As it’s based on a 1938 novella and heavily draws from the original, 1951’s The Thing From Another World, it’s more on the nose to say that each iteration is a metaphor for whatever societal panic we were immersed in at the time.

Of course, alien invasion movies of the 1950s were incessantly fixated on the public’s fear of the threat of communism, and it makes sense that The Thing of ‘81 would easily swap out queerness/AIDS in its place. That is, a lot of the symbolism of “things we are afraid of” was already there.