I am not a big horror fan, but this story was never really horror at its core. And depending on how true to the book they stay (remember Who Goes There by John W Campbell?) this second re-release of 1951’s The Thing could be quite enjoyable. Most folks today tend to remember the 1982 John Carpenter remake, which was better done than most. What both movie versions had in common with the best Hitchcock thrillers or modern Japanese horror is that neither film showed you any blood and gore; the scary bits were all off screen, but they were implied so well that your imagination ran away with you filling in all the details. Of course, this meant you would be imaging the scene in the way that would be most terrifying TO YOU, so while no two people ever watched the same movie, every one who saw it found it one of the scariest things they had ever seen. It is rare when a film captures the essence of a book, but having the audience visualize the missing bits like that brought the movie experience a lot closer to the process the human brain goes through while reading, and trust me when I say this is a technique more films should make use of. It remains to be seen how well this latest incarnation of the story is done, but this is one of the true classics of science fiction.
