The following contains spoilers for The Thing.

Critically mauled on release and largely overlooked in cinemas, John Carpenter’s The Thing has only grown in stature since 1982. What were once condemned as deficiencies – its graphic gore and violence, icy tone and low-key characterization – are now generally regarded as positives. Its simple story about a group of scientists and misfits who encounter a shape-shifting alien in their Antarctic outpost, The Thing has aged remarkably well for a 35-year-old film: Rob Bottin’s practical effects are still extraordinarily imaginative, and fans still debate the finer points of its action today. Who sabotaged the fridge full of blood samples? Were MacReady and Childs still human at the end?

Behind the scenes, the story of how The Thing was made is a fascinating one all by itself. Originally a novella, Who Goes There?, written by John W. Campbell Jr, The Thing was originally adapted in 1951 as The Thing From Another World, a hackle-raising thriller that dropped Campbell’s idea of a creature capable of imitating its host and replacing it with a hulking man-monster played by James Arness. As written by Bill (son of Burt) Lancaster, Carpenter’s The Thing went right back to the source, delivering a tense whodunnit where it’s not always clear who’s the alien. In his adaptation, Lancaster whittled down the base’s inhabitants from 37 to 12, allowing him more time to establish his ensemble cast, among them gruff helicopter pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell), veteran scientist Blair (Wilford Brimley) and pothead conspiracy theorist Palmer (David Clennon).

John Carpenter’s first studio film, garnered off the back of indie hits such as Halloween and The Fog, The Thing was a complex production, even with the handsome budget given over by Universal. Many of Rob Bottin’s VFX ideas were new and untested; location filming in British Columbia was freezing cold, while the shoot on LA sound stages saw actors spend hours on a refrigerated set in the midst of a searing hot summer. Through the process of making The Thing, there were all kinds of creative roads not travelled, scenes that were shot but later deleted. Some of the latter exist on The Thing’s DVD and Blu-rays, and are largely alternate or longer takes of existing sequences, like the moment where Blair dissects a dead chunk of alien and ruminates on its protean abilities.