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John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” originally released in 1982, was a horror-induced thriller with psychological dread and paranoia that gave it an edge over countless other gross-fests of the time. Sure it had an icky-looking alien antagonist at the center of the story, but the film’s strength was in how it captured the increasing terror in its human characters’ eyes.

Now we have a new “The Thing,” a prequel to the horror classic that lays out what happened prior to the events in the 1982 version. It has all of the required elements that made the original a pleasant, if coarse, surprise. Isolation caused by a blizzard and lots of abominable creatures, creating a similar sense of escalating trepidation for both the film’s characters and the viewer.

But that’s where the similarities end. If there is anything keeping this prequel from reflecting the same dread of its source material, it is an inferior cultivation of the driving sense of paranoia among the characters. And without that same grip on the human psyche — however horror cliche-like it might have been — the modern “Thing” is just another agreeable creature feature with a gimmick.

That’s not to say it is at all a dull experience. The lead character, a paleontologist played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, avoids the usual horror-protagonist formula that often kills the momentum and unpredictability of similar scary flicks. Instead, she is level-headed and commanding, without sudden shifts in character. In other words, she’s about as believable as a protagonist can be.

The film begins with a group of scientists, the same ones who came to a bloody end at the start of the 1982 version, discover a wondrous-looking alien spacecraft and its inhabitant. They bring it back to their base and before long it breaks free and starts wrecking havoc.

Much of this will please fans of the original, as it finally explains many questions the original left open. We see how the alien escaped from his ice-block cell, which was found empty in the 1982 version, for instance.

But the story misses the mark in the second half, barely raising any alarm that the alien, a shape-shifting creature that is able to entirely replicate any human being and animal, could be any one of them. Instead, we see the characters scoff at the possibility of such a life form, only believing when it’s far too late. There is only one scene in which the tension of trying to figure out the imposter among them is shown, and it isn’t very tense.

The problem the prequel has is that it mistakes randomness for dread. The most threatening asset of the alien (or aliens; it’s never made clear) might be its ability to mimic anyone, but the process is left unexplored. As such, there’s no driving sense of suspicion among the characters, with the exception of Winstead’s paleontologist. The closest we get to a mind game is a pool of blood found in the shower that is suddenly cleaned up, presumably by the imposter, and one of the characters seeing someone leaving that bathroom.

This missing ingredient takes away from the primal suspense, rendering everything a gory version of a blindfold guessing game. It’s a gruesome “And Then There Were None,” with Eli Roth, instead of Agatha Christie, at the helm.

Taking away from the suspense is the frequent appearance of the alien itself. The original’s threatening ambience is replaced by vulgar displays of carnage that scream “gross out” rather than “dread.”

Still, the film works as an alien-slasher, with the Thing playing the role of a ruthless, flesh-eating hunter. If simplified as such, the film does offer a few terrors, though they are not atypical of the genre.

By choosing to play the part of a prequel, the film automatically suffers from comparison. The choice to focus on what was only hinted at in the first film is an inviting shtick, but the result makes you wish the filmmakers had instead done a remake more faithful to the original. At least then we could have actually experienced that infectious paranoia again.

The Thing
Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.
Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen
103 minutes
English with Indonesian subtitles