First clip from The Thing prequel hints that it will spectacularly miss the point of the original

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

In John Carpenter’s 1982 horror masterpiece, The Thing itself doesn’t literally explode out of anything until late in the third act. It’s the most “actiony” section of the film; the climax after the perfectly executed slow-burn build of the first two acts. And it’s exactly that which makes Carpenter’s film so great – building incredible tension and fear in moments of quiet and stillness.

Then there’s the THE THING prequel/reboot/whateverthef*ck. The first clip from the film has made its way online, and it hints that the new version will likely (and unsurprisingly) opt for big, loud, and cheap rather than eerie, ominous, or anything remotely resembling subtlety. Look, I’m not saying THE THING is going to suck – that would be silly, I haven’t even seen the film – I’m saying…

Okay, I’m saying THE THING is going to suck.

THE THING – starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Eric Olsen, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje – will suck October 14th.

Synopsis: In the thriller THE THING, paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet. Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up. When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish.