The Thing from Another World

The Thing from Another World (1951) is a landmark black-and-white sci-fi horror you can watch online on iFILM. At a remote Arctic outpost, a crew of scientists and Air Force airmen dig a flying saucer out of the ice — and pull a frozen body from the wreckage. They haul it back to base. It thaws. It wakes up.

The visitor turns out to be no little green man but a plant-based organism that feeds on blood and shrugs off bullets. Cut off by a blizzard, the men are trapped with it in a maze of corridors. Kenneth Tobey's captain wants the thing dead; Robert Cornthwaite's lead scientist wants to keep it alive for study — and that argument is more dangerous than the creature itself. The fiery confrontation near the end is still quoted across the genre.

Directed by Christian Nyby with heavy hands-on input from producer Howard Hawks, the film set the template for the "trapped and besieged" horror that dozens of movies copied, and John Carpenter rebuilt it from the ground up in 1982. Essential viewing if you care where science fiction came from. Stream The Thing from Another World (1951) online on iFILM.