“It’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.” John Carpenter’s The Thing was released in 1982, but I saw it first in the mid-1990s. It hooked me right away. The opening caption: Antarctica, Winter 1982; and the scene: a helicopter chasing a dog, its passenger shooting at the animal sprinting across the empty snow towards a remote research station. The set-up was thus swiftly established, the mystery deftly embedded. What followed that strange opening chase was a science-fiction horror film as tense, atmospheric and imaginative as any I had seen in years, and one to which I have returned several times. John W. Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?‘ was published in Astounding Stories in 1938, and was first adapted for film in 1951, as The Thing From Another World. The politics of the age gave this quirky B-movie classic a strong flavour of Cold War distrust, and though it offers melodrama, wit, … There’s more →