obviously intended to cash in on Price’s success as the disfigured and vengeful antihero of Andre de Toth’s 3D classic HOUSE OF WAX (1953); Price would in fact play a rather neat variation on this narrative in Robert Fuest’s THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971) and DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN.  Calling Barry Sullivan’s character a thing in this context isn’t particularly sensitive or accurate but “thing” does apply to PYRO in a broader sense:  Sullivan and costar Martha Hyer have an illicit thing and through a tragic latticework of circumstance Hyer’s thing (fire starting) becomes Sullivan’s thing, resulting in a pyrotechnic matter of concern.

When Godzilla (aka Gojira) faced off with Mothra in Toho’s モスラ対ゴジラ (1964), American distributors wanted to license the bout for US audiences… but Mothra, the giant moth, didn’t have the name recognition of King Kong, with whom Godzilla had been paired the previous year.  So the giant lepidoptera became “The Thing” and its image was kept a secret on this side of the Pacific pond for fear that moviegoers wouldn’t think a giant moth was all that fearful or worthy an opponent of an atomic dinosaur.  As you can see from this vintage lobby card, American International Pictures suggested that Mothra was some kind of hellacious Cthuluan seabeast (“The world’s most terrifying monster!”) rather than own up to its presumed antagonist being a lovable puff ball.  Actually, Mothra is the good guy here, providing some earth motherly yin to Godzilla’s city-stomping yang.

And speaking of “seemingly disjunct or opposing forces (which) are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, giving rise to each other in turn,” you can’t get more yin-yang than THE THING WITH TWO HEADS (1972).  Sure, both of the heads are male but career criminal Rosey Grier brings a motherly sense of calm to bigot Ray Milland’s piss poor weltanschauung.  (Here’s a little useless trivia for you:  Douglas Spencer, who appears as Scotty the reporter in THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD and gets to say “Keep watching the skies!” was for many years Ray Milland’s stand-in and his last role was as one half of a two headed Martian thing in the 1961 TWILIGHT ZONE episode Mr. Dingle, the Strong.)  The specter of race relations in America suggested by this bizarro repurposing of THE DEFIANT ONES (1958) actually brings the topic of thing-ness somewhat full circle.  While the horror genre is a canny cardsharp in the game of goosing our deepest fears (of the dark, of the unknown, of the scary), its ace in the hole is that we know, down deep, that the Other, the Beast Within, It, the Thing, lies within ourselves.  For what is THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD but a version of the human race stripped (as is Robert Cornthwait’s egghead character, whose “science first” agenda poses as great a threat to the Earth as, well, the Thing from Another World) of emotion, of time-wasting character quirks, of outmoded fleshy desires for companionship, romance and coffee?  And what is PYRO but a reflection of our fear of what we might become if the superficial things upon which we establish a sense of self (our looks, our family, our jobs) were burned away, leaving our essential, crispy selves?  Society is an artificial construct just waiting for the foot of a rampaging monster to reduce it to crumbs and we know this.  To deal with our anxieties about impermanence and the looming shadow of chaos, we demonize.  We construct Others, Its, Things to serve as the repository of the sum of all our fears.  We think isolationism, chauvinism, nationalism and a host of other -isms will spare us from destruction, that the Grim Reaper’s blade will swing wide of us if we restrict ourselves to a tight circle of those who look like we do, speak as we do, think as we do, pray to the same god, pull the same lever on election day and take into our beds sex partners sanctioned by established gospels.  We’re funny like that, creating paper demons so that we don’t have to own up to the real ones.  It’s what humans do, I guess.  It’s our thing.