The two Quentin Tarantino movies inspired by John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’
Critically celebrated auteur Quentin Tarantino has expressed his admiration for fellow director John Carpenter on many occasions. We know well that Tarantino is a big fan of Carpenter’s 1982 science fiction horror The Thing, starring Kurt Russell, which tells of a group of scientists encountering a strange extra-terrestrial entity in Antarctica.
When Tarantino once discussed the films that one should see before watching his 2015 western thriller movie The Hateful Eight, he said: “If there’s one movie that is most similar in its own way, in terms of the mise en scene and the tone, then it would probably be The Thing.”
The director went on to explain that not only did The Thing inspire The Hateful Eight, but also his feature-length directorial debut Reservoir Dogs. “It’s interesting because there’s a Reservoir Dogs quality to this film,” he said. “The Thing was a big influence on Reservoir Dogs.”
On how Carpenter’s film inspired The Hateful Eight, Tarantino noted, “There are obvious aspects about it that are similar; Kurt Russell is one of the stars, Ennio Morricone does the soundtrack, and there’s the snow.” However, none of those points shows how Tarantino was really inspired, so he clarified his words.
“The real elements of what The Thing has to do with my film is the fact that they’re both studies of paranoia,” he said. “None of the characters can trust the other characters, yet they’re trapped together. They can’t leave because of the harsh elements. It’s basically what happens as they try to deal with each other.” What Tarantino says about The Hateful Eight here could certainly be said of Reservoir Dogs, too, in the sense that there is paranoia in the heist as to who in the police informant.
However, there’s a deeper aspect to The Thing’s influence on Tarantino, and it comes from how the tension builds up to a boiling point and where that tension goes. “Not only that, though, there is another aspect,” he said. “I defined it when I saw The Thing, I tried it in Reservoir Dogs, and I tried it in [The Hateful Eight]. “
The director concluded: “The paranoia in The Thing was so thick and so bottled up in that shelter that it bounced on the walls until it had nowhere else to go but through the fourth wall and into the audience. That’s what I hope that I share with The Thing more than anything else.”
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