The Uncanny Connections Between The Hateful Eight and This Classic Horror Movie

In what's definitely the most concrete link between the two films, legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone is the one responsible for the scores of both John Carpenter's The Thing and Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. Tarantino has never used an original score for one of his movies before, and what makes the link even more significant is that some of the music Morricone provided for his film was originally written for The Thing, but went unused at the time.

"I didn’t expect Ennio to give me a Western score. He had always said that he didn’t want to do Westerns anymore. So even though this was a Western, I wasn’t expecting a score similar to, like, Two Mules For Sister Sara, or anything like that," said Tarantino at a press conference for the film. "I was figuring it was going to be dark, that’s the way he almost described it. He gave me a horror film score."

If the darkly dynamic, driving sound of the film sounds familiar to you, now you know why.

The basic tenets of both storylines are nearly identical: a blizzard keeps a group of people from being able to leave an enclosed space, as the group gets picked off one by one. Tarantino openly admitted the similarities, noting, "This movie is very influenced by Reservoir Dogs, and that was influenced by The Thing. There’s a lot of characters trapped in one room. There’s a lot of paranoia going on, nobody can trust anybody [and] there’s a horrible blizzard going on outside."

Kurt Russell plays the lead role in both movies. In Carpenter's horror flick, he stars as R.J. MacReady, one of the scientists trapped in the Antarctic along with a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of the people it kills. In The Hateful Eight, he plays bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth, trapped in a Wyoming cabin with a bunch of potentially murderous psychos while a snow storm rages on outside. Whether you're a fan of Russell's or not, there's no denying he brings his A-game in Tarantino's latest.

When discussing the intense levels of fear and paranoia someone might feel while watching The Thing, Tarantino said, "The paranoia was so strong between those characters, and it was trapped in such an enclosed space, that the paranoia just started bouncing off the walls until it had nowhere else to go but through the fourth wall and into the audience. So, that was the effect I was going for with The Hateful Eight."