Fango was hot to be in infectiously close quarters with Universal’s prequel to John Carpenter’s THE THING ever since the shapeshifting redux was announced early last year. And having visited the set back in May 2010, this writer’s head has been scampering around the floor on spider-legs in anxious anticipation. The movie’s delay from an intended April 2011 release to the more horror-rific month of October had us worried (trouble in the editing room?), but now, as THE THING’s Oct. 14 debut looms, we’re anxious to feast our multiple eyes on this theatrical companion to the Carpenter classic.

Fans with open ears will notice, in Universal’s trailer for the new film, the use of the very recognizable “dun-dun” cue from the original’s Ennio Morricone soundtrack. The legendary Italian maestro was notoriously peeved at the time when Carpenter shelved much of his orchestral work, selecting the most “Carpenter-ish” electro-pulse tracks for the most part, and composing additional music himself. Carpenter’s instincts were sound, as the final film proves—though Morricone’s original score is an eerie masterpiece of mood, isolation and chilling beauty, and remains to this day largely unused in a film framework.

Jump ahead nearly 30 years to Fango’s visit to the all-new THING. When pried about his musical intentions, director Matthijs van Heijningen offers some tantalizing hints: “My idea, now that we’re halfway through shooting, is to reuse [Morricone’s score]. To do sort of a retake of it. Like with THE GODFATHER II—the themes stay the same, but you recompose it. It’s beautiful music. It’s not just horror music; it has a real beautiful quality.” The trailer lives up this intent: the thumps and crackling pulses sound like an ultra-Dolby’d industrialized revamp of the original. Will composer Marco Beltrami—whose work has graced many big-name genre projects, from the SCREAM series to Guillermo Del Toro’s DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK—be able to brew up a score as chilling and definitive as the original’s, using such superb source material? We’ll soon find out…

All horror junkies know how the Carpenter film begins: A husky races through the white Antarctic wilderness, hunted in a helicopter by two crazed Norwegians hell-bent on eradicating the runaway canine by any means necessary (i.e., machine guns and grenades!). The dog makes tracks to an American research camp, and in the ensuing chaos, the Norwegians are killed and the husky lives…and the horror begins. When the idea was posed for a true THING prequel, whose closing moments would end at the exact point the Carpenter flick beings, a real dilemma came up for the moneymen at Universal. Namely, how the hell do you make a $35-million film starring a bunch of Norwegians and expect to sell it to the American public? Van Heijningen reveals that fighting the good fight wasn’t easy.

“I fought really hard to have real Norwegians in this movie; it was a real battle,” the director recalls. “The first proposition was for a cast of 12 Norwegians, and then Universal was like, ‘We need some Americans, or else no one’s going to come see this movie!’ In the end, they reached a realistic compromise, with a handful of international researchers assisting the crew of the Norwegian outpost. The premise works, and thankfully, “There’s a lot of Norwegian spoken in this movie, which really enhances the believability,” van Heijningen says. “They just talk in Norwegian with no subtitles, which is, I think, super-cool.” We agree.

Among the visiting English-speakers in screenwriter Eric Heisserer’s scenario, SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead leads the charge against the shapeshifting alien as paleontologist Kate Lloyd, with Australian Joel Edgerton (WARRIOR) in support as R.J. MacReady-esque heli-pilot Sam. On the set, however, Fango had the privilege of interviewing a pair of Norwegian actors shipped from their Scandinavian homeland to the deepest bowels of Scarberia (a.k.a. Scarborough, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto). Actor Kristofer Hivju plays Jonas, the Norwegian team’s videographer—in the canon of THE THING, he’s the man who shot that black-and-white footage found by MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) in the 1982 film—and he fills us in on how the Carpenter film has a huge following back home.

“The first sequence in the ’82 film, with the Norwegian guys, is a cult scene in Norway,” Hivju reveals. “It’s on radio shows. Even today, it’s done every week in the intro to one program, because it’s the first time that somebody spoke Norwegian in an American movie. And the funny thing is that he doesn’t speak Norwegian, he speaks bad Norwegian. Like, Icelandic Norwegian. So to us, it sounds totally stupid.”

Attention to the new THING has been just as feverish in his home country. “It’s a big deal, because it features so many Norwegian actors in an American movie. I’ve been saying that it’s very kind of Universal to make this movie; the basis of the story is the Norwegian camp, and they have been very truthful to that concept. I think the people in Norway will experience the movie differently from everybody else. When the Norwegians speak to each other, the audience will understand what they’re saying, because sometimes there will be no subtitles. It will be a lot of fun to see our Norwegian king from the ’80s, and shots with the Norwegian flag flapping in the wind.”

From the sound of things, the Scandinavians were cast, shipped across the pond, plonked on set and given a crash course in slow-moving, big-money American-style production. Luckily, this fish-out-of-water situation added some legit Norwegian flavor to the shoot, as all the actors stayed at the same hotel and truly became a team, both on and off screen. “We have a big party sequence where we celebrate finding ‘the thing,’ ” Hivju says, “and we use Norwegian songs from the ’80s and invite [the foreign researchers] into our culture and our joy. The Norwegian culture, and these Viking guys with beards, really add an aesthetic to the film.”

The language barrier also bumps up the paranoia, division and tension in the camp as it becomes increasingly unclear who’s still human, and who has been taken over. One of Jonas’ fellow Nordic crewmates is Peder, played by Stig Henrik Hoff, who says, “Language is used as a dramatic device, because Kate doesn’t understand when we speak Norwegian. If there’s an American in the room, we speak English, but sometimes we [purposely] speak in Norwegian because no one understands it. The way we improvised was very dynamic, to make it fluid and more truthful.” It seems there was an active decision to break the conventional Hollywood mold, “this stupid thing where everyone [from other countries] speaks American, even when they speak to each other. So we’ve tried to keep it that when we talk to each other, we speak Norwegian.”

Peder is “a mechanic, greasing up everything, making everything work,” according to Hoff, and fittingly, mechanics and language issues have made up his most memorable on-set experience: “For me, that was shooting up in the pit [in Scarborough], driving one of those snowcats. I was pretty nervous. I mean, back home I’m very confident about being on a film set. But here, all the sudden there were 140 guys on the set, and I didn’t know any one of them, and I didn’t know the director because it was very speedy in the way we got the parts: No cast reading, no talking with the director, no building up the characters.”

And when it comes to on-the-spot line translations, what LA producer is going to be able to argue the way the actors interpret English-to-Norwegian? As Hoff remembers, “There was a line in the script where I say, ‘F**kin’ bastards!’ But in Norway, we don’t have that expression. It would be stupid if I said that in Norwegian. You’d laugh. So I couldn’t figure out anything else to say to these guys other than, ‘You f**king useless Americans.’ He laughs, remembering how, “In that big pit with all the helicopters and snow and everything, there was too much noise, so I had to do the line ‘wild’ when everyone was very quiet, with just the microphone. That was a good moment.”

The day Fango spends time on set, a tense, claustrophobic action scene is in progress, centering on Peder and a group of Norwegians yelling at Carter and fellow pilot Derek (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), with guns and flamethrowers brandished by both sides. This scene is a major turning point in the film (skip this and the next paragraph if you don’t want to know about a key plot development), where things take a paranoiac turn for the worst. “It’s all f**ked up,” Hoff says. “You can’t trust anyone at this point in the movie. The scene just before this, we still trust each other—or a bit, anyway. But there’s the idea that the alien can’t transform into inorganic things, like earrings and fillings. So if you’ve got fillings, you’re probably a human. But we don’t know for sure.”

The “fillings test” is this THING’s variation on the famous “blood test” in Carpenter’s film. Kate brainstorms this unique idea for determining who’s a “thing” and who isn’t—if you’ve got a prosthetic limb, a pacemaker, a piercing or fillings in your teeth, the alien cannot recreate those parts of its otherwise picture-perfect replica—makes sense, right? So in the scene, Peder is “holding the guys without the fillings with my flamethrower, and two other guys have gone out to pick up the Americans, to check if they have fillings. And if they don’t, they are probably on ‘the other team.’ ” Soon enough, “The Americans came back from an explosion with the helicopter, and we can’t believe their story’s true. It’s not human, that you could survive a thing like that. I’m saying let’s burn them—we can’t trust them!”

This isn’t the only classic moment from the ’82 film to be directly referenced in the 2011 THING. Fango catches a glimpse of a communications-room set, the “before” version of the burnt-out area found by MacReady and Copper in the Norwegian camp. In here, if you remember, along with the block of ice from which “the thing” escaped, they discover the corpse of a man, frozen in death, an old-fashioned straight razor locked in his grip, his neck slit with thick ribbons of frozen blood hanging from his wrists. Says van Heijningen, “We have a big scene where we see how that guy comes to his end, how he slits his throat, and his blood freezes…”

Damn, this is going to be cool—subzero, hellishly cool!

Look for more on the new THING in Fango #307, now on sale.

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MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features