The latest on The Thing prequel

The Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. directed prequel of the popular 1982 version is moving on with it’s pre-production, but a lot of fans of the eighties version of the film are weary with how the completed version of the Universal Pictures flick will hold up. Especially with the recent bomb of Green Zone, it’s no surprise that not too many people are looking forward to this.

The LA Times dishes out what’s to be expected of the prequel, and who’s attached on it, from producers Marc Abraham and 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.”

“So after ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ Universal basically came to us and said, ‘Everyone is remaking everything, what do we have that might be good?’” Newman told me recently. “The great thing is that Universal has all sorts of good titles. After all, they’re the studio that essentially created the monster movie genre.

“That’s exactly why we hired Matthijs,” Newman says. “Commercial directors make good film directors not just because they’ve shot millions of feet of film, but because they know how to convey emotion in 30 seconds. Whether its Ridley Scott or David Fincher or Spike Jonze, these guys are trained to tell stories without words, which is great training for a genre film. It’s like they all came out of silent movies.”

“One of our all-time favorite films is Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien,’ ” says Abraham. “It’s elegant, really scary and has characters that you care about. In a way, it’s our model for this project, which gives us an opportunity to try to do something cool.”