Answer:  The Thing

Every winter the Amundsen-Scott South Pole research station is plunged into a bitter darkness where gale force winds, snow storms, and the kind of fierce weather one would expect at the Earth’s poles ensures that the 50 or so scientists that “over-winter” at the pole are cut off from the outside world until spring.

As you’d imagine, it takes a special kind of researcher to enlist for such a gig. Not only do researchers that over-winter at the Amundsen-Scott station have a dedication to their research and a tolerance for isolation from the outside world, but it would also seem that they have a special sense of humor.

There is an annual tradition at the facility where, upon the first day of winter (during the “evening” hours) and the beginning of the cold darkness that will lock them into the station, the researchers gather together and watch a special screening of the horror film The Thing. For the unfamiliar, The Thing is a sci-fi horror film focused on what happens at an Antarctic research station, not unlike the Amundsen-Scott station, when a parasitic alien life form begins assimilating the human crew of the station and turning them against each other.

Not only do they watch a version of The Thing, but they watch a triple screener of all three versions of the film (the 1951 Christian Nyby version, the 1982 John Carpenter version, and the 2011 Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. version). All we have to say about the matter is that the researchers must be really confident that they won’t be the ones to unearth the parasitic alien that winter.