This past weekend, most of the FANGORIA team was in Dallas, TX, attending this year’s big Texas Frightmare Weekend. As per usual, the convention wrangled together a number of notable guests, interesting panels, and all the horror merch that could fit into their venue, and by all accounts the whole thing was a helluva lot of fun.
One person on-hand for the festivities? Legendary director John Carpenter (The Thing, Halloween), who participated in a Q&A which allowed fans to shotgun questions in his general direction. As you might expect, this inevitably led to a moment wherein someone in the audience asked Carpenter a question he’s surely been asked ten million times before: was Keith David’s Childs inhabited by The Thing at the end of Carpenter’s 1982 film? Or was it maybe Kurt Russell’s MacReady?
In response, Creepy Catalog quotes Carpenter as saying:
“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.'”
Well, that’s an interesting thing to hear. While The Thing is generally agreed upon as an iconic horror classic at this point, neither it nor its 2011 prequel (also titled The Thing) fared well upon release, and said prequel has not enjoyed the same sort of cultural reevaluation that Carpenter’s original received in the years since. Speaking purely from a studio standpoint, greenlighting a sequel to The Thing would be something of a risky move.
But what if we consider The Thing 2 from the standpoint of fans? Is that something they (we, to be clear) want? Would either Kurt Russell or Keith David – whoever wasn’t inhabited by The Thing, in other words – be involved? Would either of them need to be? Would the action take us beyond Antarctica, perhaps into some warmer spot on the globe, or would it keep us in the same locale the other two Thing movies took place in? Are we talking about this in terms of Carpenter directing, or are we thinking he’d be onboard as an EP while someone else calls the shots from a director’s chair? We have a lot of questions.
Of course, there’s nothing more to go on at this time. This could turn out to be something, could turn out to be nothing. How’s about we all sit down here next to this fire, have a drink, and wait to see what shakes out?
