The Thing
A loose remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi anti-Cold War allegory, John Carpenter's Thing isn't concerned with messages; it's just a terrifying meditation on paranoia and subzero dread as a group of scientists at the South Pole (led by Kurt Russell) is infiltrated by an alien that assumes the bodies of its victims in very messy ways. And despite its many gross-out F/X, no moment in the movie is more unsettling than watching cuddly Quaker Oatmeal pitchman Wilford Brimley go insane. With The Thing and Halloween, Carpenter becomes the only director to appear on this list twice, and frankly, no one's more shocked than he is. ''When The Thing was released,'' he says, ''it was one of the most hated movies of all time.'' Time to set the record straight.
