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.
