'The Thing': Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter's Thriller Soundtracks Get Special Rereleases

The soundtrack to filmmaker ’s landmark sci-fi thriller The Thing will get special reconsideration this spring with two distinct LP reissues.

The first features the original score by — best known for spaghetti westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and his Oscar-winning music for The Hateful Eight (which included music he’d originally written for The Thing) — and the second, Lost Cues: The Thing, contains newly rerecorded music Carpenter himself wrote for the film. Both LPs are due out May 5th.

In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Carpenter reflected on working with Morricone for the film, which stars Kurt Russell as a helicopter pilot battling an unseen enemy that takes over the bodies of researchers at a remote station in snowy Antarctica. “He’s just fabulous and just genius,” the director said. “All I said to him was, ‘Fewer notes.’ If you see The Thing, the ultimate theme is the result of our conversation: really simple, synth-driven, effective.”

Two years later, Morricone reflected on the score. “The collaboration with Carpenter was really something extraordinary and something very peculiar, as well,” Morricone told Rolling Stone. “He came to Rome to show me the movie but immediately after the end of the screening, he had to rush away, so I couldn’t speak to him. I was very impressed by what I’d seen but I was concerned because he didn’t give me any clue or indication about what he wanted.”

He went on to make several different cues in many different styles. “In the end, he chose just one single piece of music,” Morricone said. “Now one of the pieces he didn’t use is in The Hateful Eight.”

The LP version of the original score for The Thing, which is coming out Waxwork, features remastered audio and has been pressed on 180-gram “blood sample,” red-splattered vinyl. It also includes an 11-inch-by-22-inch poster.

Lost Cues: The Thing, which is coming out Waxwork and Sacred Bones, contains music Carpenter recently recorded with his frequent collaborators, his son Cody and godson Daniel Davies. John Carpenter had decided to write additional music for the score while editing the film, but the masters for those recordings have since been lost, so he decided to rerecord them.

“Ennio Morricone composed the magnificent score for my movie The Thing,” Carpenter said in a statement. “Because we weren’t finished editing the movie, Ennio had to score without seeing a complete picture. When we put everything together, there were gaps dramatically where I would have wanted music. So I went off and scored a couple of simple pieces that filled in.”

The LP will be available on 180-gram “arctic splatter” vinyl, colored blue with cyan speckles.