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A dozen years have gone by since the release of director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing (watch the prequel Here). Looking back at the project now, van Heijningen has some regrets over the way the special effects were handled on the film, and that he was never able to make the sequel they had plans for.

Directed by van Heijningen from a screenplay written by Eric Heisserer and based on the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell (using the pen name Don A. Stuart), The Thing 2011 has the following synopsis: After Norwegian researchers discover an alien ship buried in the ice, paleontologist Kate Lloyd joins the team at the isolated Arctic outpost to investigate. She finds an organism that appears to have perished in the crash eons ago but, in fact, is about to awake. Freed from its icy prison,...

Warning: The Thing spoilers jump out of nowhere in this piece!

“The last place you want to be in a storm in Antarctica is locked up with a bunch of Norwegian guys,” Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a Columbia graduate and vertebrate paleontologist, is warned as she is flown into the tundra surrounding “Thule,” the central research station in The Thing (2011). The sequestered Norse researchers have never seen John Carpenter’s claustrophobic 1982 alien invasion classic, The Thing. After all, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and writer Eric Heisserer’s 2011 prequel is set at the Antarctic facility from which the very Thing from outer space splits at the beginning of the ‘82 film. So the newest movie, which is finding a quasi-renaissance on Netflix these days, is a translation of the prior events by Heijningen and Heisserer.

In the snowbound original film, when exploring a deserted outpost in the aftermath of an as-yet-unknown extraterrestrial disaster,...

Not only is 2011's The Thing not a remake of the John Carpenter movie of the same name, but it actually perfectly ties into the 1982 sci-fi film. Directed by Dutch filmmaker Matthijs van Heijningen Jr (The Forgotten Battle), and starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, 2011's The Thing focuses on a group of scientists at a Norwegian Antarctic research station who discover an alien spacecraft buried in the ice. Much like in John Carpenter's movie, and the original 1951 film adaptation of John W. Campbell's novella Who Goes There?, The Thing from Another World, the alien springs to life and begins killing people one by one.

Despite the plot similarities to both 1982's The Thing, and 1951's The Thing from Another World, 2011's The Thing is not a traditional remake of either film. Instead, it works hard to fit into the same canon as John Carpenter's film,...