NIGHTMARES AND NIGHTSTALKERS

My favorite movie of all time, hands down, is John Carpenter's "The Thing".  This was John Carpenter at the height of his horror making career, and features a truly stellar performance from all of it's small cast, including a post-Snake Plissken Kurt Russell as helicopter pilot RJ MacCready.

Slow building paranoia permeates the movie as the crew of an isolated American Arctic research station , cut off from the outside world by a terrible storm, learns a nearby Norwegien base, now ravaged and  lifeless, had discovered something that had been frozen in the ice fo thousands of years. Something not human, and apparently, something not entirely dead that wants to survive at all costs. It has the ability to mimic organic lifeforms perfectly. Sled dogs. People. All it needs to do is infect you with one of it's cells and you'll become one of  "it". By the time they learn of the danger, it already had time to infect half the camp, bringing up the question who can they now trust?

The following pics are just the first of many. I will eventually post more when I have more time.

After years of wanting a MacCready but not finding a suitable head, an head was almost gift wrapped to me in the form of the Hot Toys PMC OPERATOR - PRIVATE MILITARY CONTRACTOR 07 ver., which is gorgeous. The rest of his costume was relatively easy to kitbash from different online 1:6 stores, with the exception of his grey shirt, which was laughable almost impossible, but finally found for me by my friend, Milo. Thanks Milo!

I had always planned on making 1:6 figures of  John Carpenter's "The THING" someday, so I flipped when I learned Sideshow Toys had made a dead-on sculpt of "Thing" cast member Keith David from his role as KING from the movie "PLATOON", which was too good a gift to pass up.

Keith David, who want on to play roles in John Carpenter's "THEY LIVE",  the voice of  "Goliath" on "Gargoyles", and Abu 'Imam' al-Walid in "PITCH BLACK", played one of the only two sole survivors in the THING, so he was on my definite shortlist of customs I'd want to make from the movie, including a Kurt Russell "R.J. MacCready" and a 12" Thing which is huge and in progress.

John Carpenter's "The Thing" was an updated remake of Howard Hawkes "Thing from Another World", which in turn was an adaptation of a short story called "Who Goes There?".  All versions have been influencial and made an impact on Hollywood, as the premise of finding something in the Arctic has been aped by almost every sci-fi show imaginable, such as the Doctor Who episode "Seeds of Doom" and X-Files "Ice".

The Rob Bottin and Stan Winston 's SFX work from JCTTstarted the revolution of shape shifters with exploding tentacles bursting out from their insides, which has become commonplace in video games and anime now-a-days, and the paranoia theme is what inspired Quintin Tarentino when writing "Reseviour Dogs".