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40 Years Later, the Keys to the Thing’s Greatness Lies in The Sequels You Never Knew It Had

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Take yourself back to the first time you saw John Carpenter’s The Thing. Those final shots of MacCready and Childs in the ruins of Outpost #31, looking at each other with that sneaking suspicion, scrutinizing their faces to find some sort of indication, some closure over who is really who. And if you’re anything like me, you might immediately find yourself wondering, what the hell is supposed to fill the void for want of another film like this as the end credits roll?

And the answer isn’t the 2011 prequel, surprisingly. One day I will get into the merits of that oft-maligned film.

With the 40th Anniversary of The Thing bringing repertory screenings crashing into cinemas, this is the perfect time to highlight the most fascinating of John Carpenter’s creations. While The Thing regularly clocks in as many viewers’ favorite horror film, most don’t recognize its spiritual successors in the genre, and they probably don’t even consider them sequels.

I’m talking about the other two-thirds of the Apocalypse Trilogy, an unofficial series of films conceived by John Carpenter following The Thing’s release. These include Prince of Darkness, and In The Mouth of Madness. Released over a span of 12 years, they explore possible causes for the collapse of society, human life, and even the destruction of all reality. There’s a link of chained, cinematic DNA between them all, and I think these movies are a perfect example of why The Thing is still so great. They serve as the offspring of The Thing, elaborating and surpassing their predecessor in certain aspects of their production, boiling down what makes Carpenter’s filmmaking so great.

APOCALYPTIC AUDIO DESIGN

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No horror movie composer can really hold a candle to the Ennio Morricone collaboration that Carpenter composed for The Thing. And while that soundtrack is a masterclass on making pulse-pounding music that accentuates a film, the other entries in the trilogy emphasize how music can bring more out than just simple paranoia.

Madness & Darkness add more audio textures that are thematically intertwined with the plot; many of these tracks’ soundscapes have hymnal undertones that match with the films’ explorations of religion; it employs synths that mimic organs, and Carpenter pairs subtle choir vocals to go with them. All three films have soundtracks that don’t just evoke more raw and tense emotion; they explore using music to evoke an environment’s more subtle details.

THE EFFECTS TO END ALL EFFECTS

The Thing is by far the chief example of how Carpenter’s films push effects to the limits of the human imagination. A materials varied monster factory overseen by a special effects neurosurgeon Rob Bottin, and his 35-member crew is responsible for putting together some of the most innovative effects to this date out there, utilizing the likes of microwaved bubblegum mixed with plastic, lube dyed green, and filled with explosive squibs, and even creamed corn for textural enhancements to put the creature in creature feature.

Prince of Darkness is similarly unnerving due to its novel and ambitiously done special effects throughout the film. It utilizes everything from shimmering pools of extremely toxic liquid mercury to trucks with brick walls attached to them, to almost 40,000 live insects inside a fake human body. It manages to be just as absolutely sickening and skin-crawling as its predecessor on a fifth of the budget—a cool $3 million compared to The Thing’s hefty $15 mil. At their core, the effects don’t have to be burning cash to fuel them; they can be relatively simplistic, and Carpenter knows how to work with his crews to make the simple, explosively complex looking to the human eye.

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WORLD SHATTERING CINEMATOGRAPHY

And what a talented eye John has. When you want to portray that the walls are closing in on your cast, you need to know how to frame and shoot a world where everything is falling apart. The decay rate varies between each film, and the cinematography of each is finely tailored to that fact.

We get three radically different settings for these films ranging from the arctic research base to a single dilapidated church, to a small town that may or may not even be real and the world it’s tenuously tied to. Carpenter plays to his natural strengths with each when it comes to shot composition; we get those trademark long takes, wide shots, and shot-blocking that give you a sense of dwindling space as characters move through their environments. The color grading of Madness (see: the color palette becoming cooler and darker) and the slowly diminishing light in Darkness quietly and expertly show the expanding influence of the film’s villains and their rewriting of rules as they close in on their targets.

The film is shot to enhance a rapidly escalating claustrophobia, even if there seems like there’s somewhere to run. The space is getting smaller—you’re just not aware of it yet.

FATALISTIC FINALES

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The endings of horror movies can make or break them. Despite how radically different the three are for each, they’re all unforgettable finales because they bring up the numbness caused by devastation, either emotionally, mentally, or materially.

The films that follow The Thing are the split halves of the expertly crafted grey, unsure ending that we get from Carpenter in that film. Prince of Darkness, despite its tragedy, is somewhat hopeful and hints toward a crisis that has been postponed but not outwitted; not all is lost, but enough is to make you feel empty.

In The Mouth of Madness rejects any sense of possible good in favor of a fate so terrible we don’t even get to see the brunt of its carnage, witnessing a gutted world and being the last left alive to be mocked by its new rulers. The movies don’t revel in the destruction as much as they home in on how small and weak that destruction makes the characters feel. Its cosmic horror at its greatest.

So, when you finish your rewatch of The Thing this weekend and are looking for something to scratch that “abandon all hope” itch, tune into Carpenters’ other greatest hits and prepare to have your world blown away all over again.

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Luis Pomales-Diaz is a freelance writer and lover of fantasy, sci-fi, and of course, horror. When he isn't working on a new article or short story, he can usually be found watching schlocky movies and forgotten television shows.

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‘Pet Sematary’ (2019) is Scarier Than You Remember

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Before we begin, I want to preface this by saying that I hold Pet Sematary near and dear to my heart. The novel was the first full-length Stephen King book I ever read and watching the 1989 Pet Sematary movie for the first time with my older sister is a beloved childhood memory that left me scarred in the best possible way. Little gore and scares that stick with you? Little me was invested. 

As with all things beloved, when the attempt to remake Pet Sematary was announced, I was equally excited and apprehensive. 

I know some people refuse to partake in any excitement about remakes. These same people unknowingly have favorites of their own that are remakes, but I digress. The lengths people will go to downplay a remake, simply because it’s a remake, immediately gives any movie an uphill climb to endeavor. It reminds me of what Mark Twain said: “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.”

The Pet Sematary remake brought us something new within a story we knew well. It created a horror we hadn’t gotten from the previous renditions. I am positively bewildered whenever I hear someone say that the remake of Pet Sematary wasn’t scary. As a standalone film, this movie is terrifying, and I am here to remind you why.

Everything Making Pet Sematary (2019) Worth the Watch

We Don’t Talk About Zelda

There’s something I need to make clear right away. The point of this piece is to advocate for the Pet Sematary remake’s scariness; this is not a comparison piece against the original. That being said, it’s undeniable that the original left large shoes to fill when presenting this nightmare on screen, much of which the movie amounted to successfully. However, Andrew Hubatsek, the actor who played Zelda in 1989’s Pet Sematary, is the only Cinderella who can fill these slippers. As hard as I try to view the film as a standalone piece, this is one point that I cannot remove my expectancy bias. Zelda was the scariest part of 1989’s Pet Sematary, and the remake could not surpass his spectacular performance. There is some beauty in this, though, as the scariest parts of the 2019 Pet Sematary, directed by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, instead all came from the star, as it should.

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Why Gage Didn’t Die in Pet Sematary (2019)

One of the biggest gripes we’ve seen about the film is its divergence from King’s material; on that note, I have two points. First, there’s nothing wrong with a horror director bringing the idea of someone else’s horror to life their own way. Dare to be different, so long as the original work is still respected.

Second, these divergences gave us the scariest parts of the movie- scares that were brand new to Pet Sematary lore. 

Third, the movie is King-approved. Surprise, I had three points. But back to that second one. 

Spoilers from here on out. Both King’s novel and the 1989 film adaptation of Pet Sematary have two-year-old Gage Creed die by the semi-truck that killed seven-year-old Ellie instead in 2019’s Pet Sematary. This change made fans furious for the apparent unnecessary blasphemous change to the plot. 

Again, this isn’t a comparison piece, but after Miko Hughes’ performance as Gage Creed in the 1989 film, it would have been hard to see anyone else play that part anyway. Especially given that child labor laws are not the same today as they were in the eighties, that role would be tremendously difficult to pull off today with an actual toddler. Fun fact: Jete Laurence was 12 when Pet Sematary was released, and the role of Gage Creed in this film was played by twins Hugo and Lucas Lavoie.

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Through this crucial change to the plot, we can see the perspective of someone who’d been brought back, allowing us to glimpse the darkness brought forth by the Pet Sematary like never before. Gage could only say a few words, so we were given the whole painful perspective for the first time through seven-year-old Ellie.  

The Scariest Moments in Pet Sematary (2019)

“It’s only a tangle.”

From the moment Ellie returns from her resting place in the Pet Sematary, the movie is filled with a sense of dread. We know that Judd Crandall means it when he says, “Sometimes dead is better,” and that people don’t come back from the Pet Sematary quite right. This film gives us the added horrific splendor in the fact that Ellie returns in a body that was 1) mangled in a car accident and 2) had already started the process of decomposition after autopsy. (I can’t believe I even need to continue my argument for this film.)

As such, Ellie returns with a look that is evident in all that I previously mentioned. It’s a goreful tidbit I never realized was woefully absent from its predecessor and made every scene with Ellie that much more uncomfortable. There was no looking at her and denying what you were looking at. 

Because of the added insight into what an exhumed body might look like, we’re treated to the horrific bathtub scene where Louis Creed brushes his freshly undead daughter’s hair. He hits a snag, prompting her to ask in her little, evil, woodsy voice, “What was that?”

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“It’s only a tangle,” he says, as he reveals he’d snagged onto staples in the back of her head. (You know, from where they had to staple her head back together after she died? Yikes)

That’s far from the only horrific incident with Jete Laurence’s little she-demon, as Louis Creed lays in bed next to his daughter, who can’t sleep, and as she lay, quietly seething, she proclaims:

“I can hear the woods.”

A quick aside to mention that Jason Clarke’s role as the grief-stricken Louis Creed was so well done. He perfectly encapsulated this place between “I’m happy I brought my daughter back” and “Dear god, what have I done?”

These polarizing viewpoints on existence are thematic in the film, as we see Ellie go through her own crises, as she exists as a little girl, but something else entirely simultaneously. This junction is made clear by her dancing scene the morning after she comes back. Ellie’s changed back into the clothes she was buried in, twirling around like a ballerina, but with a vicious, malicious undertone growing in apparency until she smashes up the room. Ellie is the little girl she once was who loved to dance, but it’s all tainted with a growing darkness now. 

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Likewise, Rachel Creed is in her own existential crux, as she actively tries to avoid death due to her childhood trauma just to have it hit her right in her worst nightmare by losing her daughter (and subsequently being murdered by her).

Victor Pascal is also split between states of being. He exists in a limbo where his sole mission has been stopping Louis Creed from succumbing to the call of the Pet Sematary. Ironically, he more than likely perpetuates the spread of evil, as his messages alert Rachel to return to the house, securing her and Gage’s begotten fates. But I digress. 

The dancing scene gets a lot of hate, but frankly, I’m obsessed with it because it hammers in these existential contrasts. These conflicts we see experienced by everyone on screen make these people all the more “real”, and the horrors they experience more palpable. Pet Sematary has always been a scary thought for parents in general, because at its heart, it investigates the wild recesses humans will explore when faced with every parent’s worst nightmare. The Pet Sematary remake leaned hard into this core issue, and as such, served us the same horror that made Stephen King’s story great in the first place.

An Unwarranted Hatred for a Legit Scary Movie

Overall, Pet Sematary (2019) is a remarkable scary movie and doesn’t deserve half the hate it gets. Undead Ellie was pure nightmare fuel through and through, and I’m bewildered how anyone else could say otherwise.

Is Pet Sematary (2019), in fact, trash? Is Undead Ellie not scary at all?

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First, stop lying to yourself. Then, feel free to vent all your Pet Sematary-related frustrations to the Horror Press Instagram account. I won’t receive your messages, but I’m sure our Editor-In-Chief, Curator of All Things Horror Press, James-Michael Fleites, will happily pass them along to me if you remember to give us a follow while you’re there. Of course, you can always stop by to spread love, too, but do people go out of their way to do that?

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What Are the Scariest Horror Remakes?

Should horror remakes exist? Should they not? I’m not too interested in answering that question. But the truth is that they exist, and considering how bleeding many of them there are, the question we need to ask is: Are they scary? I would like to take you on a tour of a few of the movies that respond to that question with an emphatic yes. They’re not ranked, because horror is such a subjective experience that the rankings would mean even less here than usual. And there are plenty I haven’t included, so if your favorite isn’t on the list, that doesn’t mean it’s not scary. That just means it’s not on my list. Also, a movie’s presence on the list doesn’t mean the original isn’t scary. OK, that’s the housekeeping out of the way. On with the frights!

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Horror remakes get a bad rap. In an increasingly IP-driven movie marketplace, it’s easy to understand why. Many audiences want fresh, original horror movies with unique points of view and new things to say about the world. And they want to complain when those movies get remakes and sequels down the line. It’s how things are supposed to work!

Should horror remakes exist? Should they not? I’m not too interested in answering that question. But the truth is that they exist, and considering how bleeding many of them there are, the question we need to ask is: Are they scary?

I would like to take you on a tour of a few of the movies that respond to that question with an emphatic yes. They’re not ranked, because horror is such a subjective experience that the rankings would mean even less here than usual. And there are plenty I haven’t included, so if your favorite isn’t on the list, that doesn’t mean it’s not scary. That just means it’s not on my list. Also, a movie’s presence on the list doesn’t mean the original isn’t scary. OK, that’s the housekeeping out of the way. On with the frights!

The Woman in Black (2012)

This is a new mounting of the Susan Hill haunted house novel of the same name following a TV movie adaptation from 1989. Notwithstanding the chronologically confounding choice of casting Daniel Radcliffe as a father just one year out from the end of the Harry Potter franchise, it goes without saying that applying a movie budget to the title allowed it to bring the eerie Eel Marsh House to life in all of the elegant, crumbling squalor that Hammer Films (and its many partners) could provide. 

This is a very jump scare heavy movie, so it won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but it pairs those jack-in-the-box moments with an atmosphere of such thick, oppressive, foggy gloom that the creeping damp of its central location gets into your bones even if you’re impervious to everything else going bump in the night.

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Evil Dead (2013)

The thing this remake gets most right about Sam Raimi’s original 1981 masterpiece and its follow-up Evil Dead II, is that a movie can provoke a reaction by pushing the boundaries to the extreme, whether it be a laugh or a scream. There can be something terrifying about the sheer visceral nature of the gore in Evil Dead all on its own, especially in the smaller, more relatable moments like a person’s skull being slammed into the solid porcelain of a toilet.

But on top of that, you have director Fede Alvarez’s go-for-broke aesthetic there to disorient you while the movie throws scene after pulse-pounding scene of unmitigated mayhem upon the screen. It’s bound to get under your skin at some point or another. And maybe even deeper.

The Invisible Man (2020)

The Invisible Man, an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel that so memorably became one of the cornerstones of the Universal horror unit in 1933, has big shoes to fill and does so with aplomb. It certainly helps that when Elisabeth Moss is scared of something onscreen, you can’t help but believe her. But this is also another entry where, whatever layer you peel back of the onion, there’s something different and disturbing underneath. In addition to some of the most exquisitely crafted scare gags of the decade, at its heart, the movie is about the very human and devastating violence that one person in a couple can inflict on the other. 

The Thing (1982)

The Thing is a new adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr. novella Who Goes There?, which was previously adapted in 1951 as The Thing from Another World. Here’s the thing about The Thing. It ups the ante something fierce. In addition to throwing mind-bending, state-of-the-art special effects at the screen every opportunity it gets, John Carpenter uses every item in his toolbox to build and sustain a sense of creeping dread, from an all-timer cast of stars and character actors to Ennio Morricone’s brooding, lurking score.

The Ring (2002)

The Ring is an English-language remake of the 1998 Japanese-language movie Ringu, which itself was adapted from a novel by Koji Suzuki. So if there’s anything we’ve learned from this list, it should be that horror authors really deserve their flowers. Gore Verbinski directs the movie with aplomb, adding lavish visual elements that threaten to drown you in all their heady, vainglorious grandeur.

But he doesn’t shy away from the muscular, intense scares of the original movie, either. The Ring is a movie about someone trying desperately to save themselves while the clock ticks down to their death, and though it takes its time to get to the big, iconic showstopping moment, the movie doesn’t let up in its constant reminders that certain doom lies around every corner.

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