Kurt Russell Wrote One Of The Most Important Scenes Of The Thing

Universal Pictures

There are few horror films as thoroughly chilling as John Carpenter's 1982 masterpiece "The Thing." Loosely based on the John W. Campbell novella "Who Goes There?", which was previously adapted as the 1951 Christian Nyby film "The Thing From Another World," "The Thing" follows a research team in the arctic as they battle with a mysterious alien being that had been frozen in the ice. While the movie wasn't a hit when it first came out (in large part because it was a disturbing bummer with an enigmatic ending), "The Thing" has come to be thought of as a true horror classic. 

But "The Thing" so many of us know and love today was almost a very different movie, as Carpenter realized during editing that the pacing was far too slow and he needed to cut some dialogue and add more monsters (a great call). He had originally planned for a pretty different ending in which MacReady proves he's human and ultimately survives as the hero. In an interview with CHUD.com back in 2006, star Kurt Russell revealed that he had something to do with the film's haunting, ambiguous ending, and I have to say: Thank you, Kurt!

Universal Pictures

In "The Thing," the alien can possess various hosts and puppet them as if they were still their normal selves, meaning that any living thing could be, well, a Thing. In the end, only two men are left, Childs (Keith David) and MacReady (Russell), and it's left to the audience to decide which one is human and which is the Thing. According to Russell, he and Carpenter were both worried about how to end the movie when Russell himself wrote the ending we now know, drawing directly from the source material and really getting to the root of the movie's themes. When asked if he and Carpenter ever decided who was the thing at the end of the film, he explained: 

"You know, I wrote that last scene. It was difficult because John and I were saying throughout the whole movie 'We don't have an ending, we don't have ending,' and then I wrote that. He said, 'I don't want to go through two hours and have them come back to square one,' and I said, 'John, that's what the movie's about.' And the truth is that Who Goes There was what the title of the book was, and at the end of the movie you have to ask, who goes there?"

Carpenter had actually planned on an alternate ending where it's made clear that MacReady was still human, but thankfully ended up going with the more mysterious ending. It's good that he did, because Russell is right and the entire point of "The Thing" is the unknowability of the enemy. In fact, Russell was obsessed with the idea of being possessed and kept asking Carpenter if someone would know if they were the thing, never content with his answer. 

Russell understood that the scariest part of "The Thing" isn't the gore or the horrifying monsters, it's the idea that anyone could be the enemy — even yourself. It's a story about paranoia and identity that also happens to have some of the best practical special effects and monster designs of all time, making it a pure horror classic in every sense of the word.