Since the 1970s, the horror genre has had a habit of trying to cash in on any hit.The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,Halloween, andFriday the 13thall keep chugging along. If you create a scary movie that fans love, there has to be more. As Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) tells Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in the climax toScream, “Let’s face it, baby, these days, you gotta have a sequel!” Twenty-seven years and five sequels later, Stu has been proven right. It’s rare to have thatstandalone horror hitthat stays left as it is with no follow-ups. One such horror classic that never got the sequel treatment is 1982’sThe Thing.
Sure, there was thatprequel in 2011 starringMary Elizabeth Winstead, but it told a different story away fromJohn Carpenter’s film, which actually turned out to lead right into his creation. Carpenter’s own vision might have been a reimagining of the 1951 classicThe Thing From Another World, which is based on theJoseph W. CampbellnovellaWho Goes There?, but Carpenter’s film is so vastly different that it’s similar only in its setup. For over forty years there has never been a sequel toThe Thing,even as Carpenter’s other classic creation, Michael Myers andHalloween, has gone on to spawn an astonishing twelve sequels so far. This status has keptThe Thingas an undisturbed classic preserved in the ice, with no crazy sequels out there lessening its impact. Still, that hasn’t stopped John Carpenter from talking more and more the past few years about revisiting the world ofThe Thing.
RELATED:John Carpenter Returns to Director’s Chair for Horror Series ‘Suburban Screams’
What Has John Carpenter Said About Making a ‘The Thing’ Sequel?
At the end of May, at the Texas Frightmare Weekend Convention, John Carpenter was part of a Q&A with fans. One fan asked Carpenter about the fate ofKeith David’s character of Childs at the end ofThe Thing.John Carpenter teasingly replied, “I have been sworn to secrecy, okay, because there may be, I don’t know if there will be, there may be aThing 2.”
This comment by itself isn’t much. Most likely Carpenter was just joking. He might not be hinting at all about a real potential sequel toThe Thing, except this isn’t the first time in just the past few years that he has spoken about a potential follow-up. In aninterview with MovieMaker last October, Carpenter was asked about the possibility of a continuation of the story. “I don’t know. You never know. I don’t know that I want to. But we’ll have to see what the circumstances are. That’s what it’s all about these days. If it’s fully funded and if it’s something I could do, I would like to. But we’ll see. I’m not gonna say no.”
Going back even further last year, in February 2022,John Carpenter told The Hollywood Reporter, “I would like to do a sequel toTheThing, or a continuation, something like that.But I don’t know." These past fifteen months, Carpenter has been more vocal aboutThing 2than ever. In 2020, he dropped a bombshell that has yet to come to fruition, when at the Fantasia International Film Festival,he made a comment aboutJason Blum, the man behind Blumhouse, who has put out the last threeHalloweenfilms, which Carpenter has provided the score for. “I think he’s gonna be working onThe Thing… rebootingThe Thing. I may be involved with that. Maybe. Down the road.” None of these comments by themselves mean much, but where you keep seeing smoke, there just might be a fire building in the form of a sequel toThe Thing.
A Sequel to ‘The Thing’ Could Ruin One of Horror’s Best Open Endings
One of the best parts aboutThe Thing, a film that was panned by critics and bombed in theaters at the time of its initial release, is its ending. It’s one of the best in horror history.The Thingcenters on a group of all-male researchers in Antarctica who encounter an alien presence that can assimilate its victims. It turns the film into one of claustrophobic paranoia, with none of the men, and the audience as well, knowing if they can trust the person next to them. Is this their trusted friend they’re talking to or the alien in disguise?
Led byRob Bottin’s masterful practical effectsand some well-written characters, withKurt Russellas the cool leader of the group, R.J. MacReady,The Thingbuilds and builds, with one man after another being killed by the creature. In the end, their station is blown up and MacReady and Keith David’s Childs are the only two survivors. The two men are untrusting of each other. Is this their friend who survived with them, only to freeze to death out in the elements, or is this the alien they are talking to? “If we got any surprises for each other,” MacReady tells Childs, “I don’t think we’re in much shape to do anything about it.” When Childs asks what they should do, MacReady drops the film’s most famous line. “Why don’t we just wait here for a little while. See what happens.” Behind them, the station burns, andThe Thingcomes to an end.
Look,The Thing’s open ending is brilliant. Is one of them the thing? Do they die? Are they somehow saved? We never know, and we accept that. John Carpenter had tried open endings before. The end ofHalloweensees Michael Myers shot off a balcony by his doctor, Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence). The Shape lays there motionless looking very dead, but when Loomis looks over the balcony, the boogeyman is gone. Michael has somehow risen and walked away. How did he survive? Where is he? Will he kill again? The film doesn’t tell us.
If anyone knows the damage a sequel can do to a classic horror film, it’s John Carpenter. He wrote 1981’sHalloween 2, which begins right where the first film ended, with Michael Myers up like he was never shot, his murder spree continuing. After that film introduced the “Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is Michael’s sister plot,” the whole franchise became about Michael trying to kill his family.David Gordon Green’s recentHalloweentrilogy looked to erase all of that.Halloween Killsgoes back to that 1978 night and shows us Michael being captured by the police. These scenes took away the mystery of the original film. A sequel toThe Thingwould be tempted to show us who lived between MacReady and Childs. You know anyone in their right mind is going to want to cast Kurt Russell for a sequel, which means we’d have an answer to who lived.The Thingdoesn’t need answers. Not knowing is what makes it so scary.
A Sequel to ‘The Thing’ Leads to the Temptation to Explain the Monster
InThe Thingwe also don’t have any answers to what the alien is. Yes, we see it in several forms, the researchers learn about how it operates and its physiology, but there are no scenes from the alien’s point of view showing it fully explaining its actions. We don’t know where it comes from. We don’t know its past. We only know that it’s here and wants to wipe out every creature in its path.The Thing From Another Worldexplained the monster a little bit more, but still, it didn’t go overboard. So many horror films have those awful scenes of the heroes being attacked by a mysterious creature, only for them to find a book where they can read about it, or they track down an expert who can explain it away and thus neuter it and make the monster less scary.
This is something Carpenter sadly knows about too. The worst thing theHalloweenfranchise did was not show how Michael Myers survived in 1978, but instead give him a backstory. In the original film Myers is called The Shape and the Boogeyman because he is a silent, white-masked almost ghost who kills for no reason. That makes him utterly terrifying. When John Carpenter introduced the sister scenario, we saw that Michael kills not just because he is compelled to by unexplainable means, but because he wants to take out his family. It made him human, which made him not as creepy. If you weren’t Laurie Strode or one of her friends or family members, you had nothing to worry about. Later sequels had Michaels even belonging to a cult, andRob Zombie’s reboots gave Michael an even worse reason to kill: he had a bad home life and was picked on at school. That’s not the story of a boogeyman, that’s just sad real life.
A sequel toThe Thingcan’t keep its monster’s backstory in the dark. If it did, then it just becomes an unnecessary remake. Sequels have to do something different. They have to move forward. They almost have to explain, especially in horror, in order to set themselves apart. There would be the temptation to have the creature give some awful monologue or to include scientists who have figured the alien all out. Do that, you take the scary unknown away and make it just some…thing.
John Carpenter is one of horror’s greatest masters. At 75,he hasn’t directed a film since 2010’sThe Ward. He’s been killing it with his music, making albums, and putting on concerts, and while he does deserve at least one more time in the director’s chair before he retires,The Thing 2isn’t it. As for Jason Blum, it’s not for him with someone else directing it either. Some masterpieces need to stay where they are. Let them loose with something new and who knows what it can transform into.
