I wonder how Tobe Hoopers effort would have fared.

As Cohen explained on his must-read blog The Original Fan, which is all about The Thing, he had met with Carpenter back in the ’70s to talk about directing a new adaptation of the story, but Universal was hesitant to hire an untested filmmaker. At the time, Carpenter hadn’t even yet directed Halloween, so Universal naturally thought it a huge risk to hand him the reigns.

And so, before Carpenter came on, Tobe Hooper was the studio’s first choice.

Tobe Hooper and creative collaborator Kim Henkel were coming fresh off the success of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at the time, and they seemed a perfect fit to adapt Who Goes There?. However, quite the opposite turned out to be true. Their vision was vastly different than Cohen’s, who felt that Hooper and Henkel were missing the point of the source material.

Wrote Cohen on his aforementioned blog:

"Their initial enthusiasm dimmed upon reading the novella. The issue of trust didn’t particularly interest them as an overall theme. They also worried about their ability to dramatize the mechanics of assimilation and didn’t want to be constrained by its use."

So what would Hooper have done with the film? Here’s what Cohen recalls of the script:

Rejecting the short story’s central premise, they chose instead to try to fashion something original that, in their words, would “address the larger picture.” Written quickly in order to avoid an impending writers strike, what I remember of the script was an attempt at a man versus monster epic set at the bottom of the world, a sort of Antarctica MOBY DICK with an Ahab-like character (I believe his name was The Captain) battling a large, but decidedly non-shape shifting creature.

Seemingly written as a tone poem with a stab at a Southern, Davis Grubb-like feel, the script was dense, humorless, almost impenetrable (the word John used for it when he later came on board was incomprehensible). Judged by all at the time to be something akin to a disaster, we agreed to part company.