The Thing from Another World (1951)

In 1949, in the Officers Club in Anchorage, Alaska, the pilot Captain Patrick "Pat" Hendry is summoned by General Fogarty to fly to a remote outpost to investigate something that has crushed on Earth. Captain Hendry flies with his crew and meets Dr. Arthur Carrington and his team of scientists and they fly to the location. They discover a flying saucer buried in the ice and they use Thermite bombs expecting to release the spacecraft. However, it explodes and is totally destroyed by the bombs. They also find a frozen life form and bring it to the research station. When the creature thaws, it attacks the dogs and loses one arm. Dr. Carrington researches and discovers that it is a vegetable life that reproduces like plants. Captain Hendry believes that the dangerous creature is an invader and decides to find a way to destroy it with his team. But Dr. Carrington believes that the scientific discovery is more important than lives and protects the creature.

When most think of The Thing, they think of the 1982 masterpiece by John Carpenter. However, the original The Thing From Another World, though very different, is still a skilled exercise in suspense. A group of researchers near the North Pole uncover a crashed spacecraft, and take the body of the pilot back to their station in a block of ice. Unfortunately for them, the body is still very much alive, and breaks free of the ice, rampaging throughout the base with the desperate crew trying to stop it before it spreads to the outside world.

Unlike the Carpenter version and the story on which it was based, this alien is not the shapeshifting imitator that the story has become known for, instead portrayed as a more Frankenstein-like monster. While this is a major detriment to the film, it does manage to rise above this limitation and deliver a very tense and claustrophobic thriller. The monster is traced around the station using a geiger counter, a motif that eventually inspired the motion tracker in Aliens. The most frightening scene is when the characters all huddle up in a room, watching the needle go higher and higher until the monster eventually kicks down the door. This is one of the few cases where the original film is inferior, but this chilly chiller from 1951 still wins where it counts, and will keep you watching the skies.