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"It was an enormous failure and I got fired … Audiences hated the ending. They wanted to know who the Thing was. But I don’t care. That’s how I wanted it."

On the back of the success of 1981's Escape from New York, John Carpenter was signed up by Universal for The Thing, with predictable results both in terms of box office fortunes (bad) and artistic merit (good). As with Escape from New York, The Thing is a prime cut from Carpenter and Kurt Russell's longtime creative partnership, with Russell starring as MacReady, a helicopter pilot who becomes a reluctant leader.

Reappraised as a sci-fi horror masterpiece in the years since it got Carpenter his jotters, The Thing is set in an isolated Antarctic research station and follows a group of scientists who encounter a shapeshifting alien that assimilates and imitates other life forms. As the creature infiltrates the group, mistrust and fear escalate, and with good reason: nobody knows who is still human.