John Carpenter (The Thing) The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter (born January 16, 1948, Carthage, New York) directed The Thing (1982). The film was his first studio production after the independent successes of Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and Escape from New York (1981); it was also the lowest-grossing film of his career to date and the one that closed the period of unbroken commercial momentum he had enjoyed since Halloween. He has consistently named it as his own favorite of his films.

A film-school child of Howard Hawks

Carpenter trained at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in the late 1960s, in the same student cohort as George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, and Walter Murch. His teachers and his stated influences were the second wave of classical Hollywood directors — Howard Hawks above all, John Ford, Don Siegel — rather than the European art-cinema canon his contemporaries chose. The Hawks influence is structural: Carpenter's films are built around small groups of professionals working through a problem under siege. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) is Rio Bravo in a Los Angeles police station; Halloween is Rio Bravo in a suburban living room; The Thing is Rio Bravo on the Antarctic ice. (wikipedia)

"Howard Hawks is the only director I've ever wanted to be. Every movie I've made is a Hawks movie. The Thing is a Hawks movie." — John Carpenter, Cinephilia & Beyond (2018)

Carpenter inherited The Thing from a defunct Tobe Hooper version

Universal first developed the project with Tobe Hooper attached as director and Kim Henkel co-writing a draft. The Hooper version was abandoned. Producer Stuart Cohen brought the project to Carpenter in 1981 on the strength of Halloween and The Fog; Escape from New York opened mid-development. Carpenter signed on with the agreement that the film would adapt John W. Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There? faithfully — restoring the shape-shifting premise the 1951 Hawks/Nyby version had abandoned. See Production History (The Thing) and The Hawks-Nyby Original (1951).

"When you make a movie called The Thing, you have to deal with the Hawks version. There is no way around it. My answer was: do the book. The book is what no movie has done." — John Carpenter, Cinefantastique (1982)

What Carpenter brought to the production

The film bears the familiar Carpenter signatures: 2.35:1 anamorphic Panavision (with Dean Cundey shooting), long Steadicam corridor takes, an unusual willingness to hold the camera on negative space, and an emotional pace controlled almost entirely by a synthesizer score. Carpenter directed with minimal verbal coverage — most scenes have an A-camera and a B-camera and few cutaways — and asked his cast to play scenes flat, on the assumption that the audience would do the work of fear themselves. See Carpenter's Use of Negative Space and Dean Cundey.

The most-recognizable Carpenter touch in The Thing is the score, which Ennio Morricone delivered as a deliberate pastiche of Carpenter's own minimalist style. See Ennio Morricone (The Thing) and The Score That Sounds Like Carpenter.

The reception nearly broke the run

The film opened against E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (two weeks earlier, dominating the summer) and Blade Runner (same day), and reviews were brutal. Cinefantastique asked on its cover whether The Thing was "the most-hated movie of all time." Roger Ebert gave it two and a half stars and called it "a great barf-bag movie." David Denby in New York called it "more disgusting than frightening." See Carpenter's Worst-Reviews-of-His-Career Reception and Critical Reception and Legacy (The Thing).

"I had been a hot director two weeks before. After The Thing opened I was nothing for a long time. The film was treated as the worst thing I had ever made, and the people who treated it that way were the same people who had liked Halloween four years before." — John Carpenter, The Hollywood Reporter (2022)

The apocalypse trilogy

Carpenter has retroactively named The Thing as the first film of an "apocalypse trilogy" — three films built around the destruction of a knowable world by a force that cannot be reasoned with. The other two are Prince of Darkness (1987), in which the Antichrist is liquid-form and stored in a Catholic basement, and In the Mouth of Madness (1994), in which a Stephen-King-like author writes a book that produces the apocalypse he describes. The three films share a structural premise: the protagonist's job is not to save the world but to bear witness to its ending. See Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy.

"The Thing was the first one. Prince of Darkness was the second one. In the Mouth of Madness was the third one. They are the same film. The same film told three different ways. They are the films I want to be judged by." — John Carpenter, Cahiers du cinéma (2010s)

What Carpenter directed after The Thing

The 1980s and 1990s gave him a long second act of mid-budget studio films, none as financially successful as the pre-Thing run: Christine (1983), Starman (1984, his only Oscar nominee for an actor in his lead role), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Prince of Darkness (1987), They Live (1988), Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), Village of the Damned (1995), Escape from L.A. (1996), Vampires (1998), and Ghosts of Mars (2001). He retired from directing in the 2010s and has since worked principally as a film composer, releasing four solo albums of original music that are explicitly the soundtracks to films he never made.

Selected filmography

Year	Film	Notes
1976	Assault on Precinct 13
1978	Halloween
1980	The Fog
1981	Escape from New York
1982	The Thing
1983	Christine	Stephen King
1984	Starman	Jeff Bridges Oscar nom
1986	Big Trouble in Little China
1987	Prince of Darkness	Apocalypse Trilogy
1988	They Live
1994	In the Mouth of Madness	Apocalypse Trilogy
1996	Escape from L.A.