For those hording toilet paper

The Thing (1982) has always been a great winter horror movie. Seriously, what a great setting. The start of winter as Macready (Kurt Russell) tells us when asked to take his chopper up as intimidating inclement weather was a brewing as Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) wanted to check out the Norwegian's (or as Macready erroneously calls them Swedes) camp. Why would the Norwegians want to kill a dog so drastically, shooting so erratically and frenetically that their gunfire threatened the American science station where the film's setting takes place? It is a hook. The alien ship entering the earth's atmosphere heading towards Antarctica, containing a species threatening the very extinction of the human race.

I definitely plan to watch this again early next year. The cold is so ever present and that chill of winter, or just the constant awareness of isolation and how the freeze is a bitter pall soon to function antagonistically towards the outpost's denizens, ups the terror quotient. The science station will be an important location where "the fate of mankind is at stake". Well, Dr. Blair (Wilford Brimley) takes this seriously when he calculates the probability of what "the thing" could do on an epic scale, attempting to take matters into his own hands!

The guys steel themselves during a ghoulish autopsy, one of many notorious makeup effects that marvel thanks to Bottin and his genius.