The Thing: The History of a Franchise

by Phil Hore

In 1982 Universal Pictures, a studio famous for its monster movies, unleased a new terror on the silver screens of the world that would change everything…not that anyone knew that at the time.  Today John Carpenter’s THE THING consistently ranks in the top of favourite or influential film lists, but when it was first released it was not only considered a bomb, reviewers used words like ‘obscene’, ‘gross’ and ‘instant junk’. For the first time we look at the history of the entire THING franchise, not just the 1982 film or its prequel, nor the original 1951 version ‘The Thing from Another World’. In this book we look at the radio versions, the comics, novels, computer games, music and how, from a 1931 novella by John W. Campbell Jr. The Thing began infecting our lives and eventually took over the world by initiating one of the longest media franchises in history and influencing many others like ALIEN, Dr Who and the X-files. Interviewing many of those involved, we’ll look at the marketing strategies, the reviews, the blunders, censorship… and yes, we may even figure out exactly why The Thing failed at the box office in 1982.

296 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 14, 2023

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was just a hot mess.

When you buy a book about the making of a favorite film, you don't want to read (and I'm paraphrasing here) that "so much has been written about this film elsewhere, I'm not going to bother to present that information. Go read those books and listen to those commentaries." Gee, thanks.

Author Phil Hore spends an ungodly amount of time on a 1950s novelty song called "The Thing", which I guarantee has zero connection to the Campbell book or the (Still unmade at the time) Hawks film...this should all have been edited out. He endlessly uses "Garnish" instead of GARNER. He constantly says "roll" instead of "role". He misspells Kurt RUSSELL as "Russel" almost every time he is mentioned. WILFORD Brimley becomes WALTER Brimley. He goes on and on about how he knows the 82 remake got bad reviews because the critics were not show the FILM, but a 20-minute sizzle reel...This is just ludicrous. What reviewer worth a damn, especially Roger Ebert, would risk their reputation by reviewing a film they had not seen?

He blames Universal for "withdrawing" the film too soon...That's just not how things work, especially in the jam-packed summer of 1982. The film BOMBED, and theaters, not the studio, wanted it out to make room for moneymakers, which there were plenty of. He blames Sci-Fi fans for not supporting the film...Dude, THE THING was a HORROR film, and a really gross one, at that. I saw it when I was 11, opening weekend, and it was so gross that people were walking out. That kind of word-of-mouth was the film's poison, not snobby Sci-Fi fans.

And Star Trek fans are "Treksters"....? Never heard that one before.

This book brought more annoyance than enlightenment. Take a hard pass.

[Irwin Fletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

As other people have said the book probably needed an editor. Not so much for stuff like typos, there are some of those but they're not a big deal, but to keep his mind from wandering and edit out some of his tangents. But even though it's not perfect I actually learned some things about the franchise I didn't know. I've read other books about the Carpenter film and his career in general and never learned anything I didn't already know, and usually those authors went on their own tangents about pet theories that the Thing is vaginal and represents men's fears of blah blah blah blah. So I appreciate the book for being informative and unpretentious.

One thing I do find odd is that even though the author wanted to tell us about every single piece of Thing-related merchandise (of which there isn't THAT much) and every single film or song that references The Thing... he completely left out any mention of The Thing books that have started coming out. By the time this book had come out Betancourt had put out Campbell's "Frozen Hell" and a short story collection called "Short Things" while Outpost 31's Todd Cameron had put out his unofficial MacReady prequel "Snowblind". We get a whole chapter about a song that has very little connection to this franchise and have to read the lyrics of songs with Thing references but no mention of the books that continue the franchise? He does talk about the Novelization but other than that nothing about the rest which I found weird.

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads more like a series of fan blog posts strung together into book length. There's a lot of material and ideas, some of which are far fetched and barely worthy of inclusion and some that dead end making you wish they were explored further. There's no table of contents because that would have required a coherence not present in the structure of this book. Still might be interesting to the most hardcore fans of THE THING. I was not particularly engaged although I may seek out some related media discussed in it.

[José Rafael · Rating 1 out of 5]

Extremely boring, full of typos and lacking pictures.