I picked THE THING because Eldest Son needed some experience watching gory movies on the screen before deciding whether or not to catch a horror flick tomorrow. You can’t go wrong with the classics, right? — He found it very entertaining, too. Which means we’re probably going to go see SMILE, after all*.
Moe Lane
*Which I wasn’t gonna catch, but he wants to see it and I can’t just drop him off to go see an R-rated movie by himself. It’s apparently forbidden until he’s 18, or some other nonsense. I mean, have the ratings boards seen the video games kids play today?
#commissionearned
It doesn’t have nudity or sex. Plenty of bad language and gore.
When I first read Who Goes There? by John Campbell, I had not heard of the The Thing, nor was I aware of the connection between the two (or to The Thing From Another World). So I read it cold, with no idea. And it was the most riveting and challenging story I had read up to then, being part horror but also a real challenge in that I could not envision how you could solve the problem. No super science mumbo-jumbo break through, no strange unexplained psychic powers , no deus ex machine to save the day. When the answer was developed, and the characters worked to follow through, I was genuinely exhilarated!
I don’t know if you can read the story after having seen the movie and have the same experience to someone who had not seen the movie. At the same time, I don’t know if you can read the story and then watch the movie and have the same experience as someone who had not read the story first.
That novella remains to me a work of genius. I enjoyed the movies (both The Thing From Another Word 1951 and The Thing 1982 but for very different reasons; haven’t seen the 2011 movie). I haven’t watched John Carpenter’s work in a long while, and and I really should watch it again sometime. Still, to me, the original story is superior.