The (Un)Lucky

In honor of Friday the 13th and spooky superstitions at the North Pole, I give you Christian Nyby’s 1951 The Thing from Another World (later remade into the classic 1982 John Carpenter Antarctic horror film, The Thing–we won’t even mention the most recent version…):

For a comprehensive list of polar films, check out this great website (complete with genre icons!).

In Nature’s State, Susan Kollin has this to say about the film:

Anxieties about national security and the complexities of human relations with nonhuman nature became the basis of a popular Hollywood film about Alaska…[The Thing] imagines the post-World War II threat as an alien creature, both a Soviet and a nuclear menace. The thing, for instance, literally falls out of the sky, contaminating the land and threatening to destroy American civilization as we know it.