Even if John Carpenter's was the original, it would be erroneous to refer to it as such since the new one is technically a prequel, not a remake.
Also, for all of those who saw the prequel and resented the crappy use of CGI as much as I did,
here's a little something that will piss you off even more (embedding disabled for some reason).
You can actually see a good buddy of mine sculpting one of the creatures at about 3:20. He was the one who first told me that all the awesome animatronic fx he and his team did were thrown out.