Who Goes There?

Carpenter's film is credited on screen as based on Campbell's novella, and it is the second adaptation of it: Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby filmed it in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, which turned the creature into a humanoid and dropped the part Carpenter kept. What the 1982 film restores from the page is the premise the 1951 one abandoned:

• A thing that imitates whatever it absorbs, perfectly, so anyone at the station may already be it
• A blood test improvised on site as the only way to tell, which is the novella's centrepiece and the film's
• An Antarctic research crew with no possibility of rescue, and no authority to appeal to

The ending is Carpenter's own. Campbell lets his men win.

The 2011 film is a prequel to Carpenter's, set at the Norwegian camp, and is credited as an adaptation of the same novella. Recorded separately from the 1982 edge because it adapts the source independently rather than through the earlier film.

The link between the two men is documented: Lovecraft's novella was serialised in Astounding Stories from February to April 1936, and Campbell became Astounding's editor in 1937, publishing Who Goes There? there the year after. Shared: an Antarctic scientific expedition, a thing recovered from the ice that should have stayed in it, a camp found destroyed, and horror derived from what the specimens imply rather than from what attacks. Filed LOW because Campbell never stated the debt, and the two stories diverge on the point that matters most. Lovecraft's Old Ones are an ancient civilisation to be pitied; Campbell's thing is an imitation with no self at all.