Take a little afternoon flashback to 1982, when John Carpenter’s “The Thing” began scaring moviegoers all across the country. The genre classic is
based on John W. Campbell, Jr.’s novella, “Who Goes There?” and improves (greatly) upon Howard Hawks’ and Christian Nyby’s 1951 adaptation of the
story, “The Thing from Another World.” In “The Thing,” a group of researchers in Antarctica unearth a frozen, shape-shifting monster, which hunts the researchers in their utilitarian lab. Though the film wasn’t able to break $20M at the box office, it has gone on to scare viewers for over 30
years.
As necessary, given the external shots the movie required, the cast and crew went on location for large chunks of the production. As expected, they didn’t
actually fly down to the Antarctic to do it. Rather, as this vintage 12-minute featurette explains, they
shot in British Columbia, near the Alaskan border. The 30-below conditions weren’t ideal for a Hollywood production — they had limited daylight and lenses that would freeze, plus, you know, the extreme cold — but the cast
remained pretty upbeat throughout. Even when they were back on a soundstage doing the interiors in LA, teeth were chattering. “It was 108 degrees, and we
were shooting on sets that were 20 degrees,” they explain in the vintage video.
A lot of the short is dedicated to insight on how Carpenter and his team devised the iconic and eponymous Thing. Hawks’ interpretation of the film
was humanoid with a weird looking vegetable smear exterior. Critics belittled it as “an intellectual carrot.” Carpenter didn’t want to repeat the same
mistakes, so he and his designers worked hard to come up with terrifying images and scenes, which would distance this ‘Thing’ from the one of 31 years
earlier. Later in the short, Carpenter talks about how his father’s interest in music influenced his own, which later informed his taste in film
soundtracks. (Funnily enough, Ennio Morricone’s score for “The Thing” received a Razzie nomination for Worst Musical Score.)
Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen “The Thing” yet, check out this rare teaser from 1982 — currently only available as a hidden feature on the 2008 French DVD — and see if it gives
you the willies. (Surprisingly, it doesn’t actually feel that dated…until the very end.)
And if you have seen the movie, then you might want to watch the four-minutes of deleted scenes and the alternate ending. Can
you place them in the flick? Think they would have improved the end result, or were they cut for a reason? Watch it all below.