Skip Halloween and Watch John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy Instead

For general audiences, John Carpenter’s always gonna be most famous for Halloween. But this spooky season, I want to highlight some other examples of the guy’s greatest works, specifically something that stands shoulder to shoulder with Halloween.

That’s because that thing is actually three things, and one of them is The Thing. I’m talking about John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy, a series of thematically related and narratively unrelated movies he made starting with 1982’s The Thing, continuing with 1987’s Prince of Darkness, and concluding with 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness. For horror fans, there’s no better way to kiss it all goodbye.

The Thing (1982)

Now look, when we move on to the next two movies in the Apocalypse Trilogy, a little of this is gonna become me convincing you why you should check out those slightly underloved entries in Carpenter’s filmography. But The Thing speaks for itself. It’s a pillar of both the sci-fi and horror genres and it stands shoulder to shoulder with Halloween as one of John Carpenter’s absolute best movies. It features career-defining performances from both Kurt Russell and Keith David, two of the coolest f****n’ guys alive, as they battle back a shape-shifting alien organism that assimilates its host. If you haven’t watched The Thing, it’s on you at this point. But what about The Thing in context as the first movie of the Apocalypse Trilogy?

When you think of the term “apocalypse” in film, you probably think of big, sweeping images of desolation. But Carpenter’s view of the end times is a lot more lonely. The very first shot of The Thing is from space, when we see the alien’s ship crash sometime in the past, but everything else that happens in this story with world-ending stakes is locked to Antarctica. It calls into focus an element of Carpenter’s apocalyptic storytelling that we’ll see a lot of throughout the trilogy: restricted perspective, the idea that we only have a very narrow view into the fallout of the events being depicted. Carpenter makes lower-budget movies, so his films don’t jump around to every corner of the globe showing you how the events of his stories are reverberating. It’s an inside-looking-out approach where the characters and the audience are handcuffed to each other, processing information together in real time, dreading the larger ramifications of their predicaments in the same way, partly because they can’t see the whole picture. It’s one of the things that makes each movie in the trilogy so intense – all that we can’t see. 

And we don’t need anything else: When the magic ’80s computer tells Wilford Brimley’s Blair that the organism will assimilate the entire global population within three years if it can escape Antarctica, it only takes the look on Blair’s face and the knowledge that no help is coming for Carpenter to imbue all that follows with a wild amount of gravity. Every single choice matters and could determine the fate of the human race, so the chaos, mistrust, and rash decisions that follow and leave Outpost 31 in flames is a pretty bleak take on our collective odds at surviving something like this.

Carpenter takes time early in The Thing to humanize the crew of Outpost 31 with specific interests and personality traits, to color them with life and help them stand in for the whole human race as it and they stare down their demise, whether they know it or not. That essential humanity the alien imitations strip away speaks to another thing that binds the Apocalypse Trilogy together: All three of these apocalypses involve a loss of self. It’s not just an end to the human race at stake, it’s also an end to the idea of humanity and individuality in each case. 

It's not just an end to the human race at stake, it's also an end to the idea of humanity in each of these films.

So The Thing contains the end of the world to some easily readable, corporeal boundaries – human bodies, human society. Our next stop on the Apocalypse Trilogy tour contains the end of the world in an ancient glass jar full of swirling green Satan goo! And that s**t’s starting to leak!