Reply To: Ennio Morricone
No, the music for the soundtrack album of THE THING is 100% Ennio Morricone. For the movie, John Carpenter (not Alan Howarth) recorded some very brief synth cues, but nothing substantial.
Alan Howarth, however, did a recreation of Morricone’s score for BSX and added the Carpenter snippets to it, but that’s it.
The soundtrack album itself is 100% Morricone, and the movie is almost all Morricone, except for the brief John Carpenter synth cues.
So either way, the score is not a “hodgepodge”.