John Carpenter’s Michael Myers and Laurie Strode – are now part of pop culture.
Halloween followed Halloween II, but not all of them have followed the same timeline. The most recent one, simply titled Halloween and released in 2018, is a direct sequel to Carpenter’s original film, once more resetting the timeline.
Halloween set the ground for now popular slasher films like Friday the 13th, and has also served as inspiration to many others. Like most films, Halloween included references to other classic films from the genre, among those one that Carpenter ended up directing a couple of years later. The film Laurie and Tommy are watching before the whole chaos begins is none other than The Thing From Another World, released in 1951. The film is based on the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, and is considered one of the best sci-fi films of the decade.
A new adaptation of Campbell’s story was in development in the mid-1970s, and the plan was for it to be more faithful to the source material than the 1951 version. Carpenter was approached to direct the film in 1976, but as he was mainly an independent film director, Universal went with Tobe Hooper instead. However, producers weren’t happy with Hooper’s approach, and decided to look for other ideas and directors (among those John Landis), but ended up putting the project on hold.
The project was revived after the success of Ridley Scott’s The Thing reference in Halloween is a fun detail that ended up becoming a reality for Carpenter, and both films have now a special place in the history of the horror genre.
