The Hateful Eight includes three pieces linked to Morricone’s music for The Thing. Their reuse brings Western and horror closer together, but they should be distinguished from the new score and from the recording history of those compositions.
Which three pieces appear, and where do they come from?
The music credits for The Hateful Eight identify Eternity, Bestiality and Despair as compositions by Ennio Morricone from The Thing, John Carpenter’s film released in 1982. That identification makes it possible to separate the earlier material from the music written for Tarantino’s Western. These are not three new pieces composed by Carpenter for The Hateful Eight, nor a complete soundtrack moved from one film to another.
The phrase ‘unreleased outtakes’ is inaccurate. Some of the music created for The Thing was not used in the same way in the film’s cut, but it did circulate on album releases. A composition can be absent from a film and yet have been available on an album for years. Confusing those states creates the impression that Tarantino uncovered three recordings nobody had ever heard, something that the publication history does not support.
It is also necessary to distinguish the original recordings from later reinterpretations. There are albums that reconstruct music from The Thing and bring together contributions by Morricone with material by Carpenter and Alan Howarth. If an edition announces pieces used in The Hateful Eight, that does not automatically mean that the specific recording on that edition is the one heard in the film. The title of the composition, its composer and the source of the master are related, but not identical, facts.
The three pieces are not part of The Hateful Eight’s main soundtrack album in the same form in which they are credited in the film. The commercial album selects music, songs and dialogue to create its own listening experience. That is why someone looking for every sound from the feature film may not find them by following only the track list. The absence of a piece from that album does not contradict its presence in the film credits.
Horror enters the Western through the music
The relationship with John Carpenter’s cinema has a recognisable narrative basis. The Thing and The Hateful Eight bring together a group isolated by an icy environment, forced to live with a threat whose identity is unclear. The comparison does not make Domergue’s gang a literal creature, nor does it establish that both stories work by the same rules. It describes a structure of suspicion that makes the musical closeness relevant.
Eternity contributes to the atmosphere of confinement and exposure to the outside; Bestiality is associated with violent interruptions, including the effect of the poisoned coffee; Despair appears in the final stage of the confrontation and negotiation. Those placements make it possible to observe different functions without assigning a single mechanical emotion to the pieces. The material is integrated into new actions and acquires a meaning that depends on the characters and on Tarantino’s editing.
The reuse does not need to be consciously recognised in order to have an effect. A viewer unfamiliar with The Thing can still feel unease, density or threat without identifying a quotation. Someone who knows the earlier film adds a memory of confinement and mistrust. That double reception is one of the possibilities of pre-existing music: it works as sound within the new work and, for part of the audience, as a link with another cinematic experience.
Kurt Russell’s presence in both films strengthens that association for anyone who notices it, although his characters are not equivalent. The music does not prove a fictional continuity between them. It connects different works through a feeling of threat and isolation. The Western retains its conflicts of race, justice, reward and rescue; horror contributes a way of making coexistence seem less and less safe.
How earlier material coexists with the new score
The original score by Morricone for The Hateful Eight gives the film its own identity. The 1982 pieces are inserted within that whole and do not replace it. Continuity can rely on low registers, tense textures and a preference for sustaining the wait. That compatibility does not mean everything was composed with the same original intention. The edit brings together materials born in different contexts and decides where they are useful.
The time gap also helps explain Tarantino’s selection process. An existing composition does not arrive in the scene with a fixed meaning. Its duration can be shortened, its entrance can coincide with a different action and its relationship with the dialogue can change. The final effect belongs to that new placement. Morricone’s musical authorship remains, while the film function is redefined in another movie.
The history of Morricone and Tarantino includes precisely that coexistence between admiration for an earlier catalogue and the desire to obtain new music. The Hateful Eight does not completely abandon the selection method associated with the director. It combines it with a more extensive collaboration from the composer. That mixture explains why the soundtrack can sound coherent while still retaining heterogeneous sources that are worth identifying when studying it.
The link with The Thing is more accurate when framed on that scale: three credited compositions, an affinity of confinement and suspicion, and a new function within the Western. There is no need to call already published pieces unreleased, or to attribute Morricone’s music to Carpenter. The reuse is interesting for what it allows the new film to do, as well as for the recognition it offers to those who remember where it comes from.
Back to the The Hateful Eight guide.