The chance to oversee a new
restoration of The Thing, one of my
favourite films of the 1980s and my favourite John Carpenter film (tied with The Fog), was a rare opportunity that I
honestly never expected to come along, given how widely available the film has
been always been. It has already been remastered twice, and enjoyed not one,
but two separate Blu-ray releases. It seemed that The Thing was a done deal, at least as far as Blu-ray was
concerned. But once we reviewed the previous work, and considered how we
ideally wanted to approach the project – with access to the original film
materials as well as full collaboration with the filmmakers – we realised the
potential of revisiting The Thing
once more.
The earlier Universal and
Shout Factory Blu-ray releases had used different 2K/HD restored masters, both
sourced from the 35mm Interpositive elements. Arrow's new restoration is
sourced from the original 35mm camera negative, which we scanned at 4K/16-bit
resolution at Universal Post. This is the first and only time The Thing’s original negative has been
accessed for the purposes of restoration.
Going this route has resulted
in a dramatic leap in image quality over previous editions. The film now
exhibits a finer, more detailed image with true, natural film grain and a
richer, more nuanced palette, making full use of the colour range present on
the negative. Details previously lost in the dark areas and the highlights are
now distinct. At the same time, the dated remastering processes which resulted
in video artefacts exhibited on previous masters are a distant memory. The Thing now looks and feels like
celluloid as it was always meant to.
We had the great honour of
working with both John Carpenter and director of photography Dean Cundey on
this project. I’d worked with Mr Cundey previously on The Witch Who Came from the Sea (from our first American Horror Project box-set), but
I’d never had the pleasure of working with Mr Carpenter. Our restoration
workflow involved them from the start: we sent them files to review during the
initial grading and cleanup work was underway at Silver Salt Restoration in
London. When it came time for their final grading session at Deluxe’s Culver
City facility, they spent several days reviewing over every shot to make sure
colour, contrast, highlights were all exactly as intended. They also went
through the entire film to assign final 2.35:1 framing to every shot. Sometimes
this allowed for a sliver more image area than on previous video editions, one
of the luxuries of having the unmasked negative to work from.
I gave no specific instruction
to Carpenter and Cundey, as I believe no one has a better idea of how The Thing should look than they do. I
did share with them some of the criticisms that had been voiced about both
previous Blu-ray editions, but only as something to bear in mind when applying
their final grading. Bottom line: we wanted both director and cinematographer
to arrive at a version that was as true to their original vision, and as close
to definitive as possible.
I fully expect there to be
arguments about how our new restoration of The
Thing looks in comparison with previous editions. There are distinct and noticeable
differences between all of the film’s Blu-ray editions, and our release is no
exception. The Thing means so much to
so many people (myself included), and you certainly can’t please everyone, but
I’m satisfied that with this new restoration, as approved by John Carpenter and
Dean Cundey, we've delivered a better and more definitive presentation than the
film has ever had before.
Special thanks to the teams at
Silver Salt, Deluxe and Universal.
And a very special thanks to
Mr Carpenter and Mr Cundey.
James White
Head of Restoration, Arrow
Films
October 2017
