Remember the opening credits in Carpenter's film when the Norwegian scientist is shooting at the dog (really an alien that's shape-shifted into the form of man's best friend) from the helicopter and follows it to the American camp? Well, the film takes place before that, or until that moment one suspects. But regardless of the debate, Universal Pictures has slated the film for a wide pre-Halloween release date of October 14, 2011.

The film finds Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) having traveled 10,000 miles to join a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice in Antarctica. There she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons before. But the dormant parasite is revived and with dire consequences for the stranded scietific community as human is pitted against human (and creature) as it tries to survive and flourish.

The film is produced by Strike Entertainment's Marc Abraham and Eric Newman (Dawn of the Dead, 2004).

Now back to the word 'original': Staunch purists aside, the original classic was slated by Christian Nyby in 1951, some 30+ years before Carpenter put his own brush strokes on the 1982 fan favorite (mine included) with The Thing from Another World (The Thing for short). When news broke three decades later that Carpenter had been tapped to direct a remake, fans of the original (Nyby's) were up in arms over the supposed sacrilege. But that came to pass over the years as the second version gained a cult following and eventually a broad and solid fanbase (Carpenter's film performed poorly at the boxoffice when first released). Nyby's film, in turn, was based on John W. Campbell Jr.'s 1938 novel 'Who Goes There?' And while Cambell died in 1971, he has been given story credit on the two subsequent films after - dare I say it again? - the original. My point: let's wait and see the forthcoming installment before we condemn it to a dusty death. After all, it's not a remake but an expansion of the story, and that to me is quite exciting. I, for one, plan to go see the film.

And one can thank the Gods they didn't call it 'The Thing: Origins'!