The cult classic John Carpenter only made because he needed a job: “Nothing tough about it”
There is a parallel universe somewhere in which John Carpenter’s The Thing was unleashed on an unsuspecting public in 1982, and the bleak, nihilistic sci-fi horror movie was immediately embraced as a classic of its genre. In our universe, though, this is very much not what happened. In our world, The Thing hit cinemas and was summarily rejected by audiences and critics. It was seen as too grotesque and too depressing, and it had a dramatic effect on Carpenter’s career. In fact, he signed up for his next movie out of pure desperation because he needed a job – yet still wound up making a cult classic.
When Carpenter signed up to make The Thing for Universal Pictures, he couldn’t have been happier. He was remaking a film he loved from his childhood – 1951’s The Thing From Another World – and would enjoy the resources of a major studio for the first time. In a 2023 interview with Variety, he revealed that he and the studio got along perfectly well during the shoot, but when he first previewed the film, problems began to crop up. Namely, the fact that the studio didn’t like the film’s bleak ending, hinting that the “thing” may have secretly inhabited one of the two survivors of the American research station in Antarctica. To Carpenter, this ambiguous ending asked unsettling questions about the nature of trust in the wake of the terrifying events of the film.
Instead, studio head Sidney Sheinberg told Carpenter, “Well, you know what, it’ll be great when you have this big orchestra, and they’re killing The Thing.” Carpenter knew this ending wouldn’t fit with the tone of his film, so he compromised and agreed to test two different endings he’d come up with. Both tested poorly, and because no one had any further ideas, the film was released with the first ending intact. Carpenter revealed, “Then the movie was attacked like nobody’s business. The fans hated it, because the original Thing is kind of a beloved movie.”
Worse, though, was how critics and the public reacted to the film’s utterly gruesome creature effects and extreme violence. While Carpenter had expected a certain reaction because his movie did push the envelope, he felt it was all in service of the story and not gratuitous for gratuitousness’ sake. This meant the vitriolic reaction blindsided him, and in 1985, he reflected to Starlog, “I was called ‘a pornographer of violence.’ I had no idea it would be received that way. The Thing was just too strong for that time.”
Unfortunately for Carpenter, he didn’t only have to deal with the slings and arrows of critics and the embarrassment of a box office flop. The overall atmosphere around his work as a director suffered so much after The Thing that he was let go from his next project – an adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter. He admitted to Variety, “I lost a job because of it, got fired off a movie because it didn’t make enough money. It was a hated, cursed movie for a very long time. And I was out of work and feeling pretty bleak.”
Thankfully, though, when one door closes, another opens, and Carpenter would soon have the opportunity to land another gig. Bizarrely, after being fired from one King adaptation, another one would be offered to him – Christine, a pulpy horror tale of a teenage boy and his possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury. A movie about a haunted car wasn’t exactly a dream job for Carpenter, but as he told Variety, it came along when he was in dire need of getting back on the directorial horse, so he took the job.
Unlike The Thing, Christine was a fairly painless production, and it wasn’t received with torches and pitchforks either by a furious filmgoing audience. It made $21 million on a budget of $10 million, and in later years was embraced as a cult classic. Carpenter mused, “It was a fun movie to make and easy — nothing tough about it. And it did OK, you know, it opened alright. So people were kind, which is nice.”
While Christine is rarely considered among Carpenter’s finest work, it does act as a reasonable conduit for some critical thinking around cinema. Reviews and box office takings certainly offer a brief idea of what might constitute a classic, but a director suggesting that it was easy to make tells you everything you need to know.
