The Thing

In John Carpenter's 1982 sci-fi horror masterpiece The Thing, a twelve-man American research team stationed in remote Antarctica has their routine mission shattered when a frantically flying Norwegian helicopter pursues a sled dog right into their camp. After the chaotic Norwegians perish in a freak accident, helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) and station doctor Copper (Richard Dysart) fly to the nearby Norwegian base, discovering it completely burned out, deserted, and housing a horrific, grotesquely mutated human corpse. Back at the American outpost, the rescued dog reveals its true nature: it is a parasitic, extraterrestrial organism capable of perfectly imitating any living creature it absorbs cell by cell. Cut off from civilization by a brutal blizzard, the men realize that the alien could already be any one of them. As paranoia and mistrust destroy their collective sanity, MacReady takes charge, utilizing a improvised blood-testing method with hot copper wire to root out the shape-shifting creature before it can escape to assimilate the rest of humanity.