Speaking with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, Quentin Tarantino explained why John Carpenter’s The Thing is one of the few movies that ever scared him, and how it helped him to find the right tone for Reservoir Dogs.
Tarantino never hid his love for Carpenter’s The Thing. The filmmaker worked with The Thing’s composer, Ennio Morricone, on The Hateful Eight, going as far as to reuse some cues from the horror classic in the snowy Western. However, it looks like The Thing also helped to define one of Tarantino’s earlier works, Reservoir Dogs. And it’s all because Carpenter’s masterpiece is one of the few movies to cause a fear reaction on Tarantino.
According to Tarantino, he’s a “big horror movie fan” that doesn’t usually get scared. In the filmmaker’s words, “I respond to suspense, I respond to that – oh what’s gonna happen next, and I can jump by a ‘boo’ scare – but that’s not really terror.” The Thing, however, scared Tarantino. A lot. And that’s why the filmmaker decided to “put it under a microscope” and try to understand what’s exactly so scary about Carpenter’s film.
As Tarantino describes his conclusions about The Thing:
“I think the reason [for it being scary] is this. These men are trapped in this situation in this arctic research center, and one or more of them are possibly this Thing that’s going to devour all of them. And no one knows if you are the guy I’ve known forever or you are a Thing. And the movie makes the paranoia of that so palpable, so real, it’s almost like another character in the movie. The sheer paranoia of it. They’re trapped in the Antarctic, in this shelter, and so the paranoia is bouncing off of the four walls… until it has nowhere to go except through the fourth wall into the audience. I started feeling exactly like they felt.”
It turns out the feeling of paranoia is exactly what feeds Reservoir Dogs, so The Thing was a huge source of inspiration for Tarantino. As the filmmaker puts it:
“When I started writing Reservoir Dogs, I was like, I need to have that aspect that’s in The Thing. I need to trap these bastards in this warehouse and no one can trust anybody else… and I want the paranoia of what’s going in that warehouse to bounce across the walls and hopefully, like in The Thing, it will go out into the audience.”
Tarantino still hasn’t decided which will be the last film of his career. It could be Kill Bill 3, or something wilder like a spaghetti western comedy. While the filmmaker still ponders how to say goodbye to Hollywood, it’s interesting to go back to his previous works and understand better how his classic films came to be.
Check out the segment from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert below: