Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [92]
The Thing told the story of an air force crew dispatched to Alaska, where there were rumors of a crash nearby. Inside the ship, they discover a flying saucer with a creature frozen in ice that looks like a human and survives on blood. This low-budget picture became an unexpected hit in 1951, helping launch the monster movie craze of the decade. Romero has said that it was the first movie that really scared him. Dan O’Bannon said he never forgot seeing The Thing from Another World for the first time at one of the two theaters in his town when he was only five years old. It had an even bigger impact on Carpenter, who adored the monster and the music. It was one of the first science-fiction movies to use the theremin and had a major influence on the scores of his own movies.
Loving The Thing sent Carpenter back to the original novella, a much purer expression of fantasy fiction, darker, paranoid, and gruesome. The monster in the original story assumes the shape, memories, and personality of any person it devours. When they were together at USC, O’Bannon and Carpenter talked about this shape-shifting alien. They would solve the Monster Problem by never showing the audience exactly what it wants to see. The transformations preserve an element of anxiety, increased by the ambiguity about who exactly is to be trusted. When everyone might be an alien, no one can be trusted. That worked.
After graduating from film school, Carpenter worked on a series of screenplays attempting to achieve similar results. Some of them were turned into movies, others shelved, but most of them since Dark Star had struggled with the Monster Problem. In a script originally titled “Eyes,” which was eventually changed to The Eyes of Laura Mars when it was released in 1978, Carpenter imagined a woman who had a psychic experience that gave her the ability to see through the eyes of a serial killer she doesn’t know. This allowed the movie to be told through the eyes of the maniac, giving Carpenter an excuse to make the audience see the acts of murder but not the person committing them. After accessing this power, which first seems like a mental breakdown, the woman has no idea whose body she is seeing through. To stop these horrible visions, she contacts a detective who helps track down this man. But the killer also seems to know he’s being followed and is on her trail, creating a double chase that leads to a climactic scene in which the woman sees herself being assaulted as it happens.
After Carpenter showed the script to Jack Harris, Harris gave it to the producer Jon Peters, who loved it, proposing it as a vehicle for his then girlfriend Barbra Streisand. He gave Carpenter $20,000 to adapt and direct, with the instruction to tailor the script to the talents of Streisand. That meant setting the film in New York and adding the backdrop of the fashion industry. Manhattan was alien to Carpenter, so he needed to bone up, studying the plays of the fashionable dramatist Neil Simon to get a handle on the right urban sensibility. It was an odd match, and the script he came up with was not perfect. After getting some feedback, he reworked it and brought it to the studio. This began an excruciating process of death by a thousand cuts, and while many of the changes were superficial, the major one was that Carpenter was told that the star needed to have a relationship with the killer.
He couldn’t be an unknown. There had to be motivation, psychological depth, a real character. “In Hollywood, there’s an old saying: ‘The better the villain, the better the movie!’” Carpenter has said. “That’s not necessarily the case in the sense of what’s scary. What’s scary is something that’s random, that’s unknown. The unknown killer that walks up to you for no reason is utterly terrifying because