WHO GOES THERE? OR THE THINGS FROM ANOTHER WORLD
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On the surface, the Barker and Campbell stories are similar: both concern fateful (and fatal) encounters between rationally skeptical human beings and otherworldly monsters with a talent for metamorphosis and mental telepathy. In the Flesh tells of a half-human demon in a British jail; Campbell’s Thing is an alien intruder trapped in Antarctic ice for 20 million years, until a team of American scientists on a polar expedition revive it. Before it’s finally destroyed with a makeshift electric harpoon, the three-eyed, tentacle-armed, superintelligent creature seeks to survive and spread by absorbing and then turning itself into sled dogs, cows, and the scientists themselves; since its cells are intelligent, it can replicate itself infinitely in various life forms and so threatens to literally take over the earth. Trying to psych out this insidious antagonist, the intrepid Americans wrestle with paranoid suspicion: Is the person next to me really an alien invader? each must ask. And am I one myself?
The original story–written before Campbell made his mark as the influential editor of Astounding Stories (later Analog Science Fact/Fiction)–is a gritty minor masterpiece that justifies its outlandish plot with data from biochemistry, physics, meteorology, psychology, and even telepathy (whose scientific credibility is defended with a reference to a professor at Duke University, where Campbell studied). Solid as science fiction, it’s also an engrossing detective story (the climax recalls one of those scenes in which the sleuth explains the crime to the assembled suspects), a hard-boiled study of human behavior under stress in the Jack London/Ernest Hemingway mold, a philosophical discourse on the diversity of creation (is the monster evil or “another example of Nature’s wonderful adaptability”?), and a political allegory about creeping communism, in which a collectivist creature that exists by absorbing other beings is defeated by a democratic band of cranky individualists. Neither of the story’s two movie versions have done it justice: Howard Hawks’s 1951 film turned the shape-altering monster into a Karloffian “supercarrot” whose main weapon was brute strength, while John Carpenter’s 1982 effort emphasized slimy special effects at the expense of dramatic texture.
