The prequel to John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ is definitely an intriguing idea and one that every fan of the original movie must be curious about as we get to see what happened in the events that led to them Norwegian chaps chasing the dog at the start of the 1982 classic.

It’s currently filming in Canada and due for release in April 2011 and stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Scott Pilgrim, Deathproof), Joel Edgerton (Attack of Clones, Smoking Aces), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Lost, Oz) and Eric Christian Olsen (Dumb & Dumberer, Back up Plan) who are being directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. who hasn’t done much else.

Today the official synopsis has been brought to us by Bloodydisgusting.com and although it doesn’t give to much away it seems to stick very close to what made the original one of the best and tense horror films of all time which can only be a good thing although slightly unoriginal. We know how it’s going to end the ride getting there will no doubt be full of blood, gore and ribcage hand eating mutations. Check it out below.

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.”

I presume that the entire group of scientists will only be fluent in Norwegian due to the incommunicable conversation at the start of the original between the Americans and the Norway alien dog hunters which set up the film so well and that this will be adhered to in this prequel but obviously magically translated so we get American dialect spoken.

Definitely one to look forward to.