by Mister PuckPart 0: The exciting prologue
or
How I stop worrying and learned to love the remakes
This is going to be a long editorial, there is no way around it, and believe me, I’ve looked. So it will be broken up into numerous posts, each to be presented in it’s own time. We will begin slow here in this opening part, which we shall call part 0, the origin, the epilogue, and I will try and express why.
This journey began as a review of one of my favorite movies of all time, my honest to everything comfort movie: “John Carpenter’s The Thing”. But my problem is that I like information and the more I gathered, the more there was to discuss, no, to explain. Most people already know that “John Carpenter’s The Thing” (Henceforth referred to as “JC’s Thing” to save digital ink, and because there will be many, many Things.) is a remake of “The Thing from Another World (1951)”, and many who care about such things will know that itself is an adaptation of a novel, “Who goes there?(1938)”.
There are, however, a few more steps in the journey, both before, and after, the end. With so much material to go through, one article, even a long one, would never suffice. It would become a long string of rambling exposition without form, and as you will come to see…
Form is important to this story.
Already my words have been a tad misleading, for this didn’t begin with a review, but with a labor of love. This began as a child watching a flickering black and white image on a tiny color television. A child watching a group of isolated men open door after door after door knowing that soon that.. that… Thing would be standing there. But this isn’t just an editorial about a singular alien beast. While “The Thing” IS a creature, an alien by description, it’s more than that. It’s a living colony working together to create something more, and like that alien creature, every cell of this story is a living thing that when merged, become so much more. Every part of The Thing is the whole of the thing. So we shall start there, the whole Thing.
As this series of articles progresses, we shall cover the anatomy of the thing, the original book, the entire span of films (including the lesser known), the remake, and eventually the “other” adaptations. But that’s getting too far ahead, for now.
Next Time:
Part 1: Humble beginnings?,
Or,
Why I’m afraid of doors.
