Fresh off of finishing Escape From New York, John Carpenter's first big studio film came with a big studio composer. The legendary Ennio Morricone’s icily monochrome score added memorably to the uneasy atmosphere engulfing the inhabitants of an Antarctic research station when they are confronted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of the people that it kills.

In the snowy wilderness of Antartica 12 men, including pilot R.J MacReady (Kurt Russell), have just discovered… something. For 100,000 years it’s been buried in the snow and ice. Now it has found a place to live inside where no-one can see, hear or feel it. A parasitic extraterrestrial lifeform that assimilates other organisms and in turn imitates them, has infiltrated the research station, taking the appearance of the researchers that it absorbs. And as the task of telling who is human and who is infected becomes increasingly helpless, an increasing paranoia begins to develop within the group that threatens to tear them apart.

Released just two weeks after E.T. Carpenter’s film could hardly have presented a more contrasting idea about extra-terrestrial life. And in a nice echo of the film’s central conceit, Morricone’s own unused music from the 1982 original score has made an infiltration of its own in recent times when it was revealed by the composer to have ended up in his score for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.

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