‘The Thing’ and ‘The Hateful Eight’ collide.
It’s no secret that while envisioning and making The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino had The Thing on his mind. There’s the obvious parallel in the casting of Kurt Russell, and the fact that Ennio Morricone, who did the music for both The Hateful Eight and The Thing, injected some unused music from the latter into the former, but the most obvious link is the way Tarantino studied the situation of The Thing – people sharing the same, tiny space as protection against a snow-buried, hostile backdrop – and used it and the setting to enhance the inherent paranoia of the storyline.
If you’ve never watched The Hateful Eight and The Thing as a double-feature I highly, highly recommend it, but if that’s too much of a time commitment for you, then just plop down for 90 seconds and watch this mashup from Paul Garrison Dean entitled The Thing Rides West, which envisions what The Hateful Eight could have been if it was a Prometheus-esque prequel-sequel to Carpenter’s horror-sci-fi hybrid.
Above all the other connections, this video is a fun reminder of the unexpected similarities between the genres of science-fiction and westerns and how both rely upon the environment for their drama, both contain themes of exploration and manifest destiny, and both feature characters, by and large, who are seeking something better by venturing into the hostile unknown.
Related Topics: John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful EIght, The Thing
