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John Carpenter knows who was really the Thing at the end of the movie... but four decades later, he's still not telling. 

"The ultimate in alien terror" was a mere promotional tagline in 1982. Today, those five simple words refer to one of the greatest (if not the greatest) science fiction horror movies ever made. It's hard to believe that 40 years have passed since the release of John Carpenter's The Thing, which blended elements from 1951's The Thing from Another World and the John W. Campbell Jr.'s 1938 novella it was based on, Who Goes There?, to form an entirely new specimen that has been nigh-impossible to imitate all these years later.

Carpenter's affinity for the material was evident several years earlier in Halloween, which featured a scene in which Laurie Strode and Tommy Doyle watch the Howard Hawks-produced The Thing from Another World on television just before Michael Myers' murderous rampage throughout the neighborhood. That little homage might have remained the director's only connection to the property, had it not been for his old buddy from USC film school, producer Stuart Cohen, who convinced him to take on the project, whose script was penned by Bill Lancaster (son of Golden Age Hollywood star, Burt Lancaster).

"It was not something I wanted to do," Carpenter tells SYFY WIRE. Universal had [the rights to] The Thing and they wanted to remake it. The original Thing [From Another World] was one of my favorite movies. I really didn't want to get near it. But I re-read the novella and I thought, 'You know, this is a pretty good story here. We get the right writer, the right situation, we could do something [with this]. So I decided to do that. This was right after Escape from New York. I had my first studio movie, which was a big deal."

A tale of snowy isolation and creeping paranoia, The Thing follows a group of men at an Antarctic research station who find themselves besieged by a thawed-out alien life-form capable of replicating any living organism. "We went back to the kind of origin of the story, which is the imitation," Carpenter says. "It wasn't a big Frankenstein monster, it was a creature that can imitate other life forms perfectly. It's a lot more complex and different than the first film."

The slow erosion of trust between the characters leads to in-fighting and violence as the alien, which can only be eliminated with fire, picks them off, one-by-one — all while assuming a number of gruesome forms it has learned to mimic from a lifetime spent traversing the universe. This utilization of a frozen locale and a horrific being of unfathomable origin may conjure up the cosmic dread of At the Mountains of Madness (published two years before Who Goes There?). However, Carpenter insists that the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft were "not really" on his mind while making The Thing.

Carpenter's name is on the title, but just as much credit should be given to Rob Bottin, whose trailblazing creature designs set a new benchmark for practical effects. "He said, 'Well, the Thing can look like anything.' I thought about it and [came to the conclusion of], 'Well, that's true because it's been throughout the universe. Whatever's it imitated, it can pull it up,'" the director explains. "So why have one Thing? It's a constantly changing creature."

Bottin put in so much effort, that he was briefly hospitalized for exhaustion. "He worked a little too hard sometimes, I'm afraid." The director's favorite alien design was the Norris head that splits away from the body like a TGI Friday's patron pulling apart a fresh mozzarella stick. "The most fun was the head coming off and sprouting legs and crawling away. It was ridiculous, that's why. At this at this point, the creature can design was designed after the script. I read Bill Lancaster's description of this scene and he came up with the line, 'You gotta be f— kidding,' which I just think is perfect."

Despite the fact that his adaptation would be vastly different from the 1951 version, Carpenter still wanted to pay homage to that movie by recreating its famous opening title sequence, in which the letters seem to burn right through the screen.

Bottin, who had just finished up work on Joe Dante's The Howling, suggested Peter Kuran of VCE Films for the job. A veteran of the first Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica TV series, Kuran landed the gig by bidding $20,000, which was significantly less than the price tag proposed by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Had Corman's company won the contract, The Thing's opening title would have been handled by an up-and-coming James Cameron. "I [can] actually say that I beat him out on a job," says Kuran, who accomplished the title effect with a fish tank, a garbage bag, and some matches.

"I eventually [landed on] a setup that had a huge fish tank, which I used to put smoke into. And then behind that, I had a frame that I stretched garbage bag plastic over. And behind that, there was a light ... a 1000-watt light being held back by the garbage bag plastic because [it] was opaque black. I put the title on the back of the fish tank using animation black ink in the cel to make the title. When I'd start the camera, I'd run behind and touch the black garbage bag plastic with a couple of matches. The matches would make a hole and they would burn in open up and reveal the light, which then came through the title and made the rays in the fish tank. We did several takes and got the one that we wound up using. One of the takes opened up and just said 'NG.' It didn't open up all the way."

Kuran's decision to use a fish tank was the result of a rather disastrous experience on The Wrath of Khan, which opened in theaters the same year. "I'd done a shot on Star Trek II and I used a salt heater and sugar to put together this effect. I did it inside and it just completely smoked out the whole building. So I learned from that and when I did The Thing, I put it in a tank, so that the smoke was in a tank [and] it wouldn't go anywhere further than the tank."

The Thing's opening titles feature a second nod to the 1950s in the form of a flying saucer that crashes to Earth hundreds of thousands of years before the events of the movie. The ship was actually a miniature model constructed by Susan Turner. "[Peter] sent me over to speak with John Carpenter by myself and it was great," she says. "Carpenter told me his concept of what a spaceship should be like — he liked the '50s spaceships. He was very nice person, very cordial, very supportive. So I went back, and I made it."

"We used motion control to film the spaceship in the opening sequence of The Thing, using different passes for the shots. One pass was the ship itself; two was the chasing lights on the perimeter of the ship; three was for the stationery lights. These different pieces of film were expertly combined by Pete Kuran in the optical printer with the matte painting of Earth by Jim Danforth and the 'exhaust flame' cell animation I created."

Turner still has the UFO model in her possession and hopes to sell it over the next couple of years.

With the creature designs and title sequence squared away, Carpenter set about finding his creative of frost-bitten men to populate U.S. Outpost 31:

Kurt Russell (helicopter pilot, MacReady), Keith David (mechanic, Childs), David Clennon (mechanic, Palmer), Richard Masur (dog handler, Clark), Joel Polis (biologist, Fuchs), Peter Maloney (meteorologist, Bennings) Donal Moffat (station chief, Garry), Wilford Brimley (biologist, Blair), T.K. Carter (cook, Nauls), Richard Dysart (physician, Dr. Copper), Charles Hallahan (geologist, Norris), and Thomas G. Waites (radio operator, Windows).

Some of them (like Dysart and Hallahan) were already established veterans while others (like David and Waites) were promising young graduates of Juilliard and USC. "Everybody had a character that they played, but [it felt] natural and fit together," Carpenter says. "I'm very happy with the cast."

Maloney recalls his audition at the now-defunct Coca-Cola Building once located along New York's Fifth Avenue: "I went up there with a whole bunch of other guys [actors who were not ultimately cast] ... John led us in improvisation. We teamed up, turned the tables over, and threw things back and forth across the room, pretending that we were at war with this monster, which was, of course, not there. That a fun audition."

Masur states that he was originally interested in the role of Garry, but ended up choosing Clark after reading the scrip. "I said, 'The thing that I'm most attracted to is the dog handler.' [John] said, 'Really?' I said, 'Yeah, I love this character. I just think he's so misanthropic. He doesn't seem to want to be with anybody, but the dogs.' He said, 'Well, it's yours, if you want it.' And that was it."

Polis approached his character by enrolling in a beginners biology class at Baruch College in New York. "We dissected a frog and I just got into it."

David, meanwhile, saw Childs as "the strong silent type. He was a man a few words, he didn't say a whole lot. But when he did, it counted. I just took took him as being one who observes and notices everything at least twice."

A method actor by nature, Waites went pretty deep on Windows (originally called "Santiago" in the screenplay), which drew a bit of teasing from his fellow co-stars. "Kurt and Wil Brimely — God rest his blessed soul — used to make fun of me and say, 'What do you guys do? Discussing your motivation?'"

He continues: "I was trying to find something about the guy. Who he was and what his dreams were. Did he want to work in a f—ing radio station in the Arctic for the rest of his life? No. He had to want to be something else. So I have him reading — I know this is very subtle — a Hollywood magazine with pictures of famous movie stars from the time on the cover. Because that's what he wants to be doing, was be in the movie business and be a movie star. And movie stars wear sunglasses. I picked up a pair of green sunglasses in Venice [California]. I was wearing them, I came into rehearsal, I kept them on, I read the character, and I went up to John on the break. I said, 'John, from now, from now on, I want everyone to call me Windows.' He looked down at the floor, and he looked up at the ceiling and took a long drag on the cigarette and put the cigarette out. You could see him thinking it through and he went, 'Alright, everyone! From now on, Tommy wants everyone to call him Windows, okay?'"

Before production began in earnest, Carpenter insisted on two full weeks of rehearsals (a highly unusual occurrence on a big-budget studio movie like The Thing), which took place on an empty Universal soundstage. "It was just having the actors get comfortable with their roles and with each other," he says. "It very, very valuable. There really wasn't wasn't much more than, 'Let's go through this, fellas.' You know, they worked out a couple things and they worked out their characters."

"We really established relationships with each other and I think that comes through in the film," adds Polis. "When we finished filming the film, John famously said, 'I'll never rehearse actors again.' But 40 years later, I'm told — I don't know if it's true — but I think he thinks it was his best film. And I'm sure it's because of the relationships."

"[We'd] take the time to talk about the script and offer ideas [and] those of us who would like to do research did research brought it in and shared it with everyone," Maloney remembers. "Then we wrote things on the on the board, we learned a lot about what it's like to be in the Antarctic."

During this period, Masur also spent a lot of time with the dog — a half-wolf mix named Jed — that gets chased by the Norwegian helicopter. "Jed was just remarkable," says Masur, who practiced with the canine for hours until the two could walk "in this totally casual way" down the hall leading to the kennel. Shortly after the lights go down, the seemingly docile animal soon reveals its true nature and begins assimilating the other dogs around it, prompting Childs to burn it with a flamethrower.

"Everybody always thinks it's so sexy and exciting. It was scary," David admits. "It wasn't napalm, but it was real gasoline coming through a real pump and a real gun and [producing] real fire. A slip of the finger could cost somebody their life or certainly lots and lots of damage. So, it was a little scary. I was excited and glad to be doing it, but it was a little scary."

Maloney, who had a terrible fear of dogs at the time, also needed to spend time with Jed in order to feel comfortable enough to let the dog jump up and try to lick his face near the start of the film. "When Jed stood up and put his paws on my shoulder and licked my face, he was taller than me, I think. I was pretty freaked out by having to do that."

Once rehearsals were over, the shoot began, with Carpenter's trusty cinematographer — the legendary Dean Cundey — back at his side after Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from New York. The key to this movie, Cundey tells us, was finding a sense of realism. "I made sure that the lighting came from the practical lights that hung overhead in the set ... I also think it was because the creature, in its various forms, was on the set. It was not a tennis ball on a stick, as so often it is nowadays. It was, in fact, something the actors could see, touch, feel. I think all of those authentic touches created an atmosphere, not only for the actors, but also for the crew."

The biggest challenge was shooting Bottin's creations in such a way that they felt real and took "advantage of textures and gooey slime and all of the stuff that we used to give a sense of weirdness to the creature. So it was all carefully done. Rob [would] set up the creature, would point and say, 'Okay, I hate this area, let's not look at that too much. This came out okay.' And so, I would very carefully light with little little pools of light and darkness for the creatures that he built in an effort to show off their best aspects, their strengths — rather than the audience looking at something too big. And saying, 'Oh, well, that looks like a blob of rubber to me.'"

"We are the last of the great rubber movies," Masur says. "After us, things started going pretty much all CGI for these kinds of effects, but Rob Bottin got to do the Mona Lisa/Sistine Chapel of rubber. And it's pretty impressive, I gotta say."

Filming mainly took place on Universal soundstages that were constantly kept between 40-45 degrees to simulate the frosty conditions Antarctic setting. "It was cold in there and so I had the costume designer make a woolen neck warmer, which I wore in the movie," Polis recalls. "And in in a week's time, the whole crew was wearing neck warmer."

Exteriors were filmed on the Salmon Glacier in Stewart, British Columbia (near the Alaskan border), where a life-sized model of the research station was erected. The crew then allowed the snow to accumulate for several months before making the journey north. "One of the things that fascinated me the most was how they made the set in [Canada] look exactly like the set that we were on in Universal," David says." I mean, the same pictures hung the same way. It was as if they had lifted that room and put it in [Canada]."

It was a breathtaking spot, but the weather never could stay consistent. White-outs, overcast skies, and below-freezing temperatures never failed to wreak havoc.

"Once you get a cloud or clouds overhead, then everything goes white. And we had to match the skies, which were clear and beautiful, so it was a pain," Carpenter says. "It was a mountain that we had to go up. We were down by the bottom of the mountain and then we had to travel up every day. We'd get up there, the weather would be sh**, we'd have to wait all day long, get nothing done, and then go all the way back down ... We all were in it together. It was not an easy film to make. We had to fight the elements. It was rough. And since we were all in it together, we all bonded. Everybody bonded."

"I've backpacked all over the United States and so, I love the outdoors. I was in heaven. It was an adventure," Polis adds. "T.K. Carter hated it when we went up to Alaska. He was used to LA, he had never been in that kind of cold. And some other people didn't like it very much. But man, it was so beautiful up there. And we had all these great toys: helicopters, flame-throwers, and all this s—. It was like a kid's dream come true."

Despite the uncooperative climate, Carpenter wanted to make full use of the location and went so far as to move a number of scenes outside. "Which, to my mind, just defied the whole premise of the story, which was, 'We can't go outside unless it's an absolute emergency.' After I saw the film, I thought John had made a good decision," says Masur. "So that big scene at night where where Kurt's going, 'I know I'm human' and burning the blood bags and everything. We shot that all inside in the rec room and it was a great scene — it was really tense and crazy. And then John, moved it outside and we're standing there in a line in the cold."

"Originally, he had me killed on the set indoors," Polis says of Fuchs. "I've got a great picture of me hanging from the door with a shovel in my chest. And he took a look at and went, 'No, no, this isn't a slasher movie.' And so, he devised [this new death] when we got up. He actually, bless his heart, gave me like five or six extra scenes when we went up to Alaska. He wrote them for me, because I became the bridge to the science."

Another memorable moment taking place centers around the death of Bennings, the first member of the group to be assimilated onscreen when he's briefly left alone in the storeroom. The alien barely gets to finish the absorption process when Windows returns, forcing the alien masquerading as the meteorologist is forced to make a run for it. The Bennings-Thing doesn't get very far when it's burned to death by MacReady.

"I had no shirt on, my coat coat was wide open, and with the wind-chill, it was 103 degrees below zero," Maloney recalls, adding that the only source of warmth came from a pair of hand warmers stuck inside the false arms. "John said, 'Well, now look — the cameras are going to maybe slow down here [because] it is so cold. I'm putting you in charge. If you feel that it's dangerous or it's too uncomfortable, you just tell me and we'll go back inside and warm up.' And I said, 'Okay.' I don't remember asking him to do that. Actors want to please the director and sometimes, they can put their lives in danger because they want to do what the director wants. And we all want the movie to be terrific. We don't want to chicken out and deprive the movie of a scene that might be terribly thrilling to the audience."

Maloney goes on to elucidate a rather fascinating insight that may provide fans with a fresh perspective on their next rewatch of the film: "If you see the movie and you see anybody with a beard like me, then you know that that person is not going to transform in the face. Because with with facial hair, it’s too difficult to make the [special effects] cast."

Cundey had the cameras "winterized," a process by which the manufacturer (in this case, Panavision) replaced the usual lubricant with anti-freezing agent.

"We [also] had a warming system for the the magazine on top of the camera that held all the film to keep the film from freezing and cracking and buckling. So keeping everything warm was an important thing." However, if the cameras were brought inside during breaks, the lenses would fog up with condensation. "Pretty quickly, we decided that the room with the camera work always had to stay the same temperature as outside, below freezing. So the poor camera assistants never got a break to go into the warmth while they were working. They would go into the very below freezing camera room and they would work in their big parkas and their gloves and everything."

With regards to color, the cinematographer leaned into the idea of contrasts: "[For] the interior of the of the camp, I would tend to light it with a slightly warm light, implying that where they were living and working was kept warm compared to the exterior [which] tended to be blue. Sometimes, light coming from the camp would be warm so that we could say, ‘Oh yeah, that's warmth and safety over there.’"

Tragedy nearly struck during a six-hour bus trip to Stewart, where the actors stayed for the duration of the real-world leg of the shoot. Everything was going smoothly until a white-out hit and threatened to send the bus off the side of a mountain. Proving himself worthy of the MacReady role, Kurt Russell immediately assumed control of the situation.

"Kurt goes, 'Okay, nobody move. Who's in the seat farthest from the door?' I said, 'I am.' He goes, 'Alright, Tommy — get on your hands and knees and crawl to the front,'" Waites remember. "Slowly, I did it [and] I got off the bus. One at a time, he got us all off the bus and then the weight shifted and then we got behind the bus and we pushed it back on [the road]. And we drove to Hyder, Alaska safely. This was before cellphones. There were no radios, no communications. And we arrived at 5:30 a.m. as sun was coming up, and there was John Carpenter at the bus stop waiting for his men. He shook each one of our hands as we got off the bus, not knowing the peril we had just been through."

"Kurt Russell was our captain," adds Maloney." He was hilarious and with us all the time. There was no separation of him and us the way there sometimes is with the star of a movie and the rest of the cast. We seemed to be all equals, except in the billing. At the end, of course, Kurt gets his separately because he is the star."

In another instance, life imitated art when Carpenter decided to cut a short exchange between Windows and Palmer. "It was sort of like a build-up to us fighting," Waites says. "But let's say it was three quarters of a page of dialogue. That's a lot of lines for an actor trying to get work."

He and Clennon had already gone over the scene together when it was suddenly axed. The two actors weren't very happy about this and spent the next 10 minutes or so verbally abusing their director — completely unaware that they were mic'd up. "John sticks his head around the corner [and] He goes, 'Hey, guys, I just heard every word you said.' And he wasn't laughing. It took me a while to dig myself out of that one. We were both mortified. And Clennon's like, 'Oh, come on, John! A little mutiny is perfectly normal on every set!' I think I wrote him a note to apologize, but I felt so terrible."

At the end of many work days, the gang would unwind in the Alaskan town of Hyder with plenty of free-flowing Everclear to keep them warm. "That became a hazing or a ritual that we put ourselves through," continues Waites, who has since become a recovered alcoholic. "We did a lot of drinking and a lot of partying. It was burning the candle at both ends — staying up all night and having to shoot all day. It was the ‘80s, man. It was a different time."

Of course, not everyone got in on the merriment. "Donald was a family man and [became] upset when we would come in at three in the morning drunk from the bar and woke him up a couple of times," states Polis. "But he was a good man and a wonderful actor."

For the infamous blood test sequence, Cundey devised an ingenious system for hinting at the identity of the imposter that did not make public until years later:

"I took a certain liberty that when the guy we're most suspicious of is seen, I didn't put the eye light in his eyes. I didn't put that little sparkle that we use most of the time on characters to create the sense of life, of intelligence. I kept the light out of his eyes, so his eyes were the ones who were dark and dead. I think just subconsciously, the audience sensed that ... I think it paid off because it built that suspense as we went down the line from character to character and he was always lurking and waiting."

To achieve the effect of Palmer's blood running away after it's touched by the hot wire, the crew built a custom section of flooring attached to a gimbal that could move in any direction. "Then we attached the camera to the floor, so it stayed stationary, looking at this floor," Cundey explains. "No matter what direction we we moved the floor, the camera was always looking at the same spot. And then we put the blood on the floor and moved it around. As it would run in a particular direction, the camera would only see it as crossing the frame. I think it was pretty effective."

"I remember watching the behind-the-scenes process that you do to make the film moment work," David says. "Where the blood was being come from and how it was going to look. The most remarkable thing was the hand and the petri dish. The hand is a mold of Kurt's hand, but it wasn't his hand. It was great watching him stand by his arm and [watching how they filmed it so] it looked like it was him holding it."

Once exposed, Palmer starts to transform and ends up attacking poor Windows, who fails to burn the alien in time. "I believe I did my own stunts [for that]. They put me on some machine [and] that's me shaking around," adds Waites. "I do believe so. I think I did a few takes of it and then they said, 'Okay, let's do it with the stunt guy.' I seem to remember John letting me do it because I was in quite good physical shape at that time."

The blood test scene ends with one of the biggest laughs in the movie. Weary and beleaguered after Palmer's transformation, Garry says: "I know you gentlemen have been through a lot, but when you find the time, I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS F—ING COUCH!"

"He started out so calm and then he flipped out. We burst into laughter, it was really hard to keep it in," Waites remembers. "John's sets are really fun."

In addition to the UFO model that opens the movie, Turner was also tasked with creating a miniature version of the outpost the generator room for the film’s climax. “I went over and measured everything, took a big chunk of foam, cut it out and figured out how to do all the different cans and that stuff,” she explains. MacReady’s final standoff with the Blair-Thing was originally going to feature an extensive amount of stop-motion work by Randy Cook — only a fraction of which made it into the finished cut.

“It was some great stuff," Carpenter says. "The creature comes up out of the floorboards and you see these tentacles. The problem is that everything we'd done was live-action, it just didn't fit. It just looked like a different movie and that was troublesome. So we just used the bared minimum.”

“There was a thought at first that they would do more monster reveal stuff in that ending sequence with stop-motion and an actual designed creature of some kind that comes out with multiple arms and heads and eyeballs and whatever," echoes Cundey. "When they started seeing it, it looked so different from the rest of the film, the rest of the creature stuff. All of the creature stuff, the dog head, for instance, had a real sensibility and stop-motion at the time was still very stuttery. And so, they decided to eliminate what had been designed in the storyboards, some of the shots, and they decided to keep it down to one shot — or one shot that repeats — and eliminate some of the others."

Even after all these years, fans still marvel at the special effects and continue to debate the film's ambiguous ending. Was MacReady a Thing? Was Childs a Thing? Was neither of them the Thing? SYFY WIRE hoped to settle the discussion once and for all, but things (no pun intended) are rarely ever that simple. "I know who was the Thing in the end," Carpenter teases. "I know, but I'm not telling you ... I just feel like it's a secret that must be kept. The gods came down and swore me to secrecy."

With no concrete answers available, viewers have come up with numerous explanations. One of the most prominent bits of speculation posits that the bottle Mac hands Childs is not full of whiskey, but gasoline. The reasoning goes that if Childs was infected, he wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but that logic falls apart when you remember that the alien is capable of imitating its victims perfectly on a cellular level. "We were both drinking out of the same bottle, so why would that be gasoline and [why would] he not be as dead as I would be?" asserts David. "Those kinds of comments, I don't even pay attention to them, because they're kind of stupid. [Mac] really is not Houdini, so where would he have switched the bottles if that were the case?"

Others claim that Childs is a Thing because he has no eye-light in those final moments. Again, this does not hold up to scrutiny, as that system was only applied for the blood test sequence. A third hypothesis alleges that Childs must be infected because you can't see his breath in the below-freezing temperatures. David provides the perfect counter-argument to this:

"I don't know the last time that you were in the cold and standing by a fire [but] if you're in the cold, more than likely the wind is blowing. Whether it's blowing hard or blowing soft, the wind has a direction. If the wind is blowing in my direction, and the heat from the fire is coming at me, you're not gonna see the smoke come out of my mouth the same way as if someone on the other side of the fire, where it is cold, and the smoke is coming out of his mouth. So that theory didn't hold water for me either because if you've ever been by a campfire [in the cold], you know what that looks like."

"I appreciate them, but they don't know what the hell they're talking about," Carpenter says, referring to all of the fan theories. "There are some hilarious ones. Everybody says, 'Well, he took a drink, so he must be contaminated.' Blah, blah, blah. On and on. I'm not speaking about it anymore."

"John never would reveal the answer or maybe never had an answer. He he just wanted to leave it hanging, so it would would be an intriguing ending," Cundey muses, revealing that there was plenty of speculation amongst the crew during production.

"We came up with various endings as we were working. [One such] ending [had] Kurt [as] the only one left, a helicopter comes in because Kurt's going to escape and then somehow, the creature gets on the helicopter, and goes to the Navy ship and starts the sequel. Or should the two of them be rescued and then we find out that the other character is really the Thing and he escaped on this navy ship? There were all kinds of stories written mostly by the crew as we sat shivering."

For Waites, the importance of the ending lies not in who might or might not be an imitation, but in how "no one trusts anyone anymore." Humanity's nasty habit of pointing fingers and making wild accusations is what makes The Thing so timeless (even more so than the '51 adaptation whose obvious Red Scare allegory feels rather dated).

The '82 version may have stood as a metaphor for the nascent AIDS crisis at the time, but its overarching message of eternal suspicion can be plugged into any time period and still feel shockingly relevant. "The idea that my standing next to you at a bar, I could get sick and die. You could be trying to overtake the species with your virus," Waites explains, drawing a parallel to the era of coronavirus. "That [John] had the prescience to know that our paranoia would just increase..."

John Carpenter's The Thing opened in theaters everywhere on June 25, 1982 — just two weeks after the release of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. By that point, moviegoers had already fallen head over heels for the squat cosmic visitor trying to phone home, and didn't exactly know what to make of Carpenter's graphic and nihilistic slow-burn that The New York Times called "instant junk." Even Christian Nyby, director of The Thing from Another World, publicly bashed the film. "People liked the cuddly more than they liked the fear," Turner says. "It was softer. Ours was a little harsh compared to E.T."

"It wasn't marketed," states Polis. "They gave it two weeks of marketing. Cat People was supposed to open that weekend. They were so far behind on that and we finished up, the film was ready. They were gonna give us you know, months of marketing and suddenly, they just shoved it into that position between E.T. and Poltergeist. E.T. was such a worldwide phenomenon, we just didn't have a chance."

"It was a disaster," Maloney adds. "No one came to see it. No one wanted to see it. They pulled it from the theaters ... Universal thought we were gonna save their ass. They were in terrible danger as a company and they had put their bets on John Carpenter's The Thing."

Produced on a modest budget of $15 million, the film brought in less than $20 million at the domestic box office, and Carpenter's career took a serious hit.

As we now know, the last four decades have been unbelievably kind to The Thing, which is finally considered (and rightly so) to be an unparalleled cinematic triumph, whose impact on pop culture cannot be understated. "I don't know if it's gone to masterpiece yet," says a humble Carpenter. "I know a lot of people have re-examined the film and have nice things to say about it now ... It's a lot like my work. It's kind of damned at first."

"It's unfortunate that The Thing didn't get the juice that it has gotten over these last 40 years," David says. "It's a film that really holds up well and I think it's one of John's best. We had a kick-ass cast, it was a good story, there were so many wonderful things about it. But at the time that it came out, it did not get the accolades that it has consequently gotten over the years. That's the only thing I can say about it because it wass wonderful working with John Carpenter, he's a wonderful filmmaker, and I wish he was still as active today because I would work with him anytime."

"Justice has prevailed," Waites proclaims. "I feel so vindicated, mostly for John. He risked his reputation on doing his movie his way, which is what a director is supposed to do. And because he did it, he suffered immediate backlash. But ultimately, 'the truth will out,' as Shakespeare would say. The truth of it is that whether you're a science fiction fan or a horror fan or just a cinema fan, you sit and watch it and you get pulled in by the music, by the cinematography, by the camera movement."

Maloney has seen the profound cultural resonance firsthand at a number of fan conventions. "The movie means a lot to people," he explains. "When you sit at a table signing autographs and three generations of a family come up dressed as cast members of The Thing...a grandfather, father and the grandson. They're standing there and ask you to say your lines that they remember [because] they've memorized your lines. They say, 'Say that line that we like!' And we do, and they have tears in their eyes."

Turner sums up the film's legacy best: "It was ahead of its time."

While the intervening decades have brought about a great deal of deferred acclaim, they have also brought the unfortunate passing of several cast members: Charles Hallahan (1943-1997), Richard Dysart (1929-2015), Donald Moffat (1930-2018), and Wilford Brimley (1934-2020). "[What] makes me sigh a little bit is how many of these guys aren't here anymore," Masur admits. "Dysart's gone, Moffat's gone, Charlie's gone, Wilford's gone. And then there are a few of us who are chasing up close behind them now."

The men may not live forever, but the close relationships they shared certainly will.

"You really couldn't wait to get to work every day — whether it was Wil Brimley doing rope tricks or Kurt telling stories ... whatever the day brought," Waites says. "And then, oftentimes, we would go out afterwards and get to know each other. [We'd] hang out and had a lot of laughs, man, a lot of fun. Under John's auspices, we forged a bond."

"We got pretty close, as close as you can get working together for six months on a movie, coming from all different backgrounds, different disciplines and training," echoes Maloney. "I think about those guys and how wonderful it was to [work] with them and what a privilege it was to be in a movie with them. The human side of it."

In 2011, Universal Pictures attempted to reboot the property with a prequel film (also titled The Thing), which depicted the events at the Norwegian camp and led directly into the events of the '82 classic. Written by Eric Heisserer (Arrival) and directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. (The Forgotten Battle), the project eerily repeated history as a critical and box office misfire, with many audience members pointing to the fact that its unconvincing CGI did not hold a candle to Bottin's groundbreaking practical effects.

As fate would have it, Cundey was "approached early on" to serve as director of photography on the prequel, "but they had already committed to somebody else," he reveals. "The fact that it was shot on a stage in a backlot with a lot of green screen — all the stuff that we we didn't do — was was obviously more convenient and comfortable for them. The fact was they took a different approach and when I saw their film, I thought, 'Well, interesting, but it didn't have some of the same feel of the original.'"

"Even though ours is a remake, there was a good reason to remake it," Maloney adds. "Because when they made the original, they didn't have the technology to do what we did. They also didn't have the money to do what we did. And so, I excuse it on that level and say it's a totally different thing."

If Carpenter had to choose a worthy successor to his movie, however, he'd probably go with the 2002 PlayStation 2 video game developed by Computer Artworks. "That was fun, and I was in it," says the avid gamer, referring to the character of Dr. Sean Faraday, whose appearance was based on that of Carpenter, though the director did not record any dialogue. "It's a lot of fun and I'm happy to have my visage in it."

Funnily enough, the director's notorious love of video games was apparent two decades prior on the set of The Thing. "John used to play video games on the set in between takes and he would beat the machine every day," Waites recalls. "It was Pong, he would be playing it in between takes because it takes forever to set up [certain shots]."

Back in early 2020, it was reported that a new reboot — partially based on "lost" John W. Campbell Jr. material — had entered development. Appearing at the Fantasia film festival several that summer, Carpenter revealed that he and Blumhouse were directly involved with the project.

He refused to give up any details at the time and continues to stick to that caginess when we broach the subject. "Maybe…we'll see," he says. What the hell do I know? That's the theme of my career. Write [this] down... John Carpenter: 'What the hell do I know?' No one tells me anything." Unfortunately, he also declined to speak hypothetically on the reboot when asked about what he'd like to see. "I'm not gonna tell you that. That would be something I would figure out and do and then you would discover it in the movie theater."

The cast, on the other hand, is a different story. Polis, for example, would like to see "some great CGI" and a story that brings the property "up to date," especially in a post-COVID world. "If I had to do it over again, I would have been in a hazmat suit when we brought that Thing into the rec room — if we brought that thing into the rec room [at all]. I didn't watch it for years and when I saw it, I went, 'Whoa, we missed that.' Things like that bring it up into our [21st century] understanding of science and contagion."

David would like to see "a good movie — something that holds up and is worthy of the hype."

Maloney isn't big on the idea of reboots, but wishes the studio good fortune. "I hope they make money for themselves, but does it really interest me? No, I don't have any interest. They could fool me. They could say, 'Well, Peter, we've redone it. Bennings is dead, but we want you to be in it!' If they said that, I'd be happy to do it because of John."

Similarly, Masur doesn't see much value in rebooting a film "that worked really, really well. What you need to do is take something that didn't quite work, but should have. That's makes for a great remake, where it just misses or some piece of it doesn't come together or you do something where you flip it."

"I'd like to see John Carpenter's influence," Waites concludes. "I'd like to see them ask John to write the script or ask John to produce it or ask John to influence it in some way."

The Thing is now streaming on Peacock.

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