5. The Thing — The Monster Could Have Been Much Less… Well, The Thing
John Carpenter's The Thing is one of the most famous horror remakes ever made.
And yet the production could have looked dramatically different.
The 1951 movie The Thing from Another World had already established a version of the story, but Carpenter and his team wanted to move much closer to John W. Campbell's original novella, Who Goes There?
That meant embracing the idea of a creature capable of perfectly imitating other organisms.
Which created one of the movie's greatest strengths:
You don't know who you can trust.
The paranoia is almost as important as the gore.
And the practical effects became so grotesque that audiences initially weren't exactly lining up to congratulate the filmmakers.
Today, the movie is considered a classic.
Back then?
Let's just say audiences weren't immediately prepared for a man's chest to develop teeth.
