John Carpenter's The Thing

This should be framed and hung somewhere.

Kurt Russell Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters
00:00 Kurt Russell's Iconic Characters
00:14 Escape from New York
04:15 The Thing
09:36 Tombstone
15:03 Death Proof
17:51 The Hateful Eight
20:35 Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
21:46 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
22:20 The Christmas Chronicles
23:51 Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

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20:35. coolest

*the essential horror movie for everyone

Both of them are classics, the old The Thing From Another World from 1951 and The Carpenter make of The Thing. The Carpenter version is closer to the 1938 novella by John Campbell, AKA, Don Stuart, Who Goes There, that inspired the story, but the 1951 version is excellent in it's own way, a piece of cold war camaraderie with minimal FX and a good monster. I have a marginal preference for the 1951 movie in all its monochrome glory.

An odd remake, Horror Express, is unnecessary and the 2011 remake was redundant. Another early 2000's remake seems to have floundered somehow.

It's good.

I actually don't like the orignal Hawks' one that much though. It's okay, but whatver..

I seem to have some background with this thread. Apparently, in 2014 I posted this, quite a journey for a comment -

Carpenter's Thing wasn't a remake, it was much closer to the 1935 John Campbell book Who Goes There? than the older version. The 1951 Thing was excellent as a low budget re-imagining of the book, but Carpenter's version was pretty close to the semi-original Campbell book. It's worth noting that Who Goes There was itself inspired by Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which was inspired by a chapter in Poe's only novel The Narrative of A Gordon Pym. None of the movies (especially the 2011 "prequel") is as good as Lovecraft's story, which had a movie version in the works to be done by Guillermo Del Toro. Elements of the story also appeared in The X Files. Unfortunately the investor interest in Madness dried up when James Cameron filmed a similar extraterrestrial version of the plot in Prometheus.

This line of interpretation is itself the crux of the film. It doesn't so much deny the possibility of an answer, as it leaves open every possibility without foreclosing any one of them. It is akin to Schrödinger's uncertainty because the analogy to that of the essence of a human vis-a-vis his appearance is apt - human beings and their psyche are inscrutable, no matter how transparent their motives or intentions are. One can't peer into the soul and discover the true nature of a human. One is only left with appearances, and appearances are as real as they are deceitful. By the end of the film, The Thing is no longer some external lifeforce imposed upon us, but IS us.

I dont know about all this smart talk, but this films in my top ten. It's one of the greatest horror movies of all time, for its time, and it was way ahead of its time.

Carpenter's is a really terrific way of adapting the old story that dares real far back.