About the film
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 an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being. It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman.

In the thriller The Thing, paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they're infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet. 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 an extraterrestrial 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 alien 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).

About the score
"The Thing" offered some unique challenges. The director, Matthijs van Heijningen, wanted the music to be on a large orchestral scare but still sound other worldly when referencing the monster. In order to achieve this I decided to treat the orchestra as if it was a single entity that breathes. Having the orchestra gliss between an Emin traid and a unison Ab and back to the Emin chord helped turn the band into something that constricts and expands. Mathijs' other musical request was for a theme for Kate that expressed her loneliness with also would help with the cold barrenness of the Antarctic landscape.

Another fun challenge were the wind sounds in the film. They act as an ever-present supporting character. We decided to work with the winds. The sound FX department for the film gave us their wind sounds and were able to "tune" the winds using narrow band EQs matching not only the "monster breathing" chords but also follow the chords within some of the more subdued scenes. The way it was in tune was actual sound FX and not just another layer of sound to digest.