2. The Thing
To be fair, this one might be considered a slight cheat, given that John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing is not so much a remake as it is a re-adaptation of the source text, considering how much it differs from Christian Nyby's 1951 The Thing From Another World. Their common strand is in depicting how a shape-shifting force pervades through a small band of scientists, with it in the original reflecting Cold War concerns of Communism, while in the remake, with its blood tests and all-male cast, it comes to reflect the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Better than the original film, Carpenter's work mines the paranoia, which pervades just as insidiously through the group as the creature does itself. Kurt Russell is astonishing as MacReady, the unfortunate helicopter pilot tasked with taking care of this beast, yet Carpenter is smart not to present him as the definite hero of the piece; in its bleak finale, we're left little the wiser as to whether it is him or Childs (Keith David) who is the monster. As a result, the two rest in the cold, each waiting for the other to turn, a chilling and ironic ending that was promptly eschewed in the dire 2011 "prequel" (which was essentially a tactless, witless remake).