Alien and The Thing

"What's it key off of?"

"Micro changes in air density."

I'm rewatching Ridley Scott's excellent Alien and noticing how similar the alien detector in this movie is to the way the geiger counter (now there is an coincidence) is used in the great Howard Hawks 1951 version of The Thing from Another World, which is one of my favorite Red Scare science fiction movies of the '50s.

Alien is a mash up of The Thing (the original not the John Carpenter remake, which is about AIDS not the Red Scare) and It, the Terror from Beyond Space.

ITTFBS is fun for the scene where all of the men on the mission to Mars are sitting round the table smoking while the women are clearing the table. One of the women is the ship's medical officer as well. Often when I watch science fiction films from the '50s and early '60s I realize how much the Women's Liberation movement was necessary. I don't think I could have handled being a woman for a day in the '50s or early '60s.