10 Most Powerful Sci-Fi Movie Villains
6. The Thing - The Thing
John Carpenter's masterpiece of paranoia and practical effects brought cinema one of the greatest film monsters of all time. The Thing is an extraterrestrial lifeform that takes over and then mimics other organic beings.
After infiltrating an American outpost in Antarctica, the Thing assimilates itself into the populous and starts picking them off one by one. In the instances where the Americans manage to identify who is the imposter, the Thing mutates and contorts into various monstrous shapes - and this otherworldly being is terrifying and nearly impossible to kill!
A lesson in suspense, the film builds on the fact that our characters have no idea how to kill this dangerous creature as it seems to grow stronger with each encounter. In the end, our protagonists have to destroy the entire base to kill the alien parasite.
Unfortunately for MacReady and Childs - our only survivors - there's a chance one of them could still be the Thing.
In one of the best all-time endings to a science fiction or horror film, the two characters sit and drink scotch, slightly apprehensive of each other, as they attempt to judge if they could kill the monster that seemed so un-killable.