The Thing, It, She, and Them

Cafe Society
1

In Bored of the Rings, Beard and Kenney describe the charge out of Fordor:

Lotsa monsters in there, but I’m interested in the ones named in vague terms. Because the names are so general, there are several cases of the same name being used:

Thing – The alien “carrot” played by James Arness in the Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks 1951 film sorta based on John Campbell’s story Who Goes There? that was originally called simply “The Thing”. The title reportedly got changed to “The Thing from Another World” to distinguish it from a novelty ong by Phil Harris called “The Thing” (although, really, how many people would have been confused by the similarity of names? Some claim this was just marketing – The Thing (song) - Wikipedia )

– Also The alien shape-shiter/bosy snatcher in John Carpenter’s 1982 remake (with a much closer to the original plot screenplay by Bill Lancaster)

– also the alien creature in the 2011 film that acts as a prequel to the 1982 film.
– Also the creature from the Carpenter film in lots of comics, videogames, etc.
–Ben Grimm in the Marvel Fantastic Four Franchise
– Mothra, in order to make things obscure, in the Toho film Godzilla Vs. The Thing
– The disembodied hand in TV’s *The Addams Family and the subsequent movies.

– various monsters in cheap movies, such as Ray Milland/Rosie Greer in The Thing with Two Heads

– A tourist trap attraction on I-10 in Arizona (The Thing (roadside attraction) - Wikipedia )
It

No one 1950s monster, but a number of them:

It Came from Outer Space – alien in Ray Bradbury-scripted 3D movie

It Came from Beneath the Sea – giant octopus in Ray Harryhausen film

It! The Terror from BBeyond Space – Martian creature that gets loose on a space ship in Jerome Bixby-scripted 1950s film that the movie Alien shamelessly strip-mined

also Cousin Itt, the hair-covered (and, for all we know, completely hair-composed) character on TV’s The Addams Family.
She – Ayesha, AKA “Wisdom’s Daughter”, the virtually immortal “evil” female ruler in Afraica and later the Himalaya’s in a series of novels by H. Rider Haggard. Later portrayed in several movies, most notably by Helen Gahagen in her one and only movie role in 1934 and by Ursula Andress in the 1960s. Also by Sandahl Bergman in a really bad post-apocalyptic version in 1984.

The only other monster-like She is The She Creature, a really stupid case of reincarnation, portrayed by an actor in a really wild monster suit made by Paul Blaisdell. The same plot (with a much worse suit) was filmed years later for TV as Creature of Destruction. There was another TV movie in 2001 using the same title (at a time when they were re-using a lot of the old AIP titles, but not the plots) involving a scary-looking mermaid. She Creature - Wikipedia

Them – Big ants. Them! - Wikipedia. Also the title of a paranoid fantasy story by Robert A. Heinlein. I can’t think of any others, but another giant ant movie was Empire of the Ants, adapted from the story by H.G. Wells by someone who never read Wells, and thought that all you needed was giant ants. Noted for really bad special effects and for Joan Collins, whose mind gets taken over by that of the ants. Fill in your own joke here.

2

Probably not what Kenney and Beard were thinking, but there was Theodore Sturgeon’s “It.”

3

(Head Smack) – I meant to cite that one, too!

4

There was also It Conquered the World.

Released on a double-bill with The She-Creature, and also featuring a monster built by Paul Blaisdell.

5

The Marvel Comics characters Adam Warlock and Kismet were originally referred to as “He” and “She”.

H. Rider Haggard’s “She” was the short form of “She Who Must Be Obeyed”. Her underlings were afraid to refer to her proper name.

6

Horace Rumpole also refers to his wife Hilda as “She Who Must be Obeyed”, one of the few literary references he makes that doesn’t come from the Oxford Book of English Verse. But evidently too good for John Mortimer to pass up.

I have button I got at a convention a few years ago that I gave to my wife – “SHE Who would like to be OBEYed, at least some of the time.”

7

For It, also don’t forget about Stephen King’s Pennywise the Clown, and the giant brain that ruled Camazotz in A Wrinkle in Time.

8

Cute thread idea, Cal..

I was hoping to come in and tease you by making a Ben Grimm/Sturgeon/Haggard/giant ant joke, but by golly, that was your intention all along!

9

Them had a monster hit in Gloria, but probably don’t qualify as monsters themselves. AlthoughVan Morrison has looked better.

10

“It” was also the Golem figure who ran rampant in London under the control of a psychotic Norman-Bates-esque Roddy McDowall: It! (1967) - IMDb

11

another I forgot was the wonderfully awful tree-monster in From Hell It Came.

There is a legend that the entirety of one review was “…and To Hell It Can Go!”

Paul Blaisdell, again, designed the thing, which is called the Tabonga.

Here, no joke, is how it looked:

12

There’s “The ‘I’ that Defeated the Justice League” from 1964. The creature only referred to itself as “I.”

13

Wonder Woman was menaced by a Them! in 1969.

Them turned out to be a gang of lesbian hippies.

Bonus near-miss on the OP: the cover to that Wonder Woman comic promises more appearances from I-Ching.

14

the 1967 Rankin-Bass movie Mad Monster Party had an un-named “It” that showed up at the end.

“It” was King Kong, but un-named a.) as Mothra was in Godzilla vs. The Thing to create mystery; and more importantly b.) they didn’t hve the rights to “King Kong”, but anybody can animate a giant ape.

15

Great Og – I have that issue (the second one, with I-Ching. I can read him like a book.)

16

Wikipedia has an entertaining review:

17

I have to disagree. As walking-tree movies go, the Lord of the Rings films beat this one easily, even the Ralph Bakshi cartoon version. The 1939 Wizard of Oz would, easily, if the trees had only been able to walk. Even the silent Douglas Fairbanks version of The Thief of Baghdad has a more convincing walking tree.

And, of course, Groot is easily far superior to Tobanga in every movie he’s in.

Of course, the walking trees in those movies were incidental to the main plot. This is, AFAICanRecall, the only film in which the walking tree is the main element. So, strictly speaking, it wins Maltin’s assessment as the “top of the list” of walking-tree movies in which those trees are the main point. But only by default.

If Groot even gets his own feature, though, look out.
(Triffids, too, beat Topanga hollow (he’s a hollow tree). But, despite being plants, they’re not trees.)

18

The comic book Supernatural Law had Sodd, the Thing called It!

19

There’s also the Monster Baby of It’s Alive

There was a sequel It’s Alive II (AKA It LIves Again)

And then they had a third film, Island of the Alive because, I guess, they thought it sounded marginally less stupid than Island of the It.

Then they remade the original, with the same title.

20

It’s Alive! was also the title of a truly awful Larry Buchanan film from 1969 with the same awful costume he’d used in the aforementioned Creature of Destruction recycled:

https://horrorpedia.com/2017/01/25/its-alive-1969-reviews-larry-buchanan-horror-movie-overview-cast-plot-whole-film/