John Carpenter's The Thing is a remake of the 1951
Howard Hawks-produced film
The Thing From Another World, which starred an uncredited
James Arness as a bloodthirsty vegetable being from space, with the requisite
mad scientist and hokey ending, directed by
Christian Nyby. (Carpenter's connection to this film goes way back. It is the
movie within the movie playing on TV in
Halloween.)
The Carpenter version is actually much closer to the roots of the tale. Both are based on Who Goes There?, by John W. Campbell, but Hawkes threw away most of the tightly plotted, paranoid, cramped story of a group of Antarctic explorers menaced by a polymorphic alien. The ending of Carpenter's film, with the last two survivors freezing to death, unable to trust that the other one is human, is the ending the story should have had.
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