Movies - TV
How The Thing Accidentally Became The Start Of John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy
By DEVIN MEENAN
The films in John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse trilogy” — “The Thing,” “Prince of Darkness,” and “In the Mouth of Madness ” — have no overt story links connecting them; however, they have a shared theme of depicting the world’s end by a greater force. This loose trilogy wasn’t something Carpenter planned, but instead, a career arc that happened after he had a realization when working on “The Thing.”
In “The Thing,” a computer estimates that it would only take the alien creature three years to assimilate humanity if it could reach civilization. Carpenter explained, “‘The Thing’ turned out to be an end-of-the-world project. I don’t think I knew at first. It was just a monster movie, but the implications of ‘The Thing’ became clear, and it was like, ‘Oh dear, there’s no way out of this. It’s the end of mankind.’”
Although Carpenter accidentally stumbled into the apocalypse movie genre, he continued to explore this theme later in his career with “Prince of Darkness” and “In the Mouth of Madness.” Carpenter has only released two films since the turn of the century, but he also worked on two episodes of Showtime’s “Masters of Horror,” and he listed the “Cigarette Burns” episode as an homage to his trilogy.