The Thing from Another World (1951)

"Watch the skies, everywhere! Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!"

- Ned "Scotty" Scott

US Airforce Captain Patrick "Pat" Hendry (Kenneth Tobey), his crew, and annoying newsman Ned "Scotty" Scott (Douglas Spencer) fly from Anchorage, Alaska, to a scientific research station near the North Pole, to investigate reports of a crashed aircraft.

However, they soon discover that it's actually a UFO.

Unfortunately, their attempts to remove the alien space craft from the ice results in its destruction, but they do recover the frozen body of one of its crew (James Arness), which they transport back to base.

Finding themselves cut off from civilisation due to the weather and radio interference, Pat decrees that no investigation of the alien creature can begin without the say-so of headquarters.

This frustrates gung-ho head scientist Dr. Arthur Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite), whose assistant, Nikki Nicholson (Margaret Sheridan), happens to be involved in an on-again, off-again, tempestuous relationship with Pat (which does involve bondage!).

The creature is accidentally awakened and goes on a rampage, letting the scientists at the isolated arctic base discover that it is a vegetable-based species, immune to most forms of damage.

Once the alien starts killing, secretly Carrington - and some of the scientists - also realise that the monster is after blood to feed its seedlings with, to (presumably) grow a race of killer vegetable creatures to take over the planet.

Howard Hawks's The Thing from Another World is pure action-horror pulp, pitting square-jawed heroes against an unstoppable alien menace that wants to crush their way of life and reduce mankind to the status of plant food.

Obviously, this movie was the inspiration - along with John W. Campbell Junior's story Who Goes There? - for John Carpenter's seminal The Thing, in 1982.

However, it also clearly had an influence on both Alien and Aliens, with the Air Force top brass taking a stance very similar to Weyland-Yutani when it comes to dealing with dangerous alien life forms, and the men at the base using Geiger counters in a way that presages the motion detectors famously used to track xenomorphs.

Obviously, the creature here is a very simple cinematic alien species, compared to the Lovecraftian horrors unleashed in The Thing and Alien, but nevertheless The Thing From Another World still conjures images of an alien society where humans (or their ilk) are farmed by these monstrous creatures.

Lumbering around like Frankenstein's Monster, "The Thing" is clearly a metaphor for the perceived Cold War era  'Red Menace' of Russia, lashing out at the one person that tries to reason with it - while our plucky heroes know it's a "wrong 'un" from the get-go.

Sure, it's tame compared to the movies it inspired, but The Thing From Another World remains an action-packed, sci-fi, monster flick.