FilmEdge thaws out the frozen mysteries lurking in Universal Pictures' sci-fi chiller THE THING, a prelude to John Carpenter's classic 1982 film of the same name. This ice-bound thriller opens in theaters October 14, 2011.

Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty. It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when a creature is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. In the thriller THE THING, paranoia spreads among a group of researchers as they encounter something inhuman that has the ability to turn itself into an exact replica of any living being.

Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across a ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up.

When a simple experiment frees the thing from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew's pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish.

THE THING serves as a prelude to John Carpenter's classic 1982 film of the same name. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen, the thriller is produced by Strike Entertainment's Marc Abraham and Eric Newman (Dawn of the Dead).

Taking shape in theaters October 14, 2011, Universal Pictures' THE THING is a prequel to John Carpenter's film of the same name from 1982.

Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen, 2011's THE THING enacts events prior to Carpenter's horror cult classic, telling the tale of the ill-fated Norwegian science team which discovers a buried alien spacecraft in the icy wastelands of Antarctica. When their teams finds the frozen body of one of the alien crew thrown clear from the wreckage, they chip out a block of ice and tow the creature back to their camp for study. Attempts to inspect and sample the alien accidentally free it from its icy tomb, and the Thing awakens to wreak havoc on the isolated scientists. The creature's ability to mimic and take the shape of any being it samples soon creates rampant paranoia among the science team, as any one of them could have been attacked and imitated, hiding in human form to kill more victims and perpetuate its destructive species on Earth.

Van Heijningen directs the script written by Eric Heisserer (FINAL DESTINATION 5), which Universal Pictures representatives insist is not a remake of Carpenter's film, but truly acts as a prelude to events in the 1982 classic leading up to the story of the American science team's fateful encounter with two survivors of the Norwegian camp: a scientist and a sled dog who carries the lethal threat of the Thing into the American outpost to unleash another deadly cycle of horror.

FilmEdge will continue tracking news for THE THING all summer, so don't stray too far . . . and definitely do not go out alone.

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