Movies
Strike Entertainment Producers Call Making ‘The Thing’ “Irresistible”
Shooting is gearing up to begin in British Columbia and Toronto for Universal Pictures’ The Thing, a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing from Another World (1951). Strike Entertainment producing team Marc Abraham and Eric Newman chatted with the LA Times about the alien-horror pic and a bit about how having the chance to tell this tale was “irresistible”.
“I’d be the first to say no one should ever try to do ‘Jaws’ again and I certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone remake ‘The Exorcist,’ ” Newman tells the LA Times. “And we really felt the same way about ‘The Thing.’ It’s a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It’s the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter’s movie — they’re already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible.”
Penned by Eric Heisserer, in a remote Antarctica outpost, an alien spaceship is discovered far beneath the ice. When a group of ambitious scientists decide to thaw out one of the creatures inside, they’re in for the terrifying fight of their lives…
“That’s the story we tell in this film,” says Marc Abraham, who is producing the movie with his Strike Entertainment partner Eric Newman. “We go back to that original Norwegian camp and try to figure out what happened. It’s like a crime scene, with an ax in the door, and the audience gets to be the detective, trying to piece together what horrible things have occurred.”
Being helmed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton are signed on to star.
Before updating the video nasty Faces of Death, director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei explored the dangers of online life in tech-thriller Cam, their feature debut that was acquired by Netflix in 2018 after making waves on the festival circuit.
At the end of last year, the Netflix exclusive quietly departed from the streaming platform, left without another streaming home.
It’s not an isolated story; Mike Flanagan’s Hush also left streaming entirely for a period until it was finally picked up on both physical media and other streaming services.
While the tech-thriller currently isn’t available to watch on Netflix, Tubi, Hulu, or any other platforms, that’s not a problem for Cam thanks to a very cool move by Goldhaber: the director has made his breakout film accessible to watch online for free via his website.
As his site notes: “CAM is unfortunately not currently available to view on any platforms, so you can watch it here if you like :).“
No subscriptions or fees necessary, just hit play.
Cam follows Alice (Madeline Brewer), who works as an online cam girl obsessed with her ranking on the cam site. The higher her ranking goes, the more it draws unwanted attention, and Alice soon finds herself replaced on her own show with a doppelganger.
Written by Mazzei, a former camgirl, it uses the horror thriller premise to examine the life of a sex worker; Alice’s career ambition is directly at odds with the shame it brings to her family, and how she tries to spare them from it by keeping them in the dark. It only compounds her danger when the doppelganger enters the equation in Goldhaber’s engaging thriller.
For a deep dive into the treacherous world of Cam, listen to Horror Queers’ episode on it now.
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