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JACQUES LACAN DEFINES ART itself with regard to the Thing: in his <i>Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis</i>, he claims that art as such is always organized around the central Void of the impossible-real Thing - a statement which, perhaps, should be read as a variation on Rilke's old thesis that "Beauty is the last veil that covers the Horrible" <font color="#cc0000">(1)</font>. Lacan gives some hints about how this surrounding of the Void functions in the visual arts and in architecture; what we shall do here is not provide an account of how, in cinematic art, the field of the visible, of representations, involves reference to some central and structural Void, to the impossibility attached to it - ultimately, therein resides the point of the notion of suture in cinema theory. What I propose to do is something much more naive and abrupt: to analyze the way the motif of the Thing appears within the diegetic space of cinematic narrative - in short, to speak about films whose narrative deals with some impossible/traumatic Thing, like the Alien Thing in science-fiction horror films.<br>