If you’ve seen The Hateful Eight, you’ve probably gathered that Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of John Carpenter‘s The Thing, even going so far as to utilize unused cues from Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack for The Thing in his own snowy suspense tale. As it turns out, Reservoir Dogs was also inspired by The Thing, which made a huge impact on Tarantino.

Speaking with Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” earlier this week, Tarantino explained what it is about Carpenter’s horror classic that makes it so effectively terrifying.

“I love both of them – I love Howard Hawks’s The Thing and I love John Carpenter’s The Thing,” Tarantino explains. “Rob Bottin’s effects in [Carpenter’s] movie are some of the greatest practical special effects ever put on a movie theater screen. I think it’s one of the greatest horror movies ever made if not one of the greatest movies ever made.”

He continues, “One of the reasons The Thing holds a special place in my heart… I love horror movies, I’m a big horror movie fan. I don’t get scared in horror movies. I respond to suspense, I respond to that – oh what’s gonna happen next, and I can jump by a “boo” scare – but that’s not really terror. I don’t get scared in movies. The Thing I got scared in.”

“I was scared and it made me want to put it under a microscope,” Tarantino explains. “About why I was actually frightened during that movie. And I think the reason is this. These men are trapped in this situation in this arctic research center, and one or more of them are possibly this Thing that’s going to devour all of them. And no one knows if you are the guy I’ve known forever or you are a Thing. And the movie makes the paranoia of that so palpable, so real, it’s almost like another character in the movie. The sheer paranoia of it. They’re trapped in the Antarctic, in this shelter, and so the paranoia is bouncing off of the four walls… until it has nowhere to go except through the fourth wall into the audience. I started feeling exactly like they felt.”

He adds, “When I started writing Reservoir Dogs, I was like, I need to have that aspect that’s in The Thing. I need to trap these bastards in this warehouse and no one can trust anybody else… and I want the paranoia of what’s going in that warehouse to bounce across the walls and hopefully, like in The Thing, it will go out into the audience.”

You can watch the segment from “The Late Show” below. Shortly after, you can go deeper into the 1982 Carpenter classic by streaming a past episode from our own weekly horror podcast series, Knight Light.