John Carpenter’s the Thing Finally Exists in the Marvel Universe

There are few horror movies more iconic in the history of the genre than John Carpenter’s The Thing as it perfectly blended suspense, paranoia, gore, and body horror into a beautifully twisted masterpiece that is just as good even decades after its initial release–and now, that level of horror has seemingly entered the Marvel Comics universe, and what better antihero to experience something as terrifying as the Thing than the hellish Spirit of Vengeance himself, Ghost Rider.

John Carpenter’s The Thing is a 1982 horror film that follows a group of American scientists and other employees working on a research site in Antarctica who are plagued by the presence of some kind of parasitic alien who can take the shape of anything it comes into contact with–and the creature’s true form is ambiguously horrifying as well. One of the most famous scenes in the movie is when one of the characters is having some sort of medical crisis and his teammates try to revive him by initiating resuscitative measures while the man is lying on a table. During that process, the man in need is revealed to be the Thing and his stomach opens up into a grisly mouth that bites the hands off of the person trying to help. Then, the man’s head peels itself off of the rest of his body and turns into a spider-like creature that scurries off only to infect its next victim before it’s killed by the Thing’s one weakness: fire.

In Ghost Rider #6 by Benjamin Percy and Brent Peeples, Johnny Blaze is suffering a great deal of pain as a parasitic demon has taken up residence in his body and seemingly began the process of killing him from the inside-out. Luckily, Wolverine was with Blaze at the time, and he takes him to a road house nearby. Once inside, Wolverine lays Johnny down on the bar’s pool table to get a better assessment of the situation. As Johnny cries out in agony, an ambiguous fleshy mass shoots out from Blaze’s head and then a spider-like creature emerges from his stomach. When Wolverine is finally able to cut the demon out of Ghost Rider, the Spirit of Vengeance shoots it with a blast of hellfire and the clumpy mass of flesh roughly the size of a head with a human mouth and spidery arms jutting out of it is seemingly destroyed in the flames. However, Wolverine and Ghost Rider didn’t get all of it and a small portion of the demon survived only to infect another person who was also in the bar.

The similarities between the demon in Ghost Rider and the Thing from John Carpenter’s classic film speak for themselves. Both are parasitic creatures that look almost identical, and both can only be destroyed with fire. Even the two scenes laid out above share key similarities with even something as small as the person’s stomach playing a major role in the body horror aspect of both scenes. Plus, just like the Thing, this demon doesn’t die unless every bit of it is destroyed completely or else it is free to take yet another living victim.

The only difference between these two creatures is the fact that the Thing can shape-shift and operate separately from a living host while Ghost Rider’s demon possesses someone and takes over their physical body. Honestly though, both of those are essentially the same thing and achieve the same result, so it’s hard to even consider that a difference even though, technically, the way the two monsters operate aren’t exactly the same. However, nearly every other aspect of these creatures are identical, from their aesthetic to their weaknesses–proving that John Carpenter’s The Thing essentially exists in Marvel Comics.