The Thing: Enduring Monstrosity

The horror genre thrives on limitations. Limitations may be economical, but they can also be thematic. Horror movies are explicitly meant to elicit one ultra-specific response from their audiences: fear. My favorite Carpenter film is his scariest, and no film has scared me like The Thing (Carpenter 1982). Imagination is something John Carpenter has never lacked. His version of the novella Who Goes There? would be radically different from the 1951 film, which meant that he’d have to stretch the limits of the silver screen further than audiences had ever seen before.