A Venn diagram showing where the American AIDS crisis overlaps the making of John Carpenter’s 1982 body-horror masterpiece The Thing would be a pair of circles drawn side by side. Bill Lancaster started writing the latter in 1979 and took four drafts to finish it. Doctors picked up on the spread of AIDS in 1981; while the virus first took root in the U.S. in the 1960s, no official diagnoses were made until decades later.
