The Thing and its originality

I think that every Halloween everyone should have a copy of The Thing handy. I say this for a few reasons. The first is that there are few actually good horror film directors out there these days. Some of them include: Neil Marshall, Eli Roth, Alexandre Aja, James Wan, and Rob Zombie. Now these directors are a part of a group called the "Splat Pack." Horror has taken a different turn in the past fifteen years. Gore has been the main focus which some people appreciate and others have now been turned off to the genre. I believe that there is nothing wrong with a sub-genre in horror films being that of "torture porn. " Neil Marshall's The Descent, Eli Roth's Hostel, Aja's High Tension, Zombie's Devil's Rejects, and Wan's SAW series have all cemented themselves into the horror film canon. However they have gone a different route then the forefathers (Carpenter, Craven, Romero, Cronenberg, Hooper, and Hitchcock) have in the past.

In the movie, The Thing, Carpenter flips the script on everyone. At the time the formula for a good scary movie was a monster/slasher in a mask/or ghost threatens and takes the lives of a group of people men and women (mostly women). A prime example is his classic Halloween. In that movie Michael Myers stalks and kills babysitters. It is a man going after a group of women. In the Thing, A shape-shipping creature whose original form looks something like a vagina with teeth is stalking and killing a group of men in an isolated area. So in a way Carpenter is taking the formula he perfected and flipping it around. Now the men are the victims instead of the women. This is why The Thing is an amazing horror film. It's an original take on a movie that was made in the 50's, and it focuses on two elements that everyone can relate to. Claustrophobia and not being able to trust anyone. These men are stuck in a research station with a shape-shifting alien who wants nothing more than to kill them all. If they leave they will certainly die in the blizzard and so they are stuck inside not knowing who is the monster and who isn't. These is fundamental elements of horror that a lot of directors now miss. Instead of gore and guts, nothing scares people more than not being able to trust one another. It creates suspense for an audience and in that suspense you can scare the daylights out of them.