Café de Nuit

ScS of the Fraternity wrote:The most beautiful thing about Carpenter's The Thing was its stillness. Carpenter was able to show scenes without any characters even in the shot - just the hallways as his signature pulse-like music played. Those moments allowed the audience to think, to contemplate this dreadful situation, to let the audience's imaginations work. It was brilliant! The audience became as fearful and paranoid as the characters.

It was scene like that in other movies like Escape From New York, Hallowe'en and Prince of Darkness that also helped those movies come across so much more. Carpenter is a master of setting the scene, pace and tension that others should learn from.

And also, they can stop over explaining every minute detail of things, it spoils the mystery!

Take for instance A Night on Elm Street. In the original films it was widely known he killed children, but only hinted at that he might have done more to them. In the remake he's most certainly a pedophile now and that revelation seemed to have zero effect on his victims when they learned this! WTH?! I'm sure they'd have freaked out knowing that somewhere in their subconscious were these terrifying memories of what the man had done to them when they were 6 or 7. SO yeah, overly explained and under portrayed in reaction... not that the actors in that film could have acted there way out of a soggy paper bag...

Prince of Darkness is definitely Carpenter's style, creepy without being graphic. The Liquid Evil in the church basement, the dreams that are projections from 1999, the bizarre way all the homeless and vermin act, it just has that "get under your skin and crawl around" feel to it. Plus the ending where it's ambiguous if they stopped the evil. That's true Carpenter.

Exactly. Carpenter was not perfect, (Prince of Darkness being proof) but he had an amazing style.

We see this also in his greatest hit, Halloween, where scene after scene is dedicated to building tension by only hinting at what will soon occur.

Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. was probably a poor choice for a prequal/sequal/remake of The Thing. He's only had three directorial credits so far, and his father is a big movie producer. Do the math.