Dean Cundey The Thing (1982)
Dean Cundey (born March 12, 1946, Alhambra, California) shot The Thing (1982) in 2.35:1 anamorphic Panavision. The Thing was Cundey's fifth film as cinematographer for John Carpenter and the third in 2.35 — Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and Escape from New York (1981) had established the working relationship, and The Thing extended their shared visual language onto a scope canvas that the previous Carpenter films had only partly used.
A Halloween-trained DP brought to scope
Cundey was twenty-eight years old when he shot Halloween and the long-take camera language of that film — the Steadicam glide through suburban kitchens, the hold on negative space outside windows, the patient master shots that let dread accumulate — became the template for his work with Carpenter through the next four years. The Fog, Escape from New York, and The Thing each extended the Halloween vocabulary into a wider frame: 2.35:1 anamorphic in scope ratio, with longer lenses, longer takes, and a willingness to put the actors in the corner of the frame and leave most of the screen empty. (wikipedia)
"Dean and I had three movies of common language by the time we got to The Thing. We didn't have to talk about coverage. We didn't have to talk about lensing. He knew what I wanted. He could give me the third floor of a building if I asked for the second." — John Carpenter, American Cinematographer (1998)
What Cundey did differently for The Thing
The Thing's visual signature is how empty its compositions are. Cundey lit the camp interiors at low key — dark corridors, single overhead bulbs, blue-grey through the windows — and shot exteriors in heavily desaturated whites that drained almost all colour out of the snow. Faces are isolated in pools of warm light against blue darkness; entire rooms are framed so that two-thirds of the screen is in shadow with one corner illuminated. The visual argument is that any of the dark space could contain the Thing. See Carpenter's Use of Negative Space.
"The Thing is a movie about what is not visible. So Dean's job was to make sure the audience could not see most of the frame, and could not stop looking at the part they could see." — John Carpenter, The Hollywood Reporter (2022)
Cundey has said the snow exteriors required a near-total rebuild of his exposure logic: the standard high-key snow look was the visual language of family Christmas films and was exactly what the camp footage could not look like.
"Snow on a clear day will give you fourteen stops over face. We had to crush the snow to grey so that the men in the snow looked like they were in a place that wanted them dead. We desaturated everything in the lab. The exteriors are almost monochrome." — Dean Cundey, American Cinematographer (1998)
See Dean Cundey's Snow Photography for the full breakdown.
After Carpenter, the Zemeckis years
Cundey shot Halloween II (1981) and The Thing and then drifted out of horror into the Robert Zemeckis collaboration that would define the rest of his career: Romancing the Stone (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Back to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Death Becomes Her (1992). He shot Jurassic Park (1993, Spielberg), Apollo 13 (1995, Howard), and Hook (1991, Spielberg). The arc from Carpenter to Spielberg through Zemeckis is one of the cleanest in 1980s cinematography history — a horror-trained DP who became the visual architect of a decade of family-adventure blockbusters.
"The lessons I learned shooting Halloween and The Thing — patience with the frame, willingness to let the audience do work, lighting that doesn't announce itself — those are the same lessons I brought to Back to the Future. People assume horror and family films are different crafts. They are the same craft. You are leading an audience by the eye." — Dean Cundey, Variety (2018)
Selected filmography
| Year | Film | Director | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 | Halloween | John Carpenter | First Carpenter |
| 1980 | The Fog | Carpenter | |
| 1981 | Escape from New York | Carpenter | |
| 1982 | The Thing | Carpenter | 2.35:1 Panavision |
| 1984 | Romancing the Stone | Robert Zemeckis | |
| 1985 | Back to the Future | Zemeckis | |
| 1986 | Big Trouble in Little China | Carpenter | |
| 1988 | Who Framed Roger Rabbit | Zemeckis | |
| 1991 | Hook | Steven Spielberg | |
| 1993 | Jurassic Park | Spielberg | |
| 1995 | Apollo 13 | Ron Howard | |
| 2003 | Garfield: The Movie |