The Thing: a Prequel

The Chicago Film Critics Association puts The Thing (1982) in 17th place among the scariest movies ever. I'd put it higher. I consider The Thing to be one of the best horror films of all time. Unknown to me, "Carpenter considers The Thing to be the first part of his Apocalypse Trilogy, followed by Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness." It is billed as a remake of The Thing From Another World, "a 1951 science fiction film based on the 1938 novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, Jr."

It tells the story of an Air Force crew and scientists at a remote Arctic research outpost who fight a malevolent plant-based alien being.

I've never seen the original, but John Carpenter's remake I have seen. And I could see it over and over again for the rest of my life. So, what is this Thing?

The film's title refers to its primary antagonist: a parasitic extraterrestrial life-form that assimilates other organisms and in turn imitates them. It infiltrates an Antarctic research station, taking the appearance of the researchers that it kills, and paranoia occurs within the group.

The special effects were ahead of its time. Read: no CGI. And the dread remains. "Most of the horrifying special effects were designed and created by Rob Bottin and his crew, with the exception of the dog creature, which was created by Stan Winston."

The film's ground-breaking make up special effects were simultaneously lauded and lambasted for being technically brilliant but visually repulsive.

Ebert says it's "among the most elaborate, nauseating, and horrifying sights yet achieved by Hollywood’s new generation of visual magicians."

Now in the works is a prequel, which is supposed to explain where The Thing we saw in the 1982 version came from. "The film will take place right before the first film, following the exploits of the Norwegian and American scientists who originally discovered the alien." Three days before, to be exact.

Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her two assistants Davida Morris (Davetta Sherwood) and Adam Goodman (Eric Christian Olsen) join a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship buried in the ice of Antarctica. They discover a creature that seems to have died in the crash eons ago.

When an experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate, Adam and Davida join the crew's pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing and imitating them one at a time, using its uncanny ability to mimic any life form it absorbs through digestion, and potentially reaching civilization.

The filmmakers seem legit. Producer Eric Newman said:

I'd be the first to say no one should ever try to do Jaws again and I certainly wouldn't want to see anyone remake The Exorcist... And we really felt the same way about The Thing. It's a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It's the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter's movie - they're already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible.

And I'm charmed and reassured that "Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. explained that he created the film not to simply be a horror movie, but to also focus largely on the human drama with the interaction between characters, as the first film had." That's what I loved about the 1982 version: character studies in the midst of terror and chaos.