Want Tarantino's Advice? Trap Your Characters, Trap Your Audience

In a 2021 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Quentin Tarantino made a passionate case for John Carpenter's The Thing.

These two film fans talk about what makes the movie so great and end up dissecting what makes horror work for even moviegoers (like Tarantino) who don’t get scared.

Check out their conversation here.

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What Makes The Thing So Scary?

The discussion started with Colbert, who admitted The Thing is his cinematic happy place.

"If my kids see me watching The Thing," Colbert said, "they ask if everything is okay."

Tarantino understood.

"I think it's one of the greatest horror movies ever made, if not one of the greatest movies ever made," he said.

Tarantino is a self-described horror fan who doesn't get scared by horror movies. The Thing is the exception.

"I respond to suspense, what's going to happen next. And I can jump at a boo scare. But that's not terror. I don't get scared in movies. The Thing I got scared in."

Ever curious, Tarantino wanted to figure out why exactly that was.

He decided that the physical containment of the characters creates an emotional containment that eventually has nowhere to go but into the audience.

"The paranoia is bouncing off of the four walls, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing ... until it has nowhere to go except the fourth wall of the audience. And I started feeling exactly how they felt."

Horror isn’t always about “boo scares,” as Tarantino calls them.

We've covered how cinematographer Dean Cundey engineered the terror in this movie shot by shot, and how every frame is designed to put the audience inside the characters' dread, not watching it from outside.

Tarantino also called out Rob Bottin's practical effects as "some of the greatest practical special effects ever put on a movie theater screen." But his bigger point is that the effects work because the paranoia is already doing its job. You're scared before the creature ever shows up.

How The Thing Inspired Tarantino

He said when he sat down to write Reservoir Dogs, he went back to that feeling.

"I need to trap these bastards, I need to trap them in this warehouse, and no one can trust anybody else. And I want the paranoia of what's going on in that warehouse to bounce across the walls, and hopefully, like in The Thing, it will go out into the audience."

The warehouse in Reservoir Dogs functions exactly like the research station in The Thing, becoming a pressure cooker where trust erodes in real time, and the audience feels the walls closing in.

He did it again with The Hateful Eight, even pulling unused cues from Ennio Morricone's Thing score.

How can you dissect a movie you love and use it as direct inspiration for your next project?