First let me say that horror movies are meant for big screens—not your computer monitor, not your television. During the first ooey-gooey gore scene at the press screening of The Thing—when a nice Norwegian gentleman’s head splits in two, his face ripping vertically from the inside out—a woman in the row behind me leaned back so far that she fell out of her chair. I’m not joking—she landed on her head and did a backward somersault into the aisle. Then she jumped up and ran out of the theater. Later in the film, a couple seated mid-row got up. When they reached the aisle, one of them tripped and fell down. I’ve never seen so many causalities during a movie, ever.
The second muy importante thing about watching horror in a theater is the sound. They had The Thing turned up so crazy loud that I “Aaaaah!-ed” and bounced in my seat more than a couple of times. When the monster-creature-alien-thingy suddenly jumps out to scare you, it’s hard to tell if it’s the visual or the sound assault that’s making you crap your pants.
There are lots of really intense trying-to-make-you-crap-your-pants moments in this remake, er, prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 classic. The original starred a young, pre-Quaker-Oatmeal-hawking Wilford Brimley and an even younger baby-blue-eyed Kurt Russell, who rocks a beard so big you could crawl inside it and take a nap. The original had one of the most ominous and menacing musical intros (scored by Ennio Morricone) in the history of horror. Creepy music was a huge part of how Carpenter scared us (see also Halloween and Stephen King’s Christine, both scored by Carpenter).
The prequel gives a nod to the original music but doesn’t use it throughout the film. It instead relies heavily on pure gore and well-executed “surprises” to shock you and make you jump. This is a good thing and makes the film worth the ride. It replaces Brimley and Russell with Aussie heartthrob Joel Edgerton and a doe-eyed Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who resumes Russell’s role of Keeper of the Flamethrower. When Russell torches the shit out of everybody and everything, he’s full of personal fire and memorable one-liners (“None of us are getting out of here alive, but neither is THAT THING!”). When Winstead’s character is manning the flame, she looks blank (or maybe slightly worried about her hair and/or if Edgerton’s character will ever kiss her). This lack of a strong lead is a bad thing. No one will remember this version half as much as Carpenter’s. For a remake, I mean prequel, they gave it a helluva good try, though. 
