When Ian Nathan and I spoke in 2024, as his documentary “Aliens Expanded” was being released, he shared that his next project would be giving “The Thing” the same treatment of an expanded investigation. He already had John Carpenter and several others on board, but there was one person Nathan was desperate to include: the notoriously press-shy special effects wizard Rob Bottin. So, when Nathan checked into our recent Zoom chat from his home in England, I had to know if he’d landed his white whale.

“We tried everything,” Nathan said, the frustration evident as he related speaking to several of Bottin’s friends for “The Thing Expanded,” but all of whom weren’t encouraging. “Joe Dante, who was also a close friend of his, [said] you’re not going to get him. Joe tried to do a documentary with him and failed.

“I think we can go to a point where we thought we’d done everything, [but] the documentary isn’t finding Rob Bottin; the documentary is the story of ‘The Thing,’ as told by the voices” who were there, Nathan said.

Those voices include not only director Carpenter and his star, Kurt Russell, but also supporting cast members Keith David (Childs) and David Clennon (Palmer), as well as high-profile fans such as Dante, Guillermo del Toro, Frank Darabont, and Steven Colbert.

“Kurt was the one who took the longest. I had to be quite ready,” Nathan said, adding that he and Russell’s people did the schedule dance and logistical puzzling across nine time zones. Nathan and his team were eventually granted two hours with the “Escape From New York” and “Backdraft” star, necessitating an 11-hour flight from London to Los Angeles.

“You want to get there, and he’s still going to be available. And I think he understood,” Nathan’s singular devotion to the project, the filmmaker said. “He’s a good guy, but he’s not trying to mess me around.”

Forty-two years after “The Thing” came—and, notoriously, went away without much box office business to its credit, only finding its devoted audience later—what new stories could Nathan possibly unearth for his documentary? One tale that hadn’t been told publicly is the origins of Nathan’s own fandom. Similar to his love of “Aliens,” it all started with a formative experience. As a teen, Nathan and his schoolmates played hooky—or “bunked off,” in British English—from Sports Day, wherein kids participate in various athletic events in front of teachers and parents. Rather than be a joiner, Nathan went to a friend’s house for his first-ever encounter with a VCR.

“It was the size of a rabbit hutch [and] made the loudest, clunkiest noises,” Nathan recalls of the dinosaur-era VHS machine, which loaded tapes from the top.

His friend’s dad had two videocassettes handy: the original “Alien” and “The Thing.”

“Looking back, that afternoon changed my life,” Nathan said of being so entranced by the gore and humor of Carpenter’s film. “We managed to get back to school, and no one noticed. If my old headmaster tunes into this, I’m sorry, it’s too late to punish me.”

Among the many anecdotes shared in “The Thing Expanded,” actor Peter Maloney, now 81, told Nathan on-camera that his character Bennings had three different death renditions before the now-iconic version wherein the Bennings-Thing, with its mangled hands, lets out an ungodly scream before being set afire.

“He was going to be on a skidoo, and dogs were going to attack him [but] they couldn’t afford that,” Nathan said. “Then he was stalked and got stabbed in the ear with a screwdriver, [but] they thought that’s too ‘Halloween.’ So it kept getting rewritten, and [Maloney] remembered every death scene really clearly.”

“The Thing Expanded” also features Nathan’s sit-down interview with Dutch filmmaker Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., whose 2011 prequel, also called “The Thing,” did as modestly at the box office as the original but is far less appreciated by the fans. Van Heijningen’s plan had been to do all the effects practically, just as Bottin had with the original, but the studio eventually forced him to use CGI for certain scenes.

“They did a version of practical facts. They tested that, and there was confusion around who the alien was and whether that was the Thing in body form,” Nathan says of the 2011 film. “The panic was that people weren’t getting it if you were a viewer who’d never seen the original ‘Thing’ and didn’t understand how it worked. The problem was that it got caught up with having to explain [elements] in the first film.

“[Van Heijningen] did say, in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t done it. But for a young director, a big opportunity comes your way, you’re going to take it.”

One reason people return to the original “The Thing” over and over again, Nathan said, is that the film offers fans chances to theorize about the nature and modus operandi of the extraterrestrial shapeshifter. Does a Thing not only look and sound like the person it takes over but also inhabit their personality? Would you know if you were a Thing? What was piloting the flying saucer, if not a Thing? Was the Thing a passenger? Did it crash because a Thing had taken over? Chasing such philosophical questions is a major joy of the return journey, Nathan believes.

Ian Nathan

In addition to the thrills and chills of the Antarctic-set “Thing,” Nathan finds much else to admire about the 1982 classic, not the least the humor offsetting the scares and the bloodletting.

“John has a sense of humor. He loves taking horror to that point where you’ve been really frightened, or it’s really funny,” Nathan said, adding he’s also a big fan of Carpenter and Russell’s laughing-out-loud DVD commentary recorded in the late nineties.

Nathan interviewed people who work in Antarctica as well as a scientist at SETI, who had much to say about the movie’s scientific inaccuracies—including Russell wearing a leather jacket when it’s minus-40.

Nathan also shares that he did try to get T.K. Carter (Nauls) into the documentary without success prior to the actor’s passing on Jan. 9. Carter was “evasive,” Nathan said, and likely dealing with health issues that led to his death.

“I wonder, in hindsight now [if] he wasn’t well enough to do it, and he just wasn’t telling me directly,” Nathan said. “Which is a great shame, because we’ve got everybody else in terms of the [living] cast.”

After “Aliens Expanded” and now “The Thing Expanded,” Nathan believes there are relatively few other such movies worthy of the extended documentary treatment. Perhaps the first two “Terminator” movies were given Nathan and Cameron’s prior collaboration.

“People are asking why ‘The Thing’? And I thought, well, ‘The Thing’ kind of chose us. There are only so many of these genre films that do that,” Nathan said. “I really enjoy the [long-form documentary] format as a new form of film discourse. We know with a degree of confidence going in that people want these documentaries.”

If anything, Nathan expects that when the extensive credits of “The Thing Expanded”—including all of his many, many backers and crowdsourcing heroes—roll, viewers will want to go back and rewatch the original film, whether for the second or the second-hundredth time.

“I would hope that [the documentary] enhances what already exists for you. It’s about your love of ‘The Thing,’” he said. “I ask a simple question: Why do you love it so much? And it’s five hours’ worth of answers to that.”

To order a digital or Blu-ray copy of “The Thing Expanded,” visit https://thethingexpanded.com/.