I love 'John Carpenter's The Thing'...such a great movie.

Just watched it with some of my family members. None of them had seen it before...have to say I enjoyed the reactions of my family to some of the more shocking/repulsive moments in the film.
The only downside is that I totally am going to give myself nightmares. :P

No happy hollywood walk off into the sunset. Yep,a great movie.

Imagine trying to get an R rating on that film today.

The tension was what made it.

"Fuck that, we already have The Thing..."

Perfect combination of suspense, tension, paranoia, and gruesome horror.

is "The Fog."

That one creeps me out so much. I watched it again, a few years ago, and it freaked me even more than the first time.............

It predates "The Thing," and, for my money, is MUCH better.

What a treat you have.

Don't be alone.......................

My fave Carpenter is "They Live," but will watch any of 'em. "The Thing" is the best remake I can think of off hand.

Kurt Russell is awesome in The Thing.

They Live also rocks, if you haven't seen either you should.

And I never looked at Wilford Brimley the same way again...

James Arness plays the space critter. Watch that version. You will like it much better.

and I think Carpenter's is more os a sequel.



You're right, if you haven't seen it, you have to check it out.

Both are highly recommended by me though. I don't think you can go wrong with either one.

As others said, what makes The Thing so wonderful is the character study, the tension, the moments of quiet and suspense, which make the moments of gore and horror all that much more frightening and effective.

There are few movies as perfectly made as that one.

Halloween (the original) and his early movies have become classics.
Really scarey, great performances.

mark

added: I must add and correct: The Thing cost $10 million to make, got terrible reviews in the US from EVERYONE! They all hated it. It also came out shortly after ET - people wanted happy aliens, not slime dripping shape shifters. The movie made over $3 million the first weekend, made over $13 million in the US on first release, but hqas been selling home video copies for decades, and was named #48 on the top 100 scaryest movies of all time.

strange, even in the early 70's.

I watched it with my girlfriend (on VHS) on night while she was babysitting. She had put the kids to sleep and we were watching the shock paddle scene, and just as blood and limbs began flying and ripping, this little kid starting crying behind us. He had woken up and snuck down to watch the movie from the doorway behind us. Took an hour to calm him down. Probably still has nightmares.

Also made me wonder what else he had snuck down and seen us doing in the past. :)

on the first day that snow keeps me home from work

I've seen the original maybe a dozen times and the remake about twice that many. The first is very good--excellent for its time, in fact, but it simply doesn't stand up to the Carpenter version.


Fans of either film are encouraged to read Campbell's novella Who Goes There? to see how the original author envisioned the story.

I remember taking my brother to it when it first came out, because I was 17 and he was a year younger. There were at least a couple of scenes in that movie where we both screamed loudly at the same time, then laughed at our simultaneous reaction to it. We were just exhausted by the end of that movie. We couldn't stop talking about it for a week.

I've seen The Thing countless times since, and I still have the same reactions to it. The scene where they test the blood is one of the skin-crawling, scarifying scenes of all time. It simply can't be topped, and I will personally beat the shit out of the studio head who chooses to remake it with a cast of empty-headed pretty-boy teens.

And if you know me at all, you know I don't say that lightly. :)

I originally saw it when it came out (in '82?) - I was probably 9 or 10 at the time.

A couple scenes really stuck with me from that - more than from most movies.

Apparently, my parents were a little different than most about what they let me see (helped, I'd guess, that I never had nightmares).

Best line in the movie, when the decapitated head grows legs and runs out of the room.

Yes, there are moments of gore, but the movie doesn't exist for them like so many splatterfests (which can be good in their own right). The gore simply serves as exclamation points for what is really going on - paranoia and the inability to trust anyone for fear of them being the Thing.

to Antarctica. The thought I had watching the movie was "Wait a minute--you can go THERE?"

I was pretty sure the alien thing wasn't too likely. FYI The movie is a big hit in McMurdo and there is usally a waiting list to check it out.