If the prospect of a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1980s version of The Thing fills you with more dread than the shapechanging alien itself, then you might be reassured by Meredith Woerner’s report from the set of the upcoming movie over at io9. Woerner talked to the people behind the movie – which describes itself as a “prelude” to Carpenter’s movie, and stars Scott Pilgrim‘s Mary Elizabeth Winstead as an American paleontologist who, along with a team of Norwegian scientists, discovers an alien spaceship buried in the Antarctic ice – and came away suitably impressed by what she saw: An R-rated, splatter-filled horror movie that respects the Carpenter movie so much that it’ll even include echoes of that movie’s soundtrack in its own, made by a director who has seen Carpenter’s version “thousands of times.” Oh, and it may be heavily subtitled, too, according to Winstead:
A lot [of the film will be subtitled]. We did a lot of versions where we would do at the end, “OK now do an English version just in case.” I’m not sure exactly what they’re going to decide to do. But there’s definitely a lot of scenes with Norwegian. Which has been great, especially for my to not know what people are talking about. I don’t know if they’re talking about me, so you freak out a little… [English-language reshoots are] the same as [redoing] a scene without the f-word, just in case. It’s that sort of thing which is tacked in on the end, just in case someone has a problem with that scene being in Norwegian.
And, yes: John Carpenter approves, according to producer Marc Abraham:
Carpenter’s totally cool about this…. John’s signed off on all of this.
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