The Thing

It opened two weeks after E.T. and audiences did not want this. Reviews were hostile to the point of personal insult, and Carpenter lost his Universal deal over it.

Rob Bottin was twenty-two, effectively lived at the studio for over a year, and was hospitalised with exhaustion before it wrapped. He is uncredited on the dog-thing sequence, which Stan Winston shot as a favour.

The reason it endures is structural rather than gruesome. The creature has no plan, no dialogue and no motive beyond replication, and the film explains nothing about it at any point. The paranoia works because the audience simply cannot solve it either: watch it twice and the blood-test scene still does not give you enough.

Ennio Morricone wrote the score and Carpenter reportedly used the cue that sounded most like his own work.

The best Lovecraft adaptation ever made, and it is not adapted from Lovecraft.