John Carpenter’s wild 1982 remake has largely eclipsed the original 1951 Thing, but genre fans will relish the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with this classic of post-war paranoia.

The story is much the same: a saucer crash in the Arctic and the retrieval of an alien body leads to havoc at a remote scientific station where boffins argue with the military about just what to do with the ‘super-intelligent carrot’ from another world. The scientists want to study the alien being; the USAAF guys want to blow it to kingdom come before it does any further damage. It’s not exactly hard to spot a subtext here, with the bearded liberal intelligentsia rolling over as they attempt to ‘understand’ the alien menace while clean-shaven, hawkish patriots dismiss such craven attitudes and take action.

While Carpenter’s remake – with its shape-shifting alien that can look just like you or me – is a knowing take on, and perhaps even an implicit critique of, such simplistic Cold War politics, the original plays it straight down the line, with a final warning to: “Keep Watching the Skies!” And speaking of hawkish sentiments, while the film is credited to director Christian Nyby it’s almost certain that producer Howard Hawks had a hand in its direction (and all the Hawks trademarks, from the professionals-in-a-jam plot to the rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue, are here).

While, in retrospect, Thing is a trifle plodding compared to some of the saucer scare flicks that were soon to follow, its significance as part of that first wave – after all, this was a mere four years after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting – is undiminished.