Back in May, when the summer movie season was about to get feverish, Eric Roth, the executive director of the Visual Effects Society, made waves with an open letter decrying increasingly burdensome post-production schedules that put the burden on visual effects artists.  It's awards season now, though, so now it's time to put politics aside in favor of straight-up accolades.  The Visual Effects Society, also known conveniently as VES, has announced the nominees for the 10th annual VES Awards.

From 2004 to 2008, the Saw franchise was the unchallenged master of the weekend before Halloween.  With everyone's favorite ghoulish holiday providing the appropriately macabre mood, America spent those years thrilling to the sight of victims gored, squished, split and splattered in increasingly elaborate and grisly death traps.  In 2009, however, Saw's magnanimous reign was ended with the debut of the crazy-cheap independently-financed oddity Paranormal Activity, which kicked Saw VI to the box office curb.  This weekend, the Paranormal Activity franchise proved again that we love a novelty Halloween tradition, as the second sequel, Paranormal Activity 3, opened nationwide with an estimated $54.0 million, earning it the title of biggest October opening ever and biggest supernatural horror opening on the books.

Strictly speaking, Universal Pictures' new The Thing isn't a remake of John Carpenter's 1982 classic (itself a remake of 1951's The Thing From Another World), but since it was confusingly given the exact same title and repeats each and every beat of its predecessor, its prequel status is basically a technicality.  Over the weekend, The Thing joined Paramount's Footloose, a remake of the 1984 dance-a-thon, in an attempt to bring the eighties back to multiplexes everywhere.  While Footloose fared quite well, in the case of The Thing, this attempt was largely a failure.  And despite their recognizable titles, neither film was able to usurp last week's number one film, Real Steel, as the robot-boxing family movie once again held the top spot.  Oh, and bird-watching comedy The Big Year barely registered.

In 1951, The Thing From Another World adapted a story by John W. Campbell Jr., telling the tale of scientists and US Air Force officers in the remote Arctic facing off an alien creature the biology of which was based off vegetables.  While that film stands as a fine example of the monster movies made during that time, the 1982 remake written by Bill Lancaster and directed by the inimitable John Carpenter moved the action South to the Antarctic and updated the material to far more horrific effect.  In The Thing, the eponymous alien creature is not a vegetable, but more a viral creature, infecting and imitating human life.

The Thing, which arrives in theaters this Friday, is not a remake of Carpenter's movie, despite the title.  It is, in fact, a prequel, depicting a Norwegian research base's discovery of an alien craft in the Antarctic ice, and charting the creature's decimation of the doomed inhabitants.  This leads directly to the beginning of the 1982 film, in which a seemingly crazed Norwegian chases a seemingly innocent canine to United States National Science Institute Station 4.

IAR's Managing Editor Jami Philbrick was on hand for a roundtable-style press conference promoting Universal Pictures' new The Thing.  Our press conference coverage includes director Mattijs van Heijningen Jr., along with stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Eric Christian Olsen discussing the challenges of creating a prequel to such a beloved horror movie, what makes the new film unique, and the perils of working with practical alien effects.

It's the end of September, so I'm starting to feel the deliciously creepy Halloween-season spirit down in the very marrow of my bones, and a small part of that spirit is the incoming onslaught of horror movies both new and old.  Speaking of "horror movies both new and old," there's a new international poster for The Thing, a prequel to John Carpenter's masterful The Thing, which was a remake of The Thing From Another World.  Though this new, oddly titled The Thing is not a remake, it looks to hit the same beats as Carpenter's film, with hopefully more deviation than we've see in trailers and TV spots. 

The film tells the story of the Norwegian research base that unearths the mutating alien that will/did menace Kurt Russell and company at United States National Science Institute Station 4.  Appropriately enough, this Russian poster depicts the team discovering a massive alien craft that presumably carries that extraterrestrial son of a bitch.

In anticipation of the movie's release in a matter of weeks, Universal has released a bite-sized red band trailer for The Thing, the prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 classic.  The trailer introduces Mary Elizabeth-Winstead's character, a paleontology grad student visiting a Norwegian research station in Antarctica, where the unlucky crew has just discovered an extraterrestrial being that changes shape in the most gruesome fashion and inspires no end of paranoia.  It then provides our most extensive look so far at the creature itself in various different nasty iterations.

The very first television spot for The Thing has arrived.  Actually, I'm sure there plenty of TV spots for John Carpenter's The Thing back in 1982, but this TV spot is, of course, for the upcoming prequel.  While the title is confusingly the same as Carpenter's film, which was a remake of 1951's The Thing From Another World, the new movie takes place before the 1982 horror film, telling the story of the Norwegian research base that first unearths the horrifying alien bastard of the title.

The first clip for The Thing has arrived, by which I mean to say that the first official clip from the prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing which also happens to be confusingly titled The Thing has arrived.  Despite the title, this new movie is not a remake of Carpenter's film, which was itself a remake of The Thing From outer Space, but the concept is the same: Remote Antarctic research station encounters malicious shapeshifting alien, paranoia and awful events ensue.

In Carpenter's perfectly executed story, the American research base first meets up with the alien in the form of a dog on the run from a Norwegian who is intent on murdering it, for obvious reasons.  This new The Thing depicts the Norwegian team finding the titular beast in the ice and, like a child who encounters a bear cub, making the crucial mistake of taking it home.

Though the upcoming The Thing shares a title with John Carpenter's classic 1982 The Thing, the new film by director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr is technically a prequel taking place at the Norwegian research base in the Antarctic where an alien entity is uncovered.  That entity eventually finds its way to an American scientific outpost in the form of an adorable canine, and that's where Carpenter's story, itself a remake of The Thing From Outer Space, goes down.  The first trailer the new The Thing is now available for viewing, and though it is explicitly a prequel, it looks like the film hits all the beats established by Carpenter's film.  Speaking of beats, the trailer also incorporates Carpenter's strikingly minimal score.  Listen (and look) for yourself.

Like many other means of modern social networking, Twitter no doubt has the potential to be utilized as little more than a facilitator of digital narcissism, but it also presents a plethora of opportunities for unique discourse that would otherwise have been unlikely, if not impossible.  If, for example, you wanted to address any number of questions to horror director/writer/composer John Carpenter, you'll have a chance to do so this week during a live tweeting Q & A session with the man behind Halloween, Escape from New York, They Live, Big Trouble in Little China, Starman, and The Thing.