John Carpenter’s The Thing is widely considered one of the best horror movies of all time. It also has more than enough sequel potential. The original film tells the story of an alien that crash-landed at an outpost in Antarctica. Over the course of the film, the Thing is able to disguise itself as the station crew (and even animals) until it decides to strike. The movie has been praised for its amazing practical effects, its claustrophobic ambiance, and the sense of isolation it invokes in the viewer.
At the end of the film (spoilers!), after wiping out most of the camp, the scientists that are left decide to blow up the whole building. They assume the Thing is planning to go into hibernation until a rescue squad arrives. They decide that there’s no escape for them, and it’s better to make sure the Thing doesn’t reach civilization. Kurt Russell’s MacReady, a pilot, seems to be the only one left. That’s when he’s approached by Keith David’s Childs, who went missing sometime earlier. The film ends with a tense standoff between them, with no resolution to the question of whether either of them is secretly the Thing in disguise.
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There was a 2011 version of The Thing, directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, but that was actually a prequel that led up to the events of John Carpenter’s The Thing, not a sequel. And fans have been speculating for decades about what might have happened after the events of the original film.
It sounds like maybe we could actually see what happened next after all these years. Carpenter recently appeared at a horror convention in Texas, where he was asked if Childs was possessed at the end of The Thing. He refused to answer — but for good reason, he said…
I have been sworn to secrecy, okay, because there may be, I don’t know if there will be … there may be a Thing 2.
That’s certainly not a guarantee of a project, and Carpenter could be alluding to something other than a film sequel. (Someone might be working on a Thing novel or comic or video game, for example.) But this is quite an intriguing development nonetheless.
