“Halloween” may have been his most financially successful, but if there’s one film iconic filmmaker John Carpenter will always be remembered for his 1982 Antarctic-set sci-fi horror “The Thing”.
Though a box-office bomb on release, the paranoia thriller is now widely considered one of the greatest horror films of all time and the kind of film that’s nearly impossible to do again today with all its inventive practical effects and iconic character actors.
They’ve tried, resulting in 2011’s prequel, also oddly titled “The Thing,” which felt compromised at every level – from practical effects ditched in favour of terrible CGI to script deficiencies and a lack of the original’s distinct tension.
That seemed to be the end of it, but now Carpenter himself has teased the possibility of a follow-up at a Q&A at last weekend’s Texas Frightmare Weekend.
The film’s iconic ending sees Keith David’s character Childs and Kurt Russell’s MacReady sit facing each other in the snow, sharing a bottle of whiskey, each unsure if the other has been assimilated by the creature.
According to Creepy Catalog, a fan asked Carpenter if Childs has been turned. Carpenter has always dodged the question in the past, but this time though he came up with an answer no-one expected: “I have been sworn to secrecy, okay, because there may be, I don’t know if there will be, there may be a ‘Thing 2.'”
If such a project might happen, would Carpenter direct? The man’s last film was 2010’s “The Ward,” but he revealed he also recently directed a shot-in-Prague series titled “John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams” by remote.
In recent years there have been reports Blumhouse was developing “Frozen Hell,” an adaptation of the expanded and never-before-seen novel-length version of the original “Who Goes There?” novella by John W. Campbell Jr. upon which the Carpenter film (and the original Howard Hawks film) is based.
That project is more of a reboot than a sequel, though obviously could expand beyond the storytelling scope of the original. Could that be what Carpenter is referring to? Whatever the case, the news has already got fans speculating. For now, there’s nothing official on the radar.
