Three movies I like to lump together when talking Sci-Fi Horror are:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
And I get some of you out there might think: "Whoa, that last one isn't really Sci-Fi Horror!"
However, since the movie does reference Outer Space, a space probe & the planet Venus as the source of the zombies, I'd let it slide & call it a technicality.
In any case, I call the trilogy A Tale of Two Things and it goes like this:
Part 1 Carpenter's The Thing: Jump to the end where MacReady's freezing to death and there's a Thing organism sitting next to him thinking:
"You know, I've been going at this thing all wrong.
• I went for the pilot on that spaceship, it crashed.
• I went for the Norwegians, I had to run away.
• I went for the dogs, they burned me alive.
• I went for these Americans, they blew the whole camp up!
I have got to find a better strategy for taking over a species!"
So, Part 1 ends sad for the little organism sitting there feeling dejected.
Now Part 2, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is the Thing having learned from its mistakes & coming up with a new strategy. It figures:
"You know, I'm just gonna wait for the military to come up here. Gonna hop on the back of a soldier and when I get to the mainland I'm gonna take over a plant. Since I've imitated a million life forms on a million other planets, I'm gonna replicate a Pod from one of those planets.
A Pod I know knows how to take over people quietly & perfectly. It's still gonna be me, I'm just gonna be taking over this species in the form of these Pods."
And YAY! his strategy takes off!
So, Part 1 the organism's getting it all wrong. Part 2, it's getting everything right. So now how does Night of the Living Dead fit in?
Well, as stated at the beginning, it's a Tale of Two Things. Now at the beginning of The Thing, there's a whole bunch of the organism on the outside of the spaceship. Some of that organism gets in, takes over the pilot. Now because its method is so violent, as we see in the movie, things go wrong & the spaceship crashes.
But some of that Thing organism is still on the outside of the spaceship when it hits our atmosphere. That part gets blown into Outer Space where it orbits the Earth for 100,000 years until that space probe from Venus knocks it back down.
Sadly, because it hasn't learned any of the lessons its buddies did at the Antarctic, it starts going for people the exact same way. Tragically, this Thing organism has been so mutated by our Sun's radiation over those 100,000 years in orbit, the best it can manage for a perfect replica of a human is a Zombie.
And that's why the Zombies attack & eat people. It's not that they feel threatened or need nutrition. It's that Thing organism trying to infect people to take over the species just in its very screwed up, mutated way.
What I love to think about at the end of this trilogy is what would happen next?
• Would the mutant Thing-Zombies recognize the Thing-Pod People?
• Would it attack them anyways or team up on the humans?
• Would the Thing-Pod People team up with the humans to destroy the Thing-Zombies or would the humans face a two-front battle?
• Would humans go extinct or cause the two groups of Things to attack each other?
