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It’s hard to overstate the impact of John Carpenter’s 1982movie The Thing, with its evocative and creepy Antarctic setting, itsdisturbingly minimal Morricone score, its slow-burning ramping up of paranoiaand claustrophobia and, of course, its envelope-busting special effects thatdid things to dogs and humans you’d never thought possible.

Impossible too, I suppose, to recapture the kind ofexcitement the film generated among its original audiences (I went to see ittwice the week it came out, so gobsmacked was I).