The Thing: Quentin Tarantino, Stephen Colbert discuss John Carpenter classic

On a recent episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the host revealed that he has a rather unexpected cinematic “happy place”: whenever something’s going wrong or has him feeling down, he puts on John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror classic The Thing (watch it HERE). The guest Colbert happened to make this admission to happened to be Quentin Tarantino, so of course that kicked off a discussion of what makes The Thing so great.

Colbert and Tarantino agree that The Thing is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, and Tarantino said it’s one of the rare horror films that actually scared him (with thanks to our friends at Bloody Disgusting for the transcription):

I don’t get scared in horror movies. I respond to suspense, I respond to that – oh what’s gonna happen next, and I can jump by a “boo” scare – but that’s not really terror. I don’t get scared in movies. The Thing I got scared in. I was scared and it made me want to put it under a microscope. About why I was actually frightened during that movie. And I think the reason is this. These men are trapped in this situation in this arctic research center, and one or more of them are possibly this Thing that’s going to devour all of them. And no one knows if you are the guy I’ve known forever or you are a Thing. And the movie makes the paranoia of that so palpable, so real, it’s almost like another character in the movie. The sheer paranoia of it. They’re trapped in the Antarctic, in this shelter, and so the paranoia is bouncing off of the four walls… until it has nowhere to go except through the fourth wall into the audience. I started feeling exactly like they felt.”

He went on to say that The Thing was a source of inspiration when he was writing Reservoir Dogs:

I was like, I need to have that aspect that’s in The Thing. I need to trap these bastards in this warehouse and no one can trust anybody else… and I want the paranoia of what’s going in that warehouse to bounce across the walls and hopefully, like in The Thing, it will go out into the audience.”

It’s not mentioned in this particular interview, but The Thing also had an influence on Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight – a story about a bunch of people who can’t trust each other, trapped together in one snowbound location. Tarantino even scored some of the scenes with unused cues from the score Ennio Morricone composed for The Thing.

You can watch the video of Colbert and Tarantino “bonding over their shared love for The Thing” in the video embedded below, and it’s cool to see the movie getting so much love in this kind of setting: