Cundey recounted working not only with monster makeup maven Rob Bottin, on lighting (and when not to light) his various storied creations for the film, but also with Albert Whitlock, Universal’s “master matte painter,” who’d put black mattes in front of the camera, later adding moving elements “to a dead painting” to further sell the imagery. He contrasted that with more current digital effects work, which Cundey said leaves him with “a sense that I’ve been tricked.”

He also talked about some of the film’s memorable lighting tricks, like the use of flares, when he was looking for non-flashlight source light alternatives, and how “we could never use them now,” with all that sulfur burning so close to lead actors’ faces. He compared that with a more recent film he worked on, where a fire safety crew was brought in for a scene simply lit with candles.

As for the Antarctic setting, a lot of that was doubled in northerly locales, including a “glacier research station” in Canada, where cast and crew had to bunk down during shooting. He found the heads on the Panavision cameras he was using would freeze up, so they replaced the fluids with “low temperature grease,” along with “heaters in the eye pieces. This “kept the cameras from freezing,” while, remarkably, “the lenses didn’t fog up.”

One aspect of the film’s Antarctic setting is not “doubled up,” however: Cundey said that there is a long-standing tradition at the actual McMurdo Station “to watch the movie after the last plane leaves for winter.”

So far, even with climate change, there’s been no winter of that particular, shapeshifting “discontent.” Band Pro’s recent screening though, reconfirmed the film’s status as a modern classic.

Of course, Cundey has shot several modern classics, like Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, along with his earlier collaborations with Carpenter, like the Ur-slasher flick, Halloween. (Or maybe “Ur-plus one,” if we consider Psycho?) On Halloween, Cundey and Carpenter were experimenting with earlier iterations of what we now know as the “Steadicam,” including similar rival systems, like Panavision’s Panaglide. The Steadicam opening in the chronicles of Michael Meyers’ mayhem is itself a classic sequence.

And if one were looking for Steadicam gear now, one could simply glide on over to The Tiffen Company, where Steadicam is of course now part of the imaging accessory company’s line-up, perhaps even scoring a deal during their semi-annual open house and sale. These occur twice - right after Cine Gear, in summer, then again in December.