Alien was great. Building suspense throughout. Scariest movie at the time. Something I always appreciated is that the ship was dirty. Contrast that to the USS enterprise. Functional cargo ship in space with a speedboat vs elegant craft with magical devices. And it looked like the eventual evolution of space travel: corporate focused with expendable crew. Not humanitarian focused. Star Wars was mentioned earlier which is somewhere in between the two for ship environment but it was a long, long time ago not the eventual future. Also, don’t forget, in 1979 we were still relatively early in the space exploration business. Aliens were humanoid or whatever Star Trek suggested (fuzzy critters or blobs but usually humanoid). This was a very a different alien and presented an existential threat we were introducing to the world. In jaws, we knew the enemy. In Alien and the Thing, we didn’t know what we were dealing with and it could be hiding in plain sight or viciously hideous. Either way, it appeared unescapable. My favorite aspect in this horror is the same in most zombie flicks. There may be a horrible monster but the worst monster is human nature. When presented with a threat, in this case greed (in zombie flicks it is usually self preservation) was more important than saving lives. I liked the actors. I liked the pace. I liked the cinematography. It was great.