The John Carpenter masterpiece that scared Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino has a lot of cinematic heroes, ranging from Sergio Leone to Howard Hawks. While he hasn’t made any proper horror films in his career, some of Tarantino’s biggest influences are pioneers of the horror genre. One of them is John Carpenter, the seminal American visionary whose works have only grown in stature over the years.
According to Tarantino, horror films never scared him, even when he watched them as a child. Although he learnt a lot about filmmaking and audience engagement from the horror genre, Tarantino always studied horror movies as an analyst/student because they often failed to have the intended effect of scaring him.
While talking about the genre, Tarantino admitted that most horror movies don’t work for him because he knows the craft too well. He said: “I love horror movies, I’m a big horror movie fan. I don’t get scared in horror movies, I respond to suspense…I can jump by a ‘boo’ scare but that’s not really terror. I don’t get scared in movies.”
However, one particular film terrified Tarantino because the experience it provided was too overwhelming for the director. That film was none other than John Carpenter’s 1982 magnum opus The Thing, which was misunderstood by critics and audiences when it first came out. Tarantino declared: “The Thing I got scared in.”
Carpenter’s horror masterpiece is influenced by another flick which inspired him as a child – The Thing from Another World. It revolves around a group of researchers in Antarctica who are consumed by extreme paranoia when they are confronted by a vicious, parasitic extra-terrestrial species which has the ability to assimilate living organisms.
“I think the reason [for it being scary] is this,” Tarantino explained, elaborating on the film’s merits. “These men are trapped in this situation in this arctic research centre, 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,” he added. “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.”
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.