In the first installment of what Carpenter would later call his Apocalypse Trilogy, a research team in Antarctica runs afoul of a shapeshifting alien menace. This bleak and stylish sci-fi horror thriller features Kurt Russell as resourceful helicopter pilot MacReady and Bill Lancaster’s screenplay in a faithful adaptation of John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella Who Goes There? , which was first filmed in 1951 as The Thing from Another World . Upon release, Carpenter’s film was overlooked in favor of Steven Spielberg’s record-breaking, friendly alien adventure E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), but in the ensuing decades, The Thing has become a contemporary classic, influencing many filmmakers. It was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2025.
