"The cells are made of protoplasm, their character determined by the nucleus. "Each of us with an eye on the other, to make sure he doesn't do something - peculiar." Who is the imposter? Who can you trust? And who is the alien? It fed on the paranoia of the time between the two World Wars. The idea that the alien could mutate or "morph" into any other creature, is fodder for many imitations since. The fact that the story has been filmed several times shows that there is a good basic storyline material for a horror film. "The last I saw the split skull was oozing green goo, like a squashed caterpillar.wandering around with a split skull and brain oozing out.has anybody seen it coming over here?.About four feet tall - three red eyes - brains oozing out?" (presumably this last was in case anyone had spotted a different scary alien and mistook it for the first one.) Three mad hate-filled eyes blazed up with a living fire, bright as fresh-spilled blood, from a face ringed with a writhing, loathsome nest of worms, blue, mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow -" "The broken haft of the bronze ice-axe was still buried in the queer skull. Crawling - damn, it's crawling there in the ice right now!" "They haven't seen those three red eyes and that blue hair like crawling worms. In its worst excesses it is so over-the-top as to be funny, Passages which should be chilling and horrific come across to a modern reader as unbelievable. However it is now sadly dated and feels extremely overwritten.
The premise of the story is a good one, and there are lots of possibilities for tension and paranoia, all of which Campbell tries to create. With misgivings, they proceed to thaw the creature, which then disappears. They realise that its spaceship must have crashed there 20 million years before.
The story is set in Antarctica, where an isolated group of scientific researchers find the body of an alien creature in the ice. It was first published in the August 1938 edition of the "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine, under the pen name Don A. Campbell Jr., is the novella on which "The Thing", the 1982 film directed by John Carpenter, is based.
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