The Thing

Director: John Carpenter

1984 / 109min / 35mm

CGI spectacle may offer us visions of worlds beyond imagination and gravity-defying action, but pixels alone can never achieve the sheer viscous, loathsome ickiness on display in Carpenter’s free remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby classic. Rob Bottin and Stan Winston’s practical effects co-star with Kurt Russell (“I just wanna get up to my shack and get drunk”), playing a hard-bitten helicopter pilot passing the winter at an isolated Antarctic outpost with a group of researchers when they stumble across an ancient, awakened evil—one that first comes to them in the innocent guise of an orphaned sled dog. One of the bleakest films ever underwritten by an American studio!

Distributor: Universal

Part of The Dog Dies