‘The Thing’: John Carpenter on the difficulty of failure
John Carpenter and the word ‘failure’ don’t exactly compute; it’s like putting David Lynch and ‘unimaginative’ together or Willy Wonka and ‘subtle’. Indeed, the beloved American filmmaker is responsible for some of the most colourful and creative movies of the 20th century. Creating such horror treats as The Fog and Halloween, Carpenter has also made camp action flicks Escape From New York and They Live.
While his 21st century might have lacked in almost each and every department, quite what he was thinking with 2001’s God-awful Ghosts of Mars is a genuine mystery. It cannot be denied that he was one of the most seminal movie-making figures of the 1980s. More than just a director and screenwriter, Carpenter also gave music some of its greatest scores, crafting his own soundtracks for many of his classic films.
Yet, his camp, cult style wasn’t to everyone’s taste during his heyday, with many people overlooking his intentions, thinking instead that his movies were cheap and schlocky cinematic failures. No film better highlights this than the release of The Thing in 1982, a movie that is considered to be one of the best horror flicks of all time in contemporary cinema yet was disregarded at the time of its release largely due to the release of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which came out in the very same year.
Released mere weeks after the release of Spielberg’s cute alien flick, which tells the story of a lonely young boy who sparks a friendship with a crash-landed extra-terrestrial, was the antithesis of Carpenter’s bleak horror sci-fi, which merely shared the same genre as the beloved blockbuster. Pushing the limits as to how much horror was acceptable in mainstream cinema, many people simply didn’t want to see the goopy body torture which took place in The Thing.
Saddened by the reactions to his film, Carpenter told Time Out in 2008, “I take every failure hard…The one I took the hardest was The Thing. My career would have been different if that had been a big hit”.
Continuing, he added: “The movie was hated. Even by science-fiction fans. They thought that I had betrayed some kind of trust, and the piling on was insane. Even the original movie’s director, Christian Nyby, was dissing me”.
Carpenter was also no fool to the zeitgeist of the time, recognising that it might not have been the perfect time to release his body horror flick, even citing Spielberg’s movie of the same year. “1982 was the summer of E.T.,” he exclaimed, “You don’t realise what a big deal that was. Spielberg had this uncanny knack of knowing what the audience wanted. And he thought they wanted a big cry. He was absolutely right. We came out two weeks later”.
Take a look at the original trailer for Carpenter’s 1982 classic below and judge for yourself whether it’s worthy of hatred.
