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
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.
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
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.