Ennio Morricone (The Thing) The Thing (1982)

Ennio Morricone (1928–2020) composed the score for The Thing (1982). The film was Morricone's first American horror score, an unusual commission in his catalogue — most of his Hollywood work to that point had been for Sergio Leone, Don Siegel, Brian De Palma, and the Italian giallo and police-procedural traditions — and the score he delivered is the most-discussed mismatch in his discography. The Thing's primary musical signature is a low pulse on synthesizer, two notes a half-step apart, repeating with mechanical persistence: a Morricone composition that consciously imitates the John Carpenter sound. (wikipedia)

Universal pushed Carpenter to hire a "real composer"

Carpenter's earlier films — Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York — were scored by Carpenter himself on synthesizers, with tight repeating motifs that became the films' visual signature as much as Cundey's photography did. Universal, taking on a $15-million horror picture, pushed Carpenter to hire a composer with broader prestige than the director's own pseudonym. Morricone — fresh off The Mission and a long Leone catalogue, and within a year of Once Upon a Time in America — was the choice both sides could agree on.

"Universal wanted a real composer. I wanted to do it myself. We compromised on Ennio. He flew over, we watched the cut together, and he went away to write." — John Carpenter, Cinephilia & Beyond (2018)

Morricone wrote what Carpenter would have written

Morricone delivered an unusually large amount of score for the running time — multiple cues for almost every scene, in a range of registers from full orchestral to solo electronic. Carpenter and editor Todd Ramsay selected the cues that went into the picture and discarded most of what Morricone wrote. The cues that made the final picture are almost all electronic and almost all minimalist: a low synthesized heartbeat that is structurally identical to Carpenter's own Halloween main title.

"The cue that became the main title is almost entirely electronic. Two notes. It is the kind of thing I would have written. Ennio gave me forty cues; the one I used most was the one that sounded most like me." — John Carpenter, The Hollywood Reporter (2022)

Morricone has said in interviews that he understood and respected the choice.

"Carpenter is a composer. He knows what he wants. I gave him many things. He chose the things that sounded like his own films because his own films are good films, and his music is part of why they are good. There was no offense in this." — Ennio Morricone, Score Magazine (1990s, archived at Film Score Monthly)

What Carpenter added himself

Carpenter himself wrote and performed at least four cues in the released score, all uncredited or co-credited. The cue that runs under the rec-room couch sequence in beat 33–34 is Carpenter's; the cue under the boiler-room confrontation in beat 39 is Carpenter's. Morricone's main-title cue — the two-note synthesizer pulse — opens and closes the film and is the score's most-recognized signature. The released soundtrack album mixes Morricone's original cues, Morricone's cues as edited for the film, and Carpenter's own cues without distinguishing them.

See The Score That Sounds Like Carpenter for a longer essay on the score's structure and reception.

Morricone reused his rejected cues

The cues Morricone wrote for The Thing that did not make the picture were not wasted. Two of them — fully orchestral, melodic, in the register of his Leone work — were reused, with the Carpenter contract's permission, in Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (2015), thirty-three years later. Tarantino sought out the unreleased Morricone Thing cues specifically because of the structural similarity between the two films (a small group trapped inside a single building during a winter storm, one of them an impostor) and used them as the spine of The Hateful Eight's score. Morricone won the Best Original Score Oscar for The Hateful Eight — his only competitive Oscar — partly with music originally written for The Thing.

"When I read the script of The Hateful Eight I knew I wanted Morricone. And when Morricone said: I have music for this, music that has been waiting thirty years — I knew it was the right film for him." — Quentin Tarantino, Variety (2015)

Morricone's career

Morricone wrote over four hundred film scores across sixty years. The major works in English-language cinema include The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Days of Heaven (1978), The Untouchables (1987), The Mission (1986), Cinema Paradiso (1988), and The Hateful Eight (2015). He received an honorary Academy Award in 2007 for lifetime achievement and his only competitive Oscar in 2016 for The Hateful Eight. He died in July 2020 in Rome, age ninety-one.

Cross-Film Connections

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