In the 35 years since John Carpenter‘s first big studio movie, 1982’s The Thing, which he made for Universal, was released, it’s metamorphosed from flop to underground classic in the horror genre.

The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their mouths, and it is their responsibility to keep this power in mind no matter what they say or do.

Hong Kong science fiction author Jeannette Ng became the city’s first to receive the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer last Sunday in Dublin, Ireland, but not without calling out the influential sci-fi writer whom the award is named after as a fascist. “John W.

In the 35 years since John Carpenter‘s first big studio movie, 1982’s The Thing, which he made for Universal, was released, it’s metamorphosed from flop to underground classic in the horror genre.

In an era of countless reboots, we have come to regard the whole process as a cynical exercise whose primary goal is to slash expenditure, but that was not always the case. There was a time when remaking movies was about taking a classic conception and upgrading it to meet modern standards.

The Thing

It might seem strange that a mythogeographer would be very interested in an action-horror movie from 1982, panned at the time of its release and largely ignored by audiences.

The Thing died a noisy death when it debuted in 1982. In fact, this masterful paranoiac thriller about a vicious shape-shifting alien infiltrating a group of scientists stationed in Antarctica bombed so hard that director John Carpenter was fired from his follow-up gig working on Firestarter.

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL - THE NOISE OF BEING Daniel Rourke - The Noise of Becoming: On Monsters, Men, and Every Thing in Between 26 February 2017 - De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands --- In this talk Daniel Rourke refigures the sci-fi horror monster The Thing from John Carpenter's 1982 film of the same name. The Thing is a creature of endless mimetic transformations, capable of becoming the grizzly faced men who fail to defeat it. The most enduring quality of The Thing is its ability to perform self-effacement and subsequent renewal at every moment, a quality we must embrace and mimic ourselves if we are to outmanoeuvre the monsters that harangue us. Daniel Rourke is a writer and artist based in London. In his work Daniel exploits speculative and science fiction in search of a radical ‘outside’ to the human(ities), including extensive research on the intersection between digital materiality, the arts, and posthumanism. In March 2015 artist & activist Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel released The 3D Additivist Manifesto – a call to push technologies beyond their breaking point, into the realm of the provocative, and the weird. sonicacts.com/2017/artists/daniel-rourkeCast: Sonic Acts

You see, what we’re talkin’ about here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and it imitates ‘em perfectly. –Dr. Blair, The Thing

In Scenic Routes, Mike D’Angelo looks at key scenes, explaining how they work and what they mean. Every year around this time, I find myself pondering the thin line between horror and suspense.

KEEP IT DIRTY, vol. a., “Filth” (2016) I am filthy [Je suis sale]—writes Lautréamont—I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellowish pus.

Since the 2011 publication of Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet there has been an explosion in theoretical work on everything horrible and horrific.

I got no immediate reply; Moxon was apparently intent upon the coals in the grate, touching them deftly here and there with the fire-poker till they signified a sense of his attention by a brighter glow.

Antarctica, 1982. The first week of winter. Two Norwegians in a helicopter are chasing a sled dog, which flees through the snow to a United States science station, where the 12 occupants emerge to see what's happening.

As the film writer Anne Billson has pointed out most critics were wrong about John Carpenter’s The Thing when it was first released in 1982. In general they hated it and damned the film as “too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.

Didja Know? This short story first appeared in Astounding Stories, August 1938, and is the inspiration for the 1951 film The Thing from Another World and 1982's The Thing. The 1982 version is much more faithful to the short story, though there are differences, as discussed below.

Uvula Audio‘s James Campanella has added a complete reading of H.P. Lovecraft’s “quintessential work of horror” to his podcast feed. In China Miéville’s introduction to the Modern Library paperback edition of At The Mountains Of Madness, he describes the novella as “taxonomy as horror.

On Being Thingly