About

The Thing (also known as John Carpenter's The Thing) is a 1982 sci-fi horror film directed by John Carpenter and based on the novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell. The Campbell story also formed the basis for the classic 1951 science fiction movie The Thing From Another World, which is less loyal to the original material.

The film is regarded as a cult classic, and an underappreciated masterpiece of psychological horror and science fiction, and the special effects, by the legendary Rob Bottin, are celebrated by fans of the genre and critics alike. Although the movie was largely unsuccessful at the box office, it has since become renowned as a modern classic.

A team of American scientists stationed at a remote base in Antarctica find themselves drawn into a nightmarish ordeal. A sled dog appears at their Outpost, pursued by two apparently insane Norwegians in a helicopter. After a brief gunfight, the Norwegians are killed and the dog taken into the base.

A small group of men is sent to investigate the Norwegian camp, hoping to find out what caused the bizarre attack. The camp is deserted and laying in smoldering ruins. There is evidence of some sort of grisly struggle, which seems to have culminated in the camp being burned to the ground. Nearby, the group finds a massive hole in the ice, and at the bottom, an alien spacecraft, which has apparently been buried for thousands of years. Finally, they also stumble upon a hideous, deformed corpse, featuring two faces which seem to be melted together.

Back at the American outpost, the base's doctor dissects the corpse, and the dog handler takes care of the sled dog that had been hunted by the crazed Norwegians. The situation quickly deteriorates when the so-called dog transforms into a grotesque creature and attacks the other dogs in the kennel. The men realize, to their horror, that the dog was actually a hostile, shapeshifting alien monster, capable of assimilating and replicating its victims with such precision that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the replica and the original being.

The men quickly succumb to paranoia, utterly incapable of determining who is still human and who is an assimilated replica of a human. The situation becomes even more perilous when the base's doctor discovers that, if the Thing manages to escape the wastes of Antarctica, it will eradicate the human race in a matter of months. The men are faced with the task of identifying the Things in their midst, killing them, and trying to survive the ordeal somehow.

A prequel was made in 2011, bearing the same title.

See also:

• The Thing (1982) on IMDb
• The Thing on Wikipedia