John Carpenter’s Halloween, which introduced a new slasher killer (Michael Myers) and helped develop and popularize the genre in the 1980s.
Since then, Carpenter became a widely-known name in the sci-fi and horror genres and went on to direct The Fog in 1980 and The Thing in 1982. Based on the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr., The Thing follows a group of American researchers in Antarctica who come across a parasitic extraterrestrial life-form that assimilates and imitates other organisms. This makes way for a lot of drama, conflict, and paranoia between the group as any of them could be "the thing" pretending to be a human. The Thing has been praised for its special effects, the way it builds tension and a claustrophobic environment, and the performances of the cast, but it took critics and viewers a long time to appreciate the movie.
The Thing spent years in development hell and differents directors and writers were attached to the project. The producers’ goal was to make a faithful adaptation of Campbell’s novella after the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World, and after Universal acquired the rights to remake the movie, Alien revived the project, and Carpenter finally agreed to . The Thing was finally released in 1982, and it was a commercial and critical failure, to the point where it was proposed as the “most-hated film of all time” by horror magazine Cinefantastique.
Critics weren’t kind to Blade Runner.
The initial failure of The Thing had big consequences in Carpenter’s career, as Universal canceled a multi-picture deal it had with the director and he lost many projects because of the bad reviews. Luckily, and just like with The Thing has developed a cult following and has influenced other horror and sci-fi directors, and while it’s now among the best movies in the genre, all this can’t repair the damage the initial reviews did to John Carpenter’s career.
