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John Carpenter’s The Thing refuses to change shape

The Thing is one of the most peculiar media series to try and wrap your head around. For starters, as far as series go, it struggles to qualify, mostly orbiting John Carpenter’s 1982 film, with a small and loose assemblage of multimedia offshoots (a comic series, a prequel film) dancing at the edges of its gravity. You could argue that the series itself resembles its titular namesake: an amorphous entity that devours and impersonates the characteristics of its predecessor; each incarnation a diminishing return of success. Part of the difficulty in capitalizing on The Thing’s clout through serialization is the…

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Listen to John Carpenter’s Lost Themes now

The importance of John Carpenter’s first decade or so of filmmaking is hard to overstate, particularly to fans of genre films. With laser-like precision in editing and pacing, he created definitive action (Assault on Precinct 13), dystopian (Escape from New York), slasher (Halloween), horror (The Thing), satire (They Live) and adventure (Big Trouble in Little China) films, racing as confidently and breathlessly between genres as his various protagonists did from corridor to corridor. Also: the dude got Kurt Russell. Like, really, really got him. Kurt Russell was the best action star.  Anyway, if Kurt Russell was the main course of those movies,…