The Thing (1982): Carpenter's Paranoia Machine and What It Owes Who Goes There

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

There is a story critics like to tell about The Thing, and the story is almost true. It opened on 25 June 1982, two weeks after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and audiences who wanted a friendly alien recoiled from John Carpenter’s version, which arrives by crashing a spaceship into the ice and then eating the sled dogs. The reviews were savage. The film lost money. Carpenter, who had come off Halloween and Escape from New York as one of the most bankable genre directors alive, spent years in the commercial cold because of it. All of that happened. What the story leaves out is that The Thing was right and everyone else was wrong, and the ice took forty years to admit it.

Paranoia - vo.rs

The Thing (1982): Carpenter's Paranoia Machine and What It Owes Who Goes There