I found Krystian Morgan's fan credits for John Carpenter's The Thing today while browsing The Art of the Title Sequence. Mixing obvious influences with its own special touches, this thing is creepy and haunting. Worthy of Carpenter's film. Sure, the influences are obvious (Seven, the Dawn of the Dead remake), but Morgan takes those influences and twists them enough to stay fresh. These credits are seriously cool.
Part of the fun is retroactive. People familiar with the film (re: all of you) will notice what looks like blood on a medical tray (recalling the infamous testing scene). Meanwhile, shadows flit in the background, while letters written in mismatched fonts hint at the recombined DNA of the Thing itself.
Thin lines connecting different words further that separate-but-together paradox of the Thing, a thousand different beasts, unified by the desire to reproduce (and, also, to reproduce).
Like the red text in Snyder's Dawn of the Dead title sequence, the text here sometimes contorts and melts into the background images, furthering the idea of unlikely fusions. This sequence keeps the credit order of the original's opening, but everything else changes, especially the background.
Building off previous images, we see extreme close-ups similar to insect macro photography. These images have little to do with the actual Thing - only once does the Thing appear to take inspiration from insects (the spider-head sequence (nodded to in this scene from The Mist (skip to 6:20), a film I will pimp eternally)). More importantly, these images further idea of making something massive from something small, as the Thing-cells MacReady studies can lead to behemoths twice his size.
Looks like blood...
...and we're at the end, with a hand twitching rapidly, like the monster from the film Splinter, itself a reverent reworking of The Thing. Especially cool is watching these final three frames tell the story of the film entirely through imagery. Appendages look otherwordly and bizarre, cells float in a bloodstream, and a human arm spasming (and bacteria floating, for the close observer). The montage suggests, succinctly, that something alien transfers through the blood into humans. The gloomy music underneath the images keep the sequence from evoking Seven's more energetic titles, preparing us for an atmosphere of subsumed menace.
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