John Carpenter's The Thing, released in June 1982, follows American researchers in Antarctica who meet an alien that can copy any living thing it absorbs, so no one can tell who is still human. Based on John W. Campbell Jr.'s 1938 novella Who Goes There?, it was a faithful adaptation attempt that went through several directors and writers before filming. Critics were split, with praise for the effects but disgust at their repulsiveness, and it grossed only $19.6 million. Audiences were drawn to the more hopeful E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial the same year, and a recession made its bleak tone unappealing. Home video and television turned it into a cult favourite, and in 2025 it was selected for the US National Film Registry.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.