Tobe Hooper's The Thing Plan Was A Sci-Fi Moby Dick

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Before it became John Carpenter's The Thing, Tobe Hooper planned a very different take on the material. John Carpenter made his career with the shock success of 1978's Halloween, which was produced for a tiny budget and became one of the highest-grossing independent movies of all time. It's now a genre classic, and while Carpenter's budgets steadily increased with follow-ups The Fog and Escape From New York, it was 1982's The Thing that would be his first big studio assignment.

The Thing is a remake of 1951's The Thing From Another World, which was a childhood favorite of Carpenter's. He had little interest in a straight-up remake though, and instead decided to go back to the themes of the original novella Who Goes There? This involved an alien shapeshifter running amok in an Arctic research base, with themes of paranoia and mistrust being key to the story.

Carpenter brilliantly realized this element in this story, alongside some groundbreaking practical effects. Sadly, the film was a failure upon release but has since become a beloved genre classic. The Thing's co-producer Stuart Cohen was a friend of Carpenter's and first approached him about remaking the film in the late 1970s, though Universal didn't think the director was a big enough name. Instead, the first helmer onboard was Tobe Hooper, who was hot off the success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, another gamechanger in the genre.

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Cohen recalls in his blog The Original Fan how Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel weren't really taken with the core themes of Who Goes There? They felt the process of assimilation and how it works would be difficult to dramatize, so they came up with their own take on The Thing. Cohen described this pitch as an "Antarctica Moby Dick" centered around a character dubbed The Captain hunting a large, non-shapeshifting alien.

While certainly a different take, Cohen also describes Tobe Hooper's The Thing as "dense, humorless, almost impenetrable" and it was badly received by just about everybody involved. Hooper and Henkel soon exited the project, with John Landis very briefly in the mix for the job while the likes of I Am Legend author Richard Matheson passed on writing it. The project eventually circled back to Carpenter after the success of Alien made the project hot at the studio. While Tobe Hooper's The Thing wasn't warmly greeted, there's nothing to say he couldn't have made a unique monster movie from it. That said, considering Carpenter produced a true classic with his take, it worked out well for everyone.