Antarctica, 1982. Those words will mean something to some. Or rather some ‘Thing’ to some. Still lost? No worries. That’ll be white-out blizzard howling around the prefab huts. Next to the downed helicopter. And the fuel tanks. And the smouldering remains of a grotesque chimera, looking like a Findus Crispy Pancake. With ketchup. Gone wrong.

None the wiser? Christ, I’m dropping clues like billy-o here lads. But maybe it’s apt if my references remain opaque, my motives stay camouflaged, and my true self… is hidden. That’s The Thing in a nutshell; a (literally) monstrous imposter concealing itself, and its nefarious alien self, inside an ostensibly friendly and familiar host. Can I get an ‘Eek!’?

Such was the wonder of John’s Carpenter’s 1982 reboot of Howard Hawks’ paranoiac Cold War horror The Thing from Another World, from 1953. Both based on John W. Campbell’s much-earlier sci-fi novella, Who Goes There? – but it was Carpenter who, via an SFX tour de force at the time, brought the idea of ‘The Thing’ hiding inside to life…

It is the chilling tale of the shapeshifter; the imitator; the lethal cuckoo in the nest. But unlike nature’s fat feathery gate crasher, hoovering up life-giving parental attentions at the expense of some poor, shunned baby bird - incongruous to us, yet not the brood tender – The Thing’s gift for murderous mimicry was way ahead on the sneak-o-meter.

In other words, you couldn’t tell where the monster was hiding. Leading us to conclude that it could be inside any of us. And in a way, in these troubled times, I guess that holds true. You just can’t tell what’s going on inside people’s heads. What stirs their souls. What axe they grind. And what ugly outburst lies deep within. It’s potentially in all of us.

Most disturbing of all, like the movie, there are often few tell-tale outward signs. Quite the opposite in fact. False flags abound, in that some would have it that their politics, proclivities and personal ethos insulate them from accusations of menace – rooted as they are in positions deemed progressive or liberal and on ‘the right side of history’.

Sadly, that’s not always the case. Indeed, I’d go as far as saying it’s almost never the case. Scratch the surface of even the most enlightened citizen and I suspect that – lurking under all that virtue are a few seeds of prejudice, hatred, and division. Worse still, the kind of division it’s OK to indulge because er… something something politics.

Others are easier to spot. They wave flags. They hold banners. They come out with half-truths (at best) and outright lies (at worst) that bear no resemblance to reality, faces twisted into grotesque masks of hatred that even The Thing’s SFX maestro, Rob Bottin – a genius btw – couldn’t rustle up. Yet otherwise, ordinary faces, leading ordinary lives.

That’s the hardest part of this battle. That the ‘Thing’ inside is not only growing, but that it’s turning ordinary folks into things they are not – and setting us all against each other. No one is immune. And there’s no blood test to flush out the threat (a most memorable scene in the movie – both completely terrifying and darkly hilarious in equal measure).

No silver bullet then. But in the face of this Thing, maybe a steely self-examination from all of us is the order of the day. And if you don’t know what introspection means, you need to take a good, long, hard look at yourself. I include myself in that ordinance btw. Christ, some days, my internal monologue goes beyond Meldrewism to uglier places.

Does it mean going all ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’? Not for a second. We are who we are. And kneeling in front of some anointed ideological God, which is often itself masquerading as something it’s not, only breeds resentment – and feed the beast. But at the very least, whether liberal or conservative or whatever, we should reject hatred.

To clarify, not the common or garden hatred that’s part of the human condition. “I hate when it’s pissing down”. Or “I hate the taste of Dandelion and Burdock”. Or “I hate it when a car alarm goes off at fecking 9am on a Sunday”.

No, I mean the hatred that will eventually consume all of us.

Like The Thing did all those years ago.

In Antarctica, 1982.