They Live

Nor is it to be thought (ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen . . . He knows where They had trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites.

The words “Directed by John Carpenter” mark the director’s third appearance in the credits (after the possessive over the title, and the music credit with Alan Howarth). But if we’re in the know, we’ll recognize the screenwriter “Frank Armitage” as a Carpenter pseudonym, plucked from the pages of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.” As we’ve learned an instant earlier, They Live is “Based Upon the Short Story ‘Eight O’clock in the Morning’ by Ray Nelson.” For those inclined to trace such connections, Ray Nelson, an (extremely) minor writer even within science fiction’s demimonde, was one of just two people with whom Philip K. Dick ever collaborated on a novel. So: lurking unnamed in these credits, like secret masters, are Lovecraft and Dick, perhaps the preeminent ontological paranoiacs of twentieth-century fiction—also two now-esteemed artists situated, like Carpenter, in disreputable genres.

“The Dunwich Horror” doesn’t feel much like They Live. Lovecraft’s story is (typically) both purple and morose, full of crypto-historical cobwebs, and a million miles, tonally, from Carpenter’s urban setting, media satire, and neo-Hawksian buddy-picture motifs. What “Armitage” seems to have glommed from “Dunwich,” apart from a general fascination with the invisible omnipresence of mankind’s enemies, is the ominous indeterminacy of the pronoun they. Lovecraft’s secret masters are octopus-headed devils from an ancient realm, as uninterested in dressing up in yuppie costumes and shopping for blue-corn tortillas as can be imagined.