There is something insistent in John Carpenter’s film, The Thing (1982), that tells us our worst enemy is the one sitting in front of us. With its themes of paranoia, group psychosis, and the presence of an entity whose alien cells run, undetected, through the protagonists’ veins, the film, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this summer, is the perfect metaphor in these times of COVID-19.

On one hand, there is the alien bug. The one that descended millions of years ago – before man walked on the planet – from a ship from another world that crashed in Antarctica. As if it were part of the same genesis, that which slipped from the ruined metal artifact, it had the power of burying itself in the ice and waiting, as if it were the same guardian of the tree of life waiting to be the predator of humanity.

The Thing is terrifying in its conception because like a mutating virus, the evil agent in this film just wants to jump from vein to vein,  survive in the extreme cold, go around the fire without disintegrating, and jump into civilization to assimilate. Although quite possibly at the end of its annihilation process, the irony of the universe would condemn him to remain alone, forever.

The 1938 novella written by John Wood Campbell Jr. (1910-1971) under the title, “Who goes there?” established an iceberg scenario in which a group of scientists in a station discovered a ship stranded on ice, and then suffered from the contagion of an alien being that once in contact with human cells, could perfectly imitate its victims.

With the golden age of science fiction during the Cold War fueled by mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union, Campbell’s story inspired an earlier adaptation in 1951, The Thing from Another World. Director Howard Hawks (Scarface, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo) helped adapt the script and invited his regular editor, Christian Nyby, to make his directorial debut (1951).

Hawks, uncredited as a co-director, helped piece together the plot written by Charles Lederer (Mutiny on the Bounty, 1962). A small community of scientists find a humanoid being, powerful in strength, whose cellular activity was similar to that of a vegetable but it fed on blood.

When the army enters the scene, the inevitability of disaster occurs – they are prisoners of the idea that they can aspire to communicate with a being from another world, who only seems to be a carnivorous plant.

Three decades after the celebrated first adaptation of Campbell’s story, Carpenter can’t help but admire it. In Halloween (1978), Carpenter, as co-writer and director, played The Thing from Another World on a TV in the background, not imagining that Universal Studios would call him two years later to make him in charge of a new adaptation.

The project sent shivers down Carpenter’s spine at the thought of messing with one of his favorite classics. He immediately sought to fill in Campbell’s tale – ignoring the creature’s telepathic powers.

Instead, he stressed the themes of paranoia and leadership broken by distrust in extreme situations that would manifest in the behavior of humans. And that we would never see the thing from the other world but only through manifestations in the protagonists’ behavior.

In his first film for a major studio in Hollywood, Campbell, a USC graduate and the filmmaker of Escape from New York, enlisted his star Kurt Russell to be part of his excursion to the ice world.

Shot partly in Alaska and mostly at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, Russell and his co-stars spent months on frozen sets to create the effect of the cold environment. David Clennon, Richard Masur, Wilford Brimley, Richard Dysart, T.K. Carter, and Keith David were part of the all-male cast. Adrienne Barbeau was uncredited as the voice of the computer.

For the special effects, Carpenter invited then 22-year-old Robert Bottin, with whom he had already worked on The Fog (1980). The challenge was for the moviegoers to witness, with the help of prosthetics, latex, animatronics, and other materials, the real-time transformation of a person or a sled dog into something terribly disturbing with human features turned into something more like from Dante’s hell.

Photographer Dean Cundey helped maintain this illusion with his framing and dark photography.

And although Carpenter had composed the themes for Halloween and Escape from New York, he traveled to Italy to ask Ennio Morricone to compose the score for The Thing. Morricone, an Oscar nominee at the time for his score for Days of Heaven, delivered minimalist music, with a lot of synthesizers.

Due to a confusion on the part of Carpenter, who did not understand that there would be a full orchestrated version also performed by Morricone, he stayed with the musical preliminaries. But the unintentional synthesizer score was effective in creating suspense.

The Thing died upon arrival in theaters on June 25, 1982. At a time when Universal Studios had just released E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial weeks earlier, a film with killer aliens did not seem like a good idea to the public, to the critics, or even to writers of the genre such as Isaac Asimov.

Then time proved Carpenter was right. The Thing not only tops lists of the best of horror and science fiction but has inspired filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino to pay tribute to him, as when the latter locked his characters in a cabin under the snow in The Hateful Eight (2015), using part of Morricone’s orchestral score that was never used for the 1982 film. In 2011, Universal even released a prequel, also titled The Thing, with Mary Elizabeth Olsen.

The catastrophic and lonely relevance of The Thing in recent times was fueled by the outbreak of COVID-19, reminding those scientists that Russell, at gunpoint, must force blood tests to find out where the deadly bug is living.

But the scariest part of The Thing, the one that descends from newspapers and television in their news and the way we relate to each other – magnified by social media – is that this moment of human empathy has turned into claustrophobia and anguish, knowing something is a threat to our welfare.

Translated by Mario Amaya