The Film: A return to low-budget chills for the studio-shy director. Considered by Carpenter as the second installment of what he called his Apocalypse Trilogy (with The Thing and In The Mouth Of Madness), it's probably best remembered for the mysterious, lava lamp-alike cylinder of swirling green evil.

Can the priest (Donald Pleasence) and the academics recruited to investigate it survive their time with the terrifying gloop?

Carpenter Chats: "I'm fascinated by religion in films. A lot of my movies have priests and are about religion.

"And I don't know what it is, but you know, horror stories have always worked on film. It's where they work. That's where vampires and ghosts and UFOs are real. They're not particularly real in life, but they're real on the screen.

"It's the communal aspect of movie-watching. Sitting in the dark. It goes back to sitting around a campfire when we had just come out of the trees."

Remade? No one has dared to touch it. Probably because Carpenter would unleash the Anti-Christ liquid on them.